Living With Bipolar

Although this series should probably have been titled “Living With People Living With Bipolar”, I've decided to go with the abbreviated version because I think in a way those of us whose family or loved ones suffer from this disease are also afflicted by it – we suffer too. One summer not long ago I had my first direct personal experience of bipolar disorder. It was not first-hand in that I myself was not diagnosed as suffering from the disease, but the person diagnosed was close enough to me (my younger brother) that I saw a good deal of its affects upon him and learned a great deal, most importantly, about what he needed from me during and after his spectacular and absolutely terrifying psychotic break. Not long afterwards (not remotely long enough), my girlfriend of five years was also diagnosed with this same mental illness after a prolonged depression brought on by the death of an uncle that she was particularly close to, an uncle that had helped raise her and that had, believe it or not, spent decades grappling with his own debilitating form of the very same affliction.

To be absolutely clear: I am not a trained health professional, and at no point should the following be taken as medical advice or anything like it. This is quite simply an effort on my part to describe my own personal experiences living with people suffering from bipolar disorder and my attempts to be there for them in the way that they needed me to be at different points during their own battles with the disease. There are three main reasons I decided to write this: 1) because I think this is an aspect of the conversation around mental health that is inadequately considered or addressed, and 2) because when I found myself having to contend with loved ones suffering from this disease, the psychiatric specialists treating them had little or nothing to say about what I should or could do to help, if I should or could do anything at all for that matter, and 3) because this is a way for me to work through the some of the trauma of the events I'll describe below and a way to attempt to process them and the sometimes painful lessons I've learned along the way.

Bipolar Disorder (also known as Bipolar Mood Disorder, formerly known as Manic Depression) is a blanket term covering what experts call a “spectrum” of disorders and associated symptoms, which can be expressed in an endless number of ways according to the type, severity, and frequency of episodes. While there are quite good rough groupings of these symptoms (mania, hypomania, depressive episodes, etc …), these are expressed in a range of different ways and combinations that can include things like co-morbidity and so-called mixed-states or mixed affective episodes, to complicate things further. There is no standard treatment, in other words, and although there are general rules and commonly accepted approaches, each case is treated on an individual basis because every case is different. The events I will describe are not meant to be correlated with the above symptoms or groupings, and nor should they be used as a diagnostic tool (if you or somebody you know may be showing signs of this or any other mental illness – I recommend you/they seek professional help immediately; this is in fact one of the most important messages I'd like the first part of this story to convey). These are only accounts of things I witnessed, told as accurately as possible. My hope is that in some way this might be useful to someone else who, like me, finds themselves suddenly confronted by some of the difficulties that can arise during the course of a loved one's struggle with this disease – difficulties that can be highly disturbing, hurtful and unbelievably painful to witness or (worse) participate in.

1: The Psychotic Episode – With Vikings References

In December 2013 I was at the end of another academic year, kicking back in great style. My girlfriend (we'll call her Beth) was away visiting her family up North and I was free to do as I pleased. In between gaming, media, and drinking with friends I was moving house and trying to get some work done on my thesis whenever I could. I was at my mom's place one weekend – I think it was a Saturday – when my brother (Doug) arrived with a few of his friends. They'd been to a party the night before and from the looks of them they'd had a really good time. They went to crash in his room and it was back to the quiet lethargy of Saturday afternoon in suburbia for me. Later that day – probably three or four in the afternoon – there was some kind of commotion outside. My brother and his friends were up and about; they were all out in the garden and the friends were leaving. I went out and lit up a smoke, spoke to them as they made their exit, asked them about the night before. I can't remember if one of them said something to me at that point or if I noticed it myself, but something wasn't right. My brother was on edge, confused, rambling. What he was saying to me and to them didn't quite make sense somehow. It was all a bit garbled. I thought he might still be drunk or high, or just badly hungover. I thought he needed some sleep and I remember clearly that he complained about not having slept for a while – for the next week this was something he referred to repeatedly: he hadn't slept, couldn't sleep, desperately needed to sleep.

I told him to go and get some rest and didn't think too much about it. Nor did I tell anyone what was going on – it just didn't seem very serious or too out of the ordinary. My brother was going through a phase at this point where he was living very hard. He'd written off two cars. He was drinking almost every day and was taking a lot of drugs. I don't know what he was taking exactly, aside from smoking a lot of weed, but he was dealing too and always had quite large amounts on him. He had a microwave in his room that he used as a stash (kind of an obvious stash if you ask me, but I still can't resist the obligatory “you can put your weed in there”) and it was always full. He and his friends would sit around in his room playing Xbox and smoking this massive glass bong all day and I'd join them sometimes. The dealing worried me, but I'd been a pothead for a few years by then and I kind of enjoyed getting high with my brother. I knew that a few of these guys had been into meth at one point or another and that worried me too – I'd spoken to Doug about it many times and I was fairly certain he understood the risks of getting involved with that poisonous stuff, but what occurred to me immediately was that he might have taken some; maybe intentionally, maybe not. It would explain the sleep thing anyway. I was worried, but not more worried about him than usual. I went home.

The next morning I got a call from my mom. There was a problem with Doug, she said. He hadn't slept all night and he'd been out patrolling the garden with his crossbow the whole time, firing occasional volleys into the bushes at imaginary burglars with his paint-ball gun, shouting, threatening the tenant with death for stealing a cell-phone at four in the morning (Doug had forgotten it in the tenant's room). I drove over immediately because I could hear that she was distraught and this sounded serious. For the past year or so these calls had been a regular feature of my life: Doug had been in a fight, Doug had been arrested, Doug had crashed his car, Doug was missing. At this point I was getting to the stage where I lived in constant fear of the final permutation, the last call: Doug is dead. This had happened to me before – a phone call in the middle of the night informing my family that my brother had died, not Doug, my other brother, the middle child, my companion from the time I was two years old – and that, combined with Doug's reckless, self-destructive behavior meant that this was far from a remote possibility. I was determined to do everything I could to avoid this happening again, to avoid losing my little brother. With my dad gone (he died in 2009 after a long battle with cancer) and my mom just barely coping, I often found myself stepping in to look after Doug. I felt duty-bound to do so, and I'd been struggling to get him to turn his life around, to cut the crap, for a long time as a result. I was his brother after all.

So I went over, tried to find out what was happening. My mom wasn't much help. She went through the details of the night again and not much else. She'd tried to speak to him but had been met with suspicion, paranoia and open hostility. He thought she was out to get him apparently. I'd soon find out that the list of people he thought were out to get him was a long one, and that I featured prominently. He was trying to get some sleep when I arrived and this was a good thing I thought. While I waited for him to surface I spoke with the tenant. Adam (also not his real name) had a few more details about Friday night's festivities – there had been some kind of altercation apparently, involving a girl somehow. He was short on specifics, but he said he thought there might have been drugs involved. He'd been a speed freak once upon a time and recognized the symptoms of post-binge psychosis. They would pass, he said. We just needed to give Doug some time and he needed to sleep (that word again). Adam was a few years older than me, and a veteran of the seedier side of the city's party scene. He'd won the trust of Doug and his miscreant buddies and so I believed his version of events. I was now fairly convinced that meth had been involved somehow, though Doug to this day denies having taken anything. Adam confirmed my mom's version of the night's strange events – even the bit about a loud banging on his door at four in the morning and a loaded crossbow shoved in his face.

Doug woke up a few hours later, and things began to get really weird. I went in to talk to him, to try and find out what was wrong. He looked haggard, pale and blotchy, and what he said was strange and convoluted. It was very difficult to get any sense out of him at all aside from the fact that something had happened on Friday night, that he felt in some sense betrayed by his friends, that he was concerned I would likewise betray him, and that he desperately needed to sleep, that he hadn't slept the night before or on Friday, and that he was tired and confused as a result. He kept calling me Floki, and then he would switch to calling me Rollo, not drawing any comparisons necessarily, but addressing me as if I actually was one of them. At the time I had watched maybe one or two episodes of Vikings and had no grasp of the plot-lines of the first or second seasons. I didn't actually realize that was what he was talking about and the F in Floki is often quite hard to hear, so I that thought he was making some allusion to the mischievous Norse god Loki. It turned out that he was actually referring to betrayal: In the first season of Vikings, Rollo betrays his brother Ragnar by joining forces with his enemy, jarl Borg. In season two, Floki appears to betray Ragnar by aligning himself with King Horik, though he was later revealed to have just played along in order to lead Horik into a trap. This was, in other words, the thoroughly modern psychosis: it came replete with inter-textual references. I had no idea what to make of all of this other than to try and calm him down and urge him to get some more sleep.

Needless to say, it didn't stop there. For the next few weeks I was referred to as Rollo or Floki more often than not. Betrayal loomed large in Doug's mind, and as the person closest to him during much of this time, I naturally bore the brunt of his suspicion and paranoia. This was hurtful, of course, and unnerving, and his demeanor was often quite frightening. One of the things I found hardest to deal with was the fact that I was never quite sure if he fully understood who I was – I spent many hours trying to explain this to him, to reassure him. I told him again and again that I was on his side and that I was trying to help him. I'll come back to this point. The second thing I want to emphasize here is that Doug is a physically intimidating guy. He is my little brother in name alone; he is many kilograms heavier than me and is built like a brick shithouse. He also has martial arts experience – in Jujitsu and Kung Fu. Never, at any point, no matter how upset or angry he was, did he lay a hand on me or become physical or violent with me in any way. He made threats, of course, but something inside him held him back from physically acting on what he was experiencing, from the anger and aggression he often directed at me, particularly when I attempted to confront him directly. This is obviously not the case with all people in the throes of psychosis (that disclaimer thing again), but as I look back on it I find it strangely comforting. If he'd wanted to he could have hurt me quite badly or worse, but something held him back. I think maybe at some subconscious level he knew who I was all along, that I was his big brother, that I loved him. Whatever the reason, though, I was grateful for it. If he'd become physically violent that would have changed everything.

Forcing myself to remember and reflect on this stuff is cathartic for sure. It is also extremely difficult because I've repressed at lot of it I think. Aside from losing my father and brother, this is the third most traumatic experience of my life so far, and when I try to think back on those first chaotic weeks (before Doug's diagnosis, before, during and just after his period in a psychiatric ward) everything is very murky and mixed up. This first week is particularly difficult – sequences of events are hard to reconstruct, time-lines are tricky. I know that at some point we decided Doug wasn't snapping out of it. The night patrols weren't stopping. His behavior was bizarre. He was convinced he was dying, that he was being hacked, spied on, monitored, controlled, that everyone was out to get him. He harangued passers-by through the garden fence, posted disturbing rants on his social media accounts, harassed, argued with and threatened his friends and family. I lived in fear of the police being called – how would they react to him? How would he respond to them? Would he be shot? Arrested? Locked up? By this stage we were all (my mom, myself and a few of his more sensible friends) quite convinced that he'd ingested methamphetamine, and when his very evident psychosis showed no signs of wearing off, he was taken to an inpatient drug addiction facility – a rehab for hard drug abusers. This obviously wasn't the right thing to do – they weren't equipped to deal with a psychotic man the size of my brother for a start, and psychiatric care is not what they're designed to deliver exactly. He didn't last longer than the morning, and the fact that we'd taken him there only reinforced the sense of betrayal that permeated his current view of the world and the people around him.

This was the point at which we ran out of options. I think it was the family GP who suggested it, though I am not certain. Either way, we finally took him to see a psychiatrist and he was immediately committed to the psychiatric ward at one of the hospitals in the city. His sense of betrayal at this point was unfathomable – he was furious and hurt and confused. He would spend the next two weeks under lock and key in what was, I think, the single most traumatic experience of his own life, surrounded by lunatics (of course I mean other people struggling with mental illnesses of their own - just trying to capture something of what this was like to an uninitiated outsider like myself) and regularly physically restrained and injected with potent tranquilizers. He was prescribed anti-psychotics and mood-stabilizers (and god knows what else). This period was nightmarish and involved a great deal of suffering on his part and the parts of those close to him. We spent as much time with him as we could and did everything possible to make him comfortable and to encourage him to cooperate with the doctors and minders overseeing the ward he was in, to take his medicine and to try to calm down. This ward was hardly ideal and I think it might have done as much harm is it did good. It was dark and dingy and full of some truly terrifying people.

I want to try and get all of this down in the following post, which will chart his time in the ward and the issues and conditions around this period as fully as possible. For now, though, I'm going to have to leave the story here. Doug has been committed. Family distraught. No answers, no information, no word on when he might be released. Horrified ignorance. Tedium. Endlessly walking the same grubby dimly-lit maze-like corridors before and after visits. The feeling that I was failing him, letting him down. Not knowing what to say or do. Trying (and failing) to reason with him. [I really will come back to this point because I think it's quite important, but it will have to be in the next installment.]

Treeple and the the dancer

Today I found this tree and was immediately struck by the fact that it was so obviously human once. My guess is that it was a dancer of sorts, some kind of performer definitely. Initially I got a distinctly feminine vibe, but as I look at it now I think it's more likely a man, stuck forever in a climactic flourish, a performance-ending posture designed to bring the audience to their feet in adoration and from whence he might properly bask in this glorious moment.

Then my thoughts turned to the reason behind this (sad?) fate: was this a punishment? A reward of some sort? A consolation prize? What had this man done to deserve this? Was he killed prematurely in a car crash? Was he murdered by a rival suitor? Did he hang himself? Overdose? Was he thereby rescued from something that pursued him?

In ancient Greek mythology, Daphne is saved from the amorous advances of Apollo (who is literally chasing her) by her father, the river god Peneus, who turns her into a laurel tree. Apollo is so irredeemably smitten with Daphne that he uses his powers to render the tree ever-green, so that in a way Daphne is granted eternal youth of a sort.

The word used to describe this transformation is δενδρόω (Dendroo), which means "turned into a tree". In ancient Greek mythology, arboreal transformations of this sort are not infrequent, and, depending on circumstances, can be either rewards or punishments.

Another favorite (more recent) example - which might actually be read as a variant of the Daphne/Apollo story - is Radiohead's There, There from their 2003 album, Hail to the Thief, in which Thom Yorke is pursued through a forest before eventually being transformed into a tree. The track is awesome, and the video ranks as one of my all-time favorites from their collection (already bulging with incredible work).

So there is precedence for this kind of thing. I'm not sure about how this figures in African folklore/histories, though I would certainly like to find out now that I've found a (once) living example.

The real question, though, is about the tree itself: who was this person, and why was he condemned to this eternal unbending existence? There is something strangely triumphal about the whole thing - almost too much of it for the story to be entirely sad somehow. The tree has a monumental or commemorative feel about it I think - surely a testament to to some great thespian of the Chobe; even better perhaps, the thespian himself, glorying endlessly in his dramatic achievements. Or perhaps this is actually a sad reflection on what might have been. Perhaps I will write this story myself, thereby adding another layer to the lore. Would that be wrong? I don't know.

Operation Foxbat Pt 1: Held up at Kakspruit

The panzer doesn't travel, it invades. We move across the country in a series of surprise attacks punctuated by occasional smoke-breaks, less frequent foraging parties and exceedingly rare stops for fuel - the panzer being not only brutal, but brutally efficient (have I ever told you I get 5l/100km? This is one of my favorite topics of conversation). A quick glance back while we're on the move shows all the land behind us in full retreat; this is a rout, an unstoppable blitzkrieg. Unstoppable until, that is, we strike that most cowardly of enemy defenses between the fictional towns of Kakspruit and Kakfontein, a pothole hollowed out by transport companies, corruption and ineptitude.

Pulling over at the scenic Uitkak to survey the damage, we are confronted, dear fictional reader, by a bulging side-wall. We are held up in our advance, just the opportunity the enemy forces require in order to pounce and see us off. The surrounding hills are menacing now as they ready for their next attack. Just then the bushes begin to rustle, and then they begin to emerge.We are approached by an odd assortment of pale people, claiming residence in the beautiful town of Kakspruit. They are all called Venter, and judging by their responses to our probing questions (and their lopsided malformed limbs and faces), they are all cousins. There is a station in Kakfontein, they tell us, the town spread out and blinking in the valley below. At this station we might, we are told, repair the damages to the panzer and also meet a great man who dwells there. He is some sort of trader or businessman, the agent of a great and powerful Company involved in Platinum, tenders, and extermination. "Fuck that," I say, "he sounds like a total douche."

We clamber back aboard and resolve to limp to our extraction point - from whence our invasion of Mozambique will commence in the next few days. As we pull out - slowly, carefully, trying to avoid the remaining defenses in our path - we are beset on all sides by a peculiar rising sound, a chant or cry of some kind: "Sweeeeeeeetssssss! SWEEEEEEETTTSSSSS!" We begin to make out the edges of dark human forms in the vast dark knowable (we have GPS and quite good map books) wilderness around us. In their midst is a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman. She walks in measured steps, draped in striped ANC emblazoned cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. It is the ex-MEC for Transport, Mapula Mokaba-Phukwana. The potholes are clearly her handiwork. As we get up to speed she and her retinue begin to fall back - slowly at first, but soon enough they are in full retreat.

I glance down at Kakfontein one last time and feel certain that for at least one day a year - perhaps one in ten years - this view must be very beautiful. I can see why they chose this spot to waylay us - this was a desperate gamble intended to make us stay, perhaps to dilute the Venter stock a little or perhaps just to document their inspiring lives. We pass the location near the bottom of the pass, populated by those people marked out by dark complexions, worldliness, genetic diversity and properly formed limbs for a life of labour and repression in the great man's mines. We are moving so fast now that we can just barely make out and occasional "sweeeeets!" to our left or right. The enemy's centre crumbles, folds and falls back. The line cannot hold. We race on to victory.

To burn or not to burn: that is only half the question

[This article is a response an article by Botswana's Minister of Wildlife and Environment, Tshekedi Khama, published in the Evening Standard, Monday 25 April 2016]

While I do think that Botswana's decision not to burn their ivory stockpiles is an excellent one, and while I do applaud their decision to boycott the ivory burning at the conclusion of the upcoming Giants Club summit, I would question the strategy behind erecting and displaying a statue built from this material and I would suggest that there might be a much more effective use for Botswana and other African nations' stockpiles.

On the one hand, I can appreciate the idea behind the statue – in the Honourable Minister's own words, “there is value in conserving elephants for eco-tourism and emphasising the value of a live elephant should be upheld at all costs.” It is true, I think, that the future of Botswana's elephants is dependent on not only the perception of value, but the actual value of these animals to Botswana's communities. This means that elephants must generate revenues for the communities in the way that they did while trophy hunters were still allowed to operate in Botswana, when communities generated large incomes each year by selling their trophy allocations. Eco-tourism, it is true, has a role to play, but does a statue made of ivory displayed in an airport actually contribute any real value or is it just, if you'll pardon the excruciating pun, a white elephant?

The truth of the matter, economically speaking, is that burning and stockpiling (or building statues) have the same economic effect: supply is restricted in relation to existing demand. There is, and likely always will be such a demand – there is no denying this fact. As a result, the price of the commodity is driven ever higher, the luxury status of ivory is maintained or even enhanced. This means that the price per kilogram increases, and impoverished people from adjacent countries (and increasingly from within Botswana itself) are further incentivised to risk their lives in order to obtain quantities of this valuable commodity at any cost.

Botswana has taken a tough stance on poaching, and much like the anti-poaching operations being conducted in South Africa in defense of rhino populations, there have been results in terms of arrests, confiscations, and also in terms of poachers killed. The Botswana Defence Force and the Department of Wildlife and National Parks have a well-deserved reputation as some of the worlds finest and most effective anti-poaching forces, and yet even this is not enough to deter the ever-increasing waves of young men willing to risk death for a few kilos of white gold. The sad truth of the matter is that as long as the existing supply/demand equation is maintained, there will always be fresh volunteers eager to take up the rifle and try their luck in the cat-and-mouse game that plays out every day in Southern Africa's National Parks and border regions.

But is there an alternative? I think there might be, because in economic terms a stockpile is an immensely powerful thing. A stockpile represents a potential economic force – a force that might be used to alter existing market dynamics if it is exerted in the correct way. One example of the manner in which such a stockpile might be used is supplied by arch-imperialist and mining magnate, Cecil John Rhodes. During his time at the helm of De Beers, he was often frustrated by the periodic collapse of the price of diamonds due to oversupply, which would have dire effects on his business. His solution to the problem of oversupply was to stockpile and carefully regulate the release of precious stones onto the European market, thereby avoiding gluts and maintaining a steady and predictable diamond price, year in and year out. A stockpile retained and regulated in this way can be used to maintain an artificially high commodity value, and this, I would argue, is the unintended consequence ivory of stockpiling and burning across the African continent.

Another potential use of such a stockpile involves precisely the opposite strategy. A stockpile might be suddenly released in order to flood the market deliberately, which has the effect of creating a crash in commodity value. Demand, for a time, is overwhelmed by supply, and the market collapses as a result.

What if Botswana unbanned the sale of ivory? What if government itself either released a massive amount of stockpiled ivory (an elephant-statue's worth, say) to crash the market in one fell swoop or, even better, set about regulating the market through a gradual controlled release of these stockpiles, thereby eliminating black-market/poaching/smuggling networks, bringing the market above-board, generating taxable revenue and creating value-added industries while disinsetivising poachers/poaching activity? Fewer animals would be shot illegally, particularly if this strategy was coupled with Botswana's already tough stance on illegal poaching activity.

In a country with as many elephant as Botswana, we could maintain a steady stream of sustainably harvested ivory – i.e. ivory obtained from naturally occurring elephant carcasses (predation, disease, old age), of which there are many, as well as from existing stockpiles. A well-regulated and well-managed market and supply could contribute massively to the conservation of these animals, and, crucially, could help to generate real revenues for communities. The war on black-market ivory is like the war on drugs: it is unwinnable for the simple reason that there is a significant demand and there is an (illegally obtainable) supply. As in countries where approaches have changed to regulation, education, decriminalization (and taxation) of narcotics, perhaps Botswana should consider a similar approach for ivory?

Have a picture 3: Pel's Fishing Owl, Shakawe

2016 has been a huge year for me already, and the above photo shows one of the reasons for this. This is none other than a Pel's Fishing Owl (Scotopelia peli) - a species that is listed as threatened in Botswana due to large-scale habitat loss caused by large herbivores in some of the areas where they used to be quite common. In Kasane, for example, we had breeding pairs as recently as two or three years ago. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case, and despite repeated attempts and insider information, I have failed again and again to see one of these birds in the wild. Over the Easter long-weekend, though, I was lucky enough to be invited out to Lloyd Wilmot's camp on the Okavango River in a place called Shakawe (Okavango Panhandle). Here there are still some places where the right kind of old-growth riverine forests exist, and here I was fortunate enough to encounter not just one, but three of these magnificent creatures – two of which were at their breeding sight. While I can't tell you exactly where I found them, I can tell you that if you're as desperate to see one as I was, Alistair Wilmot (www.wilmotsafaris.com) might be a good place to start.  

I'm really interested in birds - though I wouldn't quite call myself a twitcher. Birding is great for several reasons when you're out in the bush. First off it adds another level of interest that can help relieve the monotony of hours on the back of game-drive vehicle and the endless herds of elephant and impala that make up, for the most part, the average day's sightings up here. Secondly, if you're birding, you've got your eyes peeled and you're looking very carefully at every bush, every tree, every patch of open ground. You're looking for the tiniest movement and listening for the most imperceptible little sound. If you're birding, in other words, you're also much more likely not to miss out on other things that might be lurking inconspicuously just off the road. Birds are beautiful in their own right too, and interesting besides. Bird photography (particularly when they're in flight) is one of the most technically challenging varieties of the art to be found - you really have to know your gear and think very carefully about what you want to capture and how you want to capture it in order to be even remotely successful. So that's why I love it, and that's also why you'll see more of this kind of thing if you stick around. The top spot on my wish-list has just been freed up! Next one down - the Narina Trogon, that most illusive of birds!

Have a picture 2: Jari Temple, Himachal Pradesh

This shot was taken at a village called Jari, which is located just inside the beautiful Parvati Valley in Himichal Pradesh, North-eastern India. The building pictured here is the village temple, which houses the local deity - there are twelve of these from the major villages that are gathered at the annual Mela. Village temples like these are some of the most beautiful buildings to be found in villages in this region. In general, the traditional local architecture in incredibly beautiful, and the temples represent the most exquisite examples of the style. If you're lucky enough you might even see one being refitted - the timber portions of these structures are regularly replaced due to the extreme climate, which is hard on everything. I saw this once or twice and was astounded each time by the workmanship and the detail of the wood carvings around doors, on pillars, on joins in the masonry; every possible surface is crammed with the products of what I can only describe as an art of devotion. It is an incredible thing to behold. Jari is a great spot to recuperate from the hardships of real travel in this part of the world: jarring, nerve-wracking bus rides and stomach trouble, for example. It's also a great stepping-off point for trekking and exploring the rest of the valley - which I highly recommend. It is well connected with bus routes in and out of the valley, and is surrounded on all sides by lush green mountain slopes just begging to be explored. Accommodation is cheap!

Have a picture 1: Fort of São João, Ibo Island

This shot was taken in one of the creepiest places I've ever been to in my life: Ibo Island, located just off the Northern Mozambican town of Pemba in the Quirimbas archipelago. The structure I'm in/on is an ancient Portuguese fort (São João), built atop a far older Arab one, which was used by traders and slavers on the coast of East Africa for centuries. During the time of Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique it was used to house, torture and kill political prisoners, an extreme Robben Island of sorts. No hard labour, no sunlight (glaring or otherwise), just damp, dark starving isolation punctuated with brutality and the occasional dragging out into the light of a fellow prisoner to be broken and killed, then dumped into the ocean or left on the exposed beach to rot. I love this shot because of the dollar sign some asshole smeared on the inside of the minaret-like watch-post. That and the rusting cannons propped up between the parapets, useless yet somehow still menacing. There is a violence to it, in other words, but it is a violence inextricably linked with commerce, possession and oversight. The idea that the same structure could serve many different purposes all related, finally, to the same old thing is a fascinating one I think. The town is renowned for its silver-work, and the silver used by the smiths comes mostly from old Portuguese coins found along the islands beaches and mangrove-lined waterways. There is fresh water on the island, brought up from the coral bones of the place by a series of wells. The water, though, is distinctly salty, and this, I think, is the reason behind the madness I often caught glimpses of lurking behind the gazes of many of the local inhabitants - the salt and the centuries of violence and death, perhaps. Djinns stalk the streets of the town at night - as they do much of this part of the East African coast. While I was there, one was caught by a local Imam and burnt in a jar on the soccer field. It was a one-armed, one-legged slapping-djinn, which would hop up behind lonely walkers of the night and strike them a blow to the side of their heads. A fairly harmless djinn, then, but so long as it was abroad, few dared venture out or walk home by themselves. Spooky place, as I've said.