Pix and Vid.

As promised, here's some pix and vids.

Last day in Norway and finally some time to

sit in my hotel room buggering aroung on the

internet. Nice.

Luanda from prop. plane.

Me an' J, ridin' the the train James Bond style.

Jeremy in front of bombed-out Nova York Social Club, Huambo.

Bombed to shit.

Jeremy with his Vietnamese boyfriends in Benguela.

Head Fuck.

Damn! The stuff we take for granted... Amsterdam was already unbelievably clean and ordered compared to the chaos of Angola in general and Luanda in particular. But I only had two daze in Amsterdoomed before I flew on to Kristiansand in Norway - a squeaky clean town of 80,000 in which the festival I'm performing in has put me up in a fancy hotel. Actually, the first real shock was Frankfurt airport, where I had a longish stop-over on my way from Luanda to Amsterdam. First off I had a good ol' bucket of German milch cafe with a fresh croissant, then got seduced by the breakfast bar with bacon and eggs. But it was the hot-running water that did the damage. I noticed that for 6 Euros you could have a hot shower and a clean fluffy towel. Having not seen hot-running water in three weeks (I'd been heating water on gas cookers and pouring it over myself with a cup) I simply couldn't resist. OK. I got greedy, and hit the tap/button for an extra minute of steaming hot clean water a couple of times too many. I then sauntered over to my gate well pleased with myself to find out the last bus out to the plane had already left - even though the plane was still on the ground there was no way to get to it. So Lufthansa ass-fucked me for another 100 Euros to buy a new ticket to Dam 2 hours later.

As good as the shower was, I ain't sure it was worth 106 Euro Scoobies. But what comes around goes around - or sumfink. Two daze later I'm at Schriphol again to catch the 9.30 flight to Kristiansand for my own gigs, to find out that the flight had been over booked. In simple terms, the mutha fuckers had sold more ticket than there were seats on the plane. So they put us on a flight 3 hours later which took us to some small Norwegian town to get a connecting flight onto Kristiansand. Pain in the ass, made slightly sweeter by the 250 Euro cash compensation.

I had planned to upload some pix and vids from the Angola trip now - but had 1st of 4 solo shows on consecutive nights tonight and am totally buggered. Bedtime for Gramps, try to upload some stuff tomorrow. In the mean time, Jeremy has done some write-ups and vid/pix uploads at http://c6angola.wordpress.com/category/travel-diary

laterLOVEjim

Pai de bebe.

One night in Huambo we fancied a drink and found a tiny dive-bar full of Angolan girls drunk off thier asses. We sat down at the only free table, my chair right next to a highly animated girl of questionable personal hygene who was carrying more than a few extra kilos. She immediately insisted I kissed her on both cheeks, and asked my name. Meanwhile a sleeping baby was being passed among her drunk girlfriends like a piece of lost luggage. Very soon my new friend was running her fingers through my hair and telling me among other things that she was just a "simple girl", trying to get a kiss right on the smacker... In my best attempt to fend her off I told her I was a very complicated man.

Then she started to sing to/at me, "Pai de bebe! Pai de bebe!" Litterally "father of drink", but I suppose idiomatically "Suger Daddy". When it became clear to her that I wasn´t in fact going to be her Sugar Daddy in any shape or form she tumbled out of the bar with the rest of her drunk girlfriends and thier baby luggage.

Hummers.

People talk about political corruption being a major problem here, but it wasn`t till one night in Huambo that I saw exactly what that means. That night we went out to a pizza resturant for dinner that had a huge fucking Hummer parked outside. I joked with the waiter, asking if it was his. He said no, it was that guy´s at the next table. We looked over and a chubby guy in his 30´s wearing Lacost sports wear head to foot smiled and came over to chat with us.

"That your Hummer?" I asked
"Yeah, I got two." he replied. "Very expensive."
He was also wearing an ultra bling diamond studded watch. I asked what he did for a living.
"I get stuff for the government."
"What kind of stuff?" I asked.
"Whatever they need."

He asked if we had any plans for the evening and offered to take us to a new bar/club in town. So after our pizza we followed his monster Hummer in our shitty little hire Chevy accross town where he picked up a girl and then went on to this new club. As we entered he was treated like royalty. We sat down and he asked what we wanted to drink. We said beer. Wouldn´t we prefer he bought a bottle of whiskey for the table, he sugested? We politely declined. We got chatting and he told us this girl was one of 67 girlfriends he had. They all had boyfriends but liked him cos he bought them stuff.

Then we asked more about his work. It turns out his uncle had a high up government possition and offered this guys private company fat contracts to procure goods for them, presumably for a sizable kick-back to his uncle. I asked why a government office wasn´t responsible for that - he said "It was to stimulate the private sector in Angola." Yeah, right. After half an hour he tossed the keys to his Hummer to the girl who had sat there saying nothing and she left. Then he told us he was going off to fuck her, we could drink what we wanted but shouldn´t pay as he had a tab there.

So - the work this guy´s private company was doing could clearly be done for a tiny fraction of the cost by a government official on a normal salary, the rest of the money could then be spent on housing, education, health care, social welfare, feeding the starving and homeless kids in the streets - rather than on his two Hummers, diamond watches and €10,000 a week lifestyle.

Angola has unbelievable resourses. Dig a hole almost anywhere and you find oil, diamonds, copper or iron ore, the land is so fertile that if managed properly could feed not only Angola but the whole continent of Africa. But because of this type of corruption most of the population live in mud hut slums, with no running water, electricity, not enough schools for the kids and minimal health care, hungry deasesed children begging in the streets.

Now that´s some fucked up shit right there.

Older and Why?zer.

Oof! Got a proper welcome to West Africa by contracting a collection of tropical diseases. The Malaria was not that bad but the Salmonela has been a fucking pain in the gut. Treating it with antibiotics, but that dont help the pain so been necking pain killers like candy. My liver must look like a tea bag now.

After Luanda we headed down the coast in a mini bus built for 10 people with about 20 people in it. Talk about hot sweaty arse. Damn! Thunderous music all the way, and only the last 2 or 3 hours of the 11 hour trip were real torture. Arrived in the coastal town of Benguela and stayed in a lovely guest house where I ate the eggs that gave me Salmonela. Jim's Top Tip For The Day, don't eat fried eggs in West Africa!

Spent a couple of daze on the coast then caught the train (the subject of the documentary we're shooting here) inland as far as it went. At one point the train broke down and we were told it would be a couple of hours before another locomotive arrived to push us. So Jeremy and I got out and walked up the train, past the passenger carages to the cargo part at the front. Then the train started moving so we clambered up on the roof and spent the next hour thundering through the African countryside on top of the train like a frickin James Bond movie. AWESOME. I'll try upload a little video I took on my phone, but the conection in this internet cafe is way slow, so it may not work out here.

From the end of the train line we got another mini bus to a weird little town called Ganda to look at the continuation of the construction of the railway. This is being done by Chinese workers living in huge compounds, and there is some major economic political shit going on here.

Two days ago we got to Huambo, a city of a quarter of a million where the post war reconstruction is relativly advanced. But there are still buildings shot to shit on the central square.

Yesterday we went out of town half an hour to meet the Soba(tribal leader) of a mud hut village next to an enormous rock formation. He took us up the rock explaining tribal customs, me clambering behind filming everything. That was some HARD work, but great footage. I hope.

OK. Gotta go film some more now. More later.

Luanda

My Dear Blogtastic People.

Today is.... Wednesday - we arrived early Monday morning, and truth be told, that whole day was a bit of a blur. I don´t sleep well on planes, and the diazapam just served to turn me into a vegetable. Yesterday was better, except every time I sat down I fell asleep. Today I´m full o´ beans and ready to go.

Luanda is both wonderful and fucked up. Kinda like a cross between Phnom Pen and Rio. The joy of Brazil, and the melancholy of Cambodia. Today we plan to go to the biggest street market in Africa, and tomorrow or Friday head down the coast to Benguela.

More later.

jb