reality check There was a huge, angry protest nearby and we’d just gotten word that the crowd was burning an American flag. Israel, it turned out, had used a new US-made missile in its assault on Gaza
AFRICA PROTESTS: Demonstration against the 2008/9 Israeli attack on gaza.
to depart on what we expected to be the adventure of our lives. Having worked temporary stints and squirrelled away some cash, we packed our belongings into my mom’s damp basement and prepared ourselves for a journey meant to last half a year and cross South Asia and East Africa. What we didn’t know, as we headed for New York’s Kennedy Airport, our passports zippered into our money belts, was that, whatever we had left behind at my mom’s, we were unwittingly carrying something far heftier with us: our American-ness. Adventures commenced as soon as we stepped off the plane. We glimpsed icecapped peaks that rose majestically out of the clouds as we walked the lower Everest trail. Then – consider this our introduction to the presumptions we hadn’t shed – we ran into a little snafu. We hadn’t brought along enough cash for our multi-week mountain trek; apparently we’d expected Capital One ATMs to appear miraculously on a Himalay-
Photo: Muhammad Mahdi Karim
an footpath. After we dealt with that issue through a service that worked by landline and carbon paper, we took a bumpy Jeep ride south to India and soon found ourselves walking the sloping fields of Darjeeling, the leaves of tea shrubs glinting in the afternoon light. Then we rode trains west and south, while through the frame of a moving window I looked out at fields and rice paddies where women in red or orange or turquoise saris worked the land, even as the sun set and the sky turned pink and reflected off the water where the rice grew. Things would, however, soon get significantly less picturesque, as in some strange, twisted way, the farther we travelled, the closer to home we seemed to get. We arrived in Mombasa, Kenya, in January 2009, on a day when thousands of the city’s residents had flooded its streets to protest a recent, and particularly bloody, Israeli attack on Gaza. Hamas, firing rockets into southern Israel, had killed one Israeli www.coldtype.net | December 2016 | ColdType 29