Boleia!

By Beth

“Boleia!” the men shout to me from the sides of the road as I whiz by on my blue Suzuki motorcycle. This is how you flag down a ride when you see a motorcycle taxi go by in São Tomé. But directed to me it is more of a joke, of course- there are no female motorcycle taxi drivers, and certainly no white ones. It makes me smile because the São Tomeans play with me the way an aunt or uncle or cousin would- lightly making fun that, in some ways, makes you feel more at home.

Dany taught me how to ride a motorcycle so that I didn't have to depend on him for rides into town. As someone who never knew

My lovely mota, sans me, because I was uh...the one taking the picture

how to drive a car with a manual transmission, learning to ride a motorcycle took me a minute. I still have trouble starting it sometimes and shifting into first without stalling (for this reason I used to abhor four-way stops, but am slowly getting better at them), especially with someone riding behind me, since they add more weight. But the feeling of being on a motorcycle is freeing. My thighs tighten their grip on the motorcycle's body as if I were riding a horse. I lean forward, turn up the gas, passing palm trees and people selling coconuts and oceans and sand. I love my mota and it serves me well.

Like learning to ride my mota, it also took me a minute to get used to the stares. No one means harm by them, but coming from a place like the USA where people will get into fights with other people that look at them, it's strange to move from invisible to famous. But the worst thing you can do is turn in. In a strange way, São Tomé very much nurtures individuality. You learn to be like, “yup, I'm a white woman, and I ride a motorcycle, and what of it?” Kids pass and they call to me. “Amiga!” They yell. “Branca!” Friend. White woman. Men do the same, or they hiss.

But you don't ignore them. You look at them right in the eye. You say, “Hey there, good afternoon! How are you?” You smile, laugh. You are comfortable with who you are. And they, in turn, are comfortable with you too. You are a part of this community whether you like it or not.

My boyfriend, Kilson, greets every single person he sees. Everyone knows him. He might walk into a room with fifteen people and if ten of them are people he vaguely knows, he will walk around shaking the hand or kissing the cheek of every single one, then introduce himself to the people he does not know yet. Sometimes I think he is a local celebrity. He does not demand respect from people. He gives it out with graceful ease; and, in this way, it comes back to him tenfold.

Like my motorcycle weakness is shifting into first, Kilson's driving weakness is speed bumps. But he doesn't know how to drive a motorcycle, and he's not afraid to admit that he's scared of them. He gives me his baseball cap and sunglasses and I give him my helmet. We're in the middle of the city and he hops on the motorcycle behind me, wearing the helmet, even though 99% of the time it's the driver that wears the helmet in this culture. But then again, 99% of the time it's the man that drives, too. He is a muscular black man hopping onto the back of a white woman's motorcycle, and he's wearing a helmet, and what of it, because he's Kilson and everyone knows him and he is comfortable with himself and because of this he can do absolutely whatever he wants.

The Lure of the Unpaved Roads

By Jessie, guest contributor

Read more from Jessie and her husband Robert's blog, www.knkexplore.wordpress.com

Back when my parents used to say it, the “scenic route” meant the long way. I didn't want to sit in the car for an extra 40 minutes on our drive home from church, and I didn't understand why we had to go all the way out in the opposite direction just to see what was there. I knew what was there: corn fields and orchards. Same as we would see on the normal route home.

Eventually, though, I began to catch on that taking “the scenic route” was just a small way that my parents could experience a world different from the one they knew every day, a way to briefly recapture that magic of travel that I've come to know and love as an adult. I began to realize that these back roads might be unpaved, they might be indirect, but they were never a waste of time.

Today I'm ever fascinated by those unpaved roads. On my Peru map they're represented by simple red lines that draw my curiosity. My guide book already told me what I can expect to find on the main road; I want to know what I can find on the back roads.

On a recent solo road trip from Seattle, Washington, to Tucson, Arizona, I sought out the roads that ran parallel to the highway. On my Utah map they would sometimes be marked with a row of dots if they were thought to be “scenic,” a word which does all too little to describe Utah's majestic wilderness.
The most understated of them all was the horrifyingly beautiful Hogsback Ridge (Utah's Highway 12).
After many miles of pleasant forest switchbacks the road suddenly crests. The land beside the road drops away to leave you and your car stranded on a thin ribbon of two-lane highway floating thousands of feet above a sea of windswept stone in pink and orange and cream and vermilion. Fortunately at that moment they provide a turnoff so that you can pull over in a panic and collect your wits, staring out over the Escalante badlands and commiserating with other drivers as you collectively think: “Oh, shit! I have to drive down that?”

In Peru it was the unpaved, 12-hour bus ride on a single lane dirt road from Cajamaca to Chachapoyas. It was hard to know what

View from the road from Cajamarca to Chachapoyas

was more disconcerting: watching the road while the driver sped around hairpin corners with barely a courtesy honk of the horn, or staring out over the increasingly-gorgeous scenery that was spread out so incredibly far below you.

On the road from Cajamarca to Chachapoyas

During that trip we stopped in the town of Celendín, which is overlooked by most guide books. Looking for something to do, we took a taxi up to a village to search out a waterfall we had been repeatedly told did not exist. We were warned by the taxi driver not to leave the main road, but as soon as he was out of sight we looked at each other and set out on a footpath that cut through a potato field.

Campesina woman

What would we have found if we stayed on the road? Who knows! But by taking the footpath we met an old Andean campesina and her two horses, who led us on a tour of the beautiful countryside and showed us off to her neighbors.

Campesina woman

There is merit in the well-traveled routes; after all, they would not be popular if there was nothing worthwhile to see. But I also find profound joy in looking at my state atlas and saying: “What a bizarre name for a town. Maybe I'll go there today.” It's the love of the scenic route which takes you to the out of the way places where you're on your journey alone, on roads that no one has bothered to pave. You'll always find something if you're searching for it.

How Dany's Playlist Covers the Ups and Downs of Feminism

By Beth
 
It is my third day in Sao Tome e Principe and already I feel like I have a family. I am very lucky to be able to say this. Dany decides to take me to explore the north coast today. He loves driving Ned's pick-up truck, cruising through the city streets at nearly 80km per hour. Without speed limits, we are free to ride the wind as we plunge from the city center to forests thick with banana trees, to shantytowns up in the mountains, to dry, vast meadows overlooking the disturbingly blue ocean.

We roll the windows down and drive, bounding over potholes and puddles, seatbelts off, free to live, free to die (on my first day I was made fun of so much for wearing a seatbelt that I promptly stopped. Apparently it's just not the Santomense way). The CD Dany plays is usually some mix of Sao Tome radio's best- mainly thick Kizomba beats from Cape Verde and Brazil. The first song is titled “I Need a Girlfriend”. For the past three days I have listened to this song with zeal, as the verses are sung with in densely African Portuguese but the phrases repeat in English. It's a cute song: “I need a girlfriend, a freakin' girlfriend, I need a girlfriend” and then something about how that girlfriend should be the woman that this man is singing to, I believe. I listen to it and smile at the vulnerability that this man presents to his future girlfriend. The urgent need for someone that he can love and protect. A need that isn't necessarily communicated, as I have seen, from African men. So it's nice to hear something of this flavor.

Until I come to today, that is, when I finally really listen to the bridge, which goes something like, “One girl, two girls, all these shorties ain't enough for me." Then we're back to square one.
Everywhere we drive there are beautiful painted murals with phrases above them. They are, for the most part, socially

A condom-filled tree reminds teens to use protection in order to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS

conscious publicity tactics: promoting healthy living in hopes that the community will follow suit. A happy couple in bed is surrounded by mosquito nets, condoms dance and smile, babies doddle with syringes next to them (to encourage vaccination) and, my favorite, a cheerful, carefree family of four holds hands, above which it reads something along the lines of, “wouldn't you be happy to be able to give attention to all of your children?”, thus encouraging manageable family sizes. A few minutes down Dany's playlist comes a song  about these two people that send furtive text messages to each other. But the man isn't swayed by these flirtatious messages he receives. “Eu tenho lar, eu tenho filho, eu tenho ma mulher comigo,” he sings. “I have a home, I have a child, I have my wife with me.” There it is. Satisfaction in the nuclear family. The song breathes the spirit of the murals around town.

I bring these two songs up because, as Dany cautiously explained to me over lunch, polygamy is extremely common among Santomense men, and nearly extinct among the women. To each woman, her one man. But to each man, two or three women. And through this a thicket of jealousy grows. And rightly so, I might add. I can't help but ask where the women are when these two male singers indirectly debate the right of women to be treated as treasures, as monogamic entities. Apparently their voices have been taken from them. In these two songs at least.

Yet the irony rocks me. It seems wherever one goes, there are signs pressing the importance of condom use, of monogamy, and of other subject matter. But the numerous children that run through the streets are evidence enough that the murals and the real world here are entire opposites. They could quite possibly encompass entirely different worlds. In fact, the closest I think they have ever really gotten to each other is somewhere around the distance sound covers in four minutes; the length of the song that comes between them on Dany's ever-popular cruising playlist.