Crtd 05-11-05 Lastedit 14-08-20

Mwanza From Above

[Related: Finding a house, Isamilo Life, Isamilo Shopping Centre]

My friend Fons sent me a satellite picture of Mwanza:

                                          Go To:    More Maps ,    Elevation Profile of Jogging Track

The red spot near my house is a hill from where I took two pictures, one Westward, one SouthWestward, see below:

While at Isamilo, I see Mwanza is a "boom" town: I am told that ten years ago the compounds had few trees. All were burnt as cooking fire. Since then, people's incomes rose, many now have money for charcoal and the trees have come back. The number of cars increases weekly, most of them brand new. In the past weeks, we started to have a regular rush hour traffic jam of 30 m between two roundabouts on Nkrumah Road! Traffic jams still take less then a minute, unless the president is or will soon be between town and airport. This brings half of the town to a standstill for an entire hour. Running at dusk over the dry mud roads of Isamilo becomes less and less attractive due to the increasing amount of cars throwing up quite bad clouds of dust. My neighbors recently got hold of a transistor radio, the real disturbance of neighbors has begun. The weekly average of nearby disturbing open air disco parties (run by disco companies like JBL - "Just Bloody Loud") at Isamilo rose from 1 to over 3 since I live here. That is how town-Africans want to party. I noticed that many Mwanza citizens have deprived hearing, which I attribute to weekly overexposure to extremely loud noise: they will not hear your car coming if you are not hooting. While passing from behind pedestrians on my running track I scare the hell out of one in every five or ten because they simply do not hear me coming (even though my technique is far from elegant). Going out in Mwanza, I always take my ear plugs. High time to live on a dhow on the lake: no dust, no noise. The latest disaster is the launching of a just bloody loud TV video tent in my shopping centre 40 m uphill.

[Related: Finding a house, Isamilo Life, Isamilo Shopping Centre]