Hey folks,

We're on the home stretch - just enough time to hand the mike over to Grace for one more Grace-a-gram before we wrap this thing up.

I have, maybe a little too deliberately, avoided too much commentary on the state of Africa because I wasn't quite sure what to say or how to say it. Fortunately, Grace has delivered on the topic with trademark aplomb, in that most hallowed of art forms - the listicle. Enjoy.

10 Culture Shocks In East Africa

1 - "Not For Sale"

Of course, I'm used to "FOR SALE" signs - but one of the first things I noticed on our long highway drives was how many buildings were clearly marked "NOT FOR SALE" in spray paint.

I asked our guide, Linda, about this - who confirmed it was a tactic to stop scammers selling shops and houses that did not belong to them!

2 - Weapons

Nothing like international travel to make you realise how few weapons we see back home.  AK-47s are strapped to the back of park rangers, border officers and even grocery store security guards. Carrying a machete is even more commonplace.

Here, people seem to associate holding weaponry with safety - which is jarring to our delicate Australian sensitivities!

3 - School

I'm still thinking about the conversation we had with some Kenyan guides about high school in Kenya. We learned it is not unusual for classes to begin at 4 O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, and to last until around 6 in the evening, especially at boarding schools.

I cannot imagine a daily 3:00am alarm now, but for teenagers it seems a particularly tough ask. (Perhaps relatedly, our guides did not have fond memories of their high school days.)

4 - Street salesman

We've seen the usual street salesmen - street food, street vendors - but there's also an impressive number of salesmen walking in between lanes of traffic at lights trying to sell us things. Everything from hot peanuts, to children's ABC books, to windscreen wipers can be purchased from a car window while waiting at an intersection in the cities. And the traffic is bad enough that there's plenty of time to haggle.

Even the Masai herdsmen take part in street selling, with freshly cultivated honey for sale in old Fanta bottles on the side of dusty Serengeti roads.

5 - Physical fitness

You can absolutely tell that lots of the East African population are more physically active than we are. Truly, it seems sedentary lifestyles are very much a Western way of life.

We've seen it everywhere: from the paddlers who took us out tubing, to the gentlemen climbing the coconut trees, to the gorilla trekking intern who climbed the muddy hill in office trousers and a silk blouse while we were kitted up in full hiking gear and gardening gloves.

And East African women really do carry things on their heads - extraordinarily large and awkward things sometimes. I've seen women walking alongside the side of the road with everything from laundry baskets to bunches of bananas balanced with absolutely zero wobbles. Poise goals.

6 - Tech

So, maybe this doesn't count as culture shock - but I'm including this because some of the tech advances in East Africa have taken me by surprise (to my shame).

For example, M'Pesa - ubiquitous payment technology in Kenya that has allowed Kenyans to pay for things using their mobile phones for over a decade. They're leaders in mobile payment tech. According to Linda, M'Pesa was invented by a uni student and he sold it to SafariCom for around $500,000 USD, but it's now worth over a billion - and Zuckerberg keeps trying to buy it.

Another notable example was the mud huts in the Masai village we visited having solar panels installed. Apparently, this was government funded. Must be nice!

7 - Religion

Christianity was absolutely everywhere on the mainland: bumper stickers, clothing, murals, and hymns I know from high school playing in grocery stores. (I really didn't expect to be humming along to Shine Jesus Shine while buying road trip Oreos!)

The sheer number of churches - often humble, tin-roofed shacks with the name spray-painted onto the front - continued to surprise me. In each tiny village we passed, even the ones that only looked to be a handful of houses, there was at least one Christian church. Often, there was more than one.

Now we are in Zanzibar, where the overwhelming majority of locals are muslims. In Stone Town in particular, symbols of Islam are everywhere. To my memory, it's the first time I've been anywhere with a Call To Prayer and I've found it quite beautiful.

8 - Litter

Sadly, outside of the National Parks, litter is commonplace across most of the countries we've visited - particularly along the highways we've been travelling. It's quite confronting but - as Rocky pointed out the other day - we've seen almost no public bins.

The one exception to this is Rwanda, which is extraordinarily clean - but for grizzly reasons. It turns out that those who participated in the Rwandan Genocide of the Tutsis were given the opportunity to seek redemption by serving half of their custodial sentence outside of prison performing community service. This was a means of seeking forgiveness from the community, allowed via traditional community justice courts. As a result, Rwanda is a haven of well-maintained infrastructure, cleanliness, and safety. According to the Genocide Museum, it's been a crucial part of community reconciliation after the atrocities of the 1990s.

9 - Bribery

Bribery of police and state officials is commonplace, so much so that one of the drivers for our day trip to Rwanda commented that he didn't like to drive in Rwanda because he couldn't bribe his way out of a ticket there.

The other time this came up was when we crossed a bridge in Uganda at the Source of the Nile near Jinja. Linda warned us that we absolutely must not take any photos of the (frankly underwhelming) bridge: it was prohibited for security reasons and if we were spotted taking any photos, we'd be arrested - and she didn't know how much bribe money we'd need to be bailed out! 

(I did not take this picture - confoundingly, it's perfectly googleable.)

In a plot twist, I was so amused by the No Photos Bridge and did some research, and it seems that actually photos are no longer prohibited. But there are still people who will "arrest" anyone who takes a photo and demand a bribe. Go figure!

10 - Sunscreen

Sunscreen, aka Mzungu Cream, is barely available to purchase anywhere. When our friend Breanne needed some she had to find a pharmacy (not stocked in grocery stores!) and fork out $40 USD for a bottle of very fancy La Roche Posay.

When we commented on this to Linda, she shrugged and told us that La Roche Posay was the only brand that didn't leave a white sheen on black skin. Oof!

I have nothing to add to this, except that if you enjoyed a lil snapshot into what "Africa" is actually like, we can both heartily recommend Dipo Faloyin's Africa Is Not A Country to bone you up on why those quote marks are around "Africa"

Catch you real soon now,
Rocky (and Grace.)