African One-Liners

Since I'm stuck recuperating in Conakry with the kind of internet connection that comes once in a lifetime in Africa, seems like as good a time as any to dump a collection of quotes that, over the past few months, have made me laugh.. or tilt my head and think: "?"

David, in Arusha, Tanzania, on finding a guide: "If we stand around and look white, sooner or later we'll find someone."

"Now we're full." -- the herder of a 14-passenger bus in Rwanda, on boarding his 26th passenger. (Several of us immediately protested amid general laughter that we could surely fit at least two more...)

Butros Butros Ghali, on being asked to distinguish between the Arabic bukra, insha'allah and the Spanish mañana: "The Arabic 'bukra' has none of 'mañana's sense of urgency."

David to me, haughtily, after I made a snarky remark about how unexpectedly luxurious our Congolese hotel room was: "Unlike you, I don't need to be in a nest of cockroaches to get a good night's sleep."

Debating whether or not Libya was a swell country, in response to my comment on the governmental status the (pro-Libya) Nigerien dude responded: "Well, yeah.. but who gives a fuck about democracy??"

On the mass of hair that came away from my head when I took out my braids from Zanzibar - "Man, you could stuff a pillow with that." And pressed as to the color of that still attached to my scalp: "Uh... if I had to say, I would probably say... indeterminate."

"Hey, it takes a lot of willpower to go through a can of tuna!" --David, defensively, to my stare of disgust as he tuna-stank up our squalid hotel room in Kenya.

Anna and Matt, two friendly Peace Corpsers, on the obstacles to tourism in coastal Benin and Togo: "The tourists come out here in the morning with their towels and there are like six to eight people shitting on the beach."

"And this is for.. grabbing and strangling something, I guess." --David, in all seriousness, describing an item at the label-less National Museum of Ethiopia.

(This one I can't claim to have seen myself, but it's good enough to merit repeating) On a billboard in Nigeria: Do you suffer from virginal drip?

From me to David, on a random street in Masindi, Uganda after leaping out of the way of yet another honking taxi: "You know, I'm getting kind of sick of people threatening me with vehicular homicide as a means of getting my attention."

An idealistic museum docent in Benin, showing a morality statue of a woman naked to the waist, explained to the assembled Beninese (and me) how female nudity to the waist is 'okay' in African culture. One of his countrywomen heartily disagreed, and a spot of bickering ensued. The man was persistent, but the woman soon won it beyond all claim with: "Now just what do you think would happen to me if I wandered around the street naked to the waist??"

On the crowds of people swarming around our huge bus and waving their arms madly as we attempted a cramped 3-pt-turn in congested Nairobi: "Gee, everyone here's a budding traffic director."

"Hm.. One minute." -- David's estimate for how roughly how long it would take to break down the rickety plywood-and-rusted-bolt combination ambitiously calling itself my hotel door.
(15 minutes - time spent relocating all furniture in my room to directly in front of said door.)

And finally, one more to make his parents proud: David, discussing my student health plan in the EG airport, in response to my apprehension about the insurance supplier: "Man, I would take Satan himself if he was offered to me at a 75% discount!"

(Which, with insurance companies, is more or less the same thing.)

Once burned, sun-burned

When the lovely new umbrella I bought in Equatorial Guinea broke its first spoke before the end of the afternoon and crumpled into ragged plastic fabric hanging from meaningless metal spikes a day later in Cameroon, I took a holy oath not to buy another until we reached Europe. My enchantment with the collapsible umbrella, despite its brevity, had been quite keen, and I felt the betrayal of its unexpectedly final collapse just as keenly. So, I stubbornly continued to use the flimsy rag-draped spokes against an African summer sun that stubbornly continued to suck the life out of anything it touched. Pride kept me from admitting that I had been had by the wily umbrella merchant of Malabo, and that pride won me many friends across Cameroon and through northern Nigeria- right up to the unfortunate (David would challenge that adjective) day when I left it behind in a share-taxi crossing the border to desert Niger.

Thus umbrella-less, I wilted in the scorching Saharan sun for the rest of Niger, fending off David's exhortations to buy another with the once-burned remark that I had been down that road before, thanks very much.

After we crossed back into Nigeria, however, an umbrella in Kaduna managed to catch even my jaded eye. It was a kiddie umbrella, tiny and blue with a bootlegged image of Mickey Mouse over the auspicious words, "Little World". To open it, you pushed a little plastic button and pop! Mickey Mouse waved at you upside down in the shade interior. When I saw the toy plastic whistle attached, I was sold.

Not so sold I would pay another six dollars for it, though; whistles are all well and good but, as I explained to the umbrella-man, there was absolutely no way I was gonna pay more than about a buck-fifty for something that would barely make it through the day.
"It won't break," he tried to insist.
"Yes, it will," I decreed with bitterness aged like a fine liquor, and bought it for $1.50 (220 naira).

He was right. I was wrong. It did not break on the first day, it did not break on the second, and by the third day of continued use I was ecstatic. I discovered other uses for it - poking other people, smacking things, twirling in the air - that considerably heightened my appreciation for the umbrella even after my excitement over the whistle wore off. David, devoted lobbyist for an umbrella-purchase and chief broker of the sale, began to regret his former advocacy.

I was not in the slightest discouraged by his diminishing support, for it was replaced by random passersby. As we traveled south, I began to get comments about the umbrella - "Ooh, that's a nice umbrella" - from strangers that confirmed my convictions about how great it truly was. And, as I was to discover in an Abuja motor-park, I had apparently gotten a pretty good deal.

A bit loopy after four hours' unsuccessful wait for a share-taxi and sick of seeing the same hawkers again and again, I realized that if you can't beat 'em... The next man who wandered my way to offer me a SIM charge-card, I instead jumped on him and asked him whether he wouldn't like to buy a great umbrella.

The vendor was surprised but not deterred, and after sizing it up carefully, asked me what it would cost him. Naturally I had no real intention of parting with such a magnificent umbrella, but it was the only thing I was holding and I deemed it imprudent to bandy about suggestive offers about clothing.

"A thousand naira," I loftily declared, convinced this was far too high a price for him to do anything but scoff and walk away.
Scoff he did - "Ah!", the short, high-pitched Nigerian squawk of disapproval - but walk away he did not. He was highly entertained (as were most of the other hawkers, herders, and vendors lounging in the lethargic motor-park) but more than that, he willing to negotiate. "200 naira," he offered.
Now it was my turn to squawk. "Ah! I paid more even than that when I bought it." I went to walk away, but the umbrella had now caught his eye, too. "Come down," he insisted, referring to my absurd price tag, and when I joked that even 800 might not be worth it, he instantly jumped to 500. From there we stale-mated - it was too dangerous at this point for me to even joke about going down to a reasonable price - and I began to maintain a more vigilant clutch on my umbrella against David (who heard the N500 offer with glee, and was more than willing to make a 250% profit). By the time we had finally left, the hawker had edged up to 550 without any encouragement from me, and I discovered a lost calling if I ever chose to live in Nigeria.. umbrella merchant.

The umbrella, for its part, continued to serve me well, even to the point of making (oh how melodramatic) the ultimate sacrifice in Lagos. I was walking that morning along the edge of the road, watching a BMW back towards me at high speed. I believed, with inappropriate confidence in the driver's mastery of basic safety principles, that he would stop or at least slow down before he got close to me. I was, after all, hardly the only obstacle along the side of the curb, it was a pretty quiet street, and he was moving backwards. By the time I realized my mistake the sedan was about five feet away and closing fast, too close for me to retreat from and too fast for me to dodge, and it was time for an urgent decision. Even in the moment I had a fleeting regret about sacrificing my umbrella, but my arm couldn't reach far enough and by the time it did it wouldn't be the only bump he heard. So instead, I brought my umbrella down hard on the trunk several times. Success; the driver lurched to a stop a few inches from my hip. I walked forward past the driver's window and snapped rather crankily at him, "You could have killed me!" before stalking on my way. It was unnecessary; the look on his face showed he had come to the same conclusion.

The umbrella (the true victim) came away from its battle better than I expected, as the bludgeoning side, though bent, had not snapped at all during the barrage it rained down upon the BMW's bumper and trunk. That event was to mark the beginning of the end, however.. though I refused to admit it at first, the damaged spokes couldn't sustain their share of the fabric, and it began to slip off. Furthermore, our first real rain in Benin revealed that my umbrella was apparently not meant for adverse weather, and within minutes of getting wet the pole began to rust. Still I clung to the umbrella, using the lubricant for the water filter pump to revive its opening ability (and that delightful push-button pop). David began to agitate for another umbrella purchase (I think it's just the buying that he enjoys), and when we saw another umbrella just like the first in Togo - this one was purple, with dancing green dinosaurs and yellow goat-things - we bought it on the spot. David doesn't know it yet, but I'm actually only using purple-dinosaurs to extend the lifespan of little-world a bit longer, and far from chucking it, have got it stashed away inside my suitcase. (Small as it is, the suitcase is yet smaller, so the curved blue plastic handle and whistle poke out of it at one end, but I have confidence that it's still safe from damage.) As it stands now, I am (dare I say it) cautiously entertaining hopes of little-world making it through the next two months to end-point Dakar, in which case it will definitely be among the six (6) items I have that I ever want to see again after this trip. (And to give perspective on the priority there, the first is my passport, and the second, my camera.) Wish little-world luck!

GUINNEA EQUITORIALE: I came, I saw, I conquered..

... the capital.
And really not much else.
(But it's a very nice capital, in any case.)

Music: Devastating though it is to the strugging artists who produce it, I confess myself thrilled at once again finding in Malabo the street stalls stacked high with pirated cds of excellent local artists. Such street cds, readily available through most of East Africa, had been sadly lacking through both Congos and Gabon. I made sure to pick up a mix album of coupé de caillé and can't wait to buy more souk.


Food (best eaten): It's always when you're hungriest that restaurants suddenly disappear, and after half an hour of desperate searching I flagged down a passing gent and begged him to tell us where the food was. The resulting experience, rice, meaty sauce and a side of plantains, taken in a tiny local jont up some back stairs behind an alley, takes the cake for best meal in Malabo.
A close second would be either of the two meals we took at the European-cuisine Pizza Place. Though we usually do try to patronize local places as opposed to expat hang-outs, and it takes a lot for me to happily go back to the same restaurant, Malabo has a culinary gem in this casual joint. Magnificent if a bit meat-heavy.
Worst Eaten: Considering the heavy Chinese population in the capital, we really were expecting more from the simple meal we had at the money-changing hole-in-the-wall we were thrilled to find. (No ATMs in Malabo, banks won't change either, and you get yourself into pickles.) The financial transaction was well worth a bad meal, but if if they were to ask my advice those ladies would eschew cuisine entirely and set themselves up in banking.

Fun Talents Mastered: It took me a couple days in the orderly Gabonese capital before my somewhat crazed mud-induced crossness wore off, and during said period of elevated orneriness I discovered the amazing ability to stop cars in the street with a single scathing look. Though I don't think it would work in a frenetic city, here in sleepy Malabo I have perfected the art.

That said, I would definitely hesitate to walk out scowling in front of any car manned by Kampala-ites or Djiboutians. It is an expression the undertaker might have to struggle with a little.


Conversational Topics I've Learned to Avoid: David's taught me pretty well to steer clear of religious issues here in the planet's most fervently religious continent, and I've generally managed to sidestep such potential hotspots in talking to strangers. When a Muslim merchant showed me a statuette carved from the tusk of a giant forest hog, however, I made the mistake of blurting out excitedly, "Oooh! I've eaten that!!"

He immediately launched into a diatribe on how he doesn't understand "us" Christians who can stand to eat pork as it was, after all, "our" prophet who first forbade the practice.

Normally I just wait quietly and respectfully for such spurts of religious zeal to work themselves out, before gently turning the conversation back to those topics less likely to cause a world war, such as how much does this cost, or that trusted conversational inanity, the weather. This merchant would have none of that, however, demanding my active participation in his lecutre by frequently checking for agreement and quizzing me lawyer-like on the particulars of Bible verses. I was ultimately driven to confess that I am not, in fact, Christian... which instantly made matters ten thousand times worse as he railed at me for rejecting God.

Oh, dear.

By the time he was done I indeed learned a few things about the Bible I had never known (did you know pigs secretly host demonic spirits?), and a few more I most certainly will not forget about which meals not to discuss with Muslims.


Favorite Billboard: This would have to be the frequent, large adverts we saw wishing our beloved el Presidente Feliz Cumpleanos!!.... two months in advance.
Mark your calendars, everyone.. June 6th is almost here!


New Words Learned: Equitorial Guinnea is the first country since Ethiopia where neither of us speak the principal national language. Ironically, it's the most common second language for Americans to learn, too - Spanish. Though many of the youth do speak French, and we occasionally found some English among people used to dealing with oilmen, we were admittedly reduced to wild sign language and saying things like "dos chambros" and "el bed-o?" to communicate with the cute old man who ran our hostel. Considering that we can make ourselves understood in six languages, including the three most prevalent in Africa, the experience is a little disconcerting.. and humbling.

The linguistic experience was definitely wholeheartedly enjoyable, though. Spanish has now bypassed Russian and Arabic as the language I'm most eager to learn, and for one ignoble reason: facility. In one two-hour impromptu Spanish lesson from the bored clerk outside el director's locked office door, I learned to conjugate ten verbs, introduce myself, and comfortably use six lines of questioning. This is more than I gathered in two months in Japan. And if I learned Spanish, just think of all the entertaining personalities that would open up to me: Trujillo, Strasser, Noriega, Pinochet, Franco... the list goes on!


Most Alarming Security Breach: I carry a small, inconspicuous weapon with me for those awkward times when we have to walk down dark streets. While it's hardly a threat to the truly frightening of the criminal world, it is illegal in Britain and a few other places, and *certainly* isn't allowed through the security of any airport worth its salt. Indeed, even having it in my checked luggage has gotten me flagged for special questioning and searching in several places.

Putting my backpack onto the conveyor belt at Malabo International Airport, I cursed myself as I saw a familiar metallic glint from the side pocket. Crap, I thought, I forgot to move it to my checked baggage. Well, that's that. I began to make small talk casually with the guards, hoping they wouldn't take my weapon-smuggling attempt seriously, and planning out how to order another one. But after looking suspiciously through all my cds and asking how much money I had (not very much), they waved me right on through. Weapon and all!

And guess what?? This airport has direct flights to both Paris AND Houston... awesome!

Best Experience: It's hard to say which was more exciting for me - hearing that el Director was going to give us back half our money, or realizing that despite his explanation being entirely in Spanish, I had understood it all.

Other highlights include wandering around the merkado central (found a replacement handkerchief, an umbrella against the ferocious power of the sun, and a new pair of not-yet-ripped pants) and lounging on the benches outside the stately cathedral in the evening, watching colored lights play on the impressive dome fountain against the quiet, dark backdrop of a city with no power.

Most Regretted Pictures Not Taken: Though it was highly tempting, ultimately I was persuaded not to bust out my camera in front of the soldiers to catch the shot of the capital's cathedral spires, lit in the early evening light, framed by silhouettes of dark palms against a gently rosy setting sun. Blast, though, do I regret that picture.


Unforeseen Firsts: A former PCV ( you know who you are) happened to tell me some horror stories of fly-by-night-literally airlines in Africa the day before my flight from Libreville to island Malabo on that esteemed air carrier Aero-Contracters Nigeria. (Surely you've heard of them!)

Normally a veteran scorner of those silly how-to-click-your-seatbelt pre-flight safety announcements, for the first time in my life I found myself following along on the safety card for how to maximize my 0.01% chance of survival in the event of a water landing.

Luckily, my acquired knowledge was unneeded, and after safely landing back on the mainland in Douala, Cameroon, I promptly forgot it.

Could I live here? Considering I couldn't even get the papers to leave the city and thus only saw the capital, this is sort of a hard question to answer. If I had to say, though, I think I'd sooner try another place where my movements and photographic impulses wouldn't be quite so restricted.

It's kind of like a high-class insane asylum: if you don't try to leave or take pictures, Malabo is a pretty pleasant place to be.

A Jerk By Any Other Name

No matter the color or culture, women the world over have a few things in common... at least when it comes to dealing with those jerks who make themselves easy to spot.

Waiting in line to board a Douala-bound flight at Malabo Airport, one guy (obviously superior to such silly things as queues) ducked under the nylon ropes around everyone else and pushed his way through the exit at the front of the line. The woman currently exiting, a tired woman with a baby on her back and two heavy bags, was no match for him. I was right behind her, but powerless to do anything except stare at his receding back and snarl at it, "Asshole."

I was highly gratified when his bag caught in the door a moment later, preventing him from taking advantage of his line-jump as several passengers (I among them, I assure you) streamed around him struggling with his suitcase. Yesss karma.. normally I help others in such a situation, but not this time. No one else did, either.

We did, however, help the young mother carry her bags across the tarmac to the plane. She seemed exhausted, and I was glad when the ticket-checkers at the bottom of the boarding stairs motioned for her to come up to the front of the line - "You there, with the baby, you can board right away."

Suddenly there was an overfamiliar hand on my shoulder - that same dude had somehow caught back up to us - and he joked pompously and wittily to the clerks, "People with babies to the front of the line? Well here's my baby, can I come up too?"

I was *speechless* with disgust, but the female ticket-clerk wasn't, and neither David nor I needed to any Spanish to understand exactly what she meant by her one-word response: "Kulo!"

May I note with satisfaction, Señor Kulo still boarded behind me.

And thank you, Chris, for pointing out the irony in me telling everyone in my last post to wait until mañana... could be Malabo is rubbing off on me, but of course mañana always takes a few days to get here...

To my sister and all those tender-hearted towards dogs: DO NOT READ THIS

Seriously Kelly, just close the window and wait until tomorrow.



Well, much as I do like Malabo and immediately felt welcomed by its non-security-force-related inhabitants, I knew within five hours of landing what I would be writing for my "Worst Experience of Equitorial Guinnea". EG doesn't deserve to take the fall for this, though... this could have happened anywhere along the way, and this post has been building up, so maybe I should just be surprised it took this long.



Exiting a restaurant after a sumptuous meal of freshly-caught sole, I saw an extremely thin dog lying on the sidewalk. While the position was not unnatural for a napping dog, his body was too still and as I watched for breath in his narrow chest I realized he was dead. We kept walking, I thought of the rich meal I had just enjoyed and felt sick. I had no food with me, but wondered if it would be possible to revive him with something, but we kept walking.

David, also a big dog person, said nothing, but patted my shoulder a couple times.
After all the limping dogs of Libreville, I don't know how I can take it anymore.

That night I went to bed with the dog in my head, imagining what it must be like, after days of blinding hunger, to finally make that decision to give up, and lie down to die. Would it have been a relief to stop trying, or just an exhaustion of physical strength? Did it happen quickly? Did he lose consciousness through most of the painful parts? I wondered what the last place was that he tried to look for food. And what it must have been like not to find any.
And I just walked on by.. like everyone else.

It's enough to make you want to give up your life, give up everything, just find some food and feed those dogs. Just keep feeding them until they're all full and healthy, and worry about the future later.
But then what?



There's a part of me that exclaims righteously how wrong it is to focus my compassion on a starving dog when there are human beings in just as wretched a state and worse all over the world. This is a problem with which I've struggled for ten years, ever since it occurred to me that my beloved pet pooch had a cushier life than some of the world's children. Is this patently wrong, to pamper so an animal, give it abundant food, love, and medical care when malnourishment claims tens of thousands of children's lives every year?

I don't have an answer for this. I suppose I could rationalize that while there are many agencies and billions of dollars in aid devoted to alleviating the plight of the miserable and protecting wildlife, there aren't that many for the miserable among domesticated species. A few in the West, rare anywhere else as far as I can tell. (I invite all corrections.)

But - is it ethically wrong to use even one dollar to save the life of a dog, when a person somewhere else needed that dollar to survive?

For me, this ultimately comes down to human responsibility. While I like pandas and whales and support efforts to preserve biodiversity, I don't necessarily feel beholden to individual members of the species. And cats are awesome, but let's face it - cats are smart. They don't really need us, and I've known some for whom human attention was more an impediment to their preferred independent lifestyle than a lifestyle in itself.

Not so for dogs. Dogs aren't like that. Behold a species humans have virtually created for our convenience, bred to have that same dependence on humans that dooms so many of them when abandoned to the life of a stray. These are animals who have historically and unfailingly offered us protection, assistance in hunting, warmth, loyalty, even their lives. If the dogs of today pitifully surrender miserable lives unwanted on asphalt streets because humans no longer need an animal to bark when the wild things are skulking about, that is our fault. And sadder still, they don't even resent us for it. Though some of the best species can, through a determined programme of deliberate torture, be broken and turned truly mean, there is no animal on the planet like a dog for turning the other cheek. The French have a playful fable that God's first, truly perfect creation was actually the Dog, and He was only moved to create a second, less perfect Human at Dog's begging for a companion to share life with.

Spend any amount of time with a dog, and you can kinda see where that's coming from.


It doesn't make it any less wrong that children die in civil war, and efforts towards protecting children are obviously more important than those protecting dogs. This is ten-thousand-times true. But if the Red Cross and MSF are watching the children.. who's watching the dogs??


And so I continue to volunteer not with the Red Cross but with HSUS, and cry at night over the starving dogs of the world. And que voy hacer, I don't know what else to do.

Mañana....

David and I arrived in Malabo Airport ready for a police battle that never came.

We had been warned time and again by everyone (and their brother-in-law) that Equitorial Guinnea has the world's most corrupt security forces, and that arrival in the country was tantamount to saying "Hola! Si, I have bribes for you!!"

The one way around this, we were advised, was to visit the Minister of Tourism in the capital of Malabo, and get some mysterious paperwork insisting that we were real turistas. This would allow us free movement anywhere in the country.

Getting in too late to accomplish this on Tuesday, we nervously skulked about the capital for the rest of the evening, avoiding policemen, until we could show up bright and early Wednesday morning to wait for el director to make an appearance.

El Director, however, didn't seem to know much about said paperwork, confessing the Minister was away on the mainland in Bata, and that too many terrorists in the past few months = no more cartes por turistas.

We were sad.

He was sad too, and told us he'd call with someone higher up to check, and to come back in a few hours.

After a nice lunch and a walk, we went back to his office, received specific and complicated instructions of a treasure-hunt-style list of things to collect for our turista application, and spent an hour rushing about in taxis. Submitted completed paperwork at office. Waited a few hours with no result save him advising us to come back mañana. I was horrified - But sir, we have no papers, what if we get stopped?

He told us just not to try to leave the city, and by all means hide that camera.
(Damnit.)
Oh well, gave up, went home, agreed to come back mañana (Thursday). I took the battery out of my camera to lend credence to my flimsy excuse, if stopped, that it was broken, and spent the evening trying to restrain myself from catching a beautiful shot of the sunset over Malabo's seaside palms.

We went back to the Ministry Thursday morning bright-and-early-9-a.m. with slightly diminished but yet-persistent hope. Battery popped back into camera. One problem though.. el Director was not there. We waited. Hours passed. I befriended the bored clerk who had nothing better to do but teach me Spanish as we sat outside the locked office door.

At noon el Director finally showed up, told us to wait, and retreated behind his door. David was understandably growing a little impatient. I on the other hand, translating out lyrics of Manu Chao songs I had never before understood, didn't mind the lost time nearly so much. (que voy hacer??!) By 1:30, however, even this fascinating activity had grown old, and we informed the director we were a bit tired of waiting. He told us to try coming back mañana. We explained that as we were leaving the island the next day to continue on to Cameroon, getting the proper permits to travel around was sort of a task we needed to finish before mañana. He was awkward. We were awkward. Ultimately he gave us a number to call later; we called later, this time to ask about a refund of the dearly-missed sixty bucks we had plunked down in hopes of obtaining this paperwork. He asked us to call again, later. We called again, later. He said to try coming back.. you guessed it.. mañana.

We indeed came back mañana, Friday morning, no longer caring that we lacked the legal paperwork to even be in the country, now just in pursuit of our 30,000 CFA. Truth be told, neither of us had much hope of ever seeing it again, but we weren't going to let it go without at least trying. As we sat outside his office, we calculated that we had spent roughly 37% of our time in Equitorial Guinnea.. waiting at the Ministerio de Informacion y Turismo.

I suppose I can think of worse ways to spend 37% of my time in a country...
I wonder what percent of my time in the DRC was passed in the company of local security forces.

When the minister came, we were both amazed to hear him tell us entirely in Spanish that since he couldn't get us a refund (couldn't contact the Minister, there was no power, he had waited in vain for a fax) he would reimburse us for half the amount from his own pocket. And he did. And let me tell you, we took that 15,000 CFA and took off...

And so, despite seeing police roadblocks on every other corner all throughout the capital and hearing horror stories from off-road traveller's internet site, David and I never did get stopped - though we never managed to leave the city either. Or take a single photo. But they had better just wait until we get on that plane to Cameroon, cos I am finding a window and clicking away shutter-happy until the island is out of sight..