Look at that ridiculous farmer tan.

I rode my bike past Malaba and back yesterday. Here's the
gmap--http://bit.ly/qtIRzn
It was 87km roundtrip, my butt hurt, and I got a ridiculous sunburn. I
was bummed that I didn't get good views of Mt. Elgon, but I did see
two dead green mambas and a dead hedgehog, and raced some random
people along the way. Malaba didn't seem much different than Busia--a
border town with a line of gas trucks a mile long. Maybe on a longer
weekend I'll bike to Mt. Elgon, lock up the bike, and hire a guide
(mandatory, unfortunately) to hike in the national park. Some weekend
soon I'll bike to Lake Victoria at Sio Port, it's not much further a
ride than I did yesterday, only the route is a little more confusing,
so it'd be helpful if I had a smartphone with which to look at google
maps. (My GPS is totally not helpful.)

Swahili lessons are going well, and thunder storms are intense here.
John Reader's Africa: A Biography of the Continent is boring because I
don't care about geology, but Dexter Filkin's The Forever War is
interesting.

My diet has changed here. Instead of subsisting on my homemade
nut-butter and oats energy bars, granola, avocados, hummus, and
olives, I eat homemade energy bars, peanut-butter sandwiches,
avocados, beans, and a tiny bit of scotch. (I haven't found any
bourbon yet.) I cooked dry beans that required soaking (butter beans)
for the first time in my life just now. They're a little chalky.

I should probably work on getting my job market paper ready for
submission sometime.

I'm totally still (dreaming of) riding my bike home from Kenya in
2013. Who's in? BF? Nano? Why did I not look at a map when I mentioned
it last time? Juba to Khartoum is totally unnecessary thanks to this
whole thing called "Ethiopia." You can cross the border from Ethiopia
50km from Khartoum, which I'm just guessing is reasonably safe. Can
you get a visa at that crossing? Why does Lonely Planet never mention
land border crossing visas? You can get them easy at any crossing for
Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda, so why is there only info about
airport and embassy visas?