Zamani Blog

With flights, accommodation, permissions, computers and tutorials arranged, all that was left before the field campaign could take off was the long awaited clearance letter from Kenyan customs authorities which was essential to bring the scanner, a loaned Leica HDS 6100, and all other equipment into Kenya. There were a few tense moments but the letter arrived the day before we departed Cape Town and all was set.

Nairobi

Landing in Nairobi airport Heinz, Ralph and I picked up our personal luggage, minus a bundle of tripods, umbrella and GPS pole which had missed the flight somehow and headed for customs for the important equipment. Unfortunately the person we were meant to meet at customs from the clearing agency never materialised and so we started the long and complex procedure of clearing our equipment without expert assistance. Although scanner and GPS were waiting for collection, customs officials did not share the team’s sense of urgency and the equipment was not released.

Leaving the instruments at customs we moved to our hotel, the Panafric, venue of the workshop and home for the next six nights. We were more than happy to settle in to probably the most luxurious hotel we have stayed at in all our African trips. The computers installed, we began the workshop with Heinz giving an introductory presentation and Ralph and I taking over the practical tasks of introducing the practicalities of importing points, georeferencing, digitizing and map production.

Over the next three days we taught GIS to keen heritage experts from five African countries – many of whom will go on to use this technology in their institutions. We also saw a bit of Nairobi by night and were invited to a braai at Dr. George Abungu’s house (George is one of our project advisors) which turned out to be a very festive and fascinating evening. We attended the centennial celebration of the National Museums of Kenya which was held at the Nairobi Museum where Heinz gave a warming speech, and we browsed the interesting exhibits.

Blog of Rahim Rajan, organizer of the workshop and conference – (http://blog.aluka.org)

Gede Ruins

With the Nairobi leg of the trip over it was time to head for Malindi to document the remains of the city of Gede. Fortunately our equipment was allowed to leave customs on the day before our planned departure for Gede and our concerns that we might have to cancel the fieldwork proved unfounded. Landing in Malindi, we changed from the dry and mild climate of the altitude of Nairobi to the humidity of the Indian Ocean coast. We were met at the airport by Museums of Kenya officials who took us to our accommodation. We discovered Malindi is an Italian Tourist Haven and fancy restaurants line the main road of this otherwise typical African town.

Early the next morning after a local breakfast of muffins and tea, we drove to the site of Gede. We didn’t know exactly what to expect of the site as the only pictures that we managed to find showed the main palace only and no overall site shots could be found. Therefore the scale of the site and the condition and size of the buildings were a bit of a mystery to us. We had given ourselves six full days to document as much as we could. Joining us on the trip was professional surveyor Benson Kameu from the British Institute in Eastern Africa who had previously worked on Songo Mnara, a site which we documented in 2009.

On arriving at Gede we were impressed. The site closely resembled Songo Mnara in that it is an old Arab-African town, but instead of the palm trees and mangroves of Songo, Gede was surrounded by rainforest. The town is neatly set out over an area of 45 acres with a central area with houses, Mosque and a so-called ‘Palace’, with the walls constructed of coral rag. There is also an outer perimeter wall to guard the inhabitants. A tall tree with a tree house designed to give visitors an overview of the site gave us the opportunity to gain an impression of the extent of the site and thus our work. Historians estimate that Gede, in its prime, could have held 2500 people. There are very deep wells, some over 20 m and quite elaborate channels for moving water around are present as well as basins for washing before prayer in the mosque. The palace has a large sunken court in the middle, but unfortunately none of the ceilings remained after six centuries since its construction. There is also a pillared tomb where the head imam might have been buried. A troop of monkeys danced through the trees and ruins, almost tame, clutching mangos right out of our hands.

We set out scanning the largest building, the so-called palace, first as this was the most important building at the site. Luckily there are caretakers who maintain and clean the ruins of vegetation which made the scanning easier. With only the HDS 6100 scanner there was not much need for planning and coordination. Our work was made easier by a local guide book of the ruins showing a very high level of map detail of the main palace and town area; this we used to plot positions of scans and survey points. Ralph and I began scanning right away and Heinz and Benson started a total station survey to georeference our scans. The RTK GPS proved to be largely unusable because of the high trees closely surrounding the site which blocked the satellite signals, but we managed to fix a few points on wall corners at high accuracy. The heat was really oppressive but luckily the trees kept us in the shade.

We managed to get accommodation nearby at a luxury Italian hotel where Heinz used all his charm to get a discounted rate. Not used to such lavish living conditions we made the most of it after a day’s hard work, swimming in the pool and at the private beach, enjoying the Maasai shows and eating chocolate pancakes.

We made up for this, however, by starting the day well before breakfast for a 2-3 hour scanning and surveying session, then back for breakfast at the hotel, followed by another working session until lunch around 2pm. We found a nice little local restaurant to restock on cokes and cheap but delicious meals of fish and coconut rice. The waiter had a poor command of English though and sometimes you got fish fingers instead of the eggs and chips we thought we had ordered. The permanently running TV accompanied our lunch with Indian street fighting Bollywood movies. After lunch we would get back to site for the afternoon session. Ralph had brought his iPod music station with and so we scanned along to the sounds of the Beatles and 80’s disco music. Quite a few tourists came through the Gede everyday with very well qualified guides and we picked up a bit of the local version of history. Apparently in front of the entrance of the Palace was buried a pot which housed a fingo or charm. With an appropriate ritual a guardian spirit or djinn could be induced to take up residence in the pot. If an evil character entered the house the spirit would drive them out of their wits. We also heard via the guides that the town was deserted after the water level dropped and no drinking water was available for the inhabitants to live off.

Work done for the day we would raid the little shop for cold drinks and head back to the villa for a cool-down swim. We also found some nice local restaurants to watch soccer and relax. One of these was amazingly themed as a German beer garden, to the embarrassment of Heinz – they only played Bavarian beer garden music which was very strange being in the heart of rural Kenya. Backing up the data and falling asleep dead tired to the sound of buzzing mosquitoes ended the day.

Besides scanning and surveying there were also photogrammetric pictures to be taken, as well as videos and panoramas. The panoramas were the most interesting as Benson and I got to explore the whole site including the outer walls and buildings that are enveloped by thick jungle. We really felt like Indiana Jones discovering long lost civilizations out in the jungle as we circled the perimeter walls which were up to two meters high. With the buildings being so complicated we ended up with around 450 scans and 50 panoramas.

When the work was complete Benson made his way back to Nairobi and Heinz to Dar es Salaam to negotiate further documentation work in Tanzania. I mentioned that I would really like to see Lamu, an old Arabic coastal town in Northern Kenya, and it was agreed that I would go and take more panorama photographs of the town. In 2006 The Zamani Team had visited Lamu to document the Lamu fort, the Friday mosque at Shela, the Swahili House Museum and a street scene. The panoramas that were taken at the time were without a fish eye lens and not HDR, resulting in an overexposed 64 image stitched panorama, clearly inferior to the teams recently adopted approach to panorama photography. This justified my visit to this town.

Lamu

With the help of our driver I booked a bus ticket and was off to Lamu quite elated. There were reports of bandits in the area since it is near to Somalia and so I was a bit relieved when a uniformed soldier bordered the bus and sat in the front seat, rifle clearly visible. Five hours later I arrived at the mainland port near Lamu, found a ferry and crossed the channel to Lamu Island. The sights greeting me were clearly not from this era. Old fishing vessels lined the calm sea shore that housed Arabic style buildings piled on top of each other up a steep hill. Donkeys and carts are used to porter merchandise through the tiny cat infiltrated streets. The unique character and old worldliness of this village cannot be compared to anywhere – stone town Zanzibar might come close. I spent two nights in Lamu and Shela taking around 30 Panoramas of the documented sites and the town in general, though I could have spent weeks getting used to the slow paced climate of this forgotten world.

Back in Nairobi I met up with Ralph at the airport and we started the process of clearing the equipment back out of the country. This was a very lengthy process with many bureaucracy catch 22’s to overcome but in the end the equipment and some of my dirty laundry stayed in the airport strong-room overnight and early the next morning, after driving through the most dangerous part of Nairobi with an almost empty petrol tank, we caught our flight out of Kenya and back to the mother city of Cape Town.

It was another fantastic trip into Africa with many interesting mini-adventures and we were satisfied that we had done a good job teaching at the GIS workshop and Documenting a wonderful heritage site for future generations, for research and for education.

It was an adventurous trip to say the least. After only minor issues with customs in Dares Salaam, the main one being the fact that there was no photocopy machine at the airport, we met Eric Mngumi our contact and Heinz’s PhD student in Tanzania and started planning for our trip down the coast to Kilwa.

Early next morning we awoke to some fruit, tea and humidity at 5am and Chris, Ralph, Eric and I got a lift to the bus station while the rest loaded the government Land Cruiser and set off for Kilwa Masoko, a little village about 500 km south of Dar which was to be our base for the next 10 days. The equipment we had with us was a Leica HDS 6100, and the brand new Leica C10, which we were very keen to get our hands on. Also we had the Leica RTK GPS 1200, our two SLR cameras and Panorama equipment – along with various other paraphernalia that accompanies us wherever we go.

The bus ride was interesting as we were crowded into a luxury bus (curtains, comfy seats, TV) and the bus driver negotiated our way out of the bus station. The next two hours were fine, except for the horrendous Tanzania music videos playing from the TV. The rest of the trip was a lot more uncomfortable as we hit a dirt road at a speed of at least 80km/h which bounced us around like pop corn. At one stage we had to close the curtains and all move to the front of the bus as the bus was being weighed to see if it was balanced properly. The bus driver had never been on this road before but it didn’t stop him pretending it was the Dakar rally. We eventually arrived, severely shook up, at a little town called Nangurukuru, browsed around the second hand clothes market, found a taxi and got dropped at the guest house in Kilwa.

Kilwa town is a tiny street side jumble of little shops and a market, a couple of little restaurants and bars as well as some tourist accommodation. After the others had arrived we headed down to the harbour and took a little motor boat to Kilwa Kisiwani to have a look around. This was a short 20 minute ride and Roshan, Ralph and I were eager to see the Gereza Fort we had heard so many stories about. It loomed over the sea like a medieval castle as we drew nearer. Made from crumbling coral blocks the Fort is in a state of despair, however UNESCO has got involved and there is a major effort to conserve and reinforce the Fort. This left us in a bit of a conundrum as the Fort had been scanned already before it was restored. Now if we rescanned, the scans wouldn’t fit together with the old 3D model due to the changes that have happened over the 5 years. Well needless to say we decided to rescan the entire Fort again, along with the Great Mosque on Kisiwani, and then while we were there the small mosque too. Sometimes our scanning enthusiasm gets ambitious… We could have honestly spent a month on Kilwa Kisiwani scanning all the ruins, but money and time do not allow.

The next day Heinz headed off to see the authorities to announce our arrival and the rest of us took the boat to Kilwa to start scanning and photographing the small mosque. It was super hot and we had to carry a lot of equipment quite a distance, however we soon lured some local kids to carry the lighter stuff. Once Heinz was done we picked him up along with the generator he had to extract from under a bookshelf and we were off to Songo Mnara!

Wow, we had all our expensive equipment loaded into the middle of a leaky handmade dhow with a little 25 hp outboard as we travelled along the pristine coast of Tanzania. Mangrove forests, clear warm water and local fishing dhows were the only things visible to us for close on an hour and a half. Unfortunately though the captain of our vessel mistook the channel and grounded us on a sandbank out in the bay. To get the boat free we all had to disembark and push. For the next half hour we pushed the boat along, trying to mind the massive sea urchins underfoot. A couple of us ended up with urchin quills impaled in our feet.

The fun part over we arrived at Songo island. There was a clearing cut into the mangroves which led to a small beach with a dozen fishing shacks. The locals helped us offload our equipment onto their tiny dugout canoes and pushed them to the shore as the boat stayed anchor offshore. With all on dry land again we started the trek to the ruins. This involved a walk through a palm tree plantation – luckily coconuts weren’t in season or our skulls would be in serious danger, then a trudge through the 150m long path cut through the mangroves. Depending on the tide you would either be in ankle deep or waist deep water, quite a difference when there are two of you carrying a scanner in its box. Exiting the mangroves you find yourself in a clearing except for more palm trees and the coral ruins of Songo Mnara. The ruins are quite extensive and cover an area of about 300m x 300m. To scan all these buildings would’ve been impossible and so we picked out a few of the important structures for documenting and then did overall scans in between to capture as much of the detail as possible for creation of a plan of the entire site.

The first day we scanned the Palace, the main and most intact structure on Songo. The remaining walls show details of beautiful Swahili arches and carvings. The court in the middle is beautifully designed and conjures up images of grandeur.

The C10 has a range of up to 300m and so we optimized this by setting up around the outside of the building. The 6100 was used inside to quickly move between rooms. At one stage a huge palm fell off a tree about two meters away from the Scanner which had Roshan on his toes. The sun was extremely hot and the humidity soaked through our shirts. This saps your energy and liquids and we were drinking liters of water as we carried the scanners around the site.

The homeward journey was a little different as the tide had come up so much we couldn’t get back through the mangrove path. Some locals showed us a path to another side of the island where we could board the boat. So climbing the rocks and down a steep embankment we found the boat anchored 20m offshore. Wading out into the ocean with all our boxes balanced on our heads we loaded the boat and then took a long and deserved swim in the tropical waters. A relaxing 1.5 hour boat ride later and we unpacked the boat, packed the car and got back to our guesthouse for supper.

This not being a tourist haven, there were few tourist restaurants and so we dined local style eating really good fish, rice, japatis, ugali and spinach. The local masala chai (tea) is amazing. It is a blend of spices including ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and also lots of sugar. It is amazing how it will refresh you in an instant.

Backing up and recharging batteries was the last mission of the evening. We all piled into my room, hooked up our stabilizer and began. As we always say one copy is no copy and to be vigilant about backing and charging everything for the work tomorrow is quite hard after a long day in the sun but we persevered, beside the power cutting out a couple times.

Breakfast was at 6am, either beef soup, boiled eggs or dough balls and tea. Then we would begin the first of many chains for the day. This means lining everyone up and passing equipment down the line – a couple of backpacks, cameras, a few tripods, GPS boxes, scanner charger box, two scanners, a large generator, umbrellas and the stabilizer, camera box, tool box and cable bag were thus moved hand to hand. First chain is to the 4x4 from the guest house, then from the 4x4 to the boat, the boat to the dugouts on Songo, dugouts onto the beach and the beach to the site. We had to employ some local porters to help carry a lot of the stuff for us – especially the 40 kg generator.

There is a little cabin built on site with rudimentary toilets and showers. After three days of carting the equipment back and forth Chris, Eric and I decided to camp out on the island. We arranged for mosquito nets and mattresses and a cook and so after work was done we would walk down to the sea and have an evening swim, followed by a bucket shower and some local cuisine. It was tranquil.

After working for five days, interrupted by brief downpours, we headed back to Kilwa Kisiwani to scan the Mosque, Gereza fort and finish the small Mosque. This took two days, which is amazing compared to the last time it was scanned. The Gereza especially took one day with the C10 and 6100 both running full time. Panoramas and Texturing pictures were also taken all around the Fort and Mosques.

The field work was over after an epic eight days. We packed up all our belongings and boarded the 4x4 and bus back to Dar where we caught the plane back to Cape Town. All of us were physically exhausted and drained and happy to be back in the mother city with great memories of Songo Mnara and a successful trip completed.

Prof. Heinz Ruther, Graduate student Natalie and I survived a hectic trip to Mozambique at the end of November to rescan half of the San Sebastian Fortress on Mozambique Island as one of our scanners malfunctioned on the first trip. 

We had a stressful first days travelling as we left a box of camera equipment behind at security. Had our luggage delayed at Maputo until 20 minutes before a connection flight to Nampula which had us running through the airport like madmen with two trolleys stacked with expensive equipment . Our Portuguese go-to man had a heart attack the night before we left Cape Town which left us with no back up help and when we arrived at Ilha de Mozambique at 11:30pm we found that the gate on the 3km bridge to the island was locked for the night. Then after sending the taxi driver off on the back of a motorbike to sort out the problem we discovered our guest house was overbooked.

Natalie in front of the Chapel	Heinz and Stephen scanning on the Chapel	San Sebastian Fortress
Natalie Scanning	Scanning the Chapel	San Sebastian Fortress

All did eventually work out after our one charger for the scanner had to be rewired in-situ and power failures left us unable to recharge batteries for a few scanning sessions. Also the heat was staggeringly hot and we had to take cover from 10 am to 2:30 pm every day. That meant being out of bed at 4:30 am every morning.

Steve scanning in front of Fortress	Heinz and Natalie on a dhow	Map of scan positions
Steve scanning in front of Fortress	Heinz and Natalie on a dhow	Map of scan positions