To Hellholes and Back Page 2

  And these are just the obvious concerns. Upon reflection, Africa proves to be the mere tip of a blade of personal paranoia that widens like a bloody cleaver on a butcher’s block. Beyond the continent of Robert Mugabe and Idi Amin are dozens of places I’ve heretofore avoided even more assiduously than Dave Matthews albums.

  I can probably be pardoned for not getting around to Yak Heritage Days in northern Mongolia or autumn leaf peeping in New Hampshire, but for a guy who’s spent years passing himself off as a well-rounded traveler, three other locations stand out as the most shameful holes in an otherwise respectable resume. You wouldn’t think that a man in my position could have managed to avoid not only Africa but also give the slip to India, Mexico City, and, perhaps most astonishing of all, Walt Disney World. Yet year after year I have. And happily.

  Not only have I been to none of these traveler touchstones, I’ve diligently avoided them, and for mostly lame reasons. My fear of AIDS, for instance, is dwarfed by my fear of standing in line in the Florida sun next to rotund people from New Jersey and Texas who steadfastly refuse to discipline their little Jacobs, Justins, and Caitlins while they run off their Adderall highs in Frontierland.

  And food. Being a picky eater is another of my more emasculating confessions. Few pretrip worries weigh on me like the prospect of being the haole guest of honor at some native banquet presented with a steaming bowl of goat ovaries and baked kittens while a klatch of locals watch in anticipation to see if I merely love the national cuisine, or really love it! Or, worse, figuring out what exactly the discerning palate falls back on in countries where chipotle flavoring has yet to make significant inroads.

  But this unholy quartet of locations doesn’t merely signify my personal hellhounds. Each of them, and for different reasons, are places many Americans spend their lives turning their backs on. Presumably for good reason. Of the dozens of people I’ve known who have survived India, for instance, not one, not one, has returned without some horror story involving a no-holds-barred bout with a gastrointestinal ailment that rendered them half-blind for days on a damp cot in some reeking backwater “hotel” praying for a merciful and speedy death.

  “It’s practically a given that a visiting gut is going to go south at some point on a trip to India.” This is the lead sentence of the story that introduced me to India’s most widespread reprisal to tourists, a piece in Escape magazine by a writer named Andrea Gappell whose Indian stomach cramps were so painful that she made an emergency visit to a doctor in Agra. The doctor informed her that her appendix was about to burst. After emergency surgery and eight days tethered to an IV drip—“Rows of Indian patients stared at me as they lay flat on sheetless mattresses in the dingy ward”—Gappell was released from the makeshift clinic, only to be informed by locals that the doctor who’d operated on her was notorious for running the old “Your appendix is about to burst; we must operate at once!” scam on panicked travelers felled by severe food poisoning.

  Colorful anecdotes like this one are a big reason I’ve never applied for an Indian visa, despite being a big fan of any dish, movie, or stripper with “masala” in the name. No one wants to spend half his vacation laid out in Bangalore. Yet why go to India and not eat the food? Easier just to stay home.

  Aside from being a digestively explosive travel destination (though Condé Nast Traveler runs stories about India all the time, so how bad can it be?), India is even more intimidating as a political and economic entity. The value of its stock market doubled in the mid-2000s. In 2007, the Economic Times reported an annual 14 percent rise in Indian manufacturing, the largest national growth on the planet. The country’s stable, well-regulated banks largely escaped the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. BusinessWeek and The Economist routinely refer to India as a tech giant and predict the balance of power in the world’s economy shifting from the United States to China and India in the coming decade.

  On a pragmatic level, it’s true that I’m worried mostly about myself, but it does seem to me that now is an opportune time to get a close-in look at the challenges we as a nation are up against in the years to come: new diseases; new rivals; new enemies; entitlement seekers pouring across our borders; armies of hypermotivated, tech-savvy workers battling an anachronistic American labor pool whose most potent job-market skill is the self-esteem acquired in “fun” classrooms and on sports fields where everyone’s a star and no one keeps score; an international up-from-the-gutter work ethic that trounces “follow your dreams” with “suck it up, get used to a little disappointment, and find a goddamned job that doesn’t play to your dumb ambition to program video games and produce hip-hop records.” If, as it certainly feels, the world is closing in around us, it seems worth the trouble to have a look at who and what is on the way.

  All this is alarming enough and I haven’t even factored in America’s diminishing reputation abroad. During the week I began planning my daunting year of travel, the reigning Miss USA, a Tennessee stunner named Rachel Smith, was actually booed in a packed theater in Mexico City. Lustily. Not lustfully.

  I don’t care what side of the political divide you rattle your saber on or what you think of the wondrous Obama ascension, a moment like this demonstrates far more than any flag burning, effigy bashing, or orchestrated protest just how far America has plummeted in the world standings of likable countries (at the moment fighting for last place with North Korea). When one of the quantifiably hottest women out of a population of three hundred million from a country known for flashy displays of its most lurid perversions can parade her perfectly hard, twenty-two-year-old, multiethnic, beauty-queen, bikini-wrapped body in front of an arena filled with partying Mexicans and get booed, you can’t help wondering what kind of reception you’re going to get when you accidentally wander into the barrio at two in the morning with your head spinning with tequila and Los Lobos lyrics.

  If you pay attention to media drumbeats, of course, you already know that testy pageant crowds are the least of Mexico travelers’ concerns. The latest orgy of yanqui panic, fueled by more of those totally reliable State Department travel warnings and a blanket recommendation from university presidents around the country advising students to avoid Mexico during spring breaks, feels less like sober assessment and more like a concentrated effort to paint our next-door neighbor as a terrorist narco-state. Current conventional wisdom is that Mexico doesn’t simply present the United States with a drug and illegal alien problem, but with a genuine security threat. From Face the Nation’s dyspeptic Bob Schieffer to Rolling Stone magazine—there’s actually less of a difference between the two than you’d imagine, these days—there’s been a tremendous effort to lump the land of margaritas and mariachi in with the likes of Iran, Pakistan, and Al-Qaeda.

  Written by Guy Lawson, the Rolling Stone feature kicked off with an account of a violent drug raid in Mexico City carried out by a hundred federal agents wearing ski masks and armed with assault rifles. It claimed: “The real front in the War on Drugs is not in cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, or in the Sierra Madres, where drug kingpins hide out, but in the corridors of power in Mexico City.” Typically, efforts to scare Americans away from Mexico have focused on crime around the U.S.-Mexico border. Now Lawson and plenty of others would have us believe that extreme toxicity also runs wild in the capital. And maybe it does.

  “Extreme tourism” means different things to different travelers. It’s often associated with billionaire space tourists and bombastic cable TV hosts who pit themselves, alone and ill-equipped, against the Tasmanian wilderness (save for whatever supplies are required to keep union television crews powered, fed, rested, and safe). For those who would complain that some of the places covered in this book might not meet a strict definition of “extreme,” I maintain that anything that gets the traveler out of his or her comfort zone, or forces them to challenge their belief system, fits a fluid criterion.

  To some, extreme travel might suggest living in a grass hut in Borneo for six weeks, but if you’r
e the sort of person who enjoys spending time in grass huts, what’s so extreme about that? No question, prowling the Russian steppe for wolf meat and potato vodka takes a certain amount of admirable grit. Far more frightening to me, though, is the prospect of exploring the comely mermaid fantasy of Ariel’s Grotto inside the walls of a twenty-six-square-mile temple of consumerism dedicated to celebrating synthetic American culture at its overcrowded, fake-dreams, corndog-and-cotton-candy-inhaling worst, pushing a CEO-manufactured, ultraconformist mass “fantasy” presented fait accompli to American children. If it turns out there’s more horror to shrink from in Disney World than in Africa, I for one won’t be all that surprised.

  While standing resolutely behind my newfound willingness to face down extreme challenges, I don’t want to create unrealistic expectations. This isn’t a book about dangling from the end of a rope off a nine-hundred-foot rock face along the south ridge of K2. You’ll not find me dodging bullets and IEDs as I creep with my aide-de-camp Kareem over the border from Pakistan to Afghanistan.

  I don’t sleep well in the best of circumstances. I’m in reasonably good cardiovascular condition, but I have the arm strength of a man half my weight. I’m leery of heights. I’m not interested in solidifying my reputation as a wisecracking bon vivant by dying young (relatively) and leaving a good-looking (relatively) corpse. You can make your own fairly accurate assumptions about the mettle of a guy who includes Orlando on his primary list of scary places.

  But if there’s one lesson I’ve prized from my years of travel it’s this: no place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be. Government bureaucrats are more concerned with covering their asses by issuing ludicrous “warnings” than with disseminating accurate situation reports. And our “news media”—if you want to call information largely regurgitated from self-interested corporate and government sources “news”—operates pretty much like your one crazy drunk friend, the guy who has a hysterical public reaction to even the smallest events, exaggerates all of his stories, and gets in a tizzy over every opinion whether he agrees with it or not.

  I don’t have to be reminded that the world collective is united in its dread of the Congo; that power vomiting on legless beggars is the national sport of India; that Mexico City is a sweltering hole of pollution, disease, cardboard shanties, and homicidal drug syndicates; and that I’ve got some personal issues to work through regarding Florida in general and Disney World in particular. It’s just that for every warning I’ve ever gotten not to do something, someone has always been around to hand me a beer and twist my arm. And, of course, take my money for the privilege of showing me places and things that, while not always pleasant, usually end up leading to some surprising and enlightening discoveries.

  Part I

  Continent

  Africa

  1

  The Funniest Joke in Africa

  Trouble starts as soon as I clear customs and meet Henri in the parking lot of Kinshasa’s N’Djili International Airport. Henri introduces himself, shakes my weary hand with his damp one, pulls the cigarette from the side of his mouth, exhales like the last survivor at Dien Bien Phu, and says, “There are a few problems we need to discuss.”

  Five minutes in country and already things are going to hell. Actually, things have been hell here for some time. It’s just me who’s new to the game.

  The problems concern the itinerary Henri and I have spent the past month hammering out over phone and by e-mail. My Congo plans revolve around a jungle town called Mbandaka, a place whose name alone had radiated sufficient exotic appeal to whip me into a state of blind enthusiasm during my planning back in the States. I’m the kind of chump who sees names like Chittagong or Zamboanga on a map and says, “Only a fourteen-hour bus ride out of our way? How come we haven’t left yet?”

  From Kinshasa we were scheduled to fly to Mbandaka, where we’d buy supplies before striking out on a week-long canoe trip down a series of remote jungle rivers. These obscure waterways would lead us through pygmy villages and eventually to a hidden treasure of biodiversity called Lake Tumba. Henri has promised a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. I’ve been around enough to know that being stranded for two days in Blythe, California, with a busted radiator also constitutes a “once-in-a-lifetime adventure,” but as I’m soon to learn, in the Congo you’re forced to look past all manner of red flags when you place your well-being in the hands of guys to whom your only real connection is an e-mail address.

  “The first problem is that the airline we were to fly to Mbandaka has gone out of business,” Henri says. “This happened last week.”

  Henri speed walks ahead, keeping just beyond arm’s reach of both me and the pack of child beggars who trail in our wake.

  “The second problem is that the other airline with routes to Mbandaka has only one flight this week. And it is full. Same for next week.”

  Henri looks over his shoulder to gauge my level of disappointment. After a moment he nods as if to say, “OK, the quiet type, I get it,” then continues.

  “The third problem is that the destinations on this afternoon’s schedule are closed due to the fact that it is Sunday.”

  For weeks, my visits to the Congolese art museum and bonobo reserve have been planned for the afternoon of my arrival. Had Henri been unaware until now that they’d be closed on Sunday?

  “Will they be open tomorrow?” I ask.

  “Probably not.”

  Much as I’d been looking forward to communing with the freakishly humanlike bonobos, today’s closures don’t crush me. After the trip from Johannesburg, I’m happy for any excuse to trade sightseeing for a hotel bed and strategically placed fan blasting the layers of sweat off my face. For the entire flight from South Africa, the hairy Greek arms dealer in aviator shades beside me had maintained aggressive dominion over the armrest. Behind us, a man carried on for three straight hours in one of those amazing African languages in which it’s impossible to tell if the speaker is winning big at the roulette table or merely preparing to hit his wife.

  “What about the plane tickets?” I begin to pull out of my steerage-class stupor with the recollection that I’d prepaid both of our flights to Mbandaka. Nine hundred dollars. “Have you gotten a refund?”

  “I am working on that.”

  Having built himself up on the phone and e-mail as a sort of postmodern buccaneer, Henri’s appearance comes as something of a surprise. A white European in his mid-fifties, he’s pale and a little paunchy. He wears faded slacks and a short-sleeved, white dress shirt with deeply entrenched sweat stains. His eyes are loose and watery and his gray hair has the look of a heavily teased Shredded Wheat biscuit. Despite my reluctance to employ any Congo material from the stupendously overemphasized Joseph Conrad, I’m compelled to borrow the Heart of Darkness author’s description of Kurtz and apply it to the cagey, superior, and yet somehow endearingly irascible Henri: “All of Europe had contributed to the making of him.”

  We arrive at Henri’s car, an ancient Mercedes sedan with dents in all four doors, its white paint job long since humbled into a mottle of rust and scrapes. The seats are torn to the stuffing. Rats appear to have been gnawing on the dashboard. Several instrument gauges have been removed, leaving gaping holes and naked wires dangling from the panel. Tomorrow during a thundershower I’ll discover that the reason the passenger-side windows are always rolled down is because they were never replaced after being bashed out by thieves.

  Loitering around the Mercedes are five or six African men I take for drug dealers. Or car thieves. Or loan collectors.

  It turns out they work for Henri.

  Henri introduces our driver D. B. (for Daniel Bertrand), a short, muscular guy with a prominent Cherokee nose and fixed expression about as cheery as an Armenian funeral. His smooth black head shines like it’s been tumbled inside a rock polisher. He’s fifty-four, but looks thirty-five.

  During Joseph Mobutu’s poisonous dictatorial regime (which lasted here from 1965 to 1997), D. B. was the
personal chauffeur to one of Mobutu’s brothers—a prestigious and occasionally dangerous gig. He’d won the job in part because of his exemplary military career, six-dan black belt in karate, and all-around “fucking with me would be a very bad idea” disposition.

  “If action comes, I know the meaning of it,” D. B. tells me in halting English while unhooking a pair of wires that keep the trunk closed.

  Henri’s man Friday is Gilles, a slim, handsome Congolese in his early thirties with the kind of Siamese eyes that leave you fairly certain Chinese merchants were landing up and down the African coast centuries before the white slavers.

  “Unlike most Africans, Gilles does not wait to be told what to do,” Henri informs me while his star employee stands next to us smoking and examining the clouds. “He anticipates problems and fixes them. This will make him invaluable to you. He will find a solution to the Mbandaka problem.”

  Gilles nods at me while I hoist my bag into the trunk. I’ve already been in Africa for nearly three weeks—mostly on safari in Botswana, Zambia, and Namibia, then in South Africa—and I’ve got Gilles pegged. Cool is in the African DNA. Two-thirds of the guys you meet here have the slow-breeze demeanor of 1930s jazz musicians. You almost respect guys like Gilles more for not helping a brother out with the luggage.

  Henri, D. B., and Gilles form the core of Team Congo, my escort, eyes, and ears for much of the next fifteen days. Drinking buddies are one thing, but I’ve never had a genuine posse before, so even the lack of get-to-know-you chitchat and piece-of-shit Mercedes don’t dim my white guy overenthusiasm for this one.