To Hellholes and Back Read online

  Africa: Most Memorable

  India: Most Exotic

  Mexico City: Most Fun

  Disney World: Most Congenial

  Not a bad scorecard considering the general anxiety I carried into the project.

  Larger lessons of travel, of course, take time to synthesize in the mind. Years can sometimes pass before the significance of certain journeys falls into proper perspective. That’s a good line for travel writers to lay on the IRS about the two-week trip to Ireland they expensed and didn’t write a word about, but it really does work that way. The human mind, deep and inclined to wander off course, doesn’t always operate as fast or as linearly as a transoceanic jet.

  As it so often does after extended travel, time wound up revealing to me as much about the place I kept coming back to as the places I spent the year confronting. It’s supposed to be reassuring to find that people are more or less the same wherever you go, and it was indeed nice to confirm once again that wherever there are people, there’s some degree of normalcy. Even in a war-torn bribe factory like the Congo, you can walk down the street and be relatively confident you’re going to reach the end of the block without having your intestines extracted by teenagers and used to patch up a roadblock. Or have your Ray-Bans and Jansport stolen. (Both of those items made it home alive, by the way, though regarding intestines, I might as well admit that for six full weeks after returning from Africa I didn’t take a normal dump.)

  Still, I grew up believing that the United States occupies a special position in the world—the only nation in history founded upon an idea rather than a bellicose gene pool—one whose evolving (operative word) commitment to the common good makes it, if not always the greatest country in the world, at least the best one to come home to. As my catalog of international experiences stacked up against the Bush-Obama-Palin electoral circus and dissolving economic fortunes in the States, however, I began to realize that my travels had become less about surviving horrors abroad and more about facing up to ones at home.

  When I lived next door to him in Japan in the 1990s, my friend Glasser used to say something that at the time struck me as the delusional rambling of a muddled Vietnam vet, high on justifiable rage and Shanghai Bob’s expensive brandy.

  “To the Japanese, the United States looks like a Third World country,” Glasser would proclaim in a tone clearly meant to incite young patriots. “Homeless refugees everywhere. Beggars. Police. Garbage on the streets. Institutional incompetence. People dressed like hobos. Cars on the road that by Japanese standards would barely be fit for scrap metal.”

  Inured to Glasser’s cranky booze-yard musings, I always laughed off his insistence that America could be lumped in with the Angolas and Sri Lankas of the world; when I returned to the States at the end of the year with the fresh eyes of an expat, though, I discovered that he hadn’t been entirely wrong. In Japan, I’d gotten used to trains and buses that were run on time by friendly, courteous professionals. I’d grown accustomed to convenience stores and fast-food joints and car rental counters staffed—even at two in the morning—by helpful, well-trained employees. I’d learned to expect clean streets, vending machines that worked no matter how old they were, and a general public that dressed as though it was on its way to an important function, not as though it had recently been evicted.

  I’m not saying that I’d rather live in Japan or any of the many other countries that operate at a higher day-to-day level of competence than the United States. I wouldn’t. No matter what it looks like on the outside, every nation has big problems, and in the midst of America’s bedlam, there’s energy and vitality you simply don’t find in more rigidly maintained societies. Plus, OK, universal health care and the practical pressboard furniture are nice, but who could take a lifetime of Scandinavian cuisine?

  Nevertheless, over the past year I was reminded of those testy exchanges with Glasser as nagging recognition grew into grudging acceptance that the unattractive parallels between the United States and more blighted corners of Earth are more than superficial. And it wasn’t just me. While I was drawing from the bitter wells of revelation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Harper’s Magazine announced the arrival of “Third World U.S.A.” Christopher Hitchens wrote a scathing and not altogether unconvincing story in Vanity Fair headlined “America the Banana Republic.” A Los Angeles Times op-ed piece began, “Hey U.S., welcome to the Third World!” New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg echoed all of the “Third World country” comparisons in a rant about the profligacy of the federal government and ransacked national economy. These weren’t simply knee-jerk reactions to the dramatic downturn of investment markets. Many such pronouncements long predated the collapse of the American housing market and banking system, as well as the devolution of the U.S. dollar into the world’s leading brand of toilet paper.

  If many of the international pitfalls that I’d feared at the start of the year didn’t turn out to be all that tricky to negotiate (Henri in the Congo, Belu in India, and O Canada! aside) it’s thanks largely to the broad exposure I’d already had to them at home: crumbling infrastructure; religious intolerance; tribal zealotry; epidemic poverty; substandard schools; municipal bankruptcy; crippling national debt; overwhelmed public resources; a government that at least half the population doesn’t believe in; foreigners coming in packs to take advantage of an enfeebled currency; military adventurism; a toothless media; vendetta politics; soccer. While the rest of the world has been caterwauling over the insidious influence of American culture—from Pizza Hut to hip-hop to chocolate martinis, with which I regretfully report you can now embarrass yourself in Mexico City—the process has been working even faster in the other direction. If the rest of the world now behaves a lot like the United States, the United States is behaving even more like the rest of the world.21

  This doesn’t mean the rest of the world is a bad place. Just that the United States is a less special one. That’s a loss for everyone.

  The begging hordes of India, for example, didn’t shock me the way they’d shocked American travelers of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, who were understandably freaked out by the unfamiliar sight of visible destitution of India. Now you can’t walk three blocks or pass a freeway off-ramp in a major American city without being accosted by some unfortunate fellow citizen for a donation. The situation is far worse in India, but the homeless and publicly drug addled are no longer exotic features limited to the more pitiable parts of the world. The same can be said for every other item on the sobering list on the previous page. Passing through this year of bribes, lies, corrupt officialdom, and wearyingly consistent disregard for the public trust, it emerged that the most alarming discovery on the road to some of the world’s most dysfunctional places was that they weren’t all that different from the place I’d started.

  If there were a fundamental principle that once separated America from the rest of the world, I’d nominate institutional integrity. More simply, public honesty. I’m not suggesting that dishonesty isn’t readily found in every civilization, that a Golden Age of American honor ever existed, or that corruption hasn’t been with us since Thomas Jefferson was up to his third knuckle in Sally Hemings. Nor am I parading myself as a paragon of virtue. We all lie, to some degree, usually in petty ways, for the sake of discretion or keeping the peace or perhaps on occasion simply because it’s the most expedient means available to get what we want.

  Still, lying and cheating—perhaps other than to avoid hurting someone’s feelings—has never been openly accepted or condoned in the United States, much less celebrated as a “genius” operational tactic (when done with Rovian finesse) from the boardroom to the courtroom. At least, not until recently. While I was in Orlando enduring another sham of a staged political “debate” between the two pathologically dishonest halves of our singular ruling party, Gore Vidal was telling Hustler magazine: “Lying has now become a major art form (in America)…. There is no lie that you can tell that you will ever be called on.” Vidal is right, althou
gh no one who has stood by and watched eight-plus years of WMD excuses, Swift Boaters, Ken Blackwell, billion-dollar corporate welfare handouts, fudged promises to end wars, and every other manner of fraud be publicly applauded needs to be told this.

  Much has been made of the corporate and political scandals that have marked America’s passage from democracy to klepto-corporatocracy, and while, again, back-room handshakes between the country’s gilded institutions are nothing new, they’re being carried out at such rapacious and brazen levels nowadays as to attract the inevitable comparisons to the banana republics and Third World hellholes we once regarded as hopelessly backward. Worse, Americans seem to be reveling in the descent. Talking about Indian politics, writer Suketu Mehta hit uncomfortably close to the vein when he told me: “For Indian voters it is of utmost importance only that their caste group gets elected; as long as this is accomplished they are willing to accept corruption.”

  American society is no accident; it didn’t evolve by providential decree; its success wasn’t inevitable. The protection of two oceans, boundless natural resources, and firebrand leadership didn’t hurt, but if geographic barriers, mineral wealth, and religious righteousness were all it took to ensure a great society, the Congo, India, or Mexico could just as easily be running the planet. Americans have historically understood that to create a country in which half the world aspires to live, the first prerequisite is the integrity of its public and private institutions. That’s the foundation upon which the country was assembled and its illustrious future once determined.

  There’s an evolving understanding in the United States that we’re squandering our “God-given” natural wealth, that manifest destiny was one thing but mammon is another, and that our gluttonous consumption of resources must be curtailed. What’s being overlooked in the rush to save the planet, however, is that we’re also pissing away a social gift as great as any people in history have been bequeathed. And that if we don’t resist the seduction of the seemingly inevitable road in front of us, it won’t matter how much fossil fuel we stop burning, we’ll fail to preserve the part of us that mattered most in the first place.

  Then again, I never completely bought in to Glasser’s pessimism and although I readily admit the American Dream is in significant ways looking more like a nightmare these days, it feels a little early in the game to concede that all is irrevocably lost and that the best we have to look forward to is the dollar turning into the peso. Months after the last stamp has been pounded into my passport, I find my mind returning often to the most harrowing episode of the past year—just nudging out the midnight autorickshaw ride to Rohet Garh—and realizing that even from the diciest of circumstances, it’s possible to wring a few drops of optimism.

  One evening in Botswana, about a week into my African safari, with the setting sun casting its palette of orange and purple splendor across the Okavango Delta, I decided to take a walk. A hiker by habit, it was odd for me to have been outdoors for a week and not gotten more than a few hundred yards away from the Land Rover.

  I was also motivated by a desire to put as much distance between my fellow campers and myself as I could. It wasn’t really the Europeans’ fault; as I’ve already noted, while they were a largely anemic lot, they were all also decent, polite people. But I get antsy after extended time in the company of strangers, and I wanted to be alone. I wanted to experience “Africa.” I was paying a lot of money for the safari and I felt entitled to a walk, the most natural human impulse outside of breathing, eating, and changing the channel whenever Nancy Grace comes on.

  I’m no tenderfoot. I understood that trekking alone into the African wilderness is not like strolling around the block for cigarettes and a newspaper. Bush walks are fraught with implications and, on occasion, grave results. Although nobody had specifically told me not to venture out on my own, on safari, it’s more or less understood that the haoles will have sense enough not to wander off at precisely the time of day when big-game animals come out to feed.

  After camp chores were done—pit toilet dug, firewood collected, water boiled—I wandered off for a leak behind my canvas dome tent and kept on going through the scrub brush, down the jeep road, and into the open grassland. Once the camp had receded from view, two thoughts entered my mind. First: I would be incredibly lucky if I were to happen upon a lion. Even though people come to the Moremi Game Reserve from around the world for precisely this purpose, lions are elusive creatures and there’s never a guarantee of spotting one. Second: Assuming the improbable occurred and I did happen upon a lion, unarmed and beyond shouting range of our sure-handed, warrior-huntsman African guide Tebo, I’d be scared absolutely shitless.

  I walked for thirty minutes with these twin ideas rattling in my head, mostly along a dirt path that veered from the jeep road, then into the untracked veldt. Though I didn’t come across anything remarkable—no animal sightings, no marauding guinea worms—the walk was scenic, pleasant, and, best of all, serene. For half an hour I felt unreservedly at peace in Africa.

  Then, as I emerged from a grove of sparsely foliated trees with the sun bidding farewell on the horizon behind me, I was stopped cold in my tracks by a magnificent scene. In a clearing thirty yards to my left, eight mature and three adolescent impala stood in a scattered formation nibbling at dry grass and branches.

  The South Africans have an amusing term for these ubiquitous animals—JABI, or Just Another Bloody Impala. Elegant though they might be, the gentle, two-toned herbivores are to the African landscape as C-list celebrities are to the Sunset Strip. Upon first sighting, the out-of-towner goes slightly bonkers, admiring the familiar visage, stylish fur, supple physique, and decorative patterns accentuating the crotch and ass. By the twentieth or thirtieth encounter, the initial excitement begins to fade. After the hundredth, any obligation to pull out the camera disappears almost entirely. Soon, the glamorous creatures are passing within ten or fifteen feet without inspiring so much as a second look.

  Deep in the bush, however, eleven impala feeding at range close enough to hit with a rock jolts the untethered Westerner into a Neolithic state of awareness. There had been no question in my mind that the Moremi Game Reserve was packed with delicious pickings from the food chain—sightings that very day had included elephant, giraffe, wildebeest, zebra, antelope, baboon, jackal, mongoose, and field mice. But the “theme park” atmosphere fostered by the tightly controlled safari—Walt Disney World really does get a lot of the details right—had lulled me into a false sense of security. Without the Land Rover’s diesel chatter and background tourist blather, the impala’s snorting and stamping and chewing and twitching were thrillingly audible. In less than a second, Africa had become real for me in a way it had not previously been. These were wild animals. I’d known as much watching wildlife from the safety of the vehicle; alone in a field next to them, I felt it.

  Holding myself as still and silent as a frozen lake, I made mental pictures of the agile animals with their shiny coats of chestnut brown and white and the narrow black stripes around their tails and thighs. Alert to my presence, the impala remained mostly still themselves—here an ear flick, there a wary sideways glance—until one or two began munching tentatively again, satisfied that I posed no threat.

  For ten minutes I watched the impala graze. Then the spiral-horned buck—a dominant male always leads his impala consorts and progeny—decided he’d had enough of my lurking. Flipping his hind legs behind his head in a breathtaking, gymnastic flash, he vaulted high into the air and vanished into the trees. The rest of the herd followed in a panic.

  The flight of the impala signaled a flock of two or three hundred dun-colored birds to abandon hidden positions in the low grass and bolt en masse with a cacophony of squawks and communal flapping of wings that sounded like applause as it drifted into the darkening sky. Within seconds, the entire delta was alive with birds and animals calling out the alarm of an intruder.

  Calling out danger. Calling out, of all things, vulnerable me.
/>   Or maybe it wasn't me that spooked the impala. It was at this instant that I first considered the literal possibility of my throat clamped in the jaws of an overpowering predator. Mingling with other easy prey of the delta, I felt for the first time like an integral part of Africa’s biological fabric. For those who have never been in the situation, it’s strangely exhilarating to regard one’s self as absolutely nothing more than a piece of fresh meat.

  With the beating of my blood making tom-toms of my ears, I spun around in a furious 360-degree check of the surroundings. No stalking cats. No loitering hyenas. Nothing at all except a rustling wind that conjured a few factoids from Tebo’s Land Rover commentary about impala not only having much keener vision and hearing than humans, but also scent glands on their foreheads. And then it occurred to me that dinner entrées in random clearings almost never see their attackers before it’s too late, and that I hadn’t told my mother I loved her before departing for Africa.

  With that nervous inspiration, my not-as-finely-tuned-as-I’d-have-liked survival instinct finally turned me back toward camp. Double-time. Twenty minutes and a gallon of sweat later, with the nighttime sounds of the bush stirring to life around me, I skulked back into camp from the general direction of my tent, hoping to convey the impression to one and all that I’d simply been enjoying a well-deserved nap. Never have I been so relieved to see ruminative Europeans and a campfire.

  No one said a word about my absence, so I assumed I’d pulled off my little solo safari undetected—until the following morning when, leaving camp for our daily game drive at the break of dawn, Thilo, the German translator, pointed to the ground from his seat in the front of the Land Rover.