To Hellholes and Back Page 5

  Nights were spent sitting around campfires in crude bush camps and “sleeping” while predator killing machines sniffed around just outside our tent flaps. “Under no circumstances are you to leave your tent during the night,” warned our no-nonsense guide Tebo. “If you must urinate, cut the top off a water bottle and keep the contents in your tent until I give the ‘all clear’ order at dawn.”

  On safari the animals are the main attraction but, as with coworkers back home, it’s your fellow camp mates you end up spending the most time with and consequently forming the deepest connections with. Signing on as a solo traveler with a safari outfit based in Maun, Botswana, I ended up thrown in with a random bag of mostly middle-aged Euros: six German, two Dutch, two Italian, and single Austrian and Belgian tourists. I generally get along well with Europeans, but this jumbled bunch was maddeningly bereft of social skills. Say what you will about Euros, they’re usually not at a loss for opinions, a quality that tends to make them interesting conversationalists. For two weeks, though, the pinch-mouthed, taciturn, and communally stunted continentals in my midst were unable to produce anything more than the kind of cultured small talk exchanged by people who don’t really like one another but who don’t want to appear impolite.

  Among the more mysterious personalities was Klein, a fiftyish German whom I often walked behind on single-file hikes through the bush. I couldn’t help being impressed by his robotic stride—each pace was identical in form and measure, and his arms swung with the precision of a metronome. Taking a not-so-wild guess one afternoon I said, “Klein, you seem to have retained the march they taught you in the German army.”

  Without breaking stride, Klein swiveled his head, eyed me coldly, and declared, “East German army.”

  With his wind-burned face and arms turning as brown as sausages in a pan under the desert sun, it was easy to imagine Klein with the Afrika Korps, goggles pitched jauntily above his brow, squinting into the sun, scoffing at Monty’s latest flaccid maneuver, and barking orders at his panzer division to keep pressing for the Kasserine Pass. An antiquated model of Eastern Bloc austerity, he was the only person on the trip who hadn’t brought a camera. Indeed, he seemed almost disinterested in the animals.

  By far the most interesting figure, however, was the Belgian woman in her midthirties whom I dubbed in my notebook the Tittering Belge Hermaphrodite, or TBH. Even through the dark Belgian winter, I suspected the sun shone every day on the TBH, a chronically hyperventilating giggler who quaked with unrestrained delight at everything from sightings of common birds to warnings that campers exercise extreme caution around baboons and hyenas. Her ceaseless tittering initially struck me and several others as some kind of rare medical condition.

  Incessant laughter is incredibly annoying, particularly when you’re with fifteen people trying not to scare off wild animals, but I soon came to appreciate the TBH’s irrepressible demeanor. As my unkind nickname is meant to suggest, the TBH was not a woman to whom life had dealt a strong hand. Round and soft as a wheel of brie, she bordered on obese. Wild tufts of hair covered spotty patches of her cheeks, chin, and scalp. Spacious gaps between all of her pointy teeth gave her the appearance of a crocodile with irritable bowel syndrome. On hikes and in camp she moved like a garbage truck backing up around a tight corner. Upon meeting her, I’d spent several hours of surreptitious study before satisfying myself that she was in fact woman, not man.

  Yet for all her physical disadvantages, the TBH was the only tourist on safari whose energy never flagged, not even on endless afternoons in the barren desert when temperatures soared well over a hundred and the air was as still as a dead animal. The TBH spoke the native language of every white person in the truck and almost never stopped smiling. She sweated like a melting candle, but neither complained about the heat nor bothered fanning herself with the heavy pieces of cardboard the Germans and Italians used to constantly and ostentatiously cool themselves. She never failed to be excited by even the smallest discovery: “Fresh onions in the tuna salad sandwiches? Mein Gott, we are truly blessed!”

  One night around the campfire, enjoying an impromptu field dessert after a dinner of chewy kudu steaks, the TBH made a rare ugly face and asked Kap, our African camp cook, what the crunchy bits in the pudding were.

  “There is only pudding in the pudding,” Kap replied.

  The TBH clicked on her headlamp and tilted the beam into her bowl, illuminating a dozen or so large black ants crawling though her chocolate. I would have flung the bowl like a hot ember and “motherfuckered” for the next three days. Elated by this matchless safari experience, the TBH merely erupted with her trademark laughter.

  “Don’t worry,” Kap said, laughing with her as he shined his own light into the swarming mass. “It is good for the nutrition.”

  If it was my bad fortune to be cast alongside a truckful of Euro end pieces, it was twice my good luck to draw the redoubtable Tebo as native guide. From a tiny village near the Okavango Delta, the stocky, mustachioed Tebo had grown up subsistence hunting for impala and kudu with his uncle. Even as a child he’d been a superior tracker, learning to find animals by copying their behavior. After an eighteen-month stint in the Botswanan army and an improbable year as a water-pump salesman, Tebo enrolled in guide certification courses and aced every test. A professional guide for the past twenty-five years in Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana, he was filled with safari lore.

  “In South Africa, in places like Kruger National Park, many of the lions have radio collars,” he told us one afternoon. “Before game drives, guides locate the positions of lions using electronic devices. Some of them drive around telling their clients, ‘I can smell lions nearby.’ A few minutes later the lions appear and the tourists believe their guide is so skilled that he can track by scent.”

  “Really? That’s true?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. I can tell you this happens on a regular basis. This is why I prefer Botswana. There are no fences. The animals are completely wild. They can come and go as they please.”

  Tebo’s witchlike ability to track game was a daily wonder, and no matter how monotonous their conduct the Euros were largely benign—in the presence of any animal large or small they uncharacteristically carried on like six-year-olds on a maiden voyage to Chuck E. Cheese’s, but I’d gotten used to that. Near the end of the trip, however, the party’s incompetence in the wild ruined what should have been the high point of the entire safari.

  The event began with Tebo spotting a single hippo in the distance lumbering toward a small, unoccupied water hole just next to a larger lake. The sighting brought a jolt of excitement to the vehicle. On safari you see plenty of hippo heads poking out of the water, but it’s a treat to see the whole of their vast, absurd bodies cavorting on dry land in broad daylight. By the time Tebo had maneuvered the Land Rover within easy viewing range, the hippo was just getting comfortable in the water hole—no easy feat for a thirty-six-hundred-pound creature. This effrontery, however, greatly displeased a second, until-then-unseen male hippo, who appeared with an emotional bellow from the center of the nearby lake, hauled the full girth of his own tremendous frame out of the water, and trundled toward the reclining intruder.

  “The first hippo is a lone male who has entered the territory of a dominant male,” Tebo explained quietly, as twelve of us jockeyed for photo position inside the truck and Klein sat passively, mentally reconstructing the Battle of El-Alamein. “You will now see the first hippo leave the water hole.”

  As predicted, the challenger hippo took stock of the dominant male, swung his head in an aggressive side-to-side show of resentment, then heaved himself out of the water hole and onto dry land, confirming the old African adage: never bet against Tebo.

  “We are going to see a battle of hippos!” Tebo whispered, raising his binoculars to his eyes and continuing with a barely audible play-by-play. “The first hippo is signaling for a challenge. If we see him drop his dung nearby, it means he is attempting to mark this territory
for himself. If he does this, the dominant male will become enraged and have no choice but to fight. A battle for dominance will occur.”

  Right on cue, the upstart hippo cranked out the mother of all “Take that!” dumps. Then he began kicking dirt over a dried pile of existing dung, the property of the dominant male, who took in the whole scene with an expression of supreme hippo mortification.

  I don’t know a lot about hippo behavior but I can say with a high degree of certainty that dominant male hippos protecting their turf do not appreciate having their territory-demarcating feces treated with such blatant disrespect by rogue males looking to stir up trouble. Like a purple volcano, the older male exploded at the impudent treatment of his no-shit zone, shaking his amazing bulk in a furious dither and bluff charging to within thirty feet of his rival. The rogue trespasser never flinched. Both mammoth creatures then began roaring like enraged Wookiees, opening their mighty jaws to display magnificent sets of ivory choppers capable of slashing through radial tires in seconds.

  When you’re sitting at home deciding how to spend your vacation dollars, deciding which country or even which safari outfit to put your faith in, these are the moments you’re thinking about. This was the award-winning National Geographic photo op I’d been imagining since the words “African safari” had first formed in my mind: the privileged front-row view to a whisker-to-whisker hippo slaughterfest for the right to hump any three-thousand-pound cow in the lake while your pathetic rivals with their inadequate scat piles watched powerless from the bushes.

  The dominant male advanced with plodding menace, closing the gap to ten feet. Seven thousand pounds of raging hippo were seconds from throwing down. Birds twenty miles across the delta suddenly felt the urge to get as far away as possible and didn’t even know why.

  Then, with a confused stutter, the dominant male hesitated. For a moment he stood as still as a statue. Then he began rapidly shaking his head and spinning in a turgid frenzy as though a swarm of invisible wasps had begun attacking him. Finally, in an utterly unexpected gesture of appeasement, he buried his snout in the dirt.

  “Something is wrong!” Tebo called out. “The hippo smells something strange. What is that on the ground between them?”

  Tebo peered through his binoculars.

  “It’s a hat!” he gasped. “A human hat!3 The hippo is alarmed by the smell of a human! Who has lost a hat?”

  I looked through my own binoculars. A floppy blue denim hat with big, shiny buttons—the sort of thing Paddington Bear might wear to the beach—lay on the ground between the two hippos.

  Momentarily regaining the composure that had made him the swinging dick of the lake, the dominant hippo shot his young rival a look of desperate accusation. The challenger met this with a “Hey, bro, don’t ask me what that thing is” shrug. The dominant male backpedaled into the lake. Completely freaked out himself, the challenger skulked warily into the cover of some nearby bushes, staring uncomprehendingly at the hat and plotting his next move. A move, alas, that no one in the Land Rover would ever see. The fight was off.

  The explanation for this bizarre turn of events unfolded through a flood of Euro jabbering. In her haste to remove her camera from her bag and then from its case—God forbid you’d drive through a game reserve in Africa with your camera already out and ready—the TBH had knocked her floppy blue hat off of her head, out of the Land Rover, and onto the road, setting up one of the strangest and ultimately most anticlimactic episodes in the history of hippo blood sport. Too busy tittering and squawking over the impending face-off, the TBH hadn’t realized that her hat was missing until it was too late.

  Tebo jammed the Land Rover into gear and rolled over to retrieve the hat. It was coated with a layer of viscous white hippo snot. This naturally sent the TBH into a paroxysm of laughter. Without apology, she held the hat aloft while the Euros snapped photos, Klein stared into the distance, and I sulked in the back of the truck.

  After dinner that night Tebo told me, “If not for the hat, we would have seen a great hippo battle.” His tone was matter of fact, with no hint of disappointment or blame. He’d seen his share of hippo fights. He’d see a few more before his guiding days were over. I, on the other hand, had missed the only opportunity I’d ever have of bearing witness to the violent ritual that determines hippo hierarchy, thanks to one blithering idiot’s inability to muster even a trace of outdoors protocol or put a damper on her natural obliviousness.

  I stewed over the hat fiasco for the rest of the night, but it was impossible to stay mad at the TBH. Her high spirits were too infectious. The next day I sat beside her on a draining all-day drive to a new camp, sharing my stash of Starburst and, to help pass the time on the arduous haul across flat, roasting Botswana, passing her my camera when she asked if she could flip through my pictures. When she came across a shot of an elephant at a watering hole with his pachyderm penis dangling like a piece of industrial plumbing, her ensuing convulsion of magnum force tittering shook the entire vehicle.

  Like the blasphemous three-foot-long shlong I’d inadvertently captured, there was something gigantically entertaining about the TBH. Even so, by this stage of my African journey I was dying to disengage from the supervised amateur scene and get on with a more independent adventure. Despite the warnings that Tebo, Kap, and every other African I’d met so far had heaped upon the mound of paranoia started by my friends back home, for the first time the Congo beckoned as a place where I might actually escape my troubles rather than find them.

  One of Kinshasa’s few alleged attractions is the mausoleum of President Laurent Kabila, who was shot dead in 2001 by one of his own bodyguards. The bodyguard did the deed in the presence of a gang of disloyal army generals Kabila had injudiciously attempted to fire moments earlier. Officials initially said that the killing did not amount to a coup attempt—that it was merely an argument that descended into violence—though twenty-six alleged conspirators were eventually given death sentences in a Congolese court.

  Even so, the African and world press speculated that the murder had been carried out with authorization from the United States—our government was at the time backing Uganda in a war involving the DRC. Jesus Christ, if anyone would stop watching the ridiculous Hollywood portrayals, actually talk to run-of-the-mill field agents, and look at the CIA’s record of incompetence overseas, that feared organization’s reputation might eventually correspond with reality. Lucky or not for our national intelligence agencies, people all over the world are too busy believing in indestructible Bourne fantasies to check the scoreboard in places like Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Central America, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

  Kabila was succeeded by his son, Joseph, who ordered the construction of a mausoleum before proceeding to deal with dad’s enemies—a familiar enough scenario for aficionados of political dynasties. The mausoleum had been conceived as a point of paternal tribute and expression of patriotism and solidarity. But I know my exalted poobah death cribs—Napoleon, Grant, Lenin, Elvis—and this one barely befits a beloved small-town mayor. A cracking concrete canopy looms fifteen feet above the ex-president’s flower-covered casket, which is encased in glass ten feet below ground level. Four concrete fists at the base of the posts supporting the canopy represent the structure’s primary artistic motif.

  After changing money in the market, Team Congo arrives at the mausoleum’s gated entrance, where three presidential guards sit on folding chairs. They’re dressed in combat fatigues topped by bloodred berets with special forces insignias. They carry Chinese-made Kalashnikovs. They smoke cigarettes. They are exceedingly courteous. They want money to let us through the gate.

  Gilles protests in Lingala. The president’s tomb is free to all. The lead soldier, a young, well-built, Hollywood-handsome type, tells us with quiet gentility that this is a tricky day to see the tomb. This must be true since the large square surrounding the presumptive tourist gem is completely empty.

  After fifteen minutes of negotiation, we hand the guards two dollars
in francs and half a pack of smokes and are allowed to pass. When we approach the casket, another soldier appears and informs us that if we want to take pictures we must give him five dollars. I say, “That’s OK. I don’t need any pictures.” He insists, however, that once back in the States I’ll regret not having taken some photos at this historic spot. It’s not clear whether this is a threat or not, but I give him five dollars and grab my camera.

  Since our arrival, an older man in a torn yellow T-shirt has been trailing ten or twenty paces behind, shadowing our every step. The moment I lift my camera he rushes forward and introduces himself as the mausoleum’s official photographer. He explains that I’m not allowed to take pictures. He’ll take them for me, using my camera, and all the better since I can now appear in my own photographs. He will, of course, need to be paid.

  The soldier nods at me as if to say, “I know, it sounds crazy, but, seriously, it’s actually the rule!” The old guy assures me that he can operate any camera on the planet, but when I hand him my little Canon PowerShot he backs up about ninety feet and becomes hypnotized by the zoom function.

  At a traffic light not long after the mausoleum, a cop wearing a dirty blue uniform shirt and jeans sticks his head and nightstick in the passenger window and demands to see our fire extinguisher. It feels like another random shakedown until D. B. opens the locked glove box and produces a tiny red fire extinguisher.

  The cop grunts like a fat man denied pie and stalks away. Amazingly, no bribes are demanded. I tell Henri I’ve never heard of a law requiring drivers to carry fire extinguishers.

  “They created this law a few years ago,” he says. “One of the cabinet members was friends with a Lebanese businessman who imported these small extinguishers. But no one was buying them and he was stuck with tens of thousands of them. So they passed a law—every vehicle owner must carry a fire extinguisher or face a severe fine. The Lebanese man has made millions. He’s the nation’s sole supplier.”