Around the World in 50 Years (12 page)

During the ensuing seven years I completed writing
Who Needs a Road?
with Steve, appeared on a dozen TV shows, got married, got divorced, became one of the Mad Men and rose to VP of an ad agency, spent three years as a good-government lobbyist, then entered NYU School of Law to get a degree so I could—depending on my mood that day—either get rich or save the world. I was working so hard and taking so few vacations, that I'd visited just 51 countries by 1982, up to a mere 63 by 1990, and 83 by the turn of the century, averaging only one and a half nations a year, all in a casual and desultory fashion, plus 49 U.S. states. (Sorry, North Dakota.)

But I was not aware of these numbers at the time; I kept no tab because I had no such goal. My goal was totally different: Ever since the final days of the Expedition, I longed to be the first person to ever travel by land completely around our world in a
longitudinal
direction. My plan was to drive from New York to the tip of South America, then somehow manage to motor across Antarctica, drive north from the Cape of Good Hope through the length of Africa, on to the northern edge of Europe, fly over the Arctic (which was not land, and therefore did not have to be driven across) to the northernmost shore of Alaska, and conclude with an easy run back to the Big Apple.

I'd carefully studied the route, noted the most favorable departure date, prepared a detailed budget that I was sure my previous sponsors would cover, written about this dream in both the hardcover and paperback editions of
Who Needs a Road?,
and even begun to assemble a crew. For more than 30 years
that
was my dream, my ambition, and my obsession.

But I was thwarted by two big problems, and eventually defeated by one of them.

First, the way was not clear. The Western Hemisphere route was blocked by wars and sustained guerrilla fighting in Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Europe presented the barrier of the Iron Curtain. Africa was aflame with wars or revolutions in Algeria, Angola, Chad, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Eritrea, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Rhodesia, Zaire, Uganda, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Burundi, and Rwanda that blocked any route through. (Sir Ranulph Fiennes did, from 1979 to 1982, successfully lead a longitudinal expedition around the world, and wrote an excellent book about it,
To the Ends of the Earth,
but he avoided the war zones by taking ship much of the way.) The land route would have to wait at least until most of the conflicts were resolved, which did not happen until well into the Millennium.

But it was the crossing of Antarctica by automobile that proved insurmountable. My dreams die hard, but I did finally conclude—and I hope one of you will one day prove me wrong—that such a crossing could not be achieved. I read. I researched. I tested. I studied. And I consulted experts. But I could not conceive a reasonably secure way of traversing Antarctica's many wide glacial crevasses and barrier mountains by car, or of keeping the vehicle intact in Antarctica's subzero temperatures. When I tested 4
×
4s in northern Canada in the dead of winter, the tires froze and shattered and the engine had to run continuously to keep the battery charged, the parts from disintegrating, and the essential fluids liquid—a feat not easily accomplished on a barren continent where there are no filling stations.

I created gas-consumption tables, worked out plans to parachute in fuel caches every ten miles across the Antarctic snowcap, estimated likely daily mileage to determine if the transpolar journey could be completed during the five-month window offered by the southern summer, but I eventually gave up. (Well, maybe I didn't completely
give up
, but it was, and remains, a dream deferred.)

The idea of going to
every
country sort of sneaked in to occupy that recently vacated spot in my mind and heart where lodged the quixotic hope of doing something glorious and original, an adventure no one had ever achieved, of not going gently into that good night, of going out with a bang rather than a whimper.

When I gave travel lectures, attendees asked how many countries I'd seen, but I had no list. As the Millennium dawned I finally totaled them: 83. I was dimly aware that there were between 190 and 200 countries, which meant I was equally dimly aware that I'd visited less than half.

I knew I preferred visiting new countries to revisiting those I'd seen, an attitude doubtless derived from the predilection I exhibited at age seven, when I started collecting postage stamps. I refused to specialize in any country or area, as my friends did. No, I wanted a perforated piece of paper from
every
stamp-issuing entity on earth, obscure places like Oltre Giuba, Rio de Oro, Two Sicilies, Bechuanaland Protectorate, Nejd, and Hejaz.

Above my teenage bed hung a 1920s poster from the Hamburg-American shipping line:
Mein Feld Ist die Welt
(My Field Is the World). This proclivity persisted through Cornell, where I studied foreign affairs, into the University of Chicago, where I was awarded the graduate fellowship of the Committee on International Relations.

It was like much other stuff in my life: I sought to try it all out, suck it all up, and grab all the gusto I could, including eventually having six different and immensely enjoyable careers—editor, writer, advertising executive, good-government lobbyist, lawyer, and theatrical producer.

Shortly after the year 2000 I thought it would be fun—little did I know!—to see how many countries I could visit. And off I went, whenever my law-practice clients and worthy opponents permitted.

By the end of 2003 I was up to 112.
That
was when I realized that it could be possible, and surely a compelling challenge, in the remaining ten to 20 years that the actuarial tables allotted me, to visit
every
country; that such a feat was doable, and that
I
could do it.

I researched to ascertain how many people had legitimately visited every country, but could find no such category, from Guinness to Wikipedia; nor could I find any book or article written by, or about, anyone who had gone all the way. I studied what constituted a country and looked over the horizon for incipient newbies. And somewhere along this vague way, I decided—yes, really, truly, and finally
decided
—that I
would
go to every country.

 

CHAPTER 7

Making a Splash

South and Central America are so vast, beauteous, diverse, and fascinating, and their roads were so poor, their river travel so slow, and their political crises so frequent, that it took me nine separate trips to visit all their 20 continental nations. I here recount some of the highlights that took place on, in, through, or under their lakes, rivers, and seas.

TURNING TURTLE

During the homeward-bound leg of our Expedition, Steve and I had serendipitously pitched our camper by the estuary of the San Juan River on the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua on a dazzling night of the full August moon.

It was nearly midnight when, hearing noises, we exited our camper and found ourselves amid an
arribadas,
more than a thousand immense green turtles crawling out of the ocean to spawn, laboring up the slope to the dry part of the beach. They stopped about a hundred yards above the high-tide line, some near our camper. They scooped out holes more than a foot deep with their flippers into which, panting from the strain of digging and the pangs of labor, they deposited their eggs—one, two, three at a time … 60 … 80 … sometimes 100 in a clutch.

Steve and I lay on our bellies behind the holes, entranced, watching this marvel of nature, this miracle of creation.

Although exhausted from their labors, the turtles assiduously filled in these nests and leveled the surface to conceal them, then struggled through the soft sand, gasping and groaning in an almost human way, back to the breakers, back to the depths, never to see their young born—never to know that their young would never be born.

Because a hundred boys from the nearby town had been waiting on the beach that night for the annual return of the turtles. When they sighted a turtle emerging from the ocean, one or two of the boys peeled off to stealthily follow her to where she dug her hole, and dig one just behind her, a few inches away and several feet down, then tunnel through to her nest and catch the white, soft-shelled eggs as she laid them. The mother turtles, struggling with single-minded determination to perpetuate their species, never suspected the fate of their eggs as greedy fingers snatched them a handsbreadth away from the painful openings of their cloacae.

I was so upset that I ran up and down the beach all night lecturing the boys, in my incomprehensible Spanglish, on the principles of conservation and fair play, imploring them to leave half, or at least a third, of the eggs in the ground so there could be turtles and eggs for future generations.

But none of them listened. They were all too busy counting the eggs into sacks of a hundred, to be sold at the market in the morning. A few hungry boys were piercing the eggs on the spot with small twigs and sucking the yolks down as they were, raw and still warm from the womb.

A boy who had “borrowed” our flashlight returned it toward morning with thanks and a dozen of the eggs he'd gathered, the size of ping-pong balls, light and rubbery to the touch. As soon as he left, I took them and went down to the empty nests, where Steve and I gently buried these fragile seeds of life and hoped against hope that they would survive and endure.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY IN LAKE NICARAGUA

The morning after we had reburied the eggs, we drove to Lake Nicaragua, at 99 miles long the largest lake in Central America, 19
th
largest on earth. It's a gloomy body, dominated by several volcanoes along its shore and by two perpetually cloud-shrouded peaks that rise 7,000 feet from an island at its center.

On the Nicaraguan beach where hundreds of endangered 400-pound green sea turtles had laid their eggs during the full moon the night before, Steve redeposits a batch into one of the nests that had been pillaged by the locals, who shortsightedly took every egg they could find.

In the sweltering heat of an August midafternoon we reached the lake's northwest coast and drove through the charming city of Granada, one of the first Spanish settlements in the New World, a carefully preserved town with centuries-old churches and gracious, balconied, colonial-style homes. Its only contemporary architectural feature was an impressionist piscine monument at the town traffic circle that looked out of place amid all that mellowed antiquity. We drove down to the deserted lake shore where, since we'd gotten so little sleep the night before, we made an early camp.

Despite the uninviting water, which was slate gray and streaked by oil, and a shoreline rimmed with tin cans, plastic bags, cartons, straw, rotting fruit, and some of the 32 tons of raw sewage flushed into the lake every day, Steve was so hot and sweaty that he plunged right in, then swam out about a quarter mile to get away from the garbage. I walked along the smelly, mushy shore and came across the bloated body of a cow, obviously dead for several days, rocking in the oily waves a few yards from the beach, with a gaping bite missing from its haunch.

As I was pondering Elsie's fate I looked across the spooky lake and saw Steve swimming hell-bent toward the beach with—was it my imagination?—something black and sleek, like a large fin, protruding out of the water about ten yards behind him. At first I thought it was a shark, but I knew that could not be because they live only in salt water, and this was a freshwater lake. Maybe a dolphin? But weren't they also saltwater citizens? Whatever it was swam away and Steve safely reached the beach.

Not until the next day did we realize how lucky he had been. We were told in Granada that the lake was infested with dangerous freshwater sharks, the only ones on the globe, the locals said, and that the monument we'd seen was intended to both celebrate them and warn visitors. We were informed that the lake, which is only a hundred feet above sea level, had been part of the ocean until a volcanic eruption sealed it off from the sea eons before, trapping millions of fish within it, most of which died as the lake, which bottomed out at about 90 feet, lost its salinity as the rains and streams poured in. But that one species of shark had managed to evolve, adapt, survive, and become the world's only finned freshwater man-eater. Fascinating!

And totally incorrect!

The sharks' actual provenance did not emerge until ten years later, when ichthyologists proved, through tagging, that those found in Lake Nicaragua bred only in salt water, which meant, by definition, that they were saltwater fish. Further research revealed that these were not a special species, but ordinary oceanic bull sharks that had swum 120 miles from the ocean, jumped the river rapids salmon-style, reached Lake Nicaragua in seven to eleven days, and lived there for as long as they desired by a process of osmoregulation. They had learned how to reduce the salinity of their blood more than 50 percent by absorbing gallons of fresh water and excreting 20 times more urine than when in salt water.