Around the World in 50 Years (17 page)

But I could probably ignore Kugelmugel, Snake Hill, Hutt River, and other offspring of the micro-secessionist movement, as well as Tannu Tuva and Texas (the only state to enter the U.S. by treaty, a treaty that its politicians periodically claim recognized its right to secede, despite an 1868 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court construing it otherwise).

Anyway, here we are, some 600 words later, and we still don't know what is a country. But what can you expect when more than half of them have been created since 1960?

First, let's get rid of the glib and easy answers.

No specified geographical mass makes a piece of land a country. Nauru, half the size of Staten Island, is an acknowledged country, as is San Marino, the world's oldest surviving sovereign state and constitutional republic, weighing in at a mere 24 square miles. Nor does statehood require millions of inhabitants: The world recognizes Vatican City as a country, yet it has a population of less than a thousand, and Monaco has only 36,000.

A place is
not
a country just because you live there and it has a name. Hotmail lets you register your e-mail account from its list of 242 “countries/territories,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security visa rules contain 251 choices for “country where you live,” and our Census Bureau International Data Base predicts the future population of 228 “countries.” These organizations are not using the term “country” precisely; for them it's shorthand for domicile, the place you hang your hat, and includes such non-countries as Guam, Gibraltar, Greenland, and the Gaza Strip.

A place is
not
a country just because it issues its own currency; Aruba, the Netherlands Antilles, the Falkland Islands, and the Isle of Jersey all mint their own money, but are not countries. Nor is a place
disqualified
from being a state just because its national currency is that of another nation: The countries of Ecuador, El Salvador, East Timor, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, and Panama all use the U.S. dollar as the coin of their realms, just as the nations of Nauru, Kiribati and Tuvalu use the Australian dollar.

Nor do postage stamps prove statehood: Some of the most artistic stamps in my collection are issued by non-nations like Anguilla, Bermuda, Curaçao, Guadalupe, Martinique, the Tokelau Islands, St. Helena, Sarawak, Wallis and Futuna, South Georgia, Cocos Islands, Pitcairn Islands, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the French Antarctic Territory. One country, Andorra, does not issue any postage stamps; it delivers the local mail for free, while relying on neighboring Spain and France to forward its foreign mail.

Diplomatic relations alone do not confer statehood, as these actions serve as recognition of the
government,
not the nation. Russia, for example, has diplomatic relations with the Georgian breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but those are far from being countries. The U.S. has refused to have diplomatic relations with the
governments
of North Korea, Iran, and Cuba, but that does not contradict America's acceptance of them as countries.

Membership in the UN is
almost
a reliable guide, because an entity can only be a member if it's a true country.
But,
not every true country is a UN member. Both Taiwan and Vatican City are regarded as countries, but they're not UN members, the former because the People's Republic of China challenged its status, the latter because it never applied, believing it can conduct its diplomacy more effectively by having the Holy See admitted as an “observer” at the General Assembly. Then there's Kosovo, which, as we went to print, 109 states had formally recognized as an independent country, but which hasn't been admitted to UN membership because of opposition from Serbia, which lays claim to it, and Russia, which supports Serbia and wields veto power.

For more than 80 years, the guiding document has been the 1933 Montevideo Convention, which sets forth the four criteria for statehood: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and capacity to enter into relations with the other states. (A fifth, implicit, requirement is that the entity must seek to be regarded and treated as a state.) These criteria would allow an entity like Taiwan to be accepted as a state, but it has been thwarted in its attempts to do so.

The Convention forbids the use of military force to obtain sovereignty, yet at least 40 now-recognized nations have resorted to military force to overthrow their colonial masters. The Convention also excludes puppet states, yet this ban proved ineffective when the Iron Curtain descended across Eastern Europe after WW II and all the puppets of the Soviet Union were treated as countries.

If we look to political philosophy, we are confronted by two contradictory systems. The declarative theory of statehood holds that the political existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states, but the constitutive theory maintains that a state exists
only
insofar as it is recognized by other states. Everybody clear?

So where are we? Well, I'm counting, as true countries, the 193 members of the UN, plus Taiwan, Vatican City, and Kosovo: thus, 196. (The question of whether Kosovo is legally a country recently came before the International Court of Justice, which had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to clarify the broad question of statehood. But the Court punted and never responded to the basic issue, instead holding, on July 22, 2010, that “international law has no prohibition on a territory issuing a declaration of independence,” which is nice to know, but hardly a responsive answer.)

*   *   *

Now that I've defined two of the three words in my plan to “visit every country,” my lawyerly inclinations lead me to elucidate on the third:
visit
. Since there are no rules in this sport, no international body promulgating standards, a visit could theoretically range from a minute to a lifetime. I have spent from one day to one week in every nation's capital, except for Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, and traveled across the country in at least one direction in about 90 percent of the nations, the notable exceptions being Argentina, Brazil, China, and Russia, which are just too big to completely cross in enough time to still have a legal practice and a rent-stabilized apartment to come home to. I only dipped a toe in the DRC where a band of child soldiers was killing anyone who entered the contested zone in the east; Nigeria, when Boko Haram was not welcoming Westerners; Sudan, where the government strictly confined me to the area around Khartoum; and Tajikistan, where I was trapped on a tour that only spent one day there, out in the boonies.

Furthest short of my goal had been Equatorial Guinea (EG), a rich but nasty little dictatorship with one of the worst human rights records. When I was ready for it, in 2003, it was not ready for me. Its government was not allowing visitors because it was heated up and worried about the trial of 13 mercenaries who allegedly plotted to overthrow the government. Not to be thwarted by a little formality like the lack of a visa, I flew south over EG to Libreville in Gabon, then endured a jolting eight-hour ride back north on a terribly rutted dirt road to a part of Gabon that shared a watery border with EG. I prevailed upon an unsuspecting fisherman who had a little dinghy with a 5 hp outboard to take me across to the opposite shore, where I quickly hopped out, ran around, kissed the Guinean ground, smeared a bit of it in my passport, leaped back in the dinghy, and got the hell out of there. That was the best I could do, but I vowed to return legally once it permitted visits. (And did so in 2014, from July 9 to 13.)

A Ugandan gracefully carries a pile of tree bark on her head. African women expertly transport loads approaching 90 pounds in this manner, from oranges to buckets of water. In my 15 trips to Africa, I never saw any one of them drop or spill anything.
Gorilla Highlands

Since I am not one of those rich yacht-owning guys who compete with each other for their self-created title of “The World's Most Traveled Man,” I confess that I have not visited every one of the 7,107 islands in the Philippine Archipelago, or all the 17,508 islands and islets constituting Indonesia, but I've made my share of risky voyages on their rickety interisland ferries you read about in the back pages of the
Times:
“Ship Sinks in Suva Sea, 400 Presumed Lost.”

I usually cross a country by bus, car, minivan, or bush taxi, but I crossed a handful by train (Italy, Switzerland, Moldova, Byelorussia, Ukraine, Romania, and Greece), two by river steamer (Gabon and Germany), Norway via coastal steamer, the Gambia and the Amazonian parts of Peru and Ecuador by motorized canoe, half of Burma by motor scooter, and I rode completely around Jamaica by motorcycle and Nauru by bicycle. I've also crossed three small countries by foot (to wit, Vatican City, San Marino, and Liechtenstein), and parts of others by horse, camel, elephant, llama, and donkey.

So, now that we know where we are, let's get back on the road.

 

CHAPTER 10

Doing God's Work

When I reached 129 countries, after plucking much of the low-hanging fruit, I again joined forces with God. I had so enjoyed his company, his delight in travel, his easygoing nature, sense of humor, facility with French patois, and his efforts and ambition to make a better life for himself and his family, that I decided to take another trip with God on my side. But this trip was to be different: I'd be the guide and God the guest. I'd be doing God's work.

Since God was still growing his business and had no spare cash, I'd offered to pay for the trip, which he liked, and to take him to several West African countries he'd never seen, and thus expand his range, which he liked. I'd study the route and the means of transportation, which he liked, and I'd select the camps and hotels where we stayed, which God did
not
like at all after he realized that my standard for what constituted tolerable habitation was much, much lower than his.

The time was February of 2006 and our itinerary was Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea (Conakry).

It turned out, not surprisingly, to be typical TIA—This Is Africa—which means lots of wasted time, slow transit, poor roads, starchy food, battalions of bugs, problems exchanging money, power failures, paranoid patriots, widespread petty corruption, and ubiquitous poverty, but at least the guns of war and the flames of revolution were on hiatus. Whenever anything happens on this continent that, by our Western standards, is odd, counterproductive, ineffective, inefficient, frustrating, unreasonable, dumb, bizarre, incomprehensible, or plain-out weird, the old Africa hands and the expats just shrug their shoulders and, with quiet patience tinged with resignation, intone: “TIA.” Even though the revenues, productivity, and prospects of many African countries had surged since I'd first visited, more than enough TIA remained to frustrate any traveler.

God and I rendezvoused in Dakar, the bustling capital of Senegal, and immediately learned we'd blundered into a misunderstanding. God had presumed that, since I was in charge of the trip, I'd researched and obtained what visas
he
needed, while I'd presumed that since he had his passport and lived in Africa, he'd attended to this. As a consequence, we wasted an entire day trying to ascertain if he required a visa to Guinea, repeatedly phoning its embassy, which never answered, then walking for two hours to find it, where we learned he did not need one.

I rented a small car in which we headed northeast, along Senegal's Atlantic coast. After two hours we stopped by the seaside to watch a group of ten young men in dirty shorts and torn shirts performing one of the hardest labors known—panning for gold in shoreline beach sands. Three of the men shoveled the heavy sand into a large screen that stood on rickety wooden legs about two feet above the gentle waves, to catch any sticks and rocks and garbage. The other men knelt beneath the screen to catch the sifted sand in pans of sheet metal, or plastic, even a black frying pan with a long handle. They were surely outlaw operators, for few people could afford the €2,300 fee that Senegal charged for a two-year “artisan exploitation authorization.” But the men seemed neither worried about the police, whom they had likely bribed, nor about my camera, for which they proudly posed.

Senegal has gold deposits in the interior, where you'd need to process one ton of dirt and rock to get .08 of an ounce of gold, as a Canadian mining giant had just agreed to do. The guys on the beach were working over far poorer deposits, hundreds of miles from the mother lodes in the mountains. These sands harbored the most miniscule traces of gold dust, which had run a gauntlet of river panners on its tumbling ride to the ocean, and lucky if they averaged .01 of an ounce per ton, i.e., one grain of gold for every 3.2 million grains of crap.

Panning is the poor man's prospecting. It has the advantage of ease of movement, ready accessibility, and low equipment costs, but is attenuated by small throughput and backbreakingly arduous work. Each pan, about 16 inches across, with slanted sides two to three inches deep, can hold over 20 pounds of dense, water-saturated sand, which the men have to shake and swirl repeatedly in the water, as they expel, first, the lighter sands, then the heavier ones, then small pebbles, all the time kneading the contents to break up any clods and crush any clay, concentrating it all down to the heaviest, dark-black, metallic sands and—they can only hope—a fleck or two of gold.