Around the World in 50 Years (21 page)

I don't know whether the advancing years have more increased my wisdom or my cowardice, but I chickened out of the jump.

I was still shaking off the tower terrors when I reached Samoa, where my objective was far less dangerous: to climb Mount Vaea to the burial vault of Robert Louis Stevenson, my favorite teller of adventure tales. It was little more than a sweaty hour up the jungle trail, but after having gained ten pounds on the unhealthy Pacific diet, and grown soft from sitting in so many airplanes on so many long flights, the hike up the hill was a hot, hard haul for me.

Stevenson, who died at 44 of a cerebral hemorrhage after a life battling TB, had early fallen in love with Samoa, wrote numerous articles and books there, and asked to be buried there. He was so treasured by Samoans for his powerful political polemics on their behalf, for his storytelling in their oral tradition, and for putting on paper the first fiction story ever written in the Samoan language, that 30 native chieftains journeyed to his deathbed, established an honorary watch guard to keep his spirit company through the night, then carried the body of their beloved Tusitala—the teller of tales—on their shoulders as they hacked a path through the jungle and brought him up the small mountain to his final resting-place overlooking the peaceful Pacific.

I wept as I read the moving epitaph that he wrote for his tomb:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie,

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

            
Here he lies where he longed to be,

            
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

            
And the hunter home from the hill.

 

CHAPTER 12

Hanging Chad

After Samoa, I had still 49 more nations to visit before
I
was home from the hill. My initial plan was to go to Africa and knock ten nations off my To-Do list in one continuous, contiguous, 55-day sweep, between January and March 2008, first crossing the Saharan belt just south of the Maghreb, through some of the world's poorest and roughest countries, successively from Sudan through Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali to Mauritania, where I'd reach the Atlantic Ocean, then swing south, following the bulge of West Africa, to three states I'd been forced to bypass on my previous forays to the region because two of them, Liberia and Sierra Leone, had been in the midst of ferocious civil wars, while the indigenes in the third, the Ivory Coast, had been fighting a war between north and south and also killing anyone who looked remotely French, which, I'd assumed, to them
I
could remotely look. (Although I might also be terminated by a reader who had to struggle through that sentence.) Finally, if the turmoil then roiling Nigeria subsided, I might try to pop in there.

I anticipated that the most prevalent potential problems would be fairly routine African stuff, the usual mélange of muggers, bandits, kidnappers, corrupt cops, jihadists, rogue soldiers, freelancing mercenaries, unreliable cross-border buses, broken-down bush taxis, Saharan sandstorms, the dust-laden winter wind called the
Harmattan,
unsanitary water, poor diet, and deadly diseases, from malaria to Ebola.

I was to begin in Khartoum, the storied capital of Sudan, to which, after three years of unsuccessfully applying for a visa, I had finally found a way in thanks to a guy I'll call Nikolas. I had given up on the standard procedures, because whenever I asked the Sudanese Embassy in D.C. about the status of my visa application, I received the same reply: “It is being considered in Khartoum.” Frustrated after 30 months of this, I had contacted an old girlfriend who was an administrator at the UN, who referred me to a knowledgeable operative at the Arab League, who kindly put me in touch with “a man who can help you,” who, after vetting me to make sure I was not CIA, Mossad, Mormon missionary, Salvation Army, or similar undesirables, and after extracting a good chunk of change, which, he explained, had to be of sufficient amount to cross several palms, put me in e-mail contact with Nikolas, a European national long resident in Khartoum, who'd “make all the arrangements.”

I precisely followed the instructions I was given: I took a Tunisair flight from Tunis to Cairo, arriving at Terminal One, and there collected my luggage and walked to Terminal Two, where I went directly to the Kenya Air counter and asked, verbatim, for “the flight that leaves at five minutes to midnight,” the code I'd been given for flight KQ0323 to Khartoum. After the Kenya Air agent finished looking through my passport and mentioned the absence of a visa to Sudan, I told her, as I'd been told to tell her, “It has all been arranged,” and, as I'd been further instructed, gave her my most winning wink. She hesitated for the briefest bit, winked back, issued me a boarding pass, and wished me a good trip.

At 1:40 a.m. I landed in Khartoum, where I was greeted by my “contact,” a shady, Oakley-shaded Arab in a black leather motorcycle jacket, who had my visa in one hand and an open palm in the other, the latter of which someone along the chain had apparently failed to grease sufficiently, or so he insisted.

After I'd rectified that alleged oversight with a Benjamin, I was whisked by an arranged taxi to the Hotel Metropole, a picaresque joint likely designed by Robert Ludlum and operated by John le Carré. The first thing I noticed was that half its exterior was missing, covered over with boards and sheetrock, as if a bomb had ripped through it. When I asked the proprietor, he told me, somewhat reluctantly, but also proudly, that, yes, a bomb
had
ripped through it a while back, when a jihadist decided to get rid of the filthy infidels who roomed there, but only succeeded in killing three of the native staff.

I was assured it was not likely to happen again because, “As you Americans say, lightning never strikes twice in the same place.” I thought of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center but said nothing.

The lobby and sitting area were filled, even at that late hour, with several suited Western businessmen and a dozen veteran foreign correspondents wielding laptops, the journalists dithering over whether to finish and file their copy with their editors in New York, London, and Paris that night, or to shack up with their colleagues and file the next morning.

As I was the only backpacking type bunking at the hotel—tourists in Khartoum are as rare as virgins in Vegas—it became quickly clear that I was under suspicion, and that I was not getting invited to the slumber party.

But, for once, I had more pressing priorities. By dawn's early light I had to hustle to the Police Central Registration to have my arrival rerecorded and a piece of green paper pasted in my passport, a process that cost me a few more quid. I received there a lecture that I should not, for my safety—it's amazing the thoughtful procedures dictatorships around the world had instituted to ensure my safety—travel outside of Khartoum or Omdurman, its sibling city directly across the Nile.

I then had to flash over to the Information & Promotion Administration of the General Administration of Tourism of the Ministry of Tourism and Wild Life [
sic
] to receive another costly piece of paper, this one topped with a sketch of a 1950s camera, that granted me permission to take 35mm still pictures around Khartoum,
provided
I did not film “military areas, bridges, train stations, broadcasting and public utilities, such as water, gas, petrol, and electricity works” or “slum areas, beggars, and other defaming subjects.”

This severely limited my artistic scope because almost every street in Khartoum could pass for a slum, and the only people
not
dressed like beggars were uniformed soldiers brandishing serious-looking weapons and dark-suited, sun-glassed, regime insiders toting briefcases, who looked as if they harbored reasonable apprehensions that any photo of them could end up on an Interpol
WANTED
poster or a dossier at the International Criminal Court. Nevertheless, just to make sure I didn't do anything foolish, the permit required me, before I began filming, to alert “the local government inspector, the town clerk, and the executive officer of general authority.”

Oh well, at least I was free to photograph the “Wild Life.” Since I saw no examples of the four-legged variety during my sojourn, I interpreted this edict loosely and took 50 shots one evening of dozens of spotlessly white-robed Sufi devotees in trances of ecstatic religious fervor performing the whirling-dervish dance inside a wide circle of 500 observant observers.

*   *   *

While I'd turned my back on the non-African world for two weeks, it had established another country I had to visit! But before I could shoulder the added burden of going to Kosovo and whatever other newbie nations the Powers might recognize, I had to focus on Africa. Next up was Chad, to which I could venture by either air or land once I determined which one was the lesser evil.

Because Sudan and Chad were in the throes of an undeclared war, no airline flew directly between them. If I opted for air, I'd have to fly east from Khartoum to Addis Ababa, then back west, three quarters of the way across Africa, to Bamako in Mali, then back eastward to Niamey, the capital of Niger, and from Niamey to N'Djamena, the capital of Chad, taking four flights and two days (and paying full freight for each) for what should have been a two-hour hop. I had no other air route from Khartoum—unless I flew via Cairo to Paris. TIA. This is Africa.

I'd customarily preferred to travel by land because I can't learn much about a country from flying over it at 35,000 feet. It was 1,213 desert miles from Khartoum to N'Djamena, which I could probably have 4
×
4'd in less than a week. But my limited Sudanese visa did not permit that. Moreover, and far more problematic, much of the land I'd have to traverse was in the western Sudanese province of Darfur, then terrorized by several thousand nasty nuts on camelback called the Janjaweed, whose main motivation in life was to slaughter the inhabitants, a vocation at which they'd been quite successful, killing more than 300,000 in six years, while driving 600,000 from their homes into makeshift refugee camps near the border with Chad. (The Sudanese government, which was reliably rumored to be arming, supporting, and directing the Janjaweed, put the death toll at only 10,000 and blamed Chadian rebels.)

As I was deliberating over this dilemma, the Janjaweed struck three towns in a remote part of western Sudan, sending 12,000 more Darfurians fleeing to Chad and pushing Chad's president to blast Sudan for provoking the violence and declare that if this continued he was going to send 300,000 refugees back into Sudan.

The origins of the conflict were complicated. Forty percent of the inhabitants of Darfur are not Arabs, but mostly members of the Fur tribe (hence the name Dar
fur
), and the Sudanese rulers were notorious for disliking non-Arabs. A persistent drought had parched the Darfur region starting about ten years before, but the government in Khartoum had not responded with much concern or assistance, which angered the Darfurians, after which one thing led to another and the genocide began. The problem quickly spilled over into Chad, whose president was unwilling to openly assist the Darfurian rebels against powerful Sudan. Chadian rebels then formed a United Front for Democratic Change and, in 2003 and 2006, attacked N'Djamena International Airport until driven back by French troops posted there to protect the Chadian government.

These hostilities made me fairly certain the land route would not win a AAA recommendation, but I believed it could be accomplished. All I'd have to do was load a sturdy, wide-tired 4
×
4 with a hundred gallons of gas, cross the Nile at Omdurman, as permitted by my visa, take a compass bearing of 250 degrees WSW, slip past the Sudanese Army with my now-invalid visa, skirt the Janjaweed paramilitary camps, cross the scorched-earth region of Darfur, dodge through the highly congested area of the refugee camps, and then zip across the remaining 300 miles of inhospitable desert infested with rebel militias.

But, alas, I was no longer the overconfident kid who'd taken the Trans World Record Expedition through worse without worry. I opted for the four flights.

The first three went relatively smoothly, although, as just about the only white traveler on board, I was accosted at each airport by every tout, bum, beggar, mendicant, pimp, and tip-seeking baggage agent not otherwise occupied. On my fourth and final flight, as we approached N'Djamena toward midnight, the captain suddenly announced that, No, we were not landing there after all, but flying on to Addis in Ethiopia, because there was too much shooting and too many dead bodies on the runway for a safe landing.

On that fateful February night, 160 corpses and hundreds of wounded littered the airport and the land around it, and a thousand more rebels ran amok below us in pickup trucks firing heavy machine guns, assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. Seems the rebels inside Chad had decided to give rebellion another go and try to oust the uncooperative government and take over the country.

So why did they attack the airport? If some gang were trying to take over Washington, D.C., it's hardly likely they'd concentrate their efforts on Dulles International. But in Chad, a successful military action required the capture of the airport, because that's where France had stationed its tanks and its 1,500 soldiers. (France had actively defended this former colony since 1978, when the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, attempted to seize parts of northern Chad, and tried again in 1983 and 1986.) The supportive French troops bivouacked at the airport enabled the government, throughout the battle, to safely land, refuel, and reload its four helicopter gunships, which then went on to shoot the shit out of the rebels. At one point during the day, the rebels controlled half the capital. But a pickup truck is no match for a heavily armed helicopter, and within a few days the rebels had been beaten back into the desert and N'Djamena became relatively tranquil.