Around the World in 50 Years (24 page)

We returned to Bamako and bade each other a fond farewell. Bernard gave me his XL Oakland Raiders T-shirt (which can be dangerous to wear on Jets turf), and I reciprocated with a Big Apple tee bearing the picture of a bright yellow taxi, which he treasures. God flew to Casablanca to meet his New York girlfriend and Bernard took a three-day bus trip back to Ghana. I was now a week behind schedule because of the breakdowns, so I flew to Mauritania instead of going by land as I'd planned. We left the battered Cruiser in a workshop in Bamako, waiting to receive a replacement radiator, although I think what it really needed to receive was Extreme Unction.

I chipped in for the repairs, but the decline of the dollar was a shocker. Its value had eroded 25 percent since I'd traveled the past summer, and merchants throughout Africa now shunned it. On previous trips, my dollars were always in demand. People had desired the dollar, saved it for a droughty day, and much preferred it to any other currency. Now they didn't want it, and it was almost embarrassing for me to ask them to take it. Its slide had been so precipitous and continuous that the money changers were afraid to hold it even one day, lest their profit on the exchange evaporate. It was a humbling experience for one who'd always felt proud and powerful dispensing greenbacks.

*   *   *

I was not looking forward to the part of West Africa south of Mauritania. I take no pleasure in visiting once peaceful and prosperous nations destroyed by stupid wars. I'd delayed these visits for more than five years, waiting for most of the killing to stop in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Nigeria. I was heartened when, a few days before my departure from New York, the Ivory Coast announced it was peaceful enough to start delivering the five million pieces of mail that had accumulated during its civil war. But I'd need a lot more good news to make me look forward to this slog.

Each of these states was sure to be, in its own way, distressing and depressing because of their recent civil wars and internal disputes. Most Africans had received, and therefore expected, little from life, but the citizens of three of these states had been well on their way to having it all before they blew it, and they therefore felt the loss ever more deeply. How humiliating to have been the shining success of the continent and to have pissed it away. How ironic to call such a country “developing” when it was sliding backward. I frankly admit that I was only going there to check them off the list, and I wanted to get through them as quickly as possible.

But I was thwarted right from the get-go. The flight schedules along my route were a shambles because the civil wars had so severely disrupted air traffic that they'd bankrupted many African airlines. Others had fallen victim to government corruption: The ruling elite in many of these countries treated the airlines as their personal toys, often commandeering them on short notice to fly their families somewhere, bouncing the paying passengers, eventually forcing them out of business. My plan to fly directly from Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, just a few hundred miles down the coast, proved impossible. I was compelled to fly from Mauritania to Dakar in Senegal, from Dakar to Abidjan in Nigeria, from Abidjan to Accra, the capital of Ghana, and, at long last, to a dilapidated airport in Sierra Leone, from which I had to take a five-hour journey by bus and ferry to reach Freetown because so many roads and bridges had been demolished, consuming two days for what should have been a two-hour jaunt.

Sierra Leone, with its abundance of gold and diamonds, had been a flourishing economy before it erupted into a ferocious civil war from 1991 to 2002. It was now one of the ten poorest on earth. It had been set back decades, with a crumbling infrastructure and dire poverty. I saw Freetown's dusty streets filled with the armless and legless victims of its recent fratricide, so numerous that the amputees held daily soccer games on homemade crutches, a pathetic poor man's Paralympics. I did not stay long.

The Ivory Coast had been, in the 1980s, widely hailed as an economic miracle and a model of West African stability. It began to destabilize in the late 90s, with the decline in cocoa prices and mounting foreign debt. It crumbled on Christmas Day of 1999, when the military staged a coup over unpaid wages, poor living conditions, and government corruption, and it collapsed into chaos in 2004 when machete-wielding mobs of thousands attacked French homes and military bases. By the time I felt it safe to visit, I saw only a decayed hulk, drab and lifeless, of peeling paint, crumbling concrete, buildings whose walls had been sprayed by machine guns, high inflation, high unemployment, the irreplaceable loss of the French expats who had run the economy, and few prospects. I did not stay long.

Liberia had been ruled for more than 150 years by former American slave families who constituted less than 5 percent of the population and treated the indigenous folks like dirt, but who nevertheless managed to create, until the 1970s, a profitable economy based on rubber and other natural resources. It was now an economy where the only ones doing well were those who sold barbed wire or supplied armed guards. Razor wire and broken bottles embedded in cement bristled atop every wall. Hundreds of UN soldiers with blue armbands protected the government buildings, most of which had been burned or ransacked. Security personnel in army boots and carrying nightsticks were stationed outside most shops. Yet, thanks to the paternalistic attitude and financial assistance the U.S. has long maintained toward Liberia (which the Liberians reciprocated with a strong and genuine love for America), I witnessed the hope for a better tomorrow there, with dozens of rebuilding projects dotting Monrovia, many sponsored by USAID. But tomorrow is not today, so I did not stay long.

My rapid exits from Liberia and Sierra Leone were partly due to my inability to communicate. Although English was the official language of both, they spoke it in a rapid, high-pitched patois with Creole overtones that rendered them less comprehensible to me than Uzbeks.

According to news I'd picked up from the backpacker brigade—often the most reliable source of travel tips—the Nigerians had not killed a visitor for at least three days, so I decided to give it a shot—and hope it didn't give me one. I'd vacillated about whether to visit Nigeria on this trip out of concern about the risky security situation, the continuing conflict between its predominantly Muslim north and Christian south, the religious uproar over the staging of its Miss World contest, the anger over the inequitable distribution of its large oil income, most of which was lining the pockets of the governing class, and a widespread belief that this once-leading light of African economies was going to hell in a handbasket. But—again that tug-of-war between safety and desire—if I was able to get there on this swing, that would vastly simplify my future travel plans, because I'd then have visited every country in the northern third of Africa except Chad and every country on its west coast as far south as Angola.

I flew into Lagos, the largest city in Africa, home to an estimated 21 million, and the only high-rise, glass-sheathed, Western-type city on this trip, and one of only three such on the continent. It combined the sweltering summer climate of Houston with the architectural ambience of Detroit, the exorbitant prices of Tokyo, and the hospitality of Turkmenistan. It had only two redeeming qualities: fast Internet with American-layout keyboards, and the best pepper pot goat soup that side of the Caribbean.

Towering thunderheads had started massing above the coastline, leading to nightly bursts of precipitation portending the start of the rainy season, of impassable roads and insect infestations. I did not stay long.

I'd had enough days of dirt, flies, open sewers, rotting fruit, and cold-water bucket baths; of kids with machine guns, kids with crutches, kids with missing arms or legs; the ubiquitous odors of unwashed bodies; of daylong drives down dusty, rattling roads in worn-out vans; bumbling bureaucrats; brownouts, blackouts, and blowouts; trying to converse in fractured French; unpasteurized dairy products; storekeepers so poor they lacked change for a single dollar; chronically late plane departures for invariably indirect itineraries; ultra-slow computers with unfamiliar French keyboards; food vendors who washed their dishes in the same bucket of dirty water all day; merchants who falsely promised to give you “a good price”; and dozens of daily confrontations with the poverty, suffering, deprivation, and misery of others. I'd had my fill of TIA.

After so many weeks on the road, I was tired and homesick. I missed New York, my girlfriend, my cozy apartment, my bicycle,
real
ice cream, chocolates, sushi, salmon, Diet Sprite, the gym, hot showers, smooth sheets, NPR,
The New York Times, The Atlantic,
even
The Economist,
the stock market, the theater, movies, laundromats, bright light bulbs, English, and the St. Patrick's Day Parade up Fifth Avenue, which I might still make if I got a move on. It was time to head home.

 

CHAPTER 13

“Do Not Kidnap Anyone Today!”

I was not adequately prepared for my customs inspection when I landed in Houston en route to Miami after visiting Colombia in early 2009. Because I was arriving from a cocaine-exporting country, I presumed I'd be subjected to close scrutiny, and since I knew from my past experience with numerous strip searches that I fit the standard drug-dealer/terrorist profile to which the Department of Homeland Security was so rigidly and myopically attached, I'd diligently prepared for a thorough search. I'd made a list for customs of the eight places where I'd hidden cash from possible bandits, so the inspectors wouldn't conclude I was laundering money or violating currency regulations. I'd carefully packed my powdered milk next to my whole-grain cereal so my inspector got the message that not all white powder is narcotic. And I'd listed on my customs declaration the copal and the emeralds in matrix I was bringing back from Colombian mines, so they wouldn't think I was a jewel smuggler. I thought I'd covered every base.

What I'd failed to consider was that a meticulous customs agent, with some time on his hands at five a.m., would go through
every
item in my luggage, including all my travel literature and papers, where he found my itinerary, which clearly stated, with the relevant dates, that I planned to “fly to Miami, fly to Haiti, tour Haiti,” and then—
uh-oh
—“visit Cuba for a week,” followed by “fly to Jamaica.” The Cuba trip was prohibited by U.S. law absent special authorization, which I lacked. This incriminating notation required a half hour of fast and convincing talking—not my forte at five a.m.—before I was finally released, albeit with a stern warning and a disbelieving scowl from the agent, after I'd lamely explained that “Cuba” was my nickname for an old Haitian girlfriend with whom I planned to reconnect for a week.

On the main route from the capital of Port-au-Prince to the big city of Cap-Haïtien, the road was clogged with water, rocks, landslides, and garbage months after a big storm had hit. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and one of the saddest anywhere.

Haiti was so awful that I quickly understood why the customs agent had been so incredulous when I told him I planned to spend more than a week there, girlfriend or not. To paraphrase General Phil Sheridan, if I owned both Haiti and Hell, I would try to rent out Haiti and live in Hell.

Haiti is regularly ravaged by floods, tropical storms, and hurricanes. The weather can be wretchedly hot or bone-chillingly wet and cold. The thin chalky soil was now so depleted I felt sorry for the forlorn weeds trying to eke out a living there, although a few areas still retained the rich earth that had once made Haiti desirable as a colony. More than 90 percent of the terrain was too steep for sustainable agriculture, and the desperate attempts of poor farmers to cultivate it almost invariably resulted in erosion and environmental degradation. The country couldn't grow enough food to feed its population of ten million. The trees had been felled for firewood ages ago, and Haiti had no other fuel resources. The one abundant natural resource was hydroelectric power from the swollen rivers rushing down the mountains, but that was itself a destructive demon.

Haiti ranked near the top of the world corruption index, and its past rulers absconded with hundreds of millions. It languished at the bottom of the hemisphere's Human Development Index, with half the population illiterate, few children receiving adequate schooling, much child slavery, open violence against women, and persistently high unemployment. More than 80 percent of Haitians lived below the poverty line of $2 a day, 54 percent in abject poverty, and the richest one percent owned 50 percent of the assets.

It was the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and seemed to me the least happy. The Haitians appeared down and dour, with no time or inclination for frivolity. I heard not one laugh in a week, not even a giggle, saw no kids at play, not one happy face, although I was told Haiti has a culture rich with proverbs, riddles, jokes, songs, and games.