Around the World in 50 Years (31 page)

After more than two centuries of being sold into slavery, followed by two more centuries of harsh and exploitative Portuguese rule, followed by the revolution that brought independence in 1974, followed by 15 years of internecine bloodshed between a Socialist government and rightist guerrillas, the people of Mozambique had, in 1992, finally embraced peace and laid to rest ZAPU and FRELIMO, RENAMO and SWAPO, UNIP and the MMD, abandoned their radical positions, and resumed the laid-back attitude and friendly Afro-Iberian-Brazilian style that'd made the place so popular with tourists in the 60s and early 70s. The only remaining public evidence of Mozambique's revolutionary vigor was the national flag—a shovel crossed by an assault rifle—and the names of Maputo's main avenues, which commemorated international Socialist soldiers and philosophers like Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse Tung, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, and the heroes of the African Battles for Independence: Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Robert Mugabe, and Julius Nyerere.

The last was the town's main drag, a wide bustling boulevard bordered by capacious restored Iberian-style mansions, painted in yellow, pink, and fuchsia pastels, behind concrete walls above which I could see wide, wraparound wrought-iron balconies and roofs brown with South American tile, below which operated hundreds of enterprising sidewalk vendors beside gardens of flame trees and palm fronds

I found no one in Mozambique who spoke fluent English, and only a few who were even comprehensible. Here, for example, is the word-for-word declaration from the back of my Mozambique Airlines ticket: “IT CASTRATES FOR EMISSION OF ELECTRONIC TICKET. I INFORM: If the passenger's trip understands a point of final destiny or of scale in a Country that not the one of the departure the Convention of Varsavia can be applicable.” (Well, at least now you know which airline to take when you're ready to go to your point of final destiny.)

My main goal in Maputo was to get a visa to Angola. Since both Mozambique and Angola had suffered under the same Portuguese colonial masters, consequently spoke that same language, and had been the most radically leftist in Africa, there was a certain camaraderie between them, which was why Mozambique was one of the few nations in Africa in which Angola had established an embassy. That embassy was my only shot at the visa, but it was a Friday, and my flight back to Joburg—my point of final destiny—left the next day; I just had one chance.

As soon as I walked into the Angolan Embassy and said “visa,” the official tried to get rid of me by declaring that I needed, as a prerequisite, a notarized letter from an Angolan citizen inviting me to visit. When I produced exactly such a letter from the Angolan agent of Emirates Airlines inviting me to come to Luanda to inspect the airport facilities, the consular officer was nonplussed, but recovered sufficiently to tell me his embassy did not grant visas to foreigners who were not residents in Mozambique, and that I should return to the U.S. and apply there. I told him, ever so politely, that this was a load of crap because every embassy was empowered to grant a visa to an applicant who personally presented himself at the embassy, regardless of where the applicant was domiciled, as long as his passport and application documents were in order—which was not universally true, but sounded reasonable to me, and came close to passing the red-face test.

After we danced around this mulberry bush for a while, he threw up his hands and told me it
might
help if I brought him a letter from the American Embassy in Maputo asking Angola to grant me a visa. When I sought to pin him down as to whether such a letter
guaranteed
me a visa, he was evasive. He eventually told me it depended on the mood of his ambassador, but he was sure I would
not
get a visa
without
such a letter.

So off I trotted to the U.S. Embassy, where a supercilious young deputy consul wasted time asking me why he should give me such a letter. He was exactly the type of bland careerist twit with whom our Foreign Service was overloaded. I told him, as sweetly as possible, he should give me such a letter because my damn tax dollars paid his friggin' salary, and the rent on the embassy, and because it should be no big deal for him.

He frostily replied that our embassy was there to determine whether to give visas to visit the U.S. to foreign applicants, not to help Americans obtain visas to Angola. I told him, a little less sweetly, that it was his fucking job to assist U.S. nationals with any request that was legal and reasonable, as mine was. He was shamelessly more concerned with covering his butt by not performing any service out of the ordinary than with being compassionate or helpful. I thereupon took out my pen, asked him for his full name, and told him I'd report his attitude to my pals at the State Department (of which I actually have none), whereupon he haughtily said he'd see what he could do, and left the room.

A full hour later, he returned to show me the best he said he could do, a worthless, one-sentence letter simply stating I was a U.S. citizen who wanted to visit every country. He was not going to ask any favors of the damn Angolans and be indebted to them.

So I took his pathetic little letter and trotted back to the Angolan Embassy, where, without even reading it, they immediately complained that it was written on plain paper. I countered that it carried the rubber stamp of the U.S. deputy consul; they insisted I bring them a letter bearing the gold seal of the United States of America on official stationery.

So I went back to my embassy to get that gold-sealed stationery, which was not easy to extract from that unpleasant and unaccommodating twit.

And back with it I ran to the Angolan Embassy, where I was told, for the first time, So sorry, but the letter had to be in Portuguese, the official language of Angola. I told the official it was written in English, the official language of the good ole U.S. of A., but that only brought a shrug.

So back I ran to our embassy. I had started this process at 9:30 a.m., and it was now 2:20 p.m., and it was Friday, and our dedicated, hardworking envoys had cleared out and closed early for the weekend. I got no translation. And no visa.

Angola consequently became the hanging Chad of this journey. And I guess you could say that I had been Yanked around.

*   *   *

I left this part of Africa with a hopeful impression that these impoverished lands beneath the Southern Cross could finally look to a better future, that their citizens appeared genuinely pleased to be at peace and were eager to embark on a path to a safe and prospering life. Their terrifying memories and nightmares remained, as did the war-maimed bodies and the unexploded land mines. Brighter days were far in the future, and they faced a hard life immediately ahead, but they convinced me that they will persevere and prevail, and that no longer will these lands remain no countries for old men.

 

CHAPTER 19

Into the Indian Ocean

On the final six stops of my southern African peregrinations, I got dumped on from 60 feet up by a large indri, saw one of the world's only 80 golden bamboo lemurs in the wild, was arrested in the Congo, and had a quiet chat about American politics with three dead Malagasies.

The Comoros, my first stop, rated straight Ds: dirty, dull, dilapidated, deteriorating, and dismally depressing. And a dumpy PPPR of 4. My visit there even ended badly, but for that I had only myself to blame. My T-shirt boldly proclaiming I was
BORN TO BE WILD
was probably not the wisest choice of attire in which to enter the Comoros Airport security inspection area. They quickly took away my tiny nail clippers (which had passed unmolested through ten other airports), confiscated the ship-in-a-bottle souvenir I'd purchased in town the day before (“potential dangerous weapon”), scrutinized my Listerine bottle to determine if it exceeded the allowable volume (5 ml under,
whew
), and questioned me intently as to why I had pointy chopsticks in my bag (to avoid using their germ-laden cutlery, although I didn't say it).

In typical TIA fashion, the plane left the Comoros four hours late, causing me to miss my connection to Madagascar. The tardy airline treated me to a decent hotel and dinner. There, for the first time, I became the direct beneficiary of Islamic practices, the result of being seated next to three similarly delayed itinerant Muslim missionaries. The only dessert the hotel offered was a delicious rum-raisin ice cream, my first frosty treat in two months. The confection caused a heated debate among the imams, who concluded that even though it did not contain real alcohol, the rum-raisin flavor was a temptation to be avoided, the camel's nose in the tent of abstinence. The sole infidel at the table accordingly became the recipient of—and happily polished off—all four bowls of frozen bliss. Praise be to Allah!

I felt sorry my devout dinner companions had missed this treat, and I had even more sympathy for the challenges of their mission, as they explained it to me. Imagine the difficulty of arriving in some poor, remote, pagan village, a stranger in a strange land, proselytizing for a strange faith, and trying to persuade the villagers to forever abstain from any form of alcohol, drugs, dancing, pork, premarital sex, extramarital sex, recreational sex, Western TV shows, movies, revealing clothing, suggestive behavior, Danish cartoons, and lustful thoughts and deeds. All in exchange for a long shot at Paradise.

*   *   *

Before I embarked on this segment, the Malagasies—as the denizens of Madagascar prefer to be called—had turned on one another, killing more than a hundred as part of a political feud that had spread by spring to include general strikes of public employees, street and road barricades, gangs of hoodlums running amok, and growing anarchy.
The New York Times
lamented that, because of a heated dispute between the two men who each claimed to be its president, and the shooting and looting between their supporters, “Madagascar is now surely in the belly of the crocodile.”

Since that didn't strike me as quite so dangerous as being in the teeth of the tiger or the jaws of the jackal, and since I'd just completed visits to the Seychelles (PPPR #2), Mauritius (PPPR #1), and Comoros, and didn't relish making a future flight back into the Indian Ocean solely to see this one unvisited country, I decided to go for it and hope the crocodile had a bellyful.

The country's current problems had begun as an electoral tussle between two “Big Men,” egocentrics who hailed from different tribes and areas of the island, espoused divergent ideas about how their nation should be governed, had little liking or respect for one another, and gave only lip service to the rule of law and the democratic process. Such antagonistic African rivalries have frequently degenerated into the use of force, with each side taking to the streets to disrupt its opponent's political rallies and intimidate voters, precipitating elections marred by fraud and ballot stuffing, yielding disputed results, prompting the refusal to accept those results, giving rise to civil wars, culminating in the horror shows that had overwhelmed Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Angola, Liberia, Congo—and now threatened Madagascar.

As I flew over the globe's fourth largest island, I was disappointed, having envisioned a luxuriant emerald isle of dense forests. I saw instead a denuded topography of pale, poor, reddish earth, a land that had lost 90 percent of its native ecosystem as its ancient forests had been felled for furniture, firewood, and charcoal, and burned to clear ground for food. It was a land where scores of species had been exterminated since man arrived, including the pygmy hippo, the elephant bird (at 850 pounds the largest avian ever), and 19 species of lemur, among them the giant lemur, larger than a gorilla.

After 90 million years of separate evolution, Madagascar had become home to some of the most unusual—and now most endangered—wildlife and vegetation on our pale blue dot, including 70 varieties of lemurs, the planet's largest and smallest chameleons, and 120 bird species that breed nowhere else—
200,000
species in all, 80 percent of which have no other home on earth. The island had become a top concern of conservationists, but extensive damage has already been done, with the animals surviving only in national parks and reserves, while the locals continued to hunt, chop, charcoal, slash, and burn. (But before we get too shocked and self-righteous, let's put it in perspective and remember that America's original inhabitants exterminated the wooly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger, and that our European settlers wiped out the passenger pigeon, decimated America's old-growth forests, its tall-grass prairies, the Everglades, the ivory billed woodpecker, and the grizzly, the bison, the mountain lion, and the wolf.)

After I landed and was able to inspect things more closely, neither the political nor the topographical landscape seemed quite so bleak.

The Malagasies had sobered up and realized that prosperity could not coexist with anarchy and violence and that tourists were not attracted to street warfare. By the time I arrived, the Malagasies were once again among the calmest and most gentle folks. And, to make sure they stayed that way, the striking gendarmes had returned to work and now had checkpoints all over the island, which was profoundly peaceful.

The tourists had yet to return. The industry was down more than 90 percent. I needed no reservation for hotels (where I was often the only guest), experienced no waits in any queues, no crowds in the national parks, and no trouble engaging English-speaking guides at a moment's notice. But it was sad to see their economy in shambles from the lack of visitors.

From the ground, the deforested land was surprisingly attractive, with multiple mountain chains and hundreds of wide, scenic valleys, every acre of which was under cultivation to feed its 18 million people. It resembled Asia, with flooded rice paddies glistening bright blue-green in the spring sun, the hillsides terraced and trimmed with sprouting carrots, lettuce, and cabbage.