The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (43 page)

“Why don't you clear the road?” he asks Daniel.

“The problem is the government,” Daniel answers.

Maybe Daniel is right—nothing happens until a big man gives his blessing. But Sven is frustrated by this kind of routine passivity. “Always,” he says bitterly, a rare crack in his diplomatic reserve. “It's always the government's fault.”

The wind sweeps the high branches back and forth, flakes of papery bark raining down on us like snow.

We make it out in the morning, hopping all the streams again at double speed, busting our humps to make it back to Juba on time. But then the Land Cruiser breaks down. After all that, Sven has to miss his meeting. He takes it well, sitting in the hot shade of Torit all afternoon, drinking tea, finally at rest.

 

Like the great migrations and towering eucalyptus, South Sudan's human cultures have endured because war immobilized the country decade after decade, paralyzing progress. Questions about the survival of animals and habitat are not separate from the survival of man himself, and tribes here have persisted to a surprising degree, especially in the country's cattle camps. These
laagers,
islandlike villages that appear like beaten-down brown circles in the immense green of the savanna, form wherever seminomadic groups settle to let their cows graze.

In Juba, Marco and I hire a car and driver ($500 a day) and head north before dawn, hoping to find such a camp. After only an hour of bad-road driving, we spot a herd of Watusi cows, white beasts with great curved horns, scattered in the bush. A few hundred yards of walking brings us to a cattle camp, a dozen half-naked men and women gathered beside a smoldering dung fire. They're Mundari, native to this region and known by the ash smeared on their bodies and the three Vs of ritual scarring across their foreheads.

They greet us with indifference (mostly) and wild threats (the largest man). A towering, ash-covered warrior wearing only a blanket, he immediately challenges me to a fight, but then calms down and allows us to settle in around the fire. The Mundari have blankets, a few plastic sheets for sheltering infants against the rain, and wooden goads, the short prods used to move cows. There are two cell phones in the camp, neither working. A couple of immensely tall women sit on blankets, steadily shaking gourds back and forth, churning the milk of the cows into a fermented, alcohol-like drink.

Cattle are bank account and social status—a hedge against hunger, an investment, and the key to getting married. (With some tribes, paying a dowry in cattle has become a human rights concern, as girls as young as 12 are traded as child brides.) Cattle raids—organized stealing expeditions—are endorsed by both culture and economics here. In 2011, more than 1,000 people were killed during a cattle war between the Nuer and Murle, on the outskirts of Boma National Park. A hundred thousand cows were stolen, along with hundreds of women and children.

The men paint my face with dung ash, roaring with laughter at the result. Then Marco and I head off, passing a town—a few roadside kiosks selling gasoline in soda bottles alongside an empty refugee camp—before moving deeper into nothing. During a pee break, I'm zipping up by the roadside when three naked men walk out of the tall grass.

They aren't here to herd cattle. Their scarring is Mundari, but they carry burnished cow-leather shields and carved fighting sticks, not normal goads. Their skinny, hard bodies are naked and oiled, as if for a wrestling match, but they're in a good mood. We stare at each other for a while until we are interrupted by a tense hiss. They fall quiet, squinting. I follow their gaze back down the road. Another file of men, also naked, also prepared for fighting, has appeared in the distance.

Our guys wave a pennant in the air, a colorful homemade flag, and their guys break into song, jogging quickly forward. Moments later, all the men embrace and laugh. In the middle of the dirt road—it's not like there's any traffic—they break into new songs and put on a display of stick fighting, blows rattling the shields, their shiny bodies staging scenes straight from an Attic vase. The driver—a Ugandan—cowers in the car, saying, “I have never seen anything like this in my whole life!” If you want a romantic encounter with ancient Africa and don't mind land mines, South Sudan is the place.

 

On the last day of my trip, rising for another East African dawn, I meet Paul Elkan at the WCS's little compound near the airport. In the past seven years, Elkan has logged more than 1,000 hours flying over the plains of South Sudan, many of them with National Geographic's Mike Fay, and has seen a genocidal civil war turn into a cold peace. Like many NGOs, the WCS is trying to build something from nothing, scraping together training programs and keeping two airplanes aloft. After some puttering around with the Cessna, the motor finally catches, and we're off to see the biggest secret in South Sudan.

First, however, a charity traffic jam. In an almost roadless country, air transport is king, and there are more than 60 planes parked at the airport, mostly small grasshoppers from the UN, NGOs, and missionary groups. We taxi toward the runway but are edged out by an Ilyushin 76, a container ship to our rowboat. Elkan has to hold back the throttle as the cargo plane—marked
WORLD FOOD PROGRAM
—idles on the runway. “Juba Tango Charley,” Elkan calls, hoping to nip in ahead of the jet, “holding short and ready.” But there's no answer from the tower, and after five minutes the Ilyushin finally lumbers into the sky with a reek of jet fuel and a searing roar that could jump-start a migration.

We pop up quickly, sailing over the tiny precincts of Juba at 1,000 feet, and then, still climbing, across the meandering Nile, leaving behind the charcoal smoke, the glitter of round tin roofs, the chaotic yards containing donkeys. Right there, we enter 3,900-square-mile Bandingilo National Park, which hosts huge migrations of antelope twice a year but is otherwise empty, without even the trace of red dirt that marks a walking trail. The plane buzzes along at 2,000 feet, rattling like a '68 Beetle with wings, but Elkan is affectionate, praising the Cessna. (“All good planes come from one place,” he says. “Wichita.”)

We've put in an hour like this, pleasant and cool, the only easy travel in South Sudan, when Elkan points to patterns in the grass below. The vast plain—a flat horizon in every direction—is now touched with a few dark lines where antelope have moved northward. Animals follow the grass, which follows the rain; at the end of the dry season, that means migrating north, toward the retreating edge of the Sudd wetland. Elkan flings the plane over onto a wingtip, circling down on the first antelope. These are white-eared kob, the most common and the easiest to spot, thanks to white flashes on the males' necks and ears. There are dozens, then hundreds, but it isn't the time of year for dense gatherings, and we aren't flying to see antelope. Elkan levels out the plane, climbs back to 2,000 feet, and heads . . . Well, I can't say where he heads. For another hour he follows a GPS signal toward a part of South Sudan that is seldom seen, one more vast wilderness in this land of empty spaces. The location is secret because of what is there: one of the last great elephant stands in East Africa. To poachers, every elephant herd is simply a collection of millions of dollars of ivory waiting to be shipped to China.

Two hours out from Juba, we drop back down to 300 feet. The grass shows patterns again, not the tiny depressions left by passing antelope but dark, wet zigs and zags, diamond patterns gathering tighter, trails crossing trails.

We probably could have found this herd just by looking for those shapes in the grass, but Elkan is running down the satellite trackers and knows they were, yesterday at least, just ahead of us. The grass turns to a beaten black mat, crushed flat in the bright sun, and then, against a splash of water, there are elephants. Ten. Then 20. Then 50. Then hundreds.

“Four hundred,” Elkan estimates.

That's just one particular herd. There are thousands of elephants out here, beyond the reach of poachers, another secret of this hidden-in-plain-sight land. Here's hoping some things are never found.

FROM
World Hum

 

T
HEIR SACRED PLEAS
released by winds to the heavens so near, swallow-tailed prayer flags of white, green, and royal blue, inscribed with the black curlicues of Buddhist scripture in Tibetan, fluttered against the clouds grazing the pass high above the Mekong River. I stood beneath them sweaty, panting from the altitude, peering down into Himalayan canyons with plunging forested slopes. With my Tibetan guides, Tenzin and his wife, Anadorma, I had just spent three hours ascending a punishing switchback trail from Yongzhi (their home village, at an altitude of 8,130 feet) on the Mekong's stony banks. They paused briefly, exchanged hurried remarks in Tibetan, and, with sharp cries of “Yiip! Yaaas! Gaaa!” prodded ahead the two mules carrying our gear and supplies.

This was no time to rest. Just after dawn we had set out from Yongzhi on a 15-day, 200-mile pilgrimage trek around the third holiest mountain in the Tibetan Buddhist cosmogony, the 22,107-foot-high Kawa Karpo, in northwestern Yunnan Province. For Tibetan Buddhists, only Mounts Kailash and Nanja Bawa are more sacred. Tibetan lay Buddhists and lamas perform the pilgrimage to put themselves in good standing with Samsara, the deity who, depicted on their temples' murals as clawed, fiendish, fanged, and red, turns the Wheel of Life and determines their next reincarnations on the basis of acquired
sonam,
or spiritual merit. (Otherwise in Buddhism samsara denotes a soul's endless wandering through repeated deaths and rebirths, a fatiguing cycle ending only for the enlightened few, with the attainment of Nirvana.) Earn enough merit, Buddhists say, and your next reincarnation will be an auspicious one, as a human, and not, say, as a lowly scorpion or snake.

Tibetans hold that the deities Kawa Karpo and his wife, Metsmo, inhabit the mountain's summit, while a host of lesser divinities haunt the vales below. Such beliefs have no real place in the godless philosophy of compassion, nonviolence, and renunciation taught by the Buddha in northern India, in the sixth century
B.C.
There Buddhism flourished, providing the downtrodden with a refuge from the caste system and winning over kings, but eventually Hinduism largely subsumed it (though it still draws Dalit converts). But when Buddhism reached Tibet a thousand years later, it changed, fusing with the indigenous Bon religion, an ancient animist faith that hallows nature and populates the landscape with gods, and still enjoys the loyalty of 10 percent of Tibetans. Bon influence, in fact, is what makes Tibetan Buddhism “Tibetan,” and the Dalai Lama himself has recognized Bon as one of the key religions of Tibet. We might expect him to: the concept of continuously reincarnated Dalai Lamas with a divine mandate to rule is a vestige of Bon.

If Kawa Karpo's ridges rise and fall like the spine of a
Tyrannosaurus rex
ready to pounce, its summit stands in northwestern Yunnan Province, and not in the adjacent Tibet Autonomous Region (through which the pilgrimage route loops). This makes sense: along with parts of Sichuan, Qinghai, and Gansu Provinces, northwestern Yunnan belongs to historical Tibet (that is, Tibet at its most geographically expansive, before the Chinese occupied it in 1950 and redrew its boundaries), and is ethnically Tibetan. Yunnan is, in fact, the least “Chinese” region of China, and is home to 28 of China's officially recognized minority peoples. Twelve hundred miles southwest of Beijing, Yunnan only became part of China in the 13th century, when Kublai Khan, founder of the Yuan dynasty, annexed it. From its pristine heights, two of Asia's greatest rivers, the Mekong and the Salween, cascade south into Burma, Laos, and Cambodia. The province's remoteness and natural beauty have of late served as a cash asset: in 2002 the Chinese government grandiosely renamed it
Shangri-La
(from James Hilton's 1933 novel,
Lost Horizon
) to promote tourism as a source of income following the abolition of commercial logging.

Long enamored of Buddhism and the compassion, nonviolence, and transcendence of desire and suffering it espouses, I decided to embark on the Kawa Karpo pilgrimage—an enactment of the allegory that life is a journey as steep and circuitous as those depicted in paintings in Buddhist (and Hindu) temples. If I could not bring myself to believe in reincarnation, I nevertheless relished the prospect of passing 15 days communing with a wilderness redolent of Buddhism and conducive to contemplating its enlightening doctrines. I've come to believe that these doctrines, with their stress on universal tolerance and renunciation, might offer us a way out of our current planetwide crisis of diminishing resources, relentless consumerism, and terrorist violence.

Tibetan pilgrims have trekked the route since times as immemorial as the origins of Bon. The first Westerner to undertake it did so only 80 years ago, and foreigners are still a rare sight. In fact, people of any sort would be few when I chose to go—at the end of the (summer) typhoon season. Tibetans usually head to Kawa Karpo in the drier months of autumn, after the harvests are in. But I preferred the uncrowded time, the better to appreciate the wilds.

There would be risks. The route consists mostly of precipitous, avalanche-prone mountain trails, many of them above 13,000 feet, and marked, if at all, by piles of mantram-inscribed prayer stones in the lower reaches, or by prayer flags at the passes. Of their perils I had heard much sobering talk when I arrived in Zhongdian, the nearest town. In the previous year alone on Kawa Karpo, a Japanese hiker had died in a landslide, and two British travelers had succumbed in a snowstorm. Nuoji Zhaxi, the local entrepreneur who helped me arrange my pilgrimage, also told me of four Chinese crushed recently in a rockfall near the village of Yubeng, and, most infamously, of the party of 17 Japanese mountaineers who, in 1992, died in an avalanche with their two local guides while trying to scale the peak itself.