Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places

by Adam Fletcher

  We stayed in that night. Anwar was insistent that after dark there was absolutely nothing to do in Hebron. The next morning, he left early for work. We let ourselves out, leaving no evidence on the walls that we’d ever been there. It was hard to top “Make hummus not walls.”

  Getting a taxi back to Jerusalem was simple enough. We asked people where the bus station was; they kept pointing us in different (contradictory) directions until eventually we ended up in front of a man sitting on the bonnet of a recently white car. A car with Israeli licence plates.

  “Jerusalem?” the man asked.

  “Yes,” we replied.

  The price was stated. We agreed, and climbed inside. He shook his head, and called us back out again. “Two more people,” he said. He was the bus, but the bus was a car, but the car must be full, but we were only two. It was Ghana, again.

  The first hour passed quite quickly. An elderly lady hobbled into view, and agreed to take one of the last two spots. She waited inside the car while we stood out in the sun sharing biscuits with the man and some of his friends. The next thirty minutes dragged, and not only because we’d run out of biscuits. Finally we caved and bought the last place for ourselves, just so we could leave. It cost five euros.

  Once we were on the road, it became clear that our driver was both a biscuit and a speed enthusiast. After twenty minutes, we’d reached the border. The car grew suddenly tense. “Do you have problems at the border?” I asked the bus driver of the car.

  “Problems?” he said, turning and looking at me for far longer than necessary and recommendable while driving a car-bus. “No, no problems.”

  At the border, a friendly man, with a large gun, leaned into the window to collect our passports and IDs. He’d just need to press a little lever on that gun and we’d all be dead. This seemed remarkable and wrong and yet he was totally blasé about the whole thing.

  Then a discussion that we didn’t understand took place. The armed man looked through the passports again. We expected questioning. Why had we been in Palestine? Were we “for or against them?”

  The soldier pointed to a nearby parking spot. The driver parked there. The hairs on my neck stood to attention. Two new and equally lethally equipped soldiers approached. But their eyes and suspicions lingered not on us, but on the old lady in the back, next to Annett. The soldier held her ID up, so that he could see both it and her at the same time. He called the other soldier over, and he did the same. Heads were shaken. Chins were scratched. They began to question her. She seemed to be failing the interview. Our driver intervened on her behalf, pleading her case. The soldier wagged his finger at him. He talked to his partner some more, then came back to the window, said something to the elderly lady, and, finally, waved us through. Just as soon as we’d cleared the border, the driver and the woman began laughing.

  “What happened?” I asked. “You said no problems?”

  The man couldn’t talk, he was laughing too hard. That didn’t slow him down though. The little white car rattled and groaned as we gained speed. Eventually, he’d recovered enough composure to talk. “Normally no problem, but the…” He pointed at the woman in the back seat, next to Annett.

  “Lady?” I offered.

  “Lady, yes. Lady ID not good.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  The old lady handed it across to me in the front seat. On it was the image of a young woman. An attractive one, at that. It couldn’t be, could it? I looked back at her. No way. I checked it again. Could it? Maybe… The eyes were somewhat similar. She pointed at a date on the ID. The expiry date. The ID had expired in 1985!

  Now I got the joke.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. The ID had been issued in 1965! No wonder they’d had such a problem identifying her—she was using a photograph that was fifty years old. “Last time with this ID, the man say,” added the driver, as he recklessly overtook a lorry. “Very funny… yes?”

  Back in Berlin, when we told people about the trip, they wanted us to give an opinion on the conflict. To come down on a side. Weirdly, I’d actually had a firmer opinion before we went. Having seen it up close, even as quickly and superficially as we had, I was now convinced only of the futility of trying to comprehend it. It was like holding a devoutly religious Rubik’s Cube with all of the stickers deliberately torn off. As you picked it up and began trying to align the squares, two tribes of angry people ran out and shouted things at you and fought each other over whose ancestors had the cube first. Throughout the trip we’d met a lot of certain people, yet the Israel-Palestine conflict seemed to be one that could be fixed only with humility and doubt—only by forbidding talk of the past, drawing a line, and starting again. There are two tribes of humans trying to share one patch of land. Both deserve the right to self-governance. One has it, the other doesn’t. That has to change.

  I believe...

  In many ways, Anwar’s father had been right; you really don’t want to have people talking about you. Throughout human history we’ve been mostly nice to each other, just as long as no one dares veer from the safety of the masses. We don’t do minorities well. Anwar was a minority. Those of us born as majority people will never know how much of a fight it is to live as a minority, not protected by the cushioning of statistics. This is changing, but not everywhere, and not equally. I hoped that one day Anwar would get to live somewhere he could be both expressive and anonymous.

  Visiting him reminded me of how incredibly lucky I was to be born a majority, part of the first-world-white-heterosexual-English-speaking-men-of-above-average-height-tribe. It’s hard to fail when you’ve been dealt a hand like that. Intellectually I’ve always known this, but emotionally I’d stopped feeling it. In my head and heart, I felt it again. For how long I wasn’t sure. But I felt it, and it was an upgrade.

  8

  Hare Krishna Ashram, Argentina: “It’s you who’s running away from things.”

  Yoga, reincarnation, heartbreak, ants

  The bus leaving Buenos Aires got decreasingly crowded as the city’s limits were breached. We began shedding passengers, breathing unpolluted air, and seeing things of a green nature. Nature, mostly. Buenos Aires had almost none of it, to its detriment.

  An hour later, Annett and I heaved our heavy backpacks on as the bus pulled away spitting exhaust fumes into our faces. We found ourselves under a flyover, on the outskirts of a town called General Rodríguez. I took out the hand-drawn serviette map created for me by two women I’d met in a bar, after they’d told me, very enthusiastically, using an enormous number of positive adjectives, what a wonderful few months they’d just spent in a Hare Krishna camp.

  “Serviettes don’t make the best maps,” I said, as I spun it round looking for anything on it that would pass for north, a flyover, a town, or pretty much any recognisable shape. The more I spun it, the more confused I became about where it was exactly that we were currently lost.

  Annett groaned, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  “I hope there’s a General Rodríguez living here so he can answer the phone ‘General Rodríguez of General Rodríguez,’” I said, attempting to distract her from my incompetence.

  She sighed and gazed off into the distance. I was getting what is known colloquially as the cold shoulder, only Annett didn’t do things by halves; she gave cold shoulders, plural.

  I breathed in deeply. “Getting back to nature. Lovely, right?”

  She continued wordlessly admiring the horizon. I decided to pretend I knew what I was doing, a technique I used every moment of my life, with limited success.

  “It’s that way,” I lied, striding off confidently towards a field of green. She followed, a few steps behind me. We weren’t supposed to be in the town of General Rodríguez. We were supposed to be in Mendoza riding bicycles and drinking wine. It had taken two days of persuasion to get Annett to change the highlighted, laminated itinerary she’d created for us, but I’d managed it. We were going to a Hare Krishna ashram. One of us willingly, even
. It was another beautiful day in the southern hemisphere.

  “I’m looking forward to a good detox,” I said. “Giving up chocolate, wine, and meat. Aren’t you?”

  She said nothing.

  “Earth to Annett.”

  Reluctantly, she lifted her gaze from the ground and turned to face me. “They’re all the things I love in the world, so no, I’m not.”

  “I know. But sometimes the things you love don’t love you back, right? Sometimes you’re in an unhealthy, dependent relationship with them, like I am with Ritter Sport Knusperflakes.”

  Following a small trail along a rocky, unpaved road, we hit a crude white fence. I remembered the girls talking about this fence. Fake confidence had won out again. “It’s just up here,” I said, with yet more of it. We followed that fence towards a number of modest-looking wooden huts, now visible on the horizon, near a domed structure.

  I swatted at the flies buzzing around my face. I was a little underwhelmed. “This looks lovely.” Another lie.

  “Hmmmh,” Annett grunted. A cow stared at us, chewing mechanically. It’s fortunate for cows that milk becomes cheese, the most delicious substance on our planet (other than Ritter Sport Knusperflakes). Personality-wise, they are extreme undynamic individuals.

  “Look—a real-life cow! Amazing.” More lies. “I love cows. Such gentle animals. We’re really in nature now, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  In the distance, we saw the beautiful white dome of the park’s temple, which looked like the top half of an egg that was planted in the ground. It was adorned with mosaic tiles that glistened in the light. By the dome, a few people toiled in a field, bent over in a way that suggested hard labour, the worst kind of labour. “They look like they’re having good, clean fun.”

  “Hmmm.”

  We opened a small white gate. On the other side of it, a border collie waited for us, wagging its tail. It jumped up, nearly knocking Annett over. Then we followed it under a few overgrown trees, over a muddy bog, across a broken bridge, along a stream, and past several cabins, two of which were on stilts and suspended four metres in the air. We stopped outside a large wooden building in the centre of the camp. A purple sign outside it said Reception.

  We entered. No one was inside. “I love it,” I said to Annett, patting the hard wooden bench as we sat down on it, waiting for the hard labour to end. “A real back-to-basics, lo-fi charm to the place.” I didn’t love it. But I was open to the idea of potentially loving it one day, once I’d changed my entire personality.

  Annett sighed and looked at her feet.

  A few minutes later a bald man arrived at the door. He held his head, at all times, five degrees off centre, as if in permanent, albeit mild, contemplation. His face was so blank, so smooth and seemingly unperturbed by the world, it looked as if he’d just got it new from a shop. I’d always associated this advanced earnestness and intense softness with Hare Krishnas. Granted, I was hazy on the specifics of their doctrine, but had often seen them singing and dancing on street corners in different parts of the world. They were basically a band, just like The Beatles, but one that didn’t play at recognised venues and restricted themselves to the lyrics “Hare” and “Krishna.” I needed a religion that would accommodate my poor memory. The Krishnas seemed like my people. I was still looking for a tribe, still wanting to connect with something bigger than myself. Surely meeting two American women in an Irish bar who had just become Hare Krishnas was more than mere chance? I wasn’t sure if Hare Krishnas believed in fate. I wasn’t sure I did either. But I had to admit it—if it did exist, and we were allowed to believe in it, this was probably it.

  The man collected a clipboard, and he sat down on the wooden bench opposite us.

  “Beautiful place you have here,” I said.

  “Muchas gracias,” he said. He looked to Annett. She said nothing.

  “Volunteers get up at 6:30am. Before the sunrise and heat. Most work in the garden. Don’t worry, we’ll ring a bell to wake you.”

  “Wonderful,” I lied (again), looking at Annett. “Back to nature. Getting your hands dirty.”

  “Sí,” said the man. “Muchas gracias.”

  Annett leaned forward. “But we don’t have to get up then, right? Adam assured me there was a non-manual labour option?”

  “Sí. Are you sure, though?” he asked. “Sacrifice is a part of the process.”

  We chuckled.

  “Many volunteers find it very rewarding,” he added, perhaps in response to those chuckles. Probably not as rewarding as we found a long lie-in—on this point I was sure Annett and I were in agreement, and that didn’t happen often. “We’re on our annual vacation,” Annett clarified. “We get up early all the other times of the year.”

  The man broke eye contact, lowering his gaze.

  “Of course we’re disappointed to miss out.” The lies kept coming. “I’m sure it’s very humbling. People just have so much now, you know? We’re losing our connection to nature.”

  He looked up once more. “How long would you like to stay for?”

  “Five days,” I said.

  “Three days,” Annett said.

  The man told us more about the camp. After four-and-a-half hours of work, the volunteers were free to enjoy their day in the tranquil surroundings. There were two sessions of yoga, and the more spiritually minded were invited to join meditation and chanting sessions in the temple afterwards. In the evenings, we’d all watch a movie together. He stood up. “I’ll show you to your accommodation.”

  We trudged out. It had rained recently, and the compound was now a bog. We squelched our way through it, past the community centre and several other accommodation huts, to the far back of the complex. The man flicked the light switch on the porch of a wooden shack. Nothing happened. “Lovely.” I’d lost count of the lies. “Very quaint.”

  “Gracias,” said the man. Annett remained mute.

  The man opened the door to the hut. Inside were three bedrooms, the second of which was to be ours. He inserted the key, turned it, and pushed the door. It got stuck. He pushed harder. That didn’t help. “It’s stuck,” he said, which we knew, because we had eyes. I helped him lift it, and together we groaned and pushed and it slowly scraped over the uneven wooden floor a few inches until we could slip sideward into the room, after removing our backpacks.

  The decor would be best described as frontier-chic. Aside from the bed, the only other thing in the room was one wooden chair in the corner. There wasn’t space for the three of us, and the two backpacks, so the man stepped back into the doorway. “Probably best to keep the door open,” he said.

  “No problem.” What was one more lie?

  “Yeah, why not,” said Annett, sarcastically, dropping her rucksack onto the bottom bunk. The man left.

  “Oh God,” she said.

  “Oh Hari, you mean.”

  “Fuck you and him.” She put her head in her hands. “This is not quite what I had in mind.”

  “What did you have in mind?” I asked.

  She removed her hands and inspected the room. “Fewer ants.”

  “Suffering is part of the process?” I offered.

  “Fuck you and your process.”

  At this point in our expectations-realignment therapy session, the man reappeared in the doorway. It was awkward. Couples who fought as often as we did really needed working doors to do it behind.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I lied. “We’re settling in well.”

  “Bueno,” he said, and gestured with his thumb towards the front door. “I’m locked in. The lock on the front door is broken. You have to be careful, or you get locked in.”

  He really needed to take his own advice.

  We learned the front door could only be opened from the outside. A significant design flaw. It was a shame mosquitoes couldn’t open doors, since there were so many of them buzzing threateningly in a cloud just beyond it. We shouted from the window until two wom
en came and let the man out. It turned out they were our neighbours, returning from yoga. They were from Canada, and had planned to stay a month but were now mulling over whether to leave a week early. We stood with them in their room. “It’s fine,” one of them said. “Totally fine. Lovely, peaceful people. Very little indoctrination. But there’s… well… not much to do, you know? Unless you like yoga.”

  “And the early mornings,” added the other, who had the sort of earnest, humble demeanour of someone open to religious indoctrination. She moved to sit on the room’s bottom bunk. “Working in the garden is surprisingly tiring, and while I like yoga as much as the next person, you can have too much of a good thing. Even yoga.”

  “And how are you settling in?” she asked, looking up at Annett.

  “I hate—”

  “Very well, thank you,” I said.

  “I hate it here,” Annett reiterated, as we crossed the compound for dinner, our shoes now caked in mud. The only cake on offer here.

  “I think it’s very quaint and rustic,” I lied. “These people are focused on their religion. They don’t need trappings like working doors and toilet seats that don’t fall off when you sit on them. It’s going to be very relaxing once we get used to it.”

  The dinner was fantastic. I didn’t even have to lie about that, although I’d been more than prepared to. The quality of the meal was particularly impressive considering the Krishnas had banned almost everything worth eating. The vegetable-heavy fare, much of it grown in the garden, was delicious, as was the home-made bread. It didn’t leave you feeling bloated and guilty like the bloody crime scene that was rest of Argentinian cuisine.

  Annett was less enthusiastic about it. “It’s Moppelkotze,” she said, pushing at a pile of beans with her fork. I had no idea what Moppelkotze was. This truly was a place of learning. “Moppelkotze is like what they serve at hospitals when you can’t chew,” she clarified.