The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  Sitting next to me on the bus was a Frenchman who introduced himself as Auguste Lecomte. He fingered an immaculate copy of that very morning’s Le Monde — Francophone Africa is splendid at distributing the papers — and read a line at a time through pince-nez. A few minutes later he looked up and spoke.

  “We are nearly at the ferry point, and should get to Banjul by about six,” he said.

  “Are you here on holiday?” I asked.

  “My boy, my profession is to travel around the world buying excellent rare banknotes to sell to dealers. Did you know that Gambia’s dalasi are quite sought after?”

  I replied that I did not. Opening his case, he displayed perhaps a hundred currencies, each in mint condition. Tugrik from Mongolia, metical from Mozambique, Icelandic krona, dollars from the Solomon Islands, and many others, lay jumbled about.

  I sensed a heavy breathing down my neck. Monsieur Lecomte obviously felt the draft as well. We hunched up our collars, but the cinnamon-scented breath continued. I turned around and focused on an emerald pair of eyes — which dilated with curiosity and envy. A mouth on the same face yelled:

  “Khey meng, how ya dawing? I’m Oswaldo, Oswaldo Rodriguez Oswaldo.”

  His vice-like hand was thrust into mine and pulled me towards the seat behind. He addressed the Frenchman, “Khey meester, ya wanna buy dis stuff?”

  His fingers fumbled in a pouch around his waist and he fished out two handfuls of grubby Argentine banknotes. Monsieur Lecomte grimaced, appalled by the abruptness of the heavily-breathing Argentine. Declaring that the notes were worthless, he turned away to finish reading the editorial in Le Monde.

  Oswaldo Rodriguez Oswaldo leant back, pushed a dark brown trilby onto his forehead, and sat in silence. Short, almost stunted in appearance, with well-proportioned features and an immaculate mustache, he smelt of lavender.

  Outside, the baobabs stood motionless. There was no wind and the sky was free from clouds. The bus moved closer to Barra Point; it felt almost that we were driving through an oil painting.

  On the ferry to Banjul a man, who said he was a hundred years old, changed my Senegalese C.F.A. currency into dalasi. He studied each note through thick lenses, reading the numbers aloud in Wolof. Oswaldo followed in my footsteps. I had the feeling that I would rather be alone, but Oswaldo craved company. The money-changers, who had refused to accept his pesos, had asked where Argentina was. We sat on a blue iron bench and watched Gambia draw closer.

  “Where ya gooing meng?”

  “I’m on my way to Freetown, to visit a friend. What about you?” I asked.

  “I”ng gooing to eest.”

  “How far east?”

  “All de way meng. I earning from Buenos Aires in sheep to Dakar. Long tyng meng.”

  “Where are you from, exactly?”

  “Patagonia.”

  I recalled geography lessons and the teacher rolling the word Patagonia around his mouth with an educated satisfaction. Oswaldo was short, perhaps five foot three. He swung his stubby legs in the air and clicked a pair of decomposing cowboy boots together. He never stopped moving. Before speaking, he would rub his pencil-line mustache with his thumbnail; and would laugh loudly three times, as if to clear his throat.

  A boy selling wooden pots made from the branches of the baobabs offered them around. Oswaldo was delighted. He grabbed the boy and screamed, “Ha Ha ha! Khey meng I lika wota ya gote dare. Give us looks!”

  Four assorted-sized bowls were brought out and the Patagonian passed a bundle of Argentine pesos to the child.

  “Ya taka dem to za benk, Okhey?”

  The boy shuffled away, wondering what to do with the large collection of multicolored bills. Oswaldo opened the mouth of his voluminous rucksack. He fished out a shirt and a pair of red jeans and put the baobab bowls at the bottom. I asked why he had such a large rucksack and only two other pieces of clothing.

  “Che, dee reeson’s cos I buying lots souveneers, I lika dis stuff meng.”

  I hoped we could get away to Banjul before the boy’s father saw the pesos.

  Having stepped off the ferry onto the shore, a child of about nine took Oswaldo by one hand and me by the other and led us to the Hotel Apollo. The wooden bowls clicked about as we took our first look at Banjul — capital city of the former British dependency.

  Hotel Apollo was run down. But without being discourteous, one could say that the whole of Banjul had lost any air of elegance that it might once have commanded. There were two main streets: Buckle Street and Wellington Street. Hotel Apollo had once been painted white.

  The owner was named Haji, and he greeted us warmly, his long Mauritanian-type robes dragging in the dust beneath his feet. Oswaldo asked if the hotel accepted Argentine pesos. It did not. But, as an act of diplomacy, Haji offered to reduce our board by a third if we would pay in a European currency and stay two nights.

  Having agreed, our bags were carried ceremoniously up to a rather dilapidated room. A peculiar contraption filled one corner. The bag boy flicked the switch to turn it on. Before it started up, I heard the sound of his bare feet pounding as fast as they could away from the room. Cogs within the machine began to grind. This was followed by the noise and vibrations, as of a pneumatic drill. As we stood there, plugging our ears with our thumbs, water was sprayed across us and the walls. Oswaldo grappled with the apparatus, which was very like one of those machines film crews use to create wind and rain. A small plaque on the side, inscribed in Gothic script, read Desert Cooler.

  Oswaldo combed back his short brown hair and applied a thick layer of green brilliantine. The room now reeked of lavender. The Patagonian pulled on his red jeans, opened his shirt to the waist and, after cackling three times, yelled, “To those deesco meng!”

  He dragged me out of the hotel, hauling me up and down the two main streets, requesting that I ask for the best dance-hall in town. One man pointed left, another right, and a third looked very worried. There was a shimmering red glow coming from a bar off Buckle Street.

  “Khey Brit, we gooing dere!” He pointed a stubby arm towards the bar and pulled his shirt front further apart, revealing a hairless white chest.

  A thunderous rhythm was being beaten out on two drums. Some torn sacks had been tacked together and hung in front of the doorway, almost as if they were keeping some kind of poison gas inside. Oswaldo clicked his heels to the drum-beats, then we entered the red glare.

  A room, which seemed little bigger than an airplane’s lavatory, was packed with all kinds of life. Oswaldo ordered himself two bottles of Jewel lager, I asked for a pomegranate juice.

  “Khey, dis nice stuff!”

  Oswaldo seemed overjoyed and, in his enthusiasm for the situation, he slapped the man next to him very hard on the back. I prepared for a bar fight. But the Gambian man was too drunk to co-ordinate hostile movements. Oswaldo handed him a bottle of Jewel lager and the two men began to dance.

  When the boys had stopped drumming, we each pulled up a packing crate and sat. Oswaldo’s dancing partner was a Gambian called Robertson. In his early sixties with a fat, chubby face, he began to tell his life story. A career as a sailor had shown him the world. He spoke twelve languages, one of which was Spanish. Oswaldo was ecstatic when he discovered his new friend had been to Argentina. He puckered his lips and kissed Robertson squarely on the forehead. The two men began to sing Spanish sailing songs, acting out the sordid parts in full detail.

  The manager’s baby son was sucking at an empty lager bottle and making gurgling sounds from between the crates on which we sat. Robertson patted the infant on the head affectionately as he continued with his tale. Then Oswaldo broke in, swigging from the dark green bottle in his left hand as he spoke. Suddenly, while he was talking, the Patagonian calmly reached inside his right boot and, in one motion, pulled out a stiletto. Springing the blade open, he threw it between the fingers of the baby boy. The drummers and the proprietor looked up. A chicken which had been roosting in one corner flapped to the door. Robertson sto
pped talking and stared in horror. Oswaldo took a sip of his lager. Then he pulled at the knife, which was deeply embedded in the floor. A scorpion was skewered halfway up the blade.

  “Khey meng, eets beeg one,” he muttered, as he scraped it off with his foot onto the floor. Robertson cheered. The landlord, who was shaken, grasped his son in his arms. Then the drummers beat out a special rhythm to compliment Oswaldo, the unusual Patagonian. He lounged back on the crate.

  The manager — who had been deeply moved by the stranger’s bravado — came over. In his hands was an old biscuit tin which had lost most of its paint. He pulled open the lid. Inside was a dusty bottle of Heineken lager. Wiping a tear from his left eye, the landlord murmured gently:

  “I have been keeping this for a special man and a particular night. That man and that night have now come.”

  We ate breakfast the next morning at Café Express on Buckle Street. I had decided to take the evening flight to Freetown. Oswaldo said that he would like to come too, as he had never flown before. Having seen his display the previous night with a stiletto, I thought it might be to my advantage to have him along. After the meal we would go and buy tickets from the travel office.

  A schoolboy came and sat at the third chair. He said nothing, just sat motionless. His and Oswaldo’s legs dangled above the ground. Oswaldo hummed what he said was the Argentine National Anthem. One hotdog was brought and we divided it into three. Each of us chewed at the sausage as long as was possible. The child jumped up, shouted Jirijef, Hello,” and ran off with his satchel swinging behind him.

  A reduction was given for students on all flights to Freetown. I had no student identity card. But, in the interminable ticket queue, I used some Letraset to turn an international driving license into a student identification. The letters were rather crooked, but it did the job. Oswaldo flashed an Argentine identity card. The lady nodded approvingly and the tickets were written out. Oswaldo was very happy.

  “Macanudo! Lets gooing sunshining!” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “In that beach.”

  An hour or so later I found myself supine on the beach front of the Atlantic Hotel. Fleshy British package tourists waddled about, clutching towels, suntan oil, brown sauce, and plates of fish and chips all at once. I told Oswaldo not to point. He explained that to get a tang, you must he in the sun for four hours.

  The rays burnt deep into my back and chest until I was sure that something was wrong. Gambia is near the equator and so the heat is very intense. At three P.M. I tried to stand. My skin had shrunk, and I felt like the inside of a cooked frankfurter trying to burst out.

  Oswaldo looked worried for a moment. Then he said that we had better get to the airport. A woman from Blackpool had given him a ballpen with a scaled-down replica of a tower trapped inside. When he tilted the pen, the tower moved. Delighted with his new possession he showed it to everyone he met. But I was not interested. Instead, I staggered towards the Hotel Apollo, feeling like a boiled lobster.

  The Air Ghana flight was delayed three hours. The plane sat on the runway for half that time, waiting for some repairs to be done to the fuselage. Engineers with troubled expressions hurried up and down the cabin shouting, and hurling spanners like boomerangs back and forth. The lack of security checks before boarding had been rather disconcerting. Oswaldo took the stiletto from his boot and ran it across his fingers. I told him to put it away before we were both arrested. The stewardess clambered about, handing out rock-cakes and glasses of fluorescent orange squash. An aging Ghanaian lady insisted on sharing my seat, as the plane was now full.

  As we munched on our rock-cakes, the pilot suddenly hauled back the throttle and the craft swooped out of Banjul airport into the African sky. Orange juice and rock-cakes flew about as if there were no gravity. Oswaldo screamed at the top of his lungs and swung his red jeans about his head. Pulling a sick bag over my face, I pretended not to know him. The woman sharing my seat writhed about, increasing her territory. There was a tap on my shoulder. I turned round and was handed Oswaldo’s pants which had been propelled into the row behind us.

  At Freetown’s immigration, our passports were taken away. They were put in a black box. Two guards patrolled back and forth for about ten minutes and then opened the box. The documents were returned, dripping with stamp-pad ink. Rumour had it that, on entry to Sierra Leone, a large amount of foreign currency had to be declared and immediately changed into leones at the official rate. The routine searching of luggage often resulted, a source had assured me, in the confiscation of one’s belongings. Oswaldo handed me a piece of chalk.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Cross da bags, amigo.”

  He had noticed that all checked luggage was efficiently crossed in white chalk. But what about the currency regulations? Oswaldo leapt into the lair of officials and they forced him to hand over a wad of Argentine pesos. The soldiers looked as if they believed that the unknown notes might be even more valuable than dollars.

  As I walked through, a very strange thing happened. I concentrated deeply on the end of the line of salivating officials. Some were handing out forms, others brandished white chalk.

  I moved straight ahead without turning. There was no sound behind me. No one called back or grabbed me. For some reason I managed to get by without changing any money at the official rate. It was as if I had willed them not to see me.

  Max was studying philosophy at Freetown University. He had written in his last letter that I should to take a room at the City Hotel, as it would be more comfortable than his floor. We had not met before. When I was about twelve I had placed an advertisement to be circulated world-wide asking for interesting and unusual pen-friends. Max’s letters had always been unusual. Many had been covered in blood, while others spoke of fantastic experiments and ceremonies in which he had taken part.

  With one letter he had once enclosed the dried intestines of a small fly-eating lizard, together with some dogs’ claws, which he said that I was to boil up into a kind of tea. He had come to West Africa to learn more of the rituals of ju-ju and the secret societies of Freetown.

  A Frenchman from Marseilles with an aristocratic air let us share his taxi into town. He loaded four Purdey shotguns into the back of the Renault and rolled up the corners of a handlebar mustache as we jerked along. Thick jungle undergrowth abounded on either side of the road. Monkeys swung from tree to tree and the sounds of a seething insect population hummed around us. Oswaldo began to tell the man from Marseilles all about his homeland. Removing the stiletto from his boot, he showed it to the Frenchman, who admired the Patagonian quality.

  Freetown was dark and depressing. We crossed a stretch of water in a launch and walked up the slope to the City Hotel.

  It was in a state between dilapidation and total dereliction. The crumbling facade was subsumed in moss and creepers. Yet it must once have been almost palatial. Corinthian colonnades held up the remains of the roof, and the lintel of the main doorway had been replaced with an iron bar. A symmetrical pair of flights of winding steps led to the door. The wrought-iron gates were rusted from neglect.

  A white man sat on the veranda under the light of a paraffin lamp. He was the proprietor, and said he could provide Oswaldo and me with a room. The Frenchman from Marseilles sniffed haughtily and carried his shotguns off into the night to find a more salubrious place to rest.

  The owner was an Italian from Switzerland. He had not returned to Europe in over four decades. His skin was pallid, as if it had not been exposed to light in years. The building was bathed in an aura of decrepitude. A giant, standing at least six foot nine, moved into the lamplight and picked up our bags. The owner spoke in French, mumbling, “This is my son, he will take you to your room.”

  The creature, whose resemblance to Frankenstein’s monster was more than uncanny, trod his way up three flights of stairs, whilst demonstrating his unusual talent of holding a lit candle in his teeth. The candle flickered as we progressed from one dra
ft to the next towards the attic. The banisters, and indeed, all removable pieces of wood, so the giant said, had been incinerated to heat the house.

  On the second floor, a naked man was washing a shirt in a basin. His broad smile revealed three gold teeth. The stairs creaked beneath our feet and, as we stumbled upward, Oswaldo edged closer to my side.

  Two beds filled most of the attic room. Neither had mattresses, only tattered sheets on bare springs. A swarm of mosquitos fought above the sink and flitted around the peeling pink walls. The giant strode to the sink and relieved himself in it. I asked for the room key. There was no need for a key, I was assured, as there were no locks. Instead, we were invited to come down for a drink and to get anti-mosquito incense coils. Oswaldo went down immediately, while I took a shower on the second floor.

  A slow stream of water fell onto my head. It was cold and pleasing. I washed my sunburnt body with enormous care; it could just endure the pressure of the cold water. When the drops became less frequent, I glanced upwards at the nozzle to see if it was clogged. I noticed a gap of about two inches between the boards above my head: they were the floorboards of my room. In the candlelight, the white of a single eye rotated and blinked above me. Shrieking, I ran from the shower. The sound of footsteps pressed across the ceiling, as I made for the stairs to get to the putative privacy of the attic room. Halfway up I met the naked man with gold teeth. We paused for a moment. I might have asked him the reason for his voyeurism, but the fact that he was naked and that my badly blistered body was protected only by a face-cloth, gagged my questions.