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To
my beloved mother and father,
may they rest in peace,
and may they forgive me
for having assured them
that this journey was
“nothing to worry about.”
We will either find a way, or make one.
—HANNIBAL
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden
Yes, Al, there is a certain publicity value to your being killed on this quest, but most publishers want a living author who can do TV and press interviews, so, on balance, it’s a bit better to stay alive. If you can.
—TONY OUTHWAITE, LITERARY AGENT
One of the many spectacular rock formations in the desert of Saudi Arabia near Al-Ula, north of Jeddah. After Saudi Arabia stopped issuing visas to tourists several years ago, I was able to slip in as part of an archaeological group.
FOREWORD
Harold Stephens
This is the best adventure/travel book written in this young century.
It’s a robust, rugged, insightful, humorous, raunchy, wise, thrilling, intensely readable saga of how my favorite travel buddy, Albert Podell, overcame tremendous odds and hardships to achieve an almost-impossible dream of visiting every country on earth.
This book has it all—adventures, disasters, survival, victories, wit, wisdom, intriguing facts, fascinating figures, perceptive observations, graphic descriptions, history, geography, culture, politics, revolution, war, intrigue, spies, sin, sex, snakes, and sharks, all conveyed in a smooth, engaging, page-turning style that makes you feel that you are right there beside Al as he gets into one jam after another. And out.
Around the World in 50 Years memorializes, and takes us along on, a unique human achievement. To my knowledge, there is no other book by, or about, anyone, living or dead, who achieved this remarkable feat of perseverance, resourcefulness, and quiet courage.
It is not a travel guide, yet there is much that Al did from which a traveler could take guidance. Nor is it a book of traditional explorations or corny claims; Al did not go to any place “where no man has ever gone before,” but he went everywhere with a brave heart, clear eyes, and an inquiring mind that made astute observations and discerned remarkable relationships, all told in a bright, vigorous, and eminently enjoyable style.
Al’s travels required 102 separate journeys that encompassed more than 50 years and close to a million arduous miles. He highlights the major troubles, accidents, wars, breakdowns, robberies, problems, hassles, dangers, detours, misunderstandings, nut cases, and whack jobs he needed to overcome to survive to 196 countries. It describes only those travels and events that were particularly adventurous or engrossing and only those countries that were exotic or far from the tourist track, like Nauru and Lesotho, Benin and Tuvalu, Palau and East Timor, Saudi Arabia and Guinea, North Korea and Somalia, Congo and Rwanda and Yemen.
This fact-packed book is loaded with fascinating encounters with voodoo sacrifice rituals, king tides, tiger sharks, fruit-bat pie, the Ghost Fleet of Truk Lagoon, Cuban counterintelligence agents, Havana hookers, killer hippos, Zambezi River rafting, Kalahari sandboarding, primitive bungee jumping, bizarre foods, the New Guinea Wigmen, camel caravans, the slave trade, lovable lemurs, swimming with penguins, Islamic politics, the drowning nation, the Lord’s Resistance Army, how to greet a gorilla, hunting with nomads, Pure Blonde Naked Pale Ale, and much, much, much more, all recounted in a fresh, funny, and exuberantly rollicking manner.
Although primarily an adventure tale, it provides a special background for understanding today’s world and its dangers, splendors, animosities, oddities, politics, problems, and people.
Al would be the first to admit that this is not a tale of exceptional heroism, because the many dangerous situations and hair-raising adventures in which he found himself did not spring from purposeful attempts to put himself in harm’s way, but were simply the result of ordinary ill luck, inadvertence, misplaced trust, foolish notions of invincibility, or just the way the cookie crumbled. Nor is it a book of miracles, because Al paid a high price for his many misadventures in injuries, illnesses, expenses, and girlfriends who gave up waiting for him to finish.
It’s a book about the dedication, persistence, and indomitable will of a guy who spent a good part of his life pursuing his goal on ancient Third World airplanes; leaky, overloaded foreign ferries; and broken-down, jam-packed bush taxis driven on rutted roads at 100 mph by wild kids who never passed a driving test. He unrolled his sleeping bag at border posts, campsites, roadsides, jungles, glaciers, airport floors, and in hostels, dahk bungalows, tents, trailers, trees, teepees, campers, cars, caravansaries, desert dugouts, and flea-bag motels; alternately sweating and freezing; dodging dengue-fever mosquitoes by day and malarial ones by night; lugging more than 130 pounds on some trips while trying to get by on others with a Speedo and sandals; en route to 203 countries (seven of which no longer exist) to reach the 196 officially recognized today.
It’s a damn good read! One of the best of its kind since Marco Polo. We learn what this world is really like and come to understand how, by just showing up for the job, day after day; persevering in the face of myriad misadventures, year after year; and never giving up, decade after decade, you can achieve your impossible dream.
—Bangkok, Thailand
October 2014
Harold Stephens is the author of 24 books of travel and adventure. He was, with Albert Podell, the co-leader of the Trans World Record Expedition and coauthor on Who Needs a Road?, which is still in print after almost 50 years, and about 40 pages of which are used or adapted in chapters 2 to 5 and 7 of this book.
CHAPTER 1
Between a Croc and a Hard Place
I was on a quest to visit every country on earth, but I was about to get stuck, between a croc and a hard place.
I had just reached the inner section of the Okavango Delta of Botswana, where one of Africa’s mightiest rivers fans out into the sands of the Kalahari Desert. I’d taken a jouncing two-hour ride in an ancient Land Cruiser and a two-hour voyage through tall reeds and flowering lily pads in a mokoro, a pole-pushed dugout canoe with the shape (and, it sometimes seemed, the width) of a large banana. Then an hour’s walk through the bush to where a guide promised I’d find many harmless photogenic herbivores.
I was kneeling down, doing what any Outside subscriber does when he isn’t able to get the latest issues: examining half a dozen differing piles of animal excrement. The medium-sized crap with the pointy end was clearly from a porcupine. The huge tan ones of barely digested grass, tree branches, and palm nuts could only be an elephant dump. The blackish globular clusters were wildebeest. The tiny pellets were springbok. The small balls were zebra. The golf-ba
ll-sized globes that contained fur and tiny mouse bones were from either a serval or a caracal; and—holy shit!—those fresh piles of pancake-shaped dung looked much like the spoor of Cape buffalo, the meanest and most dangerous animal in Africa, and one I’d been assured was not in the vicinity. But the scatological evidence was compelling: The turds looked like no other animal spoor, and, much worse, they were warm, almost steaming, no more than half an hour old.
Here I am examining animal spoor in the inner reaches of the Okavango Delta. The spoor of every animal is different in shape, size, and texture and can provide the knowledgeable outdoorsman with valuable information as to what game is in the area, and whether there are any dangerous carnivores about.
I decided to get right out of there, so I rose up and … froze. There, not more than 80 yards across the knee-high grass, were about 15 Cape buffalo looking intently and angrily in my direction. Since it doesn’t take much to provoke a charge by these beasts, who live by the motto that the best defense is a good offense, attack at the first sight of a perceived enemy, and use their long horns with fatal accuracy, I was nervous. Very nervous.
I thought for a minute: What would Indiana Jones do in such a situation? The answer was obvious: climb a tree. Only problem was that the trees in the southern part of the Okavango Delta are few, fragile, and far between. It was about 50 yards from me to anything climbable. Even that was no safe haven, because these beasts will charge a tree repeatedly and knock it down to get at their prey. They’re infamous for their persistence. Once they decide to get you, they’ve been known to wait at the base of a tree for a day or more until you become faint from dehydration and sleep deprivation and fall out.
I thought for another minute: What would Crocodile Dundee have done in this situation? The answer was obvious. I tried, as casually, apologetically, and unprovocatively as possible, to saunter away from the wild buffalo in a circular arc that would take me far downwind from them and back to the mokoro.
After ten minutes of shaky sauntering, my way was blocked by a large pond where a family of hippos was bathing near the far edge and a congregation of crocodiles was basking on the right bank. The male hippo spotted me and opened his mouth wide, in what resembled a yawn but was actually a warning to back off, and the crocs started to bestir themselves.
Since the Cape buffalo is the nastiest animal in Africa, and hippos annually kill more people (including tourists) than any other beast on the continent, and those beady-eyed reptiles are more aggressive than the American alligator, I was in a tight spot.
I thought for a minute: What would my portly scoutmaster have done in this situation? And the answer was obvious: have lunch and let the situation resolve itself. I dropped down into the tall grass, out of scent of the buffalo, which were upwind, and out of sight of the hippos and crocs, whose olfactory apparatus is less acute, then carefully checked my situation: I had a ham-and-cheese on rye with mustard, a leg of fried chicken, an apple, and a very upset stomach.
When I finished lunch, the hippos and the crocs were still staring at my last-known address. I thought: What would my old traveling buddy, Harold Stephens, do in this situation? And the answer was obvious: take a nap in the afternoon sun under the cloudless Botswanan winter sky. I was pretty sure the hippos would not waddle a hundred yards from their pool to hunt me down; the crocs couldn’t see me and should be sufficiently satiated from the impala, kudu, lechwe, and wildebeest that came to the pond for a drink that they wouldn’t be hungry for a human hors d’oeuvre; and I knew that a Cape buffalo would not attack a dead person, a category I optimistically expanded to include a sleeping one. I also remembered reading—or did I?—that the buffalo had difficulty using its horns to kill creatures that lay flat on the ground. So maybe I’d be safe if I took a nap.
I awoke with a start about 30 minutes later after remembering another germane speck of buffalo arcana: If the Cape can’t gore its grounded victim with its horns it will simply stomp him to death with his hooves. End of nap.
I peeped through the waist-high brown grass and was relieved to find the hippo family frolicking in the pond with no lingering interest in me, the crocs dozing on their crowded solarium, and no more buffalo in sight. I crept for the mokoro and home base, having suffered nothing more serious from this little outing than some dung-scented fingers.
Since you’ve just met me, and may be skeptical about this tale, and others to come, or wonder if I’m exaggerating, let me hasten to assure you that, given my extensive experience enhancing “true adventure” stories when I edited the magazines Argosy, blue, and Modern Man, if I’d decided to fabricate the story, it would have been much more exciting. Like this:
The Cape buffalo snorted and charged directly at me. I ran to one of the few trees in the delta and clambered up just in time, his scalpel-sharp horn missing my leg by an inch. The beast relentlessly hammered the slender tree until it toppled, propelling me into the pond, where I bobbed up to see four crocs torpedoing right at me. I dove under the nearest one and swam onto his scaly back. I dug my fingers into his eye sockets and held on, steering him toward shore. The male hippo began to bear down on me, his deadly jaws wide open, capable of bisecting my body with one bite. On the shore, a pride of lions had gathered to be in on the kill. As my fate seemed sealed, a bull elephant lumbered into the pond for a drink. I seized his trunk and was hoisted to safety.
I was later assured by two Botswanan game wardens that I was safer with 15 Cape buffalo staring at me than just one. They explained that since a Cape will almost always charge when it feels threatened, there’s less likelihood of one member of a grazing herd charging, because they each feel secure when chowing down with their buddies. The warden insisted that the real danger comes from encountering a solitary buck who, lacking the comfort and safety he feels in a gang, will charge to protect himself.
That assurance may be all well and good in theory, but since it would only take one angry iconoclast to wreck my day, and the risk of there being such a one among a mob of 15 is higher, I’d still prefer to be confronted with just one. Or, better yet, none.
At this point you might well be wondering: What’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?
So let me take it from the top …
CHAPTER 2
A Late Start
It all began with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I devoured it in one long day at the end of the 1959 winter semester at the University of Chicago, where I was the graduate fellow in international relations. Early the next morning I blasted out of academia and those gloomy Gothic towers and hit the asphalt, joyfully thumbing my way south and west on old Route 66, the Mother Road, through Towanda, Tulsa, Tucumcari, Gallup, Kingman, and across the Mojave Desert to the City of the Angels, then up the breathtaking coast road to bond with the Beats in San Francisco, yearning for more travel.
Three years later, already 25, I finally made it to my first foreign country, although it wasn’t that foreign: It was only Canada.
My parents traveled little, never venturing farther from Brooklyn than Boston (once every four years to visit my father’s siblings) because we were poor (my mother a secretary, my father a waiter in a succession of near-bankrupt kosher delicatessens where he never earned more than 70 dollars in a week) and because they found no delight in traveling. When they were quite young, they had each separately made the long and arduous train journey from their impoverished, pogrom-plagued villages in the hostile heart of Byelorussia to the teeming ports of western Europe, where they were jammed into the steerage compartments of dirty, overcrowded ships for a storm-tossed twelve-day crossing to the fateful examination at Ellis Island. That was, for them, enough traveling to last a lifetime. All my father ever wanted after that was “a roof that doesn’t leak, enough food on the table, and a warm bed—with your mother in it.” Their unwillingness to travel made me all the more eager for it.
I was at Fort Drum, near Watertown, New York, a sergeant in the Army Reserve on summer tour of duty, training my squad
on the 155mm atomic cannon, a mean machine capable of hurling a nuclear shell more than 22 miles—about the distance to the Canadian border, although we never aimed it that way. At the end of our two weeks of live-fire exercises (without nuclear warheads), six of us crammed into the corporal’s old car and headed across the St. Lawrence River for the nearest big city, which was Ottawa—Canada’s capital—a neat, staid, pleasant, government town.
Canada looked to me a lot like the U.S., just a bit cleaner and quieter, with clearer skies and greener grass, and populated then only with white folks, all of whom walked slower, talked slower, and were more friendly and courteous than the Noo Yawkers among whom I grew up, but little likely to inspire anyone to imagine that foreign travel could be a fabulous joyride.
My next foreign foray came a year later, when I was picture-story editor of Argosy. A movie producer junketed me to Madrid, at whose outskirts he’d erected a cardboard-and-plaster full-size replica of ancient Rome to film Fall of the Roman Empire.
A week’s free trip to Madrid could whet anyone’s appetite for travel, but what made mine insatiable was a full-day stopover in Paris on my flight home, my first of a dozen visits since. I dumped my bag at an inexpensive pension in the Boulevard de la Tour-Maubourg but never made it to back to bed. For the next 22 hours I devoured the City of Light on foot—the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides, the Tuileries, Place de la Concorde, Panthéon, Luxembourg Gardens, the Left Bank, the Right Bank, the American Express Bank (cash resupply), Montparnasse, the Sorbonne, Notre-Dame, evening with the artists in Montmartre, night with the ladies of the Folies Bergère in Pigalle, and a glorious morning watching the sun rise over the twinkling city from atop the hill in the basilica of Sacré-Cœur.
Ottawa had been my first, shy, fumbling kiss; Madrid was heavy petting; Paris was going all the way, true love. I was hooked on travel and eager for some serious sightseeing.
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