Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  I created gas-consumption tables, worked out plans to parachute in fuel caches every ten miles across the Antarctic snowcap, estimated likely daily mileage to determine if the transpolar journey could be completed during the five-month window offered by the southern summer, but I eventually gave up. (Well, maybe I didn’t completely give up, but it was, and remains, a dream deferred.)

  The idea of going to every country sort of sneaked in to occupy that recently vacated spot in my mind and heart where lodged the quixotic hope of doing something glorious and original, an adventure no one had ever achieved, of not going gently into that good night, of going out with a bang rather than a whimper.

  When I gave travel lectures, attendees asked how many countries I’d seen, but I had no list. As the Millennium dawned I finally totaled them: 83. I was dimly aware that there were between 190 and 200 countries, which meant I was equally dimly aware that I’d visited less than half.

  I knew I preferred visiting new countries to revisiting those I’d seen, an attitude doubtless derived from the predilection I exhibited at age seven, when I started collecting postage stamps. I refused to specialize in any country or area, as my friends did. No, I wanted a perforated piece of paper from every stamp-issuing entity on earth, obscure places like Oltre Giuba, Rio de Oro, Two Sicilies, Bechuanaland Protectorate, Nejd, and Hejaz.

  Above my teenage bed hung a 1920s poster from the Hamburg-American shipping line: Mein Feld Ist die Welt (My Field Is the World). This proclivity persisted through Cornell, where I studied foreign affairs, into the University of Chicago, where I was awarded the graduate fellowship of the Committee on International Relations.

  It was like much other stuff in my life: I sought to try it all out, suck it all up, and grab all the gusto I could, including eventually having six different and immensely enjoyable careers—editor, writer, advertising executive, good-government lobbyist, lawyer, and theatrical producer.

  Shortly after the year 2000 I thought it would be fun—little did I know!—to see how many countries I could visit. And off I went, whenever my law-practice clients and worthy opponents permitted.

  By the end of 2003 I was up to 112. That was when I realized that it could be possible, and surely a compelling challenge, in the remaining ten to 20 years that the actuarial tables allotted me, to visit every country; that such a feat was doable, and that I could do it.

  I researched to ascertain how many people had legitimately visited every country, but could find no such category, from Guinness to Wikipedia; nor could I find any book or article written by, or about, anyone who had gone all the way. I studied what constituted a country and looked over the horizon for incipient newbies. And somewhere along this vague way, I decided—yes, really, truly, and finally decided—that I would go to every country.

  CHAPTER 7

  Making a Splash

  South and Central America are so vast, beauteous, diverse, and fascinating, and their roads were so poor, their river travel so slow, and their political crises so frequent, that it took me nine separate trips to visit all their 20 continental nations. I here recount some of the highlights that took place on, in, through, or under their lakes, rivers, and seas.

  TURNING TURTLE

  During the homeward-bound leg of our Expedition, Steve and I had serendipitously pitched our camper by the estuary of the San Juan River on the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua on a dazzling night of the full August moon.

  It was nearly midnight when, hearing noises, we exited our camper and found ourselves amid an arribadas, more than a thousand immense green turtles crawling out of the ocean to spawn, laboring up the slope to the dry part of the beach. They stopped about a hundred yards above the high-tide line, some near our camper. They scooped out holes more than a foot deep with their flippers into which, panting from the strain of digging and the pangs of labor, they deposited their eggs—one, two, three at a time … 60 … 80 … sometimes 100 in a clutch.

  Steve and I lay on our bellies behind the holes, entranced, watching this marvel of nature, this miracle of creation.

  Although exhausted from their labors, the turtles assiduously filled in these nests and leveled the surface to conceal them, then struggled through the soft sand, gasping and groaning in an almost human way, back to the breakers, back to the depths, never to see their young born—never to know that their young would never be born.

  Because a hundred boys from the nearby town had been waiting on the beach that night for the annual return of the turtles. When they sighted a turtle emerging from the ocean, one or two of the boys peeled off to stealthily follow her to where she dug her hole, and dig one just behind her, a few inches away and several feet down, then tunnel through to her nest and catch the white, soft-shelled eggs as she laid them. The mother turtles, struggling with single-minded determination to perpetuate their species, never suspected the fate of their eggs as greedy fingers snatched them a handsbreadth away from the painful openings of their cloacae.

  I was so upset that I ran up and down the beach all night lecturing the boys, in my incomprehensible Spanglish, on the principles of conservation and fair play, imploring them to leave half, or at least a third, of the eggs in the ground so there could be turtles and eggs for future generations.

  But none of them listened. They were all too busy counting the eggs into sacks of a hundred, to be sold at the market in the morning. A few hungry boys were piercing the eggs on the spot with small twigs and sucking the yolks down as they were, raw and still warm from the womb.

  A boy who had “borrowed” our flashlight returned it toward morning with thanks and a dozen of the eggs he’d gathered, the size of ping-pong balls, light and rubbery to the touch. As soon as he left, I took them and went down to the empty nests, where Steve and I gently buried these fragile seeds of life and hoped against hope that they would survive and endure.

  MISTAKEN IDENTITY IN LAKE NICARAGUA

  The morning after we had reburied the eggs, we drove to Lake Nicaragua, at 99 miles long the largest lake in Central America, 19th largest on earth. It’s a gloomy body, dominated by several volcanoes along its shore and by two perpetually cloud-shrouded peaks that rise 7,000 feet from an island at its center.

  On the Nicaraguan beach where hundreds of endangered 400-pound green sea turtles had laid their eggs during the full moon the night before, Steve redeposits a batch into one of the nests that had been pillaged by the locals, who shortsightedly took every egg they could find.

  In the sweltering heat of an August midafternoon we reached the lake’s northwest coast and drove through the charming city of Granada, one of the first Spanish settlements in the New World, a carefully preserved town with centuries-old churches and gracious, balconied, colonial-style homes. Its only contemporary architectural feature was an impressionist piscine monument at the town traffic circle that looked out of place amid all that mellowed antiquity. We drove down to the deserted lake shore where, since we’d gotten so little sleep the night before, we made an early camp.

  Despite the uninviting water, which was slate gray and streaked by oil, and a shoreline rimmed with tin cans, plastic bags, cartons, straw, rotting fruit, and some of the 32 tons of raw sewage flushed into the lake every day, Steve was so hot and sweaty that he plunged right in, then swam out about a quarter mile to get away from the garbage. I walked along the smelly, mushy shore and came across the bloated body of a cow, obviously dead for several days, rocking in the oily waves a few yards from the beach, with a gaping bite missing from its haunch.

  As I was pondering Elsie’s fate I looked across the spooky lake and saw Steve swimming hell-bent toward the beach with—was it my imagination?—something black and sleek, like a large fin, protruding out of the water about ten yards behind him. At first I thought it was a shark, but I knew that could not be because they live only in salt water, and this was a freshwater lake. Maybe a dolphin? But weren’t they also saltwater citizens? Whatever it was swam away and Steve safely reached the beach.

 
; Not until the next day did we realize how lucky he had been. We were told in Granada that the lake was infested with dangerous freshwater sharks, the only ones on the globe, the locals said, and that the monument we’d seen was intended to both celebrate them and warn visitors. We were informed that the lake, which is only a hundred feet above sea level, had been part of the ocean until a volcanic eruption sealed it off from the sea eons before, trapping millions of fish within it, most of which died as the lake, which bottomed out at about 90 feet, lost its salinity as the rains and streams poured in. But that one species of shark had managed to evolve, adapt, survive, and become the world’s only finned freshwater man-eater. Fascinating!

  And totally incorrect!

  The sharks’ actual provenance did not emerge until ten years later, when ichthyologists proved, through tagging, that those found in Lake Nicaragua bred only in salt water, which meant, by definition, that they were saltwater fish. Further research revealed that these were not a special species, but ordinary oceanic bull sharks that had swum 120 miles from the ocean, jumped the river rapids salmon-style, reached Lake Nicaragua in seven to eleven days, and lived there for as long as they desired by a process of osmoregulation. They had learned how to reduce the salinity of their blood more than 50 percent by absorbing gallons of fresh water and excreting 20 times more urine than when in salt water.

  Aside from having swum in a lot of shark piss, Steve could have been in deep shit, because the bull shark is responsible for more attacks on humans than any other. They’re temperamental, unpredictable, and aggressive—like Russian drivers—but nine to ten feet long, with powerful jaws, and will eat whatever mammals they can wrap their teeth around, from rats, dogs, and tree sloths, to antelope, cattle, and people. (In India, I’d watched their genetic cousins swim up the Ganges to eat the human corpses that bereaved families devoutly dumped into that sacred river.) Ichthyologists believe that bull sharks are the most dangerous to humans because, of the three main man-eating species—great whites, tigers, and bulls—only the bulls habitually live in shallow water close to populated shorelines; the others live farther down and farther out.

  The bulls were the apex predators of the lake. They’re attacked only by tiger sharks and great whites but, since none of those lived in the lake, the bulls were able to thrive there. Until the Japanese came along in the 1980s and pretty much fished them out for their fins.

  THE PEAK OF DEATH

  If sweat and tears count as water, this harrowing incident belongs here, for it caused me to shed more of both than any other on our auto expedition.

  The Inter-American Highway north from Panama City was bordered by thick tropical jungles and littered with the run-over carcasses of dozens of snakes, but it was paved and fast. Halfway up through Panama the cement ended and Steve and I entered its worst stretch, more than 200 miles of jolting corrugations, loose gravel, razor-sharp rocks, and spring-busting potholes, continuing through southern Costa Rica. Ahead loomed the highest mountain pass of our trip around the world, the 13,000-foot summit of Cerro de la Muerte, the notorious Peak of Death, a nerve-wracking rut of a crooked road with narrow curves bordered by steep cliffs, subject to dense fog, flash floods, and landslides.

  We didn’t make it.

  A thousand yards below the pass, on a blind curve, we felt a sharp jolt and heard the shriek of tortured metal scraping on stone. Steve jerked the Cruiser to a halt and we leaped out to see our camper—20 yards behind us, its nose dug into the road, its A-frame still hitched to the Cruiser, snapped completely through at both joints.

  It was our worst possible breakdown: Only a heavy-duty welding shop could fix it and none existed on the Peak of Death. It made no sense bringing the A-frame to a welder unless we also brought the camper to which it had to be reattached, but it was not possible to bring the camper anywhere with its A-frame detached. We were stranded on a treacherous mountain road, on a blind curve, with trucks charging down, no shoulder on which to pull off, far from the nearest city, on the fog-shrouded summit of the highest peak on the Costa Rican section of Inter-American Highway at the height of the rainy season.

  We concluded that the only way to get our trailer back on the road was to build an entirely new A-frame. We established a protective barricade of warning boulders and reflectors along the road, pitched our Pop-tent in a clearing we macheted out of the adjacent jungle, chopped down two mature bamboo trees, and toiled for three days with crude tools, trimming and shaping and fitting and binding the tree trunks into place.

  We hoped this bamboo frame had sufficient strength and flexibility to enable us to haul the camper to a welding shop in San José. If it broke anywhere on Cerro de la Muerte, the camper could roll out of control and be dashed on the rocks below. But we had no alternative. We headed toward San José at a speed reduced from the 15 mph we had been doing to an excruciating crawl of 5 mph, to avoid straining the timber.

  We reached San José nine days after we had left Panama City, a mere 317 miles away. But at least we’d pioneered an indispensable technique for other world travelers who find themselves stuck in the wilds with a broken trailer frame—if, that is, any other travelers were stupid enough to try to drag an easily breakable camper-trailer around the world.

  IN PERIL ON THE PACUARE

  The east-to-west-flowing rivers of Latin America offer some of the best and fastest white water anywhere. The Andes run up the far western side of the continent like a spine, hundreds of high peaks covered with snow or drenched by rain that inevitably flows down to the sea, which is not far away, making the descent steep and filling the streams with flash and foam.

  I should have known better, but I decided during a visit to Costa Rica to run the Pacuare, a challenging stream on whose steep sides lived kingfishers, herons, toucans, tanagers, and lizards, and whose thickly vegetated side gorges were home to jaguars, ocelots, monkeys, and sloths. The Pacuare has some of the grandest white water in Central America, with rapids ranging up to Class V on the international scale of VI, based on gradient, constriction, and obstruction. Its Class III rapids feature high to irregular waves and narrow passages that often require complex maneuvering. The Class IV are long, difficult rapids in constricted passages that demand precise paddling in extremely turbulent waters. As for the Class V … we never made it that far.

  All the signs said DON’T DO IT DUMMY: It had been raining for a week and the river was boiling; it was the day after Christmas and the regular rafting shops were closed, so I ended up with a guy who had a patched, outdated raft and a hangover; I had no strong team, only my friend Anna and her two preteen kids, which meant we were woefully underpowered for the Pacuare. I was experienced enough to know better, but too determined to go for it—a frequent failing throughout my misadventures.

  I was paddling for all I was worth on the left side of the raft, with Anna’s son behind me, Anna and her daughter on the other side, our befogged guide perfunctorily steering in the stern. We miraculously managed to make it through Crazy Rock, Double Drop, Chicken Drop, and Pin Ball, and were halfway down to the Caribbean, when the raft was sideswiped in the Devil’s Armpit and got pushed far down on my side. Anna’s son was flipped overboard and clear, safe in his life rest, but I was stuck fast and sucking up water. I was on my back, arched over the side, with my head completely in the water and my feet tightly wedged under my butt and beneath the raft’s gunwale, on which my full weight was pressing down. I could not get free. I flapped. I floundered. I tried to twist, to turn. But I could not get free. The flow of water over my chest and face was too powerful for me to rise up and pull myself back into the boat, and my agility was impaired by a cumbersome life vest. The water kept pouring into my nose and mouth.

  In my many decades in the water—kayaking, canoeing, diving, rafting, even surfing at big breaks in Hawaii—I’d never been in a more perilous situation. Although my face was only a few inches underwater, I was drowning and was powerless to do anything about it. It was truly one of those Is-this-the-way-I-go?
moments.

  As I was about to pass out, Anna carefully crawled to my side of the raft, reached out, grabbed a strap on my life vest, and hauled me back in, coughing, sputtering, and expelling a liter of water.

  I was too shaken up to even think of asking her for some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—although I corrected that oversight the next day.

  TORN BETWEEN THREE FALLS

  Within a small area in northeastern South America are three waterfalls: one is the world’s most awesome, the second is the world’s highest, and the third is its most magical.

  The most awesome is Iguazu, my favorite spot on the planet.

  I fell in love with Iguazu the moment I saw her, thundering between Brazil and Argentina, and have remained faithful ever since. She is incomparably stunning, thrilling, and enchanting.

  I’d reached her from Rio de Janeiro after a long and enervating bus trip, expecting to stay half a day. I stayed three days, mesmerized. I saw her first from the rim, almost two miles wide, over which she seemed to suck into herself the entirety of the region’s rainfall and hurl it 270 feet over the basalt cap of the Paraná Plateau in 275 different drops, between which only tiny tufts of clinging grass survived.

  After soaking up that remarkable sight for several hours, I clambered down a long metal walkway that merged into stairs that descended to a small island in the river at the base of the falls, where water came crashing down on three sides, its vapor rising 500 feet. I just sat there on a solitary bench in the jungle, not another person in sight, and stared, eyes wide in wonder, mouth open in astonishment, ears filled with the relentless roar, basking in the gentle mist, hour upon hour. It’s like no other place on earth. Small wonder that when Eleanor Roosevelt first saw Iguazu, she exclaimed, “Poor Niagara!”