Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  I usually cross a country by bus, car, minivan, or bush taxi, but I crossed a handful by train (Italy, Switzerland, Moldova, Byelorussia, Ukraine, Romania, and Greece), two by river steamer (Gabon and Germany), Norway via coastal steamer, the Gambia and the Amazonian parts of Peru and Ecuador by motorized canoe, half of Burma by motor scooter, and I rode completely around Jamaica by motorcycle and Nauru by bicycle. I’ve also crossed three small countries by foot (to wit, Vatican City, San Marino, and Liechtenstein), and parts of others by horse, camel, elephant, llama, and donkey.

  So, now that we know where we are, let’s get back on the road.

  CHAPTER 10

  Doing God’s Work

  When I reached 129 countries, after plucking much of the low-hanging fruit, I again joined forces with God. I had so enjoyed his company, his delight in travel, his easygoing nature, sense of humor, facility with French patois, and his efforts and ambition to make a better life for himself and his family, that I decided to take another trip with God on my side. But this trip was to be different: I’d be the guide and God the guest. I’d be doing God’s work.

  Since God was still growing his business and had no spare cash, I’d offered to pay for the trip, which he liked, and to take him to several West African countries he’d never seen, and thus expand his range, which he liked. I’d study the route and the means of transportation, which he liked, and I’d select the camps and hotels where we stayed, which God did not like at all after he realized that my standard for what constituted tolerable habitation was much, much lower than his.

  The time was February of 2006 and our itinerary was Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea (Conakry).

  It turned out, not surprisingly, to be typical TIA—This Is Africa—which means lots of wasted time, slow transit, poor roads, starchy food, battalions of bugs, problems exchanging money, power failures, paranoid patriots, widespread petty corruption, and ubiquitous poverty, but at least the guns of war and the flames of revolution were on hiatus. Whenever anything happens on this continent that, by our Western standards, is odd, counterproductive, ineffective, inefficient, frustrating, unreasonable, dumb, bizarre, incomprehensible, or plain-out weird, the old Africa hands and the expats just shrug their shoulders and, with quiet patience tinged with resignation, intone: “TIA.” Even though the revenues, productivity, and prospects of many African countries had surged since I’d first visited, more than enough TIA remained to frustrate any traveler.

  God and I rendezvoused in Dakar, the bustling capital of Senegal, and immediately learned we’d blundered into a misunderstanding. God had presumed that, since I was in charge of the trip, I’d researched and obtained what visas he needed, while I’d presumed that since he had his passport and lived in Africa, he’d attended to this. As a consequence, we wasted an entire day trying to ascertain if he required a visa to Guinea, repeatedly phoning its embassy, which never answered, then walking for two hours to find it, where we learned he did not need one.

  I rented a small car in which we headed northeast, along Senegal’s Atlantic coast. After two hours we stopped by the seaside to watch a group of ten young men in dirty shorts and torn shirts performing one of the hardest labors known—panning for gold in shoreline beach sands. Three of the men shoveled the heavy sand into a large screen that stood on rickety wooden legs about two feet above the gentle waves, to catch any sticks and rocks and garbage. The other men knelt beneath the screen to catch the sifted sand in pans of sheet metal, or plastic, even a black frying pan with a long handle. They were surely outlaw operators, for few people could afford the €2,300 fee that Senegal charged for a two-year “artisan exploitation authorization.” But the men seemed neither worried about the police, whom they had likely bribed, nor about my camera, for which they proudly posed.

  Senegal has gold deposits in the interior, where you’d need to process one ton of dirt and rock to get .08 of an ounce of gold, as a Canadian mining giant had just agreed to do. The guys on the beach were working over far poorer deposits, hundreds of miles from the mother lodes in the mountains. These sands harbored the most miniscule traces of gold dust, which had run a gauntlet of river panners on its tumbling ride to the ocean, and lucky if they averaged .01 of an ounce per ton, i.e., one grain of gold for every 3.2 million grains of crap.

  Panning is the poor man’s prospecting. It has the advantage of ease of movement, ready accessibility, and low equipment costs, but is attenuated by small throughput and backbreakingly arduous work. Each pan, about 16 inches across, with slanted sides two to three inches deep, can hold over 20 pounds of dense, water-saturated sand, which the men have to shake and swirl repeatedly in the water, as they expel, first, the lighter sands, then the heavier ones, then small pebbles, all the time kneading the contents to break up any clods and crush any clay, concentrating it all down to the heaviest, dark-black, metallic sands and—they can only hope—a fleck or two of gold.

  It takes a strong, experienced panner at least six minutes to concentrate a pan, at most ten pans an hour, 90 in a long and utterly exhausting day. At that rate, one panner and his helper could process three cubic yards of sand a week, about six tons, and each could end up with .03 ounces of flakes, totaling 1.5 ounces at the end of a full year. Sounds futile? Well, this teaspoonful was worth $2500, which was more than double Senegal’s GDP per person, and more than ten times that of nearby nations.

  One of the men gave me a pan to try. I could barely lift it, much less shake, knead, and swish it while preventing any golden grains from swirling out.

  God merely stood on the shore and watched, offering no help whatsoever. After all, he’d moved up life’s ladder to become a licensed tour guide, a middle-class semiprofessional, almost a member of Ghanaian society. No more manual labor for him: Every day was his seventh day, and God rested, although he had, on some windy days during our first tour, been observed to help Bernard set up a tent, and he was always available to demonstrate his bartending skills to his thirsty clients come cocktail time. But it was unfair to fault his indolence: I reminded myself that this trip was to be God’s vacation, God help me.

  The next day I was in Lake Retba, northeast of Dakar, and up to my neck in brine, while a recumbent God snoozed in the shade of the car. The lake has a salt content of 40 percent, almost a pound of NaCl in every liter. Large amounts of salt had precipitated out and were caked in thick slippery deposits on the lake bottom, from which they were shoveled up by the men who lived in the industrious village bordering the lake.

  The men had long ago exhausted all the near-shore deposits and were working about 50 yards from the lake’s edge, with eight-foot-long shovels, standing in water over their shoulders, for six to seven hours a day, to lift the salt-bearing deposits up from the bottom and dump them into their adjacent rowboats. I tried to do it, but I couldn’t get any leverage without bending over, and I could not bend, for the brine was already up to my chin. Moreover, my skin was sore from the saltiness because I was not protected, as were the village men, with a thick emollient of butter from the local shea trees.

  Once these heavily muscled, broad-shouldered behemoths had filled a boat with salted muck, they pushed it to shore, where the village women took over, scooping the briny mush into wide plastic washbasins, too heavy for me to pick up, that they easily lifted onto their heads and dumped into separate conical piles about ten feet up the beach. After these piles had dried out for a day or two, the women, who toiled ten to 14 hours a day, raked and consolidated them into much larger piles, about three feet high, that they left to dry in the hot Senegalese sun for several weeks, after which they graded the dry product by coarseness and color, from nearly white to almost brown, and shoveled it into large plastic bags that held over a hundred pounds. The men loaded the bags onto trucks, to be sold in the city, where they fetched about $40 a ton—only two cents a pound—roughly one-third of the world price for pure, mined salt.

  Their work was typical of the division of labor I observed between the genders
throughout most of black Africa, where only three tasks are considered sufficiently macho for African men to perform: heavy lifting or pushing; driving taxis, trains, tanks, and trucks; and working with large animals—camels in caravans, horses that pulled carts, donkeys that bore burdens, and oxen that were driven in treadmill circles to run the threshing machines at harvest time. Everything else was women’s work.

  A woman’s lot was not a comfortable one by Western standards. If you’re a married female in rural Africa, your husband’s principal contribution to the homestead will be to wake you up with the sunrise and send you to fetch water from wherever the local well is, then have you fire up a warm breakfast for him and the kids—and there will be lots of kids—then send you out to tend the fields for the rest of the day, with the youngest child wrapped to your back, while he assigns one of his sons to drive the livestock to the pasture field, then goes back to sleep and wakes up in the afternoon to spend the rest of his day hanging out with his buddies, getting sozzled on whatever fermented grog you’ve had the time to concoct for him after hoeing the weeds, harvesting the crops, washing clothes in the river, scavenging for firewood, and preparing dinner. On special occasions, such as planting time, your husband might deign to walk beside you with a stick, poking holes in the tilled soil, into which you deposit millet seeds you carry in a large gourd.

  In rural Africa, where cars and few and trucks are costly, farmers and villagers use bicycles, donkeys, wagons, and carts to transport huge loads of fruits, vegetables, and other commodities to the nearest market, where they are either sold to local consumers or consolidated for shipment to the cities. Gorilla Highlands

  Our next state was the Gambia, as the country is properly called, the so-called tongue of Africa, a sliver of land averaging only 30 miles in width, surrounded by Senegal on three sides and by the Atlantic on the fourth, looking like a skinny snake burrowing into Senegal. It’s the smallest nation in mainland Africa, and one of the poorest, making its negligible livelihood from peanuts. Since 1994 it had been ruled with a heavy hand by an eccentric former wrestler and army colonel whose hobby was persecuting and executing his political opponents, and often his own ministers, creating a permanent atmosphere of paranoia.

  The Gambia River bisects the country lengthwise and was the initial European trade route into the interior of Africa. It had quickly become one of the first main conduits for the slave trade, and its banks were harvested for strong black bodies for 400 years, The Gambia is now a pilgrimage destination for black Western tourists where, as one travel site put it, “The people of the Diaspora can come to rediscover and reaffirm their African heritage and unite with their ancestral family.”

  In Banjul, the sleepy capital of this nation of 1.7 million, I negotiated with the owner of a 20-foot motorized cargo canoe to take me and God (and the pretty waitress we’d met the night before at dinner) up the Gambia River for two days. We started the voyage by making the obligatory rounds of the relics of the bygone slave trade, with mine the only white visage among the tear-streaked faces of the 20 American citizens of African descent we saw confronting their family origins on this most somber tourist trail. Our boat motored past St. James Island, lying low in the center of the river and 20 miles upstream from its mouth, where the conquering colonials had built a fort, now a ruin, that gave them control of the river, and a slave house, now also a ruin, which gave them control of tens of thousands of lives. We next visited the village of Juffureh, on what has become known as Kunta Kinte Island, in honor of the man whom Alex Haley, in Roots, claimed to be his great-great-great-grandfather, and where he was sold into slavery in 1767.

  It was, for me, a strange experience. I was intellectually outraged by the slave trade, and my sense of justice was awake and aware of its terrible inhumanity, but I was unable to make a real, deep, personal, emotional connection to its horrors, to the deaths, the chains, the shackles, the rapes, the whippings, the killing of newborn children, the families torn asunder. As I looked around, at the tearful African-American families returning to their tourist steamer with the heavy heritage of their history on their bent shoulders, I felt like an outsider, an interloper, an intruder who had boorishly blundered into the mourning pain of grieving relatives at the funeral of someone I had never met, or knew only in the most superficial way.

  After our canoe left the heritage trail and continued upriver, we saw little life or livelihood, just mile after mile, hour after hour, of dense mangroves lining the edge of the dark river, with only a few villages visible in a hundred-mile stretch. I pondered, as we chugged past the deserted jungle, if the absence of anything worth seeing was, in itself, something worth seeing, if the Senegambia region will ever recover from the slave trade, which saw three million of its inhabitants—almost twice its present population—shipped away on the Voyage of No Return.

  Back in Banjul, it was back into a bush taxi for a tiring ride to Bissau, the somnolent capital of Guinea-Bissau, an impoverished nation of 1.5 million, mostly farmers, who raised peanuts, palm kernels, cashews, and cotton, more recently managing to make its mark as a smuggling hub for drugs shipped in from Latin America en route to Europe. As was the norm in most of Africa, the driver refused to depart until the van was full, which required 13 more passengers and consumed three hours. I’ve often offered, when my minibus was within a person or two of being full, to pay the driver for the empty seats in exchange for an immediate departure, explaining that my time was more valuable to me than the five dollars or so they charged each person for a full-day’s drive. But for reasons I’ve never understood, no driver ever accepted my offer, even after I pointed out that if they left with a van having a few empty seats, they had space to pick up passengers along the route and make even more money.

  When these situations became acute, as in terminals where three or four minibuses were delaying departures for the same destination, all still half empty, all competing for passengers, all biding their time until full, all prepared to wait for hours, I eventually developed a successful stratagem: I’d innocently sidle up to a competing van, start a quiet conversation with some of their waiting passengers, then offer them a dollar or two to switch their patronage to my bus which, I assured them, would be the first to leave—and so it was.

  From Bissau, we took another bush taxi for a journey across the country that was painfully slow because Guinea-Bissau’s coastal strip was cut by ten or more rivers and streams, around which we had to detour, or across which we had to take a ferry. It took us two dusty, jolting days to reach the frontier of Guinea-Conakry.

  To enter Guinea-Conakry we had to take a ship across a river deep in the jungle. The ferry was resting on the river’s other side, 400 yards away, waiting for passengers heading toward us, which consumed three hours. She was a large old rust bucket, with room for about 20 cars and several hundred people on a flat metal deck, and was propelled by a score of sturdy passengers pulling a river-spanning cable that ran through a winch contraption on the deck. As she crept toward us, I started taking pictures, until the captain pointed at me and began screaming. I then remembered that many of these countries are supersensitive about the taking of photos, especially near their borders, some requiring a police permit, so I put my camera down.

  This did nothing to quell the captain’s anger; he continued to rage and rave even after his ship reached our bank. I panicked and hastily chose to play it safe by deleting the dozen photos I’d taken of the ship and the frontier, but, in my nervous state, I pressed the wrong button—which was not hard to do on my early-model digital—and erased all the pictures from the trip.

  The captain kept ranting and threatening to turn me in to the police once we got to the town on his side of the river. Several passengers from my van told him I was a good guy, not an enemy agent filming the frontier to facilitate an incursion, and he should cut me some slack. To help my cause, I joined the 15 or so passengers hauling on the cable, and made a big show of grunting and straining, as we pulled the lumbering boat across
for 20 minutes. To assure the captain’s clemency I gave him two new Big Apple T-shirts as I disembarked, and swore to never commit such a heinous crime again.

  After that it was God’s turn to get in trouble.

  Guinea-Conakry—one of three nations using the name “Guinea”—is one of the world’s most corrupt, scoring a dismal 2.1 out of a possible 10 on the Transparency International Corruption Index, and ranked 168 out of 180 on the Corruption Perceptions Index. I was not as surprised or shocked by Guinea’s illicit practices as God was, having suffered far worse when I’d crossed the CAR (Central African Republic), several years earlier.

  In the CAR my minibus had been stopped at twenty-nine separate checkpoints along the 250-mile stretch from its capital of Bangui to the border of Cameroon. At a typical checkpoint, a policeman or military officer sat, about 30 yards from the road, under a thatched shelter furnished with a table and a couple of chairs. The locals passed unmolested, but I, the only white guy in the bus, was directed to see the officer, who told me I could either pay him five dollars—sometimes ten—or stay there and go no farther.

  Before I’d left home I had been warned about this corrupt practice, which was rampant in CAR since most of these officials and officers had received no pay from the moribund central government in more than six months, maybe a year, and had gone into business for themselves. No tourist’s excuse worked: They refused to believe a foreigner who said he had no money, and they’d threaten to arrest him as a vagrant if he persisted. It was impossible to bluff them because they’d simply keep you off the bus and let you wilt in the sun until you paid. I’d therefore come prepared with dozens of new T-shirts I’d purchased in Times Square souvenir shops, where, at seven shirts for ten dollars, they served as a loss leader to lure in tourists.