Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  At 27 of the 29 checkpoints I was able to get through with the “gift” of a ($1.42) shirt, after extolling its virtues and exaggerating its price by a factor of ten. One lean, mean captain, sporting an AK-47 and wearing highly polished combat boots that he kept arrogantly propped up on the table and in my face, was not so easily bought off. I was compelled, after a lengthy bargaining session during which my patient fellow passengers ate lunch, to add a half bottle of OFF! insect repellant and two AA batteries.

  The most outrageous such indignity had occurred as I was about to leave the CAR. The captain of the border post refused to return my passport and let me exit until I gave him ten dollars cold cash—no T-shirts. His colleague, who ran the health station, was employed to check the yellow-fever cards of those entering CAR to ensure they’d been vaccinated against this disease and consequently could not pass the virus to mosquitoes in CAR after coming from infected countries. He had no proper business even looking at my yellow card now that I was leaving his country, but he insisted on seeing it, carefully scrutinized it for ten minutes, and then demanded five dollars for the services he’d rendered on my behalf. Unless, that is, I preferred to try to continue my journey without my yellow card.

  I didn’t like or condone the system, but I’d learned, the hard way, that it makes no sense to tell someone to go to hell unless you have the power to send him there. And that you don’t flip the bird to a guy caressing an assault rifle.

  As a result of my treatment in CAR and other corrupt countries I was well accustomed to the shakedown routine, but God was not, because it was not prevalent in the tourism-promoting states where he plied his trade. He also misguidedly assumed that because he carried a Ghanaian passport, and Ghana, like Guinea, was a member of ECOWAS (the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States), he should be exempt from any improper bribery, tipping, or service fees.

  In view of my experience in CAR, I did not understand why none of the corrupt police manning the eight checkpoints between the Guinean border and the capital of Conakry asked me for a penny. They hit each of the other passengers, all Africans, for a buck or two, which those passengers fully expected and wearily paid.

  But not God.

  His refusal to comply began as soon as we entered Guinea, where the passport officer asked him for a small tip for stamping him in. God flipped out and berated his corruption. I paid the bribe, pushed God out of the office, and laid the facts of life on him, to which he replied, “When the soldiers were hustling me to give them a bribe so they stamp my passport I was fighting with them because I am fighting corruption back in Ghana.”

  Good sermon, God. Wrong church.

  At each checkpoint, my usually mild-mannered friend demanded to see the officer in charge, at whom he ranted that the extraction of money by the police for doing their job was illegal, that such corruption was a sin and a crime, that he was a citizen of a friendly ECOWAS state, that he was a tour guide who could bring needed business to their country, that he was traveling with an American friend who was aghast at this type of corruption, that the police were an embarrassment to their profession and their country, that he’d rather walk than pay, that …

  He definitely got their attention. His fee for passing the next stop rose to three dollars.

  By the time the taxi was stopped at the fourth checkpoint, God was so outraged and outrageous he didn’t even wait for the tip to be solicited, but charged out of the van waving his Ghanaian passport and telling all and sundry that he’d never been so badly treated in his life and would never return to this craphole of a country. That cost him four dollars.

  By the sixth checkpoint, on the outskirts of Conakry, God was $22 poorer, and so vociferous that he was threatened with arrest, at which point I interceded, paid the tip for him, and told the police he was suffering from a hangover and sunstroke.

  In retrospect, perhaps I should not have interfered. “God Arrested” would have made an intriguing title for this chapter. But I didn’t want him wasting away in prison. I’d already hired him to guide me on a trip to Timbuktu in 2008.

  CHAPTER 11

  Travels in SPAM Land

  My next journey got off to a bad start. I’d set aside two weeks in July 2007 to revisit Japan to provide a gentle warm-up for the ensuing seven weeks of primitive touring in New Guinea and eight other island nations of the western Pacific. No such luck. I got soaked with ten straight days of rain, was caught in the biggest super-typhoon to strike Japan since they began keeping records in 1951, plus two (small) tsunamis, and a 6.8 earthquake rumored to have resulted in some leaking nuclear reactors.

  I left Japan on a roller-coaster of a flight through a tropical storm en route to Papua New Guinea (PNG), where I was long delayed by Air Niugini (ANG), whose planes chronically took off after they were supposed to have already landed at their destinations. Of my three flights with ANG, one was delayed seven hours and none less than three, and the mechanics were continually pulling parts out of one plane to fix another. I suppose this cannibalizing came naturally, but it did not inspire great confidence. Yet ANG had the only passenger planes in PNG.

  Soon after I reached the interior I witnessed the only deadly sword fight (actually long machetes) I’ve seen off the silver screen. PNG was near the end of elections, and tempers flared when the vote counting dragged on for a week. In many provinces, the rival candidates came from tribes that had forever engaged in warfare against each other.

  The election disputes escalated into roadblocks and burning tires on the only dirt track of a trail running through the Highlands, with a few head bashings if you came from the wrong tribe or clan, and the torching of some huts. Nevertheless, these folks had come a long way in 70 years, when these so-called Stone Age tribesmen, living in the deep, steep, almost inaccessible valleys of inner PNG, saw their first white man, their first piece of metal, even their first wheel.

  They were all welcoming to me, and my worst annoyance was 30 British bird-watchers who invaded the lodge where I stayed in the Southern Highlands. These avian aficionados were straight of out of a Punch cartoon, replete with every conceivable appurtenance from rubber boots and ultra-high-powered binoculars to birdsong recordings and laptops flashing their life lists and current sighting goals, which they knowledgeably and passionately discussed for hours.

  They somehow persuaded me to join them the next morning at 5:00 a.m. to go trekking through the moist and misty jungle looking for birds of paradise eating their breakfast, of which we saw five species, which greatly excited all but yours truly, who was wishing he’d been able to eat his breakfast before embarking on this rash misadventure.

  But it had its rewards: I am now the only one among my pals who has seen the rare King of Saxony bird of paradise in the wild, though I doubt if those pals will now treat me with the reverence and respect I have long and unavailingly told them I deserved.

  To escape the incessant Brit bird chatter, I garnered a guide and traveled to the isolated Huli Wig School on the banks of a sacred stream in the Highland jungles. To the Huli and several other tribes, a huge mop of hair is essential for status and respect. You just can’t—so to speak—get ahead without it. You can’t even marry until you’ve grown it fully. The “it” is not a factory-made object, as we think of a wig, but a piled-up hat of hair that was cultivated into a wide, slightly squashed, tightly knit Afro. It grew atop the scalp of a living man, supported from underneath by a thin circular frame and string to hold its shape.

  The growers spend at least two years in the wig school under the keen eye of the Wig Master, living a monastic life, unable to touch women or even be fed by them, just growing their hair, bonding with the brothers by preening one another’s wigs for hours with long-tined picks, all sauntering down to the banks of the sacred stream several times a day to repeatedly fill their mouths with “magic water” that, for an hour, they expelled upward as a fine mist aimed to softly settle on the wig and keep it moist. Because the wig could easily get bent out of shape, t
he men sleep on their backs with their heads supported by a wood neck rest eight inches high, one of which they gave me in exchange for a bottle of OFF! and a T-shirt.

  Their routines are occasionally interrupted by a tiff with a hostile tribe, usually over a stolen woman or a pig—I’m not sure which theft engenders more action—for which they grab their bows and arrows and rush, whooping, into the jungle, much to the consternation of the Wig Master, who scolds them if they’ve torn any hair while bounding through the bush.

  A well-groomed four-year growth of healthy hair can fetch the equivalent of $6,000 after it’s been shorn off the scalp of the grower and sold to someone too lazy or busy to grow his own, after which the grower begins to grow another, until he retires and grows one he keeps on his head. (I assume that if a purchased wig passes to several generations, it would eventually be considered an hairloom.)

  After I reluctantly left the multiple fascinations of PNG and landed in Brisbane to change planes for the Solomon Islands, I had a tad of a tussle with the Australian Agricultural Quarantine Service when they sought to confiscate the necklace of a dog’s skull and bones, which my PNG tribal pals gave me after we’d dined on the unfortunate canine. (My pals didn’t think I rated a pig, which is their most highly prized form of currency—50 to 60 of them buy a bride with superlative attributes. And no, I never was able to clarify what those hallmarks were.)

  It took me a while to satisfy the Aussies that neither my necklace nor my cassowary thigh-bone souvenirs were likely to cause an epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease among their precious cattle. But I knew I’d have to return to Brissie ten days later to change planes again, and I doubted whether, given my past experience with these overly confiscatory characters, I’d find such a reasonable customs lady again. (When I’d visited Australia in 1981, they’d seized ten quarts of harmless packaged powdered milk from me, offering only the arrogant explanation that I could buy powdered milk there. On this trip they considered confiscating three pounds of packaged wasabi peas I’d brought from Japan until I convinced them that no insect could possibly survive the wasabi.)

  As I crisscrossed the Pacific, each of the island-nations I visited was distinct but had, except for Tonga, a generally similar history: 1,000 to 3,000 years of simple, idyllic life until, starting some 200 years ago, being “discovered” by the whalers, traders, and European powers, who then infiltrated, invaded, subjugated, colonized, and renamed them, and introduced Western values and religions that shattered their cultures. The islanders were then hit with WW II, which devastated their homelands physically, wrecked others spiritually, subverted their traditional diets, and led to their deplorable current condition—sluggish, obese, and vegetating—in the hammock and on the dole. This enticed ambitious businesspeople to move in from India, Australia, and China to take over what little commerce there was. Tonga escaped this because it was the only one of these island-nations always ruled by indigenous governance and never colonized, which gave the Tongans a feeling of communal pride and power the others lacked.

  Tuvalu was one of the most pathetic. Formerly the Ellice part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, it was ruled by Britain until after WW II. That war, counterintuitively, was regarded by the elderly Tuvaluans I talked with as the best days of their lives, because the Americans got there before the Japanese (who were derailed by the Battle of Midway) and converted the island into a major arsenal for the war, and port to 174 U.S. warships by 1944. The islanders benefited in many ways: compensation for the land taken to build the port, the airfield, and the radio tower; four to five years of wages, cigarettes, chocolate, soap, canned food, and kerosene; and a monetized way of life.

  The future is gloomier. Tuvalu will be the first country to disappear under the waves of the rising ocean. (The slightly lower Maldives are sufficiently wealthy to build a seawall.) It’s the world’s fourth smallest nation at ten square miles, composed of three islands and six true atolls, eight of which are inhabited—hence its name, which means “eight standing together” in Tuvaluan. Each is only three to four feet above sea level, with one shrubby hummock on the island of Niulakita (which I climbed in six steps) the highest spot in the country, 15 feet above the ocean. It is widely agreed that if climatic warming continues, life for Tuvalu’s 10,000 inhabitants will be untenable within 40 years and finished within 100.

  Tuvalu may not even last 40 years above the waves because of its location and the adjacent topography. It offers no barriers to the breakers and is subject to the most devastating king tides, pushing the waves over many of these islands, none much wider than a football field. (A king tide is the highest of the highest of Pacific Ocean high tides, occurring when both the moon and sun are their closest to the earth, aligned in perigee and perihelion.)

  The fear of flooding consumes the inhabitants, a watery sword constantly hanging over their heads. They asked me: “How are we to live? Where are we to go? Who will take us in?” Surely not Australia, which was already rejecting boat people. Not Japan, which strives to keep its population pure and homogenous. Not Indonesia, already overcrowded. Tuvalu’s deputy prime minister asked, “Do we turn ourselves into fish and live under water?”

  Think about it from their perspective: They believe that we—yes we—are inexorably inundating their country and slowly drowning their children and their children’s children with our gas-guzzling cars, wasteful energy practices, and reluctance to conserve. As their prime minister somberly told the UN in 2003, “It is no difference to a slow and insidious form of terrorism against us.” At the conclusion of an unresponsive international Climate Change Conference, Tuvalu’s spokesman lamented being “offered thirty pieces of silver to betray our people and our future.”

  Tuvalu is too impoverished to help itself. It has no natural resources, little income, no potable water save whatever rain can be collected on roofs and stored in tanks, and no longer any agriculture since salt water has invaded the pits that the natives had for centuries dug into the sand and filled with compost so they could grow pulaka, a form of taro that was their dietary staple. All that these 10,000 ethnic Polynesians have left are a few scrawny chickens pecking along the almost-deserted single-lane road; a pig or two in a pen out back of a collapsing tin-roofed shack; sometimes a peeling old fishing dory; and a flower-filled burial ground in their front yards where they inter their ancestors, whom they dearly respect, but whose spirits they no longer worship after being converted to Christianity.

  Tuvalu’s only income is derived from remittances sent by workers who toil overseas, some international aid, and the sale of stamps and commercial fishing licenses. Nothing tempts more than a thousand tourists a year to visit this flat, plain, quiet community that has no lamb, beef, diet sodas, beauty parlors, theaters, cell phones, HBO, or reliable Internet.

  Since I can endure only so much sadness and tranquility, I wanted, after three days on Funafuti, to go diving, but there was no dive shop in the nation—and for good reason, as I learned too late. I trudged back and forth along the main (and only) road down the center of the capital island searching on both sides for boat mooring places and finally found a 19-year-old who agreed, for a $100, to borrow a boat and throw together some snorkeling stuff. I went back to the Vaiaku Lagi, the country’s only hotel, and rounded up a group of receptive guests: two Kiwis, an Aussie, an Italian, and a shy, deaf Japanese woman named Midori who was an Olympic badminton player. She told us, through her sign-language interpreter, that, although she’d never gone snorkeling before, she was eager to try it because, in the silent world beneath the waves, she would be, for the first time in her life, equal to all the rest of us—no longer the child of a lesser god.

  But it was not to be.

  The next morning dawned bright and cloudless, and the boy I’d hired took us 40 minutes out to a flat, shallow reef, covered by six to 15 feet of water, near a steep drop-off. We backflipped into the clear water, but inexperienced Midori jumped and landed atop some spiny coral heads and cried for help. She had badly scr
aped her leg and was bleeding profusely. We gathered around her and gently lifted her into the motorboat, where the Aussie elevated her leg while I applied pressure with a handkerchief to staunch the bleeding.

  When we were certain her bleeding had stopped and that she was not in shock, we gulped some air and went back down to explore. We’d only been under a few seconds when in zoomed a large, blunt-nosed monster with faint vertical stripes along its sides—the dreaded tiger shark, a voracious hunter with powerful jaws; sharp, highly serrated teeth; and a superb sense of smell that had undoubtedly enabled it to home in on Midori’s blood.

  I froze as the brute brushed past me, heading toward the back of the boat where Midori had been. The tiger is one of the three deadliest sharks to humans but, unlike the great white, which will often take a bite of an arm or leg and decide it doesn’t like the taste, the tiger will usually devour its entire prey. Tigers generally live deeper but will venture onto small shallow reefs like the one we were on.

  I held my breath for the longest I ever had, let myself slowly rise to the surface without making any motion to attract unwanted attention, gently rolled onto my back, and directly sculled my way to the boat and lunged in. According to our Italian companion, who stayed down the longest, the shark nosed around, as if searching for something, but, not finding it, headed back down to the deep drop.

  When we were all in the boat, I berated the “captain,” who was by now slightly conked on kava, for taking us into shark territory. He pulled up his T-shirt to show us a jagged, dark purple, partly healed wound in his chest, the size of a serving platter, where he said a tiger shark had taken this bite out of him a few months before at this same spot. He looked at us with little sympathy and shrugged: “What’s the big deal? None of you was hurt.”