Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  The only unpleasant occurrence on the next leg was caused by a huge breadfruit—about the weight of three grapefruits—that dropped 40 feet from its tree and beaned me while I was exploring the ruins of an ancient civilization on the island of Nan Midol in the Pohnpei Group in Micronesia. Luckily, as my friends have frequently pointed out, I have a rather hard head, so it takes more than an errant breadfruit to do me in. (A coconut falling 100 feet might do the job, so I looked up frequently during the rest of this tropical island foray.)

  While scubaing off Truk and Palau, where dive tourism accounts for nearly half of the local economy, I did see squids, sharks, and octopi, but they were not large and acted more frightened that I’d eat them than the other way around. I saw no sea snakes, which are aggressive and had almost gotten me on the Great Barrier Reef in 1981, and none of the pain-inflicting, paralyzing stonefish, scorpion fish, and lion fish I’d often encountered in the warm waters of the Red Sea and Indo-Pacific region.

  The Truk Lagoon was fascinating from underwater, filled with haunting relics of WW II. It had been the forward anchorage of the Japanese Imperial Combined Fleet, home to more than 20 warships, five airstrips, a seaplane base, torpedo boat station, submarine repair shop, and communications center, the Rising Sun’s most formidable stronghold on a conquered island.

  Until February 16, 1944.

  That’s when the Navy launched Operation Hailstone and battered Truk Lagoon for three days with dive bombers and torpedo planes from five fleet carriers. We sank 15 warships, 32 merchant vessels, and sent more than 250 enemy planes to the bottom, where they remain today, as the “Ghost Fleet of Truk Lagoon,” almost all lying virtually intact and clearly visible in their shallow tombs after more than 60 years, with just a bit of seaweed and coral encrustation, all resting in peace in the largest ship graveyard under earth’s oceans.

  When I came upon the well-preserved remains of a Curtiss Helldiver, one of the 25 American planes shot down during the attack, resting level in less than ten feet of clear water, I swam slowly down, slid into the opened cockpit, and silently thanked the missing pilot, and the others of the Greatest Generation, for having rid the world of the Axis menace and preserved our liberty, as I teared up and my face mask misted over.

  Three days later the Aussie quarantine service finally got me. When I flew back to Brisbane to change planes, I reentered Oz with the same PNG souvenirs I’d taken both in and out of Brissie three weeks before, but got a much tougher inspector. After a heated argument, he agreed to allow in my dog bones and boar tusks, but insisted that the ornaments strung between the bones were not beads, as I averred, but “dried seeds of a noxious weed” that could not enter. I offered to leave the ornaments in quarantine at the airport overnight, but he rejected that, disdainfully cut both necklaces apart, and chucked out the seeds—I mean beads.

  I flew out the next day and established a new personal worst by touching down in seven airports in one 24-hour period. While I was in Japan, and despite my having a reservation, Air Nauru had decided to discontinue their flights from Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands, to Majuro, capital of the Marshall Islands. To make it to the Marshalls, I now had to fly from Honiara back to Brissie, sleep in the transit lounge, fly to Cairns, change planes, fly to Guam, change planes, fly down to Truk, then to Ponepae, Kosrae, Kwajelein, and, finally, Majuro. This was like flying from New York to Boston via Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Montreal. But I had to do it: The Marshalls were a country.

  I also set a personal worst record for most continuous days of rain—33! I spent much of Day 34 drying clothes to vanquish nascent mold.

  On the island of Tongatapu, the largest in the Kingdom of Tonga, the challenge was to buy gas and food on a Sunday. Tonga is one of the world’s most devoutly Christian nations; hence, all commerce ceases from Saturday midnight to Sunday midnight, and nothing is open except the emergency room at the hospital.

  The natives were long ago converted and are now either Catholic, Free Wesleyan, Methodist, Mormon, or Church of Tonga. The converts turn out in droves to Thank the Lord for whatever they have, all wearing their spotless, bright Sunday best, all walking in smiling family groups to church, where they romp and stomp and sing and clap and have a grand old Godly time. One minister told me that some parishioners have apologized to him for the devouring of his great-great-grandfather by their great-great-grandfathers. Or was this his attempt at missionary humor?

  I’d been looking forward to trying Tonga’s famous fruit-bat pie and their flying fox fricassee, but I was warned that these little hairy buggers were off limits to tourists and reserved solely for the nation’s king and the royal family. I did detect a loophole—and only a New York lawyer would argue this—in that the king, after a 40-year reign, had died some months before, and his successor would not be crowned until a year later. Therefore, since there was no king …

  I decided not to push it and to wait for Palau, where the indigenes also savored these crunchy critters, but where anyone could eat them. I went to a bakery in Koror, the former capital, and found several fruit-bat pies for sale for $35. But they were not what I’d envisioned; I’d hoped for a tart-sized taste, not a ten-inch multimeal. And I’d assumed the bakers gutted and cleaned the bats and ground them all up like mincemeat. Instead, each pie contained ten to twelve whole bats: And I do mean whole! Complete! Entire! The Works: wings, heads, fur, feet, and all. And they were all facing up, laid out side-by-side inside the fringing reef of brown crust, with their fragile little wings spread and touching, their hair thickly coated with dark purple jelly, hirsute ears erect and slightly pinkish, their tiny pointed teeth shining—and all of them looking, pathetically and accusingly, right at me.

  I suddenly remembered my vow to never eat an endangered species. Surely these little guys must be endangered, right? I sort of recall having read that in one of my environmental magazines. I decided that I’d better make sure before I indulged. Maybe on Guam, where there were more bats, and the shops might sell me a simple order of fried wings? To go. With a side of slaw.

  I tried to make up for this culinary cop-out by eating the mangrove clams in Palau, the mud crabs in Tuvalu, sea cucumber jelly in the Marshalls, the giant coconut crabs in Vanuatu, and drinking the kava in Fiji.

  The one thing I steadfastly refused to eat is what has become, thanks to our WW II GIs, the national dish of almost every island nation in the Pacific: SPAM. I never knew there were so many brands and varieties. By my tally, the average South Pacific supermarket devotes 20 percent of its shelf space to SPAM and its progeny, and some smaller shops push it up to 30 percent. The locals eat it for breakfast, creamed, on toast (similar to the chipped beef dish that, in the army, we called SOS and uniformly hated); then cold for lunch, straight out of the can, topped with pineapple or papaya; and in all sorts of disgusting heated variations for dinner.

  The other big dish in all these nations—again, blame our GIs—was fried chicken with French fries, the combination of which was producing a Generation XL of Big Fat Mommas and Papas, weighing in at way over 300 pounds, and giving these people one of the world’s highest rates of heart disease and diabetes. Pacific Island nations occupy the seven top spots on the WHO global obesity rankings.

  The majority of the islanders I saw never exercised, but sat all day (except Sunday) gossiping, listening to pop radio, guzzling Foster’s, and thinking about maybe mending that leaky roof or dead motorcycle next week. At least we can blame the Foster’s on the Aussies.

  We cannot blame the Aussies for the multiple cups of kava the denizens of these islands ingest every day, a slightly sedating, foul-smelling potion they imbibe with much devotion and ceremony. It tasted to me like the bottled coyote piss I used to spray around my vegetable garden to keep away the deer and rabbits, and it combines the worst effects of Novocain and Dramamine.

  Kava is brewed by grinding, pounding, or chewing the root of the kava plant, and is alleged by Western forensics to cause severe
liver damage, a malady seemingly unknown to the Pacific Islanders, many of whom couldn’t get through a day without a kava infusion, and who often live to their 80s—provided they stay away from burgers, franks, fries, SPAM, candy, and the other junk food to which we introduced them.

  My next port of call was the island-nation of Vanuatu, birthplace of bungee jumping. More than 30 years ago, when it was a dependency called the New Hebrides, a Kiwi tourist who observed their tower-jumping ritual—a test of manhood among the locals—decided to make it safer, with sturdy elastic bands tied to a firm tower, and imported it to New Zealand, from whence it spread to Australia and around the world. In Vanuatu, however, it has remained for centuries unchanged and unnerving. Where the Kiwi had merely observed, Big Al intended to participate.

  I climbed up a rickety wooden tower, as tall as a five-story building, to a shaky platform where they affixed jungle vines to my legs, as a group below turned over the soil beneath the platform so my face wouldn’t get too smashed up. As I fell, I would theoretically break or bend some of the saplings that supported the jump platform, which would supposedly slow my descent from deadly to merely dangerous. As I timorously peered down from the sickening height of 60 feet, I suddenly realized that Vanuatu might be short on trauma surgeons and that a broken neck might negatively impact my global goal.

  I don’t know whether the advancing years have more increased my wisdom or my cowardice, but I chickened out of the jump.

  I was still shaking off the tower terrors when I reached Samoa, where my objective was far less dangerous: to climb Mount Vaea to the burial vault of Robert Louis Stevenson, my favorite teller of adventure tales. It was little more than a sweaty hour up the jungle trail, but after having gained ten pounds on the unhealthy Pacific diet, and grown soft from sitting in so many airplanes on so many long flights, the hike up the hill was a hot, hard haul for me.

  Stevenson, who died at 44 of a cerebral hemorrhage after a life battling TB, had early fallen in love with Samoa, wrote numerous articles and books there, and asked to be buried there. He was so treasured by Samoans for his powerful political polemics on their behalf, for his storytelling in their oral tradition, and for putting on paper the first fiction story ever written in the Samoan language, that 30 native chieftains journeyed to his deathbed, established an honorary watch guard to keep his spirit company through the night, then carried the body of their beloved Tusitala—the teller of tales—on their shoulders as they hacked a path through the jungle and brought him up the small mountain to his final resting-place overlooking the peaceful Pacific.

  I wept as I read the moving epitaph that he wrote for his tomb:

  Under the wide and starry sky,

  Dig the grave and let me lie,

  Glad did I live and gladly die,

  And I laid me down with a will.

  This be the verse you grave for me:

  Here he lies where he longed to be,

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  CHAPTER 12

  Hanging Chad

  After Samoa, I had still 49 more nations to visit before I was home from the hill. My initial plan was to go to Africa and knock ten nations off my To-Do list in one continuous, contiguous, 55-day sweep, between January and March 2008, first crossing the Saharan belt just south of the Maghreb, through some of the world’s poorest and roughest countries, successively from Sudan through Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali to Mauritania, where I’d reach the Atlantic Ocean, then swing south, following the bulge of West Africa, to three states I’d been forced to bypass on my previous forays to the region because two of them, Liberia and Sierra Leone, had been in the midst of ferocious civil wars, while the indigenes in the third, the Ivory Coast, had been fighting a war between north and south and also killing anyone who looked remotely French, which, I’d assumed, to them I could remotely look. (Although I might also be terminated by a reader who had to struggle through that sentence.) Finally, if the turmoil then roiling Nigeria subsided, I might try to pop in there.

  I anticipated that the most prevalent potential problems would be fairly routine African stuff, the usual mélange of muggers, bandits, kidnappers, corrupt cops, jihadists, rogue soldiers, freelancing mercenaries, unreliable cross-border buses, broken-down bush taxis, Saharan sandstorms, the dust-laden winter wind called the Harmattan, unsanitary water, poor diet, and deadly diseases, from malaria to Ebola.

  I was to begin in Khartoum, the storied capital of Sudan, to which, after three years of unsuccessfully applying for a visa, I had finally found a way in thanks to a guy I’ll call Nikolas. I had given up on the standard procedures, because whenever I asked the Sudanese Embassy in D.C. about the status of my visa application, I received the same reply: “It is being considered in Khartoum.” Frustrated after 30 months of this, I had contacted an old girlfriend who was an administrator at the UN, who referred me to a knowledgeable operative at the Arab League, who kindly put me in touch with “a man who can help you,” who, after vetting me to make sure I was not CIA, Mossad, Mormon missionary, Salvation Army, or similar undesirables, and after extracting a good chunk of change, which, he explained, had to be of sufficient amount to cross several palms, put me in e-mail contact with Nikolas, a European national long resident in Khartoum, who’d “make all the arrangements.”

  I precisely followed the instructions I was given: I took a Tunisair flight from Tunis to Cairo, arriving at Terminal One, and there collected my luggage and walked to Terminal Two, where I went directly to the Kenya Air counter and asked, verbatim, for “the flight that leaves at five minutes to midnight,” the code I’d been given for flight KQ0323 to Khartoum. After the Kenya Air agent finished looking through my passport and mentioned the absence of a visa to Sudan, I told her, as I’d been told to tell her, “It has all been arranged,” and, as I’d been further instructed, gave her my most winning wink. She hesitated for the briefest bit, winked back, issued me a boarding pass, and wished me a good trip.

  At 1:40 a.m. I landed in Khartoum, where I was greeted by my “contact,” a shady, Oakley-shaded Arab in a black leather motorcycle jacket, who had my visa in one hand and an open palm in the other, the latter of which someone along the chain had apparently failed to grease sufficiently, or so he insisted.

  After I’d rectified that alleged oversight with a Benjamin, I was whisked by an arranged taxi to the Hotel Metropole, a picaresque joint likely designed by Robert Ludlum and operated by John le Carré. The first thing I noticed was that half its exterior was missing, covered over with boards and sheetrock, as if a bomb had ripped through it. When I asked the proprietor, he told me, somewhat reluctantly, but also proudly, that, yes, a bomb had ripped through it a while back, when a jihadist decided to get rid of the filthy infidels who roomed there, but only succeeded in killing three of the native staff.

  I was assured it was not likely to happen again because, “As you Americans say, lightning never strikes twice in the same place.” I thought of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center but said nothing.

  The lobby and sitting area were filled, even at that late hour, with several suited Western businessmen and a dozen veteran foreign correspondents wielding laptops, the journalists dithering over whether to finish and file their copy with their editors in New York, London, and Paris that night, or to shack up with their colleagues and file the next morning.

  As I was the only backpacking type bunking at the hotel—tourists in Khartoum are as rare as virgins in Vegas—it became quickly clear that I was under suspicion, and that I was not getting invited to the slumber party.

  But, for once, I had more pressing priorities. By dawn’s early light I had to hustle to the Police Central Registration to have my arrival rerecorded and a piece of green paper pasted in my passport, a process that cost me a few more quid. I received there a lecture that I should not, for my safety—it’s amazing the thoughtful procedures dictatorships around the world had instituted to ensure my sa
fety—travel outside of Khartoum or Omdurman, its sibling city directly across the Nile.

  I then had to flash over to the Information & Promotion Administration of the General Administration of Tourism of the Ministry of Tourism and Wild Life [sic] to receive another costly piece of paper, this one topped with a sketch of a 1950s camera, that granted me permission to take 35mm still pictures around Khartoum, provided I did not film “military areas, bridges, train stations, broadcasting and public utilities, such as water, gas, petrol, and electricity works” or “slum areas, beggars, and other defaming subjects.”

  This severely limited my artistic scope because almost every street in Khartoum could pass for a slum, and the only people not dressed like beggars were uniformed soldiers brandishing serious-looking weapons and dark-suited, sun-glassed, regime insiders toting briefcases, who looked as if they harbored reasonable apprehensions that any photo of them could end up on an Interpol WANTED poster or a dossier at the International Criminal Court. Nevertheless, just to make sure I didn’t do anything foolish, the permit required me, before I began filming, to alert “the local government inspector, the town clerk, and the executive officer of general authority.”

  Oh well, at least I was free to photograph the “Wild Life.” Since I saw no examples of the four-legged variety during my sojourn, I interpreted this edict loosely and took 50 shots one evening of dozens of spotlessly white-robed Sufi devotees in trances of ecstatic religious fervor performing the whirling-dervish dance inside a wide circle of 500 observant observers.

  * * *

  While I’d turned my back on the non-African world for two weeks, it had established another country I had to visit! But before I could shoulder the added burden of going to Kosovo and whatever other newbie nations the Powers might recognize, I had to focus on Africa. Next up was Chad, to which I could venture by either air or land once I determined which one was the lesser evil.