Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  Anna left Livingstone the next day for her long flights home while I headed farther east on my crazy quest into Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique.

  CHAPTER 18

  No Countries for Old Men

  With many miles to cover and borders to cross after leaving Livingstone, most days now entailed a wake-up around 5:30 a.m., a rush to catch the 6:30 bus to the next main stop (only to be informed it would not leave until it was full, which was often 9:30), then an 8-to-12-hour ride in a rickety old vehicle designed for 50, reconfigured for 65, and crammed with close to one hundred. I would reach my destination around eight p.m., set up my tent in the dark; wake up the next morning to visit whatever brought me there, then pack up at dawn the following morning and shove off again. Day after day.

  On one of these trips I heard that, the week before, a bus driver had stopped to have a few drinks while transporting 15 mental patients to an asylum near Lilongwe. When he returned to his bus, he found the patients had all escaped. Afraid he’d be fired for gross negligence, he drove to the nearest local bus stop and offered a free ride to the first 15 people to board. He then delivered them all to the mental hospital, advising the psychiatric staff that these patients were prone to wild fantasies and highly excitable. His deception wasn’t discovered until three days later. (I still don’t know if the tale was apocryphal—or ordinary TIA.)

  As I headed east on my buses, circumstances changed markedly. The eastern half of mid-southern Africa was different from, and far tougher than, the western half. As a few examples:

  • Per capita income in Botswana was $13,000; in Zambia, $1,400.

  • No beggars in Namibia and Botswana (NB), many of them farther east.

  • No bicycle riders on the roads in Namibia, lots of them in poorer Zambia and Malawi.

  • A German-quality cleanliness in NB; dust, dirt, and grime to the east.

  • Camping in NB usually meant sharing, with a few other tents, the lush, fence-enclosed back lawn of an industrious widow’s home, with hot showers, kitchen privileges, cooking facilities, and sit-down, indoor, flush toilets. East of Livingstone, it was pit campfires and primitive latrines in crowded, dusty campsites.

  • Although all these countries were experiencing a four-year drought, harming agriculture and livestock, its impact was far more severe in the east. NB, possessing great mineral wealth and a thriving tourist industry, was able to buy needed food, but the eastern states tottered on the brink of serious famine, relieved only by international aid agencies.

  • The NB restaurants served German-style food, often with culled grilled game. Farther east, the grub at the roadside stalls was starchy, fried, and lacking in nutrients: cassava fritters, fried bread balls, rice, and dozens of dishes made of mashed-up corn ground into a powder and reconstituted into everything from bland pancakes to tasteless porridge.

  • The temperature in NB had been in the 70s. It soared into the 90s after I’d crossed the Tropic of Capricorn.

  • The rate of HIV infection rose from 20 percent in Namibia to well over 30 percent in the east. Life expectancy was reduced from 52 years in Namibia to 34–39 farther east.

  These were no countries for old men. Or of them.

  For the second time in my last three trips, I got hit by pickpockets. In the undeveloped world I wear pants or shorts with at least six pockets and try to distribute my valuable portable assets among them so no single picked pocket is a disaster. I knew the rear pockets were the most vulnerable and tempting, and I knew I was entering pickpocket paradise when I visited the fairgrounds in Lusaka to see the 89th Zambia Agricultural and Commercial Exhibition, so I headed directly for a men’s room where I intended to shift my back pocket stuff to a safer location. But the bad guys beat me to it.

  Two of them grabbed the large box I was carrying (filled with handicrafts I’d just bought at the Sunday Market down the road), pretending to help me carry it. While I remonstrated and tussled with them, their third colleague hit my right-rear pocket and made off with its contents: a plastic baggie containing a little cash ($20); a photocopy of my passport (30 cents); my ticket for the bus to Chipata the next morning ($6); and my last hundred sheets of soft, white, genuine U.S. toilet paper—Priceless!

  Toilet paper is also the key to the system I use for comfort-ranking countries around the world. Unlike the rather esoteric econometric model utilized by the World Bank or the incomprehensible computer program employed by the International Monetary Fund, my Podell Potty Paper Rating (PPPR) System is simple, reliable, and easy to apply. It’s based on the quality of toilet paper in that country’s public restrooms and uses the following scale:

  COUNTRY’S WORLD COMFORT RANKING BASED ON TYPE TOILET TISSUE IN PUBLIC RESTROOMS

  1 Soft white

  2 Hard white

  3 Rough brown, green, or purple

  4 Pieces of newspaper

  5 Bucket of water (mostly in Asia)

  6 No paper, no water. And no toilet seat.

  7 No public toilets at all

  The PPPR System can also be applied to rating hotels: Just ignore those three or four stars the management has wishfully or misleadingly painted on the welcoming billboard, and head for the head to check the goods.

  Moving ever eastward, I stayed at one rugged campsite (PPPR = 4) where I met a group of 16-year-olds from England who had just finished a ten-day backpack, carrying all their food, water, supplies, and tents, with no porters, across a dry, uninhabited, mountainous area in southern Malawi. (And I’d thought I did well if I backpacked for three days along the Escarpment Trail from Kaaterskill Falls to Windham.)

  At my campsite in Lilongwe (PPPR = 2) I met four sturdy Irish lads who were bicycling from Cairo to Cape Town, frequently covering a hundred miles a day, even in mountainous terrain. (And I once believed I was doing well if I pedaled the level 25 miles from Westhampton Beach to Shinnecock Inlet and back before nightfall.)

  At the Big Blue campsite on the shore of Lake Malawi (PPPR = 3) I met three brawny South Africans in the midst of a yearlong journey kayaking the length of the four largest African lakes and their riverine connections. (And I had been proud of myself if I managed to kayak from Riverhead out past the Peconic Bay Bridge and back before the tide changed.)

  It’s no continent for old men.

  I took a break at Big Blue for four lazy days of much-needed R & R, tenting near the relaxed, almost Caribbeanesque, backpackers’ town of Nkhata Bay on the western shore of Lake Malawi, the third largest on the continent, which 19th-century explorer David Livingstone called “the lake of stars.” Unlike the Great Lakes or New York State’s Finger Lakes or most U.S. lakes, which were formed by glacial gouging and scouring during the Ice Age 20,000 years ago, the three largest lakes of Africa were all formed more than a million years ago when tectonic plates tore Africa asunder, creating a longitudinal gash more than 2000 miles long. In this gash are the awesome Rift Valley in Kenya and the 3000-foot-deep gorge in Ethiopia that is the start of the Blue Nile and Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika, and Malawi.

  Lake Malawi contains the largest number of fish species of any freshwater body on the planet, including more than one thousand species of cichlids, which students of evolution regard as significant as Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos.

  Around Big Blue, I hobnobbed and bargained for carvings with the famed Malawi woodworkers; ate delicious whole local butterfish; hiked one of the few remaining rain forests in the country, where I managed to see (with the help of a nature guide) the elusive African broadbill, a species which, despite its prosaic name, is much sought by bird-watchers; kayaked along the lake’s shoreline; tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, to clamber aboard one of the thin, tipsy dugout canoes the natives use; scuba dived with Aqua Africa into an amazing variety of brightly colored freshwater fish, mostly cichlids, 95 percent of which are found nowhere else on earth; and slept ten hours a night to the sound of the waves lapping at the shore 15 feet below my tent perch.

  I also spent the better part of
two days chatting up and photographing a lovely British college student, and was sure I was making good progress. When she asked me to e-mail her a couple of the photos I saw my opportunity. I confessed to not being very adept with a computer and slyly suggested I could deliver photo prints to her in London, in person, in six weeks, on my way home. And maybe I could take her to dinner after the delivery?

  “No, don’t bother,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Just send them to me as an e-mail attachment. Perhaps you could ask one of your grandchildren to show you how.”

  Have I mentioned it was not a favorable environment for males of advanced age?

  At the cramped Internet hut adjacent to Big Blue that housed six heavily trafficked open cubicles, I couldn’t help but overhear the young man in the next booth skyping his mum back in England. It was, by his admission, his first call to her in three months and only his third since he left the English Midlands seven months before. Within ten minutes he told her the following: He had discovered his true calling, which was to become an artist of African scenery and wildlife, and had abandoned his previous career plan of becoming a photographer. He had sold all his photo equipment to buy expensive African hardwood frames for the paintings he’d exhibit in Berlin in the not-too-distant future (although he had yet to find a gallery). He thought he’d be home to see her in about three more years. He had a relationship with a girl in Mozambique but, not to worry, he no longer thinks he will marry her, although she might be preggers, but, again, not to worry, she doesn’t mind keeping the baby because “it’s the African way,” and no big deal; and, Oh, yes, he might have contracted HIV, but the chances were slight, and, no, he hasn’t had time yet to get an AIDS test, but he will get one within three months and will be sure to let Mum know the result. And give my love to Da. Bye.

  * * *

  Two concerns persisted through my trek eastward: my need for a visa to Angola and my need for a root canal job on my lower-right bicuspid.

  I’d exchanged gossip with the backpack brigade and found not a one who ever got an Angolan visa, although the Irish bicyclists were hopeful they’d succeed because “everybody loves Ireland.” Even more discouraging, the woman who ran the camp in Lilongwe told me that in all her years of operation, she’d only had two guests who’d managed to snag visas to Angola, and that, if I managed to get one, dinner was her treat. She was depressingly confident she’d never have to make good on this offer.

  As for the bicuspid, my dentist had tested it thoroughly a month before I left New York and advised a prophylactic root canal, but admitted, when I pressed him, that all his tappings and cold-air sprayings and X-rayings were inconclusive. I had not been in the mood for a possibly unnecessary root canal, so I opted for watchful waiting.

  Sure enough, the little bugger started to ping and twitch about two weeks into this trip, and then caused a big abscess. Since there was no friggin’ way I was going to submit to an endodontic procedure in Malawi, I dipped into my supply of Amoxicillin tablets three times a day for a week, which reduced the twinging, and I repeatedly stabbed the abscess with my hypodermic needle, which reduced the swelling, both of which made me somewhat hopeful I could drag this out until I returned home in another six weeks.

  I left Nkhata Bay for the once-a-week, 25-hour voyage across Lake Malawi on the Ilala, a decrepit ship long overdue for the scrap heap that’d be familiar to anyone who read Lord Jim. It was an accident waiting to happen, with just two 22-person lifeboats, one life raft, and four life preservers—I counted them very carefully—for ten times as many passengers. It was one of those ancient rust buckets whose sinking, with hundreds drowned, flashed on the news for a few hours. But it was the only game in town if one needed to cross the lake. And this one needed to cross the lake.

  Although I usually book passage in second class on Third World trains and boats so I can get to know the locals instead of the wealthy tourists, some sixth sense fortunately prevailed upon me not to use this occasion to assuage my colonial guilt, but to book a mattress on the first-class deck instead. Best decision I made this trip.

  The second-class deck was hardly a deck, but an oppressively humid, fetid, unbearably hot corridor chockablock with bags, bundles, bawling babies, and about 400 sweating, half-naked, sharp-elbowed people compacted into a space for 50, with no seats, no lights, no toilets, no water, no AC, and no breeze. For 24 hours. (Third class was totally beyond belief, more a means of torture than a mode of travel.)

  It was no ship for old landlubbers.

  As the voyage drew to a close, I wanted to get off as quickly as possible. But that was not possible. Most of the villages where the Ilala discharged its passengers were too poor to build docks or jetties. You had to hand your luggage down from the upper deck into a wildly bobbing lifeboat, then climb 30 feet down a rickety ladder into the boat, which was loaded to within two inches of the gunwales, then endure the sea-sickening 15-minute ride to the beach, and then leap off, with all your luggage, into thigh-high water.

  At the port of call right before mine, it had taken the Ilala, using this method, six and a half hours to discharge its passengers and its cargo of dried fish, bananas, galvanized roofing, motor oil, and complete homes of furniture, as a result of which we reached my discharge point, and my perilous plunge into the lifeboat, seven hours behind schedule and in the dead of night.

  After I waded ashore, I saw no buses, minivans, or any other means of transport at the tiny border burg of Metangula, and I was assured I’d see none until morning at the earliest. After several hours of dickering, I prevailed upon the immigration officer, who was going off duty, to drive me and a Swiss couple two hours through the forests to Lichinga, the somnolent capital of Niassa Province in far northern Mozambique, which the locals accurately describe as o fim do mundo, the end of the world. It’s the least populated province in Mozambique and one of the most sparsely settled in all Africa, comprising the lake, sheer cliffs, rocky escarpments, and inhospitable land. From the ship, I’d seen only four huts in the final five hours. In the car, we saw only six houses and two vehicles in a drive of 90 miles.

  It was no country for anybody.

  Women tending a tea plantation in Mozambique. In most of Africa, women do most of the work. The men limit their labors to three tasks: lifting heavy objects, driving trucks and other motorized equipment, and herding or working with large farm animals.

  After another week, by then two days behind schedule, I made it to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, a city so large and spread out that foot power had to yield to horsepower. I got about in worn-out old cabs and minibuses operated by kids who couldn’t even pass the driving test in New Jersey. These cars had crumpled fenders, missing bumpers, threadbare tires, and shattered windscreens frequently festooned with decals assuring the passengers that THIS VEHICLE IS PROTECTED BY THE BLOOD OF JESUS, which failed to assure me as much as being in the good hands of Allstate, or if State Farm were there, or Nationwide were on my side.

  After more than two centuries of being sold into slavery, followed by two more centuries of harsh and exploitative Portuguese rule, followed by the revolution that brought independence in 1974, followed by 15 years of internecine bloodshed between a Socialist government and rightist guerrillas, the people of Mozambique had, in 1992, finally embraced peace and laid to rest ZAPU and FRELIMO, RENAMO and SWAPO, UNIP and the MMD, abandoned their radical positions, and resumed the laid-back attitude and friendly Afro-Iberian-Brazilian style that’d made the place so popular with tourists in the 60s and early 70s. The only remaining public evidence of Mozambique’s revolutionary vigor was the national flag—a shovel crossed by an assault rifle—and the names of Maputo’s main avenues, which commemorated international Socialist soldiers and philosophers like Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse Tung, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, and the heroes of the African Battles for Independence: Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Robert Mugabe, and Julius Nyerere.

  The last was the town’s main drag, a wide bustling boulevard bordered by capacio
us restored Iberian-style mansions, painted in yellow, pink, and fuchsia pastels, behind concrete walls above which I could see wide, wraparound wrought-iron balconies and roofs brown with South American tile, below which operated hundreds of enterprising sidewalk vendors beside gardens of flame trees and palm fronds

  I found no one in Mozambique who spoke fluent English, and only a few who were even comprehensible. Here, for example, is the word-for-word declaration from the back of my Mozambique Airlines ticket: “IT CASTRATES FOR EMISSION OF ELECTRONIC TICKET. I INFORM: If the passenger’s trip understands a point of final destiny or of scale in a Country that not the one of the departure the Convention of Varsavia can be applicable.” (Well, at least now you know which airline to take when you’re ready to go to your point of final destiny.)

  My main goal in Maputo was to get a visa to Angola. Since both Mozambique and Angola had suffered under the same Portuguese colonial masters, consequently spoke that same language, and had been the most radically leftist in Africa, there was a certain camaraderie between them, which was why Mozambique was one of the few nations in Africa in which Angola had established an embassy. That embassy was my only shot at the visa, but it was a Friday, and my flight back to Joburg—my point of final destiny—left the next day; I just had one chance.

  As soon as I walked into the Angolan Embassy and said “visa,” the official tried to get rid of me by declaring that I needed, as a prerequisite, a notarized letter from an Angolan citizen inviting me to visit. When I produced exactly such a letter from the Angolan agent of Emirates Airlines inviting me to come to Luanda to inspect the airport facilities, the consular officer was nonplussed, but recovered sufficiently to tell me his embassy did not grant visas to foreigners who were not residents in Mozambique, and that I should return to the U.S. and apply there. I told him, ever so politely, that this was a load of crap because every embassy was empowered to grant a visa to an applicant who personally presented himself at the embassy, regardless of where the applicant was domiciled, as long as his passport and application documents were in order—which was not universally true, but sounded reasonable to me, and came close to passing the red-face test.