Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  After we danced around this mulberry bush for a while, he threw up his hands and told me it might help if I brought him a letter from the American Embassy in Maputo asking Angola to grant me a visa. When I sought to pin him down as to whether such a letter guaranteed me a visa, he was evasive. He eventually told me it depended on the mood of his ambassador, but he was sure I would not get a visa without such a letter.

  So off I trotted to the U.S. Embassy, where a supercilious young deputy consul wasted time asking me why he should give me such a letter. He was exactly the type of bland careerist twit with whom our Foreign Service was overloaded. I told him, as sweetly as possible, he should give me such a letter because my damn tax dollars paid his friggin’ salary, and the rent on the embassy, and because it should be no big deal for him.

  He frostily replied that our embassy was there to determine whether to give visas to visit the U.S. to foreign applicants, not to help Americans obtain visas to Angola. I told him, a little less sweetly, that it was his fucking job to assist U.S. nationals with any request that was legal and reasonable, as mine was. He was shamelessly more concerned with covering his butt by not performing any service out of the ordinary than with being compassionate or helpful. I thereupon took out my pen, asked him for his full name, and told him I’d report his attitude to my pals at the State Department (of which I actually have none), whereupon he haughtily said he’d see what he could do, and left the room.

  A full hour later, he returned to show me the best he said he could do, a worthless, one-sentence letter simply stating I was a U.S. citizen who wanted to visit every country. He was not going to ask any favors of the damn Angolans and be indebted to them.

  So I took his pathetic little letter and trotted back to the Angolan Embassy, where, without even reading it, they immediately complained that it was written on plain paper. I countered that it carried the rubber stamp of the U.S. deputy consul; they insisted I bring them a letter bearing the gold seal of the United States of America on official stationery.

  So I went back to my embassy to get that gold-sealed stationery, which was not easy to extract from that unpleasant and unaccommodating twit.

  And back with it I ran to the Angolan Embassy, where I was told, for the first time, So sorry, but the letter had to be in Portuguese, the official language of Angola. I told the official it was written in English, the official language of the good ole U.S. of A., but that only brought a shrug.

  So back I ran to our embassy. I had started this process at 9:30 a.m., and it was now 2:20 p.m., and it was Friday, and our dedicated, hardworking envoys had cleared out and closed early for the weekend. I got no translation. And no visa.

  Angola consequently became the hanging Chad of this journey. And I guess you could say that I had been Yanked around.

  * * *

  I left this part of Africa with a hopeful impression that these impoverished lands beneath the Southern Cross could finally look to a better future, that their citizens appeared genuinely pleased to be at peace and were eager to embark on a path to a safe and prospering life. Their terrifying memories and nightmares remained, as did the war-maimed bodies and the unexploded land mines. Brighter days were far in the future, and they faced a hard life immediately ahead, but they convinced me that they will persevere and prevail, and that no longer will these lands remain no countries for old men.

  CHAPTER 19

  Into the Indian Ocean

  On the final six stops of my southern African peregrinations, I got dumped on from 60 feet up by a large indri, saw one of the world’s only 80 golden bamboo lemurs in the wild, was arrested in the Congo, and had a quiet chat about American politics with three dead Malagasies.

  The Comoros, my first stop, rated straight Ds: dirty, dull, dilapidated, deteriorating, and dismally depressing. And a dumpy PPPR of 4. My visit there even ended badly, but for that I had only myself to blame. My T-shirt boldly proclaiming I was BORN TO BE WILD was probably not the wisest choice of attire in which to enter the Comoros Airport security inspection area. They quickly took away my tiny nail clippers (which had passed unmolested through ten other airports), confiscated the ship-in-a-bottle souvenir I’d purchased in town the day before (“potential dangerous weapon”), scrutinized my Listerine bottle to determine if it exceeded the allowable volume (5 ml under, whew), and questioned me intently as to why I had pointy chopsticks in my bag (to avoid using their germ-laden cutlery, although I didn’t say it).

  In typical TIA fashion, the plane left the Comoros four hours late, causing me to miss my connection to Madagascar. The tardy airline treated me to a decent hotel and dinner. There, for the first time, I became the direct beneficiary of Islamic practices, the result of being seated next to three similarly delayed itinerant Muslim missionaries. The only dessert the hotel offered was a delicious rum-raisin ice cream, my first frosty treat in two months. The confection caused a heated debate among the imams, who concluded that even though it did not contain real alcohol, the rum-raisin flavor was a temptation to be avoided, the camel’s nose in the tent of abstinence. The sole infidel at the table accordingly became the recipient of—and happily polished off—all four bowls of frozen bliss. Praise be to Allah!

  I felt sorry my devout dinner companions had missed this treat, and I had even more sympathy for the challenges of their mission, as they explained it to me. Imagine the difficulty of arriving in some poor, remote, pagan village, a stranger in a strange land, proselytizing for a strange faith, and trying to persuade the villagers to forever abstain from any form of alcohol, drugs, dancing, pork, premarital sex, extramarital sex, recreational sex, Western TV shows, movies, revealing clothing, suggestive behavior, Danish cartoons, and lustful thoughts and deeds. All in exchange for a long shot at Paradise.

  * * *

  Before I embarked on this segment, the Malagasies—as the denizens of Madagascar prefer to be called—had turned on one another, killing more than a hundred as part of a political feud that had spread by spring to include general strikes of public employees, street and road barricades, gangs of hoodlums running amok, and growing anarchy. The New York Times lamented that, because of a heated dispute between the two men who each claimed to be its president, and the shooting and looting between their supporters, “Madagascar is now surely in the belly of the crocodile.”

  Since that didn’t strike me as quite so dangerous as being in the teeth of the tiger or the jaws of the jackal, and since I’d just completed visits to the Seychelles (PPPR #2), Mauritius (PPPR #1), and Comoros, and didn’t relish making a future flight back into the Indian Ocean solely to see this one unvisited country, I decided to go for it and hope the crocodile had a bellyful.

  The country’s current problems had begun as an electoral tussle between two “Big Men,” egocentrics who hailed from different tribes and areas of the island, espoused divergent ideas about how their nation should be governed, had little liking or respect for one another, and gave only lip service to the rule of law and the democratic process. Such antagonistic African rivalries have frequently degenerated into the use of force, with each side taking to the streets to disrupt its opponent’s political rallies and intimidate voters, precipitating elections marred by fraud and ballot stuffing, yielding disputed results, prompting the refusal to accept those results, giving rise to civil wars, culminating in the horror shows that had overwhelmed Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Angola, Liberia, Congo—and now threatened Madagascar.

  As I flew over the globe’s fourth largest island, I was disappointed, having envisioned a luxuriant emerald isle of dense forests. I saw instead a denuded topography of pale, poor, reddish earth, a land that had lost 90 percent of its native ecosystem as its ancient forests had been felled for furniture, firewood, and charcoal, and burned to clear ground for food. It was a land where scores of species had been exterminated since man arrived, including the pygmy hippo, the elephant bird (at 850 pounds the largest avian ever), and 19 species of lemur, among them the giant lemur, larger than a gorilla.r />
  After 90 million years of separate evolution, Madagascar had become home to some of the most unusual—and now most endangered—wildlife and vegetation on our pale blue dot, including 70 varieties of lemurs, the planet’s largest and smallest chameleons, and 120 bird species that breed nowhere else—200,000 species in all, 80 percent of which have no other home on earth. The island had become a top concern of conservationists, but extensive damage has already been done, with the animals surviving only in national parks and reserves, while the locals continued to hunt, chop, charcoal, slash, and burn. (But before we get too shocked and self-righteous, let’s put it in perspective and remember that America’s original inhabitants exterminated the wooly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger, and that our European settlers wiped out the passenger pigeon, decimated America’s old-growth forests, its tall-grass prairies, the Everglades, the ivory billed woodpecker, and the grizzly, the bison, the mountain lion, and the wolf.)

  After I landed and was able to inspect things more closely, neither the political nor the topographical landscape seemed quite so bleak.

  The Malagasies had sobered up and realized that prosperity could not coexist with anarchy and violence and that tourists were not attracted to street warfare. By the time I arrived, the Malagasies were once again among the calmest and most gentle folks. And, to make sure they stayed that way, the striking gendarmes had returned to work and now had checkpoints all over the island, which was profoundly peaceful.

  The tourists had yet to return. The industry was down more than 90 percent. I needed no reservation for hotels (where I was often the only guest), experienced no waits in any queues, no crowds in the national parks, and no trouble engaging English-speaking guides at a moment’s notice. But it was sad to see their economy in shambles from the lack of visitors.

  From the ground, the deforested land was surprisingly attractive, with multiple mountain chains and hundreds of wide, scenic valleys, every acre of which was under cultivation to feed its 18 million people. It resembled Asia, with flooded rice paddies glistening bright blue-green in the spring sun, the hillsides terraced and trimmed with sprouting carrots, lettuce, and cabbage.

  The fruits and vegetables I savored were fresh and cheap: 25 cents bought me eight bananas, or six succulent tomatoes, or a pound of exotic fruit fresh from the forest. I dined contentedly on the tastiest tilapia, on zebu steak (which I’d never eaten), freshwater shrimp (which I had not known existed), and Chinese soup (in which floated a calf’s knee and a dozen chicken innards I had not known were edible).

  The zebu takes the place of cattle in southern Madagascar and gives the scenery an Asian cast with its huge horns, a fatty hump at the top of the neck, and long folds of flesh under the neck. Far more docile and obedient than cattle, zebu were everywhere, plowing the paddies and pulling heavily laden large-wheeled wooden carts along the roads. And they tasted fine, somewhat like buffalo, a bit chewier and less fatty than beef.

  The soil in the valleys was loaded with kaolin (aka China clay), ideal for retaining water in the paddies and for making bricks. Every village I saw had a brickmaking yard on the edge of its farms, such farms usually having ten to a hundred paddies, each about the size of a basketball court or two, but with innumerable variations in shape to accommodate the topography. When the Malagasies added a new paddy, they scooped out the clay-rich muck, piled it up near the road, ran it through a one-brick press to squeeze out the water, let the bricks dry in the sun for a few weeks, then either carted the bricks to town to earn some cash or used them to build more houses, houses which will last a hundred years (except for their thatch roofs) and blend harmoniously with their concolorous environs.

  The farmers then flood the paddy and often put in a school of small fish to eat the larvae laid there by mosquitoes and other pesky insects. The fish droppings drift down and fertilize the soil. The farmers later bring in a dozen domesticated ducks or geese to eat the fattened fish and add their own nutritious excrement to the mud, after which in go the young rice plants, one by one, each inserted by hand.

  Half of humanity is dependent on rice, including many of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable peoples. It is their staple food, providing more than one-fifth of all calories consumed around the globe, and is the only major cereal crop that can be grown in these hot and humid regions, which quickly wither wheat, barley, soybeans, and rye.

  But rice is under siege. Production surged in the 1960s, during the Green Revolution, as plant breeders increased its yield threefold to feed the expanding population in the nations where rice was the staff of life. But the yield per acre has not increased much since then, while the world’s population has doubled and is heading for 9.6 billion by 2050, which will require another—and probably unattainable—doubling of rice productivity.

  Climate change will also have a disproportionately negative impact on rice because rising temperatures will result in increased heat and drought and decreased available water. This, the agronomists at Cornell ominously predict, “will require people to rethink how rice has been grown for thousands of years,” forcing the growers to abandon the system of flooded paddies that has controlled weeds since biblical times.

  Most of us incorrectly assume that the omnipresent paddy water is required to hydrate the plants, but the real reason for the pools of water is to prevent weeds from taking root. Weeds are far more harmful to rice than to almost any other crop because the major weed in a rice field is a wild form of rice, a form sexually compatible with the crop being grown, resulting in an uncontrolled transfer of genes both ways, enabling the wild rice weed to withstand herbicides, and causing the modern, genetically modified rice to lose its high yield and head back toward where it was prior to the Green Revolution. As fresh water becomes scarcer, not only will those picturesque paddies be things of the past—but so may many millions of our poor brothers who depend on them.

  Any global warming will harm tropical crops the most because those plants are already subjected to the maximum temperatures at which they can thrive.

  On top of that, African agriculture had been hard hit with brown streak, a disease caused by mealy bugs, that had widely ravaged cassava plantations, and for which there was no cure yet. Because cassava (also known as manioc, tapioca, and yucca) is the third most important source of carbohydrates on the planet, and since millions of poor Africans rely on that starchy root for a majority of their calories, the prospect of widespread famine is frighteningly real. Oh, Africa!

  Madagascar is most famous for its lemurs, 99 varieties of which have managed to survive, all in widely scattered national parks, and I was fortunate to see ten species in my ten days of driving 2,000 kilometers.

  The prevailing theory as to why only Madagascar has lemurs is that, 100 million years ago, their prototypes evolved on the African continent and became inadvertent mariners when they were washed out to sea in storms. They floated across the 260-mile-wide Mozambique Channel to Madagascar 62 to 65 million years ago on lumps of vegetation while their less fortunate predators drowned en route. These accidental tourists speciated and filled unoccupied biological niches on Madagascar, thereby avoiding competition with other species for food or shelter and enabling the little guys to thrive.

  The modern lemurs are indigenous and endemic to Madagascar and include varieties that are nocturnal, diurnal, crepuscular; or cathemeral, some of which estivate in the dry season—and I promise no more sentences like that. They range in size from the indri, which can top 25 pounds and has a haunting cry that carries for miles, to the tiny pygmy mouse lemur, which is the world’s smallest primate and could hide in a teacup. They are all cute, cuddly, endearing, and lovable. (I was tempted to write a short poem about them, which would have been my first lemurick.)

  The rarest is the golden bamboo lemur, not discovered until 1986. It lives only in the Ranomafana rain forest.

  How does one get to see this singular little creature?

  Looking for lemurs is not as simple as spotting squirrels i
n Central Park or pikas on Mount Whitney. First, I had to drive for two days to Ranomafana, then rise before the sun because the little critters are only active and eating from dawn to around nine a.m., then hire two guides to assist, one to search ahead for the lemurs and the other to drag me along through the forest. I hiked through mountainside woods for two hours; clambered up and down through dense, wet, cloying, slippery jungle; tripped on roots, vines, creepers, mud, and thorns; and plunged into dense thickets of giant bamboo, whose newest, most tender, cyanide-laced leaves the little guys like to chomp for breakfast.

  The resolute searcher repeats this arduous process every day for an average of three or four weeks to stalk this elusive species that had avoided detection for hundreds of years. I was lucky and hit the jackpot on my first day, getting some pretty good photos of both the golden bamboo lemur and the almost-as-rare greater bamboo lemur. My hands and legs were covered with thorn scratches, I twisted my ankle, and I suffered the indignity of being shat on from high above by a large indri. All in all, a fair exchange.

  Now, about talking to those dead folks …

  The culture of Madagascar is replete with both voodoo, which came across from Africa, and ancestor worship, which came with the Malagasies’ Asian forbears. These traits are combined in a remarkable ceremony called Famadihana, the turning of the bones.