Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  After someone has been dead and buried about five or six years, by which time only bones and some sinews remain, the family exhumes the body, opens the coffin, lovingly washes the bones, tenderly anoints them with honey to preserve them, then dances with the bones to live music, puts them in a smaller, brightly colored coffin for reburial several days later, and parades them through the streets of whichever town the deceased resided in.

  I witnessed this ceremony in a small village where the family had just disinterred Pop and the grandparents. The whole town celebrated. It was a joyous occasion, not in any way macabre or bizarre to them. They were having a fabulous party, making a gleeful noise, dancing in the streets, drinking and clapping, overjoyed to have their “dear old friends” back in town for a few days. The bones were then escorted by the celebrants to the family residence where, like dear old friends who’d been away for a long time, they were shown through the house, regaled with all the family gossip, informed about any of the chief changes that had occurred, had their advice sought about many of those changes, and were introduced to any new spouses and children.

  Villagers in southern Madagascar carry the coffin of a disinterred person during the ceremony known as “the turning of the bones,” where the skeleton is cleaned, preserved with honey, and joyfully welcomed back to town like an old friend who had been away for about five years.

  As an honored foreign guest, I was invited to join the festivities and was particularly asked to explain to the departed—uuuh, I mean the dear old friends—the wonder of Barack Obama, the miracle of a black man—a very good, wise, and intelligent black man, they told me—the son of an African father, the husband of a woman who was the great-grandchild of slaves, being elected president of the mighty United States, an event that had struck Africa with amazement and stirred it deeply with joy and love and hope for America. And for itself.

  As far as I could tell, the bones were pleased.

  * * *

  I flew back to Joburg to replenish supplies and complete this trip with a transit to the heart of darkness, the Congo and the DRC. I spent most of my time there dodging potholes and beggars, searching for something to eat, ferrying across the wide river between the two nations, bargaining for carvings (of which the Congos have some of the best in Africa), and losing much of what I wrote at the Internet café during the three or four daily blackouts and the ten or 20 short power interruptions.

  When the power in my hotel went out, so did the overhead fan in my sweltering room, which meant I had to go out. Easier said than done. My half-star native hotel had no windows to illuminate its pitch-black hallway, and the porter put only one candle on the floor in the middle on the 150-foot-long hall. One candle.

  There’s not much to do in Kinshasa, and even less during a blackout (unless you’re a mugger), but I found one benefit: I could get an inexpensive haircut. You see, half the dudes in town had their hair clipped down to the scalp and half were taking it a tad longer, in a new style they called “The Obama.” Since both styles required the barber to use electric trimmers, he was effectively out of business during the blackouts, enabling me, as the only long-haired game in town, to negotiate for a scissors cut at half the price.

  By this point I’d finished off 60 breakfast bars, 68 packets of iced-tea mix, 15 pounds of adult cereal, 49 Big Apple T-shirts, seven large paperbacks, 750 vitamin pills, three bottles each of water purification pills, mosquito repellent, and sunscreen, 20 compact Hyatt Hotel sewing kits (dispensed as gifts and tips), two pairs of worn-out jungle pants, one pound of matzos, six tins of sardines, eight gigabytes of camera flashcard memory—and twelve of the 13 countries I’d set out to see. And my tooth was twinging sharply. It was time to head home, so I decided to take a few farewell photos—and got arrested.

  I had not been taking any photos in the Congos because I saw nothing photogenic, just grime and dilapidation. But I thought someone back home might like a look, so I walked out of my hotel and snapped two pictures of the food vendors across the street. This caused an immediate outburst of shouting, pointing, and fist waving from the locals, whereupon the omnipresent plainclothes police promptly pounced on me.

  After a thorough check of my passport and documents, and a lengthy lecture in heated French, they explained that the torn-up strip of worn tar fronting my hotel was one of the main roads leading from the Congo River into the capital and that if the rebels (who had been contentedly raping and pillaging many hundreds of miles to the east for the last couple of years) attacked from the sea and came up the river to Kinshasa (which was about as likely as their invading Coney Island) my photos could provide them with vital intelligence on how to strike into the heart of the city. Which was just pure war-hysteria bullshit. The only info the rebels could glean from my photos was where to find the fly-besieged outdoor barbecue where I ate lunch, and that would wipe them out quicker than any government weaponry.

  After I rejected the response outlined above as too difficult for me to successfully translate into diplomatic French, I told the police that I was just a simple-minded American tourist idiot who wanted a few snaps of this glorious place to show my buddies back home. I eventually got released on my own recognizance.

  The next day I learned why I’d been let off so easy in that normally repressive nation: The police had much bigger fish to fry, and size matters. The morning headline proclaimed:

  PENIS THEFT PANIC HITS THE CITY.

  After more than 14 self-described victims complained, the Kinshasa police had arrested some dozen alleged “sorcerers,” who were accused of having touched the victims to shrink their penises, often promising to restore the equipment in exchange for cash. (No credit cards accepted.) The situation was so inflammatory, with attempted lynchings reported, that the police also detained the victims until the furor calmed down.

  None of the Kinshasans congregated around the newsstand where I read this had any doubt that these crimes had actually happened.

  Hard as it may be for Westerners to understand, many West Africans either practice or believe in voodoo, black magic, and witchcraft, and a few even commit ritual murders to obtain body parts and blood for occult practices.

  An article in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry on March 29, 2005, titled “Understanding Genital-Shrinking Epidemics in West Africa,” studied the psychopathological aspects of these periodic panics—the researchers called it mass psychogenic illness—in which people have been lynched or beaten to death after being accused of causing penises, breasts, and vaginas to shrink or disappear. The belief is called koro and is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

  Preferring probative evidence to psychiatry, the Kinshasa chief of police informed Reuters that “I tell the victims that their penises are still there. When they tell me that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent, I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it?’”

  I learned that penis thefts and shrinkings had also been recently reported in Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Benin, Senegal, Sudan, and the Gambia.

  So it looks like Big Al dodged another bullet. Or even worse, the loss of his gun.

  Meanwhile, the rebels were still raping and robbing at leisure in the distant eastern jungles and have yet to make me an offer for my invaluable photographs.

  CHAPTER 20

  On the Whims of the Dragoons

  With 21 nations left, I planned to knock off the ten most tranquil of them—Nauru, East Timor, Brunei, Bhutan, Burma, Mongolia, Kiribati, North Korea, and two newbies—between July and September 2010, saving for 2011 those I most feared might knock me off.

  But after I’d purchased all 24 (nonrefundable) airline tickets and one (30-hour) ride on the Trans-Mongolian Express across the Gobi Desert, things started to unravel all along the route.

  Burma (my preferred name for Myanmar) was beset by political unrest when the military regime used underhanded ways to prolong the house arrest of pro-democracy leader Aung San Su
u Kyi before the promised elections. The elections had been scheduled for February 2010, so I’d blithely assumed that any demonstrations attendant upon it would be out of the way by the time I arrived. But in January the regime postponed the voting, and the rumor mill predicted a rescheduling for the numerologically auspicious date of October 10, the tenth day of the tenth month of the tenth (though technically the eleventh) year of the new century, which, lucky me, was right after I planned to arrive. Things were heating up and protesters were killed by the army a month before I was due to arrive there.

  North Korea decided that the spring of 2010 was a good time to take some torpedo practice, sinking a South Korean Navy ship and raising tensions to the highest level in several decades. After catching two Americans who crossed its northern border without permission, North Korea tightened the entry requirements for U.S. citizens. They refused to grant a visa to any author or journalist—and would not disclose whether they considered me to be in either of those categories until I presented myself at their embassy in Beijing the day before my plane was scheduled to fly to Pyongyang.

  Mongolia was beset by the second-worst drought in 60 years, which followed an exceptionally frigid winter, that one-two punch killing seven million head of livestock, the mainstay of the nation’s diet and economy.

  China, my gateway to Pyongyang and to Mongolia, and subsequently to Bangkok, was ticked off by President Obama’s insistence that it raise both the value of its currency and its respect for human rights, and it retaliated with a policy change that denied U.S. nationals multiple-entry visas. Although I explained to their visa office why my itinerary required me to enter and leave China three times, and implored them to grant me a triple-entry stamp, they gave me only two entries.

  Thailand, the airline hub through which I’d scheduled twelve flights, had suddenly erupted into violence between the red-shirted backers of the ousted prime minister and the trigger-happy soldiers who supported the replacement government. King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the revered 83-year-old monarch who’d held these fractious folks together for more than 60 years, was too ill to intercede, and might even have to vacate the throne for his inept son who was despised by the Thais on both sides.

  Nauru was acting up, angry because the U.S. had charged that desperately impoverished island-nation with selling itself for Russian rubles when it became one of only four countries to recognize the breakaway Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations.

  East Timor was also problematic. An island-nation north of Australia, it was now almost cut off from the rest of the world. In the euphoria surrounding its birth, three airlines had rushed to provide air service, connecting its capital of Dili with, respectively, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia. But as East Timor’s financial prospects dimmed, and neither trade nor tourists materialized, two airlines had flown away, and it was left with a thin, single-carrier lifeline from Australia.

  Thailand has some of the most ornate and impressive temples in the world. The architectural style totally different from its Buddhist neighbors in Burma and Bhutan. Here, at Wat Arun (the Temple of Dawn) on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, a huge demon is the temple guardian.

  Atop these concerns, I belatedly concluded that I needed to visit two extra countries to satisfy my criteria for visiting every state in today’s world. One was Bangladesh (where I had come within a minute of being hanged as an Indian spy when its land had been called East Pakistan, which no longer existed). The other was the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (which was a different political entity than the South Vietnam I’d visited in 1965 as its war was heating up). Much as I wanted to skip the rerun and the distant replay, I felt that would be cheating. For the purposes of my quest, I had defined a country as a political entity as well as a geographical one. I therefore had to go back because I had never visited these newly created political entities. To squeeze them in, I had to add an extra week to my itinerary.

  So much for the start of a simple summer sojourn intended to be spent peacefully picking off the easiest of the remaining nations.

  Adding a pervasively sad undertone was the poor health of Steve, my dear buddy and old travel companion. Steve and I had agreed, back in 2007, to mesh our schedules for the summer of 2010 so we could reunite for our last hurrah together, one final, freewheeling, 4 × 4 trip, across the steppes and deserts of Mongolia to visit the haunts of Genghis Khan.

  Steve was seriously injured in December 2009, when a tiger attacked the elephant on which he was riding in a remote part of Nepal. In the course of a long recuperation in a Bangkok hospital, Steve fainted several times for reasons unrelated to the attack, but which his Thai physicians were unable to ascertain. When he grew worse, he was emergency airlifted, feeble and incoherent, to the VA hospital in San Francisco, and was there diagnosed with widespread Stage IV lymphoma. Our final trip together was not to be.

  As I made preparations, with a heavy heart, to start the Asia segment by late July, Steve was in intensive care, but he managed to send me a farewell e-mail: “Sorry to let you down, old pal. We would have had a great time on the trail of the Great Khan.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Murphy Moves to TomorrowLand

  Through that winter of 2010, I tried to maintain contact with Steve in the VA hospital, but the doctors had him so doped up to mitigate his pain that our conversations were frustratingly incoherent.

  Knowing Steve as well as I did, I was sure this inveterate traveler and macho adventurer, then 84, would prefer to have died with his boots on rather than be painfully poked and probed by oncologists and subjected to all the debilitating side effects of chemotherapy in a likely losing battle. What grander, more glorious, more memorable, and more appropriate curtain call could a guy like Steve ask for than to be killed by a tiger that had pounced on the elephant he was riding while on the trail of a story in the Nepalese hinterlands! Now that’s the way to go!

  Was the tiger a cosmic cat that failed to fulfill its mission? Or did fate have more in store for Steve?

  Steve had the strongest constitution of any guy I knew, and he was still alive when I got a call through to him just after the 4th of July. He was in obvious pain, his memory was shot, he’d developed an excruciating peripheral neuropathy, and he lapsed in and out of semiconsciousness, but, as we said our good-byes, he managed to mumble, “Al, buddy, you have to finish the world. Win this one for the Gipper. Come on, bring this baby home for me.”

  And that was what I promised to do.

  * * *

  First on my list of ten was Kiribati, a midget nation comprised of one raised island and 32 atolls in the middle of the Pacific, hundreds of miles from anywhere, just on tomorrow’s side of the International Date Line, where Today ends and Tomorrow has already begun. It had been on my schedule when I’d visited the Pacific in 2007, but I’d never reached it because, shortly before I was to arrive, the only airline flying the Kiribati-Nauru route ceased operation, filed for bankruptcy protection, and left me with a useless ticket and two missed countries.

  That carrier, reincarnated as Our Airline, resumed service in 2009, providing me with a second chance to reach Nauru and continue on to East Timor. I would have to fly the once-a-week Monday Air Pacific from Fiji to Tarawa, the quiet capital of Kiribati, and visit for eight days—not because there was anywhere close to eight days’ worth of stuff to see there, but because Our Airline only flew from Tarawa to Nauru once a week, on a Tuesday, leaving me with a choice between a hasty one-night stand in Kiribati or a boring eight. I chose the latter. If I encountered any delay leaving Kiribati, it would wreck the rest of my journey.

  I became so tense about this scheduling that this ol’ road warrior morphed into an old worrier. From spring into summer I was worrying about everything—flights, visas, the political situations, weight restrictions, supplies, logistics, accommodations, diseases, endurance. What the hell was going on with me? Why had I become such a worrywart?

  I pulled back, took a ha
rd look, and came up with a three-part explanation. First, I was totally dependent on one airplane, owned by an airline with an unreliable past, flying a route only once a week, to get me out of Kiribati on time to begin to catch 21 tight airline connections to 14 countries. Second, I had been sitting on the sidelines for a year and had lost my sea legs, my travel reflexes, my on-the-road confidence. I needed to get my groove back.

  The third reason was the most pertinent, but the hardest for me to accept: I was getting older, well past the age when people traveled the way I did. At most of the abodes where I stayed, on most of the trains and buses I rode, in most of the countries I visited, I was decades older than the other voyagers. Independent travel in the underdeveloped world was a young guy’s game, requiring sturdy legs, strong arms, sharp eyes, loads of energy, a reliable memory, a high tolerance for problems and delays, and a phlegmatic demeanor, all of which I was losing.

  Had I played the game too long? Should I join the blue-rinse brigade on those cushy cruise ships? Did I think I was Peter Pan? Was I the wise, seasoned, competent, world traveler I thought I was? Or just an aching, aging, crotchety wreck of an old fart foolishly following an impossible dream far beyond his ability to achieve? Should I give it up? Or should I suck it up and make a strong final push to get the job done in the few fair years I might have ahead?

  The answer came slowly, but inexorably: I would follow my impossible dream. And I would keep my promise to Steve.

  With renewed spirit, I set out for the Pacific and Kiribati and what I hoped was the penultimate part of my great adventure.

  * * *

  If you wake up on Kiribati earlier than any of its 110,000 other inhabitants, you’d be the first person on earth to welcome the new day. Other than that, there’s nothing special or spectacular about it.