The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  ALSO BY CARL HOFFMAN

  Hunting Warbirds

  For my mother and father:

  Diane Hoffman and Burt Hoffman

  Our Nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

  —Pascal

  We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all one’s exploring will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.

  —T.S. Eliot

  Contents

  Prologue: Time for Prayer

  PART ONE

  AMERICAS

  ONE: Go!

  TWO: Hope for Buena Suerte

  THREE: Your Time Comes or It Doesn’t

  PART TWO

  AFRICA

  FOUR: Agents of Death and Destruction

  FIVE: That Train Is Very Bad

  PART THREE

  ASIA

  SIX: Jalan! Jalan!

  SEVEN: The 290th Victim

  EIGHT: I Can Only Cry My Eyes

  NINE: What To Do?

  TEN: Scariana

  ELEVEN: Hope And Wait

  TWELVE: Same, Same, but Different

  Appendix

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  Time for Prayer

  OUTSIDE OF PUL-I-KHUMRI, the bus shuddered to a halt on the dusty roadside and couldn’t be restarted. Khalid, my traveling companion, sighed. Fretted. I rose to go outside and stretch my legs like everyone else, but Khalid stopped me. “This is bad,” he said in a whisper. “It is a dangerous place. It is the home of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He is the most dangerous man in Afghanistan. Very religious, the leader of the Islamic Party of Afghanistan. It is the party of violence and killing of innocent people. He is not Taliban, but just as bad. He lives in exile now, but his people are here.” Khalid, I knew, was right. Hekmatyar had been politically all over the place, but since the fall of the Taliban he’d been violently opposed to both the Karzai government and the American presence in Afghanistan. He’d been officially labeled a terrorist by the United States. I suddenly had a terrible feeling. A feeling of dread, worse than at any time since I’d left home months ago to journey exclusively around the world on its most dangerous and crowded and slowest buses, boats, trains, and planes. My knife was taped to my arm and I was dressed in a grease-stained salwar kameez, with a hat pulled low over my head and a week’s growth of beard covering my face, but out here what good would it do if we had to stop moving for a day? Where would I go? Where would I flee? There was no taxi to jump into, no government ministry or five-star hotel in which to hide. Outside were brown fields. A few mud houses. Bare trees. What if the bus couldn’t be restarted? What if we had to get off and wait in town and I was discovered? I was crazy for trying to ride a bus across Afghanistan in the middle of a war; idiotic. What had I been thinking? I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep, to think about nothing.

  Khalid prayed.

  PART ONE

  AMERICAS

  A Russian-made Cuban commercial jet smashed into the side of a mountain near the Venezuelan city of Valencia on Saturday night, killing all twenty-two people on board, authorities said today. There was no immediate explanation for the crash, the second major accident in less than a week for the state-owned airline.

  —New York Times, December 27, 1999

  ONE

  Go!

  “GO, GO, GO!” yelled a Chinese woman in front of the New Century Bus office, a yellowed, basement room in an old federal row house on H Street Northwest, in Washington, D.C.’s anemic Chinatown. The bus was around the corner. It was leaving. Now. It was cold and bright and my children and Lindsey, my wife, ran with me and we hugged and a Chinese man in a black leather jacket barked “Go!” and the next thing I knew I was alone, rolling down K Street on a so-called China bus to New York City. My phone chirped. A text from Lindsey: “I wanted a picture of all of us!” There had been no time. It seemed like a voice, fading, from up a river on which a current was sweeping me away.

  The weather was unsettling, as it always is in the first weeks of March. The day before had been hot and cold and sunny and rainy and cloudy and windy all at the same time. Walking down Columbia Road with ten hundred-dollar bills fresh from the ATM in my pocket, squinting into the sun and clouds and trying not to get blown away by the gusts, I even got hit with hail the size of peas. Stop signs whipped back and forth, and a Washington Post news box crashed to the ground. I had a lump in my throat. My chest was tight. I hadn’t slept well for weeks. In the morning I was leaving home.

  For twenty years I had been a stable husband and father, and then I’d snapped. My life suddenly didn’t seem to fit anymore. I was middle-aged, with a wife and three children whom I loved but hadn’t been living with for almost a year. A long journey seemed the best solution. The classic move was to leave the world for the exotic to be born anew: Gauguin shipped himself off to Tahiti, Wilfred Thesiger to the Empty Quarter; the New York artist Tobias Schneebaum literally shed his clothes by the Madre de Dios River and walked naked into the Peruvian Amazon. Its opposite—the search for raw pleasure—had long been popular, too: food and cafés in Rome for Henry James, and for Liz Gilbert, the spiritual groove of Bali’s Ubud.

  As I fought my way through the wind down Columbia Road to finish packing in my barely furnished apartment, I had something different in mind: to escape not out of the world but right into its messy heart. To experience travel not as a holiday, but as it is for most people: a simple daily act of moving from one place to another on the cheapest conveyance possible. A necessary part of life, like brushing your teeth or sleeping or making love.

  The idea first struck on a flight from Kinshasa to Kikwit in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while traveling on a magazine assignment. The thirty-year-old, eighteen-seat Short Skyvan was full, hot as an asphalt roof on a summer’s afternoon and buzzing with flies, and there was some doubt about when it would leave or if it would leave at all. Planes in the Congo were crashing with alarming regularity; my worry wasn’t whether I’d get a meal, but whether I might live or die. And we were lucky; we were flying. Below us was a country the size of Western Europe, with just three hundred miles of paved roads on which hordes of people were packed into thirty-ton trucks traveling on dirt tracks.

  By road or by air, none of the people moving around the Congo were tourists. My fellow passengers in the Skyvan were sweaty and nervous, but resigned to delays and waiting and discomfort. Maybe that was how all travelers had once felt, I thought. For most of human history, travel, after all, was an arduous necessity. The word itself comes from the French travailler—to toil or labor, reflecting the difficulty of going anywhere in the Middle Ages. Aside from a few freaks like William Lithgow, a Scotsman who wandered through Europe, the Near East, and northern Africa in the early seventeenth century, people traveled not for the pleasure of it but because they had to—long journeys by foot or horseback or wagon or sailing ship that were uncomfortable and unpredictable and scary. Roads were bad. Ships sank. Today, however, we think of travel as joy-seeking, the pursuit of pleasure, a vacation, and tourism is the largest industry on earth, generating $500 billion a year in revenue. But tourism is a relatively new phenomenon, barely three hundred years old. As a journalist who frequently ended up in some of the world’s oddest corners and crevices, I gradually began to realize that the big numbers of today’s tourism industry obscured a parallel reality, excluded a whole river of people on the move. Excluded, in fact, most of the world’s travelers, for whom travel was still a punishing, unpredictable, and sometimes deadly work of travail.

  After that Congo flight, wherever I went I saw it, this pulsing artery of these people, moving within cities and between countries and across oceans, people who didn’t show up on the tourism statistics and didn�
�t earn frequent-flyer miles. A largely rural planet of villages had, in the last fifty years, become a rapidly urbanizing and interconnected world. Fifty-five percent of Brazilians lived in cities in 1970; by 1995 that number was almost eighty percent. Pick a country in South America or Africa or Asia and the statistics were similar. On cars, minivans, buses, boats, trains, and planes—not to mention the most pitiful of all, packed into shipping containers or trudging through the Texas desert with their coyote guides—people moved from village to city, from country to country, between continents, largely invisible in the world’s travel statistics. Only in 2008 came the report from Dilip Ratha, a renegade economist at the World Bank and the first person to seriously study remittances (the money migrants send home to their families). Until Ratha’s research, most economists saw remittances as small sums insignificant to international development. But Ratha unveiled some 200 million migrants worldwide sending home $300 billion a year, three times the world’s combined foreign aid. That’s 200 million roofers and landscapers and dishwashers and construction workers and babysitters on the move, and most of them weren’t relaxing on United or Singapore Airlines.

  Reading the paper, I noticed the macabre shadows of their travels: BANGLADESH FERRY SINKS; MANY DIE, burped a typical small headline buried deep within the Washington Post. In the poor, watery world of Bangladesh, more than 20,000 passenger ferries were the only option between Dhaka and its outlying districts. In the last twenty-six years, 496 sinkings, killing more than 5,000 people, have been reported. Ditto Indonesia, where 400 drowned in January 2007 when an overcrowded ferry sank on a nineteen-hour passage between Java and Kalimantan. Which was nothing unusual for weary travelers in the archipelago: it was the second ferry to sink in two days, and the fourth loss of over 500 people on Indonesian passenger lines since 1999.

  Wherever I looked, I saw them. With an eye peeled for those little news clips, they were never-ending: Amazon passenger boats capsized and sank. Airplanes in Africa crashed. Trains in India derailed or were attacked by mobs. When the New York Times ran a piece in 2007 about the discomforts of air travel, its website was swamped—298 angry, bitter, indignant comments poured in. “I will go to the ends of the earth to avoid air travel,” wrote Isabella from Palo Alto, California, in a typical note. But those comments were largely about domestic U.S. air travel, where only one fatal crash occurred on a major scheduled airline between 2006 and 2009. Crowded (but clean) airplanes, unsympathetic flight attendants—so what? You could book your flight on the web, get a bag of mini-pretzels, and arrive. African aviation was a different universe altogether, home to fifty of the ninety airlines banned as “flying coffins” by the European Union, and where you were twenty-five times more likely to die than on an American carrier.

  In The Naked Tourist, Lawrence Osborne writes that “travel itself is an outmoded conceit … Travel has been comprehensively replaced by tourism … and the modern traveler has nowhere left to go.” I knew what he meant, but I didn’t agree. Travel in the oldest sense of the world was still right under our noses, I thought. On all those buses plunging off cliffs and sinking ferries and crashing planes, people were unselfconsciously making arduous and unpredictable journeys every day.

  Once I started seeing all those deathtraps out there, I couldn’t shake my curiosity. I wanted to jump on and circumnavigate the planet on that unseen artery of mass transit. I wanted to know what it was like on the ferries that killed people daily, the buses that plunged off cliffs, the airplanes that crashed. I wanted to travel around the world as most of the people in the world did, putting their lives at risk every time they took off on overcrowded and poorly maintained conveyances because that was all they could afford or there were no other options.

  A long journey invites the unexpected, and I decided to take small hedges where I could. Inflatable life vest. Waterproof, battery-operated strobe light. A half-joke canned survival kit my sister had handed me on Christmas morning. A pile of orange plastic vials: Cipro if things turned “watery,” said my doctor, “but if you see blood, seek help.” Zithromycin for respiratory infections. Tylenol with codeine for really bad pain, “two every four hours as needed.” Malarone for malaria. Sterile needles and suture thread. I’d tried to double my life insurance, to no avail: two different insurance agents had come up empty-handed, even though I’d conveniently forgotten to mention most of the really bad places and conveyances on my tentative itinerary. My “travel exposure,” as the guy from AIG Insurance said, was just too great. I was pumped up with every vaccine imaginable: hepatitis A and B, and Japanese encephalitis; yellow fever and typhoid; tetanus and cholera. There was nothing more to prepare for.

  . . .

  ESCAPING WAS SOMETHING I’d gotten good at. In my twenties I’d started writing and traveling. For me, the two were inseparable. For my first national magazine assignment I profiled the captain of a 600-foot chemical tanker sliding down the Atlantic coast. Leaving home to meet the tanker in New Haven, Connecticut, I was so nervous all I wanted to do was puke. Three weeks later an editor called and said, “How’d you like to go to the Canary Islands for two weeks?”

  Lighting out was hard in those days. I’d fallen in love with Lindsey the summer I’d turned twenty-two; we’d married five years later and we were both self-employed, so we were together all the time. Leaving, walking down the Jetway for some distant place, I’d suddenly feel naked. I can remember leaving for St. Lucia once and getting choked up as I boarded the plane. I called home every day.

  I don’t know when or how things changed; they did so slowly, bit by bit. Over the years I grew comfortable out on the edges of the world. I was never so focused—all of my energy every day and night bent to the single task of getting the story, getting into other people’s lives. I could sacrifice myself to that task, and go hungry or suffer through heat or cold in a way that I never did at home. For me, each story was like life and death, a journey to the edge and back, and in many ways I felt I could go so far precisely because I had an anchor so firmly planted in the sand of home.

  I was paid to sate my curiosity about the world. I hung out with flying missionaries in the jungles and mountains of New Guinea, and with mercenary pilots in southern Sudan. I ate reindeer marrow with the last remnants of a tribe of herders in Siberia. On a 150-foot ship off the coast of southern and eastern Greenland I learned to drink whiskey with a man who’d once been imprisoned in a three-foot-square metal box in the Solomon Islands and roamed the world with a life-size cardboard cutout of John Wayne. The adventures were addictive. Instead of choking up when I walked to my next flight, I started craving that moment of setting out. To get on the plane was to roll the dice, to look up at the sky and think, here I go! What would I experience? Whom would I meet? Would I get the story and bring it home? Would I even live? And I got to plunge into other people’s galaxies, see life through their eyes. That was the greatest privilege of being a journalist—to live for a time in someone else’s world, to be subsumed in otherness and make it yours, wrap it around you like a new identity. The more borders I crossed, the more strange places I dropped into, the more I couldn’t abandon the thought that right now, at this moment, there were Polar Inuit whipping their dogs across treeless deserts of ice and snow in Greenland, Dayak women weaving baskets in longhouses in Borneo, Mayans worshipping strange gods in smoky ceremonies in Guatemala. Once I understood that otherness was out there, I couldn’t leave it alone.

  Home became ever more strange to return to. The two lives were jarring; one day to be in southern Sudan in a war zone in heat and flies amid gunshot victims, the next at a PTA meeting. One day drifting down the Amazon, the next vacuuming the house and buying milk at Safeway. I told my tales—they were eagerly awaited—but I didn’t tell anyone how difficult it was becoming to straddle those two worlds. I was ever more open to the world and ever more closed at home … until the time that I looked forward to most was walking down that Jetway, rather than coming home.

  One day my body just reacted
, as if I had a simmering flu. I was fully functioning, but tired, lethargic, barely able to get off the sofa and seemingly never able to get enough sleep. A year passed and the doctor could find nothing wrong with me. Then, as so often happened in my life, the phone rang and a week later I was gone—this time on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for two months, writing about a quixotic search for Amelia Earhart. My lethargy evaporated on the very first day of royal blue sea and flying fish and the flukes of sounding whales. Eight weeks later I was home again, sickness gone, but conscious for the first time of a deep unhappiness, profoundly disconnected from the life I’d thought unshakable.

  IN THE OPENING PAGES of the first book I ever loved, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, the vacationing Walker children discovered a dinghy in the boathouse of their rented farm on the shores of a lake—and then spotted an island. “All four of them at once were filled with the same idea,” wrote Ransome. “It was not just an island. It was THE island, waiting for them. It was their island. With an island like that within sight, who could be content to live on the mainland and sleep in bed at night? With a lake as big as a small sea, a fourteen-foot dinghy waiting in the boathouse, and the little wooded island waiting for explorers, nothing but a sailing voyage of discovery seemed worth thinking about.”

  Written in 1930 by a roving correspondent who covered the Russian Revolution, married Leon Trotsky’s secretary, and cruised the Baltic in a twenty-foot catboat, that passage captured the birth of wanderlust better than any I’ve read since. A boat. An island. A journey. The idea arises unbidden. It takes hold and you can’t shake it. Nothing else seems worth thinking about. “Why are you doing this?” asked my friends. They couldn’t fathom it. They saw my journey as some sort of masochism, and the conveyances as a self-imposed death sentence. People stopped calling me days before I even left. They didn’t offer condolences or sympathy or even good luck. They just hid, as if I’d gone nuts, as if they were embarrassed for me and didn’t know what to say. “Poor Carl,” I could imagine them saying, “he’s so lost he’s gone off to kill himself the slow way.”