Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places

by Adam Fletcher

  This bus had cried wolf too often. We’d just cried. Something else was going to go wrong, surely? Waiting out there would be poles and cement sacks and we’d be hoisted up and unceremoniously dumped back into our bunks once more.

  The front door opened. The first passengers disembarked. The crew formed a row from the driver’s seat to the door and shook hands with the disembarking, dishevelled passengers. This hadn’t been a normal journey for them, either.

  “I think this is really it,” Annett said, as we collected up our stuff and sloped down the aisle.

  “It can’t be. It just can’t be. Can it?”

  John held out his hand to me. I had a sudden, strange urge to thank him. It arrived unexpected, at the back door of my mind, like a burglar. What did I have to thank him for? I investigated the feeling. It was a new feeling. It felt good to be having new feelings. Even if they were just vague and confusing.

  I tried to assemble the feeling into a shape. In Berlin I tutted and stamped my feet and cursed the heavens if I arrived at an underground station and the screen said I’d have to wait five minutes for the next train. Here, with minimal complaint, no entertainment, and almost nothing to eat or drink, I’d spent forty-three hours. This experience and so, by extension, John, had taught me a lot. I now knew that I could sleep in a space little bigger than a matchbox, that I could live on half a pastry a day, that I could pee in an open pit, that I didn’t need the soft furnishings of home, that I rose to challenges, rather than ducking, covering, and lightly whimpering in their presence.

  I grasped his hand. It felt like leather. We shook. I nodded at him. It wasn’t much. I hoped it was enough.

  Stepping out into the street, I looked down at my watch for the final time.

  Forty-four hours had passed.

  We were mobbed by sellers. Despite the simplistic, out of date stories they tell themselves of being socialists, capitalism hunts you down here, shouts its prices at you, harangues you into looking at all its trinkets. We bought everything. We bought it all. Water, cookies, pot noodles, fruit. With our hungry eyes and empty bellies we indulged. Oh, did we indulge.

  The little old lady from the bunk in front of me hobbled past, twisted over her wooden walking stick, her back worn down by the abrasives of time and gravity. I wondered what those forty-four hours had been like for her. They were outliers for Annett and I because we were used to things just working. We expected things to be easy, comfortable, reliable, safe because that was how our lives had always been until now.

  Distance, time, hardship—it all existed on a different scale here. I doubted that this journey would make it into any book of her life, not compared to what she’d lived through here. What was forty-four hours of mild inconvenience when you’d already spent thirty years trapped in a high-speed vehicle of political change with an even less clear destination, no possibility to get off, and the view from the windows showing a dizzying, relentless blur of progress—of indoor plumbing, skyscrapers, cars, scooters. Everything getting bigger, wider, faster, then smaller, flatter, shinier and congested as cities gobbled like Pac-Man at the surrounding farmland. Did she think she still lived in a Communist country? That long after Chairman Mao some formula was amended, some missing zero was added and the code of Communism finally clicked into place and transformed a nation where everyone was supposed to be equal into a nation with the fourth-highest level of inequality in the world? That was a lot of change for one lifetime. I didn’t envy her having to try to make sense of it.

  We checked into the first Western chain hotel we could find. It was gloriously generic; its shiny, marble lobby spoke to the standards of luxury it would offer us. Our days of peeing in a pit were over. In our room, wrapped up in our complimentary fluffy dressing gowns, we ordered room service and guzzled water. Our bathroom had a door. I felt almost guilty about the decadence. We were bus people no more.

  Climbing out of the shower, having set a new world record for longest time spent in one, I found Annett sitting up in bed, reading a book. “Do we have to do the full three weeks?” she asked.

  “You want to go home early?”

  She rested the book on her lap. “Don’t you? Are you having fun? Because I’m not, really. It’s just blizzard, chaos, travel breakdowns, a bit more blizzard. And once this is over I have to go back to work. You don’t. I’m actually looking forward to work because it won’t be this.”

  I took a moment to try to convince myself I was having fun. “I’m not sure you go to China for fun,” I conceded, having failed to do so.

  “Well why are we here then? You certainly go on holidays for fun.”

  “Forget the why. We’re here now. Again, your idea—let’s make it work. It can’t get much worse than that bus trip, right?”

  “It had better not,” she said, picking up her book.

  We did make it to Xi’an, where we narrowly missed being in a car crash on icy roads. Our car spun in a circle before clipping a metal pole. We saw the terracotta warriors created to protect Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor, in the afterlife. An idea that is absurd (terracotta figures go to the afterlife?), nonsensical (pottery can fight?), and unnecessary (what’s the worst that can happen there—you die again?). Yet, to the emperor’s credit, it was a madcap act of mass ceramicism executed with commendable zeal (eight thousand soldiers’ worth).

  A short (thousand-kilometre) train ride later we reached Beijing, where we climbed a certain famous wall while learning about Mongolian hordes. A wall that robs you of your breath, replacing it with awe and disbelief that mere humans could build something this expansive just to stop other humans from killing and enslaving them. The cold never let up. Travelling was a grind; simple tasks such as buying train tickets sometimes took half a day because of language breakdowns and insurmountable cultural divides regarding personal space, queuing, and politeness. Menus were perennial lucky dips. By Beijing I was both flu-ridden and a nervous wreck. Aside from rousing myself for the Great Wall, I spent all my time admiring the four Average Walls of our hostel room. I got up only to eat soup and use the bathroom.

  We lasted the three weeks, just.

  On the plane home we jigged down the aisles, happy knowing we’d never have to endure another Chinese winter. Or China, in general. Not that I regretted anything. I wanted more holidays like this, full of adventure, excitement, uncertainty, and struggle. We had wanted weird and strange and different. Actually, maybe I had wanted these things and Annett had wanted to give them to me. Regardless, China had delivered them. But it hadn’t delivered enjoyment. The longer we’d stayed the more convinced I’d become that enjoyment wasn’t the point of China. People go there because they know one day China will be in charge. That this day may already have arrived. They go to see what kind of a guardian it will be. They go because its present is frenzied and complex and dissonant from what it tells itself. They go because the planet’s future almost certainly depends on China’s. There are more than enough reasons to visit—just nowhere near enough to make that visit in January.

  5

  Kissi, Ghana: “It’s not really fun in the classical sense of fun.”

  The Gospel of Green Tea, clickshakes, moonshine

  “I know where I want to go next,” I said, as we sat at our kitchen table eating a pasta dish I’d prepared and which had been unfairly criticised as “lacking in passion.”

  “Okay. Where?”

  I made jazz hands. “Aaaff-rica.”

  “If you even think about Lion Kinging, I’m leaving you.”

  I put down my jazz hands.

  “Africa is kinda large. You got somewhere specific in mind?”

  My eyes widened. “I was thinking… Ghana.”

  “Why Ghana?”

  “Well, firstly, because it’s in Africa and we’ve never been there. And Ghana is kind of a weird one since it’s English-speaking, safe, and has good weather but isn’t anyone’s definition of a tourist hotspot. I’d kinda like to know why.”

  She pu
shed her glasses up. “And we have a contact there.”

  “Exactly.”

  That contact was a genuine, bona fide, enormous Ghanaian called Djarbah. I’d met him in Berlin once to eat falafel. We had mutual friends with whom he ran Future Hope People, a charity building schools in rural Ghana.

  Annett nudged at some of her impossibly delicious pasta. “I’ll buy the Lonely Planet,” she said, moving to get up. I looked down at her half-empty plate. “Don’t you want to finish your pasta first?”

  Her forehead rumpled. “What makes you think I haven’t?”

  Not wanting to repeat the fiasco of China, and wanting to prove to Annett that I could be organised too, I emailed Djarbah many questions. None of which he answered.

  Hello Adams,

  Thanks so much for your mail but the connection is so bad today so i will answer it tomorrow.

  I didn’t hear anything for the next few weeks, and felt this was stretching the accepted definition of tomorrow. I asked one of our mutual friends, Manuel, if Djarbah’s sporadic communication style was normal, and he explained that Djarbah only had Internet access when he travelled thirty minutes to the nearby town, and that the Internet cafe operated via a hotspot running from a single mobile phone. As a result, it could take up to fifteen minutes to open an email. Knowing that, I wished I’d put a bit more effort into mine. It must be extra infuriating to spend such a long amount of time opening something only to discover that it’s incorrectly punctuated. By the time I got answers to my questions we were already in the capital, Accra, and so didn’t need them.

  “Djarbah?” I said, trying out my new Ghanaian SIM card in the shadiest corner of the hostel’s courtyard, hiding from the humidity smothering me like a pillow.

  A booming voice overwhelmed the phone’s puny speaker. “ADAMSSS?”

  “Djarbah! We made it, we’re in Accra!”

  “Oooh, very fine. How do you like it?” Djarbah has a majestic way of speaking. His words stroll out like well-dressed senior citizens on an afternoon walk.

  I wiped a trickle of sweat from my forehead. I’d finished showering only ninety seconds before. I intended to shower again ninety seconds after the call. “It’s… er…” I skipped the part about the constant power cuts and oppressive heat. “Great.”

  “Good, good,” he said. “When are you coming to Kissi?”

  “In two days. Tuesday. Is that okay for you? If not we can stay longer here…”

  “Tuesday? Oh, very fine. Take the bus to Takoradi and tell the driver you want to get off at Kissi. Call me when you get here.”

  It sounded so easy. And then, Tuesday morning, we arrived at what everyone assured us was the bus station. Seconds after leaving the taxi, we were engulfed in a swirling tornado of humanity. A giant, frenetic melee of capitalism. People hawked fruit, water, car parts, entire cars, entire chickens, and parts of a cow. There were no buses.

  “This is a bit full on,” I said to Annett, as a scooter swerved and missed my foot by a single-digit number of centimetres. She stood on tiptoes, trying to see over a nearby stall selling mobile-phone credit. Probably to be used by people caught in the centre of the melee frantically calling out for help. A curious thing about Ghanaian melees is that they have no discernible beginning or end. They just suddenly appear, like a sand storm, and then before you have time to resist, you find yourself, inexplicably, in the dead centre of one, confused and disorientated. It had happened to us several times over the previous days.

  She scanned the horizon. “There must be some kind of system, right?”

  The core of Annett’s world view is that, underneath it all, everything is striving to be logical and efficient. This belief cannot be dented by evidence to the contrary.

  We were looking at overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

  Eventually, more through luck than judgement, we found the part of the melee that had the buses in it. It was about a hundred metres past the rusted-car parts area, down the end of a narrow alley of carcasses on hooks, sharing an entrance with both the Bible and assorted brooming paraphernalia stalls.

  Obvious, in hindsight.

  Two long hours later the last seat on our bus was sold (no timetables here) and we could leave. As the vehicle began to slowly excavate itself from the melee, a man who had been crouching next to me in the aisle sprang to life. I thought he was going to offer us a sermon. We’d seen this often—someone getting on a vehicle to bless the journey and remind everyone taking it of God’s love for them. They did this on a no-obligation, pro-bono (the legal term not the singer), voluntary, discretionary, gratis—oh, you want to tip me? Really? Well, that’s unexpected and absolutely in no way why I am doing this but I guess, since you insist—basis.

  Instead, this man reached down to the plastic bag at his feet and removed a dark-green rectangular box of tea.

  “Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman,” he said, confidently, as if he’d been specifically booked as the bus’s keynote speaker. “This is a-powerful tea, brothers and sisters.” His tone was firm and measured, that of someone born to sell packages of beverage on a moving vehicle. With one hand he gripped the overhead luggage rack, and rocked himself back and forth, while holding the green tea packet aloft triumphantly with his other hand.

  “It’s not like your normal a-tea-ah. Your fruit a-tea-ah. OOOH NO-AAH! It is a-strong. You put it in, you stir, and you take it a-out. You do not leave it in. No! It’s a-powerful. Ladies and gentleman, sir and madam, the benefits, the BEN-A-FITS of this A-TEA-AH…” And here he paused for dramatic effect, bowing his head slightly, before returning it towards the heavens.

  “WOW… A-WOW.”

  During our days in Accra, in the rare moments that we’d been blessed with electricity, we’d tried to watch as much TV as possible, though what we found always left us in a state of shock: God TV, Praise TV, Hallelujah TV. About 50 percent of the channels were religious, and featured men who looked almost exactly like this man. They seemed so used to this proselytising style of selling that it was now how they sold everything, even the Gospel of Green Tea.

  “It’s good for the digestion, GOOD for the headache, GOOD for a-so many health benefits, SO MANY. Men, it’s also good for your… you know.” He winked. “Ah hmm. Yep. And… ladies and gentleman… it’s also good against THE CANCER!”

  After twenty minutes of high-tempo, high-energy salesmanship, and with four packets sold, the man got off. The journey felt uneventful in his absence. The most fun was looking out the window and enjoying Ghanaian business names. n Ghana, people’s religious inclinations are woven into everything they do, and so the naming of businesses is a perfect chance to try to outdo each other in sanctity and devotion. My Redeemer Lives Fast Food was an early favourite, before we spotted Clap for Jesus Fishes, which had the crown for forty-five minutes until we discovered Thank you Jesus Plastic Chairs.

  After four hours, one hour longer than expected, Annett prodded me.

  “Can you go and check with the driver again?”

  “Why do I always have to go?”

  “Just go.”

  I clenched my fists. “Aren’t you supposed to be a feminist?”

  “There is no ‘supposed to be,’ mister. I am a feminist.”

  “Then why are certain tasks automatically mine? Talking to strangers, investigating scary sounds in the middle of the night, erm… emptying bins.”

  She flicked her wrist. “I don’t think you understand feminism. Ask the bus driver about it while you’re up there.”

  “Hello sir,” I said, approaching the driver. “Just checking—you will tell us when we reach Kissi, yes?”

  The man turned to face me as the bus collapsed into a generously sized pothole. “Yes sir, yes, not far now. Ten minutes, perhaps. Yes?”

  I wasn’t sure why this was a question. “Erm. Wonderful, thank you.”

  I briefly considered asking him about feminism, but what with trying to snake the bus through the thin slivers of flat road, he already had enou
gh to do. It looked as though the country were at war with moles.

  It was losing.

  I headed back down the aisle to my seat. Heavy blows from the mole army upon the vehicle’s suspension knocked me into the lap of an elderly man in a brown-striped corduroy suit.

  “Ten minutes, apparently,” I said, collapsing, winded, into my seat.

  Annett frowned at her phone’s screen. “He said that the last time, one hour ago.”

  I shrugged. “Ghanaians don’t seem all that great with time.”

  Eventually, it wasn’t the driver but a neighbour (and a soon-to-be-cancer-free green-tea purchaser) who alerted us that we were now approaching Kissi. Another saw us getting up and shouted to the driver that he should stop, which he did in an unsafe manner that involved screeching brakes and minor passenger whiplash.

  Disembarked, we found ourselves in front of a petrol station. The heat hugged us like a jilted ex-lover who just wouldn’t take the hint. We took solace under a nearby tree. I called Djarbah. He also claimed he’d be there in “ten minutes.”

  Twenty-five minutes later—laudably punctual by Ghanaian standards—a battered Toyota pulled up next to us, blaring German hip-hop. I recognised the man driving it. Firstly, because he was dressed in a luminous yellow Borussia Dortmund football jersey and hat. How common could Dortmund fans be in these parts? Secondly, because the man was gigantic. Behind the wheel he looked like an elephant in a golf cart. I know that today doing something as innocuous as wearing a silly hat, or expressing a minority political opinion, might be enough to get you labelled “larger than life.” Well, when I say that Djarbah is larger than life, I mean it in the original sense of the phrase. He’s a two-metre tall, seven-metre wide wall of muscle.

  “Adams!” he said, leaping out and attempting a handshake, which because of the size of his hands, and the muscles of the frame manipulating them, ended up more like a wrestling move that crushed my arm as if it were a grape. He ended this affectionate mauling with a click of two of his giant bear fingers. My arm was returned to me, limp, confused and having lost most of its market value.