Better Than Fiction

by Lonely Planet

  It may have been the invitation up to the coffin tower or it may have been the Mefloquine kicking in, but I believe it was around this point that things began to go strange. In my moment alone with the deceased, I gazed at his coffin. It looked like a boat with scales or a dragon with a prow. I was hypnotised by the paint on it. Sniffing its hand-carved grooves, I thought, or possibly said out loud, Whoa, that is so gold.

  I remember being given some meat to eat on a paper plate and a cup of sharp dark wine. I remember a crowd of us holding the coffin over our heads and trotting in circles to spin it, ensuring that its inhabitant would lose his way and never return to haunt us. I remember thinking that I would suggest this ritual at the next funeral I attended.

  I remember an afternoon organised by my new best friends from Deutschland. We visited burial trees and caves, looked into the balconies packed with effigies that were looking at us. I remember piles of bones and baby-filled trees. I have no idea what we said to each other but I have a feeling I talked, a lot. I remember feeling special.

  The next morning, feeling even more special, I checked out of my cinderblock hotel. The mountains on the edge of the valley were my destination. They were dotted with tiny settlements, most reached only by footpath or pack animal. The clerk was content for me to park most of my belongings behind the front desk, as long as I intended to come back for them.

  My clothes, my passport, my wallet, the guidebook, my book, my paper and my pen all stayed behind. My journey needed to be pure if it was going to be honest, right? With a daypack, some water and a little bit of cash, I set off.

  As indicated earlier, I am not the Into the Wild type. I had started the trip with a typed itinerary and travel insurance, intent on spending my days wandering the big-ticket sights and my evenings in dimly lit rooms, reading and writing. This walkabout was the Mefloquine talking, and it wouldn’t shut up. Each step into the mountains brought greater splendour. Passing a donkey on the narrow footpath became an otherworldly pleasure. The mirrored rice paddies seemed to be painted by the gods. In the nearby shuffling leaves around me, it was easy to see a dwarf buffalo following my progress with a sly grin of approval.

  Although nearly out of my mind, I knew I needed to sleep indoors. Somehow, I negotiated a bed from a woman whom I passed on the trail. Her house had been constructed from scavenged parts of other houses, with walls of different materials fastened together. Inside, the plaster hearth beckoned. In one pot there was coconut soup and in another there were coconut fritters. Would I like some? Three cats sat on the fireplace, making sure I gave the right answer. The coconut was like none other, before or since. It was caramel and woody and milky and floral and sublime.

  The window in the tiny guest room had a scrap of fabric nailed across it. This, I thought, with evangelical fervour, was all I needed.

  With no light except the moon and nothing to read, I fell asleep listening to the noise of the jungle, making up a name for every creature I heard until I drifted off. An epic thunderstorm woke me in the middle of the night, soaking the fabric and my bed. I didn’t move to get out of the way. It was preordained that I would get wet. Forgetting about my ticket home, I vowed to stay in these hills for a month, just being.

  I stepped out the front door to inspect the new day. Vivid. The jungle cascaded down one side and lush farmland terraces stepped down the other. After a breakfast made from reheated dinner, I headed for the next ridge, bold and victorious.

  It was around here that my lizard brain switched on to save me. I realised that instead of feeling invincible, doubt was setting in. All the thrilling thoughts of supreme self-sufficiency and better-than-German-traveller fearlessness were now matched with an uncomfortable fullness in the chest and stomach. From the most distant switchback of my brain, this protective pulse overrode my desire to conquer the jungle. With urgency that I am still grateful for today, it turned me back toward Rantepao.

  Still Magellan-ish though, I searched for shortcuts. Sweaty and wild-eyed, I climbed fences, pushed through leech-ridden lowlands and trod along the edges of rice paddies. Curious locals and every variation of chicken watched me take the longest route back to town.

  Eventually there was the comforting sound and scent of diesel trucks. It was market day and the central area was teeming with water buffalo. In a flicker, I calculated that I could buy one and take it with me on my trek, but my cautious conscience marched me back to the hotel and my stuff.

  The cook was there. He offered me more marinated pork. No thanks, I said, closing the door and falling onto the bed.

  The coconut soup began to curdle in my mind. It had been warm, not hot. Warm. My host’s fireplace had been comfortable enough for the cats to curl up there: The soup had never boiled. With this realisation, I began to erupt. The next hours were spent in the bathroom. I wasn’t brave enough to venture far between bouts, and minutes passed with me hazily tracing my fingers along the rock sculptures above the tub. When I was able to seize a moment to advocate for my health, I wrapped myself in a sheet and crawled out to the desk to beg for toast. The increasingly patient owner escorted me out of the common area and soon delivered my request. Which my body quickly rejected.

  By the next night, I was empty. There was still the occasional contraction, but there was nothing left. I stretched out on the bed and let the moon illuminate what was left of me. This is when the children’s choir began performing Christmas carols. They were sweet songs, not quite recognisable, but harmonised with a homely imperfection that could only come from dutiful children in bright matching uniforms. I hauled myself to the door and opened it for a look. Outside, the night was quiet. I closed the door and the choir returned.

  My first thought was not that it was unlikely there were carollers in my room, as it was the middle of the night in the wrong month. My first thought was that I needed to determine where in the room the choir was hiding. I was certain I could help them. The solution was to circle the perimeter on all fours. They were vexatious, this choir, and, in between trips to the bathroom, they kept me stumbling around trying to pinpoint their secret location for hours.

  The next days followed similarly, with me distracted by hallucinations and unable to eat anything with the confidence of retaining it. In the middle of extreme exhaustion and this drug-induced fog, I resigned myself to continuing like this until my body gave up. I would live out my days jabbering in a corner of the village. I would waste away and then contract some equatorial infection that had long shiny teeth. Finally, the choir and their siren song would lead me in front of a bus.

  From this funk, I wondered if my travel insurance would know that they had to make good on the repatriation of my remains or if I should send a postcard home advising my family that it would be covered. In the more exuberant moments, I decided that I wanted my body to stay there, that this was a lovely place to die. With planning, there could be an effigy of me on one of the hillsides.

  As you may have gathered, I survived. The psychiatric symptoms eased up enough for me to link them to the Mefloquine and I skipped the last tablet (and didn’t get malaria, either). The local chemist had a good stock of Imodium, which provided all the gastric security I could hope for, enabling me to endure the flights to Ujung Pandang, to Denpasar, to Jakarta, to Singapore, to Frankfurt, and home to New York – not the best 36 hours of my life. It would be months before the coconut-soup parasites were identified and treated, and almost fifteen years before the makers of Mefloquine stopped marketing the drug in the United States. It’s still available elsewhere in the world.

  That I didn’t die may be something of an anticlimax, like when the bomb is defused at the end of the movie. I don’t mind. The whole detour stays together for me, from the meditation class to the long trip home. It doesn’t linger as a bad travel story as much as an adventure. I did what I wanted to do: I got myself lost. The fact that I didn’t stray deeper into the jungle or ingest something more lethal is largely due to luck. That is enough of a lesson for any traveller,
with or without an itinerary.

  On my last day in Toraja, the German couple showed up at the corner shop, as I was girding myself for the long trip ahead. They were flying back to Ujung Pandang too. We shared another lawnmower/taxi. I wasn’t feeling nearly as vivacious as the last time I’d seen them, so they talked. They’d had a change in plans. The jungle was uncomfortable, they hadn’t found the animals they’d set out to see, they’d underestimated the difficulty of their hike and didn’t think they could make it as far as the diving site. They’d had enough of travel, they said, and were ready to go home.

  Sudan: The Scarface Express

  BY JOE YOGERST

  In January of 1982, Joe Yogerst quit his job working for a sports magazine in the San Francisco Bay Area, sold his car, took all of his money out of the bank and bought a one-way airplane ticket to South Africa. Truth be told, he was chasing a woman, a relationship that (like so many born of travel) didn’t work out in the real world. To get his mind off the breakup, Yogerst began taking ever-longer and riskier trips – backpacking solo through the African bush, hitchhiking to northern Namibia, where a furious border war was then in progress, and then undertaking an epic Cape-to-Cairo journey that included his ride on the Scarface Express. That was the start of thirteen years overseas, during which Yogerst worked as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor and freelance writer on three continents. He returned to his native California in 1995 and continues to write about his travels across the globe. He is the author of two novels, White Tiger and Fortunate Son.

  Five of us stumble through the streets of Kosti in the middle of the night, trying to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and the thugs who are chasing us. I can smell the mulchy aroma of the nearby Nile, feel the grit of Sahara sand beneath my feet. But this is no time to contemplate the local geography, because we are literally running for our lives.

  I have just done something amazingly brilliant or incredibly stupid – depending on the outcome of our current escapade. I have told the scar-faced sergeant of the platoon protecting a train that’s just brought us halfway across Sudan that we are not going to cave to his extortion. Under no circumstances are we going to pay the bribes that just about everyone else on the train has been shelling out over the past four days. Not only that, but we have confronted him openly in front of the locals – people who normally don’t see anyone challenge his venomous authority – causing a loss of face that no doubt outweighs the value of the cash he was trying to scam from us.

  And once that die was cast, the only thing to do was abscond. Run as fast as we could, find a place to hide until first light, and hope that Scarface and his men would tire of the chase, crawl back onto the train and chug away. Because the alternative – getting caught – was unthinkable. We’d seen how Scarface and his men had dealt with Sudanese passengers who didn’t comply – beating them with leather strips and rifle butts, tossing them off the train in the middle of nowhere. And we had no illusions that they would deal any less harshly with us, five young foreigners traveling across their country.

  Gasping for air, we came upon the darkened bus station. The front doors were padlocked, but we shook them all the same, hoping to rouse someone inside who could tell us when the next bus was leaving – for anywhere, really. Destination didn’t matter at this point. An elderly watchman poked his face through a crack between the doors. ‘Inshallah, six o’clock,’ he told us. Another four hours.

  We looked around, back up the street that had brought us from the river. Nothing but silence and a stray dog shuffling across the road. But then in the murky distance, half a dozen men running our way. Scarface and his troopers, armed to the teeth and bent on revenge.

  Opposite the bus station was a large open-air café. It was closed for the night, the tables upturned, and that’s where we took refuge. Where we decided to make our last stand. If they found us, so be it. But we couldn’t keep running forever. Hunched behind one of the tables, all sorts of thoughts ran through my mind. Nobody in the outside world had the faintest idea where I was at this point in time. Scarface and his men could do pretty much anything they wanted to us – torture, prison, even death – and nobody would ever know the difference. You hear about people disappearing without a trace during their travels. And it suddenly occurred to me that the five of us might soon be among those gruesome statistics.

  There was a rush of footsteps into the square. Scarface and his men, speaking in Arabic, pointing up and down the street, no doubt trying to figure out which way we had fled. The sergeant barked orders and they began to fan out in different directions. One of them looked around at the café where we were hunkered down, took a tentative step our way …

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  It was my ‘year of living dangerously’ in Africa, an overland journey from Cape to Cairo by any means I could find or afford – trains, boats, buses, walking, hitching. I knew the 2000-mile leg between Nairobi and Khartoum would be the most difficult because there wasn’t any public transport and not much in the way of private vehicles that might be willing to give me a ride. Southern Sudan wasn’t an independent nation yet and the country was still plagued by its long civil war. But there was a temporary ceasefire and I decided to take the chance of venturing across Sudan.

  I rode buses to northern Kenya and then hooked up with an overland truck and a handful of other young Western travelers headed north. Crossing the Turkana Desert was a breeze, and other than getting stuck in the mud a couple of times – and having to dig out the truck – we managed to make it across the Sudd swamps without major incident. Reaching the town of Wau on the northern edge of the wetlands, we figured the worst (in terms of road conditions) was behind us. What we hadn’t counted on was freakish weather. Heavy rains had washed away both the road and the rail line between Wau and Khartoum, creating a 150-mile-wide flood zone that was virtually impossible to cross. The local cops estimated it might be a month before anyone could get through.

  Stunned by the news, we retreated to a campsite on the grounds of the Catholic mission to discuss our options. We could try to make an end run out west around the flood zone, but that would take us through Darfur and its notorious bandits. We could backtrack 400 miles to Juba and hope the Nile ferry was running. Or we could sit tight in Wau and wait for the water to recede.

  Wau was the lesser of the evils, but not by much. Founded by slave traders in the 19th century, the town had grown into a market and administrative center for much of central Sudan. Most of the buildings were shabby cinderblock or mud-brick, the streets so covered with sand, dust and cow manure it was hard to tell they were paved. The terrace in front of the hospital was littered with used hypodermic syringes and other medical waste. And there were vultures everywhere: picking at the garbage beside the Arab and Greek shops, haunting the rooftops around the market square, perched ominously on the branches of a barren tree behind the Wau police station and prison, tearing frantically at an undefined carcass in the high grass behind the city hall.

  With its Italian padres and towering red-brick cathedral (modeled after the Duomo in Florence), the Catholic mission proved a welcome refuge. But even that was short-lived. The Dinka caretaker killed a poisonous snake beside the well. One of the other travelers discovered a foot-long worm inside one of her feet. Adding to our misery was persistent heat, humidity and insects. There was no way we could spend a month here without losing our minds.

  On our fifth morning in Wau, the caretaker came running into the orchard shouting, ‘The train, the train – it is here!’ Having had so many false alarms, we didn’t know whether to believe it or not. But as we walked into the center of town, it became obvious that something was up. People with handcarts, pack animals and bags were rushing toward the station. There must be a train, we thought. And then lo and behold, there it was: a raggedy line of box cars and passenger coaches behind an old General Electric diesel. The stationmaster told us it would depart for Khartoum in precisely three hours.

  Figuring t
he train couldn’t possibly be any worse than what we were already enduring, five of us decided to ride the rails rather than stay another night in Wau – myself, three young Brits and a Greek-Lebanese law student by the name of Philippa who spoke fluent Arabic. We’d come up from Kenya together and were well acquainted by now.

  Gathering our things together, we rushed back to the station – and utter pandemonium. Hundreds of Sudanese had laid siege to the ticket windows; soldiers with rifles were trying to keep them at bay. Mayhem broke out when the signal was given that tickets were finally on sale – people jumping over one another, screaming, punching, clawing like animals, anything they could do to get tickets and get the hell out of Wau. But even then, the panic wasn’t over. After buying their tickets, the passengers made a mad dash to secure their spots on the train, crushing through the train doors, forcing their baggage through windows and crawling up to the roof, until there was a solid line of human beings along the crest of the train and faces hanging out of every window.

  By the time we elbowed our way to a ticket window, the train was nearly full. The stationmaster told us that one of the better carriages was reserved for army and police personnel. Perhaps we could convince the officer in charge (a certain Major Hassan) to let us sit in that car. With her good looks and easy charm, Philippa was able to ingratiate herself to the young major within minutes. Readily agreeing to our request, he personally escorted us to the military carriage and enough empty seats to fit us all.

  We slumped into the hard wooden seats to enjoy our grand departure from Wau. A locomotive whistle shrieked and the train lurched forward. Up and down the train, passengers screamed with excitement as the journey began. Children ran beside the windows trying to snatch one last sale of guavas or peanuts. Soldiers around the station cheered and waved their guns in the air as a salute to departing comrades. We slowly chugged past the grass huts and millet fields on the north edge of town and suddenly Wau was gone.