I go back to the stall and look around for a teaspoon. I can’t see any. ‘What do you want now?’ she says.
‘A teaspoon, please.’
She looks at me strangely. ‘A what?’
‘A teaspoon.’
She can’t figure this out, looks at me even more strangely. ‘You know, to stir the sugar into my coffee.’
She points vaguely to a beaker with clear plastic drinking straws in it. ‘There.’
I tentatively take a straw. ‘One of these?’
She looks at me as if I’m completely gone and nods.
I take the drinking straw back to my little part of Alaska and stir my coffee. One sip confirms its undrinkability. I go back to the stall to order a proper coffee, to hell with the expense. She sees me coming and quickly turns her back and pretends to be busy, hoping I’ll go away. I’m patient. She can’t keep it up for very long, there’s no-one else in the lobby at that time of morning.
‘Yes?’
‘I’d like a caffe latte please.’
‘It’ll cost you … ’
‘That’s all right. Better to pay for good coffee than to drink bad coffee for free.’ I’m trying to be friendly. She rolls her eyes.
She starts to make the coffee in a polystyrene mug. ‘Could I have it in a cup please?’ There are real cups on top of the coffee machine. She stops what she’s doing, looks at me.
‘You want it in a cup?’
‘Yes, please.’ I stay patient and friendly and smiling. She clearly considers me to be a mental retard.
‘A cup,’ she says. She still hasn’t moved. I nod, still smiling. The smile apparently confirms my retard status.
She sighs, gets a cup down from the machine. It is dusty, so she wipes it out and puts the coffee in it. I sign the check (adding a fifteen per cent tip) and take my coffee to my table, stir some sugar into it with the plastic straw. It is a perfect coffee, everything about it is just right. I enjoy it, with a cigarette, despite the noise and the cold. I approach the stall once again. ‘That was so good I’d like another one just the same please.’
Whether out of spite or for some other reason, the second coffee is not ‘just the same.’ It’s terrible. There’s nothing I can do about it, I’ve already done too much to her.
That’s the story of this hotel. They finally find my waiting faxes thirty-six hours after I arrive. Three times I’ve been promised that a power-point adapter will be delivered to my room, but none has yet arrived (there’s another whole story with this one). A packet of cashews from the minibar costs eighteen Australian dollars. Room service is too expensive, I don’t have enough clothes to eat in the hotel (it is literally too cold to sit down there for any length of time), and not enough American cash to go out (the banks are closed and the hotel doesn’t know what overseas money is).
Outside is also bad, but in a different way. It’s sleazy, dirty, unpleasant. People walk around exuding unhappiness. I buy a spinach quiche at a ‘French’ patisserie near the hotel (breakfast was hardly breakfast). Before I can say anything, it is folded into a huge sheet of paper, put into a large paper bag with four paper serviettes, and then the whole thing is put into a plastic bag for me to carry off. I spend minutes at a garbage bin unearthing the quiche from its wrappings. It is cold anyway. It’s America.
Things get so bad that I am paralysed into inaction. I start to watch TV, truly a sign of degradation and depression. At random intervals of between five and fifteen minutes the television set spontaneously turns itself off. The minutes in between, the programs, are worse, a culture in complete decay, ghastly, terrible, shocking, obsessed with death and killing, the actuality channels bleating about how terrible it is (and profiting from it), the drama channels (owned by the same people) glorying in it.
There’s a new form of censorship here, where they blur, soften really, any section of the image that is remotely sexual … then you flick channels to see someone hacked to death or shot, the image presented in perfect clarity.
It is a society that is slowly poisoning itself. It aggressively exports itself to the rest of the world and the rest of the world is willingly buying it. It is profoundly depressing.
Eventually, gratefully, it gets dark. Three of the lights in my room don’t work. I go out to eat, after a day of a pastry and a cold spinach quiche. I find a cheap-looking sort of Italian restaurant, a little rundown but not too cold inside and you can smoke and get a drink. I decide to risk the Visa card.
I order a half bottle of Chianti and a pasta e fagioli (bean soup). They don’t have the Chianti. I order a half bottle of something else. They come back without that as well. Finally they bring me the only half bottle of anything they have. Even though it’s $12.95, in desperation I take it.
The soup comes. The bowl has been overfilled and the plate beneath it is swimming. The waitress smiles and says she’s sorry. I continue my un-American activities by being nice.
I then taste the soup.
It is sensational. Not just good, but sensational. I order penne with broccoli. The penne itself is overcooked to buggery but apart from that the dish is very good. Then I order another bowl of bean soup. Again overfilled on a swimming plate. Again sensational.
The whole eating experience puts me into a somewhat better frame of mind, and I find myself hoping Dreyfuss doesn’t want to have dinner with me tomorrow night so that I can come back here and have more bean soup. It is something to look forward to in this godforsaken country.
In Search of a Dolphin’s Grave
BILL BENNETT
Bill Bennett is regarded as one of Australia’s most experienced and respected filmmakers. In a career spanning nearly thirty years, he’s made fifteen feature films and more than forty documentaries. He’s won numerous prizes internationally, had three major film retrospectives, and won Australian Film Institute Awards (Australia’s Oscars) for Best Picture and Best Director. His filmmaking has taken him to many countries, including remote regions of Papua New Guinea, India, China and Africa.
I looked at my crumpled plastic bottle of water. It was a 1.5-litre bottle that I’d casually picked up that morning before setting off. I’d already drunk two-thirds. I’d gulped it down, unthinking, uncaring, on the long trip from Assab out to the edge of the Red Sea, bouncing through the scorched Eritrean desert past villages decimated by drought and famine, not realizing that as the day unraveled, every drop would become precious.
Outside the Land Rover it was in the mid-fifties (degrees Celsius, or about 130 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s what my driver estimated at any rate. Even for him, that was hot. Heat that hot is not definable. It’s not sweating hot. It’s not dry-mouth hot. It’s not put-the-air-con-to-max hot. It’s blast-furnace hot. It’s iron-smelter hot. It’s melt-the-plastic-on-the-dashboard hot. Coming from Sydney, I thought hot was sitting on the beach at Bondi on Boxing Day, getting sunburnt and hoping for a sea breeze.
The Land Rover was bogged – bogged up to its chassis. It had broken through a thick mud crust and had sunk down into moist gloop, with the Red Sea only meters away, steam rising from the water as if from the spout of a boiling kettle. It was that hot. It was so hot I couldn’t breathe through my mouth. It was like breathing air from a raging bushfire.
It scorched my throat and I had to breathe through my nose in short sharp gasps because getting a deep lungful of that incendiary air was hurtful. The heat burnt off the moisture on my eyeballs and I had to squint. My tongue was thickening and my lips were as cracked as the dried mud underfoot, or under-chassis.
The local young men who’d come along as guides, four in total, tried to push the long-wheelbase vehicle out but all that did was entrench it even further. We’d passed a village about ten kilometers back, but in this heat, walking ten kilometers would not be possible. No-one knew where we were, I’d foolishly not given my travel plans to anyone, and there was no such thing as a GPS rescue transmitter in our kit. We could simply perish out here in the firestorm heat in this isolated corner of
Ethiopia and no-one would be the wiser for weeks, months or possibly even years.
The driver, Tommy, spoke English and he was flummoxed. He explained to me that the ground that we’d been driving along for the past hour or so – the flat bitumen-like foreshore – was in fact dried mud and when we stopped, the weight of the vehicle simply forced the tires through the thick crust, resting the chassis on top. Underneath was a thick muddy stew.
Normally when the vehicle gets bogged, he explained, he can either winch it out or find some foliage or branches to put under the tires to get some traction, but where we were, on this remote edge of the Red Sea, there were no trees or rocks to winch off, nothing to put under the tires except some odd stones, which immediately sank down into the gloop. The Land Rover was sitting belly flat on the cracked-chocolate mud and we were buggered.
I started to think of my wife and young family back in Sydney – wondering seriously if I would ever see them again. My only comfort was that the Hollywood producer who had sent me on this crazy quest to find a real-life mermaid had, on my request, taken out a life insurance policy. At least if I died in this parched cauldron, my family would get something.
It was a great story and would make a great film. The book was called A Grave for a Dolphin, a true story evidently written by an Italian cartographer sent to the Eritrean coast prior to World War II to chart the waters in preparation for an invasion by Mussolini’s navy. Whilst there, he became deranged by heat exhaustion and loneliness, and woke up one morning to find a beautiful half-naked Maasai woman seeking shelter from slave traders. According to this man’s diary, the woman turned out to be a dolphin, in love with another dolphin which would leap out of the warm waters of the Red Sea of an evening, to catch her eye.
I won’t go into the details of the book, other than to say the woman-dolphin finally died, and the cartographer buried her in a rocky cairn on the edge of the Red Sea, near the border with Djibouti. There were enough clues in the book for me to attempt to find this cairn, and verify the story.
I had been contacted by this highly successful Hollywood producer to write and direct the film. I read the book and realized that to write a screenplay with any degree of reality and to avoid cliché, I really needed to go to Eritrea to steep myself in the culture, the language, the nuances of the place and the people, and to try and find this grave. This would then give me the background texture to write a fully dimensional screenplay.
The producer admired greatly my professionalism, understanding that it would make the script much richer and hence easier for him to finance with a studio, and yet highly successful though he was, wealthy beyond my immediate understanding, every day doing deals in six- and seven-digit figures, he would not spring for my travel costs, flying coach-class even. The cost of my trip would have been equivalent to a big dinner for some studio heads at Spago. But nope, it was ‘on your dime,’ as he put it. Welcome to Hollywood.
At the time I had a young family and not many dimes. I felt though that this was a great opportunity to write something of real merit and so my wife agreed to my going, on the condition that the producer take out life insurance in case anything went wrong. We’d just bought a new house, populated with newish babies, and Eritrea was a minor war zone, even though the area where I was going was out of the conflict. The producer agreed to the insurance – I did my medicals, signed my forms – and so off I went, first to Addis Ababa, then to Assab, near the coast.
There was only one real hotel in Assab and that was more like a firebombed concrete bunker. My room had a bed of sorts, a shower of sorts, cement floors with no coverings, and no curtains on the windows. Not that anyone would want to look in.
The shower had only one tap – cold – and I soon realized that was because there was no need for hot water. The cold water came out near boiling – presumably because the water ran through pipes in the ground, and the ground was almost too hot to walk on. The water was so hot I had to let it run into a plastic bucket, kindly supplied by the hotel, and then let it cool before I could splash it over myself.
Outside of the town were fenced-in compounds containing dozens of old army tanks and missile-launching vehicles, all ravaged by the desert and past wars. Even though Assab was south of the Eritrean capital, Asmara, where most of the fighting was happening, there were soldiers everywhere.
The town was also full of aid workers, a veritable army of professional NGO-ers looking after famine relief for the surrounding districts. The drought had been endless, and the country was denuded of all living vegetation, other than a few stunted trees and some brave cacti. The Eritreans themselves were stick thin, and yet everywhere people ran. They ran down the dusty streets, they ran in the mornings and in the evenings, they ran barefoot over ground that was so hot I needed thick-soled, asbestos-lined Timberlands. This, I realized, is why Ethiopia has such extraordinary long-distance athletes, because instead of lazing around in their shanties watching ESPN on television or kicking back by the oasis reading a book, they’re out running.
I arranged to have some local guides take me further south towards the border with Djibouti, towards the place where I believed the grave to be. Despite the cost, the hardship of being there, the danger and the overbearing heat, I was driven by the deliciousness of this story. Could it be true that this forgotten corner of the world had seas harboring dolphins that can transmogrify into women? True mermaids?
I was determined to find out.
We set off the next morning. I’d grabbed a bottle of water just before leaving, from a place purporting to be Assab’s version of a 7-Eleven. We headed out of town, past the graveyard of tanks, past the roadblocks manned by bored soldiers with old-fashioned machine guns that probably didn’t work, past the sinewy young barefoot men running out into the fiery desert just because they loved running.
When we left that morning, the temperature was forty-nine degrees Celsius. That’s 120 degrees Fahrenheit. A couple of my guides had jumpers on, it was so chilly. They didn’t start to warm up until it got beyond fifty-four degrees Celsius.
The wind was cutting. It gave the heat sharp edges that sliced into my lips, scoured my eyes. Even so, we were heading into exotic territory – towards the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf. I’d read before leaving Sydney that scientists believed the Red Sea had, through quirks of ancient geophysical activity, become something of a closed ecosystem containing species that existed nowhere else on earth. Could it be that this hermetically sealed aquarium housed real mermaids?
The Land Rover was a relic, even though it was costing me an eye-watering amount to hire for the day. It was long wheelbased, without any such genteel accessories as air-con or radio, but it trundled easily along the tracks and paths that led us to the coast of the Red Sea, past villages of dour thatched huts with beautiful women wearing brightly colorful cloth that billowed in the hot wind.
There were no crops, no wells, no workable agriculture or stock. There was just sun-blasted desert and rocky hills with spiky weed and these statuesque resolute people who inhabited this uninhabitable land.
We got to the coast several hours later. The ground gave way to a tarmac-like flat, which took us right out to the edge of the sea. I was hoping that I could have a swim because the temperature had climbed to the mid-fifties and I had already drunk half my water.
I’d been expecting dazzling white sands leading to deep blue sparkling waters, some coral maybe, reefs offshore with exotic birdlife, dolphins frolicking, turtles breaking surface and gulping air, schools of swarming fish rippling across the Gulf. In other words, I had this wildly romantic notion of what the Red Sea would be like.
What greeted me at the edge of the sea was something quite different – a baked mudflat that was quickly consumed by a thick rolling wall of mist, or rather steam, rising in whorls from the water. I could barely see fifty meters out past the shoreline. And the dirty turgid sea, when I tried to swim in it, was so hot it was like a spa on steroids. This was not a refreshing dunk in sweet crystall
ine waters. This was a breathless fetid dip in murky swirling heat-fog.
I quickly got back into the vehicle and we headed further south, now following the coastline, watching out for any rock formations that could possibly be the cairn where the woman-dolphin had been buried. We stopped several times and I jumped out, ran over, checked out a hillock or pile of rocks, but they all seemed to be just that, a hillock or pile of rocks. Not something this love-struck delirious Italian mapmaker had constructed to be the mausoleum for his magical creature.
As we approached what must have been the border with Djibouti – because out here, there were no customs and immigration gates, no cheery signpost saying ‘You are now leaving Ethiopia, have a nice day’ – there was only a sense that you’d driven far enough and the bordering country just had to be not far off – it was then that I spotted a jutting finger of land prodding out into the Gulf. I remembered a similar description in the book, the place where the mapmaker had camped.
I told Tommy to drive out, and as we approached, I saw a massive pile of rocks. In the book, the cartographer had described how he’d buried the woman, carrying rocks from surrounding hills. We stopped. I got out and walked over.
What was I hoping to find? Bones? Fish bones? The sun-bleached skeletal remains of a woman’s head and a fish’s tail? A headstone with an inscription: ‘Rest in Peace Oh Dolphin Girl.’
All I found was a big pile of rocks where there should never have been a pile of rocks. It made no sense for that pile of rocks to be there. It looked man-made. If I really squinted, it looked slightly Italian. Possibly even from the Milanese School of Rock Design. Hah. Who knew? It could have been the grave, but then again it could have been put there by fishermen as a beacon. Or it could have been freakishly washed up by unseasonal weather. I would never know.
Lights, Camera...Travel! Page 8
