Hold the Enlightenment (35 page)

Rule 3:
Exercise ordinary caution. Never, never, never put a marshmallow in your mouth and try to feed it to a bear.

Rule 4:
You are the protagonist. There is a variety of travel book currently in vogue. The writer, a man or woman broken by a bad relationship, sets off on a journey designed to heal the soul. By the end of the book, the formerly tortured scribe is figuratively knocking back margaritas in an orgy of cleansing regeneration.

Used to be, we sent mythical or fictional characters on such journeys. Gilgamesh searching for the answer to death; Odysseus on a ten-year voyage of discovery; Dante and Orpheus in hell; Huck Finn on the Mississippi. These days, we tend to be more democratic in our mythology. You get to be the driving force. Make your myth a good one.

Rule 5:
Boredom greases the cogs in the machinery of marvels.
In
The Immense Journey
, the anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley says,

What Eiseley doesn’t say is that, on your quest for marvels and insights, you will be bored. Oh, God, will you be bored. The three days waiting for an Indonesian bureaucrat to issue you a travel permit; the rock slide in Costa Rica that caused a twenty-three-hour traffic jam; the five-day wait for the Congo River passenger barge; the eight sweaty hours spent in the transit lounge of the Bujumbura airport, waiting for crews to clean up the wreckage of the last plane that tried to land in Kigali. Boring.

Bring along a big book. This is your chance to finally finish
War and Peace
. And remember—while you’re plowing through Andrey’s interminable conversations with Karatayev—that boredom is often the price we pay for marvels.

Rule 6:
Stop whining. If you’re cold and wet, it’s a good bet that everyone else in your party is too. Why should they listen to you talk about what they already know? Travel is boring enough as it is.

Rule 6, corollary 1:
This can’t be stressed strongly enough: No one wants to hear about your last bowel movement.

Rule 7:
Read guidebooks. Guidebooks, books on the country, and books by local authors can all help you refine the nature of your quest.

Rule 7, corollary 1:
Expect the books to be wrong or out of date.

Rule 8:
It ain’t about money. There are guidebooks for backpackers and budget travelers that say that in most Third World countries, there’s a three-tiered price system. The first price is for
stupid, rich outsiders. The second is for citizens who are not local. And the third is for locals. Strive, the books tell you, for the third price. This, they say, will increase your interpersonal skills and tell you much about the country.

Okay, true enough. There are places where you are expected to bargain and sharpies who want to take advantage of you. Unfortunately, too many people who think of themselves as “world travelers” become obsessed with money. It’s loathsome to see some young trekker arguing for an hour with an elderly woman over a fifteen-cent charge for an afternoon of washing clothes.

Too often money, and the process of saving money, becomes the entire point of traveling. If the nature of your quest is financial, stay home and get into arbitrage.

Rule 8, corollary 1:
Similarly, don’t listen to fellow travelers who espouse this philosophy: “Don’t spoil the natives” is the way it is often put. Screw these people. Spend what you need to in order to accomplish your quest.

Rule 8, corollary 2:
Thinking of your hosts as “natives” who can be “spoiled” dehumanizes people and creates the kind of abyss that is impossible to bridge with friendship.

Rule 9:
Don’t worry too much about gear. Unless you’re going to climb a mountain or scuba-dive on your own, bringing too much of your own equipment can be a problem. Do people live where you’re going? Have they lived there for centuries? For a millennium? Maybe they know something about survival in the place where they live. Why spend three days trying to find a machete in Denver when you can buy a better one for a quarter of the price in Honduras?

My own kit is fairly standard: diarrhea medicine, a dry pad to sit on, hot sauce for bland meals, dental floss to use as sewing thread, a Leatherman tool, something to read, and duct tape, which the Bambenjele pygmies of the northern Congo told me represents the high point of my culture.

Rule 10:
Don’t follow rules. This is probably the most important rule.

Rule 11:
Try the local foods. Eat what is put in front of you. They
are not making fun of you. The rooster’s head floating in the soup really is given to the honored guest. It is impolite not to eat it. If you’re a picky eater, stay home.

Rule 11, corollary 1:
Take the usual precautions, but expect to get sick anyway.

Rule 11, corollary 2:
See Rule 6, corollary 1.

Rule 12:
Learn the rudiments of the local language. It’s important to be able to say: I’m sorry; excuse me; I didn’t know; I’m not from around here; where’s the bathroom; thank you; how much is a beer; I beg your pardon; I’ll pay for it; call a doctor; call the police; don’t call the police.

Rule 12, corollary 1:
Intimate relations fuel idiomatic fluency. The colonial Dutch had a saying that holds true to this day: “The best way to learn a language is under the mosquito net.”

Rule 13:
You are the foreigner, dickweed.

Once, in Costa Rica, I saw an older gentleman in Bermuda shorts and black shoes upbraid a waiter who didn’t understand the word “ticket,” as used to mean “bill.”

“Gimme my ticket.”

“Your ticket, sir?”

“Yeah, my ticket. What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t understand this word, ‘ticket.’ ”

“How old are you?” the American asked.

“I have twenty-nine years, sir.”

“Well, goddamn it,” the man said, “you’re old enough to know English by now.”

This is why people burn flags.

Rule 14:
The “natives” have their pride. One thing an American traveler hears quite often is “You Americans have a great nation, and much power, but we [Peruvians, Mongolians, Egyptians, Congolese, Bolivians, Turks] have the great soul.” Don’t argue with these folks, Miles Davis and Smokey Robinson notwithstanding. Instead, inquire about the nature of the national soul. You could learn something.

Rule 15:
Schedule a rest day every now and then. Contrary to what you read, sudden insights seldom happen at the summit of a
mountain, at the moment the whale is sighted, or in the face of some overwhelming bit of landscape. You haven’t yet assimilated the experience. Look for epiphanies on those days when you’re lying on your back, watching the ceiling fan push dust motes through a shaft of light falling through a grimy window. Exhaustion seldom engenders insight.

Rule 16:
Don’t drink too much in a little basement bar just off a street called Florida in Buenos Aires … because you’ll find yourself involuntarily surrounded by
coperas
, or what we would call B-girls, and three bartenders will all be opening bottles of “champagne” that you didn’t order and that cost $60 apiece, and you’ll have to fight your way up the stairs to the exit, throwing money at the bouncers, and the
coperas
will run out into the street and yell
“Maricón”
at you as you stagger away, thinking, “Geez, I thought they liked me.”

Rule 17:
Don’t become involved with your guide. This is often a cause of heartbreak. Worse, there are situations in which the affair works out. Then you end up married to a guide.

Rule 18:
Wait until the last possible moment to punch out disagreeable traveling companions. It’s best not to punch out traveling companions during the first two-thirds of a trip. The person may possess skills that could come in handy. It’s best to swallow insults, listen to complaints, and nod sympathetically at the vivid description of the last bowel movement. Then, at the moment of greatest annoyance, simply recall your resolve to deck this bozo with a sucker punch. Don’t do it, just think about it. In practice, you’ll find the idea of a physical comeuppance soothing. And by the end of the trip, you may even find you’ve developed a grudging respect for the person. You may actually have become friends. But let’s say it’s time for the last good-bye, and you still think the person would benefit from a physical explanation of his various failings. Don’t throw that punch. Think instead about how happy you’re going to be when you’ve seen the last of this slime weasel. The punch is a psychological device, a coping mechanism, and it lives only in your mind.

Rule 19:
Mold experience into stories as a mnemonic device.
Travel is a chaos of experience, momentarily memorable and distressing in its capacity to flee the mind and disappear without a trace. Guides, professional travelers, mold the clay of experience into stories. All guides believe their stories are unforgettable. Some of them are.

Here’s a typical guide story: Two guides, whom we’ll call Big Mike and Medium Mike, are in the midst of a long, boring wait in Punta Arenas, Chile. They’re waiting for a freighter that will take them to Antarctica. Medium Mike is telling the story. “So the freighter is being loaded and may leave at any time. One of us has to wait for the departure call. We draw straws. I get to wait. It’s Saturday night. Big Mike goes to the local house of ill repute. He’s there all night. Seven o’clock the next morning I get the call. Boat’s leaving in two hours. I run down to the place where Big Mike is, but the door is locked. No one answers my knock. I’m getting frantic. The windows are high off the sidewalk, so I’m on a cement block, pounding on a window, yelling for them to open up, c’mon, this is important. About this time, a group of nuns walk by on their way to Mass. One of them stops and says, ‘Son, couldn’t you wait until after church?’ ”

Rule 19, corollary 1:
You don’t have to be a guide to tell guide stories.

Rule 19, corollary 2:
All guide stories begin, “No shit, there I was …”

Rule 19, corollary 3:
The worse the experience, the better the story. Therefore …

Rule 20:
There are no bad experiences.

T
wo donkeys were missing—and the Masai were not happy. The animals weren’t merely lost, the Masai concluded, but had been stolen, probably by Barabaig, a people the Masai call “enemy.” Something had to be done. Blood might be shed, even over a couple of donkeys, because here in Tanzania among the various seminomadic tribes of East Africa, livestock was treasured: it represented a man’s wealth, his self-esteem, his standing in the community.

So the Masai had called a meeting with the Barabaig, and now two groups of men—about twenty on each side—were sitting in separate assemblies under the shade of an immense acacia tree, whose small, flat leaves grew only at the top of the tree, about forty feet up in the air. Everyone knew this was a serious political meeting, and, consequently, everyone was seriously armed, most with spears, a few with bows and poison-tipped arrows.

The Masai didn’t exactly frown on donkey theft. They believe that God gave them an exclusive on livestock and that when they take donkeys, cows, or goats that ostensibly belong to another tribe, they are simply “repossessing” them. It’s the way a lot of Masai start their herds. The Barabaig were much of the same mind, except that they thought God had given livestock to the Barabaig. So donkey and cattle theft among the two groups was a way of life, and a rite of passage for a young man in his quest to progress from boy to warrior.

This was all understood. What irritated the Masai was that whoever
stole their donkeys lived nearby. What was that about? You were supposed to travel far and steal livestock from people you never met. This bush-league move, on the other hand, was entirely unacceptable. The Barabaig, for their part, considered themselves innocent victims of circumstance, if, indeed, any of them had actually stolen the donkeys. Both groups were seminomadic, but the Barabaig had been grazing cattle here first. The Masai had only relocated here in the past few months, driven south from their usual territory by drought. It was not as if the donkeys had been stolen from old friends.

The Masai and Barabaig dressed much alike, in long robes called
shoukas
. The Masai were in red, with muted checks, while the Barabaig’s
shoukas
were red or orange or purple.

The convocation began with flowery speeches on both sides.

“This is a good thing,” my friend and safari guide Peter Jones assured me. “In the old days, there would have been a lot of killing, and then years of blood feuds.” Even in Tanzania, arguably one of the most peaceful nations in Africa, things can degenerate into violence very quickly. In fact, less than twenty years ago, Warangi tribesmen had killed five Barabaig and wounded many more at a conference just like this one.

Peter Jones is the son of a respected English academic and a former Harvard archaeology instructor who himself has lived in Tanzania for almost twenty years. For reasons as simple and convoluted as love, Peter married a friend of mine from Montana whom I used to know as Mimi. These days, she signs her e-mails Margot, and I thought perhaps she’d become pretentious in the manner of silly white persons who live in East Africa. I found soon after I arrived, however, that in Swahili “mimi” means “me, myself.” This led to such Swahili sentences as “Hello, I’m me myself.” Or: “May I introduce you to my wife, me myself.” Margot, her given name, was easier.

Peter and Margot live at Ndarakwai, a former cattle ranch about four thousand feet up the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, and, in the past five years, working with their Masai and Chagga neighbors,
they have managed to bring back the game that had once been decimated in the name of African beef. There are zebras and baboons and elephants and leopards and giraffes on the ten-thousand-acre ranch, all protected by several highly paid antipoaching rangers. There are, Margot told me, even three lions on the place now. She asked me not to mention that to her Masai neighbors.