The Accidental American… Somewhere in Africa

I wouldn’t say anything as clichéd as “this is the life” or anything like that, both because it’s not that great here, and clichés are to be avoided like the, uh, peste, by any writer worth his, uh, paper (dodging clichés can be difficult). Of course I hear people refer to Thailand as ‘paradise’ and I don’t know what they mean. I guess it can be an ego booster for someone with low self-esteem, though perhaps the opposite for someone truly talented. There’s certainly an element of village communism present there and in most small communities, jealousy and resentment, the great equalizer. I usually relegate such platitudes to the ‘superficial impressions’ folder. Nevertheless, it’s always nice to find a place worth hanging, time to wash the clothes, buy some bread, and make some tea, especially after a week or two of rough travel. This is the way I like to travel, like serial monogamy, never exactly settled down, though hardly extreme adventure. I guess it’s a backpacker style, or maybe an American one, but probably my own. That’s the way I do everything, never totally committed to any one thing, but unwilling to ever totally dump anything or anyone, almost. In addition I’m a terrible tourist, often preferring to riffle through postcards rather than actually get up at dawn to get the best light for that sublime view of some God-forsaken ruin. Where I differ from the typical backpacker is that they tend to congregate with ‘their own kind’ whereas I tend to eschew such. A modern-day backpacker can travel throughout Southeast Asia from one safe haven to another and never really see anything else. While not wishing to be judgmental, the disservice seems to be that he might think that what he’s seeing is the totality of the landscape. This plays into frightening ‘artificial reality’ scenarios, a la ‘Matrix’, ‘Vanilla Sky’, ‘Truman Show’, ‘Pleasantville’, or many others (most of which I like), in which the Berkeleyan dictum esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) gets carried to absurd, if plausible, extremes. After all, if we just followed common sense perception, we’d still be worshipping the Sun god on his daily rounds, and far from even considering multi-flavored quarks for Mr. Mark that sit and spin to a regularity that somehow underlies the very fabric of our physical reality.

I was in Mexico so many times when somebody saw an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe in his tortilla soup that I swore they were running that tape for me every time I crossed the border. Twice I was there during the worst pollution ever recorded, the second being worse than the first. They found a mutated rat about a meter long. I hope there’s nothing like that here. By some quirk of fate, or some butterfly that happened to flutter by, I find myself in Dakar, Senegal. This is how most of life works really, isn’t it? Is natural evolution really anything other than a series of brilliant mistakes? Is cultural evolution any different? Conscious decision-making and pompous philosophy usually come only after a big meal. Hunger can speak any language. So here I am, the accidental American on a busman’s holiday. But for a few quirks of fate I would be thinking about Quiche’ Indians right now instead of the price of quiche downtown. But for another quirk or two I would’ve lived the last ten years in Bolivia freezing my buns and learning Aymara’ instead of steaming them and learning Indo-Aryan. This is more than just ‘funny how life plays out’; no, this is indeed at the very core of our being. It’s almost as if the Lord said, “Go forth and divide,” and the rest is history.

In my research of mail-order brides, I learned a very interesting statistic. Do you know how most couples meet? Chance encounter, pure dumb luck and fortuitous circumstance. That makes Internet encounters seem relatively inspired and calculating now, doesn’t it? Downright rational, I might add. Should we re-think planned marriages? Maybe Mom does indeed know best. Now there’s a scary thought. Enter the dumb tourist into this lively mix, whether in Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts, or backpack and dreadlocks, or me. We’re here to test the tourist uncertainty principle by accident or design; it makes no difference. That means that our experience is not only limited to our perceptions of that experience, not the thing itself, but that nevertheless the thing itself will be altered in the very act of being perceived. This is a lively ground for interaction, in direct proportion to the distance from the original source. Like lightning drawing a spark up from the ground to meet it in mid-air, travelers draw out the most susceptible locals from the teeming masses, those just dying to meet us. Hard things on both sides will be seeking out soft spots in the other simply to test their resilience and because they are there. Beware three-body problems. They’re unsolvable.

So the signs all say ‘Dakar’ and so it must be. If they all said ‘Abidjan’, I wouldn’t know the difference. What there is here is a street scene that has to be seen to be believed. Think something between Khaosan Road and a Dead show. Apply pigment. It seems like everybody is selling something, especially cell phone SIM and top-up cards. You Americans have been spared most of this hysteria, with your two-year plans and two-page contracts. One guy’s got shirts draped over his arms, the next guy’s got pants, then there’s shoes displayed on the pavement every block or so, so I guess you could outfit yourself on the way to a party without having to go home and change. The problem is that it can be hard to walk down the street having to dodge vendors. Fortunately my cell phone’s got a radio, so not only can I listen to the local tunes, but I’ve also got plausible deniability, in case someone is offended at his entreaties being ignored. “Hey! Chill, dude! I didn’t hear you!” I’ve taken to using earphones even with the radio off. They’re too much hassle, the constant sales pitches and general hangings on and followings along. I guess it’s part of African culture or at least big-city African culture. It wasn’t like that on the train or in Mali, and to be honest, it’s no worse than Kuta Beach in Bali. I’ve caught at least one guy secretly following me for an hour or two, pacing his steps to match mine, always managing to be right there every time I changed my mind and turn around. The important thing is that I haven’t felt physically threatened once, only annoyed, and that’s good, ‘cause these are some big brothers. My wife asks, “Aren’t you scared?” Yes I am, and frequently, but not from aggression, not yet, at least. I’m scared to eat the gumbo, and I really want to, ‘cause it looks pretty good, but the last thing I need here is to get the runs or stomach distress. This is a calculated fear, logically inferred from premises, not merely fear itself. Fear itself is transcendent. Unlike Mali, at least there are options for eating here, though I’m not likely to get restaurant fatigue any time soon. I’m considering a boredom diet. It works.

I’m not the first who’s washed up here in the path of least resistance. If Americans wash up on the beach in Mexico and Brits tend to wash up in Thailand, then this is where more than a few Frenchies find themselves when the euros run low. I suppose they’ve got a few stories to tell. The Europeans used to always rag on us Americans back on the Gringo Trail. “You Americans only want to work,” they’d accuse. Hey, we got no gap year or continental grand tour or month-long paid vacation every year before we go back to our predictable life in the same town where our great-great-great-grandfather was born. We’re immigrants by nature, always on the look for something better. My g-g-grandaddy got on a boat, in steerage I presume, because it couldn’t be any worse than ‘back home’. Much of northern Europe did the same, looking for liebensraum. We need it. We’re not the romantic type; we’re the Germanic type. We’re not looking for each other; we’re looking for the other. We’re not looking for style; we’re looking for substance. Civilization is not limited to cities, and we’ll invent computers and cell phones and rocket ships to prove it, if that’s what it takes. It just takes space, and time, and lots of edible purple berries until the first crops come to harvest. This is our mission, mission impossible. It’s a way of life. Still the French implant their patisseries and boulangeries on the cuisine and their breathy ‘je t’aime’s and syrupy love songs on the airwaves without the slightest trace of self-consciousness or irony at the juxtaposition of such fluff in deepest darkest in-yo-face Africa. It takes all kinds. I wish they’d implant some of it in Mali.

Less Miserable… Dakar d’accord

No, I haven’t taken to writing way-off-off-off-Broadway plays. I’d only end up blogging them for release to the public. No, sometimes when it’s fourth and ten and you’ve got linebackers rushing the punt, you just gotta’ grab the ball and do an end run. So I reverted to plan B. You’ve got to have a plan B. This is an axiom of free-style travel, especially if you’re going to a region for the first time, especially if the travel guides steer you wrong, as they sometimes do. I’m still pissed off. I respect my readers more than that, both of you. I’ll tell you the truth, even if it hurts (sales). I won’t play up to false political correctness that does you no good when you’re standing on the side of the tracks on the edge of town at five in the morning without a clue, without a brew, all strung out on her or him. No, I’ll tell you the truth, even if it causes you to re-think a certain portion of a certain trip. The truth is that the ethnologist in me found Mali awesome; the traveler in me found it awful. Words fall short of the reality. Still I try to be positive and put the best face on things. I have to, because I have to go back. This happened once before, in Haiti. Plan B was the Dominican Republic.

I’ll tell you straight up that even though Mali is probably one of the most incredible places in the world, sometimes the most incredible places are locked in some of the most impossible situations, e.g. Burma, Cuba, etc. In Mali that situation is not political so much as simple under-development. I just can’t afford to really like Mali whole-heartedly. It’s not practical. It would mean I’m slumming, watching poverty from the safety and superior vantage point of my tour-bus window, enjoying the spectacle. Poverty in the countryside can still have dignity and status, that of tradition and homeland. In the city it just plain sucks, though it still speaks volumes. You can see the history of West Africa laid out right before your eyes on the streets of Bamako, likely part of the larger area where black Africa became black Africa, in a large population pool from which the Bantu speakers spread out to dominate the rest and populate the continent, displacing the aboriginal ancestors of the modern Khoisan speakers. They arrived at the cape not long after the Dutch. Of course many Africans from this area wound up in the American South from the slave diaspora. I think I see some familiar faces. Still, Bamako is hardly a city, more like a hundred villages in search of one, a dozen tribes in search of a nation.

Mali is like the Guatemala or Cambodia of Africa, picturesque and inspiring, but cumbersome for travel. But cost-wise it was starting to look more like Bhutan. I don’t mind some culture shock. This was sticker shock! Guatemala and Cambodia are cheap. Do the math; the numbers just don’t work for Mali. So I booked a train to Dakar, Senegal. If Senegal doesn’t get the same marks for authenticity, it at least gets higher marks for ‘livability,’ at least for West Africa. “The roads are bad,” they say, so I booked a seat on the train, thirty-five hours, but at least maybe I can get some sleep, train tracks not being so bumpy, usually, by definition. The train leaves in the evening, so I’ll arrive in the morning, and what I save on two nights’ hotels will pay for the trip. Well, the travel writers blew it again. They don’t tell you that this is the train from Hell. One look at that sorry caravan made me quickly regret that I had contracted for thirty-five hours of such abuse. It gets worse. Apparently that thirty-five hours refers to only the actual travel time, not including the interminable delays and waiting time on the tracks, nor the meal and pee-pee stops at least three times a day. The bathrooms were unspeakable, of course, so I held my own for the whole time, which only works if you don’t eat much. I didn’t, surviving mostly on something like rose hips and the kindness of strangers. Times like these are when you do that long-postponed fast, when you finally shut off the caffeine to your free-wifi-with-coffee-addled brain and concentrate simply on being and nothingness, staying awake, thinking outwardly, no internal dialog, pure perception without the curse of consciousness that language brings in its wake. There were some magic moments, too, like when the whole car breaks into song at one extroverted lady’s instigation. Bunuel’s Subida al Cielo (Mexican Bus Ride) has got nothing on this. Then there were the endless expanses of baobab trees, looking nothing so much like little African baby dolls rising from the landscape with thick trunks gradually tapering to tufted hair and stubby limbs. It was like a dream and a nightmare handing off the baton through the night.

When the train finally rolled into the station, almost sixty hours had passed, or would have, anyway, if it had actually rolled into the station. It didn’t. The train dropped us off at the edge of town at five in the morning, we final travelers looking and feeling like compost after being squeezed together for the better part of three nights. What to do now? Bite the bullet. Find a hotel and hope it’s late enough that I’ll only be charged for one day if I leave the next morning, a small consolation prize. No such luck; they hit me for two nights and I didn’t even have a key for the door since it’s mostly for short-term use, if you know what I mean. There was a condom on the floor, if you know what I mean, mute testimony to some disembodied desire at least filled full, if not exactly fulfilled. On top of that, the taxi driver over-charged me. On top of that, I got a signal on my cell phone but I couldn’t get a message out to my wife ‘out there,’ might as well be the moon. Worst of all, my feet were so squeezed on that train that I got a case of swollen-foot thrombo-phlebitic ‘economy class disease,’ and feel a screaming bout of gout coming on. There’s some pills left over from last year, but they won’t last long. I’m traveling in a foreign country and now I can’t walk? That’s usually almost all that I do. I could use some inspiration. Still I never lost my faith in my fellow men, and that’s what sustains me, the basic goodness of men and women, cultivated through religion and honed through practice. These are ‘people of the book,’ too, the Qur’an, and it shows. I was never offered so much food and drink as on that train, even by Thais, and they’re good at that, and including Deep Southerners, ditto. This, too, will pass.

The whorehouse wasn’t that bad, really, right next to a honky-tonk that I could look right into from my window. I wasn’t going anywhere fast anyway after sixty hours on a train and an attack of gout. If you don’t know what gout feels like, count your blessings. The pain is excruciating, only slightly mitigated by the fact that it can go away as fast as it comes on. That doesn’t mean that it will, of course. So when the Senegalais band started playing around midnight and went on until four or five in the morning, that was fine with me. I got a free concert. I’d only be drifting in and out of consciousness otherwise anyway. The next day will be better. It has to be. I get an early start and start walking. The foot is serviceable. I pick up some speed, and then a sudden realization hits me. I have no idea where I’m going. I had expected to be let off at a train station, which usually confers a certain centrality to its location. Why that train dumped us on the edge of town I’ll never know. There’s a ‘cyber café’ open, so I check my e-mail and look for maps online, spurning the advances of a little baobab doll of a teenager looking for a ride to the US. I couldn’t understand much of what she said anyway, since they’ll never speak their language the way they expect you to speak yours when English has to be reverted to. It’s the white man’s curse. Anyway, the maps are junk, so bid the little girl good-bye and revert to instinct, in no certain order. She’s cute, but it would’ve never worked. I flag a taxi and ask to go to the train station. There has to be a real one somewhere, and I’m betting that it’s close to the center. It is, and the taxi driver didn’t even rip me off. My French must be improving. At least French actually gets used here between locals, which I never heard in Bamako. There’s an obvious Arab middle class here, probably Moroccans in addition to peripatetic Lebanese, so that must be the difference. Still there are no hotels in sight. This is a breach of logic, a traveler’s last line of defense. Anywhere else, Asia or Latin America at least, and there’d be bunches. It’s time for the sixth sense, a kind of traveler’s radar, to flush out the elusive goal, a cheap but good hotel.

Fortunately I travel light, rule number one. Like an ant following familiar smells where no lines are drawn, I gravitate toward the dense part of town. It shouldn’t be far. It’s not, and there’s an auberge sign pointing up above a commercial courtyard. They size me up quickly and show me a room back by the staff’s kitchen, my kind of place. The price is right. We’re in, and right in the center of the city. Dense commercial area? Hmmm… I wonder. I flip the lid on my laptop and look for a wi-fi signal. It hems and haws, then locks on, Skype and all. We’re really in! I need a line! Quick, Trinity, give me a number! The Skype rate to Thailand from Senegal is the same as from the US! The phone is ringing! In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit… A voice comes on the line. Could it possibly be? “Sawatdi kha.” It’s a miracle.