Around the World in 50 Years (30 page)

• Although all these countries were experiencing a four-year drought, harming agriculture and livestock, its impact was far more severe in the east. NB, possessing great mineral wealth and a thriving tourist industry, was able to buy needed food, but the eastern states tottered on the brink of serious famine, relieved only by international aid agencies.

• The NB restaurants served German-style food, often with culled grilled game. Farther east, the grub at the roadside stalls was starchy, fried, and lacking in nutrients: cassava fritters, fried bread balls, rice, and dozens of dishes made of mashed-up corn ground into a powder and reconstituted into everything from bland pancakes to tasteless porridge.

• The temperature in NB had been in the 70s. It soared into the 90s after I'd crossed the Tropic of Capricorn.

• The rate of HIV infection rose from 20 percent in Namibia to well over 30 percent in the east. Life expectancy was reduced from 52 years in Namibia to 34–39 farther east.

These were no countries for old men. Or of them.

For the second time in my last three trips, I got hit by pickpockets. In the undeveloped world I wear pants or shorts with at least six pockets and try to distribute my valuable portable assets among them so no single picked pocket is a disaster. I knew the rear pockets were the most vulnerable and tempting, and I knew I was entering pickpocket paradise when I visited the fairgrounds in Lusaka to see the 89th Zambia Agricultural and Commercial Exhibition, so I headed directly for a men's room where I intended to shift my back pocket stuff to a safer location. But the bad guys beat me to it.

Two of them grabbed the large box I was carrying (filled with handicrafts I'd just bought at the Sunday Market down the road), pretending to help me carry it. While I remonstrated and tussled with them, their third colleague hit my right-rear pocket and made off with its contents: a plastic baggie containing a little cash ($20); a photocopy of my passport (30 cents); my ticket for the bus to Chipata the next morning ($6); and my last hundred sheets of soft, white, genuine U.S. toilet paper—
Priceless!

Toilet paper is also the key to the system I use for comfort-ranking countries around the world. Unlike the rather esoteric econometric model utilized by the World Bank or the incomprehensible computer program employed by the International Monetary Fund, my Podell Potty Paper Rating (PPPR) System is simple, reliable, and easy to apply. It's based on the quality of toilet paper in that country's public restrooms and uses the following scale:

COUNTRY'S WORLD COMFORT RANKING BASED ON TYPE TOILET TISSUE IN PUBLIC RESTROOMS

1   Soft white

2   Hard white

3   Rough brown, green, or purple

4   Pieces of newspaper

5   Bucket of water (mostly in Asia)

6   No paper, no water. And no toilet seat.

7   No public toilets at all

The PPPR System can also be applied to rating hotels: Just ignore those three or four stars the management has wishfully or misleadingly painted on the welcoming billboard, and head for the head to check the goods.

Moving ever eastward, I stayed at one rugged campsite (PPPR
=
4) where I met a group of 16-year-olds from England who had just finished a ten-day backpack, carrying all their food, water, supplies, and tents, with no porters, across a dry, uninhabited, mountainous area in southern Malawi. (And I'd thought I did well if I backpacked for three days along the Escarpment Trail from Kaaterskill Falls to Windham.)

At my campsite in Lilongwe (PPPR
=
2) I met four sturdy Irish lads who were bicycling from Cairo to Cape Town, frequently covering a hundred miles a day, even in mountainous terrain. (And I once believed I was doing well if I pedaled the level 25 miles from Westhampton Beach to Shinnecock Inlet and back before nightfall.)

At the Big Blue campsite on the shore of Lake Malawi (PPPR
=
3) I met three brawny South Africans in the midst of a yearlong journey kayaking the length of the four largest African lakes and their riverine connections. (And I had been proud of myself if I managed to kayak from Riverhead out past the Peconic Bay Bridge and back before the tide changed.)

It's no continent for old men.

I took a break at Big Blue for four lazy days of much-needed R & R, tenting near the relaxed, almost Caribbeanesque, backpackers' town of Nkhata Bay on the western shore of Lake Malawi, the third largest on the continent, which 19th-century explorer David Livingstone called “the lake of stars.” Unlike the Great Lakes or New York State's Finger Lakes or most U.S. lakes, which were formed by glacial gouging and scouring during the Ice Age 20,000 years ago, the three largest lakes of Africa were all formed more than a million years ago when tectonic plates tore Africa asunder, creating a longitudinal gash more than 2000 miles long. In this gash are the awesome Rift Valley in Kenya and the 3000-foot-deep gorge in Ethiopia that is the start of the Blue Nile and Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika, and Malawi.

Lake Malawi contains the largest number of fish species of any freshwater body on the planet, including more than
one thousand
species of cichlids, which students of evolution regard as significant as Darwin's finches in the Galápagos.

Around Big Blue, I hobnobbed and bargained for carvings with the famed Malawi woodworkers; ate delicious whole local butterfish; hiked one of the few remaining rain forests in the country, where I managed to see (with the help of a nature guide) the elusive African broadbill, a species which, despite its prosaic name, is much sought by bird-watchers; kayaked along the lake's shoreline; tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, to clamber aboard one of the thin, tipsy dugout canoes the natives use; scuba dived with Aqua Africa into an amazing variety of brightly colored freshwater fish, mostly cichlids, 95 percent of which are found nowhere else on earth; and slept ten hours a night to the sound of the waves lapping at the shore 15 feet below my tent perch.

I also spent the better part of two days chatting up and photographing a lovely British college student, and was sure I was making good progress. When she asked me to e-mail her a couple of the photos I saw my opportunity. I confessed to not being very adept with a computer and slyly suggested I could deliver photo prints to her in London, in person, in six weeks, on my way home. And maybe I could take her to dinner after the delivery?

“No, don't bother,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Just send them to me as an e-mail attachment. Perhaps you could ask one of your grandchildren to show you how.”

Have I mentioned it was not a favorable environment for males of advanced age?

At the cramped Internet hut adjacent to Big Blue that housed six heavily trafficked open cubicles, I couldn't help but overhear the young man in the next booth skyping his mum back in England. It was, by his admission, his first call to her in three months and only his third since he left the English Midlands seven months before. Within ten minutes he told her the following: He had discovered his true calling, which was to become an artist of African scenery and wildlife, and had abandoned his previous career plan of becoming a photographer. He had sold all his photo equipment to buy expensive African hardwood frames for the paintings he'd exhibit in Berlin in the not-too-distant future (although he had yet to find a gallery). He thought he'd be home to see her in about three more years. He had a relationship with a girl in Mozambique but, not to worry, he no longer thinks he will marry her, although she might be preggers, but, again, not to worry, she doesn't mind keeping the baby because “it's the African way,” and no big deal; and, Oh, yes, he might have contracted HIV, but the chances were slight, and, no, he hasn't had time yet to get an AIDS test, but he will get one within three months and will be sure to let Mum know the result. And give my love to Da. Bye.

*   *   *

Two concerns persisted through my trek eastward: my need for a visa to Angola and my need for a root canal job on my lower-right bicuspid.

I'd exchanged gossip with the backpack brigade and found not a one who ever got an Angolan visa, although the Irish bicyclists were hopeful they'd succeed because “everybody loves Ireland.” Even more discouraging, the woman who ran the camp in Lilongwe told me that in all her years of operation, she'd only had two guests who'd managed to snag visas to Angola, and that, if I managed to get one, dinner was her treat. She was depressingly confident she'd never have to make good on this offer.

As for the bicuspid, my dentist had tested it thoroughly a month before I left New York and advised a prophylactic root canal, but admitted, when I pressed him, that all his tappings and cold-air sprayings and X-rayings were inconclusive. I had not been in the mood for a
possibly
unnecessary root canal, so I opted for watchful waiting.

Sure enough, the little bugger started to ping and twitch about two weeks into this trip, and then caused a big abscess. Since there was no friggin' way I was going to submit to an endodontic procedure in Malawi, I dipped into my supply of Amoxicillin tablets three times a day for a week, which reduced the twinging, and I repeatedly stabbed the abscess with my hypodermic needle, which reduced the swelling, both of which made me somewhat hopeful I could drag this out until I returned home in another six weeks.

I left Nkhata Bay for the once-a-week, 25-hour voyage across Lake Malawi on the
Ilala,
a decrepit ship long overdue for the scrap heap that'd be familiar to anyone who read
Lord Jim.
It was an accident waiting to happen, with just two 22-person lifeboats, one life raft, and four life preservers—I counted them
very
carefully—for ten times as many passengers. It was one of those ancient rust buckets whose sinking, with hundreds drowned, flashed on the news for a few hours. But it was the only game in town if one needed to cross the lake. And this one needed to cross the lake.

Although I usually book passage in second class on Third World trains and boats so I can get to know the locals instead of the wealthy tourists, some sixth sense fortunately prevailed upon me
not
to use this occasion to assuage my colonial guilt, but to book a mattress on the first-class deck instead. Best decision I made this trip.

The second-class deck was hardly a deck, but an oppressively humid, fetid, unbearably hot corridor chockablock with bags, bundles, bawling babies, and about 400 sweating, half-naked, sharp-elbowed people compacted into a space for 50, with no seats, no lights, no toilets, no water, no AC, and no breeze. For 24 hours. (Third class was totally beyond belief, more a means of torture than a mode of travel.)

It was no ship for old landlubbers.

As the voyage drew to a close, I wanted to get off as quickly as possible. But that was not possible. Most of the villages where the
Ilala
discharged its passengers were too poor to build docks or jetties. You had to hand your luggage down from the upper deck into a wildly bobbing lifeboat, then climb 30 feet down a rickety ladder into the boat, which was loaded to within two inches of the gunwales, then endure the sea-sickening 15-minute ride to the beach, and then leap off, with all your luggage, into thigh-high water.

At the port of call right before mine, it had taken the
Ilala,
using this method, six and a half hours to discharge its passengers and its cargo of dried fish, bananas, galvanized roofing, motor oil, and complete homes of furniture, as a result of which we reached my discharge point, and my perilous plunge into the lifeboat, seven hours behind schedule and in the dead of night.

After I waded ashore, I saw no buses, minivans, or any other means of transport at the tiny border burg of Metangula, and I was assured I'd see none until morning at the earliest. After several hours of dickering, I prevailed upon the immigration officer, who was going off duty, to drive me and a Swiss couple two hours through the forests to Lichinga, the somnolent capital of Niassa Province in far northern Mozambique, which the locals accurately describe as
o fim do mundo,
the end of the world. It's the least populated province in Mozambique and one of the most sparsely settled in all Africa, comprising the lake, sheer cliffs, rocky escarpments, and inhospitable land. From the ship, I'd seen only four huts in the final five hours. In the car, we saw only six houses and two vehicles in a drive of 90 miles.

It was no country for anybody.

Women tending a tea plantation in Mozambique. In most of Africa, women do most of the work. The men limit their labors to three tasks: lifting heavy objects, driving trucks and other motorized equipment, and herding or working with large farm animals.

After another week, by then two days behind schedule, I made it to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, a city so large and spread out that foot power had to yield to horsepower. I got about in worn-out old cabs and minibuses operated by kids who couldn't even pass the driving test in New Jersey. These cars had crumpled fenders, missing bumpers, threadbare tires, and shattered windscreens frequently festooned with decals assuring the passengers that
THIS VEHICLE IS PROTECTED BY THE BLOOD OF JESUS
, which failed to assure me as much as being in the good hands of Allstate, or if State Farm were there, or Nationwide were on my side.