Around the World in 50 Years (32 page)

The fruits and vegetables I savored were fresh and cheap: 25 cents bought me eight bananas, or six succulent tomatoes, or a pound of exotic fruit fresh from the forest. I dined contentedly on the tastiest tilapia, on zebu steak (which I'd never eaten), freshwater shrimp (which I had not known existed), and Chinese soup (in which floated a calf's knee and a dozen chicken innards I had not known were edible).

The zebu takes the place of cattle in southern Madagascar and gives the scenery an Asian cast with its huge horns, a fatty hump at the top of the neck, and long folds of flesh under the neck. Far more docile and obedient than cattle, zebu were everywhere, plowing the paddies and pulling heavily laden large-wheeled wooden carts along the roads. And they tasted fine, somewhat like buffalo, a bit chewier and less fatty than beef.

The soil in the valleys was loaded with kaolin (aka China clay), ideal for retaining water in the paddies and for making bricks. Every village I saw had a brickmaking yard on the edge of its farms, such farms usually having ten to a hundred paddies, each about the size of a basketball court or two, but with innumerable variations in shape to accommodate the topography. When the Malagasies added a new paddy, they scooped out the clay-rich muck, piled it up near the road, ran it through a one-brick press to squeeze out the water, let the bricks dry in the sun for a few weeks, then either carted the bricks to town to earn some cash or used them to build more houses, houses which will last a hundred years (except for their thatch roofs) and blend harmoniously with their concolorous environs.

The farmers then flood the paddy and often put in a school of small fish to eat the larvae laid there by mosquitoes and other pesky insects. The fish droppings drift down and fertilize the soil. The farmers later bring in a dozen domesticated ducks or geese to eat the fattened fish and add their own nutritious excrement to the mud, after which in go the young rice plants, one by one, each inserted by hand.

Half of humanity is dependent on rice, including many of the world's poorest and most vulnerable peoples. It is their staple food, providing more than one-fifth of
all
calories consumed around the globe, and is the only major cereal crop that can be grown in these hot and humid regions, which quickly wither wheat, barley, soybeans, and rye.

But rice is under siege. Production surged in the 1960s, during the Green Revolution, as plant breeders increased its yield threefold to feed the expanding population in the nations where rice was the staff of life. But the yield per acre has not increased much since then, while the world's population has doubled and is heading for 9.6 billion by 2050, which will require another—and probably unattainable—doubling of rice productivity.

Climate change will also have a disproportionately negative impact on rice because rising temperatures will result in increased heat and drought and decreased available water. This, the agronomists at Cornell ominously predict, “will require people to rethink how rice has been grown for thousands of years,” forcing the growers to abandon the system of flooded paddies that has controlled weeds since biblical times.

Most of us incorrectly assume that the omnipresent paddy water is required to hydrate the plants, but the real reason for the pools of water is to prevent
weeds
from taking root. Weeds are far more harmful to rice than to almost any other crop because the major weed in a rice field is a wild form of rice, a form sexually compatible with the crop being grown, resulting in an uncontrolled transfer of genes both ways, enabling the wild rice weed to withstand herbicides, and causing the modern, genetically modified rice to lose its high yield and head back toward where it was prior to the Green Revolution. As fresh water becomes scarcer, not only will those picturesque paddies be things of the past—but so may many millions of our poor brothers who depend on them.

Any global warming will harm tropical crops the most because those plants are already subjected to the maximum temperatures at which they can thrive.

On top of that, African agriculture had been hard hit with brown streak, a disease caused by mealy bugs, that had widely ravaged cassava plantations, and for which there was no cure yet. Because cassava (also known as manioc, tapioca, and yucca) is the third most important source of carbohydrates on the planet, and since millions of poor Africans rely on that starchy root for a majority of their calories, the prospect of widespread famine is frighteningly real.
Oh, Africa!

Madagascar is most famous for its lemurs, 99 varieties of which have managed to survive, all in widely scattered national parks, and I was fortunate to see ten species in my ten days of driving 2,000 kilometers.

The prevailing theory as to why only Madagascar has lemurs is that, 100 million years ago, their prototypes evolved on the African continent and became inadvertent mariners when they were washed out to sea in storms. They floated across the 260-mile-wide Mozambique Channel to Madagascar 62 to 65 million years ago on lumps of vegetation while their less fortunate predators drowned en route. These accidental tourists speciated and filled unoccupied biological niches on Madagascar, thereby avoiding competition with other species for food or shelter and enabling the little guys to thrive.

The modern lemurs are indigenous and endemic to Madagascar and include varieties that are nocturnal, diurnal, crepuscular; or cathemeral, some of which estivate in the dry season—and I promise no more sentences like that. They range in size from the indri, which can top 25 pounds and has a haunting cry that carries for miles, to the tiny pygmy mouse lemur, which is the world's smallest primate and could hide in a teacup. They are all cute, cuddly, endearing, and lovable. (I was tempted to write a short poem about them, which would have been my first lemurick.)

The rarest is the golden bamboo lemur, not discovered until 1986. It lives only in the Ranomafana rain forest.

How does one get to see this singular little creature?

Looking for lemurs is not as simple as spotting squirrels in Central Park or pikas on Mount Whitney. First, I had to drive for two days to Ranomafana, then rise before the sun because the little critters are only active and eating from dawn to around nine a.m., then hire two guides to assist, one to search ahead for the lemurs and the other to drag me along through the forest. I hiked through mountainside woods for two hours; clambered up and down through dense, wet, cloying, slippery jungle; tripped on roots, vines, creepers, mud, and thorns; and plunged into dense thickets of giant bamboo, whose newest, most tender, cyanide-laced leaves the little guys like to chomp for breakfast.

The resolute searcher repeats this arduous process every day for an average of
three or four weeks
to stalk this elusive species that had avoided detection for hundreds of years. I was lucky and hit the jackpot on my first day, getting some pretty good photos of both the golden bamboo lemur and the almost-as-rare greater bamboo lemur. My hands and legs were covered with thorn scratches, I twisted my ankle, and I suffered the indignity of being shat on from high above by a large indri. All in all, a fair exchange.

Now, about talking to those dead folks …

The culture of Madagascar is replete with both voodoo, which came across from Africa, and ancestor worship, which came with the Malagasies' Asian forbears. These traits are combined in a remarkable ceremony called
Famadihana,
the turning of the bones.

After someone has been dead and buried about five or six years, by which time only bones and some sinews remain, the family exhumes the body, opens the coffin, lovingly washes the bones, tenderly anoints them with honey to preserve them, then dances with the bones to live music, puts them in a smaller, brightly colored coffin for reburial several days later, and parades them through the streets of whichever town the deceased resided in.

I witnessed this ceremony in a small village where the family had just disinterred Pop and the grandparents. The whole town celebrated. It was a joyous occasion, not in any way macabre or bizarre to them. They were having a fabulous party, making a gleeful noise, dancing in the streets, drinking and clapping, overjoyed to have their “dear old friends” back in town for a few days. The bones were then escorted by the celebrants to the family residence where, like dear old friends who'd been away for a long time, they were shown through the house, regaled with all the family gossip, informed about any of the chief changes that had occurred, had their advice sought about many of those changes, and were introduced to any new spouses and children.

Villagers in southern Madagascar carry the coffin of a disinterred person during the ceremony known as “the turning of the bones,” where the skeleton is cleaned, preserved with honey, and joyfully welcomed back to town like an old friend who had been away for about five years.

As an honored foreign guest, I was invited to join the festivities and was particularly asked to explain to the departed—
uuuh,
I mean the dear old friends—the wonder of Barack Obama, the miracle of a black man—a very good, wise, and intelligent black man, they told me—the son of an African father, the husband of a woman who was the great-grandchild of slaves, being elected president of the mighty United States, an event that had struck Africa with amazement and stirred it deeply with joy and love and hope for America. And for itself.

As far as I could tell, the bones were pleased.

*   *   *

I flew back to Joburg to replenish supplies and complete this trip with a transit to the heart of darkness, the Congo and the DRC. I spent most of my time there dodging potholes and beggars, searching for something to eat, ferrying across the wide river between the two nations, bargaining for carvings (of which the Congos have some of the best in Africa), and losing much of what I wrote at the Internet café during the three or four daily blackouts and the ten or 20 short power interruptions.

When the power in my hotel went out, so did the overhead fan in my sweltering room, which meant I had to go out. Easier said than done. My half-star native hotel had no windows to illuminate its pitch-black hallway, and the porter put only one candle on the floor in the middle on the 150-foot-long hall. One candle.

There's not much to do in Kinshasa, and even less during a blackout (unless you're a mugger), but I found one benefit: I could get an inexpensive haircut. You see, half the dudes in town had their hair clipped down to the scalp and half were taking it a tad longer, in a new style they called “The Obama.” Since both styles required the barber to use electric trimmers, he was effectively out of business during the blackouts, enabling me, as the only long-haired game in town, to negotiate for a scissors cut at half the price.

By this point I'd finished off 60 breakfast bars, 68 packets of iced-tea mix, 15 pounds of adult cereal, 49 Big Apple T-shirts, seven large paperbacks, 750 vitamin pills, three bottles each of water purification pills, mosquito repellent, and sunscreen, 20 compact Hyatt Hotel sewing kits (dispensed as gifts and tips), two pairs of worn-out jungle pants, one pound of matzos, six tins of sardines, eight gigabytes of camera flashcard memory—and twelve of the 13 countries I'd set out to see. And my tooth was twinging sharply. It was time to head home, so I decided to take a few farewell photos—and got arrested.

I had not been taking any photos in the Congos because I saw nothing photogenic, just grime and dilapidation. But I thought someone back home might like a look, so I walked out of my hotel and snapped two pictures of the food vendors across the street. This caused an immediate outburst of shouting, pointing, and fist waving from the locals, whereupon the omnipresent plainclothes police promptly pounced on me.

After a thorough check of my passport and documents, and a lengthy lecture in heated French, they explained that the torn-up strip of worn tar fronting my hotel was one of the main roads leading from the Congo River into the capital and that if the rebels (who had been contentedly raping and pillaging many hundreds of miles to the east for the last couple of years) attacked from the sea and came up the river to Kinshasa (which was about as likely as their invading Coney Island) my photos could provide them with vital intelligence on how to strike into the heart of the city. Which was just pure war-hysteria bullshit. The only info the rebels could glean from my photos was where to find the fly-besieged outdoor barbecue where I ate lunch, and
that
would wipe them out quicker than any government weaponry.

After I rejected the response outlined above as too difficult for me to successfully translate into diplomatic French, I told the police that I was just a simple-minded American tourist idiot who wanted a few snaps of this glorious place to show my buddies back home. I eventually got released on my own recognizance.

The next day I learned why I'd been let off so easy in that normally repressive nation: The police had much bigger fish to fry, and size matters. The morning headline proclaimed: