Around the World in 50 Years (43 page)

I had arranged, six months earlier, to visit Uganda accompanied by James Stedronsky, a law school chum who was an outdoor enthusiast, so I'd have someone to cover my back, especially since I'd be camping out for most of the two weeks there, but Jim bailed out the day after the troop announcement, sending me this e-mail:

I'm not traveling to Uganda as a US citizen while US special ops are chasing an outrageously dangerous group through the country. It's too dangerous, Al. You have no idea whether someone can make a buck selling you to some rebels. You need to seriously discuss this with some other people whose judgment you trust. It's blatantly reckless to travel alone under these circumstances. You need to discuss this with mature people who are very close to you and care about you. You know better than anyone that when traveling you have to continuously weigh risks and change plans. A US military intervention ranks with these. Don't decide this by yourself and don't insist on going “because this is what I do.”

But, Jim, this
is
what I do.

The world's newest state, South Sudan, had become even more dangerous. It had been my hope, for the previous five years, that the achievement of independence in July 2011 would end the fighting between the South's animist population and the Muslim-dominated North. But the violence instead intensified along the disputed, mineral-rich border zone. Hundreds were killed and dozens of villages burned to the ground in the three months following independence.

In other parts of the new nation, more than 2,400 had been killed, 3,000 wounded, and 26,000 cattle stolen in fighting between the Murle and Lou Nuer communities. (Cattle rustling is a main source of insecurity in South Sudan, as cows represent wealth and social status, and are used as “blood money,” and compensation, and payment of dowries.) The International Crisis Group noted that “Sticks and spears have historically been used to carry out rustling and the violent disputes it often causes. However, the proliferation of small arms changed the nature of this practice, making raiding far more deadly.”

Then there was Yemen, to which the Arab Spring had come late, but ferociously, with an almost successful assassination of the autocratic president, followed by heavy-handed government retaliation, which was killing about ten protesters a day, while Al-Qaeda made the most of the disorganization and turbulence to consolidate its hold on South Yemen, countered by escalating attacks by American drones to pick off terrorist leaders. Admittedly not the best time to visit—unless you were an arms merchant.

Even well-developed Kenya, which had been calm after two of its largest tribes hacked each other up following an election two years earlier, and which I'd have to transit to enter Somalia and South Sudan, went ballistic a few weeks before I was scheduled to depart, and dispatched its army into neighboring Somalia to attack the terrorists of Al-Shabaab, who had kidnapped a French tourist and killed her. The fittingly named spokesman for Al-Shabaab, Sheikh Ali Mohamed Rage, vowed his group would attack Kenya with a vengeance in retaliation.

He would carry out this threat on March 12, 2012, when assailants hurled four grenades into the Nairobi bus station, killing at least six and injuring more than 50. Twenty other grenade/explosive attacks in Kenya killed 48 and injured more than 200 in 2012. On September 21, 2013, Al-Shabaab terrorists invaded an upscale shopping mall in Nairobi, killed six Kenyan soldiers and 61 civilians, and broadcast that this was retribution for Kenya's military support of the Somalian government.

The worst was Somalia, often cited as the most dangerous country on earth. I knew Al-Shabaab had established a brutal reign in which they whipped women for showing their ankles, chopped off the hands of petty thieves, and beheaded those suspected of being disloyal. They had banned TV, music, gold teeth, and bras as offensive to Islam. But I didn't realize quite how dangerous it was until I received an e-mail from the manager of a hotel in Mogadishu to whom I'd inquired about their accommodations and how far it was to walk to the nearest restaurant. He replied:

Dear Al, I will try to guide you as best as I can on your planned trip. Mogadishu is unlike any place on earth. There is no such thing as “going for a walk.” You cannot walk out of our compound whenever you want. You will be immediately spotted, and kidnapped within minutes. There are no taxis. You will need armed Somali security guards, who will take you in a convoy of Toyota Surfs with blacked-out windows should you need to move around, even 100 yards. Security guard escort service plus vehicle and driver is $350/day. Foreigners cannot move around (even with armed guards) anywhere in the city after sundown. We cannot offer a rate without meals because you will starve! There are no restaurants you can go to outside our compound. Either you eat at our place or you do not eat. For these reasons, coming here as a tourist is wildly expensive and not recommended. Our clients are journalists, diplomats, and UN staff, who have received hostile-environments training. Moving around the city, you may encounter small-arms fire, possible IEDs, grenade or RPG attacks. If you're still interested in visiting, please let me know.

And he was trying to
encourage
my visit.

*   *   *

When high risk is closely linked to the reasonable possibility of a high reward, as in the stock market or romance, I've often given it a go, with much success in the former, and only a few dozen disasters in the latter. But when it came to this travel game, the high-risk countries offered scant rewards. They were, more often than not, sad, sorry, lawless lands with few things worth seeing, unless you had a fetish for starving, homeless people; ruined infrastructure; wounded and malnourished children; and bullet-pocked buildings. When traveling in lawless lands and failed states, high risk comes with a high possibility of an untimely funeral—if, that is, your next of kin is fortunate enough to locate your body.

On my scoreboard, the reward was always the same: just one more country. Whether it's France or Somalia, Canada or a killing ground, it still only counted as one country, regardless of the risk involved. For that reason, I'd diligently sought to avoid the dangerous hot spots when they were inflamed, and visit them only after they'd cooled down. My overall venture may have been fraught with perils, but since I'd never been an adrenaline junkie, and was no longer the blissfully ignorant, foolishly invincible youth who naïvely set out on that drive around the world decades earlier, I did whatever I reasonably could to minimize the risk. I never consciously went in search of danger. When it confronted me, I'd tried to make the best of it and find a way out of it or around it. I was a living oxymoron—a cautious adventurer.

But I could no longer do that or be that. I was down to the nitty gritty of the Nasty Nine, none of which showed signs of becoming completely peaceful before I got carted off to the assisted-living facility or the booby bin. If I was going to go for the goal, now was the time. I'd dodged and ducked and avoided the big dangers as long as possible, but now I had to put up or shut up.

I could have stopped here, at 187 countries, and lived peacefully in my cozy, souvenir-filled apartment, enjoying my sweet girlfriend, my good pals, the spa at Chelsea Piers, my front-row ballet seats, my pile of must-read books, and enough savings to lead a comfortable life. Or I could continue the adventure and risk it all for an objective that to most probably seemed meaningless and inconsequential and whose origins and attraction I but vaguely understood.

After much consideration, I decided to go for it. I arranged to leave on November 18, 2011, for Saudi Arabia and Yemen, then into Africa, and I hoped to be back in the States and up in Vermont before the end of ski season.

I never made it.

 

CHAPTER 27

My Meddle in the Muddle East

Despite my e-mailed entreaties to my friends asking that they not try to talk me out of my plans, only ten of them advised me to “Go For It!”—four adventurous types, three free spirits, two beneficiaries of my will, and one who asked to be added to it.

The legion of naysayers recommended I stay home and live a long and peaceful life. Some sent me brochures for attractive retirement communities. A friendly shrink offered me a free mental evaluation. My cousin Larry tried to lure me down to Vero Beach by promising to make me blueberry pancakes for breakfast. My insurance agent advised he was unable to get me that million-dollar term-life policy now that he knew where I intended to travel. And Professor John King, my forensic pathologist pal at the Cornell, who usually autopsies pigs and sheep around the world that have died of mysterious diseases, thoughtfully volunteered to “help get what is left of you home.”

I partly heeded their advice by beefing up protection. I hired two security experts and six guards with assault rifles and an armored car for Mogadishu, and I agreed to take Andrew Doran, who is a fearless martial-arts expert and crack shot, for the most dangerous parts of the trip—once I was sure they hosted no massage parlors to tempt him. I went to a rifle range to reattain the sharpshooter rating I'd earned in the army, and shot 245 out of a possible 250 points at medium range on a semiautomatic with basic slit sights! Not bad for a squinty dude who can barely see his shoes on an overcast day. I was ready for action.

I left for Saudi Arabia well prepared, thanks to literary agent Steve Ross, who treated me to a lunch of bagels and lox with a schmear, not easily obtained in Riyadh. I'd selected Saudi Arabia to begin this final segment as the safest of the Nasty Nine. But events on the ground invariably trump careful planning and showed it was naive of me to assume, with the Arab Spring in full bloom on its every side—in Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain—that the Desert Kingdom could remain immune, especially given its large and restive minority population of Shiites encouraged by Iran to foment trouble within its main challenger for regional supremacy.

The day after I arrived, the police killed two protesters in Qatif in the heavily Shia Eastern Province, which I needed to drive through the following week to reach the causeway to Bahrain and my flight to Africa. Two days later, at the funeral of those protestors, unidentified assailants killed two police and wounded several bystanders as others burned tires and set up roadblocks.

The next day the Saudi Interior Ministry (while scrupulously avoiding any mention of Sunni/Shia tensions) denounced the killings as “incited and dictated by foreign malicious plans using unknown criminal elements who have infiltrated among the citizens and are firing from residential areas and narrow streets.” It warned that “Whoever deludes himself about violating order will be deterred strongly. Those who cross the line will be dealt with severely and with maximum force. We are a country targeted by many plots.”

So much for my peaceful start. As a result of this violence, my group of seven acquired an armed escort for most of each day. Police checkpoints had been set up every forty miles along the main highways, and as soon as our van stopped at the first to present our travel authorization papers, a patrol car with flashing lights took up station either in front of or behind us and escorted us for most of the rest of the day, most closely when we visited desolate archaeological sites. Personally, I'd have felt safer without the flashing lights, which do little to deter determined terrorists, but instead alert them to a high-value target.

Our group proceeded unmolested, and the locals welcomed us. One of our group did break a couple of ribs while scrambling around, but we couldn't blame that on any foreign criminal elements. The same day, two relatives of our driver were killed, but that occurred in Syria, which was starting to heat up and break down.

Because it's difficult to study on 196 nations, I didn't have a deep understanding of Saudi Arabia before I arrived there. I knew it possessed, pumped, and sold more oil than any nation, banned women from driving, and was an absolute monarchy whose official religion was an ultraconservative form of Islam called Wahhabism. And I knew it forbade females from wearing revealing or provocative clothing, and that its sharia courts imposed the death penalty for adultery.

I further knew, from personal experience, that it was a damn tough place for which to get a visa. I had tried, five years earlier, at both the Saudi Consulate in New York and the Saudi Embassy in Washington, but they just held my application for months and never gave me an answer. I then tried again, two years later, in Bahrain, and was again rebuffed. After I insisted on knowing the reason, an unusually candid consular officer took me aside and admitted, “Look, we have lots of oil money, so we don't need your few tourist dollars. We have two million Muslim pilgrims visiting every year to do the Haj or make Umrah, and they are no trouble. Some of our conservative citizens do not want non-Islamic Westerners coming and stirring up our people with liberal ideas. And we certainly do not need the bad publicity if you are hurt or killed in our country by some radical. All together, it just makes no sense for us to allow in tourists.”

Unable to refute his logic, I decided to go around it. I attempted, the next day, to saunter across the causeway from Bahrain into the Saudi city of Dammam to see if I got a warmer reception there. I was brusquely turned back midway.

In September of 2010 several travel publications had reported that the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities had banned the issuance of any visas for tourists, except devout Muslims. Because I
had
to get in to complete my quest, I might have to “convert” to Islam for a while, read the Koran, study with a mullah, attend a mosque, and forget I was an oversexed Jewish atheist. Instead, I found a lead in
International Travel News
that enabled me to reach Saudi soil—albeit $9,000 poorer—dressed in desert gear and devoutly following an elderly archeologist/cultural anthropologist from the University of Texas who was the world's authority on the minute clay counters utilized in the Middle East some 7,000 years ago to keep financial accounts, which, she had posited in her two-volume opus, gave rise to the first writing. My role? Don't ask. Don't tell.