The western portion of the country is a marvelous place, full of ancient ruins from a variety of civilizations that still bask in Mediterranean warmth.  And by and large the population is friendly and hospitable.

1) The tourist’s image of Turkey: a land of ruins, sea, and sun – Photo by KG Herring

We didn’t linger in Anatolia very long.  Frankly, everyone in the van was paranoid.  The movie Midnight Express had yet to be released, but we knew the details of its reality by heart.  Turkey was famous a country where travelers did not want to be stopped by the cops while in possession of drugs.  No.  Turkish jails were rumored to be black hellholes worthy of the Oliver Stone screenplay that eventually described them so well.

So we made our way east and north as fast as possible, keeping away from the tourist routes.  In retrospect this was a shame; we missed many glorious sights.  My parents, who in these matters were usually smarter than me, traveled extensively in Anatolia and its surroundings, even buying in Izmir a beautiful carpet that now graces the living room of my house.  The rug is a Hereke, named after the group of villages that have traditionally produced large carpets for mosques and royal retreats.

2) The Hereke carpet in our current Seattle home

But carpets are not the focus of this story.  After spending a few days in Istanbul, a city we considered huge, unwieldy, and extremely polluted, with overhead street wiring hazardous enough to electrocute half of its population in a heavy rain, we departed for more distant lands.

On one memorable occasion we arrived in a small village, whose name I have long forgotten, quite late in the evening.  We were tired, hungry, and the village had gone to bed for the night.  We did find an open store and stopped to ask about accommodations.  Word of our arrival spread like a fire in New South Wales.  Soon the entire population of the town woke and gathered.  A restaurant was opened for our enjoyment, the local police showed up to join in the festivities, and soon an epic arak-drinking contest began.  Everyone concerned felt it a matter of honor and duty to swallow as many shots as humanly possible.  I used to have a photo of my friend Renée, drunk and hugging an equally inebriated police officer, she sporting his uniform hat on her head, he grinning like he’d just married the finest white woman in all of Asia Minor.  The hospitality of these people was truly astonishing, one of the finest examples of a true welcome I have ever witnessed.

At last, well after midnight, the party ended.  Rooms were provided for us above the restaurant and the village retired, soused and sleepy.  We slept like tranquilized babies and woke fresh in the morning to continue our journey, pushing ever eastward.

The going got more sketchy as we made our way into the arid mountains of Eastern Turkey, after a brief overnight stop in Ankara to visit Ataturk’s tomb, a rigid monument to grandiosity and the cult of personality.  The road passed through increasingly dry terrain, and after a couple of days we found ourselves in a rugged, desolate landscape, devoid of greenery or people.  We had heard that this stretch of Turkey was dangerous to travelers.  Bandits regularly descended from the hills at night to waylay big-rig trucks, hippie vehicles, and any other traffic they could find.  Often drivers vanished without a trace, and nobody thought alien abductions were the cause of the disappearances.

3) The road east: Photo by KG Herring

So we made a decision to turn north and head to Trabzon on the Black Sea.  I liked the idea.  Located near the edge of Turkey, not far from the border of Iran and Russia, I imagined  that we might glimpse views of the Caucasus Mountains from the shoreline, and be embraced at an ancient crossroads of humanity, where great armies had passed over the centuries, warring with one another as Europeans clashed repeatedly with the cultures of Asia.  Besides, I had never seen the Black Sea, and of course wondered if the body of water would indeed look, well, black.

We arrived in Trabzon in the late afternoon.  Our first night there, we headed east of the town and camped on the beach, a most unsatisfactory arrangement.  The weather was cold and damp, and the beach sand had the consistency of a dirty landfill.  Furthermore, the Black Sea looked gray and the water was cold.  Of the legendary Caucasus Mountains, little could be seen except some high peaks that drifted in and out of a dank fog.  Perhaps they were in Georgia, then part of the Soviet Union, or they could have been in Turkish territory.

The second night we elected to find a hotel in town, somewhere to warm up, take a hot shower, and sleep in a warm bed.  On one of Trabzon’s main streets we found an inexpensive place to stay.  But for reasons no longer recalled, I didn’t like the feel of the place, so I decided to sleep in the van for the night.  The others haggled with the owner about the price of the rooms and came to an agreement.  The cost of a habitation was on the expensive side, considering the quality of the establishment.  It seemed like the kind of place where bedbugs and cockroaches might rule the late hours.  The van, with its basic interior of bench seats, at least would provide a relatively clean space to stretch in my sleeping bag.

The following morning I woke early.  None of my friends had yet appeared from the hotel, which was across the street from the van.  I hadn’t yet seen Trabzon’s harbor, so I took a walk to the water’s edge to move my legs and shake the sleep from my bones.  The port proved to be a disappointment, with only a few shabby fishing boats moored at the docks and dirty water lapping at a rocky patch of beach.   At least here the Black Sea was black, probably more from pollution than from a poetic visual perspective.

Returning to the van, I noticed that a group of men had gathered around it.  Not thinking clearly and still groggy from lack of sleep and coffee, I thought little of the peculiar scene and continued slowly toward the vehicle.  Suddenly one of my friends opened the rear sliding door and shouted, “Jump in, quick!  We have to get out of here!”  I reacted with startling speed and raced to the van, throwing  myself through the door.  Something was seriously amiss, that much was clear.

No sooner had I climbed inside than my friend slammed the door shut.  The group of men around the van, I quickly discovered, had not gathered to pay us their morning respects.  They were screaming at the driver, who yelled back in return.  Suddenly a Turk opened the driver’s side door and dove inside, knife in hand.   The driver wound up and punched him in the face, hard enough to send the the man flying back out of the van.  Then the other traveler in front reached into the glove compartment and grabbed the 12 gauge starter pistol we carried.  The men outside began to rock the Ford, trying to turn it on its side.  Our redoubtable navigator leaned over our driver, opened the window with amazing speed and fired point-blank into the crowd.  “Floor it!” he screamed, and the van took off like a vehicle  in a Steven King novel, possessed with demons.  The crowd ran close at our heels.

Dazed and baffled, I demanded, “What happened?  Why are these men so angry?”  The van continued to accelerate and was now doing close to 100 kilometers per hour on the busy street.

“We got into an argument about the price of staying in the hotel.  The owner wanted to double the rate he agreed to last night.  We said no, so he ran outside and called to his friends to come help him make us pay.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“We refused and they became even angrier.  They were going to kill us!”

“Holy shit!”  I added, now bewildered.  My aimless walk to the harbor might have been the last walk I ever embarked on, had I not returned to the van in time.

“We wondered where you were.  What the fuck were you doing?”

“Um, just taking a morning stroll to the water.”

“You could have got us fucking wasted.”

“Sorry, how was I to know?”

Meanwhile we had now escaped downtown Trabzon.  We fired a few more rounds for effect from the starter pistol, our collective adrenaline pumping like acetone in a coke factory.

And so that was that.  We had been attacked but managed to escape.  Had the Ford stalled before we left the city, we would have been thrown in jail or worse.  Surely the blast from the starter pistol, shot into the throng of men from only a meter away, had caused serious bodily injury.

But we carried on and soon forgot about our brush with disaster.  Such was the way of travel in those years.  A few days later we stopped in Erzurum where we were treated to some of the finest Turkish food to be had in the country, and we delighted in the sight of the famous Cifte Minareli Medrase, one of Turkey’s architectural gems.  The people of Erzurum proved kind and helpful..

But we experienced a final negative encounter at the border between Turkey and Iran.  Before arriving there we had wonderful views of Mt. Ararat, its volcanic cone soaring into the heavens, and I thought of Noah or Gilgamesh or the Native American boat survivors who had washed up near the summit (depending on which version of the world-wide legend a person chose to believe)  so long ago during one of Earth’s great cataclysms.

4) Mt. Ararat from Yerevan, Armenia: Photo by KG Herring

At the frontier we halted behind a long line of commercial trucks that plied the route between Europe and Asia.  Slowly the line advanced, and soon we saw a Customs and Immigration shack on the side of the road.  We wondered if we would be able to check out of Turkey before nightfall, when the border probably closed until the following morning.

A Turkish border guard opened the door of the mud-brick hovel and lurched in our direction.  Dressed in a slovenly uniform, with half its buttons missing and the fly unzipped, he staggered to the van.  He had his hand on his sidearm, a large and nasty handgun.  Leaning into the open window on the right side of the van, arak fumes emanated from his breath into the interior as if he was exhaling gasoline.  “You!” he barked.  “I want woman!”

“Excuse me,” the English driver said.  “What may we do for you?”

“Woman!” he repeated, waving his free arm through the window in the direction of the three women travelers.  “I want!”

This was bad news.   He had absolute power in this lonely outpost.  The truck drivers would do nothing to interfere with his authority.  “Well,” our driver said, “we can offer you a nice carton of cigarettes.”  He pulled a long box of Rothmans from under his seat, kept there for such emergencies.

“No.  You give me woman. I take.  Bring back later.”

I had an idea.  We also carried with us several bottles of Johnny Walker whiskey to use as informal bribes should an unpleasant situation demand a “gift.”  “Listen,” I said, holding up a bottle.  “Let’s go back to your office and talk.  We can have a drink and discuss matters of mutual interest.”

My friend Steve now said, “Yes, sir.  Wouldn’t you like a taste of good American whiskey?”

The border guard assumed a befuddled expression.  He’d planned to have his way with one of our female passengers, but on the other hand, American whiskey was a tempting offer.   Before he could answer, Steve and I exited the van, bottle prominently displayed.  I took the bold step of putting my arm around the official and gently led him away from the Ford to the Customs House.  “It’s a cold day,” I said.  “A drink will do us all good.”  I didn’t dare look back at my other companions.

So we entered the man’s office and sat down.  He had a metal barrel he used as a stove and heater.  Taking a jug of alcohol or maybe straight petrol, he poured it into a metal hole on top.  The fire roared and I still wonder why the thing didn’t explode into a fireball.

And so we sat and chatted, perhaps for two hours.  He turned out to be a simple fellow, if not exactly likeable.  But we sympathized with his plight, stuck here in the middle of nowhere with the great mountain of Ararat as a forbidding backdrop to his station.  He told us of his family, far away in another district, and how he seldom saw them. He told us how little he was paid, and how the truck drivers treated him with disdain, while his superiors demanded ever longer work hours with diminishing pay.

Finally Steve and I became nearly as intoxicated as our host.  We rose to our feet and engaged in a group hug with the Turk.  Tears streamed down his cheeks as he bid us farewell and safe journey.  The two of us returned to the van, weaving and slurring, beaming with the conclusion of what might have turned into an ugly scene.  Very ugly.

And so our Ford Econoline departed Turkey.  We jumped the queue and drove to the Iranian checkpoint.  Steve and I positioned ourselves in the rear seat and prayed that the booze on our breath wouldn’t be noticed by less alcohol-tolerant Iranians.  Turkey fell behind us, a land of startling contrasts and fascinating people.  The question of right and wrong as related to our actions there, both in the legal and moral sense, is one for which we have no answer.

I have to wonder about this individual’s motivation.  Was the guy a liberal (I assume a man performed this search, although I could be mistaken) looking for information on the sexism so prevalent in the Muslim world, or was he a bigot, hoping to find justification for a twisted belief that some females ought to be murdered, based on their ethnicity or social class or whatever foolish criteria might be implied in the search terms.

So I stare at the computer screen, still at a loss to explain these words’ meaning.  Except that  to type them into a computer at all speaks eloquently, albeit poorly, of our modern civilization.

Yemeni woman from the Tihama: My feeling is that she deserves to live – Photo by Peg Herring

Of course, I could be entirely wrong about the rationale for the search terms, and there may be an innocent explanation.  I would like very much to hear it.

I landed in Lisbon from Montreal, and true to character, after spending a month in the cold nations of Scandinavia and the Low countries, I made a beeline for Madrid and then Algeciras.  From there I knew that passage on the ferry to Tangiers was a simple matter.

When I arrived in Tangiers the Customs and Immigration officials were friendly enough, but they asked me where my parents were.  I smiled and said, “Well, they’re back in Canada.  I thought I would take this opportunity to visit  your country on my own.”  My interrogators were baffled, but really didn’t care much, so they stamped me into the country and bade me good luck.

Walking from the ferry dock into town was like entering an alien land.  Hawkers and hustlers accosted me, wanting to sell all manner of goods, both legal and illicit.  But I declined, made my way to the Casbah, and found an inexpensive hotel.  Life in Morocco is largely lived on the streets and I was continually captivated by the outlandish behavior and strange ways of the city-dwellers in the back alleys and warrens of Tangiers.

But that city is not a good place for a young teenager to drift aimlessly, so I quickly adapted to the Moroccan style of traveling.  After exploring the locality for a few days and fending off the street hustlers, while spending many hours just watching the multi-ethnic mix of world citizens  who made the old city a home base, I decided to travel by train to Casablanca, a name that brought back visions of the Bogart movie with the same name, as well as mental images of the World War II intrigues that had enlivened the place less than 30 years before.

On the train, a modern conveyance that proved a comfortable ride, I met a couple of American backpackers.  We joined forces; they were older than me, but I spoke French and could navigate my way through the complexities of Moroccan travel better than they.  A perfect combination, the three of us agreed.

We arrived in Casablanca at night and found a hotel with some difficulty. The city was dark and quiet, with few indications of where to find lodging.  But eventually we stumbled upon a hotel.  The neighborhood seemed safe and I bargained the price of the room to a good rate.  All went well.

The next day we utilized public bus transport to get around the city.  The bus fares were cheap and the system reliable.  Before the day was finished, however, disaster struck.  I carried only a shoulder bag with a few meager possessions:  a sleeping bag, tee-shirts and a few pairs of shorts.  But for reasons I still don’t understand, I put all my money in a small wallet and secreted it inside the shoulder bag.  My passport and ticket back to Canada stayed in a money belt under my clothing and tied around my waist .

Casablanca is a huge modern city with little charm other than in its name.  We saw project-like concrete apartment complexes that dominated much of the urban area, and the beach turned out to be dirty and wind-swept.  But none of this mattered.  We were in Morocco, an exotic country in an exotic continent.

The last bus we boarded was crowded beyond its maximum capacity and we stood in the isle, crammed together with a jumble of passengers, constantly jostled as the vehicle passed over potholes and made sharp jerky turns.  Long story short, when we disembarked, I reached inside my bag for my wallet and it was gone.  All my cash had vanished, both local currency and my stash of American dollars.  I was broke, destitute, without even a few dirhams to buy a pack of cigarettes or a cheap meal.

Panic set in. I was far from Europe with no way of returning.  I still had my ID, and an open plane ticket from Amsterdam to Montreal, but these constituted the extent of my assets.  Since my parents didn’t even know I had ventured into North Africa, I could hardly call them and tell my bad-luck tale.

My new American friends came to my rescue without a moment’s hesitation.  In return for showing them around Casablanca for a few more days they kindly agreed to pay my hotel and food, and then my ticket back to Tangiers and from there the ferry to Spain.  I was saved!

But they also indicated they would not travel further than Algeciras with me, and from there I would be on my own to return to Amsterdam.  As I still had my Eurail pass, getting to Holland would not be an issue.  But what was I going to do for food and shelter?  Regarding the latter, I could simply ride trains all the way north.  But to eat, well, I would have to take reality as it was thrust upon me.

So I returned to Spain with the Americans and we parted company.  The train journey to Amsterdam in those days was a slow one.  I passed the first four-day period without any food, drinking nasty water from the rail car taps, which were clearly marked in various languages, first in Spanish as no potable, then in French as pas potable, and then in Germanic script which I couldn’t decipher.

The first two days passed quickly enough but soon hunger took hold.  At one point a Spaniard or a Frenchman, I can’t remember which, saw me drooling while he drank a beer, so he bought one for me.  The sensation of light-headedness I felt was exquisite as I guzzled the precious liquid.  Beautiful, cool, refreshing sustenance passed through my throat into my gullet and a warm feeling spread over my body like a comforting blanket.

But that pleasure was fleeting and my situation grew worse.  A day later another passenger donated a chocolate bar, and eating the thing was one of my all-time culinary highlights.  I have never since tasted anything so powerful and the sugar passed into my bloodstream like an intravenously injected drug.

Finally I arrived in Amsterdam at the central train station.  The only remaining task was to panhandle bus fare to the airport and hope to catch a quick flight back to Canada.  I stood at the station’s grand entry, asking other backpackers for help, explaining my rather suspicious story about getting ripped off in Morocco and wanting only to head back home, and how the 30 cent fare to the airport was beyond my means.  I was ignored, insulted, and generally blown off by everyone I asked.

Daylight waned and I grew more desperate.  What to do?  To hell with it, why not ask the Dutch commuters who now thronged the station for the fare to the airport.  The very first man I accosted, a middle-aged business type, looked thoughtful as he listened, and without comment produced the guilder or two that would cover the bus ride.  I was saved again!

At the terminal I went straight to the counter of Air Canada and asked if they had any seats on the evening flight.  The agents told me coldly all flights were booked for at least two weeks.    I retreated to a corner opposite the airline desk and sat on the floor, defeated. God!  I couldn’t stay broke and homeless in an airport for two weeks.

I don’t remember how much time passed.  But eventually an agent walked from behind the counter and spoke.  “You know,” she said, “you can try to fly stand-by.  Perhaps you will be able to get on the next flight.”  I hadn’t thought about that option; my thought process was nearly incoherent from hunger.

So I procured a ticket and marched to the gate.  Surprise, the plane was half-empty!  Now why would the ticket agents have told me when I arrived at the airport that all the flights were full?  Maybe my slovenly, starved appearance kicked in some anti-hippie bias.

I was able to use a nearby pay phone to call my folks in Canada and explain to them, leaving out most of the exact details, why I would be returning home that very night.  They were thrilled; I’d been traveling abroad for a month and a half, no small feat for seventeen year old kid.  But the experience was a great introduction to life on the road, and led me to a passion for travel that has yet to diminish.

And so I arrived the next morning in Montreal, poor but clean.

POSTSCRIPT: The following semester at university I signed up for a class in African History.  During the first day’s session the professor, a pretentious fool who knew very little about the ways of the developing world, asked for a show of hands from students who had actually been to Africa.  In a room full of African-Americans, I was the only person to raise a hand.  The professor asked where in Africa I had visited, and I replied, “Morocco.”  “That doesn’t count,” he said brusquely.  The other students glowered at me.  How could a white boy have visited the great continent while none of them had?

I dropped out of that class with alacrity.  Morocco forms an integral part of Africa, wields great influence around the northern portion of the continent, and is far more welcoming than the ivy-ringed halls of American academia.  You can even travel through the country completely broke, a project I would not care to pursue in the United States.

The American, whose name I forget, then told me about going to Ba’albek, the great sacred city of antiquity that had become a focus of cannabis production and terrorist training, two pursuits I would have thought as mutually exclusive.  There, he had bought a great sack of pollen, the raw ingredient for one common variety of Lebanese hash.  He had carefully sewn most of it into his down sleeping bag for safekeeping, not wishing to attract the unwanted curiosity of border officials or police.  A fine idea, was it not?  The scheme sounded well-conceived to me.  Until he told me the sleeping bag was stolen at a Jordanese youth hostel a week after his return from Syria and Lebanon.

Intrigued by the Philadelphian’s adventures, I decided it would be a lark to visit Lebanon.  Perhaps the biggest attraction was Ba’albek. Here, unknown to most of the world, rested the biggest single stone monolith ever worked by human hands. Called the Hajar el Goubel, the rock was a massive thing, some seventy feet long. It had been cut and squared, and now lay discarded in a field, a few kilometers away from the Temple of Jupiter, where three of its only slightly smaller companions formed part of the foundations of the famous Roman temple.

No modern crane existed could lift these stones.  We may never comprehend how the ancients manipulated and raised them.

None of these forays into dope-running and archeology meant much to me upon my first glimpse of war-torn Lebanon.  At the border, we found the Lebanese police post closed and shuttered.  Travelers were free to enter the country without official scrutiny.  However, a long line of refugees, more than a mile’s worth, pressed against the customs station on the Syrian side.  They clamored to escape a country that was descending into the low reaches of hell.  We entered the war zone and saw stunning views of the Beka’a Valley, but we were able to proceed only a few miles before artillery fire forced our dauntless taxi driver to hightail it back to Damascus.  Those of us in the back of the cab breathed nervous sighs of relief as the cab jumped the queue in front of the hapless war refugees and slipped back into Syria.  In a short hour or so we were safely ensconced again in the Damascus Youth Hostel, drinking black coffee and congratulating ourselves about our escape from live combat.

NOTE: Extracted from the manuscript of Descending the Cairo Side

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  In 2007, my wife Diana and I took a boat down the Mekong River, after crossing the border to Houeisay from Thailand.  This is an interesting backwater.  We saw one backpacker get arrested upon entry into Laos, for reasons unknown but possibly related to his lack of funds and obvious intoxication.  He was summarily returned to Thailand, where I am sure he was made welcome.  Very sure.

Photos by Kit and Diana Herring

1) The river crossing, as seen from the Lao side.  The vessel in the foreground serves as a petrol station

The boat we boarded took two days, stopping overnight at a lodge in Pakbeng.  Since the Mekong has been a transportation highway in Southeast Asia for untold millennia, the region is not the place to look for wilderness and untrammeled rain forest, but along the river banks are many interesting sites, from small farms to teak plantations.

2) River life

The river is also famous in the Thai-Lao border region for giant catfish.  Specimens have been caught that exceed 3 meters (10 feet) in length.  Alas, none of the underwater critters put in an appearance for our sake.   But in the small hotel we spent the night in on the Thai side before crossing the border, a picture hung on the wall depicting Vietnam- era American soldiers holding one of the fish they had caught.  The thing was truly huge.

As the boat journeyed downriver, with the pilot and his assistant carefully watching the current for underwater  obstructions – the river was low and ours was the first trip of the season – we noticed that as we left Thailand behind the river became less populated.  Clearly the Mekong had once supported many more inhabitants, but Laos was depopulated in the wake of the American war.  The government is still Communist, at least officially, but Southeast Asia is now safe for the despotic version of democracy the States spent so much time and blood fostering.  We should be grateful for small (and large) favors, I suppose.

The lodge at Pakbeng where we stopped the first night was an attempt by the tour company to join the ranks of eco-tourism operations, and it was a nice place, with shingled bungalows and a hewn-wood common dining area.

4) The Pakbeng lodge

Only problem was, the place was at least a kilometer from the town, so we had no contact with the locals.  I tried walking the dirt road into Pakbeng proper, but didn’t have the time to get far.  So we contented ourselves watching the river roll by from our private bungalow.  A lodge that inhibits contact with locals does not do much to encourage multi-national relationships, but perhaps the owners had overlooked that aspect of enlightened tourism.

5) Our riverside view

We set off early the next day toward Luang Prabang, stopping at a few villages where locals brought out gaudy modern weavings to sell to the tourists.  I didn’t object to their attempts to make a few dollars and better that they produced new fabrics of inferior quality than to sell their heirlooms, but I imagine the antique tapestries had already been traded to earlier travelers for a song, the patrimony of the country disappearing into the collections of Western tourists long since, much as has happened around the world.  In one town, a weaver obliged Diana for a photo.  Like women everywhere she wanted to look good for the picture and so removed her glasses before the portrait session.

6) Village weaver

The villages were poor in the extreme and belied the poverty that is so prevalent in Laos.  Quaint to the eyes of Western tourists, the locals were probably desperate to escape to the larger towns in search of jobs and the money that would enable a more modern lifestyle.

7) Lao village – at least the thatch occasionally gives way to stronger tin roofs

Every village had a Buddhist temple.  On the doorways we saw many examples of exquisite folk art.  So one old tradition had yet to be extinguished.

Temple artwork

The area used to be a major opium-producing region.  This trade has been mostly stamped out, but likely opium is still grown, away from the prying eyes of government officials and Western drug enforcement agencies.  While walking around one village, a local kid showed me a broken tool that was used to slit the opium poppies and extract the sap.  I asked, through our interpreter, if a better example of the tool might be available for sale.  Immediately the kids who were listening ran off, and soon returned with two or three more of the devices.  The initial asking price for a good one was $30 US, an astonishing price considering that the amount probably represented a farmer’s monthly salary.  I am not one to try to chisel my way into picking up valuable antiques for a song; of course tourists such as myself possess wealth in nearly incomprehensible terms compared to the rural Lao.  But I finally settled on a price of $5 for an exquisite opium pod-slitting tool.  It was made from hand-forged bronze, I believe.  I figured if Customs found the thing and gave me a hard time when I returned to the USA – drug paraphernalia and all that – I’d call it a crochet needle.  But the officials at the Los Angeles airport never searched my luggage, so I arrived safe and sound with my souvenir at the end of the trip.

9) Opium pod-slitter: notice signs of wear and cool yellow string used to bind the three parts together, so the instrument would make three slices at a time

Interestingly, when I showed our group my purchase, most of them were quite pleased at my find, but a couple from Scandinavia became quite angry.  I believe the man of the couple was a cop of some sort, and therefore did not approve of any trade in drug-related goods.  No sense of humor, I guess.  Perhaps he was on the payroll of Interpol, or even the DEA.

Our boat also stopped in a village that is famous for its “whiskey” production.  As a teetotaler, I declined the offered beverage, but judging from the primitive distillation apparatus, the drink resembled the aguardiente stills one finds around Latin America.

10)Village famous for its moonshine: the rest of the tourists seemed to enjoy the tasting session

Our final waypoint was the famous Pak Ou Buddha Cave about 20 kilometers upstream from Luang Prabang. This is a well-known and must-see stop for all tourists traveling in the area.  Over the centuries the locals have placed literally hundreds of Buddhas of varying provenance in this riverside cave.  The place is not quite a tourist trap, but one encounters there voyagers from all over the world.  One method the locals use for making money is to sell small caged birds for the tourists to release in the hopes of providing good luck for themselves.  The practice is an abhorrent one, as the birds are abused and maltreated as they wait in their tiny prisons for release.  We saw a backpacker who had bought one and let it out of the cage, only to have the creature die right there on the spot.  She was understandably tearful and we hoped this did not bode ill for her future kharma.  Nonetheless, the business of torturing birds for the amusement of paying travelers ought to be stopped.

11) Buddha statues at the cave entrance

Above the main cave is a larger grotto with some interesting carvings made from the living rock inside.  Quite a treat.

12) Me beside a carved happy face in the upper chamber

An across from the caves, at the confluence of a tributary and the Mekong is an impressive cliff face, which I understand is popular with the rock-climbing set.

13) Cliffs near the caves

And so, at the end of the second day, we arrived in the former royal capital of Laos, Luang Prabang.  Now a World Heritage site, the city has been compared favorably with Cusco and Kathmandu, a tropical version of an ancient, laid-back city of ancient origin and great beauty.

But like its sister cities in South America and Asia, it is fast becoming a victim of its own charm, and deluges of tourists are rapidly changing its character.  Already rents are becoming too high for local residents to live in the old quarter, and its quaint palm-fringed streets have transmogrified into a collection of backpacker restaurants, tour agencies, and internet cafes.

14) The old city from above: temples and coconut palms, a delightful combo

We first stayed in a small hotel overlooking the Mekong River, but the street was noisy and the place lacked the proper ambience .  A television blared in the lobby – shades of South America – and the structure was a modern affair of personality-deprived concrete.  But the riverside was pleasant nonetheless; a number of tourist restaurants promised relaxed dining.

15) Riverside restaurant

Of the great many temples and monasteries of Luang Prabang, words fail to describe their beauty and grace.

16) Just one of Luang Prabang’s amazing temples

17) Another view from above

Home to hundreds if not thousands of monks, common Lao who as young men typically spend a period of their lives as devotees in the shrines, the city is unparalleled.  Every morning processions of monks walk through the streets in a ritual ceremony of alms-collecting.  The tourists, naturally, appear in droves to take photos of the event, often intruding themselves into the solemnity of the occasion.  Such is the lot of these Buddhists; Westerners again thrust their selfish desires ahead of spirituality.

18) Alms-collecting as seen from our hotel room balcony – a non-obtrusive way to observe the ceremony

19) A local man giving alms

We finally decided to change hotels and found a reasonable place across from one of the city’s major temples.  This decision proved to be an auspicious one.  We had a bird’s-eye view of the morning alms ceremonies and also of the daily routine of the temple.

While we were there, the head monk of the temple suffered a fatal heart attack. Dignitaries from all over the country arrived to pay their respects.  In a creative mix of old ritual and newer technology, the monks set up a memorial to the great man that included a life-size duratrans image.

20) Memorial to the late holy man, head monk of the temple

22) The memorial at night

The owner of the hotel, himself a devout Buddhist, told us that the monk’s body was placed inside the temple so that his followers might see him for a last time, resting “in State.”  To our surprise he said that we would be welcome to enter the temple and view him, so long as we dressed respectfully and followed proper protocol.   So Diana and I dressed in our finest clothes – her with a shawl covering her shoulders and me in long pants and a button-down shirt.  Shyly we entered the temple and sat for a time by the body, meditating on the fleeting span of mortal life.  It was an experience I will not soon forget.

But we had one more destination in mind to visit in Laos.  I had heard of the Plain of Jars since the time of the American War in Vietnam.  The eastern part of the country where the great archeological site is located was purported to be the most heavily bombed area of the entire planet.   More ordnance was dropped there in the 1960s and 1970s that the Allied threw on the Germans during World War II.  I had even read that bombers, returning from their usual missions, would release their excess bombs at random before returning to their home bases.  Truly mind-boggling and thoughtless mayhem, paid for courtesy of American tax dollars thanks to our barbarian military leaders.

The Plain of Jars is so named because of the huge stone “jars” that dot the landscape of this high plateau of eastern Laos.  No one knows who created these stone monuments, since rock cannot be dated.   Human remains dating over a thousand years ago have been found in some of them, but scientists cannot say for certain that these were placed there by the builders or by a later populace.

The US State Department still placed warnings on their travel web site, proclaiming the region off-limits due to a few bandit attacks that had occurred some years previously, where disgruntled Hmong tribespeople had bushwhacked some tourist vans and killed the occupants.  One can’t really blame the perpetrators.  The hill people are looked down on by lowland residents all over Southeast Asia, and in a particularly heartless move, the Lao government had engaged in a scheme of relocation of these harmless folk, uprooting them from their remote mountain homes and resettling them along the roads, the better to control their movements and desire to live freely, unmolested by the central government, which was (and is) much more interested in dictating rules to the mountain people than leaving them alone.

But people in Luang Prabang assured us that the road was now safe.  We arranged with a local travel agency to hire a van for the trip. The kind owner tried to find some other passengers to split the fare with us, but the Plain of Jars is not on most tourists’ itineraries, due to its remoteness and dicey reputation not only as a dangerous journey, but also because of the huge amount of unexploded bombs and booby traps that lie about the countryside like so many death-inducing party favors.  One imagines that Afghanistan and Iraq will have similar issues for decades to come.

So Diana and I had this great, new luxury van to ourselves.  The cost, which I bargained with the agency owner, was not that pricey, and he explained to me that a significant portion of the expense was because of the kickbacks he was obliged to pay to government officials, which goes to show that “communism” is no less subject to corruption and graft than capitalism.   Nice to know that differing systems of government share the same pitfalls of human nature.

The highway, French-built and remarkably sound, passed through beautiful mountain scenery and villages that clung to ravines and hilltops.

23) Riverside village en route to the Plain of Jars

24) Balsa rafts in the river; similar craft to those of the South American Amazon

25) Hill town

We climbed into the mountains and were treated to spectacular landscapes of the rugged terrain that makes up central Laos.  At the end of the day we arrived in Phonsavan, a new and nondescript town that serves as the local center of government.  But the Plain of Jars was close, and we wasted no time visiting several of the sites that have been cleared of bombs and other wartime hazards.  Markers clearly warned visitors to stay on the paths.

26) Warning signs at one of the sites

The Plain of Jars ranks as one of the world’s great mysteries.  Words cannot do justice to the strangeness of these ancient artifacts.  We stopped at three sites, and even got to slog through some rice paddies en route to the jars, all the while noting the ubiquitous bomb craters that pockmarked the land.

27) Bomb crater now used as fish pond

28) Walking through a rice paddy, watching for incoming from the treeline

Apparently the American pilots used the archeological sites as targets during the war.  Kind of reminds me of the Taliban in Bamiyan.  Here is one site that was bombed, and the smashed jars were everywhere.

29), 30) The jars

But plenty of them are still intact, some of which weigh many tons.  The quarries are many kilometers from where they were placed; moving them would have been a chore.

31) The biggest one of all

32) The limestone formation in the background contains a cave. During the war Lao civilians took refuge here during a bombing raid; a rocket was fired directly into this cave and dozens were killed

33) A jar interior

34) This collection escaped relatively unscathed

We ended our trip to the Plain of Jars in a town that was carpet-bombed by the Americans.  Only this Buddha survived as the temple around it was leveled.  The statue is now considered something of a miraculous object.

35) After the bombs: the surviving Buddha

A fitting end to a trip that left us with a lot to think about, both in terms of antiquity’s wonders and the horrors of the recent past.  I felt embarrassed to be a North American during our visit and was continually astounded by the grace and hospitality of the Lao people who have suffered so much at the hands of the “democratic and free” World.

Is this how we’ll go out – with a bang?

I’ve given a lot of thought about the year 2012, since I first heard in the 1970s that the date of December 21 of that year signifies the end of the Mayan calendar.  There are a lot of factors to consider.  First, is this calculation accurate?  I mean, did the archeologists and linguists who established that indeed this is the exact end of the calendar get their facts straight.

It’s hard to say.

The gist of the theory is this:  the Mayans, having an obsessive relationship with time on a grand scale, proposed in their “long count” that the end of the current cycle grinds to a halt, for inscrutable reasons, in 2012.  A lot of minds more deeply involved than mine have studied this.  Nowhere have any Mayan writings been deciphered that announce December 21 as the end of time.  We suppose that they were merely recording an arbitrary figure to delineate the final day of a huge period of history.

Modern Mayan market – did they know something we don’t?

Yet, looking at various cultures around the world, we see evidence that ancient people may have left encoded messages in their monuments that perhaps were meant as a warning to future civilizations that something might be cosmically afoot.  The complex at Giza in Egypt serves as a good example.   The possibility exists that the alignments monuments and pyramids there reflect the sky in 10,500 BC. Why?  To remind future generations of a great catastrophe that occurred in that time?

Egypt Photos by Ken and Peg Herring

The Valley Temple near the Sphinx – built long before the rest of Giza, these megalithic walls have more in common with ruins in Ollantaytambo and Cusco in Peru that with other ancient Egyptian structures

More examples of huge interlocking stone walls in the Valley Temple. No inscriptions or other artifacts in this structure connect it with later Egyptian works

Were the Egyptians trying to tell us something?  The Sphinx is also almost certainly far older than the pyramids. Weathering patterns on the great lion tell us that erosion shaped it at a time when Egypt was a much wetter place, conditions that date back 7000 years if not longer.

Vertical fissures on the body of the Sphinx clearly show water erosion, alluding to the great antiquity of the monument

What may have happened?  A pole shift or an asteroid impact?  We don’t know.  And were the Mayans trying to tell us that some similar event was due to occur in 2012?

Of course I recognize that doomsday scenarios have long been part of human thought, especially around the time of millennial dates in our calendar. In the year 1000 AD end-of-world cults rose all over Western Europe. Today, the fringe of fundamentalist Christian cults announce forecast of the return of Christ and the attendant Rapture to follow.  The variations of such peculiar thinking are too long to detail here.

But we might be advised to take notice.  If a planet-wide disaster takes place, where might the safest places be?  My pet theory is that regions of the planet that have survived more or less intact over the eons may provide refuge.   The Appalachian Shield of Canada is a very old formation, geologically speaking.   So is the Outback of Australia.  Other spots presumably exist.

One thing is certain.  The places with the most spectacular scenery are probably unsafe.  The Andes Mountains, the islands of the South Pacific and Hawaii, in fact anywhere around the Ring of Fire will probably not constitute good places to hang out and wait for that day in December 2012.  There’s enough information out there to take notice, as long as we have the wherewithal to interpret it.

We may have been warned.  The time to act is coming soon.

One month before the cyclone: Aitutaki moon

Tropical cyclones have always taken aim at the Cook Islands.  A couple of weeks ago a storm innocuously named Pat called on Aitutaki and demolished the island’s infrastructure.

The hurricane chose its arrival date poorly.  Here in the United States, the news people were all aflutter with the Tiger Woods infidelity scandal, and the public had been maxed out on disaster coverage after the Haiti earthquake.  So the powers that control information in this country felt, not unreasonably from their point of view, that no one would care about a storm in Polynesia, especially one that resulted in no deaths, at least not on Aitutaki.  The old adage, “If it bleeds it leads,” still stands,  sound advice to those who depend on advertising dollars to finance their news broadcasts.

So when we heard about the cyclone our only source of information was the internet; Radio New Zealand provided a good store of information about the event.  Surprisingly that web site did not get all the facts straight.  Their web site maintained that the brunt of the storm was felt by the northwest side of the island, where most of the beach hotels are located.  We imagined near-total destruction of the local tourist trade.  Luckily – but not for the residents there – the opposite side of the island was hit the hardest, with the villages of Vaipae and Tautu sustaining the greatest damage.

Most of the island’s houses lost their roofs. The storm also gutted the small plots of land from which the residents get their food, and the power grid was destroyed.  Two people were injured during the hurricane, which struck at night.  Aitutaki had enough warning of its path and most everyone found shelter before Pat came ashore.

The Kiwis, who guard the interests of the Cook Islands on the international scene, responded admirably.  Their army even showed up, we hear.  Otherwise, lots of volunteer electricians and builders have donated their time and expertise to rebuilding.  Help has been offered from as far away as Canada.

But the USA has remained silent.  Few Americans could even locate the Cook Islands on a map, much less Aitutaki.

I don’t really remember.  What was the question again?

1) Near Bligh’s first landing site, Aitutaki

When Captain William Bligh let go the anchor of the Bounty off the west coast of Aitutaki a few days before the famous mutiny, he beheld an island and a culture far different than we can possibly understand today.  He did not visit the whole island, but rather only the area loosely termed Arutanga.  Always a meticulous diarist, he recorded some interesting facts.  Of the natives in Tahiti he had written, “Inclination seems to be the only binding law, marriage in this country for a woman will get her a husband if she pledges…”

He continues about the inhabitants of Aitutaki, “The people are just the same as those of the…Isles…  but are more docile and inoffensive.”

The account from his logbook of the discovery reads as follows:

“At daylight however we discovered an island of a moderate height with a round conical hill…A number of small Keys were seen from the mast.”

2) Maungapu, the “round conical hill”

3) View from hilltop lookout.  Note small islands or “motus” in distance

“They were all around with trees and the large island had a most fruitful appearance.  The shore was bordered with flat land, with innumerable Cocoa Nut and other trees.  I saw no smoke or any sign of inhabitants.”

4) “…all around with trees…” one of the motus

He writes that, “(T)hey called this island Whytootackee, ” and that upon his first meeting with the natives, “I was however agreeably surprised by a visit from four men in a single canoe… Two of the men had each a large Mother of Pearl shell hung on their breasts… On being told I was the Erree (chief), the principal person immediately came and joined noses with me and presented me his shell and tyed it around my neck… Notwithstanding they said there were no Hogs, Yarros, of tarrow… they called them by name, and I rather inclined to believe they were imposing upon me… The Chief of the canoe took possession of everything I had given… a knife, some nails, Beads and a looking glass.”

He goes on to say that two locals wished to overnight on his ship.  Apparently some of his crew took the idea of immediate friendship in a rather liberal sense.  “After the natives were gone I heard that some of my johns had engaged to bring women off in the morning, and it was therefore the reason perhaps that two of them designed to sleep on board.”

We have no reason to disbelieve his observations.  Any navigator who sailed in an open boat, as Bligh did after the mutiny, over several thousands of miles of the unexplored open Pacific to safety at the nearest European settlement, Batavia,  now the capital city of Jakarta in Indonesia, deserves respect and validation. Regardless of the circumstances that resulted in his being tossed from the Bounty with scant provisions by a crew that had become enchanted with the terrible beauty of Polynesia, he was a man who set forth to record all he saw.

But life on this tranquil outpost of Oceanic civilization received the first of its death blows at his hands, although Bligh could not have understood the tragedy about to unfold when he touched shore. The story of the coming of the missionaries in 1821 is well known and does not need to be repeated here.  The tales of forced conversion, the bringing of diseases and epidemics that the “Christians” blamed on the Polynesian gods, the later blackbirding of the population and the relentless efforts of the Europeans to stamp out the old ways — these stories are horrific and yet accepted today as a matter of course.

With their bodies’ physical beauty covered by the whites in heavy nineteenth-century civilized clothing, the very essence of the pre-contact natives was smothered irrevocably.  Today no oral traditions remain of that first contact, and the missionaries did nearly a complete job of eliminating the old spirituality and the old ways.

The author Jared Diamond has noted that perhaps the biggest mistake humankind ever made was to quit the hunter/gatherer way of life and settle into towns and cities, where manipulative leaders were then able to force stifling societal rules and repression on hapless clans of formerly free people.

Whether or not this generalization holds much truth is still a matter of debate, but in Aitutaki the answer is painfully obvious.

Harar street scene: Photo by Jack McGory

The hyenas circled the perimeter of the alley, audibly gnashing their teeth and giving voice to low, guttural growls.  Their feet padded softly on the dirt, but the animals’ smell overwhelmed even the fetid stink from the narrow alleyway, where night soil from an open sewage canal ran through a channeled depression in the center of the lane.  Over the roofs of the low cinder block buildings the faint glow of the city’s lights shined, blocking the sky and the meager starlight overhead.

I didn’t have the faintest idea how to react to the threat of the wild beasts.  To think that feral creatures roamed the town after dark formed an unsettling backdrop to my already heightened sense of alertness.  I sighed and moved forward warily, wishing like hell I’d thought to bring a flashlight.  But then, a light may have only served to inflame the hungry scavengers into a frenzy of pack behavior.  They slunk low to the ground, their fur a patchwork of mange and short, spiky hair.  Insects hovered near the hyena’s elongated noses, swarming about their eyes and drooling mouths.

I didn’t have the faintest notion what actions on my part would either mollify the hyenas or perhaps set them upon me in a frenzy of violence, imagining vividly a surprise attack, and final, fleeting seconds as they tore me apart, greedily ripping chunks of flesh from my torso as they devoured his my guts, perhaps lunging first for the throat to ensure a quick demise.

Whatever had possessed me to embark on this evening stroll?  The animals circled closer and I smelled their breath, redolent with the pungent odor of freshly scavenged carrion.  Were they merely eating street offal, or had they found more pliable living victims close by, with their blood now wetted for meatier sustenance.

The glossy brochure I’d picked up at the Harar city tourism office proclaimed that the wild hyenas who prowled the town at night were a major attraction, harmless in their regular sojourns through the back streets as they made their way to the city gates for regular feedings by holy men whose job it was to see that the animals were kept sated and thereby inclined to leave Harar’s inhabitants unmolested.

My traveling companion, Bruce, and our new friend Jack wisely declined to join the evening tour, preferring to remain back at our hotel.  There, during the daylight hours, we admired the Ethiopian fighter-bombers as they made their daily runs over the rebel positions on the front line of the Ogaden battlefront.  From our comfortable room balcony we had front row seats from which to watch the carnage, rockets and bombs dropping like clouds of metallic flotsam on the hapless ethnic Somali rebels, who had advanced to within twenty kilometers of the Muslim city, hoping to free their Islamic cousins from the yoke of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s rabid dictatorship.  Of course the conflict had deep roots in the animosity between the Christian Ethiopians and the Somali followers of Mohammed, and was a bitter dispute that spanned ages of sporadic warfare between the desert tribes to the east and the so-called civilized Copts from the greener highlands of Ethiopia.  Like most wars, its original justifications were lost in the shrouds of history, history that was seldom written in the official annals of East African politics.  Blood feuds were far more important than political and religious squabbles.   In this respect, the Ogaden region was little different from a hundred other locales that I had visited over the years, from the Levant to Central Asia.

But for a traveler like myself, who craved adventure, who needed action to keep my spirit alive, Ethiopia was a prefect country to explore, with its vast unruly population repressed by a world-class strongman, yet so outside the bounds of normal human society that to call the place a country at all was a polite euphemism abetted only by mapmakers and global strategists in far-off First World capitals.

I guess I looked the part of a crazy foreigner, oblivious and impervious to the terrible circumstances I encountered in the world’s war zones and geopolitical basket cases.  Yet I  smelled the world around as well as did a hungry shark, a trait that occasionally served me usefully, but mostly resulted in the stench and grovel of my preferred developing countries thrusting their olfactory sensations into my brain in a never-ending assault.  Frequently this worked to my advantage; tonight, however, I deeply wished that the hyenas lurking in the shadows might have had the decency to bathe before entering the inner precincts of Harar.

Toward the east I discerned a halo of light. This represented the streetlights near the main city gate, where the priests brought their scraps and garbage to feed the hyenas, so I headed in that direction.  The animals followed, but as I made progress toward the Harar walls, I noticed that the creatures  backed away slowly, as if realizing that their chance for a quick touristic dinner was becoming less of an option.  All the stories I’d heard over the years proclaimed that hyenas dined solely on the leftovers of other carnivores, carcasses picked over by lions, leopards, and other predators.  But newer theories I later watched on nature television programs would hypothesize  that a different behavior was true; hyenas were the killers, and the mighty cats of the savannah filled the lesser function of the scavenger.   It was a notion that would prove hard to reconcile with my schoolboy’s vision of feline prowess.  But looking at those mangy prowlers who had collected nearby, I believed now that they would have killed me in a second had I assumed the behavior of prey.

Soon I arrived at the old Harar gate, a medieval structure with twin turrets connected by an overhead arch.  A wooden drawbridge completed the scene, with great rusted iron chains holding the ancient beams in place.  Squatting in the dirt a pair of white robed men held haunches of meat in their hands.  Hyenas darted to their outstretched arms, grabbing the gristle and bones in their jaws before returning to enjoy the handouts, growling commands to their less-opportune neighbors to keep a prudent distance.

The most peculiar element to the scene was the absence of other tourists or bystanders.   The “hyena men” as they were locally known, did not perform this nightly ritual for dollars or fame.    Why they chose to feed the animals was a question for which I doubted I’d receive an answer.

One of the men spotted me as I stood aside in the shadows to watch the performance.  “Come,” he said quietly.  I obeyed.

“Here, you feed them?”  The tone of the man’s voice suggested a question, but I was not certain of his intent.  The priest or holy man or nut-job, whatever he was, held out a stinking piece of meat.  Before I had a chance to react, a hyena darted forward and snatched the offering.

“I don’t think so.”  “Maybe better I just watch, ok?”

The Ethiopian smiled.  “Yes, you watch.  You want to understand?”

“Sure.”

The man rose to his feet.  His friend didn’t look at us, but rather kept his gaze fixed on the hyenas, who looked annoyed at the interruption of their meal.  The hyenas did not move off, as I thought they might, but held their ground, waiting for the feast to continue.  But I had had enough of this quaint scene, and decided to leave.  The feeding was still taking place when I departed.

After returning to our squalid hotel, I propped a wooden chair against the wall of the balcony and stared down at the city.   Harar had a rudimentary electrical grid, but at this hour only a few lights peeped from the houses that made up the old quarter.  In the faint moonlight I saw the wall that surrounded the town.   Closing  my eyes to slits, I imagined myself  transported to medieval times, into a pre-modern world where the twentieth century  had yet to intrude.

I preferred the illusion of time-travel as opposed to thinking about the present.  Not that I had traveled to Africa to escape.   A person couldn’t pick a worse destination than Ethiopia to serve as an escape hatch.

* * *

A day or so later, the three of us decided to go for hike in the hills behind the city.  We had no particular destination in mind, just the notion that we should stretch our legs, as the saying goes, and see what lay outside Harar.

We didn’t get far.

After walking up and over a series of low hills, we crossed a ridge top and froze in out tracks.  Down in a shallow valley, hidden from the view of casual observers, a camp of some sort had been constructed.  Surrounded by concertina wire and guard towers, the complex was clearly a prison or detention center.  The first words that came to mind were, “concentration camp.”  As we looked on the appalling sight, lines of men were being herded into the center by gun-toting guards.  While we could not determine the eventual fate of the detainees, the situation did not look good.  No.  It looked like a horror show.

Before we had time to properly react,  some guards who had apparently been patrolling the perimeter outside the camp spotted us. They ran up the hill, shouting and waving their assault rifles.  Christ on a biscuit, now what were we do to?

Remembering that we were in a Muslim area, I waited until the men approached within earshot and began to holler at them in Arabic, beseeching them in the name of Allah that we were innocent bystanders who meant no harm.  Ana canadi!” I cried, not knowing what else to say.  “Huwah amriki!” I added, referring to Jack.  “In the name of Allah the merciful, we are mere travelers, here to sniff the breeze,” I went on, using a poetic expression for travelers and pilgrims.

The guards, if that is what they were, stopped in their tracks.  I said we did not come here on purpose and pointed with my arms, indicating that nothing would please us more than to beat a hasty retreat.  Motioning to my brother and Jack, I quickly backed up and commenced the fastest trot I could manage while maintaining a semblance of dignity.  My companions followed suit, and sweating, we backed away from the ridge and soon returned to the relative “safety” of Harar.

That episode blew us away.  Harar was in the throes of a purge, although we never discovered the nature of its victims, who were likely political opponents of Mengistu.

Later, while roaming the streets of the city looking for something to eat, or perhaps to buy some basic supplies such as candles and matches -  such goods were nearly unavailable in the smaller towns of Ethiopia at the time – I remember coming across a man, shackled at the ankles with a primitive wooden device that bore a superficial resemblance to the stocks that colonial American religious fanatics to punish heretical lawbreakers.  The man was skinny, undernourished, and clearly in the process of becoming physically deformed from his forced “stress position” as our own military justice system currently would term the punishment.  We asked him why he was shackled.  Perhaps a bystander interpreted.  Apparently he had been convicted of minor theft or another crime of small  consequence, and his punishment was to be let loose, hog-tied, to roam the streets and beg for food.  His family, if he had one, would not help his predicament.  So he was like a self-mutilated beggar, forced to eke out an existence as best he could.  Starvation was a real possibility.  His own countrymen who were not similarly inhibited by the State had enough problems finding food. Even our group of three was hungry most of the time, as little food could be purchased, regardless of one’s financial circumstances.

One day we found a proper restaurant, shabby and unkempt. The only fare, openly displayed, was rotten raw meat, swarming with flies, and equally rotten ingera, the ubiquitous Ethiopian fermented bread.  But this sample had fermented long beyond the designated time, and tasted more like decayed fish than baked flour.  We were able to convince the owner of the restaurant to boil some of the meat for in oil, and we forced it down our throats, biting into the horrible ingera to help choke it down.

One one other memorable occasion we stumbled upon a huge, truck-sized pile of peanut shells from a local processing plant.  Groups of women clambered over the pile of tens of thousands of shells, picking through the refuse in hopes of discovering a single peanut that had not been emptied from its casing.

Such was the lot of Ethiopia in 1977.  I could say more about the street beatings, the lines of prisoners marched through the streets prodded by Mengistu’s brutal thugs, but what is the point?  Madness takes the same form in all countries during  times of unrest and trouble, and Ethiopia was experiencing now in its turn the horrors of human savagery,which can occur even in the most civilized countries when their leaders lose sight of rational planning and choose to force their perverted wills on the unfortunate citizens whose only crime is tor reside at the wrong time in the wrong place.

Let us hope that such events never again come to pass in our own Western countries. I am not optimistic.