Lost Worlds Page 2

  They just have this one little quirk. They enjoy playing on the edge of mortality; they have this thing about white-water adventuring…

  MICHAEL: “And so off we go, and the waves are crashing—you hit the waves, the waves hit the boat, you get thrown all over the place…you’re holding on to your paddle and you’re hanging over the side of the boat, water churning off rocks, huge waves everywhere, and you’re bouncing around like crazy…and then it’s over for a while and you say, ‘That was nothing.’ And you want to go on because you don’t know what’s going to happen next…but deep down inside you’re thinking: I hope we flip—I really hope we flip!

  “It’s one of the greatest feelings to take on nature—to take on these rivers. The river gives you everything it’s got and you get through it—at the end of the day you get through it. I’m not suicidal—I’m not going to do a river where I know I’m going to die if I don’t know what I’m doing…. I’m not going to take on a challenge like that if I don’t feel I’m up to it…. I respect there are forces out there that are greater and better than I am and I have to learn to face them…I want to be a part of it…. I like the feeling of nature beating on me—giving me its best—facing it—looking at it right in the eye and coming through.

  “The magic is you get to go to places that very few people have gone—you get to see the real country—you’re actually there, in this canyon, this gorge…you get to keep all the memories—the dangers, the feeling of being on the edge of things, being in these beautiful places with nature at its best, its wildest…and you’re part of it all.

  “It leaves its mark. You’re stronger, you feel more confident…you feel you can face things better than before…it’s something you can always draw on…nothing has got anywhere close to what I had to face on those rivers…you feel so…alive!”

  MARIANNE: “I’m a perfectionist. I want things done right, I want results, I want things perfect…but when you’re on the river, it’s not perfect, you have to let go, stop controlling…. I suppose you learn to have faith that somehow you’ll be okay.

  “I remember one time on the Moose. We were there for the snow runoff—real rough—beautiful—and I fell in on the worst rapids, boat flipped…what scared me most was that it was so cold that I couldn’t catch my breath. Then I got pinned under the boat—my head was banging on the keel…. I was trying to breathe in the air pocket…. I was panicking.

  “Then it was slow-motion. Everything changed. After that first panic I just gave in to it…you’ve just got to go with it, don’t fight it…. Sometimes it seems like an eternity, so much longer when you’re pinned underneath…but somehow there’s that peace…you feel really free, just letting go like that…. The shock only hits you when you’re out of the rapids and you remember how cold you are. It doesn’t take long before you hit the shore, but it can seem like forever on that last stretch.

  “But you survived—that’s the big thing. You give it your best shot and then you learn to have faith…. That sense of letting go is the best feeling you’ll ever have…you know you’re part of something so much greater than yourself and that you’ll be okay no matter what happens…. And you carry that feeling with you…. You become a true optimist.”

  Which is a key fourth confession: I too am an incorrigible optimist, not just in terms of my own personal well-being, but also in the belief that our fragile planet will survive intact despite the enormous threats of overpopulation, disease, pollution, the destruction of the wild environment, and the mindless eradication of natural resources.

  Optimists are not very fashionable species today in the aftermath of the 1992 Rio conference and the gory, pessimistic gloating of “Greens” in all their myriad forms and frenetic guises. Of course I’ve seen the destruction—driven by roaring greed and the lure of quick wealth. I’ve walked through the burned-out rain forests of Panama; I’ve seen the eroded slopes of southern Tasmania’s mountains after the clear-cutting of ancient forests; I’ve seen pollution in all its varied forms in India, Latin America, Africa, the South Pacific islands, the Mediterranean, and the United States. I know those threats are real and must be remedied. Regrettably the remedies are rarely simple. The issuing of eloquent eulogies, strict dictates, and hand-wringing homilies will do little to stem the tidal waves of human hopes, material expectations, and Western-inspired concepts of “progress.” My years as a city planner taught me the dangers of fast, slick solutions based on a naive obliviousness to the enormously complex and entangled forces that create, shape, and define the destiny of cities. Invariably, too little time is given to understanding the cause-and-effect whiplash effects of ill-shaped “solutions” to urban ills. In the United States in particular we seem to have a habit of pouring great caldrons of cash into the sinkholes of problems without ever seriously examining the endlessly porous nature of the bedrock. And there we stand on the edge—peering into the maw—asking ourselves, “Where did it all go? What happened to all our solutions?”

  I remember my time in Panama, on the edges of the almost impenetrable Darien Gap jungle (see Chapter 5). I was talking with members of a campesino (peasant) family. In the distance the ancient rain forest was in flames. From another direction huge trucks were emerging from the deep darkness of the jungle laden with freshly felled trees.

  “I thought the government had banned tree-felling in these forests,” I said.

  “They have,” replied the wife.

  “So why are these trucks here?”

  Shrugs all around.

  “And the burning,” I said. “I thought the government had banned the burning of the forest.”

  “They did,” said the wife again.

  “So why the burning?”

  “To make a farm.”

  “For whom?”

  “For us—for our families. We have to make a living.”

  “But in other parts of Panama, this hasn’t worked. The soil is no good for farming. After four or five years there’s no farm left.”

  “Yes,” said the woman’s son, “but in four years we will have a video machine….”

  A few days later, after an arduous journey through the Darien jungle by canoe and on foot through some of the hardest—and hottest—hiking territory on earth, I entered a small Cuna Indian community high in the mountains. I was far from the burning and logging frenzy to the north and sat talking with the chief’s son in the shade of huge forest trees. The Cuna are one of the last tribal groups in Latin America to withstand the scourge of conquistadors, colonialists, and modern-day capitalists in a relatively unscathed state. They have been labeled by anthropologists as the last original democracy on earth and still conduct their affairs in the heat of community debates. They resist progress in the Western sense and regard their rain forests as sacrosanct:

  “We believe the forest is part of the Golden Time,” the chief’s son told me, “a time of balance. The forest is our home, our pantry, a place for our medicines. Yet every year it is threatened. There have been so many plans to take our trees, make our islands into places for tourists, build roads through our forest, and bring cattle into the lowland along the coast.”

  He went on to explain that after laborious petitioning of the government and with the help of U.S.-based institutions, the Cuna have so far managed to safeguard their sacred forests and maintain their traditional way of life. Western scientists now work with the tribespeople to study the ecological cycles of the Darien rain forest and the medicinal properties of plants unique to this region.

  “You see,” the chief’s son told me, “there are many things in our forest which may help other people. We do not have to destroy it. We can live here. The balance can be kept.”

  Hence my optimism. I believe we are beginning to learn to appreciate and maintain fragile balances. Also, in questioning many of our own modern-day mores, in realizing the complexity of the problems we have created for ourselves, and in looking again at the knowledge, cohesion, and balance of so-called primitive societies, we are
becoming far less myopic in our thinking and possibly more modest about our once-bombastic sense of endless change and progress.

  And a final reason for my optimism. The journeys undertaken for this book and its precursor (The Back of Beyond: Travels to the Wild Places of the Earth, HarperCollins, 1991) have made me realize just how wild and unexplored much of our planet remains. My wanderings through “lost worlds”—places seemingly untouched by the horrors of mindless decimation and the hyperbole of the “end-of-the-earth” doomsayers—reinforced my faith that we, and these places, will survive. Just to know that such “lost worlds” exist at all—untouched, unspoiled—is succor for the spirit of wonder in each one of us. It is my hope—my optimistic hope—that these journeys will help a little to rekindle that spirit and reinforce our efforts to maintain and protect the great wildernesses of our earth.

  We are learning to tread softly in these secret places and to safeguard a world we barely comprehend. We are learning to accept its gifts gratefully, to take only what we need (and continually reexamine the need for these “needs”) and to hold its bounty in trust for the future. It is our world—our only home. We are the earth—and the earth is us.

  And—last confession—I love it.

  1. ZAIRE’S RUWENZORI

  To the Mountains of the Moon

  “It was like traveling back to the earliest beginning of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish…. The stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.”

  —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  Just think about it. Soaring ice and glacier-wrapped peaks rising almost seventeen thousand feet out of the scrub, forests, swamps, and grasslands of lowland Zaire and Uganda. The third highest mountains in Africa. Vast, majestic, sky-scratching, cloud-smothered pinnacles in the middle of millions of square miles of unexplored, unmapped wilderness.

  Henry Morton Stanley, the man who sought out the elusive Dr. Livingstone in 1871 and became the first European explorer to see this mystical mountain massif, called it just that—Ruwenzori. A simple Bantu expression meaning “hill of rain” or “rainmaker.” He recorded his sighting as:

  A sky-piercing whiteness…which assumed the proportion and appearance of a vast mountain covered with snow.

  Those two irascible wanderers Richard Burton and John Speke were convinced the Nile was born here. Burton referred to the massif as the “Lunatic Mountains” because of the old legends of men being driven to madness trying to seek them out in a region covered by clouds for most of every year. But the two men never proved their hypotheses to the satisfaction of the walrus-mustached, sideburned doyens of exploratory knowledge sipping their ports and brandies in the mahogany-and portrait-walled confines of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society.

  The wonderfully foolish, courageous, desperate (and very erotic) expeditions of these two men merely added confusion and cartographical conflict to the neat-minded “Empire” protagonists in their sagging leather wing chairs.

  “Nonsense!” they said.

  “Wrong measurements,” they said.

  “Let’s have another drink and toast the Queen,” they said.

  And so two more “life must be more than this” exponents were dumped into the ash cans of dubious notoriety. Lives of soaring adventure ending in squalid squabbles, mutual backstabbing—and ignominious deaths.

  The “Mountains of the Moon”! What an enticing prospect. A red rag to this wandering bull. Hidden in their almost perpetual cloud cover, they definitely exist. We know that from later, better-organized expeditions. But even Ptolemy guessed the presence of the “Lunae Montes” somewhere in the center of the continent. Aristotle referred to “a silver mountain” in the heart of Africa, and Aeschylus wrote of “the Gods’ great garden [the Nile Delta] fed by distant snows.”

  The region is still a mysterious lost world today. People have vanished here, dying in blizzards, being swallowed up by moss bogs, or tumbling off the edge of ice-sheened precipices. French mountaineer Bernard Pierre described it “a place not of this planet.”

  But it is on this planet and I had to see these peaks. Touch them. Trample over their glaciers and ice fields. Explore the strange foothills where familiar flowers and plants back home—heather, lobelia, groundsels, and ferns—grow into tree-sized specimens, where three-foot-long earthworms ease through mossy bogs, and where one of the oddest creatures on earth, the rock or tree hyrax (a rabbitlike member of the elephant family with hooves and a humanlike shriek) frolics in the always-wet gloom of fantasy forests seen nowhere else on earth. I had to come here and experience these hidden wonders in deepest central Africa for myself.

  My destination was the town of Beni in eastern Zaire, couched on the lower flanks of these great Ruwenzori Mountains. However, I began my journey a long way from Beni, over eleven hundred miles to the west, in the capital city of Kinshasa (Leopoldville) on the great Zaire (Congo) River—the Amazon of Africa. Getting to the mountains presented experiences and challenges that, by themselves, could have filled a good half of this book.

  Part I—Kinshasa to Kisangani by Riverboat

  Chaos. Absolutely bloody, sweaty pandemonium.

  I though I’d get there early. “Board at dawn,” an official of the riverboat told me. “Afterwards—all crazy!” Well—it was barely dawn. The sun was still below the horizon. And it was already crazy. Passengers—hundreds of them—tumbling across the docks, down metal plates that pretended to be a gangplank—goats, pigs, bundled chickens, caged monkeys, buckets full of vegetables and meat, baskets bulging and covered with sacks, women in bright flowery frocks carrying babies papoose-style, little children dragging even smaller children, an Indian merchant balancing twelve bound rolls of printed fabric on his head, three Bantu tribesmen manhandling an enormous trunk with brass padlocks and a Christmasy ornamentation of stickers and transit labels. And soldiers too—big fellows with angry faces and automatic rifles and a penchant for pushing and bawling at the churning, shouting, screaming mass.

  I hardly had a chance to see the boat from the quay. The General something or other—a lopsided, low-in-the-water, rusty white five-deck creature pierced with tiny windows—mother to a flotilla of five even rustier barges strapped with frayed cables to its superstructure and to one another. Together they were easily the size of a football field. My ticket indicated I had a “to-share” cabin in the main vessel. Most of the crowd was surging farther forward into the shadows of the single-and double-deck barges. Over three thousand people were in there, I was told later, for our seven-hundred-mile, eight-day ride from Kinshasa to Kisangani (Stanleyville). I don’t know how many were in the main boat, but it felt like a floating palace compared to the stifling claustrophobia of the prisonlike rooms and passageways on those barges.

  I found my room. Two bunk beds and a porthole encrusted with explosions of rust and black cobwebs. Couldn’t open it. Wouldn’t make any damned difference anyhow. Never been in a tiny space so hot before. Sweat pouring. Wanted to dump my pack but nobody around, no key, so dragged it back up on deck and sat in a small patch of shade, wondering what the hell I was going to do with myself for the next eight days.

  Time passed very slowly in the sweltering heat. They’d said the boat would leave at ten A.M. It was now one P.M. and still no sign of departure. More shouting, desperate passengers—more goats and chickens. Finally a great blast of steam, whistles, gongs, and soldiers giving vent to their pent-up anger by dragging away two raggedly dressed men who tried to leap for the side of the boat as it creaked and sagged into the main channel of the river. Howls and yells from friends or family on board. Didn’t make a bit of difference. The soldiers had something to punch and pound at last. God—sometimes I hate Africa.

  And then again, sometimes I don’t. Ten or more mil
es upstream, things settled down. People came out on the long veranda with stools and folding chairs; there was the chink of beer bottles, even the aroma of food being cooked somewhere deep in the growling bowels of this ungainly boat-barge conglomeration. A breeze too. And shade. Now we were getting civilized. Kinshasa was gone. Farewell, festering, unworkable city of four million. The locals call it Boubelleville—Trash Can City! A remarkably accurate description in spite of a patina of modernity in the form of broad boulevards and modest high rises. All for show, though. The truth lies beyond the gleaming towers.

  The jungle was edging in. Miles and miles of it in all directions tumbling to a ragged halt along torn, timber-strewn shores. Might not be such a bad journey after all. The cabin was a hellhole, but what the heck, I would stay on the deck.

  I was wondering if the sun was melting my brain. Couldn’t seem to focus on anything serious. All that noise and crush and panic had unloosed some idiot in my skull. I needed some relief. A beer first and then maybe someone to talk to.

  “Hello.”

  I looked up and saw a man about forty or so with graying hair, a lean face closely shaved, wearing a blue T-shirt and a crisply pressed pair of white safari shorts. (And carrying a generous supply of bottled beer.)