That’s how this place has always functioned so there’s no point in importing your outsider stress. Just latch onto a good local guide and prepare to drink deep of their fatalism. They will sort it out. It’ll just take time. And you need luck to make sure you don’t run into any of the bad guys. In a country where 1,500 people still die each day as a result of conflict, there are plenty of bad guys to go round. There is also no functioning state as such so don’t expect anybody you meet wearing something approximating a police uniform to 1) be a policeman 2) follow any sort of legal code 3) have any bullets in his police gun or batteries in his police radio.

And you need cash. The remarkable thing about a state as failed as the Congo is that the price of living for outsiders is astonishingly high. Sure you can survive out in the bush on next to nothing but the moment you come to a town you will be shaken down for cash (always foreign currency, US dollars mostly) and at prices that would make a Brooklyn diamond dealer blush.

First, a bit of history to sort out the confusion that so often adheres to the Congo brand. The really big messed-up country attached to the Congo name used to be a Belgian colony, is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo and used to known in days gone by as Zaire, the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo. The smaller messed-up version used to be a French colony, is now called the Republic of the Congo and also has also gone through various name changes. The first country is really, really big. From one side to the other is the distance from London to Moscow. The second one is also pretty big but for the purposes of this article we are going to ignore it as a runt and focus on its huge neighbour. Don’t worry if you get a little confused; people often do. The actor/motorbiker, Ewan McGregor, and his team, who rode down Africa in 2007, managed to muddle the two countries.

The thing these places all have in common is the Congo River. At 4,500 km in length it is a tad shorter than the Nile. But while it might be Africa’s second longest river it is, by several orders of magnitude, its mightiest. The outflow from the Nile into the Mediterranean is weeny in comparison to the 43,000 tonnes of fresh water that belch out of the Congo every second all year round into the Atlantic. That’s a lot of fresh water. Indeed the first white outsiders to discover the Congo river, some particularly nutty Portuguese mariners in the 1480s, described how, twenty miles out at sea from the mouth of the river, they could drink the seawater.

I set about crossing the Congo (the Democratic Republic of Congo, that is) in 2004 as an exercise in part-journalism/part-prove-it-can-be-done/part-midlife-crisis-risk-everything. I had just spent four years covering crises in Africa for a British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, almost all of which had roots in the Congo. The thuggish Lord’s Resistance Army had kept northern Uganda ablaze for twenty years because they could slip across the unmarked border into the lawless Congo and find sanctuary. Ethnicity in Rwanda festered because Hutus responsible for the 1994 genocide were still alive and well, surviving in eastern Congo. Darfuri rebels funded themselves from cross-border smuggling into the Congo. Even Robert Mugabe’s rickety regime down in Zimbabwe was linked to the Congo because he bought off his generals by sending them to the Congo to line their pockets with cash from its alluvial diamond fields. So to try to understand the continent’s major problems I wanted to go the Congo, their common denominator.

But the main reason I wanted to tackle the Congo was that I was told it could not be done. In fact, several people told me it was suicidal. In 1996 a series of wars and rebellions began in the Congo that have continued until today and that have helped turn the country into what most outsiders regard as a no-go area. I had a map in my Telegraph office in Johannesburg of the entire African continent and for years the Congo goaded me from its centre like some sort of cartographical golem. The train lines that used to go into the Congo had been cut, the ferry lines collapsed and the road network choked by the equatorial forest. Like other colonial nations, Belgium loved statistics and I found an unabashed travel guide for the Belgian colony that boasted the country had 111,971 km of road in 1949. When I set about crossing the Congo half a century later I doubt if more than 500 km of road remained.

You might wonder why roads are important in a country so generously endowed with rivers but my problem was that the route I chose to cross the Congo had a long overland component. I wanted to see if it was possible to follow the trail blazed by the first white explorer to reach the Congo, Henry Morton Stanley.

Stanley is best known for his 1871 journalistic scoop where he tracked down David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary-turned-explorer, who had been missing for a few years in central Africa. Stanley, a nuggety little Welsh bastard, came up with the sound bite of the century in “Doctor Livingstone, I presume”, and transformed himself into a global star. But it was his next trip to Africa that was to have a much profounder effect on the continent.

Between 1874 and 1877 Stanley bushwhacked from the east coast of Africa to the west on an epic trip that meandered more than 7,000 km. It was a pretty impressive display of determination and stamina (all three of his European companions died and only a third of his 300 bearer party made it out alive) but it cost the lives of countless Congolese natives. Stanley was of the school of explorer that shot first, and then shot some more and never really got round to asking questions as there was probably more shooting to be done

The reason the trip changed history is that Stanley was the first outsider to chart the Congo River. He went back to Europe with a map of a massive navigable river reaching across the continent. The Belgian King, Leopold II, saw in the river a spine for a new colony bringing African resources downstream and shipping European manufactured the other way. Stanley’s trip fired the starting gun for the Scramble for Africa. The Belgian king made his move for the Congo River basin around 1880s and within two decades almost all of the rest of the continent had been snaffled up by the colonial powers.

Stanley reached the Congo by crossing Lake Tanganyika and landing on its western shore. He had heard tell of a massive river, the Lualaba, or Upper Congo, deep in the forest somewhere out to the west but he had no idea how to find the river or where it would lead. A not dissimilar sense of mystery descended on me when I set out on my journey in the dry season of 2004. I knew the river was out there in the badlands of northern Katanga province, but the truth was I had no idea how I was going to get there.

It had taken days of messing around with United Nations logisticians to glean a seat on a light aircraft to Kalemie, once a big Congolese port on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, but now a cholera-contaminated ruin. My mum had travelled through Kalemie in 1958 but that was back during the colonial period when things like railways and ferries worked. Since the Belgians pulled out the Congo in 1960, this part of the country had been in a near-permanent state of rebellion. Che Guevara had fought around Kalemie, attacking the tiny hydro-electric power plant that used to give the town its electricity. Mad Mike Hoare, the best known of the white mercenaries who infested the Congo in the 1960s and 1970s, had been stationed here.

My lucky break came when I persuaded some local aid workers from Care International to give me lift on their motorbikes. One of the wars was believed to be ending and they wanted to get to places they had not been able to reach during the fighting. I, quite literally, cadged a lift for 900 km on a journey back in time.

Buses used to cross this region daily along a Belgian road network maintained by “cantonniers” or local labourers. All that had gone, washed away by seasonal rains and consumed by the advancing Equatorial forest. For days we snaked along jungle tracks often no wider than our hips, stopping endlessly at broken bridges and fallen trees. The bikes were tiny little things, small enough to lift over obstacles. Anything bigger would have been pointless.

United Nations peacekeepers didn’t venture into these parts, the stronghold of black magic-using mai-mai rebels and murderous interahamwe fugitives from Rwanda. I passed a village where a skull and other human bones lay thick on the ground the result of some forgotten, bloody skirmish. I biked through burnt-down, abandoned villages and caught the occasional glimpse of people in rags who ran away, petrified of outsiders.

And the secret weapon to get me through these terrors? A pygmy called Georges Mbuyu, a tiny man who stared down red-eyed mai-mai wearing hideous necklaces of animal teeth, body parts and fetishes. “Don’t worry, I know these people, they will not hurt you,” he said reassuringly. He might have only come up to my chest but in these killing fields he was a giant.

But the most moving sight? The Ho Chi Minh trail of Congolese survival – cadaverous men we saw by the hundred wandering the forest, pushing pedal-less bicycles laden with jars of palm oil for hundreds and hundreds of km for the chance of making a few dollars by trading them for another commodity like salt. These men were on six week round trips, drinking when they passed a stream, eating what they could scavenge in the bush, and sleeping on the trail when the sun went down.

“There is nothing in my home town, Kongolo – this is my only chance to feed my family,” Muke Nguy told me before heaving his tottering bike down the trail. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at a loop of vine on his shoulder. “My bicycle repair kit”, he said. The sap, a form of natural rubber, makes a gummy resin, ideal for mending flat tyres. I shook my head in sorry disbelief. Think how great Africa could be if the skills and talents of its people were released from survival and self-preservation.

In 900 km I saw not one other working motorised vehicle. I met village elders who told me VW Beetles used to pass regularly in the 1960s but now their own teenage children had never seen a car. This was a part of the world in regression – the hands of the Congolese clock were not just standing still, they are spinning backwards.

At night I fell asleep in thatched mud huts re-reading Stanley’s diary. He too wrote of burnt-down villages and human skulls littering the ground. Had nothing changed?

When I first glimpsed the river, it was huge. More than 3,000 km upstream from the Atlantic Ocean it was already wider than the Thames in London. But what should be one of the great transport arteries of Africa, shuttling goods and people along a fluvial superhighway, was clotted.

It took weeks to negotiate my way down river past towns like Kibombo, an eerie-looking place where I spent a night. People here cannot remember when the electricity last worked and I saw a ghostly scene of guttering palm oil candles and shadows dancing across hulks of abandoned colonial-era buildings.

The riverside town of Kindu was home to a large UN HQ, fitted out with air-conditioning, satellite uplinks for the internet and a canteen where I had my first fizzy drink for a month. Behind the razor wire these peacekeepers lived in blissful isolation – many did not even know that a few years ago 13 Italian peacekeepers had been dragged through these same streets, disembowelled by a mob and eaten.

After leaving Kindu I had my only truly serene moment in the Congo. There was not a single working Congolese motorboat on this stretch of the river – the rusting remains of paddle steamers, tugs and barges can be seen rotting at various spots on the bank – and the only river traffic was made up of pirogues, canoes made from hollowed out tree trunks.

One evening I took a pirogue with four paddlers and we headed into the midstream of the Congo just south of the Equator. The sun had set abruptly but as the night rushed in and the sky, forest and river merged into one impenetrable whole, an unforgettable thing happened – a moon rose red and full in the east.

As the water lapped against the pirogue and the paddlers sang in gentle Swahili harmony I watched as the slow-climbing moon struggled to light one of the world’s most benighted regions. The next day my pirogue reached the spot where, in 1951, a full Hollywood crew had come to film The African Queen. Katharine Hepburn wrote in her diary of finding a charming riverside town full of helpful missionaries. My experience was different. The priests had long ago been driven out, all the buildings lay in ruins and I was told it was too dangerous to dawdle.

A few days later and I finally reached Kisangani, the city on the Bend in The River. Once an industrial and intellectual centre where multinationals like Unilever maintained large factories, it was a broken ruin. It used to be called Stanleyville, in honour of the explorer who first passed here in a flurry of poisoned arrows and spears from Wagenia tribesmen rightly suspicious of outsiders.

All traces of Stanley have been removed. Where his statue once stood there is now just an empty plinth and a spring where hookers from the local Hotel Des Chutes wash their smalls. A few whites cling on: a French born trader who married well into the clan of Mobutu Sese Seko, the post-independence dictator who single-handedly bankrupted the country when known as Zaire; a Greek trucker who somehow maintains the town’s tatty Hellenic Club with its daily menu of tzatziki and moussaka.

And there was, 83-year-old Father Leon, a tiny, beer-drinking, chain-smoking priest who came from Belgium to the Congo in 1947. He remembers clearly November 24 1964, the day Belgian paratroopers dropped into Stanleyville to rescue him from mai-mai rebels. But the paratroopers only landed on the right bank of the river. On the left, ten priests and fifteen nuns were tortured and murdered.

“I still have a picture of Heinrich Verberne who was killed that day. He was standing in for me when he was captured by the rebels so perhaps it should have been me,” Father Leon said quietly. “Why are you still here after all these years, after all these horrors? I must go where there is need and in the Congo the need is great”.

It took weeks to find a boat downstream towards Kinshasa and the Atlantic Ocean where Stanley’s epic journey ended in Aug 9 1877.The national transport company had long since stopped operating and I was forced to board a Congolese boat chartered by the UN. For days it crawled along the river’s sweeping arch across central Africa. Penniless villagers would paddle out in pirogues and bravely try to latch onto our boat to sell the crew smoked monkey, fresh fish, edible grubs or cassava bread. It was a hazardous exercise and often they were overwhelmed, sunk by our wash shouting forlornly for us to stop.

It was a scene Stanley himself would have recognised and after my journey was over it stayed with me as the perfect metaphor for the region – courageous, desperate people left behind wallowing in the mighty Congo River as the rest of the world steams by.

Tim Butcher’s `Blood River – A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart’ was published October 2008 in the USA by Grove Press and in the UK by Vintage. Read a review of the book here

Author and Photography – Tim Butcher

(Posted by Lee Ridley)

So a different angle of thinking is required to find new and exciting ways to continue the great tradition of world exploration in the 21st century, and Tim Butcher, Middle East Correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, did just that when he laid down his plans to follow in the footsteps of the great Henry Morton Stanley and his epic journey through The Congo in 1874-7.

For H M Stanley, his well-publicised greeting “Dr Livingston, I presume”, upon tracking down that other great explorer at Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanjanyika in 1871, became more famous than his actual expeditions and if anything, only succeeded in making his colleague a household name, with Stanley himself consequently becoming a short side note in that particular story. For the uninformed, Stanley was sent to find David Livingstone and that’s where his story ends.

But Tim Butcher is not the uninformed; not in matters of 18th century exploration at least, and in 2001 he started in earnest to research the possibility of retracing Stanley’s epic route from Lake Tanjanyika, through the Congo rainforest to the head waters of the mighty Congo River and thence to the West coast. A huge accomplishment back then, but no big deal in today’s age of satellite communication and detailed maps of every square inch of the planet, right? Wrong… Whether you know it as The Belgian Congo, Zaire or the D.R.C. it is still pretty much the most violent killing ground you might ever have the misfortune of finding yourself in, and to travel overland through this hell hole, with a backpack, clean clothes, white skin and a wad of cash is to court disaster of the worst kind.

Nevertheless, Butcher would appear to be possessed with a sense of adventure that drowns out his sense of survival, so it’s little surprise that he developed selective hearing when every rational soul that he spoke to of his plans warned him he was on a one way ticket to a very sticky demise; and in 2004, with all the “good advice” ringing in his ears, he boarded a flight to Lubumbashi in the far south of the D.R.C. and walked headlong into the darkest, filthiest, bloodiest, most corrupt, fetid region on earth, with no other aim than to follow the route some other guy took 130 years before, and live to tell the tale.

Blood River is that tale, and it’s a veritable litany of corrupt officials, murderous rebels, near misses, chance-encounters, impenetrable jungle, sickness and abject poverty. But it’s also a testament to the tenacious and undying spirit of man in the face of insurmountable odds: The old men that drag palm oil for hundreds of miles through the forest for a few lousy shillings; the folks that set up home on board the riverboats, waiting sometimes for months for the boat to depart downriver. These are the people that represent the beating heart of The Congo, even if the beating heart is regarded by many to be black as pitch.

The characters that Butcher meets along his journey are portrayed as one with the contrasts of the forest; the Mai Mai dark and menacing; the villagers full of colour and hope; and the Interahamwe uncompromising and omnipresent. And as he tells his account, we find the forest reveals overgrown, decaying remnants of its opulent colonial past, and we get the sense that a fading hope of a return to better days for the Congo becomes a parallel thread to Butcher’s own passage.

The reader is left in no doubt that Butcher is one of a rare breed of modern-day travelers, who take on every obstacle with quiet resolve and stay focused on the challenge in hand. But The Congo is an immense and ominous place, and even when Butcher left the dangers of the civil war in the east of the country far behind, the regular challenges of simply moving through a region with no infrastructure, other than a murky, foreboding river, remained as testing and arduous as anything he’d tackled before.

Whether you’re a seasoned world traveller, or just content to see the world through the eyes of others from the comfort of an armchair, Tim Butcher’s “Blood River” is essential reading. It’s impeccably written with great intelligence, insight and humour and offers a fantastically detailed view of the interior of this darkest and most forbidding of countries.

Order the book here

Book review by Lee Ridley.

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We were artists and we were on our way to the Democratic Republic of Congo, our heads filled with ideas, triggered by the whole hideous story of the region. From the early colonial heydays to the present geopolitical mess, which leaves no one free of responsibility.

We were supposed to go with an Echo flight to Goma three days after our arrival in Kinshasa, but due to the Air Serv crash, things were rearranged and all seats were taken on the Echo flight by humanitarian workers, whom for a while at least, didn’t want to use Air Serv. Our only possibility to get to Goma was to fly with the local company, Hewa Bora, which of course as with every other congolese airline, figures on the aviation blacklist. It’s a bit like playing Russian roulette, but we took our chances and arrived safely; the plane coming to a sudden stop on the runway, 2/3 of which is buried in lava.

In 2002 the volcano Nyiragongo exploded and a river of molten rock poured into Goma and created a humanitarian catastrophe, as an estimated 300,000 people fled into the neighboring country of Rwanda. I have always found the whole idea about applauding the pilot when he lands a plane slightly annoying, but on this occasion it seemed appropriate.

In the center of the city, workers were occupied with removing the remnants of a Hewa Bora plane, which had recently crashed shortly after take off. The government forces and the UN peacekeepers, MONUC, were everywhere, patrolling the streets as Nkunda’s rebels had launched a major offensive not far from the city some days before. The rebels were gaining control on the road between Goma and Bukavu, and we were strongly advised not to go by car to Bukavu. Goma, it seemed, was a fortress.

The atmosphere was extremely tense and we could hardly get away with filming, even though we had paid a fair amount of money to get a permission from the Secretariat General Au Tourisme in Kinshasa. Soldiers were keeping an eye on us from everywhere, letting us know that flashing a camera would land us in trouble. Paranoia is like a disease that has spread throughout the whole society. The Congolese don’t want to be photographed. They fear that the pictures will be used for sinister purposes. In addition many believe in witchcraft, and you can be sure that somebody, somewhere, is watching you at all times when you are out in the streets.

Police officers will fine you for the most ridiculous things and you have to bribe and talk your way out of situations time after time. They call it the Article 15: ”You’re on your own”. It essentially means that each has to care for himself, even if it means to violate the law, to cheat and to lie. The corruption runs through the whole system from top to bottom; it’s the legacy of Mobuto.
And as the rain came down hard each night it seemed to me that Goma could have been the perfect backdrop for a post-apocalyptic movie fiction. The city had witnessed heavy fighting since the Kabila war broke out in 1996. Now Kabila Jr. is continuing what Kabila Senior had struggled for in many years, an attempt to wipe out the rebels, a seemingly impossible task. And all along the civilians are suffering from unspeakable atrocities. Many, having fled their villages, now live in the refugee camps surrounding Goma. We arranged a visit to one of these camps, Buhimba, with Christian, a security officer and a journalist.

Bahima Refugee Camp

An NGO had supplied us with shirts and papers saying that we were on an official mission. But it is not so easy to gain access to the camps. At first we were introduced to some suspicious looking aidworkers. A swedish woman, who refused to speak swedish, even though we as Danes could easily have understood her mother tongue, shook her head in disbelief and contempt as we presented her with the concept of our project. Then we were told to turn off our cameras before we could get permission to meet the manager of the camp.

We were taken to a hut and told to wait. After a while the manager came and introduced himself and we told him about our project and showed him our papers. Obviously the papers didn’t qualify for this particularly mean environment, but after some discussion we were permitted half an hour of access on the condition that we would not ask any questions regarding politics. We were told that a gendarme would have to follow us for our own protection. ”The refugees are desperate, we haven’t received any food supplies for three months and we are struggling to limit an outbreak of cholera”, he told us, with undisguised reproach.

The smell hit us hard and sickening as we entered the camp. From far away we could hear the banging rhythm of a drum and we moved in the direction of the sound, followed by forty or fifty wildly enthusiastic and malnourished children.You light a small spark of hope here simply because you are white. Their parents seemed more hopeless, sitting, crouching or simply lying on the ground in despair, following us only with their reddish eyes, barely capable of mobilizing more than a faint greeting.

Is it morally justifiable to exploit such suffering and human indignity? We were not journalists nor aidworkers and you can’t escape the feeling of being a useless and insensitive intruder, hiding behind a camera, keeping a distance, knowing that you will soon leave it all behind again. You are a voyeur, handing out a few dirty, next-to-worthless bills for a short interview, telling the rest that you don’t have any money. You get what you want, justifying to yourself that what you do is important; it is for the benefit of the unfortunate. You deal with political issues and you do it in a sober way. You even tell yourself that you are courageous because you dare to go beyond the headlines. This is what you tell yourself while you adjust your lenses and try to get it all from the right angle, and the truth is that this ”Theater of War” gets you excited. The anxiety and fear fuels you and gets the adrenaline going. It is the return of the ”Real”.

The sound of the drums came from a big rectangular closed tent. Someone told us that a Mass was being held, but it sounded more like an unrestrained village party; we were not allowed to enter. The children were getting more and more excited and tried to grab the microphone from my backpocket, coming at me from all sides. We hastily moved further, Christian telling us that we had to hurry up, obviously a bit uneasy about the whole situation. But we insisted on making a short interview with a female refugee. We wanted a least one individual voice, telling us what we already knew.

You can’t imagine the horrors, the women of Congo have been victims of since the war broke out. You want to escape the Western concepts of ”The Dark Continent” and move on, but it is not all possible. They tell their stories of mass rape and mutilations and they do it without showing any emotions. You are ashamed because you are a man and you wonder if these women can ever gain some kind of confidence in you. You give a bit of money, because they ask for it and now you just want to get away from it all; the stench, the tragedy, the disgust. More people are asking for money on the way out and you gaze beyond the mountains. The sky is very white.

Buhimba Refugee Camp

We leave Buhimba in the afternoon. There are four more camps in the surroundings of Goma and they all contain thousands and thousands of displaced men, women and children each with their own individual story to tell. We are told that the rebels are attacking the camps from time to time. How is this possible considering that the largest UN force in the world is present here? We are also told that both sides of the conflict want the UN to pull out their peacekeepers, the fighting parties want to settle it by themselves. On the other hand, a lot of civilians are blaiming the MONUC for not being capable of protecting them, but Nkunda and his rebels are powerful, he has been in the game for many years.

The government forces and the UN, mainly consisting of Indian and Pakistani troops, are weak. Some claim to be informed about a coming Foreign Legion intervention. The rumors are rife. You genuinely try to understand the complexity of the conflict, this mess they are in and you are thinking this mess we are in, because you know it is a geopolitical game, but you still find it very difficult to comprehend. It is called ”The Forgotten War”, even though an estimated 4-5 million people have lost their lives so far.

A couple of days before, we had returned from Bukavu, the capital of the South Kivu province. We had travelled overwater, across Lake Kivu, the only secure way to travel between the two cities these days. Lake Kivu is a so-called exploding lake, due to the gaseous chemical composition, methane and carbon dioxide, interacting with volcanic activity. The risk from a possible Lake Kivu overturn would be catastrophic, since approximately two million people live in the lake basin. Scientists hypothesize that sufficient volcanic interaction with the high gas concentrations of the lake’s bottom water, would heat the water, force the methane out of the lake, spark a methane explosion, and trigger a release of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide would then suffocate large numbers of people in the lake basin as the gases roll off the surface. It is also possible that the lake could spawn tsunamis as gas explodes out of it. In every way ”The Kivus” is a dangerous place. After the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the waters of Lake Kivu gained notoriety as a place where many of the victims of the genocide were dumped.

In Bukavu we had spent a couple of days with two priests, who we had met on the boat. One day the four of us went to the Panzi hospital, a place we had heard about one night in Goma. The Panzi is known for its surgical department, treating women who suffer from genital mutilations. The whole staff of doctors and surgeons had willingly showed us every single part of the hospital, the screaming from the operating-rooms sending shivers down the spine, as we moved from room to room. But the Panzi didn’t have the facilities to house everyone who was in need of treatment.

In the surroundings of the hospital, the patients where living in temporary tent camps, preparing their meals on bonfires. Most of them were women, in all ages. Their attitude towards us was inscrutable and again we had the feeling of being overly-inquisitive. We made an interview with the director, who raged against all sides of the conflict, accusing everyone of warcrimes. And by the end of day, just before we were about to leave, the doctors had asked us for money. They too had families to feed, they told us their wages were low. Only later did we discover that each of the patients pays USD50 to be attended by a doctor, a considerable amount of money in this particular part of the world.

Every night we went to bars, to drink, to normalize. To meet people. Mostly NGO’s and their local fixers. Fixers make up a whole industry in the DRC, there are lots of them and they are eager to arrange whatever you might be interested in. This is how they earn their living. Hundreds of dollars are easily spent in a couple of days and the prize is not to be bargained. It is supply and demand. And you depend on good fixers, who know the way around. So we kept on emptying big bottles of Primus, Tembo and Turbo King, while socializing and exchanging small scraps of paper with phone numbers and email adresses, in nightclubs and bars occupied with wazungu and prostitutes. We listened to their stories of war and rape and of children being kidnapped by the rebels and forced to be soldiers. The locals have an almost eerie ability to talk about these things without showing the slightest expressions of grief. Fuck, sometimes they even laughed at the whole tragedy! I guess it is impossible to understand, if you haven’t spend your whole life in a warzone.

The day before we left for Kinshasa, a plane carrying president Kabila landed in the airport in Goma. The president came to attend a meeting, addressing the situation and discussing recent events and as his plane hit the runway, one of the tires blew up. It could have been the end of it, but Kabila got away with it this time.

The author on Lake Kivu

But rumor has it, that a coup is under way. If so it wouldn’t be the first time in the DRC. No one should feel safe here, least of all the ones that are in power. But will it make any difference if it is one or the other that is in charge. Who has the means and the will to end the misery? One night, after we had returned to Kinshasa, we talked with a young student, who we had met at the Academie des Beaux Arts. He told us that he had been serving in Laurant Kabila’s army of child-soldiers when he was eleven years old. He made a drawing of an AK47 on a napkin while we spoke. We bought him beers; he was a sympathic and resonable young man. You wouldn’t have thought that he had participated in the most atrocious cruelties. Suddenly, he revealed that he had a dream and that dream was to become president one day.

We urged him to give a speech and though there were not more than four people present, he spoke for half an hour, with great feeling, sounding sincerely visionary, as if he had been standing before a crowd of thousands. For a moment there I didn’t have the slightest doubt that he would some day succeed. He was only 22 years old. But my french is not very good though and I probably didn’t get half of it. A photograph I had taken of him earlier that same day shows him posing in a green US Army shirt, clutching a book, the collected writings and speeches of Mobuto Sese Seko, with both hands holding it close to his chest.

A future President

Written by Christian Danielewitz

And so as we enter the final week of 2007, the staff at Polo’s Bastards, tucking into roast goose, washed down with hot mulled wine, present you with their collective assessment of the year’s top ten worst destinations. Always the source of much contention and vehement disagreement from various corners, we expect this year’s compilation to be no different. But whatever you may think of us and our take on the world’s more “colourful” destinations, we think you’ll have to agree that getting upset about a teddy bear’s name is just plain stupid, and murdering monks is dismally short of tactful.

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Iraq

What, wait, aren’t things supposed to be getting better there? Yeah sure they are, for those who may have already survived umpteen hundred suicide car bombs and bombers, extra judicial killings and kidnappings perhaps, but for you Mr. And Mrs. Samsonite, even the best and safest parts of the country may put you on the wrong end of a Turkish JDAM, or stuck at the wrong checkpoint, or tossed unceremoniously into the trunk of a car that you most certainly did not hail.

Your hide is still worth money here or it simply might just be good for a point making beheading on YouTube by all the wrong independent filmmakers, whom have absolutely no axe to grind with you personally, except the one that happens at that moment to be against your neck. Face it does anyone even know how many people are actually still being held hostage in Iraq? Arab hospitality notwithstanding, there are more armaments circulating this country in all sorts of hands and at all levels of technology that while it may be possible to get a cold drink and a tan the potential for so much more than you bargained for, or were willing to pay, is still very much in the realm of possibility.

While the violence and unabated killing seems to be enjoying a temporary lull it really is one of those rare countries where everyone seems to have a beef with someone else, whether it be brand new or a hundred years old. Let there be no doubt here, it’s whether or not the country is even in possession of a future that is still very much in doubt.

Afghanistan

There may be only one place more wary of strangers as a whole than Afghanistan’s hinterlands (that’s pretty much the majority of the country outside Kabul) and that spot too would be inside Afghanistan somewhere. For centuries the tribes and people that populate this country have taken great pride in tossing out occupiers, and now for the past six years the country has been loaded with occupiers from all over Europe and the rest of the developed world. This would be courtesy of an organization called NATO and, all things considered, those locals that are so predisposed to the longstanding tradition of ejecting outsiders certainly have plenty of motivation to get their game on.

Unfortunately for everybody involved – the citizens, NATO and yes you the world traveler of exotic locations, the extreme dichotomy that exists within this physically and culturally stunning country range from “We want our MTV!” to “Sharia dictates that you must be punished for watching it”. Indeed you’ll be punished for any number of apparent ludicrous crimes against Allah by any number of barbaric forms of punishment; all of which for the average citizen and especially for the traveler tends to create a behavioral minefield. Speaking of minefields; this lovely country has more than its fair share of those too, sixth in the world, in fact, not to mention when talking of world rankings it happens to be number one in opium poppy cultivation. So while there may be a myriad of ways to find yourself in a great deal pain, whether through ever increasing rates of suicide bombing via human bombers or vehicle borne devices, kidnapping or random shootings, car or bus crashes on dangerous mountain roads, rampant disease, conflagrations initiated between NATO and the Taliban or the current villainous warlord of the moment, you’ll at least be able to derive some comfort that there will be enough morphine or heroin around to take the edge off.

While Chicken Street and much of Kabul and its populace will invariably be sure to invite you inside their rug shop or café for a hospitable cup of chai and to chat you up and practice your particular language, this will not be the case in the south of the country or in the northwest frontier provinces where tribal law and ‘who has the most guns’ tends to sort out even the most minor of issues. Unless, of course, NATO, the Taliban, Narcotics funded warlords or the Pakistani military decide to put in their two cents’ worth, which more often than not tends to be the case. Expect things to heat up in the upcoming year.

Somalia

How much worse can it get for this poor impoverished, fractured, chaotic pseudo nation? It could always be stated that for a country that has had no viable government since the early 1990’s, it’s not doing too bad. Some folks even felt the leadership takeover this past year by the Islamic council was a step in the right direction, despite the fact that edicts governing basic human behaviors and Sharia-based laws were being declared on a weekly basis. The banning of public showing of movies, and Khat chewing, not to mention simply playing a radio, were punishable offences.

Say what you will about Sharia law but this was enough to prompt Somalia’s powerful neighbor, Ethiopia, to invade to toss these Islamists and their supporters out of power. This took cities like Baidoa and Mogadishu that already had enough violence and chaos and misery, and turned them into full on battlefields, where of course it was the civilians who suffered the most. Like so many forces before them, Ethiopia is now bogged down there following an initial withdrawal and then a quick return to support an outgunned interim government that within weeks of being “returned to power” was once again under attack. If this sounds complicated it hasn’t even begun to bring into play the role the warlords and their affiliate clans play, and the resulting constant, ongoing havoc. When it comes to the deaths of journalists that cover the anarchy, this country is second only to Iraq and it’s not clear where that leaves your camera-yielding white tourist other than dead.

Chronic Khat chewing leaves young, bored, gunmen with very twitchy trigger fingers and enough stimulation to jump into the back of a heavily armed Toyota Hi-Lux, ready to settle some perceived score with some begrudged party. If you plan a visit it is a very good idea to hire this type of crew as a preemptive measure to protect you from the very real threat of kidnapping by the very same people you’re hiring.

And it’s not just on land that you stand a chance of an early demise either: Rampant piracy has led to attacks, kidnapping and hostage taking on the high seas, and any ship or vessel entering Somali waters runs this terrifying gauntlet. The increase in the past year has been dramatic and worrisome for all involved. Relief agencies, the UN and Somalia’s citizens all depend on the goods and services that the maritime trade provides. Without safe, open shipping routes, a large segment of the population faces the prospect of starvation.

Without question the south of the country is vastly worse than the northern end, which has for the past several years been trying to divorce itself from its misbehaving brethren to the south by declaring itself the independent de facto states of Puntland and Somaliland. This is done to attempt on an international level to separate the north from the anarchy and violence in the south, and thus engender stability and a better way of life for the northern citizens. So yes it could be worse for Somalia – it could break off the continent and fall into the sea. Expect the grind to continue at its usual steady pace.

Lebanon

For a place with such a perfect Mediterranean location; wonderful historical context; exceeding geological beauty and refined social culture, it sure does have a load of worries. It’s really difficult to choose just where to start with this small plot of land with big problems, but betting people have been talking for some time now about the “if’s” and “when’s” of the next dust up between Hizbollah and Israel. This valid concern might be the top reason any vacation you plan here might most be affected. The last conflict in 2006 left no less than 3 billion US dollars in damage to Beirut alone, and a similar action could be your fastest ticket to ride along with the US marines or the French navy during the next mandatory evacuation, thus placing a sizable kink in your holiday plans of sunbathing, drinking fine wine and café dining. Couple this with an ongoing and seemingly systematic eradication via car bombs of higher echelon Lebanese politicians and civil leaders, and those who tend to be in the same area with them. Syria usually takes the blame here, so it’s easy to see that Lebanon has some serious neighbor issues.

No matter where you go in Lebanon, you will find the potential for trouble for a variety of different reasons. In the south, Hizbollah’s strong hold, you’ll find minefields, some old some new; you’ll find the remnants of cluster bombs that Israel dropped in the area during 2006; and you’ll need to contend with the potential for Israeli artillery to occasionally drop in, or over-flights from their jets that like to buzz Damascus and the disputed Golan, occasionally dropping explosives. But even in the north, on the outskirts of Tripoli, the Lebanese army has spent a great deal of time this past year fighting Palestinian Islamic militants (Fatah-al-Islam), who had entrenched themselves in some refugee camps. Outside of the potential for Pakistan to explode into an orgy of election inspired violence, to many this small country might perhaps have the greatest chance in 2008 to become, once again for all but the most fool hardy of travelers, a “No go” destination.

Pakistan

The nemesis of India just seems to go from bad to worse and this year was a particularly exciting one for them. With tribal problems, Islamist problems, territorial problems, sovereignty problems, election problems, foreign relation problems and the imposition of martial law, it’s a wonder they’re not getting a complex. Of course, the big bang this year (or at least the one that the media bothered reporting) was the public and very messy attempted assassination of opposition leader and former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto. With a few hundred casualties, it gave us a good reason to stay away from political rallies in this volatile country. The incumbent PM also had at least one attempt on his life, too. Of course, with the amount of weapons floating around the country (largely thanks to the manufacturing production lines in the North West Frontier Province) combined with a peculiar predisposition to settling differences with said weaponry, it’s little wonder that the politicians of the country are constantly dodging the pointy end of them. Speaking of NWFP, the state continues to stew in a molasses of violent tribal retribution and anti-government sentiment with continued rumors that this is the current hiding place of the big kahuna himself – Osama Bin Laden. The other big problem, of course, is there are the twenty or so proxy Islamist groups that keep popping up in Kashmir to fight the evil secularists in India, though how much control the central government has over them is up for argument.

The lid is beginning to loosen on this powder keg which gives Pakistan a firm spot in our top 10 and a very likely position in next year’s too unless something drastic happens and it changes for the better. With the sheer scope of problems in the country, that is pretty unlikely.

Sudan

The hilarity just continues in Africa, with Sudan getting another well deserved place on the list. Notwithstanding the fact that it appears to be a country with a sizeable population of idiots that believe a teddy bear’s name is reason enough to execute an old lady, Sudan is also mired in as complex tribal and political hostilities as you’ll find anywhere on the continent.

As one of the world’s longest running conflicts and the resistance of the central government to any meaningful actions that could lead to a lull in the hostilities, it’s difficult to see an end to it. With 200k Darfurians already dead and another four million displaced or relying on aid, the counter just keeps ticking. The 2006 Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement didn’t have a lot of support on the ground and resistance of the central government to the deployment of a UN peace keeping force means any real muscle that could help stop the slaughter remains impotent. Clashes between the Government and the SPLM also leaves the Comprehensive Peace Agreement on the verge of collapse with the rebels withdrawn from the Government of National Unity.

African Union troops currently deployed seem to be remarkably ineffectual and are coming under direct attack. Seven aid workers were killed in October alone and major aid organisations (which supply millions of people with their only access to food and water) starting to contemplate withdrawing. Cross border incursions by the government armed militias are also destabilising neighbouring Chad and having an effect on CAR.

As if all this isn’t enough, Sudan Arab militias have struck up a lucrative deal with those humanitarian angels, the Chinese, in which oil is traded for weapons and military training. Nations with a shred of decency walked away from an oil deal with Sudan, but Chinese oil companies saw an opportunity and now two billion US Dollars’ worth of oil each year is shipped out and fundamentalist Arabs draw a handsome salary. With untapped oil fields in the north/south borderlands, it seems only a matter of time before the shaky peace deal falls apart and if the north goes to war against the south again, Darfur will pale in comparison.

Even with all of this going on, Sudanese President Omer al-Bashir had the temerity to term 2007 “the year of peace” proving once again that politicians always have their hand firmly on the pulse of reality. The only question remaining now is whether the international community will have the strength of purpose to pursue a peace operation that guarantees security to civilians now that it is glaringly obvious to everyone that a short or even medium term political solution is a pipe-dream. We’re not holding our breath.

Myanmar

You know things aren’t going great for you as a government when you need to start killing and torturing monks. Now that’s some bad karma. But that’s what happened this year in our favourite South East Asian golden land when the monks started backing up a fairly sizable portion of the general population in anti-government rallies and found themselves on the wrong side of the ruling junta. Now, Myanmar has had its own fairly constant and intense teething problems with pesky things like elections and opposition parties, but beating up on monks was a new low and there were even reports that the soldiers were targeting anyone with a camera in order to stop the story getting to the outside world. Needless to say, the opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest (the only Nobel Peace Prize winner with such a distinction) and journalists have been warned about reporting on the problems with internet access being cut off completely for a time and then restored intermittently.

Of course, we can’t really forget the ongoing insurgency in the country or the massive amount of heroin that comes out of the place, or the 300,000 odd refugees along Myanmar’s various borders. Really, Myanmar has it all!

Now, entering as a tourist, it might seem like a pretty nice place. This is largely due to the fact that the government forced thousands of citizens into forced labour to pretty up the main tourist destinations and thus encourage tourism, which is responsible for a fair amount of the country’s hard currency. The International Labour Organisation stated that it would be seeking to prosecute the leaders of the government for crimes against humanity as a result. With the likelihood of such great national management continuing there is a fair chance that we can expect to see more fun in Myanmar in the coming months and years.

Democratic Republic of Congo

Welcome to the darkest heart…. well one of them anyway. DRC is one of those nightmare places that usually ends up as the background of a flippant Hollywood attempt at depth and insight. Unfortunately for the locals it is all too real.

This year, DRC’s main claim to fame is their love of the child soldier. According to several charities, who still operate in the country, the eastern DRC has seen some of the worst situations for children in recent times (not to mention the displacement of up to 800,000 people). Kids as young as 10 years old are being draughted by both sides of the conflict as front line soldiers, not to mention porters and sex slaves. One exceptionally troubling element of this is that the government (and UN) backed soldiers have also been accused of recruiting children to their cause during an offensive against rebel general, Laurent Nkunda. Spotting the good guy is getting increasingly difficult.

Of course, to add to the lovely ambiance of DRC was a UN report in July by the United Nations Human Rights Council on violence against women that characterised the problem as “extreme” and “pervasive” with local authorities doing little to stem the problem. According to the report, “In numerous cases, male relatives are forced at gun point to rape their own daughters, mothers or sisters.” As for who to blame for the brutality, according to the report, it is “committed by non-state armed groups, the Armed Forces of the DRC, the National Congolese Police, and increasingly also by civilians”. That basically means there’s nowhere to hide. How nice!

Chad

When the UNHCR warns that genocide may well occur in your country, it’s probably best to sit up and take notice. Well, that is unless you live in Chad where it’s just another day at the slaughter house. The country seems to have more problems than Paris Hilton and Pete Doherty’s love child and things certainly ain’t getting any better.

With several hundred thousand Darfurian refugees on the border with Sudan, Chad is now forced to endure constant cross border incursions by the Sudanese armed Janjaweed militia, leading to pretty tense relations between the governments, not to mention the people at the coal face. Combined with another 50,000 or so refugees along the border with CAR, who have fled the fighting there, and 140,000 internally displaced persons of their own, it’s fair to say room is getting a little tight at the inn.

Things couldn’t possibly be complete without a homegrown insurgency, too, and Chad does not disappoint. The Chadian Movement for Justice and Democracy keeps the government on their toes from the north of the country and at least a couple of other groups keep things tense. Banditry is also pretty rife so be sure to keep your iPod at an extended distance from your person so that the thieves don’t take your arm or head too when they steal it.

Sri Lanka

The country seemed to be united at the time of the cricket world cup with a multi-ethnic team making the finals of the event. Unfortunately, the Tamil rebels put a slight damper on that unity when they started dropping bombs at the exact time the rest of the country, including the army, was watching the Sri Lankan team play in the finals. But that’s how things roll in Colombo, where the bombs just keep coming. Sri Lanka lost the cricket and the peace but won a spot on our most coveted of lists.

Unfortunately, 2007 was another less than stellar year for peace on the island, with the Tamil Tigers finding a way to launch their own air raids against various facilities controlled by the central government, and the government finding ways to marginalise human rights groups, who questions their tactics against the rebels. In reality, both sides attracted condemnation for their human rights abuses, but who’s keeping count anyway? Extra judicial killings, “disappearances” and arbitrary arrests under terrorism laws are all part of the local festivities. With a quarter million people displaced and thousands dead, it can only get better… or not.

The Tamil Tigers have taken up a fine tradition from other parts of the world in kidnap for profit, and some pro-government militias have started to take up the fine tradition of child recruitment for military adventures. Fun!

With no viable political solution being discussed, we can only look forward to the party going on. Luckily, the cricket world cup only rocks around every four years.

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And so as the new year unfolds before us, keep a mental note of this list of unsavoury spots and book yourself a nice skiing holiday in Austria instead; or a beach holiday in the Bahamas; or a barbeque at Ayers Rock. And if you simply can’t ignore that irresistible urge that’s drawing you to a night’s partying at the Hard Rock Café, Mogadishu, then don’t say we didn’t warn you.

From all at Polo’s Bastards – Go well.

Authors – Rob Wood, Steve Strommer and Lee Ridley.
Photography – Michael Cordoni, Lee Ridley, Sean Rorison, Vince Gainey.

The first time I picked up a Bradt Travelguide, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Another Rough Guide? Another Let’s Go? Footprint or Lonely Planet perhaps? What I found was a new style that had certain similarities to some of the others, but at the same time seemed to have a voice (and class) all of its own.“Only one way to know for sure”, I thought. So I put the Uganda guide through its paces, in Northern Uganda, in March 2006. The book held up, so a year later I found myself Africa bound again, this time destination Rwanda, with a glossy new copy of the Bradt Travelguide for Rwanda stuck in the side pocket of my rucksack.

Rwanda is a tiny Central African country with an immense history, not least the well-publicised genocide of 1994. With a backdrop of 2000 years of tribal, feudal and, more recently, colonial history, a visitor to Rwanda should at the very least know the rocky path that the people and their ancestors have trodden en route to today. This travelguide explains the complex history and the chronology of events leading up to the 6th April 2004 and the days since, in excellently researched detail, and lends the reader a true sense of understanding of Rwanda. The pages are thorough in their detail without being cluttered with extraneous passages and unnecessary paragraphs. In short, Booth is to be applauded for making such a complex and thorny subject so lucid.

Once the reader moves beyond the opening section and enters the travelguide proper, they’ll discover an easy-to-navigate compendium of pertinent information. The book is divided into multiple geographical sections with numerous maps. In previous Bradt reviews, I had commented on the rudimentary level of detail in the maps, which at times have caused me some confusion, and this appears to have been resolved in the latest edition (three) of this Travelguide. Indeed, I have the 2nd and 3rd editions of the Rwanda Travelguide and it’s clear to see the notable improvements from one to the other.

The information provided on each town/village I have always found to be complete and accurate, although prices quoted are often slightly out due to inflation, but the margin of error is consistent throughout, making it very easy to plan ahead and forecast expected costs. Having said that, edition three is so current that prices are pretty much spot on. Even bus departure times I found to be generally accurate, something quite unusual when dealing with African public transport. However, I found bus journey times to be generally underestimated, which caused itinerary problems before I learned to add on an hour or two to what the book was saying. Rwanda has among the best roads in Africa, so I’m not sure where these inaccuracies came from. It seems as though the information in the book is consistent with the information that one might get from the locals, and this is rarely, if ever, going to be accurate.

Hotel information, along with places to eat, is as good as you’ll find in any travelguide, and enabled me to travel in relative comfort without ever having to stretch my expenses. Of course, there are places that aren’t in the book that should be, I found one such live music restaurant/bar in Kigali, but that has to be the province of the traveller to find these places and let the Bradt authors know.

Rwanda has three national parks and I found the information provided on these areas, along with instructions how to maximise your experience – be it an hour with the Mountain Gorillas, a trek to the Chimpanzees or a classic big game safari – to be concise and well-articulated. Nevertheless, Africa is the continent of misinformation, and it is all too easy to be misled, regardless of what the Bradt Travelguide says. I found the information contained within the pages, along with what other travellers pass on, to be generally more reliable that what locals might tell you. Bear this in mind.

The Rwanda Travelguide also contains a small section on commonly encountered wildlife. I thought this information appeared a little on the sparse side, but I appreciate that there is no substitute for a proper field guide if you are there to spot African beasties. Even so; a section on birds really should be included too. As a keen ornithologist, I would have loved the book to have contained a few pages on the more commonly seen avifauna.

All things considered, I would recommend this book as the definitive guide to Rwanda. The ORTPN Tourist Office in Kigali appears to concur with that, although they’re still selling off their stocks of the 2nd edition. If you go there looking to buy a copy of the guide, be sure to ask for the latest. They may not oblige but at least you’ll have asked. In any event, the 2nd edition will still most certainly see you right.

To the best of my knowledge no other Rwanda guidebook comes close, a view evidently shared by a traveller that I met in Cyangugu, who, upon seeing my Bradt guide, put her Lonely Planet back in her pocket and attempted to read the Bradt from cover to cover in one go. Another convert as the Bradt machine rolls on.

Author – Lee Ridley.

In November, the Democrats took control of the US Senate, spelling the beginning of the end for Bush, while elsewhere we’ve had floods in Indonesia and Malaysia; poisoned Russian spies in London; nuclear weapons testing in North Korea, a military coup in Thailand, Castro’s ailing health and Pinochet’s last gasp. Plenty to keep the worldly-wise interested and Polo’s Bastards’ writers busy.

So what news of the places that have been making the front page headlines of 2006? Where are you next going to follow your wanderlust, and where are you going to avoid like the plague. Polo’s Bastards have hand-picked the top ten worst destinations (in their opinion) to help you decide. Click on the photos to enlarge.

Iraq
There was really never any doubt that Iraq would top the list again, at the end of another year of widespread carnage and chaos. Conflict-related body count figures for 2006, alone, vary wildly. Some claim tens of thousands, while others claim several hundreds of thousands, and although access to this battleground, for journalists, photographers and other adventure types, is as easy as it’s ever been, caution is an absolute necessity, as the death toll certainly has much mileage left in it. The north remains relatively safe, although the Kurdish PKK are still seriously pissing the Turks off and hiding out in their N Iraq safe haven; leading one to think that it’s only a matter of time before Ankara sanctions an incursion across the border to weed the fighters out. Who knows? They may already have done so. Do we really think N Iraq will remain stable for long? You decide.
In the rest of Iraq, the US and Britain are both under considerable pressure to start withdrawing their respective forces, but the sectarian lawlessness that now grips the country, will surely continue in their wake, and will undoubtedly see Iraq here at the top of Polo’s Bastards’ top ten worst destinations for a long time to come.

Afghanistan
While the country seems to have picked itself up and brushed itself down following years of Taliban stranglehold; and having celebrated the coalition forces’ sacking of the errant Islamists, the buggers have in fact tenaciously maintained dominance in the southern provinces and made the region a no-go area for anyone without a burka or a long wizened beard (or both). British forces are entrenched in the hostile lands, trying to eradicate the blighters but are, quite frankly, taking a kicking. Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan definitely remains out of bounds for the wish-you-were-here crowd. In fact that goes for all the southern provinces, although we at Polo’s Bastards heard from one crazy guy, who, just a couple of months ago, donned a turban and hitchhiked to Qalat in Zabol! It’ll be a while before the adventure tourism companies put the Kuchi Nomad Hospitality Tour back on their schedule. Stick to Kabul; we hear the rugs are lovely.

Chechnya
Another of last year’s top ten contenders makes the grade again this year, as nothing really seems to have changed at all in this part of the North Caucasus. Even if you can get yourself a permit to enter this troubled land, you’re not likely to have the right to roam without a collection of Russian soldiers escorting you every step of the way, making sure you don’t photograph anything, or talk to anyone, that they don’t want you to. Not that you’d want to go out on your own around here to walk your lunch off, as kidnapping would most likely spoil your afternoon stroll real fast. In any case, with the poisoning of former KGB agent, Aleksander Litvinenko, topping headlines towards the end of the year, along with his well known association to Chechen rebel envoy, Akhmed Zakayev, the Kremlin is going to be doubly sensitive about foreigners wandering around Grozny, digging for newsworthy gossip. Don’t expect visa-on-arrival to be available in Chechnya for a while yet.

Chad
2006 has not been a good year for Chadian President, Idriss Deby, as rebels calling themselves the United Front for Change tried to seize control of N’Djamena back in April. Although the coup failed, hundreds were left dead, as the rebels were driven east into Sudan, where it was alleged they were receiving backing from Khartoum. Sound familiar? While troops loyal to Deby were busy countering the UFC’s offensive, the Sudanese Janjaweed, who we’ve all come to know and loath, used the disarray to their advantage, pushing ever deeper into Chad’s eastern desert. Aid workers based in Abeche, and administrating over a large part of the Darfur IDP population, had little choice but to evacuate, as the security situation collapsed around them. A state of emergency now exists in the volatile border region and tanks are a common site on the streets of N’Djamena. Chad, for the time being, is most definitely suitable only to those well versed in central African discord. Perhaps a beach holiday in Mombassa may be a better option.

Nepal
In the last ten years, Maoist insurgents in Nepal have left 12,000 people dead and over 100,000 displaced as they’ve fought for a communist republic, mugging tourists and murdering policemen as they went. Ranked among the poorest countries in the world, Nepal is a ripe picking ground for the Maoists, who found they had widespread support from the peasants in the fields; so visitors to this most scenic of places have all too often found themselves handing over sums of money and expensive items, such as cameras and phones, to help fund these mountain folks’ cause. Resistance is not taken lightly. In January 2006, the Nepalese town of Tansen was attacked by the rebels and 20 people killed, but since then peace talks have made considerable ground and the days of the Maoists destroying roads and bridges is alledgedly over; for the time being at least. However, they’re still heavily armed and refusing to lay down their Kalashnikovs, so a cautious step is still advised. Notwithstanding the political environment, if the Maoists don’t get you, the altitude has teeth and is a fickle beast.

Haiti
Officially the poorest nation in the Americas, Haiti is a poverty-stricken, barren dustbowl, marred by violence. A trip to Port Au Prince can be a trouble free experience for the Saga city-breaker, who’s just looking for a voodoo doll souvenir to take back to the cruise ship. But an evening stroll through Cite Soleil, Haiti’s largest and most notorious slum, is a different prospect entirely – probably just your cup of tea if you’re yearning for a burning tyre necklace or double-tap to the back of the head. Our advice is don’t even think about it unless you’re either tucked safely inside a UN APC, or best drinking buddies with the Cite’s ruling class – whoever they may be on any given day. In 2004, when Jean-Bertrand Aristide was booted out of his presidency the second time around, violence erupted, resulting in 8000 killings and 35,000 rapes (Lancet Report). Following that promising start, Haiti has gone downhill from there. Since May 2006, newly elected President, Jacques-Edouard Alexis has faced the unenviable task of leading Haiti out of the chaos. We wish him luck.

North Korea
Resting down there at the south-eastern end of the Axis of Evil, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is doing a great job of winding up the United States. A test missile launch in July provoked widespread condemnation, but Kim Jong-Il just stuck two fingers up at the rest of the world and went on to detonate a nuclear device in October. Sanctions were imposed as a result but this just brought stubborn defiance from Pyongyang, where they’re now saying that unless the sanctions are lifted, the nuclear deterrent programme will continue. It’s hard to see how this sabre-rattling stalemate is going to play out, but one thing’s for sure; the hapless citizens of Seoul are sitting pretty, like ducks in a row, with DPRK artillery pointing their way, and are getting real twitchy just praying that George Dubbya doesn’t draw on his wealth of experience in global diplomacy and make a move. Travellers are allowed into the DPRK, with a permit of course, but they’re not going anywhere on their own. Expect a very polite shadow everywhere you go instructing you to only photograph street corners, billboards and bus stops.

Horn of Africa
We’re very generous folks, here at Polo’s Bastards, so we’re going to give you three for the price of one, with Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. Hell, let’s throw in Sudan for good measure, too! The fact is it’s pretty hard to go anywhere on Africa’s great horn without getting caught up in some god-forsaken, stinking hole with the bullets flying.
All looked good for the folks of Eritrea, when they were awarded independence from Ethiopia in 1993, but some kid on work experience at the local cartographer’s office, in Addis Ababa, had his map upside down and got the border demarcation all wrong. It’s been tense up there ever since. In the southeast of Ethiopia, the disputed territory of Ogaden has been the cause of some serious squabbling too. There’s a non-aggression pact in place now, though, between Ethiopia and Somalia, but if you go there, you’ll probably die of thirst anyway.
Elsewhere on the Horn… In the south, the Somalis are shooting anything in a white skin, as Mogadishu swings back and forth between mild anarchy and all-out-lawlessness, and now the Ethiopians are throwing their weight around in towns such as Galkayo and Beledweyne too. In the north, the Eritreans are allegedly harbouring and training anti-Khartoum rebels, while they themselves are warding off a Sudanese plot to assassinate their own President in Asmara. All in all, the horn is a tense place to be right now. If you do decide to throw caution to the wind and fly down there, keep smiling and watch your back.

Central African Republic
Not a nice place to be if you still have some growing to do; the C.A.R. has a reputation for trafficking in children; sold into a life of forced labour, domestic servitude and sexual exploitation. For the adults, life isn’t much better, as the country has pretty much been a boiling pot of instability for all of its 47 years of independence. Coup has followed coup, and today armed militia roam the forested countryside with impunity, so hats off to Francois Bozize for taking the presidential stand in 2005, probably knowing that his will eventually be an unsavoury demise if past experiences are anything to go by. He was a coup leader himself, so he should understand better than anyone. Britain’s foreign office warns against all travel to the country, even suggesting that military escorts guarantee no safety. A foreigner can rest assured, however, that he or she will stand out in a crowd and draw plenty of attention. Just bear in mind that it may not be a good thing.

Lebanon
The relationship between Lebanon and Israel has never been affable and gracious, but July 2006 saw the shit really hit the fan, when Hezbollah thought it would be cool to kidnap a couple of Israeli soldiers. Israel unleashed hell on Hezbollah, taking out any man, woman or child that was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time; polarising global opinion into those that saw Hezbollah as suicide bombing terrorists, and those that saw them as beleaguered country men, suffering at the hands of Israeli oppression. Whatever side of the fence you stand on, the unexploded ordnance that still litters the Lebanese countryside isn’t fussy and will remove your legs without discussion, and probably the rest of your flimsy body too. In Beirut, you’re equally vulnerable, as western interests are still at considerable risk of retaliatory bomb strikes. Lebanese Industry Minister, Pierre Gemayel, was assassinated last month (21st November), so don’t think the Middle East peace process is making ground just yet.

So here’s to 2007 and all it brings, and we wish you well in your forthcoming adventures. May the eyes in the back of your head be keen, your friends genuine and your enemies slow witted. As you scale breathless mountains and grumbling volcanoes; tread dusty back roads and vanishing point interstates, please remember to keep an open mind with a healthy sense of paranoia. And if you find yourself in the midst of the headlines as they’re being written, we’d like to hear about it. Godspeed and happy New Year.

Author – Lee Ridley
Photography – Sean Rorison, Lee Ridley, Lightstalker, Flipflop, David Astley and Fergus Cunningham.

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It may not be Baghdad and it may not be Kabul, but walking the streets of Berlin in Germany, at the moment, in the wrong colours could potentially land you in all sorts of bother at the hands of football hooligans.

Here’s the other (better) side of the FIFA World Cup tournament:

SWEDEN

PORTUGAL

AUSTRALIA (As if you couldn’t guess!)

BRAZIL

TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO

HOLLAND

ITALY

POLAND

PARAGUY

ENGLAND (One for the ladies)

Fast asleep in his parents’ otlum, the traditional dwelling of the Acholi people in the north of Uganda, he was woken from his dreams, ordered to dress, and then marched, barefoot, at gunpoint, in the pitch darkness into the African bush, along with four other unfortunate children abducted that night from the same village in Gulu district. Behind them, their horrified parents were beaten and tortured but lucky to be left alive. Scared and torn from everything he held dear, Paul didn’t know it at the time, but it would be four years before he was able to seize the opportunity to escape his violent and oppressive abductors.

For a six-year-old in these parts, life should be innocent and consisting of simple pleasures such as helping mother with the younger siblings, while she tills the earth to grow millet, maize and sorghum; and father goes to town to work. For the lucky few, primary school is also a possibility, where new friends can be made and football skills practised in the playground. In other words, the lives and aspirations of the children of northern Uganda shouldn’t be a far cry from those of youngsters the world over. But the dark, ominous threat of abduction by the Lord’s Resistance Army is a blight on every child’s hopes and aspirations, following 19 long years of civil war in this forgotten corner of Africa. Every time they look like they are defeated, the LRA just come back stronger and more malicious than before. And countless more children are torn from their mother’s sides and thrown into a world of suffering, where nothing makes any sense, and hopes of ever seeing home again fade with every passing day.

Gulu, N Uganda

The origins of the Lord’s Resistance Army stem from an Acholi woman, named Alice Auma, whose claims of being possessed by Lakwena, a dead Italian Soldier would have seen her burned at the stake in many parts of the world. In 1986, Alice Lakwena gave up her work as a spiritualist in Gulu, N Uganda, and launched the Holy Spirit Movement (HSM), a resistance army, whose primary aim was to overthrow the Museveni government and restore Ugandan power to an Acholi leadership, such as that which had existed with former President Tito Okello. It was widely believed (and still is to an extent) that only an Acholi President will bring development and prosperity to the predominantly Acholi north.

Auma’s plan was doomed to failure, as she was a slave to her spiritual Acholi beliefs, and led her followers to believe that they could be protected from bullets by smearing themselves with sheanut oil. Obviously, casualties were high and Alice Auma, defeated, fled to Kenya, where she still lives today in a refugee camp in the north of the country. Before she fled, the spirit Lakwena deserted her and resumed its work in her father, Severino Lukoya. Lukoya was even more inept than his daughter and only succeeded in driving a brief rebellion in 1987, before he was ousted from the HSM by the leader of a breakaway group called the Ugandan People’s Defence Army (UPDA). The new player’s name was Joseph Kony.

Over the following years, Kony, now also claiming to be possessed by Lakwena, renamed his organisation the Lord’s Resistance Army and exerted his leadership, conducting extensive operations in the districts of Gulu, Pader and Kitgum, in the north of Uganda. Thousands of innocent civilians were abducted and tortured, supposedly for simply not being seen to be supporting him. Kony was quoted as saying in explanation of these acts, “If you picked up an arrow against us and we ended up cutting off the hand you used, who is to blame? You report us with your mouth, and we cut off your lips. Who is to blame? It is you! The Bible says that if your hand, eye or mouth is at fault, it should be cut off.” And so the very people that the LRA was claiming to be fighting on behalf of, were systematically tortured, mutilated and brutalised.

Acholi Man in Kitgum

In 1994 a new, sinister twist developed as the LRA began widespread abduction of children to bolster its ranks. In their thousands, children were snatched from their beds at night, or whilst on their way to school, and force-marched north, towards the border with Sudan, where they were to be trained how to use weapons in preparation of fighting the Ugandan army. Girls were taken and forced to become wives – sex slaves to the LRA Commanders. Many contracted AIDS. A rule of fear was, and remains, the doctrine to prevent the new ‘recruits’ from escaping and it wasn’t long before accounts began to emerge of unspeakable horrors being forced on these poor, bewildered souls.

Wanting nothing more than to run back to the protection of their mothers, these scared children limp on swollen feet under the weight of heavy loads, weak with hunger, thirsty, bruised and broken from severe beatings. Many of the children have trouble keeping up with the group, and those who cannot are unceremoniously killed – stabbed or beaten to death in full view of the rest of their group, and left for the vultures. Those who are caught trying to escape also face the same consequences. Normally the rebels force other new captives to dish out the punishments, forcing young children to beat or stab to death their terrified companions. Refusal incurs harsh penalties, often death, for not following orders. For those children who survive, taking part in the murder of other captives forms a gruesome initiation into the ranks of the Lord’s Resistance Army and, for many, signifies a point of no return.

Here are just a handful of statements from some of the children who have managed to escape from the LRA:

They beat all my young cousins who were just small boys, four or five years old. One of them they killed. Then they burned the house. Stephen – 17.

They gave me as a wife, but I refused the man. He ordered other boys to beat me on my back with a panga (machete). Catherine – 17.

Primary School Children – Kitgum

The troubles in Uganda’s north have now been going on for 19 years, in which, some figures state, 30,000 children have been abducted. Of that, approximately 20,000 are accounted for, either as killed-in-action or as escapees. But 10,000 still remain lost children, and the sad reality is that over 95% of those still missing are almost certainly dead, as latest figures (March 2006) put the LRA’s strength at only a few hundred. Every time we hear that the Ugandan People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) has killed more rebels, what that really means is that more children have been killed in the bush and will not be coming home. But there’s only so much the UPDF can do to minimalise casualties, as the cowardly LRA Commanders treat the children as a dispensable force, pushing their captives to the front line and ordering them to walk tall and keep firing. Any attempts to run for cover and the individual will be shot from behind. For the children, the enemy is on all sides and at times it seems like a UPDF bullet may be the only way out.

UPDF Soldiers

So why does such a small group of rebels and one man, Kony, in particular continue to evade capture in today’s age of technology and communication? For the answer to that, we should turn our eyes to both the north and south, and the Sudanese government in Khartoum, along with the Ugandan government in Kampala.

Relations between Kampala and Khartoum have been marred by hostility and suspicion for many years, as each have played their parts in aiding local rebels and militia groups, fighting their respective central authorities. The late John Garang, founder of the Sudanese rebel group, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), was a personal friend to Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, who supplied Garang’s troops with training, logistical support and military hardware. In retaliation, Khartoum offered the same deal to the LRA for fighting the SPLA rebels in southern Sudan, and to assist them with their own ongoing struggles against Museveni’s rule. From the mid-1990’s, Kony’s rebels were able to maraud in northern Uganda and then vanish into Sudan with impunity, leaving the UPDF frustrated at the border, unable to pursue.

Former abductees at Gulu Central Highschool

For 5 years this continued, as Museveni and Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, slogged out some kind of plan for putting their differences aside, and by 2001 diplomatic relations were finally restored. As talks continued, the UPDF were finally granted permission to follow the LRA into Sudan in order to hunt them down and finish them once and for all. But it simply didn’t happen. Despite vehement denials from Khartoum, some sources claim that information provided, as required, to the Sudanese military when the UPDF are planning a cross-border operation, is forwarded immediately to LRA Commanders, who promptly vacate their camps and disappear into the bush. The UPDF repeatedly find nothing more than recently abandoned camps. Furthermore, accounts from children escaping from the camps in Sudan all bear one thing in common: They all tell of arms and uniforms being routinely delivered by Arab, government troops, despite assurances from Khartoum that they are no longer supporting the LRA.

Whether Khartoum is complicit or not, this has become a war of attrition, and the LRA do seem to be on the losing end. The villages of northern Uganda have long been almost entirely deserted, as some 1.6 million people, 90% of the Acholi population, were moved into guarded Internally Displaced Persons’ (IDP) camps, where they survive on monthly food handouts, provided by the World Food Programme (WFP). Although life in the camps is one of overcrowding, malnutrition, disease epidemics and loss of life to natural hazards, such as fire and flooding, the supply of children for the LRA to snatch has effectively been cut off and an end to the horrors (for the Ugandans, at least) may finally be coming into sight.

Justo Onur – Amida IDP Camp, Kitgum District. The scar above Justo’s chest is from the exit wound of an AK47 round when he was shot from behind trying to escape the LRA. They left him for dead.

Significantly, in recent times, a number of high-ranking officers have either deserted the LRA or been captured, and have taken advantage of an amnesty offered by Museveni. Three of these high-profile former officers are Onen Kamdulu, Chief of Operations; Brigadier and LRA Spokesman, Sam Kolo; and Kenneth Banya, formerly Kony’s third in command. In an interview I held with Kamdulu and Kolo on the 6th March 2006, in Gulu, Kamdulu suggested that more Commanders would be encouraged to leave Kony if they see their former comrades doing well under the amnesty. Attrition at this level could go a long way to spelling the end of the LRA as we know it.

Onen Kamdulu – Former LRA Chief Of Operations and Sam Kolo – Former LRA Brigadier and Spokesman

Meanwhile, sporadic attacks still occur on vehicles along the roads of Gulu and Kitgum districts, by isolated units, cut off from their central command. But the number of children coming out of the bush, having escaped the LRA, has fallen drastically, indicating that numbers may be at an all time low. The main concentration of rebels are now operating solely in Sudan under what appears to be a new remit – to destabilise the region around Yei and Juba, and shut down newly-formed Ugandan trade routes. Under the auspices of the SPLA, roads in the south of Sudan have been de-mined and tarmacked, but peace in the south is seriously denting the finances of certain folks in Khartoum, who no longer are able to corner the market with consumables priced at 300% value. The north south divide in Sudan is as wide as it’s ever been. This conflict in Equatoria is far from over.

So what does the future hold for the brave children, like Paul, now 10, who escaped the LRA following a botched raid on a Latugu tribe’s cattle in Sudan just a month ago? Well, thanks to centres such as the Rachele Rehabilitation Centre in Lira; and the World Vision and Gusco centres in Gulu, trauma counselling is the first step towards recovery from a life of experiences that most adults would struggle to deal with. Paul’s parents have been notified of their son’s return and can now just sit and wait for his recovery to reach a stage where he’s fit to leave the security of the Rachele Centre and travel north to their village for what will undoubtedly be a very emotional reunion. For now, he has Bosco Ochen, his Social Worker – an adult who he trusts to protect him and help him get by each day. Bosco, and many like him, are the unsung heroes of northern Uganda today, slowly but steadily repairing these broken children so that they can resume their lives with something approaching normality.

Paul with his Social Worker, Bosco, at the Rachele Rehabilitaion Centre, Lira

Schooling is the best chance these children have of surviving and building a future, if they are to avoid sinking into a life of crime and prostitution. But it comes at a price now that the state has reduced sponsorship funding in the last month from 60% to less than 10% of all students. It costs approximately £170/$300 to send a child to school for one year in Uganda, a cost that is out of the realms of most average farming families, and totally unachievable for the families that are languishing in the IDP camps. Many of the formerly abducted children don’t even have parents, having lost them either to the war or to AIDS, and so organisations such as Belgium-based Sponsoring Children Uganda are their only lifeline. More then 2,500 formerly abducted children have returned to school through this programme, and some have even progressed to university, illustrating that schemes such as this can (and do) work, and don’t necessarily just furnish the President with a new Land Rover. But many more come to the centres or the school gates only to be turned away through lack of funds. Paul may even yet be one of them.

Painting by formerly abducted child, showing the day the LRA came

The future may not look bright for the Acholi of northern Uganda and their children, but it may at least be beginning to clear, albeit at a cost to the Dinka and other tribes of southern Sudan, who now have the LRA in their backyard to contend with. There’s little we can do about the past, except hang our heads in shame for doing so little to stop these terrifying atrocities from happening to innocent, wide-eyed children for so many years. But the very least we can do now is help in anyway we can, however little, to provide a future for the thousands of kids, who we’ve so far failed to protect.

Author – Lee Ridley.

All names have been changed.

For more information on Sponsoring Children Uganda, visit – www.Childsoldiers.net
Donations can also be made via the dog-tag scheme – www.namecampaign.org

For more information on the LRA, a valuable insight into the reality of life in the rebel army can be found in the book Aboke Girls, by Els De Temmerman. All proceeds go to Sponsoring Children Uganda.

Sources:

Websites -
http://www.childsoldiers.net
http://www.c-r.org
www.namecampaign.org
New Vision Newspapers

Conversations with -
Els De Temmerman – Consulting Editor for The New Vision and Author of Aboke Girls.
Emmy Allio Ewaku – Senior Reporter for The New Vision.
Betty Bigombe – LRA/Museveni Peace Talks Mediator.
Onen Kamdulu – Former LRA Chief of Operations.
Sam Kolo – Former LRA Brigadier and Spokesman.
Bosco Ochen – Social Worker at the Rachele Rehabilitation Centre, Lira.

Bradt Travelguides target the extreme adventure-travellers’ market and in doing so set themselves a hefty challenge. By the very nature of the places that their target audience prefer, researching and producing a comprehensive guidebook of any worth, in these far-flung and often troubled corners of the globe, is no small feat. But from what I’ve seen of the Bradt Travelguides so far, not only are they doing it, but doing it very well indeed.

One thing that distinguishes Bradt Travelguides from some of their counterparts is that the less-travelled destinations still warrant their own full-volume guidebook, rather than just a short chapter in a multiple country-one book approach. Africa is an excellent example of this, where Bradt produce 28 individual guides, covering unusual destinations such as Eritrea, Benin, Sudan and Rwanda. This is a very welcome approach for those who intend to travel in specific, localised areas. Obviously, for those who are planning an extended trip taking in multiple countries, carrying a separate guidebook for each border crossing is out of the question, so, to cover all eventualities, an all-in-one is also available in the form of the Bradt Africa Overland Travelguide.

For anybody intending to spend time in Uganda, the Bradt Travelguide to Uganda (Author – Philip Briggs) is an essential item, not only for planning tours, accommodation, transport etc., but also as a compendium for well-researched and well-written background information on all aspects of the country’s history and culture. The book is well laid out and specific information is easy to locate among the pages, although the maps are decidedly sparse and could be much better. A few more photo pages wouldn’t go amiss, too.

It’s fair to say that with Uganda’s current problems in the north, 99% of tourists are likely to stay in the south of the country, only heading north for the Kidepo and Murchison Falls National Parks, and although Philip Briggs covers these national parks, and getting to them, in appropriate detail; by his own admission, he is no stranger to the north and so could easily have provided more information on the towns of Lira, Apac, Gulu, Kitgum, Arua etc. Notwithstanding the dangers posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a substantial number of photographers and reporters travel in these areas and would greatly benefit from a reliable guidebook with accurate and up-to-date information on bus routes, journey times, accommodation etc.

When it comes to Uganda, Briggs obviously knows his subject well and has included numerous information boxes and ‘asides’ throughout the book that enable the reader to build up a very useful knowledge of the country, its past and its culture. Furthermore, information on the relatively inaccessible parts of the country, such as the Ruwenzoris, is covered by first-hand accounts from people that have made the journey and have the cuts and bruises to show for it, making this guidebook more than just a directory of hotels, restaurants and bus timetables – Making it a book you can actually enjoy reading on those long bus rides.

Things change in Africa at an alarming rate, and it would be an impossible task to keep all information up-to-date at all times. Ferry services are suspended; hotels close down; new hotels open, and ferry services recommence etc. But Briggs has achieved an impressive level of accuracy that can only be found by doing the research and treading the streets. Inevitably, I found parts of the guidebook to contain invalid phone numbers, although perhaps it would be a harsh call to pull Briggs up for these minor discrepancies.

All things considered, I found the Bradt Travelguide to Uganda to be well balanced, useful, informative and highly readable. This book deserves a place on any kit list belonging to someone who plans to explore this vibrant corner of darkest Africa.

Author – Lee Ridley

From Here to There and Back Again: Horses and Cultural Ruminations in Kyrgyzstan

Below the snow-covered slopes of eastern Kyrgyzstan, the horses ran in the At Chabysh races that afternoon in early November with all of the power and the grace and the beauty of all of their forebears. So much in the foreground of human cultures has changed. But the horses and their willingness to do the bidding of their riders remain a constant. A constant, that is, in the development of empire and trade along the Silk Road. A constant, that is, in the fledgling new businesses of ecotourism that have been launched in the post-Soviet period. A constant, that is, in transportation in a country where only 10 percent of households own cars. And a constant, that is, in the tending of livestock and in people’s diets.

Who, though, were the many hundreds of people who patiently watched the races and then the awards ceremonies that ran for hours and hours through the late afternoon? What motivated a group of musicians and horse people from the northern Rockies to come halfway around the world to showcase the cultures of the American West? Why had an ad hoc group of about 25 French people volunteered and paid their way to Kyrgyzstan to help organize these races? Why is Switzerland so far in the lead among NGOs working in Kyrgyzstan?

Several days before the races began some of us had broken away from the preparations to ride on the slopes above the racecourse. During the morning of that day I had been involved in the set up of a photo exhibit that tenderly portrayed cowboys and rodeo riders at work. Others in our delegation did a sound check of the equipment to be used in a program of western folk songs that would be performed that evening. Another member of our group, Teresa Jordan, the greatly admired author of a memoir on ranching life, Riding the White Horse Home, had already done a slide show that morning depicting 30,000 years of horses in art.

The village that day, in which these events took place, was Tamga, a destitute small town above the treacherous and lightly used road that runs along the south side of Lake Issyk-Kul, a huge alpine lake in eastern Kyrgyzstan, into which the waters of the Tien Shan mountains flow. This particular spot had once been a resort for vacationing Soviet soldiers who stayed in bleak, multi-storied apartments in the town’s center about two miles above a dreary fenced-in picnic and beach area on the lakeshore. Nothing about the town or resort layout seemed inviting. And now that all of these facilities are closed and have rapidly fallen into disrepair, it was not at all clear how people make their living here, or why they would stay at all. Of course, people the world over tend to stay where they are, until circumstances like war or famine force them to make a change. The risk of losing what one has outweighs by far, for most people, the difficult-to-picture benefits of moving somewhere else and doing things that one can’t quite picture.

In Kyrgyzstan, the generalized but secure poverty of life in the former Soviet Union has been replaced by a market-based economy that is far more precarious, so it’s all but impossible to picture alternatives that open on to a better material future. Commonly, when a person goes trail riding in the western United States, they leave their day-to-day affairs behind and cross over into unpopulated areas, like the national forest or a wilderness area, where recreation and nature merge to give one the feeling of living sensually in a mythic present tense. But here where 60 percent of the people (versus less than 2 percent in the United States) derive their livelihoods from grazing animals and farming, the line between town life and nature is completely blurred.

In Barsko’on, a town of several thousand people, on a plateau between the mountains and the lake where the races were run, shepherds on horseback or on foot drive their small groups of cattle, sheep and goats out along the roads each morning onto the open ground at the edge of town that stretches away in all directions. There on the unfenced commons, shepherds spend their days moving their animals around in search of forage, returning to town after 5 pm and once again clogging the roads as the sun drops behind a distant ridgeline.

In November, there is still a slight feeling of repose, and this is when some of the great Kyrgyz distance races (since banned by the Soviets) were held historically. The harvest work is completed. The snows, which would soon make daily life so difficult and uncomfortable, wait patiently on the slopes above.

We rode our horses that afternoon for several hours, from the delightful, relaxing setting of middle fall to the sharply defined snow line 500 meters upslope. Over and over again I thought that we had come to the settlement edges beyond which no one else lived, but over and over again we’d turn the crest of a small knoll and find yet another dwelling nestled in a draw. The Kyrgyz that we saw that afternoon seemed both patient and attentive, their lives conspicuously influenced by the rhythms of their animals’ lives and the forceful progression of the seasons. As we rode by we nodded shyly at the people who stood outside their dwellings and watched us. But the gesture of contact, as far as it went, was miniscule. For surely we must have been as irrelevant to the day-to-day reality of their lives as a shepherd moving a flock of sheep along a distant ridgeline would be to passing motorists in the Rockies.

It was these qualities of patience and fortitude that we also intuitively observed in the people who came to watch the horse games and races that were held over the course of three days. People clearly enjoyed themselves. There was lots of laughter and conversation. But there wasn’t the restlessness in a crowd one would see in the West. And when an afternoon’s events concluded, people moved away much more slowly than their western counterparts would have done, racing to beat the traffic snarls.

But why were we, as people of the West, from France and Switzerland and the United States, there at all? If what I thought I saw in eastern Kyrgyzstan is linked to factors in the natural world that deeply influence how people there live their lives, where were we coming from environmentally and culturally? What are the deeply embedded aspects of our lives that draw us halfway around the world?

Self-referential inquiries like these shouldn’t be allowed to absorb too much of one’s attention. But the fact is that, like factions in a political party, we’d talk a lot among ourselves about the Europeans we got to know tangentially over the course of two weeks. And hopefully by describing the other outsiders, I’ll come around to some conclusions as to why we, the Americans, were there.

As for the French, they were the least ambiguous, the most dedicated. The leader of their group of racecourse volunteers was Jacqueline Ripart, a wiry woman in her 50s (I’d say) who has documented and collected DNA samples from horse breeds all over the world. It was she who decided several years ago to revive the traditional At Chabysh celebrations after the long interval during which they were banned by the Soviets. And it is she who’s leading a sustained effort to preserve the Kyrgyz horse breed before its characteristics are completely lost to crossbreeding.

Thrifty and powerful, the relatively small Kyrgyz horse is superbly adapted to life in the high mountains. Renowned for its energy and for its capacity to travel for days without food, it is undoubtedly one of the world’s first or original breeds from which all other modern horses descend.

Alongside their efforts to make a new society, the Soviets also wanted to develop an improved version of the Kyrgyz horse by mixing its bloodlines with thoroughbreds. They also slaughtered thousands of Kyrgyz horses after World War II, a documentary film by a Kyrgyz producer asserts. At this point in time it’s not clear what the Kyrgyz horse really is or isn’t in terms of its DNA profile. And the only criteria for entering the At Chabysh races were that the horses be smaller than thoroughbreds.

While the Americans played a lead role in bringing entertainment and cultural offerings to several villages in the vicinity of the races, the French focused completely on the horses, the races and the media work of documenting, in idealized romantic terms, everything that was going on. They didn’t appear to be more than politely interested in the cultural programming that the Americans brought in (… historically shallow, already familiar?) but they were obviously very respectful and very fascinated, as we were, by everything Kyrgyz.

As I looked through some French magazine takeouts on Kyrgyzstan and Jacqueline Ripart’s work that had been photocopied, several things stood out. One was that in France there are at least several very well done magazines, like Animan, Les Routes du Monde, that are dedicated to the subject matter of faraway foreign cultures. On the cover of an issue in which Jacqueline describes her work in Kyrgyzstan, a photograph shows two solitary camel drivers walking with their steeds in different directions across a sand dune in the Sahara. The ideas imparted by this photograph are that the human being stands alone in the world; that vitality comes from a natural world that is inhabited by those who are strong; by those who have not been corrupted by modernity and politics.

The beautiful photographs that appear in Jacqueline’s article portray the nomadic life styles and distant mountain residences of the Kyrgyz people. Nothing modern, like cars or radios, can be seen. These images could have been set 200 years ago.

The American version of this story would more likely have been built around photographs of pure, “unpeopled” nature. But more to the point – there wouldn’t be anything like an American version of this story. Beyond National Geographic and the publications that serve tightly defined recreational subcultures, like rock climbers for example, there are no magazines that would publish photo texts on remote foreign locales (… thank you, Polo’s Bastards).

One cannot help but admire the energy and curiosity that the French bring to cultures in remote settings. And even though this inquiry might be romanticized and self-referential at times and always, always, media attentive, it’s a life choice that produces much less of a drain on world resources than the choice to stay at home and immerse oneself, as Americans commonly do, in a bottomless materialism that passes for a way of life.

Understandably, the French people we met were not particularly interested in us. They weren’t bellicose or dismissive, but like many of France’s cultural heroes, the French who’d come out to Kyrgyzstan were straight ahead, unapologetic, completely specific in their own agendas for being there. Coming as they do from a culture that is renowned internationally for its sublime and aristocratic contributions to world culture, many modern day French people seem to look beyond France for a sense of renewal and self-affirmation. But perhaps surprisingly, the French are much less directly involved in helping the Kyrgyz via non-governmental organizations (NGOs), it appears, than the Swiss and Germans and even the Americans are. The Swiss in particular are very visible because Helvitas, the country’s largest NGO, directs its formidable resources to specific places and projects that it selects autonomously.

Kyrgyzstan, partly because it is mountainous, receives lots of aid in the form of the applied expertise that engineers, hydrologists, foresters, ecotourism consultants and others who work in alpine settings can offer. In all of the conversations that I had with Swiss people there, an emphasis on what’s really needed was apparent. In the same way that Switzerland follows its own path in Europe, the Swiss projects in Kyrgyzstan are independently chosen and funded with the awareness that resources, along with what can be actually be accomplished, must be tightly defined.

For example, Bernard Repond, the long time Director of a summer school near Gstaad, travels to Kyrgyzstan several times each year to monitor the construction of bridges that will open the high country to herders, an operation paid for by an NGO that he launched six years ago. In 1999, while trekking in the Terskey-Alateu Mountains, south of Lake Issyk-Kul, Repond encountered whole drainages that were inaccessible by people living nearby, because bridges allowing access had fallen into disrepair.

“For many years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nobody even knew where the villages were,” Repond said. “The villagers themselves were waiting for the government to repair the roads and bridges. And in the meantime they [were overgrazing] the areas near their summer encampments that could be reached.”

Using powerful winches that villagers would not have access to, Repond realized that bridges all over the country could be repaired or built from scratch for as little as $5,000 apiece. Local people could be paid to do the work under the supervision of a technically trained person.

When Repond went to international aid organizations like the Central Asian Mountain Project, he found that expensive studies on the grazing potential and ecology of high mountain pastures were being done. But when he pointed to the far simpler work of repairing bridges, an official admitted to him that the issue of access had never been identified.

“This pattern among large NGOs of studying problems and discussing them in the setting of international conferences absorbs much of the money that’s available for project work in Kyrgyzstan”, Repond said. In Karakol, a small city on the eastern end of Lake Issyk-Kul, below the 7,000 meter peaks of the Tien Shan range, he had counted, at one point, no fewer than seven NGOs simultaneously studying the ecotourism potential of the region. “They are all very busy. They’re all doing reports,” he said, “and yet in Bishkek (the capital city 300 miles away) in this, the 15th year of independence, there is still no single office in the center of the city where a visitor to Kyrgyzstan can go for maps or basic information.”

This can-do quality of the Swiss, their realism and careful deployment of resources runs through much of the work that they support in Kyrgyzstan. As for the Americans – what is the personality of their involvement? Beyond the heavy-handed geopolitical aspirations of the US government to maintain a military presence in this strategically significant part of the world, there is a growing and very active community of missionaries who are funneling resources into impoverished villages. The work of modern day missionaries is much less based on counting converts than it is on the activist tradition of working with the poor. But in spite of this, the work of missionaries is very controversial. It also demonstrates how Americans tend to subordinate their efforts and labor to larger causes. And it follows, surely, that our ad hoc group of musicians and horse people could be seen dispassionately by an outsider as the embodiment of something specifically American.

But what really was distinctly American about our participation in the At Chabysh festival? For me, it’s hard to separate our purposes in being there from the ideas of Candra Day, a remarkable charismatic woman in her 50s who

several years ago developed an arts center in Jackson Hole that cost $12 million and now somehow had cobbled together the funding that was needed to send our delegation of 13 Americans half way around the world.

For Candra, and for all of us who are swayed by her vision, the arts can be a doorway to honest, long-term relationships. “The ‘delight factor’ embedded in the arts is a powerful force for the good and is freed from the interferences that economic and political pressures sometimes produce,” she said. “And mountain cultures have lots to teach one another.” There’s a natural curiosity and a kindred spirit that ties mountain peoples together on a planet where only 10 percent of the human population lives above 1,000 meters. And in places like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is the wealthiest single county in the United States, there’s an opportunity to raise money and use it to get things done in parts of the world that desperately need infusions of capital.

So this was why we were there. As Americans, we tend to be drawn to agendas that are larger than ourselves. We’re embarrassed by many of the policies that our government pursues in our names. We want to go further into foreign cultures than pleasure-based tourism allows. And perhaps in a subtle way we feel guilty (or at least awkward) about the very large amounts of wealth that flow into our lives from places unseen. It’s marvelous, on the one hand, that we can do the simplest things for one another in the United States and be so amply rewarded for the exercise of such ordinary talents. But it’s also vaguely apparent that there are lots of people living in other places who probably work just as hard as we do and who are just as capable, who earn pennies compared to our dollars.

The opportunity to go out into the world and to share some of our cultural traditions would have been the idea that drew our polyglot group of “cultural ambassadors” together. On the ground, none of this was particularly clear. All of us appreciated the assignments that gave structure to our meanderings, and many of us probably doubted that we were more than marginally qualified to do the tasks that we had been assigned.

In other words, it was life as usual, albeit in a very unusual and distant place.