Songs of the Baka and Other Discoveries Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Dennis James

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  “Algeria: Blood, Sand, and Natural Gas” first appeared in the Legal Studies Forum under the title “Algeria Journal.”

  “Cuba: State of the Arts” first appeared in the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) Report on the Americas.

  Cover design by Anthony Morais

  Cover photo credit by Barbara Grossman

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1350-5

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1352-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To all the people who welcomed us,

  into their countries, into their villages,

  and into their homes.

  “One’s destination is never a place,

  but a new way of seeing things.” —Henry Miller

  “When you come to a fork in the road,

  take it.” —Yogi Berra

  Contents

  Introduction

  PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Expect the Unexpected

  ALGERIA: Blood, Sand, and Natural Gas

  NEPAL: Langtang Valley Trek

  CAMEROON: Songs of the Baka

  CUBA: State of the Arts

  MALI: Before the Storm

  IRAN: The Absence of Evil

  THE ORINOCO, VENEZUELA: In Humboldt’s Wake

  STATE OF PALESTINE: Mission to Gaza

  ETHIOPIA: The Omo River Valley

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Photos

  Introduction

  Barbara Grossman and I spent our professional lives practicing law in Detroit, Michigan. We met in 1997, married in 2001, and retired and moved to New York City in 2005.

  Among our many common interests is a desire to travel. Raising children during a prior marriage and practicing law as a partner in a small law office left me little time to take more than one-week family excursions into the woods and lakes of northern Michigan and an occasional weekend for professional meetings in cities such as Boston and San Francisco. Barbara’s experience was similar, although she had done some traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and South America.

  By the time we met, our children had left the nest. We began to travel together, going on several Sierra Club backpacking trips that lasted seven to ten days. Our international trips were initially limited to the tourist magnets of Europe. But after encountering one too many tourist buses, we resolved to seek more isolated, less popular destinations.

  In 2002, we went to Vietnam for three weeks, hiring occasional drivers and guides. We had protested against the Vietnam War, and I had counseled and represented draft resisters in my law practice. Not many Americans had explored the country since the war ended. We were curious as to the reactions the Vietnamese would have to us. Rather than displaying hostility, or worse, because of our government’s destruction of their country, the Vietnamese, friendly and businesslike, were concerned only with what we wanted to buy. “The war?” they said. “Which war? The Japanese? The French? The Chinese? The Cambodians? Oh, the Americans! Oh, that’s all over. Let me show you our new line of silk shirts.”

  We were hooked. Thus began our odyssey, usually to countries that caused friends and family to worry (needlessly) about our safety and judgment. Over the years, they have learned to accept our choices and simply to ask where we are going next. Their curiosity about our experiences gave rise to the idea for this book.

  In recent years, we have incorporated trekking into our travel plans. Hiking from village to village and staying in villages at night has given us the opportunity to see how people in other societies live. This is a felicitous way to learn about other cultures—to eat with people, stay in their homes, go into their fields, watch their dances, listen to their music, and hear their stories, myths, and legends. People are proud of their culture and delighted that friendly strangers are interested. The accommodations are certainly not luxurious—most lack indoor plumbing—but the rewards are immense. Leaving our comfort zone has expanded our view of the world.

  We trekked and stayed with Sherpas in the Langtang Valley of Nepal; tribal village farmers in the Shan hill country of Myanmar; rubber tree farmers in China’s Yunnan province; the cliff-dwelling Dogon along Mali’s Bandiagara Escarpment; tribes in the mountains, rivers, and coastal range of Papua New Guinea; and the Baka Pygmy of the Dja Forest Reserve in Cameroon.

  We have developed a particular interest in indigenous peoples whose cultures have survived relatively intact for centuries–their art, music, dance, sexual mores, economic and political hierarchy, and spirituality. How have they resisted change under the pressures of economic globalization and the incursions of western culture? Why do they resist? Are they happy? If so, what do they know that we don’t?

  Travel is also a way of gaining information about political issues and events of importance. Face-to-face communication with people directly involved in these situations provides valuable insight not available in our mass media.

  Other than in unique circumstances, such as in Gaza in 2009 and Cuba in 2013, we avoid tours and choose to travel with only a guide and driver. Because of this, people in both isolated and populous areas often approach us with a smile to ask where we are from and why we have come to their country. In China, they even asked how much money I earned. They frequently invite us into their homes and offer coffee or tea, something that rarely happens when a tour bus pulls up and twenty tourists emerge.

  We are not young—I was born in 1938, and Barbara, in 1944. However, we work out a lot and are in good shape, despite our share of late-life malfunctions. I have early Parkinsonism and recently had open-heart surgery, while Barbara has just recovered from knee-replacement surgery. But to the extent that we can travel and trek, we will continue to do so. Our hope is to inspire others who are ambulatory, curious, adventurous, and thoughtful to do the same. This is perhaps the last generation to have the opportunity to observe these cultures before their ways of life or their environments succumb to globalization. And, unfortunately, because of subsequent events, we may already have been among the last tourists to visit some of the amazing places in this world—Syria, Mali, eastern Turkey, Venezuela, and perhaps even Egypt.

  In most of the nonwestern cultures we visited, older people, both men and women, are treated with great respect and treasured for their wisdom. Members of the community ensure that their elders are fed and protected from harm. This includes visitors, and our gray hairs made us frequent beneficiaries of this tradition. In Papua New Guinea, we were made honorary elders in a Highland village. In Bali, our young guide asked me how I felt about life, at my age. I thought before I answered and said, “It’s been a full life—and getting fuller.”

  Traveling while older has had its
amusing moments as well. While going up the trail in Nepal, we encountered a young man coming down who looked at our gray hair and told us that the only trekking his father did was from the living room couch to the refrigerator. In Palmyra, Syria, a young woman told us that she thought it was “wonderful that elderly couples are traveling together.” In Venezuela, a checkpoint guard looked at our passports and asked our guide, “Where are their children? Why are their children not taking care of them?” And so on. But most often, people are amazed that we are strong enough to visit their remote areas and admire us for doing so.

  This volume includes only some of the trips we have taken. It is based on our memories, my journals, and Barbara’s photos.

  Perhaps the other trips—to eastern Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Laos, and Cambodia among them—will form the core of another volume. We hope to add to that list in the future.

  Dennis James, 2016

  Papua New Guinea:

  EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

  It is late afternoon in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, in the coastal area called Tufi. Barbara and I have been trekking for seven hours on steep, slippery terrain along a barely discernable trail from the village of Tumari, where we had spent the night, to Koruwe Bay.

  The trail passes through rain forest, whose one-hundred-foot-high canopy houses birds of paradise, the fashionistas of avian society, sporting yard-long tail feathers, spiral antennae, and plumage like the Medici court. The trail skirts carefully tended village flower gardens of bougainvillea, hibiscus, and frangipani and wanders through patches of wild orchids and groves of giant tree ferns, like those in paintings by Henri Rousseau.

  We climb and descend hillsides of chest-high kunai grass whose sharp edges cut exposed flesh. Grab a wad of it and you’ll come away with bloody fingers. So, despite the heat, Barbara and I wear long pants and long sleeves. Our principal guide, Clarence, and three of his fellow villagers (two cousins, Donald and Eddie, and Phillip, a village elder) are barefoot and wear shorts and T-shirts. Their skin, especially the soles of their feet, is toughened by a lifetime spent shoeless on this harsh terrain. Their toes are splayed and widely separated. Their feet grip surfaces that our boots skid and slide on.

  It is hot and humid. Tolerably so under the forest canopy, which filters out some of the rays, but on high burner in the treeless fields of kunai. We have stopped only briefly to eat bananas and papaya and to drink water. Now we can see the sea in the distance—the Solomon Sea, part of the South Pacific Ocean—a shining wedge of turquoise framed by the black branches of a mahogany tree. There must only be a few hundred yards to go. We pick up the pace.

  “We are almost there,” Clarence says. “Only one more hard part.”

  The trees thin out and we can see more of the bay’s inlet. Suddenly, we come to the edge of a lava rock cliff, with a sheer drop of sixty feet between us and the last stretch of the trail. I point toward the bottom of the cliff and look at Clarence, who smiles and nods.

  “Last hard part,” he says. “We will help.”

  I look down and can feel my acrophobia morphing into vertigo. “Let’s go,” says Clarence. “You’ll make it down.”

  “Yes,” I say. “The question is how.”

  With Clarence on my left and his cousin Donald on my right, we creep downward, facing the lava wall, on what I can now see is a six- to eight-inch ledge, half covered with shrubbery, that snakes across the cliff face in descending switchbacks.

  “Put foot here,” Clarence says. “Foot there.” Twenty minutes go by and we are halfway down. I take my eyes off the trail to see Barbara above with Phillip and Eddie hovering over her. Above them, smiling and waiting patiently at the top of the cliff are Clarence’s wife and two daughters. We come to a particularly difficult segment of the trail that is blocked by a large shrub poking through the black rock. As Clarence and Donald confer on how we are going to negotiate this obstacle I drift into rueful reflection on our situation.

  It is June 2014. I am seventy-six. Barbara is seventy. What are we doing here? I’m exhausted, covered with sweat and mud, clinging to a cliff face. We should be sipping Pernod at Les Deux Magots café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain or wandering through the back streets of the Trastevere in Rome. Why did we go trekking in Papua New Guinea instead?

  Why Papua New Guinea?

  On one of our visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, we wander into a gallery of Oceanic Art and are quickly struck by the sophistication and intricacy of the wood carvings from Papua New Guinea.

  “Papua New Guinea,” Barbara says. “That would be an interesting place to visit.”

  Papua New Guinea, often referred to as PNG by its citizens, is the poster child for a destination that is enticingly exotic but too difficult to get to and get around in. Nevertheless, with the help of our travel agent, we put together a unique itinerary that involves three- to four-day treks in three zones of Papua New Guinea—the Highlands, the Sepik River, and the Tufi Coast, interspersed with one-day stays at Western-style hotels. On the treks, we will be encountering and staying with New Guineans who live almost entirely on what they grow or find in the bush, who value pigs more than money, and who rarely encounter white people. The agent assures us that the New Guineans are very friendly and hospitable.

  We spend a couple of weeks gradually talking ourselves into a New Guinea trek, trying to rationalize the discomfort and expense of the long transit necessary to get there and discount warnings about the perils in-country. Our friends are no help in allaying our concerns. A few of their comments include:

  “Papua New Guinea!? Are you crazy?”

  “They have malaria and dengue fever.”

  “They eat people there. They ate Michael Rockefeller.”

  “What’s the matter with Hawaii?”

  But the most frequent question is “Why Papua New Guinea?”

  I get tired of answering, perhaps because I am not sure, myself. But PNG’s paleontological history indicates that many tribes today live substantially as they have since the end of the most recent ice age. These tribal cultures may soon be marginalized by the relentless intrusion of global capital seeking new sources of timber, minerals, and hydrocarbons, and new locations for luxury tourist development. This may be a last chance to meet and learn from people who are living almost as humans had lived twelve thousand years ago. We do some peak scrambling in the White Mountains of New Hampshire just to be sure our legs are ready.

  Finally, we pay the fare and mark our calendars for June 6, 2014, to June 29, 2014. Our travel agent, who has traveled in New Guinea before, notes that a popular saying there is, “Expect the unexpected.” Then he laughs.

  Getting There

  We spend thirty cramped hours in stuffy aluminum tubes, plus six or seven hours of layovers in sterile, sprawling airports—New York to Los Angeles to Brisbane, Australia, to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. The fifteen-hour flight from LA to Brisbane is in almost total darkness as the plane races ahead of the sunrise. We fly through several time zones and cross the international dateline, eventually losing contact with any prior circadian rhythm. Dinners are served when our bodies expect sleep. Snacks appear when we hope for meals. Fitful slumber is interrupted by flight attendants hawking duty-free booze.

  Barbara and I do the New York Times crossword puzzles together. We read. But, strapped in my seat and constantly snacking with little sleep and no exercise, I feel like a bloated zombie by the time the plane lands in Port Moresby on the southern coast of PNG.

  We retrieve our carry-on luggage and backpacks and stagger through Customs and Immigration, then make our way to the ground transportation deck. The heat and humidity of the night tells us something about what the coming days will be like.

  I see a van from the Gateway Hotel and flag it down. The lobby of the Gateway is crowded with foreign and New Guinean businessmen. The hotel staff is crisp and efficient. But when I claim our reservations, a desk clerk informs me, crisply and efficiently, that I have n
one. To make matters worse, our local guide, who was to meet us at the hotel with the requisite paperwork, does not show. Fortunately, we are able to reach our local contact, Emanuel, a calm and mild-mannered young man, who, as he did so often during our trip, fixes everything with a couple of phone calls.

  Port Moresby (population of 255,000) is the capital and largest city. It is not the Paris of the South Pacific. Much of it is squalid, dirty, and dangerous. Gangs of unemployed young men hang out on the corners. Tourists are advised not to walk alone or too far from the hotel at night. Jet lagged, we eat at the hotel and go to bed.

  The next morning, Emanuel comes by to introduce himself and advise us that our scheduled flight from Port Moresby to the coastal city of Madang has been canceled because the aircraft was “inoperative.” He says this without any indication of surprise, disbelief, or frustration. Instead, we will fly to the city of Mount Hagen in the Highlands. Thus begins our experience with “expect the unexpected.”

  Our flight to Mount Hagen (population of 45,000) is uneventful. We check in at the Highlander Hotel. The city, which has a Nursing College and a Bible College, is otherwise a smaller version of Port Moresby. The next morning, we meet our local guide, Steve, who takes us on a short tour of some of the farms on the periphery of the city. The farms are incredibly neat, with fields of taro root, cabbage, sweet potato, and pumpkin, as well as small orchards of papaya and mango. The fields, each about a rectangular half acre, are bordered by worn dirt paths and hedges with orange flowers. One of the rectangles contains nothing but orchids—not for sale, just for the family’s décor.

  Because of their proximity to a large town, these farmers enjoy urban amenities such as electricity, running water, autos, modern building materials, etc. I suspect this will not be the case in the Highland bush, beyond the reach of New Guinea’s few roads.

  PNG 101

  The vast majority of Highlanders had no contact with the outside world until the 1930s, when two gold-prospecting Australian brothers, seeking locations for exploration, flew over central New Guinea. The Australians assumed, as did all Europeans, that the interior was an uninhabited, mountainous rain forest. They were astonished to find a million people living off of neatly laid-out gardens on the mountain slopes and high valleys. These New Guineans were equally astonished to find that there was a world of human beings outside their small villages. In fact, the early inhabitants typically did not even know the people in villages beyond their immediate neighbors. Eight hundred and thirty-one distinct languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea, one-twelfth of all languages spoken worldwide. Everyone made up their own language because talking with other villagers was not a priority.