ARCHIVED REPORTS

Test Dri­ving the Buggy

Hi! I’m Tom. Wel­come to Redbuggy.com! This is the first in a long series of reg­u­lar (and irreg­u­lar) reports which will fol­low the mak­ing of this new adven­ture film. We are in Swe­den now prepar­ing for depar­ture towards Africa in the begin­ning of December.

There is a lot of test­ing going on dur­ing this phase of pro­duc­tion. We are refin­ing our cam­era, sound, and light­ing equip­ment to opti­mise it for the rig­ors and require­ments of the trip. We research cloth­ing, test camp­ing gear, purify dirty water, and review vehi­cle recov­ery sys­tems. Every­thing must be top qual­ity yet small and light. The Buggy (cap­i­tal­ized to denote our partner’s proper name as well as descrip­tion) is to undergo a major rebuild includ­ing a new motor, cus­tom roll cage, even big­ger tires, brush-bar with winch, and lots of less vis­i­ble spe­cial equipment.

Before this over­haul begins we took a last tor­tur­ous test thrash­ing of the old girl (well, old by car stan­dards, she is 35). Her back­yard is Got­land, a Swedish island in the mid­dle of the Baltic Sea. It has great sand dunes, rocky beaches, windswept for­est areas, and some utterly dis­gust­ing, slimy, and stinky, mud bogs. In all an excel­lent test track!

It is com­mon for men to think that they are great dri­vers, but I really am. This is not idle brag­ging, but a claim based upon vast and hard-won expe­ri­ence. An irony of skilled off-roaders is that when they do get stuck they are likely in a hell of a mess (if it wasn’t a hell of a mess a skilled dri­ver wouldn’t get stuck, right?).

But we had great fun! Jump­ing over sand dunes, manoeu­vring through woods a jeep could not nego­ti­ate, and splash­ing through waves on beau­ti­ful des­o­late beaches. The sun was shin­ning and we were unstoppable!

Well… until I got stuck.

There was a well dis­guised bog filled with a sort of fibrous mud made entirely of decom­pos­ing sea­weed. It was not unlike being stuck in the mid­dle of a sewage treat­ment facil­ity (I sup­pose). Yoshiko clicked a few pic­tures while bla­tantly refus­ing to set foot in the mess. I removed my shoes, socks, and pants – and two dis­gust­ing hours later the Buggy and I drove free. It took an hour of scrub­bing my body to get rid of the stink. It took four hours with a high pres­sure sprayer before any­one would go near the buggy. I sure hope the mud in Africa does not smell that bad!

Pic­tures:
1. Medieval town of Visby in Swe­den
2. A stone beach on the island of Got­land
3. Buggy through the surf!
4. Bal­anc­ing on a sand dune
5. Cov­ered in dis­gust­ing ‘mud’

The Ital­ian Con­nec­tion or Diet by Freezing

We apol­o­gize for the delay with this first report. In our defense, we have weath­ered the ele­ments from Swe­den to the edge of the Sahara dessert dur­ing the weeks since our depar­ture from Stock­holm. Sur­vival took prece­dence over writ­ing and find­ing Inter­net con­nec­tions. We expected the open Buggy ride through Swe­den, Ger­many, and the Alps in the peak of win­ter to be bru­tal. We were not disappointed.

I won­der if the weight loss effects of shiv­er­ing have ever been studied?In one week, while doing noth­ing except dri­ving a beach buggy through North­ern Europe in mid-winter, I lost all excess fat around my waist­line. This same feat would have required months of hard dis­ci­pline at home. I began to ques­tion why Weight Watch­ers or the Sur­geon Gen­eral were not rec­om­mend­ing this prac­tice to com­bat obe­sity in Amer­ica, or why I should not get rich offer­ing this proven treat­ment as a guar­an­teed weight loss pro­gram? Then I real­ized that to nor­mal peo­ple it was prob­a­bly about as appeal­ing as spend­ing six months in a Libyan jail cell, which would almost cer­tainly have a sim­i­lar effect on excess body fat.

It was so cold in Swe­den that our engine caught on fire. Ironic isn’t it, fire from freez­ing? The buggy is designed only for warm weather and has no heat ris­ers for the intake man­i­fold. At 15° below zero, the atom­ized gaso­line was freez­ing before hit­ting the com­bus­tion cham­ber caus­ing the spark plugs to foul, then run­ning unburned down the sides of the cylin­ders to mix with the oil. At three in the morn­ing, in the mid­dle of nowhere, after only one day on the road, our brand-new engine caught on fire and almost self-destructed. It looked like the adven­ture might be over before we got out of Sweden.

I got the fire out and Yoshiko and I sur­vived unharmed. We were res­cued by friendly natives, and the Buggy was towed 15 kilo­me­ters to the near­est vil­lage. The next day a help­ful mechanic at the local Mer­cedes deal­er­ship came in on a hol­i­day to help me change the oil and plugs. He refused to accept any pay­ment, and we were back on the road again. Adven­tures tend to bring out the best in peo­ple, even the ones you just meet on the way.

With a few sets of fresh spark plugs, and slightly higher tem­per­a­tures in Ger­many, we nursed the Buggy (at 130 kph) down the Ger­man Auto­bahn. My mem­ory is foggy there but I recall shiv­er­ing, drink­ing Red­Bull by the liter, and auto­mated toi­let seats (what will the Ger­mans think of next?) mixed with visions of us pass­ing huge columns of tractor-trailers on our right while cars roared by on our left at speeds well over 200 kph (that’s over 125 mph to you Amer­i­cans). Finally the sun appeared as we crossed the snowy Aus­trian Alps into Italy where some local spon­sors awaited our arrival.

The dif­fer­ence between North­ern and South­ern Europe was clar­i­fied by our new friend Enrico. Appar­ently there is inter­na­tional time, and then there is Ital­ian time (I would prob­a­bly rename the lat­ter ‘Latin’ time). And in stark con­trast to their North­ern neigh­bors, using blink­ers to sig­nal lane changes is purely optional in Italy. For that mat­ter, choos­ing a lane is optional as well. If no other vehi­cle is within ten feet of yours, then why stress your­self with details like choos­ing a lane when you can drive in the mid­dle? This would have been a mor­tal sin in Ger­many and prob­a­bly a jail­able offence.

So what is the pay­off for less order and effi­ciency besides great Cappuccino?

Life, my friends. The Ital­ians are sim­ply bet­ter at liv­ing it than their North­ern coun­ter­parts. It is not just red wine with lunch, Fer­raris, or Sofia Loren in her prime, but also a love of fam­ily and a pri­or­i­tiz­ing of a lit­tle free time every day to keep stress at bay and to nur­ture good feel­ings. We were fed end­less amounts of great food and pro­vided the warmest hos­pi­tal­ity imag­in­able. The staff at our two new spon­sors, Can­tone Ricambe in Livorno and Dei Kafer Ser­vice in Sienna, have become cher­ished friends whom we will never for­get and will almost cer­tainly visit again. They also proved that even on Ital­ian time it is pos­si­ble to do top notch work as they did a ter­rific job of help­ing us get the Buggy in absolute top shape for the gru­el­ing months to come in Africa.

And as if that were not enough to make our stay won­der­ful, my lit­tle sis­ter just hap­pened to be in Italy at the same time! So we shot from the Lean­ing Tower of Pisa across the coun­try to the canals of Venice for a day and a night and a won­der­ful visit with Janey before she took off to the Alps for a ski­ing vaca­tion (yes, the same Alps we had just crossed in a beach-buggy!).

So that is it. Well, actu­ally it is just the start. We are already on the edge of the Sahara with new adven­tures to relate. But they will come in the Next Report. We are on the African con­ti­nent now so we will slow down a bit. Besides, we may be stuck in Tunisia for a while wait­ing for visas to Libya. Tomor­row we make our first excur­sion into the dessert, just fifty miles or so to get a feel?

So stay tuned! And why not tell your friends to check us out as well? Until the Next Report…

Ciao!

Pic­tures:
1. Pisa and pizza are both good in Italy
2. Don Gio­vanni and Son prepar­ing lunch at the shop
3. Dri­ving this close to the Col­i­seum attracted police
4. My sis­ter Jane vis­ited us in Venice
5. The clean­est buggy shot on record

We Came, We Saw, We Were Conquered

The Sahara is not con­sid­ered the great­est desert on Earth with­out rea­son. It sure kicked our asses.

After leav­ing our won­der­ful friends in North­ern Italy, our last day in Europe proved mis­er­able. We did a marathon drive south through that coun­try in pour­ing rain with tem­per­a­tures just above freez­ing in the open buggy. After depart­ing Italy by ferry to Tunisia we spent one day in the capi­tol, Tunis, apply­ing for Visas at the Libyan Con­sulate. We had made the African con­ti­nent, but were still on the Mediter­ranean shores, which were too cold and wet in Jan­u­ary for our tastes. We made a dash for the desert where despite cold nights we knew we could count on sunny days.

Douz is a small vil­lage in south­ern Tunisia that is touted as the gate­way to the Sahara. This became our base for almost two weeks. We checked into a friendly back­pack­ers hotel where we could park the Buggy on the side­walk right in front of the door. We quickly became famous as the pilots of the most incred­i­ble vehi­cle the Tunisians have ever seen. They are con­vinced that the Buggy is a brand new, high-end, super sports-utility vehi­cle worth more than a new Range Rover. Many sim­ply refuse to believe me when I try to explain in hor­ren­dous French that it is an old VW. They beep their horns, scream out their win­dows, and give us thumbs-up in approval every­where we go. Chil­dren chase us, adults stop us to pose with the car, and the police often flag us down to stare in admi­ra­tion for a minute before wav­ing us on with big smiles. The response is even more over­whelm­ing than we expected. When we shoot off the road into the sand dunes they howl with joy and we have been chased sev­eral times (at sur­pris­ingly high speeds) by young men on camels des­per­ate for a closer look.

It is easy to see why I became cocky– which can be a dan­ger­ous thing when traveling.

Return­ing from our first hard day in the Sahara we pulled up in front of our hotel and I noticed that the parking-brake did not work. Upon inspec­tion I saw that the bracket that the brake han­dle hinges in was bro­ken and had split open. Closer inspec­tion revealed, WHAT!!! The car was split open!

The car was lit­er­ally break­ing in half, crack­ing right across the mid­dle of the chas­sis. After a day with a local welder we took a test run in the desert. The car cracked again, rip­ping right through new sheet metal. Two more days at the weld­ing shop fol­low­ing a design I drew up adding LOTS of new and heav­ier metal in very strate­gic places as well as cut­ting away all old welds and redo­ing them and we went back into the Sahara again. This time the chas­sis held. I thought I beat the desert, and got cocky again.

We packed up the Buggy and blasted out into uncharted ter­ri­tory. This was the hard­est dri­ving so far in the Buggy’s life. Actu­ally, the soft Saha­ran sand was easy com­pared to the hor­rid excuses of tracks lead­ing out towards the open desert. Carved by big 4-wheel drive trucks they were sim­ply two end­less, par­al­lel ruts in very rocky sandy dirt. The poor Buggy is just too small and was bashed sense­less, as were its occu­pants. We bot­tomed out so hard and so con­stantly that our teeth must surly have been loos­en­ing in our heads! The new winch we had installed so proudly was noth­ing more than a sand plow now, smash­ing the occa­sional small boul­der out of our way as well. The best way to not get stuck was to keep up speed. In a flurry of dust and fly­ing stones we crashed along as if run­ning the Paris-Dakar race. This was abuse beyond any­thing we had anticipated.

But when night came, we ate by our camp­fire per­haps 40 miles from the near­est human beings, who were lit­er­ally camel jock­eys. We were per­haps a hun­dred miles from the near­est house. We tented under one of the clear­est skies in the world. And for a while it all seemed worth the effort.

But even­tu­ally we had to return to town. More hours of bone-jarring abuse man­aged to weaken the old tor­sion bar springs to a point of near col­lapse. This resulted in a lower Buggy and even harder crash­ing which even­tu­ally knocked our air fil­ter off, with­out my notic­ing. This allowed the hard-pressed engine to suck masses of sand directly into the com­bus­tion cham­bers grind­ing the metal away with amaz­ing effi­ciency and destroy­ing our new motor in a few hours.

We made it out of the desert– just barely. Limp­ing badly, the Buggy is now almost un-drivable. We are try­ing to crawl, burn­ing more oil than gaso­line and with tires rub­bing against the low­ered body, to a city to find parts and a rea­son­able place to work. Last night we came to Gabes, back out on the coast. But they have no parts here. I don’t speak Ara­bic or French, which com­pli­cates things. Maybe the Ital­ians can send us parts? But it is major work requir­ing at least a week in a real garage to rebuild the motor and the sus­pen­sion sys­tem. We are a bit desperate.

Last night we checked into a very cheap hotel in Gabes. At least the peo­ple are friendly. Every­body wants to help, but there is noth­ing they can do. Yoshiko and I are argu­ing a lot. the stress is get­ting to us. It feels like one dis­as­ter after another. There are no Ital­ian spon­sors wait­ing around the next bend to res­cue us now, and South Africa seems very far away.

This morn­ing we came out to the Buggy to find a large pud­dle under it. We are leak­ing gas from a hole in the tank. This is not fic­tion or filmic drama, it is our real­ity. We can­not afford these set­backs, nei­ther our pock­et­books nor our spir­its. We are both healthy and that must count for some­thing, but this Inter­net con­nec­tion I am using right now to send this report was dif­fi­cult to find and the line goes dead every few min­utes. I won­der if the report will get through? It feels a bit rep­re­sen­ta­tive of our trip. And all I really want is a hot bath, a cold beer, and a fresh Buggy. None of those things is in sight. I am a fighter, but I am car­ry­ing Yoshiko now as well. And she calls me a liar. She says I told her the Buggy was strong, but the desert broke it. I can­not explain the mechan­ics and physics involved. We are not com­mu­ni­cat­ing. She thinks I should have an answer for this prob­lem as I usu­ally do, but I don’t.

I’m not sure where to go or what to do, and I am tired. Wish me luck.

Pic­tures:

1) Bask­ing in the Sahara sun at our hotel in Douz.
2) Camels don’t bathe often, but I think it is unfair to call them gross!
3) Gross camels cross­ing.
4) The pro­pri­etor of a desert café, we were his only guests.
5) Stuck on a big dune, again.

Lion Food & Hooligans

Imed is mar­ry­ing Hella on March 19th. There will be 1500 guests. The fact that a man we had never heard of a few weeks ago is mar­ry­ing next month may seem irrel­e­vant to this film on the sur­face. But looks can be deceiving.

Imed is the owner of the only licensed Volk­swa­gen ser­vice cen­ter in South­ern Tunisia. He is a big, happy man, gen­er­ous by nature. His com­ing wed­ding – and the bliss he antic­i­pates – has made him even hap­pier than nor­mal. He has res­cued us and pro­vided a place for me to rebuild the Buggy. In a few min­utes he is tak­ing us to The Bagh­dad Café, arguably the finest restau­rant in Sfax, Tunisia’s sec­ond largest city. There, as usual, he will fill us with local del­i­ca­cies fol­lowed by fab­u­lous desserts, Yoshiko’s favorite part. He main­tains that this is not for our ben­e­fit, he is only fat­ten­ing us up to make a proper meal for the Lions which will surely devour us by Cen­tral Africa – should we sur­vive that far.

Astute read­ers will won­der how we made the leap from des­per­ate adven­tur­ers beaten into sub­mis­sion by the Sahara and on the verge of giv­ing up – to com­fort­able trav­el­ers being wined and dined by gen­er­ous locals? This is the won­der of travel, and one of the rea­sons that we are here. On an adven­ture the highs and lows of daily life are ampli­fied ten-fold. Despite the best-laid plans, one never knows what tomor­row has in store.

The dis­cov­ery last week that our car – which had a blown motor and sag­ging sus­pen­sion – was also leak­ing gaso­line from a hole in the tank(!) was almost the straw that broke the camel’s back. Yoshiko was ready to go home, and I was pretty near ready to give up. Sit­ting on a street cor­ner in Gabes pon­der­ing the sit­u­a­tion yielded absolutely no hope of a solu­tion. There was no place to work, no parts to be had even if I found an appro­pri­ate garage, and our reserves of willpower were dwin­dling rapidly. Tunisia rep­re­sents the most east­erly of the for­mer French ter­ri­to­ries in North Africa. That colo­nial power’s influ­ence spread beyond lan­guage and cui­sine. Peu­geot, Renault, and the occa­sional Cit­roen are the auto­mo­biles here. No parts at all for an old Ger­man machine like ours. I heard that there might be a garage in Sfax with some parts. Bil­low­ing clouds of blue smoke marked our trail as we headed north through end­less rows of olive trees. There was absolutely noth­ing else to do.

Foot­ball, what Amer­i­cans call soc­cer, is the biggest sport in the world. Tunisia was host­ing the Africa cup, and our arrival in Sfax coin­cided with the arrival of sev­en­teen thou­sand vio­lent Alger­ian hooli­gans for a match against Morocco. I was too despon­dent to feel threat­ened, as the Tunisians cer­tainly did. Seven thou­sand extra police were called in and the ten­sion was high. Cheap hotels were full of loud, drunken foot­ball fans as bad as any Eng­lish hooli­gans I’ve seen on TV. I almost joined them because I was so des­per­ate for a beer, a rare com­mod­ity in an Islamic state. But the local police, as infat­u­ated by the Buggy as every­body else here is, warned us in no uncer­tain terms that it was not safe on the streets that night. In the end it was decided that we park directly in front of the police head­quar­ters where they could guard the Buggy till day­light, when it would be mar­gin­ally safer. With full police pro­tec­tion we even left our bags in the car, tak­ing only cam­era and clothes, and march­ing exhausted to the near­est dive for a cheap bed.

It proved damn lucky that we fol­lowed the policemen’s advice, as the hooli­gans broke every­thing. They smashed signs, cars, banks, and stores. They mur­dered two peo­ple in some of the worst vio­lence the town had seen. But the buggy was intact, under police sur­veil­lance the next morn­ing, with chaos all around. I thanked the offi­cers on the new watch, and asked them if they knew of a VW dealer in town. They gave us a police escort through the city and the hooli­gans, break­ing every traf­fic law ever invented, and even­tu­ally find­ing a VW and Audi parts store. But the store only stocked newer parts, and had no abil­ity to order older stuff from Ger­many. The sit­u­a­tion was as bleak as ever. With the hooli­gans jeer­ing every­where and wreak­ing havoc it was almost com­i­cal, in a tragic sort of way.

In the store I became ner­vous at hav­ing left Yoshiko alone with the car on the street. It always attracts a crowd, and today’s crowds were par­tic­u­larly lively. I checked, and not only were sev­eral peo­ple lean­ing on the Buggy, but one guy was doing some seri­ous pic­ture tak­ing. He turned out to be the com­puter tech­ni­cian for the Volk­swa­gen deal­er­ship and wanted to doc­u­ment our amaz­ing VW. He was very polite, spoke Eng­lish, and insisted on show­ing me his dig­i­tal pic­tures imme­di­ately. Leav­ing an uneasy Yoshiko to defend the Buggy, I decided it might be a good idea to ply him for infor­ma­tion. In his office I fed him our hard-luck story and he said I should meet the boss, who had a 1942 Willy’s Jeep in his col­lec­tion and would cer­tainly appre­ci­ate our Buggy. My choice of cars was prov­ing use­ful again, and we were off to their garage to meet the chief.

Imed greeted us with a huge smile at the Buggy, bet­ter Eng­lish than we had encoun­tered in weeks, and a sym­pa­thetic ear for our dilemma. After proudly show­ing us around the 40-man strong repair shop, it was decided we should fix the car there. He would pro­vide space and assis­tance, free of charge. As for a cheap hotel while we waited for our Ital­ian con­nec­tion to send us a hun­dred pounds of new parts. we would stay at his house. Unre­al­is­tic dreams of a hot bath, a cold beer, and a fresh Buggy had been sus­tain­ing me through days of despair, and in min­utes, the bath and the Buggy seemed attain­able. The beer could wait; two out of three was not bad!

We staked out a cor­ner of the garage for the long job I had to do on the Buggy. Then we moved all our gear into our own heated room in Imed’s house up the street with its 800 chan­nels of satel­lite TV.

I peeled off my smelly clothes and was run­ning a steamy bath when a boom­ing voice called out, “Hey Tom!”

“Hey what?” I yelled back pop­ping around the cor­ner clad in only a towel.

“We have very hot baths in this house, you may need this”.

And there stood Imed, hand out­stretched, with an ice-cold bot­tle of beer.

Things had clearly taken a turn for the better.

Pic­tures:
1) Hella & Imed
2) Explain­ing the Oper­a­tion
3) Charm­ing Natives
4) Mohamed Stock­ing Impor­tant Sup­plies
5) Will Any­one Believe This?

Let­ter to Gadafi

To: Colonel Muam­mar Gadafi

C/o: Gov­ern­ment of Libya

Dear Mr. Gadafi,

I am writ­ing to you regard­ing a minor mat­ter, though one of some urgency to me. My name is Thomas McAlevey and I am an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen. I am presently mak­ing a doc­u­men­tary film about Africa for inter­na­tional dis­tri­b­u­tion in the­aters and tele­vi­sion next year. The film has no polit­i­cal agenda and will be directed towards gen­eral audi­ences for enter­tain­ment and edu­ca­tional pur­poses only. You can see all infor­ma­tion regard­ing the film on our web­site at www.redbuggy.com. Unfor­tu­nately we have run into bureau­cratic dif­fi­cul­ties and are appeal­ing directly to you for help.

I am trav­el­ing with a Japan­ese cam­er­a­woman, Yoshiko Kino. We are dri­ving a very spe­cial car from Europe, through Africa, to Cape Town. On arrival to Tunisia from Italy we went directly to the Libyan con­sulate in Tunis where we applied for visas to Libya. We were told to call in four days. That was almost four weeks ago. We call every day, but receive no infor­ma­tion; we are sim­ply told to try again tomorrow.

We can­not afford such a long delay. We have six months to com­plete the entire jour­ney through fif­teen African coun­tries and have wasted almost a month now wait­ing for a visa to Libya. For the sake of Yoshiko and I per­son­ally, and for the sake of the film, we ask you respect­fully to please instruct your con­sulate to issue our visas with­out fur­ther delay. We greatly appre­ci­ate you help with this matter.

Since I am writ­ing to you per­son­ally for assis­tance in this mat­ter, I will take the oppor­tu­nity to raise one other point for your con­sid­er­a­tion. I under­stand that you pre­side over a fund whose pur­pose is the advance­ment of Africa in the inter­na­tional arena? I am a man who is ded­i­cat­ing time and money toward just this cause, via the pro­duc­tion of this movie. We would be hon­ored if you would con­sider this project for a dona­tion. Libya, or you per­son­ally, could effec­tively become a spon­sor for the film. I would be pleased to dis­cuss this mat­ter fur­ther with you per­son­ally. And I would like to include our meet­ing in the film, with your per­mis­sion of course.

I am most eas­ily reached via this e-mail address while trav­el­ing. If you give me a tele­phone num­ber I can call you in Tripoli. I am wait­ing for your reply in Sfax, where I have also con­tacted the Libyan con­sulate with­out suc­cess. Any assis­tance you can pro­vide will be greatly appre­ci­ated. Thank you in advance for your time.

Respect­fully yours,

Thomas McAlevey, CEO

Right Arm Pro­duc­tions Inc.

I sent that let­ter two weeks ago (yes, really). Gadafi still has not called me. The Libyan Con­sulate in Tunis has finally made a deci­sion; they will NOT issue us visas. And I have run out of patience.

It is impos­si­ble for an Amer­i­can to travel to Libya pri­vately. The Libyans will not issue a visa. And it is off lim­its for US cit­i­zens by our own State Depart­ment as well, i.e. I risk fines and impris­on­ment in the US if I travel to Libya (I risk fines and impris­on­ment for speed­ing too, but I do that every day). And that is before we even begin to dis­cuss the issue of tem­po­rary vehi­cle impor­ta­tion. Also, we had fresh reports from Ital­ians and Ger­mans who HAD valid visas but were refused entry because they had no “Let­ter of Invi­ta­tion” with them. The Libyan Con­sulate said no, the US Embassy said no, and absolutely every­body we talked to said it was impos­si­ble. This was way too much trou­ble to get into a dan­ger­ous, desert coun­try full of aggres­sive, American-hating ter­ror­ists, that don’t even have beer! But Libya is very much in our way. So before giv­ing up and return­ing to Europe to drive around the Mid­dle East and into Egypt that way – I decided to go to the bor­der and try my per­sua­sive magic. Twelve hours later we were in Libya.

I will spare you the details of that amaz­ing night. Suf­fice to say that I am the first Amer­i­can to cross the Tunisian/Libyan land bor­der with his own car in over twenty years. The Libyan police con­firmed this. Coin­ci­dently, the US ban on travel to Libya was lifted the very morn­ing I entered the coun­try. It means that I am likely the first pri­vate Amer­i­can to enter the coun­try by land legally in 20 years. The Libyan police, by the way, were polite with­out excep­tion. As were all the sol­diers. As indeed every Libyan we have encoun­tered has been. More myths dispelled.

In fact, instead of shoot­ing me on the spot, when informed that I am from New York – an “Amerikani” – they are always thrilled. You are from “par­adise” they say, a “good and great coun­try”. They tell me they know that Amer­i­cans are good peo­ple. They say it is a shame that politi­cians on both sides can make such a mess of things. They tell me we are friends again now, as we should be. And they mean it. They buy us bot­tled water, and talk about rel­a­tives they have in the US. One man exclaimed, “New York, were you there on Sep­tem­ber 11th? Your fam­ily is OK? It was a ter­ri­ble thing those peo­ple did to your home. We are ashamed of these per­sons. They are not real Mus­lims. Amer­ica is full of good peo­ple. And Libya is full of good peo­ple.” And I can only agree with every word he says. I am a lit­tle ashamed myself at what I thought of Libyans before vis­it­ing their coun­try. And they are not try­ing to hus­tle us for money like Egyp­tians and Moroc­cans are famous for doing. They ask for noth­ing and con­stantly offer to help if we should need anything.

Oh yeah, you were won­der­ing what hap­pened with the Buggy in Tunisia? We were well cared for through­out our stay by our Tunisian sav­ior, Imed, while our Ital­ian sav­iors Enrico and Gio­vanni shipped us new pis­tons and cylin­ders and high-flow heads and other good­ies. I have been work­ing as a full-time mechanic for a cou­ple of weeks now and have rebuilt the motor and sus­pen­sion. Yoshiko helps, but only does what she wants, the “fun” stuff, like build­ing the engine. Of course she does not know the dif­fer­ence between a car­bu­re­tor and a crank­shaft, but it keeps her from get­ting bored. I also redesigned sev­eral com­po­nents and car­ried out lots of other major work, all in an effort to “Sahara-proof” the Buggy. Fat chance of that! The Sahara is mer­ci­less. The Libyan peo­ple have treated us won­der­fully, but their desert broke my car, again!

The starter is only work­ing inter­mit­tently now, pos­si­bly because the very fine sand has worked it’s way into the sole­noid. And reverse is almost gone. We got boxed in between big boul­ders in deep soft sand and I was sort of “rock­ing” the car out at almost full throt­tle when it started pop­ping out of reverse. Each time it popped out the reverse gear ground sav­agely for a split-second before I got the clutch in and the revs down for another try. And each suc­ces­sive try it popped out a lit­tle eas­ier. Now it pops out with the slight­est resis­tance. We need a new trans­mis­sion. I think I’ve had enough of the Sahara.

By the way, before you run off and book your dream vaca­tion to Libya I ought to men­tion a few down­sides about this inter­est­ing coun­try. They throw garbage on the sides of the roads every­where – in quan­tity. One young Libyan explained to me that it was almost a national sport. Appar­ently the idea is to toss the garbage out of your car while dri­ving and see if you can hit the car behind you. Thank­fully we have not been hit yet. Maybe they know for­eign­ers have no expe­ri­ence at this sport?

And they are the worst dri­vers in the world, prob­a­bly in the uni­verse. I sus­pect that the only qual­i­fi­ca­tion for a Libyan dri­ving license is that you can reach the ped­als. Not only do they often drive on the wrong side of the road and com­pletely dis­re­gard every basic traf­fic rule in exis­tence (even the Tunisians do that), but they drive really fast too. They have more gas than water here, lit­er­ally, so fuel econ­omy plays no part in mod­er­at­ing dri­ving speeds. They race around in crappy lit­tle Korean Dae­woos with their foot on the floor and their hand on the horn on whichever side of the road is most con­ve­nient for them. We wit­nessed sev­eral acci­dents and count­less dead ani­mals on or in the road. In the desert the big trucks even plow down camels reg­u­larly. Their huge car­casses stink for miles. But I sup­pose when they smash into my Buggy they will be very polite about the whole mess – espe­cially when they find out that I’m an Amer­i­can. And for all this sur­pris­ing hos­pi­tal­ity we are truly grateful.

Pic­tures:
1) Leav­ing our friends at the garage in Tunisia?
2) And mak­ing new friends in Libya. Note the tem­po­rary License plate.
3) The Sahara as seen through the tent win­dow, no shoes allowed indoors.
4) All signs in Libya are exclu­sively Ara­bic. I won­der what this can says?
5) The desert can even be hard on camels.

I lost Yoshiko in Egypt?

It is dif­fi­cult to hold hands if you only have one arm. I’m a strong swim­mer (not only in cir­cles), a decent pho­tog­ra­pher, a good mechanic, and I have a Black Belt in Tae-Kwon-Do, so it is easy to for­get about the lit­tle incon­ve­niences of hav­ing lost an arm. You prob­a­bly never thought about the fact that when you are strolling along the board­walk hand in hand with some­one, your free hand is busy doing every­thing from scratch­ing your head and pick­ing your nose, to retriev­ing money from your shorts to buy an ice cream. When­ever I want to do any of these things I must break my grip to free my only hand for action, mak­ing me a bad hand-holder. Lit­tle things like hold­ing hands are impor­tant to women.

Yoshiko and I have been fight­ing so much that we have repacked the Buggy. We can fight about any­thing from the weather to my occa­sional desire to have a cig­a­rette – which she vehe­mently refuses to allow. So now every­thing of hers is con­sol­i­dated in one yel­low North Face duf­fle bag. Osten­si­bly this is to facil­i­tate her imme­di­ate depar­ture should we decide to go our sep­a­rate ways on the road. Actu­ally, I would not aban­don her in any unsafe sit­u­a­tion, no mat­ter how badly I felt she was behav­ing. Should she go home, I would pre­fer to drop her at the air­port. And even if we argue a lot, there are prac­ti­cal ben­e­fits to not trav­el­ing alone besides reg­u­lar sex (about the only time we do not argue). Like cross­ing bor­ders for exam­ple. It is much eas­ier for me to work my per­sua­sive magic if I am not dis­tracted by thoughts of bag­gage (or the whole Buggy) dis­ap­pear­ing when­ever I can­not see it. Yoshiko acts as a guard at these times and I rely on her completely.

Bor­der towns can be rough places. The Libyan/Egyptian cross­ing near Soloum was no excep­tion. At Al Burdi on the Libyan side of the bor­der, the friendly screams at us and the Buggy that we had grown used to sud­denly took on a men­ac­ing tone. The whole town seemed drunk and rowdy, like in the Wild West at the end of a big cat­tle run. There were fist­fights in the street right in front of police who quickly ush­ered us through a gate into the offi­cial bor­der zone. This was just as bizarre. In front of our eyes Egypt­ian heads popped over the Libyan bor­der wall, checked right and left for sol­diers and police, then tossed their bags and them­selves over the well-beaten barbed wire to scurry off into the Libyan night. But the Libyan author­i­ties were polite to us as always, and after an hour or so of bureau­cratic has­sles, I even got my fifty Dinar (about 30 dol­lars) deposit back for turn­ing in the Buggy’s tem­po­rary reg­is­tra­tion plates. We said our good-byes to Libya and drove the hun­dred meters or so across no-man’s land – that lit­tle space at many polit­i­cal bor­ders where you have offi­cially left one coun­try but not yet entered the next. Through­out my research for this trip one point came up repeat­edly: enter­ing Egypt with a vehi­cle is a costly and tedious task. The aver­age cross­ing runs about 300 dol­lars and requires sev­eral hours. Though Egypt on prin­ci­ple wel­comes both Japan­ese and Amer­i­cans, we didn’t even have visas in advance, so I was prepar­ing for a long night.

I put on my best bor­der cross­ing face. It radi­ates polite­ness and respect for the author­ity of the offi­cials, while ema­nat­ing strength and con­fi­dence. It says “I will behave and do exactly as you direct, but don’t try to jerk me around as I am not your typ­i­cal tourist”. It worked. I quickly had a respect­ful young Egypt­ian police­man escort­ing me to the head of line after line and mak­ing quick work of what would oth­er­wise have been a bureau­cratic night­mare. I almost felt sorry for all the peo­ple we passed, until it came time to pay the visa fee. Thirty US dol­lars stood between me and a visa stamp in both of the pass­ports I held in my hand. But it had to be cash and I had no dol­lars, and my best per­sua­sions fell on the deaf ears of the arro­gant bank teller. He was unin­ter­ested in Libyan Dinars, Visa cards, and even cash Euros. He could not sell me dol­lars, only Egypt­ian pounds, which he refused to accept back as pay­ment, only green­backs would do. That is the law, he explained. And with­out thirty dol­lars in cash we must return to Libya now!

I flatly refused to leave. The friendly police­man began to get ner­vous. I was watch­ing our smooth entry into Egypt crum­ble before my eyes and visions of border-town, third-world jail cells began danc­ing in my head. I rea­soned with myself that if I could get us into Libya the Egyp­tians would not turn me back. But deci­sive action was required imme­di­ately. I felt that the banker was an ass, who nobody par­tic­u­larly liked, so I took a chance. I told him fla­grantly that he lacked the author­ity to send me any­where, that I had every inten­tion of enter­ing the lovely coun­try of Egypt, and that he could con­tinue to sit there and be use­less for all I cared until I returned with his thirty lousy dol­lars – which I would man­age to get on my own. This pro­duced smirks on a few faces around me, includ­ing the cop, so I forged ahead. I took the police­man aside and con­fided that I needed his help, that I knew this was a sen­si­tive issue, but that I was con­fi­dent we could solve it together. There were ille­gal mon­ey­chang­ers lurk­ing about, some­one must have thirty dol­lars? He cham­pi­oned my cause and, despite ini­tial appre­hen­sion at deal­ing directly under the nose of a cop, the sleazy black-marketers were forced to give me a fair rate and even accepted the last of my Libyan Dinars, which no Egypt­ian bank would have touched. Suc­cess! Visas in hand I pro­fusely thanked our help­ful police­man, who steered me towards… Egypt? Nope. That was just the people-part of the cross­ing. He pointed me towards the vehic­u­lar import build­ing loom­ing omi­nously across the road, apol­o­gized that this was out of his juris­dic­tion, and we were on our own again.

And so the tedious process of tem­porar­ily import­ing a car into Egypt began. Yoshiko sat with the Buggy while I plied my skills on the men inside. Suc­cess­ful travel depends on the abil­ity to read peo­ple and sit­u­a­tions, to act appro­pri­ately, to com­mand respect, and even to win allies in pre­car­i­ous and some­times dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions. The process of get­ting tem­po­rary plates was going well. I was at the sec­ond to last of about seven stages – pur­chas­ing Egypt­ian third-party lia­bil­ity insur­ance (they don’t accept for­eign poli­cies here). A big Arab who needed to shave a few times a day gruffly shook my hand, siz­ing me up, a crit­i­cal moment. He could push me through the bureau­cracy faster – or drag his feet and even close his shop if he did not like me. And he could pick any fee he wanted for the required insur­ance, every­thing is nego­tiable here. We are so under-financed that a hun­dred dol­lars here and there may decide whether we reach South Africa or not.

I shook his hand firmly and launched into our story in care­ful Eng­lish, hop­ing he would be amused and sup­port­ive. He draped a big arm over my shoul­der and led me into his pri­vate office, a dingy, win­dow­less room with a dusty desk and a dirty cot. We sat in two chairs siz­ing each other up. A big Arab and a tough Amer­i­can; it could go either way. He offered me a cig­a­rette, which I reluc­tantly waved away, ges­tur­ing towards Yoshiko. “She hates when I smoke”.

“Aha” a know­ing grin, “You enjoy cig­a­rettes, but your lady does not? It is dif­fi­cult but impor­tant to keep women happy in this life. But she is out there, and won’t come in here” He stretched the packet out towards me again, offer­ing, almost insist­ing. I accepted a cig­a­rette and a light, and he smiled broadly and began fill­ing in forms. This would go well. We were no longer an Arab and an Amer­i­can; we were two men shar­ing a smoke and the pri­vate joke that we were harm­lessly pulling the wool over my girlfriend’s eyes. Hem­ing­way would have been proud. We smiled at our com­plic­ity and I knew he would treat me fairly. Then we saw Yoshiko in the door.

Two strong men from dif­fer­ent cul­tures who could have stood side by side against a small army in defense of the uni­ver­sal broth­er­hood of man were sud­denly reduced to com­plete help­less­ness in the face of a woman’s wrath. Yoshiko become so upset that she scared all the men in the build­ing before she stormed away, leav­ing me alone and the Buggy unguarded. I got advice from half a dozen fright­ened Arabs on how to appease an angry woman (thank­fully none of them sug­gested that I beat her). After ten min­utes of apol­o­giz­ing to an unfor­giv­ing Yoshiko I grew angry and accused her of behav­ing self­ishly and risk­ing our equip­ment as well as our entry into Egypt. This did not help matters.

We even­tu­ally got into the coun­try, though we remained angry at one another for some time. Twenty-four hours later, and 241 kilo­me­ters north­west of Cairo, things came to a head. On the side of the road, in the mid­dle of nowhere, we got into a heated argu­ment. This cul­mi­nated in Yoshiko doing the one thing I can­not tol­er­ate at all. She delib­er­ately and force­fully jammed our expen­sive broad­cast cam­era between the seats, in effect say­ing “Watch it pal, things can go very badly if you get me really mad”.

I grew dan­ger­ously calm. I sug­gested that if she was unhappy with the sit­u­a­tion she should not break the cam­era, but take her bag and go – so she did.

She grabbed her yel­low duf­fle demon­stra­tively, and marched off into the warm Egypt­ian night. I waited about half an hour before I began to worry. Would she really leave? Then and there? How long should I wait? What should I do? I was mad and con­cerned at the same time. After an hour I began to real­ize she was not com­ing back. I beeped, revved the loud engine, and shouted into the dark­ness. I cruised slowly up and down the high­way as far as I cal­cu­lated she may have walked in the elapsed time, plus a few kilo­me­ters more, just in case. I ques­tioned every­one I saw, pedes­tri­ans and police, even the guy at the gas sta­tion we had passed ear­lier. I found a vil­lage and asked around about a Japan­ese woman but my Ara­bic con­sists of only a few words. Finally the police from a road­block we had passed ear­lier that evening com­mu­ni­cated to me that she went to a hotel with a man in a car. It made some sense, because we had asked them to rec­om­mend a cheap hotel in the area when we had passed the first time. The hotel was a half an hour away. Going there meant leav­ing here, and prob­a­bly never find­ing Yoshiko again if she had not actu­ally got­ten a ride to that hotel. I smoked a cig­a­rette (pro­vided by the police) and thought hard. She had obvi­ously left the area, and I had no bet­ter lead. I climbed back in the buggy and headed towards Alexandria.

The police were mis­taken. In their under­stand­able dis­be­lief that two West­ern­ers were trav­el­ing alone through Africa in a Buggy, they had taken me now to be a sec­ond Buggy nut, look­ing for his two friends (me and Yoshiko), who had passed this way before and to whom they had rec­om­mended the hotel. I was the man that the Japan­ese woman got a ride to the hotel with! Of course I didn’t under­stand all this until later.

I was not prowl­ing the streets in search of a wan­der­ing Yoshiko now. I was pur­pose­fully dri­ving towards a hotel some dis­tance away. At high­way speed in the open Buggy, I barely heard the scream that sounded vaguely like “Tom” drift­ing in the dark­ness. I slowed, con­cen­trated, and heard it again. I backed up with a fail­ing reverse gear and out of the dark­ness popped a hys­ter­i­cal Yoshiko. Tears streamed down her face. She was ter­ri­fied almost beyond words. She mum­bled semi-coherently that I left her. I reas­sured her that she was wrong, that I never left her, that I searched and found her as I always would. I held her and she gripped me hard. She was con­vuls­ing with fear and relief. Despite the trop­i­cal heat it was a long time before she stopped shak­ing. It was about one in the morn­ing now. She had been alone, in the mid­dle of nowhere, for a cou­ple of hours. We headed towards Cairo in the Buggy. We were so exhausted that we slept, fully dressed on the side of the high­way, before con­tin­u­ing on to the Great Pyra­mids of Giza the next morning.

What had hap­pened was that Yoshiko had marched off sev­eral hun­dred meters up the road, sat down to pout angrily at me, and then fallen asleep. When she awoke I had left. As far as she could know, forever.

I hoped maybe this would mark some cross­road in our rela­tion­ship. Increase our trust and respect for one-another. Move our rela­tion­ship to a more mature level. That night she behaved as a quiet angel.

But the next day we were fight­ing again.

It would be easy to blame our fight­ing on the heat, the stress of the adven­ture, the enor­mous prac­ti­cal prob­lems we have had, or our lack of money. But when I think about it deeply, I’m pretty sure it is all because I am not very good at hold­ing hands.

Pic­tures:
1) What the heck am I doing here?
2) This is where I lost Yoshiko.
3) Lux­ury accom­mo­da­tion on the side of the road.
4) A New Yorker at home in the big city of Cairo.
5) Still together?

I left my appen­dix in Cairo

We might as well be in Disneyland.

After every­thing we have been through, to be enjoy­ing a com­pli­men­tary week at a five star beach resort feels like being on another planet. Warm seas, cold beers, and beau­ti­ful scenery. The ten-dollar hotels we are used to always have beds that sag badly in the mid­dle. El Gouna not only has firm mat­tresses, it has great food, good ser­vice, and a fresh beach towel every time we go for a swim. It has so much secu­rity we don’t even worry about the Buggy. It also has man­age­ment with the savvy to rec­og­nize a poten­tial mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­nity. That’s why they put us up for free. We are enjoy­ing a vaca­tion from our adven­ture. Yoshiko and I are lap­ping up the sun at this beau­ti­ful resort town on the Red Sea. But, you last heard from us in Cairo with no reverse in the Buggy?

Pyra­mid Road runs sev­eral miles from down­town Cairo out to the Great Pyra­mids of Giza. It is traf­ficked by count­less taxis for the wealthy and mini-busses for the work­ing classes. What is unique is that the mini-busses are all old VW vans from the 70s. These vans share many parts and prin­ci­ples with the Buggy. Maybe we could rebuild the trans­mis­sion here?

I remem­ber a Mexican-American come­dian who claimed that he had six sis­ters all named Maria (Maria one through six). In Islamic coun­tries every other male seems to be named Mohamed. Luck­ily all the Mohameds we meet turn out to be great guys. When the VW deal­er­ship in Cairo could not help us repair such an old car, I got one of my funny ideas. I went down to a busy gas sta­tion on Pyra­mid road and talked to every VW dri­ver that came by for an hour until I found one that could speak Eng­lish. Mohamed was a ter­rific guy who had spent 16 years work­ing on Amer­i­can con­trolled oil­rigs in Saudi Ara­bia. He was proud of his rusty Eng­lish, and proud of his home coun­try of Egypt. He was deter­mined that we should get a fair deal with what­ever repairs were needed. He quit work­ing and spent the rest of the day dri­ving us around to grungy lit­tle repair shops he knew in parts of Cairo that have never been put on a map.

We set­tled on the most unlikely trans­mis­sion spe­cial­ist imag­in­able. An oil-soaked 20-year-old named Abu – work­ing out of a tiny grease cov­ered hole in the side of a dilap­i­dated apart­ment build­ing. With a lit­tle assis­tance from me, he would remove my engine and trans­mis­sion, dis­man­tle them, deter­mine the prob­lem with reverse, acquire replace­ment gears etc., reassem­ble the gear­box, and then rein­stall the gear­box and the motor in the Buggy. All in one day. All on the side of the street out­side his grease-cave. And all for less than 50 dol­lars. I had my doubts. Trans­mis­sion work requires clean­li­ness, pre­ci­sion, and a good deal of expe­ri­ence. But Mohamed assured us that Abu was the best. What was Mohamed’s cut? Noth­ing. Not only did he refuse any sort of pay­ment, he treated us to tea at his family’s tiny cof­fee shop before dri­ving us home.

Abu was true to his word, and turned out to be a com­pe­tent pro­fes­sional. We arrived at his shop at 11:00 the next day and drove the Buggy back to our hotel nine hours later with a rebuilt trans­mis­sion. This kind of effi­ciency is rare in the West, and all but unheard of here. He gave me a ter­rific price for the new parts, and then charged me 20 dol­lars for labor. He refused any tip and insisted that should if it failed he would repair it for free. The trans­mis­sion is work­ing fine.

All these sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dures on the Buggy were begin­ning to dis­turb our equi­lib­rium. It seemed only fair that a human par­tic­i­pant in this adven­ture should be oper­ated on as well. Plus, it would make ter­rific film footage – an emer­gency oper­a­tion on the road in Africa! I fig­ured acute appen­dici­tis would do the trick. It is life threat­en­ing and dra­matic, but the fix is still sim­ple enough to per­form with a sharp knife and a bot­tle of whisky. Yoshiko wanted no part of being oper­ated on, so as usual she han­dled the cam­era while I did the dirty work.

I woke up with wicked stom­ach cramps in the mid­dle of the night. I was sure it was food poi­son­ing and decided to tough it out. After a few hours, Yoshiko awoke from my moan­ing and looked con­cerned. Mr. Macho curled up in a fetus posi­tion in agony spelled trou­ble. When the pain had not sub­sided after 12 hours (suf­fi­cient for food-poisoning to pass) we finally took a cab to the hos­pi­tal. Dis­ap­point­ingly, they had real doc­tors and nurses and tests to deter­mine that I needed my appen­dix removed imme­di­ately. They even had real anes­the­si­ol­o­gists instead of liquor, and I was quickly put to sleep and put under the knife. It could almost have been a West­ern pro­ce­dure, except for the night nurse who locked the door mys­te­ri­ously and then demanded a tip, “bak­sheesh”. Yoshiko paid her well (about two dol­lars) as this nurse lit­er­ally had my life in her hands. I watched this sur­real event though the dreamy eyes of the heav­ily sedated. It was bizarre. I wanted more drugs.

Two days later I was back on the streets. Seventy-two hours post-surgery I was dri­ving the Buggy five hun­dred kilo­me­ters out to the beach to recover in the sun. That was a mis­take. My insides were still all cut up and the bounc­ing caused my stom­ach to swell up like a beach ball. I couldn’t buckle my pants and felt pretty sick. Still, van­ity dic­tated that I use my recov­ery period to work on my tan, and Hurghada (the town we had dri­ven to) turned out to be a cheesy tourist resort with­out even a decent beach. So I crawled back in the Buggy to find some­place more suit­able. Weak and sick as I was, we only stopped at El Gouna for a laugh, it was way out of our price league. But it was beau­ti­ful and it was on our way. And for the film’s sake we wanted to show the con­trast between how a wealthy tourist might expe­ri­ence Egypt as opposed to what we had been through. Instead of call­ing secu­rity to run us off the prop­erty, the kind woman at their info booth was truly fas­ci­nated by our story. She put us in touch with the man­age­ment, who offered to put us up for free, and here we are.

Now my recov­ery is going well. A few days ago after walk­ing the fifty meters from the beach back to our lux­ury hotel room, we watched Tony Blair shake hands with Gadafi on CNN (after we paved the way of course). Then we saw that Jen­nifer Lopez has another hit on MTV and learned that Kylie Minogue will be host­ing a show about artists from Aus­tralia. Armed with this vital knowl­edge, we feel bet­ter pre­pared to take on the new adven­tures that await us. Time to load up the Buggy and wave good-bye to Dis­ney­land. Plus, I miss my kids, and I promised them that I’d be back by sum­mer. We are very far behind sched­ule. It is time to hit the road again– and it feels good.

Unfor­tu­nately I just spoke to the Sudanese Embassy in Cairo (again) to check on our visa sta­tus and they said to call back next week, they had no word from Khar­toum. Déjà vu. This is rem­i­nis­cent of the Libyan con­sulate in Tunisia. The answer was promised in a week; after a month it came back as a “no”. So maybe we’ll try a bribe at the bor­der? Or maybe just drive straight into the coun­try ille­gally through the mid­dle of the Sahara and hope to receive some of the famous Sudanese hos­pi­tal­ity instead of a shoddy Sudanese jail cell when they pick us up. Or maybe we’ll have to go back up to the Suez canal and try to hitch a ride on a freighter straight past Sudan to the strange lit­tle coun­try of Dji­bouti?

One way or another I’ll be in South Africa this sum­mer. And Yoshiko is still with me.

Pic­tures:
1) Mohamed out­lin­ing our options.
2) The Buggy under­goes surgery, again.
3) Dr. Abu and Dr. McAlevey show the bad reverse gear.
4) Tom under­goes surgery.
5) Then he recov­ers at El Gouna, nice scenery.

E=mc2, The Big Bang, Reli­gion and Sudan

It was a scorcher.

Not the kind of hot that you can get on a bad sum­mer day in New York, which is pretty bad. This was the kind of hot that can only be achieved when the sun is directly above your head, diluted by the short­est pos­si­ble stretch of atmos­phere, like in the Sudan in April. We met a Swiss man in a 4WD van with a California-made solar panel on the roof that was rated at 90 watts max­i­mum. Here it was pro­duc­ing 140 watts! If you didn’t move your feet once in a while the soles of your shoes would melt to the ground.

Mohammed spoke in clear, schooled English.

–Do you drink, Tom?

I weighed the pos­si­ble responses. Does a bear shit in the woods? But irony, like humor, is too often lost on the non-native Eng­lish speaker.

–Absolutely.

With an ice-cold (and ille­gal) Heineken in the blaz­ing after­noon sun I am sit­ting on a bank where the White Nile joins the Blue Nile to form one of the world’s great­est rivers– and pon­der­ing our trou­bles. We are behind sched­ule, over bud­get, and we need to build another new engine. DHL wants 600 dol­lars to ship the parts from Europe. And we are ille­gal aliens in Khar­toum hop­ing to obtain exit visas, like char­ac­ters from the film “Casablanca”.

But we are in Sudan. We have just sur­vived an extra­or­di­nary ille­gal desert bor­der cross­ing from Egypt. And we are healthy.

OK, how many of you under­stand Einstein’s The­ory of Rel­a­tiv­ity? Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared is arguably the most stag­ger­ing sin­gle con­cept mankind has ever put forth. And it is almost cer­tainly cor­rect, unlike the Big Bang the­ory, which is non­sense and will be dis­re­garded in my life­time. Then, why do so many sci­en­tists sub­scribe to the Big Bang the­ory? Like reli­gion, it pro­vides an answer to some ques­tions that have haunted us since the dawn of con­scious thought. It is uncom­fort­able to accept that we have no idea why we are here, where the uni­verse ends, or when time began. Faith (in God) makes these ques­tions unim­por­tant, sci­ence (like the Big Bang the­ory) attempts to pro­vide answers. The grounds for both are pretty shaky. I am always amazed at peo­ple who believe with cer­tainty that their reli­gion is the only cor­rect reli­gion, while three quar­ters of the world believes with equal cer­tainty that their totally dif­fer­ent reli­gion is cor­rect. Some­thing is wrong with this equation.

The Big Bang the­ory is not much bet­ter. Did you really expect me to believe that all mat­ter in the known uni­verse came to exis­tence through the explo­sion some 15 odd bil­lion years ago of an infi­nitely hot, infi­nitely dense, infi­nitely small speck? Please. And for half of the last mil­len­nium sci­en­tists were just as sure that the world was flat.

But Ein­stein was cor­rect. Mat­ter and energy really are con­vert­ible via the phe­nom­e­nally huge yet beau­ti­fully sim­ple E=mc2. Nuclear bombs and sun­tans are just two of the lim­it­less exam­ples of E=mc2 at work. The sun is busy con­vert­ing its mass to energy, which it spits out con­stantly to tan my skin and to scorch the sands of The Sudan. And humans, though far less effi­cient than the sun, can also push mat­ter (like Plu­to­nium and Ura­nium) across the “=” sign in Einstein’s equa­tion to cre­ate mas­sive bursts of energy sim­i­lar to the ones that the Amer­i­cans dropped on the Japan­ese almost sixty years ago. Bring­ing us back to Yoshiko and myself– and to Sudan.

Nuke it.

I’m not kid­ding. Nuke Sudan. I mean who would notice? Maybe the Egyp­tians would com­plain that the Nile stopped flow­ing for a few years while it turned a crater the size of the east­ern United States into a beau­ti­ful lake. But no one else would care. It is a fly bit­ten, dust rid­den, mis­er­able excuse of a coun­try that doesn’t want vis­i­tors, still con­dones slav­ery, doesn’t allow women to wear biki­nis, and doesn’t even have beer. It has the worst roads in the world, bar none. And it broke my car. Do you remem­ber that film that all your friends told you was great? Then when you finally got to see it you were dis­ap­pointed? That was Sudan for me. We had heard so much about the Sudanese hos­pi­tal­ity that we had for­got­ten about all the bad stuff. We really just want to get through Sudan now and on our way South. But the car is bro­ken and we need to rebuild the motor, again. And of course, we have no visas.

OK, I am kid­ding. Don’t nuke Sudan. Even if the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals fac­tory wasn’t pro­duc­ing phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, as Richard Clarke indi­cated in his recent tes­ti­mony regard­ing the so-called “intel­li­gence” sur­round­ing 911. And even if Al Queda does have active cells here. And even if women are second-class cit­i­zens, alco­hol is ille­gal, and Sharia law still pre­vails. And even if the coun­try has been embroiled in bru­tal civil wars through­out most of its inde­pen­dent exis­tence since 1956. Because despite all this – or per­haps because of it – the leg­endary Sudanese hos­pi­tal­ity is alive and well. You can go almost any­where in this coun­try and feel welcome.

The Sudanese give new mean­ing to the term “dirt-poor”. Most of them live and breathe the stuff. And it is God-awful dirt. A fine dry pow­der that blows all over and gets into every­thing. Noth­ing grows in it. And if you do add water it makes a hor­rid sludge that quickly dries to an abra­sive cement until it is even­tu­ally pul­ver­ized back into the orig­i­nal awful dirt. Yet these peo­ple, most of whom have noth­ing but a tiny patch of this stuff, will invari­ably invite you into their homes for tea, expect­ing noth­ing in return.

This same dirt is the cause of our most recent motor fail­ure. The fine Sahara sand and Sudanese dust that goes right through our air-filter to grind away the insides of the motor. This time after I rebuild the engine I will change the car­bu­re­tor back to a stock type. And I’ll cut the body to allow the fit­ting of an orig­i­nal old VW air-filter that relies on oil to trap the dust instead of paper. Oil fil­ter­ing is a far supe­rior con­cept for the bru­tally dusty African conditions.

But only motor-heads like me want to hear more car details. I think most of you would pre­fer to hear about our unique entry into Sudan? About how we risked our lives to com­plete a film that should have been stopped by the Sudanese Embassy in Cairo or the Egypt­ian mil­i­tary in the desert? About days of dri­ving with­out see­ing so much as a fly and nav­i­gat­ing by the sun? About huge stretches of untouched Sahara where the sand was per­fectly flat to the hori­zon in every direc­tion, and where we could drive as fast and com­fort­ably as if we were on a mod­ern high­way? Or about how incred­i­bly stu­pid I can be?

Right, I knew you wanted to hear about that last bit.

Given my grasp of things like Einstein’s The­ory of Rel­a­tiv­ity, one could draw the con­clu­sion that I am an intel­li­gent human (though I’m begin­ning to sus­pect that “intel­li­gent human” is an oxy­moron). But the facts do not speak in my favor. For exam­ple, recent expe­ri­ence has repeat­edly proven that every time we take extended trips into the desert, we break the car. So what do I do? Take an even big­ger trip into the desert, of course! One has to won­der at times what goes on in my mind? If you fig­ure it out please let me know.

In my own defense, this most recent and most dan­ger­ous trip into the desert was not really vol­un­tary. It was a last resort attempt to con­tinue with the film and the adven­ture. When it became obvi­ous that the Sudanese Embassy in Cairo wasn’t going to issue us visas we decided to take mat­ters into our own hands. We would drive down to the closed bor­der cross­ing along the Red Sea and try to talk our way in. Sim­i­lar tac­tics had worked in Libya. Any­thing was bet­ter than giv­ing up.

But we never got the chance. Egypt­ian mil­i­tary firmly turned us back hun­dreds of kilo­me­ters from the bor­der. They explained that this was for our own pro­tec­tion, which thor­oughly pissed me off, as the only dan­ger­ous peo­ple around were the sol­diers them­selves. It got a lit­tle tense and we even have footage where we are argu­ing with sol­diers and secret police when they tried to grab the cam­era from Yoshiko, who held on firmly.

We drove hun­dreds of miles back up that coun­try and then down the mid­dle of Egypt to try our luck south of Luxor, along the Nile River, which is the only other road that crosses the bor­der to Sudan. Same thing. No for­eign­ers were per­mit­ted any­where near the bor­der. We were already defy­ing the rules as we were only sup­posed to travel in the inte­rior with armed mil­i­tary con­voys. We were under strict orders to desist with our activ­i­ties and return to the north of the coun­try. Instead we headed west, into the desert, skirt­ing twenty-mile loops through the sand around each mil­i­tary out­post we saw on the hori­zon. We finally arrived at Baris, a tiny oasis-town in west­ern Egypt and the last place to buy gas if you were head­ing south. Under the inquis­i­tive eyes of the locals, and under con­stant police sur­veil­lance, we filled every con­tainer we had with gas and even acquired two empty plas­tic 20-liter oil jugs, which we filled with gas and added to our col­lec­tion bring­ing our total fuel reserves up to 110 liters. We would need it. Then we went to sleep, baf­fling the poor police­man who had to sleep out­side our door.

Com­i­cally, the police­man guard­ing us to pre­vent our dri­ving south had no car! We were per­mit­ted to drive to the gas sta­tion and to a local restau­rant to eat. The police­man had to run after, arriv­ing when­ever his feet allowed. The next morn­ing we went to the same restau­rant for break­fast, but left before the police­man caught up with us. Nat­u­rally, we headed south.

That morn­ing was spent play­ing cat and mouse with the Egypt­ian mil­i­tary. We drove around four more out­posts before leav­ing the road com­pletely and head­ing straight across unmarked desert and, hope­fully, into Sudan. With no GPS, a tiny com­pass on Yoshiko’s watch, a blaz­ing sun to help nav­i­gate, and ten liters of water, we headed south by south­west into the most un-trodden desert imag­in­able. We hoped to avoid Egypt­ian mil­i­tary. We hoped to end up deep enough in Sudan before encoun­ter­ing offi­cials that it would be imprac­ti­cal for them to turn us back. And we des­per­ately hoped that even­tu­ally, head­ing in this direc­tion would run us into the Nile and some sort of civ­i­liza­tion. Quite sim­ply, our lives depended on that last point.

After a few ner­vous but very excit­ing days alone in the desert, we have suc­ceeded on all counts. I have accepted the toasted engine as the price of admis­sion to Sudan. Some bor­der cross­ings are more expen­sive than oth­ers. And now in Khar­toum, rested, show­ered, well fed, with a cold beer in hand, and pam­pered by the over­whelm­ing hos­pi­tal­ity of the Sudanese peo­ple, maybe I’m begin­ning to reassess the sit­u­a­tion– maybe Sudan is not that bad after all.

Of course, a swim­ming pool wouldn’t hurt. And air-conditioning. And a firm mat­tress. And a good mas­sage. And… well, you get the idea.

So that’s it. We are alive and well. And part of the rea­son I under­took this project was to remind myself that some­times, being alive and well is enough. That stereos, fast cars, and big-screen TVs are not required to pass sat­is­fy­ing time on this earth. That life is much big­ger than the anti­sep­tic exis­tence most peo­ple try to carve out in the West.

In Baris, Egypt, on the night before we set off alone across the dessert, I read a local expres­sion that went some­thing like this:

–The stars exist to remind man of his insignif­i­cance through the ages. The Sahara exists to remind man of his insignif­i­cance right now.

Pic­tures:
1) Load­ing the Buggy in south­ern Egypt.
2) Ille­gal bor­der cross­ing? Film it!
3) The very first Sudanese we met invited us to tea.
4) Another coun­try, another toasted engine?
5) Stay­ing cool in the Sudanese sun.

All the Pretty Faces?

The elderly Aus­trian cou­ple we met who were head­ing north in a Land Cruiser were stern in their warning:

–They throw stones in Ethiopia.

It was a fact. The kids swarmed you, begged for money, and stoned you if they did not get any. If you did not stop, they would stone your vehi­cle as you drove by. The Swiss cou­ple had had the same expe­ri­ence, and even the crazy Aus­tralian con­firmed it. Our Sudanese friends sug­gested that we wear hel­mets as it was com­mon knowl­edge that Ethiopi­ans were igno­rant and stoned for­eign­ers. In the Buggy we would be sit­ting ducks for every bored or frus­trated kid with a stone around. And there are stones every­where in Ethiopia.

–We’ll be OK, I said. The Buggy is magic.

And it was true. As we rolled through the tiny vil­lages of north­ern Ethiopia we saw kids every­where poised with stones. But when they began to real­ize exactly what they were look­ing at their mouths dropped in shock before form­ing smiles so huge that they for­got to throw the stones they held.

Ethiopia is best known to West­ern­ers as a drought-plagued bar­ren waste­land, totally depen­dent upon for­eign aid to feed its peo­ple, and con­stantly embroiled in war with Eritrea. We have all seen the pic­tures of big-eyed chil­dren with bloated bel­lies, too weak from mal­nu­tri­tion to wave away the flies on their faces. Noth­ing could be fur­ther from our expe­ri­ence. After three months in the desert, Ethiopia stands in stark con­trast with its green rolling hills, rich dark soil, forests, moun­tains, and rain. And although the per capita GNP is an absurdly low US$ 105, mak­ing it one of the poorer coun­tries in the world, there are tilled fields and graz­ing live­stock every­where. The peo­ple are active and seem healthy. And they are pretty.

My shoul­der is sore. Every time my gaze lingers too long on a beau­ti­ful young peas­ant girl with curves show­ing proudly through a thin bright dress, Yoshiko punches me in my arm. Since these girls are in every vil­lage, I get hit a lot. In another world, they might be grac­ing the cover of a fash­ion mag­a­zine. Here they are car­ry­ing huge bun­dles of fire­wood bare­foot down the road.

And they run– the men, the women, and the chil­dren– fast and sure. The whole coun­try seems to be mov­ing con­stantly. They think noth­ing of walk­ing sev­eral miles between towns or to school every day. And when they are work­ing far out in the fields and see us approach­ing, they sprint to the side of the road for a bet­ter look. All this activ­ity occurs a cou­ple kilo­me­ters above sea level, so their lungs know how to extract oxy­gen from the thin air. It is no won­der that they dom­i­nate the marathon scene so completely.

But before we could enter Ethiopia we had to get out of Sudan. We rebuilt the blown motor in the Buggy at great expense in Khar­toum. Then we replaced our high-performance Weber car­bu­re­tor with a stan­dard VW model includ­ing an orig­i­nal oil-based air-filter to bet­ter han­dle the destruc­tive dust of Africa. And we finally got exit visas. After two weeks of bureau­cratic has­sles we were free to leave the coun­try. This was no small feat. I was sus­pected of being a spy. We needed a local spon­sor who would vouch for us and accept full respon­si­bil­ity should we do any­thing wrong. Luck­ily Mohamed came to our res­cue. After days of argu­ing patiently with the author­i­ties to con­vince them that we were not work­ing for the CIA, he lost his temper.

–He is a one-armed guy trav­el­ing with a small Japan­ese woman in a tiny beach buggy for God’s sake! What do you think they are going to do?

So they finally stamped our pass­ports and we were off. But not before we got a few going away presents. Like a tank of gaso­line full of sand in Khar­toum! From a brand name oil com­pany by the way. It has wreaked havoc on us for days, and now I must remove the Buggy’s fuel tank and flush it completely.

When we finally reached the Ethiopian bor­der at Gal­la­bat in the mid­dle of the night, the police would not let us leave Sudan. The visas we had worked so hard to acquire did not include the Buggy, which had no Sudanese paper­work at all. It seamed that we were back where we started. We were informed clearly that it was impos­si­ble to exit the coun­try with­out a vehi­cle entry stamp from Don­gala, the town where we had come out of the desert and into Sudan– on the other side of the coun­try! Ethiopia and free­dom were only fifty meters away. I lost my patience.

–We ARE leav­ing, I promise you, I stated emphat­i­cally. Unless you are plan­ning to shoot us we are going to Ethiopia.

–OK then, come with me, said the police­man with a big stick.

I left Yoshiko guard­ing the Buggy. The police escorted me up the street to head­quar­ters where we woke up the area gen­eral. He came out look­ing tired and irri­tated, with two more armed police, all car­ry­ing long sticks that they did not use for walk­ing. I had an omi­nous feel­ing that I was going to get a seri­ous beat­ing. My adren­a­line was flow­ing and my fear was only superceded by my macho-pride. Peo­ple rarely fought back in these sit­u­a­tions, as they were too scared. Fear of author­ity is the whole premise of the police state. They would not expect resis­tance, so I had the ele­ment of sur­prise on my side. I could block the first blow that came with an angled fore­arm eas­ily, and then break the attack­ers nose with a well-placed elbow across his face. I would prob­a­bly have a chance to get in at least one good side-thrust kick to some­body else’s abdomen or groin before I went down under the inevitable flurry of blows. At least they would think twice before the next time they beat me.

OK, so maybe I have seen too many Hol­ly­wood movies. But I’ve also seen the inside of a few jail cells. My tac­tics work well if you don’t want to become the prison tough guy’s new “boy”, or the guard’s new “toy”. But I was not beaten. After some tense argu­ing with the Gen­eral, Yoshiko and I (and the Buggy) were politely “detained” in a vehic­u­lar lock-up area behind cus­toms. We were made as com­fort­able as our guards, who were pretty mis­er­able – but accus­tomed to it. The next day a higher-ranking gen­eral arrived and sorted things out in short order. The Gal­la­bat cus­toms sim­ply stamped the Buggy in (ille­gally) then out again! Our cap­tors (or were they our hosts?) even pro­cured us a small can of tuna to eat, a fairly lux­u­ri­ous item in those parts. They apol­o­gized for the “delay”, and were very hos­pitable about the whole mess, as their tra­di­tion dic­tates. After break­fast we were free to go.

Now, we have made it to Addis Ababa, the capi­tol of Ethiopia, with many new sto­ries to tell. The Buggy needs new motor mounts and a whole list of other repairs, so we will be here for sev­eral days. We have already befriended the owner of the local VW deal­er­ship, and are work­ing in their shop. The Ital­ians occu­pied Ethiopia briefly dur­ing Mussolini’s reign, so in addi­tion to Injira – the local foam-rubber-bread based sta­ple food – there are pizze­rias, pasta, and cap­puc­cino to help pass the time. And unlike Sudan or Libya, beer is legal here! And of course, there are all the pretty faces to look at…

I think my shoul­der is going to be sore for a while.

Next stop: Kenya!

Pic­tures:
1) Mohamed finally got us our exit visas.
2) Lunch at the VW work­shop.
3) The beau­ti­ful Ethiopian coun­try­side.
4) But the blown-up tanks were a reminder of very real prob­lems.
5) Hope the Buggy doesn’t end up like its cousin here!

White Peo­ple in Jeeps

We made it!

No, we are not in Cape Town yet. But after five months on the road we have finally made it to East Africa. We had planned to be here in five weeks. Major car trou­bles and dif­fi­cul­ties acquir­ing visas for some coun­tries almost pre­vented us from get­ting here at all. The rest of our route is rel­a­tively devel­oped from a tourist’s point of view. There are paved roads, fre­quent hotels in all cat­e­gories, and no more coun­tries that rou­tinely deny some West­ern­ers entry.

And there are lots of white peo­ple in Jeeps.

To be accu­rate, there are not many Jeeps at all, Jeep being a trade­mark for a pop­u­lar Amer­i­can four-wheel-drive vehi­cle, which has not caught on well in Africa. But there are count­less Toy­ota Land Cruis­ers and Land Rover Defend­ers. And it seems that almost half of them are dri­ven by white peo­ple. This is novel to us. Dur­ing the months we spent trav­el­ing from Tunis to Nairobi, we could count the West­ern­ers we met on my one hand. Here there are white peo­ple left over from the colo­nial days, white peo­ple work­ing, and white peo­ple on Safari. There are white peo­ple back-packing as well, and lots of over­land trucks car­ry­ing West­ern­ers who want a lit­tle more adven­ture than nor­mal – but per­haps not quite what Yoshiko and I have been through.

In a way, we miss being on our own and liv­ing “on the edge”. To be sure, we have lions and ele­phants left to encounter. Know­ing us that could get pretty excit­ing in an open car. And just last week we were locked up for a day because we acci­den­tally (that’s the truth) drove the Buggy more than half way up Mt. Kil­i­man­jaro! But it was worth it, what a moun­tain. Still, com­pared to dri­ving alone through the Sahara in order to enter Sudan ille­gally, get­ting arrested for dri­ving the Buggy up Kil­i­man­jaro seems rel­a­tively normal.

And now we are on the beach in Tan­za­nia laugh­ing about it over a beer with a bunch of rowdy over­land truck dri­vers, most of whom have some pretty inter­est­ing sto­ries to tell them­selves. Like Ben, a big, talk­a­tive Britt, who came down the same route as Yoshiko and I did through north­ern Kenya. The stretch of dirt track from Moyale, on the Ethiopian bor­der, down to Marsabit, 300 miles into Kenya, is famous for two reasons:

1) It is one of the worst “roads” in the world. Two par­al­lel ruts cut by heavy trucks through sharp, loose rocks, rang­ing in size from gravel to small boul­ders. It gave us two flat tires, the first on the trip, and dam­aged count­less other items on the Buggy, both large and small.

2) It is packed with “Ban­dits”, i.e. men with AK-47s who don’t answer to any authority.

All the nor­mally decent Masai peo­ple we saw herd­ing sheep or cat­tle were armed with machine-guns in addi­tion to their stan­dard issue spears (I’m not sure which I would pre­fer to be attacked with?). This was to defend them­selves against other peo­ple, equally well armed, per­form­ing no use­ful tasks, who rou­tinely attack them, and any­one else that comes their way. No one seems to know what these Ban­dits want or where they got their weapons. We were left in peace, even chang­ing tires in the night. Per­haps it was the magic of the Buggy? Ben, who was dri­ving a big truck, was not so lucky.

Nor­mally vehi­cles dri­ving this stretch are assigned an armed police escort. We, in a buggy with no room to spare for lux­u­ries like a police escort, were never offered this option. Ben had two police armed with auto­matic rifles rid­ing on the back of his 20-ton flatbed truck. A bit north of Marsabit the Ban­dits opened fire. The police returned fire and a full out gun-battle was on. Ben did the only thing he could; he ducked low and put his foot to the floor. Bash­ing the 20-ton truck along one of the worst roads in the world at 120 kph, he swears he had all the tires in the air at the same time on sev­eral occa­sions. When the shoot­ing stopped, the sus­pen­sion on the truck was com­pletely trashed, but every­body – at least on his side – was alive.

These are the kind of sto­ries we sit around and swap over a few beers at a camp­ground on a beau­ti­ful beach in Tan­za­nia. We have car­ried out more major repairs on the Buggy, but it is ready now, and it is time for us to head south. The big game parks in Kenya and Tan­za­nia have so far refused to let us in with an open vehi­cle. They are afraid that the lions will eat us. We of course want to film them (the lions) with the Buggy! Tomor­row we will head for Mikumi national park in south­ern Tan­za­nia. The main road runs right through that park so they can­not refuse us entry. The truck­ers all agree that chances are good there to see lions and other big game. Maybe we’ll have some good wildlife pic­tures for the Next Report.

Then it is time to start mak­ing our way to the cape. Time and money are run­ning out. More impor­tantly, it is sev­eral months since I’ve seen my kids. We are going to try to find a ship from South Africa that can carry us and the Buggy back to Europe. But we still have Malawi to cross, and pos­si­bly Botswana and Mozam­bique as well. Yoshiko wants to do some div­ing, and we are really look­ing for­ward to see­ing ele­phants and lions now. And, if his­tory is any indi­ca­tion, we prob­a­bly still have sev­eral adven­tures left on this trip. And we’ll prob­a­bly meet a lot more white peo­ple in Jeeps to tell our sto­ries to. So, until we chat again, “Hakuna Matata!”

Pic­tures:
1) Cross­ing the Equa­tor.
2) Mt. Kil­i­man­jaro!
3) Lunch while under arrest
4) And a “Kili” beer after we were released.
5) White peo­ple in jeeps.

In Praise of Bungee Cords

He was huge. An African ele­phant stand­ing four meters at the shoul­der and weigh­ing close to ten tons. Judg­ing by his tusks I sur­mised that he was still fairly young. Maybe next year he would defeat the aging dom­i­nant male in the area and take over the herd. But now he was alone.

Well, not exactly alone? I was there. Only sev­eral meters of open space sep­a­rated me from this giant. He stared at me and flapped out his ears men­ac­ingly; he was con­tem­plat­ing a charge. There was no place to hide.

I spoke calmly and clearly, address­ing him directly, “Nobody wants to fight you big guy. Just take it easy. We’re here for a few pic­tures then we’ll be on our way, OK?”

He was uncon­vinced. He took a step towards me, low­er­ing his head a bit. I stood my ground. What else could I do?

“Hey! I told you, nobody wants to fight here. I know when I’m out­gunned. So just relax Gigantor”

He was rea­son­ing things out in his head, try­ing to make sense of my words. Sud­denly he seemed to believe me. He slowly and delib­er­ately turned his back on me and headed towards the brush.

I breathed a sigh of relief. I was still alive. Then I real­ized that I had not taken his photo. Damn!

“Hey!” I yelled at him, “How about one good pic­ture before you leave!”

On my words he stopped, turned, posed majes­ti­cally while star­ing at me, and waited while I clicked a cou­ple of stills. Then he walked calmly back into the cen­tral African bush, effec­tively end­ing our con­ver­sa­tion. I stood in awe, amazed at what had just transpired.

You could pass this off as a “big fish” story, a wild exag­ger­a­tion of the facts, save for one thing; Yoshiko filmed the whole episode. And she was dumbfounded.

“You can speak to ele­phants!” she exclaimed, with a mix of adrenaline-filled exhil­a­ra­tion at what had hap­pened, and relief that we were alive. She had been just fif­teen meters behind me rolling the cam­era all the time.

“Sure” I replied coolly, happy not to have peed my pants, “I never told you that?”

Close encoun­ters of the African kind. This one took place in Malawi, where they were more relaxed about the Buggy enter­ing the game parks than they were in Kenya and Tan­za­nia. Malawi turned out to be a very friendly place. The peo­ple laugh loudly and fre­quently, espe­cially at the Buggy. All through Africa peo­ple stare and shout their approval. In Malawi they burst out laugh­ing, a joy­ous, deep, instinc­tual laugh­ter. It is a com­fort to know that our mere exis­tence makes so many peo­ple so happy.

And Lake Malawi is renowned as one of the world’s top fresh water div­ing loca­tions. Since Yoshiko is a dive instruc­tor she des­per­ately wanted to test the waters. I have always wanted to learn to dive, so we decided I would get cer­ti­fied in Malawi. Cape Maclear to be pre­cise. We drove up to the only five star (PADI) rated dive cen­ter in town, Scuba Shack, and asked them if they wanted to give me the open water course.

Now I always thought that Glenn Camp­bell was an Amer­i­can Coun­try singer. Wrong. He is the owner of Scuba Shack, a Cana­dian ex-pat, and one of the best divers in Africa. He teaches instruc­tors in all the crazy aspects of div­ing, like caves and wrecks and extreme deep water div­ing. “Tech­ni­cal Div­ing” is the term, since it involves lots of sci­ence and high-tech good­ies. He dove to 152 meters (almost 500 feet). It took one month of plan­ning, 40 min­utes to descend, two min­utes at the bot­tom, then five and a half hours back up to avoid decom­pres­sion ill­nesses (like The Bends). To avoid car­ry­ing the 17 tanks of com­pressed air that would have been required for such a dive, Glenn wore a “re-breather”, a device that detox­i­fies your exhaled air and adds pure oxy­gen so you can breathe it again. This guy is intense. And he wasn’t pulling any punches in train­ing me.

Dur­ing a lec­ture about out-of-air emer­gency maneu­vers he said, “And when begin­ners feel what its like to run out of air, it’s my expe­ri­ence that a lot of them bolt for the sur­face, which can kill you”. He stared into my eyes to see if I was a “bolter”.

“I won’t bolt,” I said, star­ing right back.

He was unmoved. “As I was say­ing, it’s my expe­ri­ence that a lot of begin­ners bolt, so I’ll grab you if you start up, to con­trol your ascent.”

“I won’t bolt,” I repeated.

Yoshiko didn’t know whether to laugh or run away. For the first time in six months there was some­one else as cocky and intense as me in the room. Could two such egos dive together?

The next day, kneel­ing on the lake floor six meters under the sur­face, Glenn gave me the sig­nal to do the out-of-air exer­cise. I con­cen­trated on my train­ing, took a deep breadth, spit out my own reg­u­la­tor, and reached for his aux­il­iary reg­u­la­tor. Time was tick­ing and my body was anx­ious for more air, but every­thing was under con­trol. I got his aux­il­iary reg­u­la­tor off his BCD, raised it to my mouth, and inhaled deeply– and sucked in as much water as air! Chok­ing twenty feet under the sur­face of the sea I pan­icked and almost bolted. But instinc­tively I sucked again, and I got more water. I was cer­tain that I would die if I did not get to the sur­face imme­di­ately. Every cell in my body was sud­denly in per­fect har­mony, and they all agreed, Bolt!

But two feet in front of my face was Glenn’s icy cold stare, bor­ing a hole in my soul and dar­ing me to stand my ground. I was actu­ally con­vuls­ing, drown­ing; yet pride held me down and forced me to con­cen­trate on Glenn for an instant. He was clearly indi­cat­ing some­thing, but what? He was rotat­ing his hand in front of his reg­u­la­tor. Sud­denly I under­stood, the aux­il­iary reg­u­la­tor in my mouth was upside down! Instantly I flipped it over and got some air into my lungs. I was still in bad shape, chok­ing vio­lently, but I had air as well. I choked into the reg­u­la­tor again and again, but with each con­vuls­ing breadth I was get­ting more air and less water into my lungs. Yoshiko claims that you can vomit into a reg­u­la­tor and just keep breath­ing through it. I hope I never have to test that. After one or two min­utes I began to calm down and breathe more nor­mally. Through­out this inci­dent Glenn sim­ply stared straight into my eyes, seem­ingly unmoved. When I finally regained my com­poser he raised his right hand and signed the ques­tion, “Are you OK?”

Rais­ing my own hand I signed back, “Yes, I’m OK.”

And I was.

And I hadn’t bolted.

So we moved directly on to the next exercise.

It was an honor to be taught by Glenn, who is nor­mally teach­ing peo­ple more expe­ri­enced than Yoshiko. His no-nonsense mil­i­tary style may seem harsh to some, but it worked for me. Two days later I was maneu­ver­ing con­fi­dently in and out of caves at 25 meters (about 80 feet) deep. And no mat­ter what hap­pens, I know I’ll never try to breathe through an upside down reg­u­la­tor again. And Glenn and I have become friends. Who would have guessed that under that tough skin was a nice guy?

Which brings us to bungee cords. Actu­ally, it does not even steer us in the gen­eral direc­tion of bungee cords, but I like a good non-sequeter now and again. Who­ever invented bungee cords is one of the unsung heroes of the 20th cen­tury. Every­thing on the Buggy is held down with the things. At times I’ve used them to hold parts of the car itself together until I could make per­ma­nent repairs. Essen­tially giant rub­ber bands with metal hooks on the ends, bungee cords are works of shear genius. There should be a hall of fame ded­i­cated to their designer. Through eight African coun­tries and thou­sands of kilo­me­ters of hor­ren­dous roads, they have never failed us once. Noth­ing has ever even fallen off the Buggy. They are amaz­ing. I hold them in the high­est esteem. Right up there with duct tape.

Now we are in Mozam­bique. Wait­ing for more car parts and doing some spec­tac­u­lar div­ing. But we have to be mov­ing along soon, there may still be a few lions to tame between here and Cape Town, like in Kruger National Park. And who knows what else? We have begun to meet a lot of South Africans and look for­ward to vis­it­ing their coun­try. They all seem as crazy as me. Wait a minute? a coun­try full of peo­ple like me? Maybe we should turn around right here! Well, stay tuned.

Ciao!

Pic­tures:
1) Break­fast in the camp­ground.
2) Good to know I’ll be ener­getic when I’m dead.
3) Sun­set over Lake Malawi.
4) This chameleon was almost a road kill.
5) Scared by the micro­phone he turned to this!

Men Are From Mars?

To con­tract a mus­cle in our body requires an elec­tri­cal impulse. Elec­tri­cal charges also jump across the gaps between the ends of our brain cells, com­plet­ing cir­cuits, result­ing in our thoughts. When the same cir­cuits are com­pleted repeat­edly, they form mem­o­ries. The human body requires and pro­duces elec­tric­ity. But com­pared to the con­sump­tion of even a sim­ple house­hold appli­ance it is an absurdly low amount of cur­rent. Which is why one of the ideas in the film “Matrix” is flawed. Intel­li­gent machines could come up with myr­iad bet­ter energy sources than farm­ing human bod­ies as liv­ing batteries.

How­ever, the basic premise – that machines will take over the world – is not only pos­si­ble, it is inevitable. When pro­cess­ing power, mem­ory, and espe­cially oper­at­ing sys­tems begin to approach human lev­els, there is no rea­son to assume they will not begin to per­form human tasks. With­out the need to eat, sleep, or pur­sue the oppo­site sex in order to repro­duce, they will be vastly more effi­cient than we are. The time required to evolve a new and improved gen­er­a­tion of mech­a­nized “beings” can be reduced to weeks, as opposed to decades for humans. It does not require a rocket sci­en­tist to see that our days are numbered.

Which is why I don’t worry too much about con­ser­va­tion. I think I should be allowed to drive my car on Euro­pean beaches. A six hun­dred kilo Buggy rolling on four fat tires doesn’t exert more pres­sure on the sand or grass than a grown up walk­ing bare­foot. And who cares if it did? Machines are going to take over the earth soon any­way. Haven’t you been pay­ing attention?

Jus­ti­fy­ing one’s actions can be very sat­is­fy­ing. A trip through Africa in a Buggy allows plenty of time to think. Hope­fully it entails a bit of per­sonal growth and matur­ing as well. I feel more grounded now than I have for some time. How­ever, accord­ing to Yoshiko, my wom­an­iz­ing ten­den­cies have not dimin­ished in the least. It is not that I chase other women while we are trav­el­ing together, I don’t. To start a fight with Yoshiko, it is suf­fi­cient that I gaze too long (too long­ingly?) at any attrac­tive woman. Why can’t I help look­ing at women? My jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is sim­ple; it is in my com­puter programming.

The oper­at­ing sys­tem that I had when I came out of the box was labeled “Male”. There­fore it is in my nature – in my basic pro­gram­ming – to mate with every fer­tile female I can in order to prop­a­gate my DNA as suc­cess­fully as pos­si­ble. It is my prime objec­tive, sur­passed only by my need for food and shel­ter. Things like edu­ca­tion, reli­gion, cul­ture, and fear of AIDS may con­spire to curb my nat­ural incli­na­tion to rav­ish every healthy female of child­bear­ing age, but they don’t sub­due it com­pletely. So I find myself look­ing at women more than I should, or at least…more than any woman I am together with appreciates.

Yoshiko was labeled “Female” and came out of the box with a very dif­fer­ent basic com­puter oper­at­ing sys­tem installed. Despite con­fus­ing details like soci­ety and birth con­trol, her pri­mary task is to find the most suit­able mate to fer­til­ize her, thereby insur­ing the best chance of a suc­cess­ful con­tin­u­a­tion of her off­spring (to prop­a­gate her own DNA). “Suit­able” used to be a much eas­ier qual­ity to quan­tify. Big­ger and stronger was bet­ter. Today other attrib­utes must be taken into account as well; things like intel­li­gence and econ­omy – any­thing that may increase the chances of suc­cess of the next gen­er­a­tion. Not long ago Bill Gates might have had trou­ble get­ting a date. Today a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of Play­boy cen­ter­folds would prob­a­bly accept him as their mate.

Despite all our fight­ing how­ever, and despite our rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent pro­gram­ming, Yoshiko and I have made it to the final coun­try on our African safari. The Repub­lic of South Africa is a place where DNA and pol­i­tics have clashed and con­gealed to form one of the most inter­est­ing coun­tries on earth. After being boy­cotted by polit­i­cally con­scious trav­el­ers like myself for many decades, in the early 90s, under F. W. De Clerk’s lead­er­ship, the white con­trol­ling Afrikaans minor­ity finally suc­ceeded suf­frage (the right to vote) to the black major­ity, effec­tively end­ing apartheid. Nel­son Man­dela was elected pres­i­dent, and the rest is his­tory. “Great” I said to myself, “Some­day I’ll have to check it out.” And that was all the thought I ever gave the matter.

Until I got here.

Wow! After years of trav­el­ing through­out the world I never expected that a coun­try with widely spo­ken Eng­lish and a highly devel­oped infra­struc­ture could sur­prise me so much. Given time I would like to explore the Xhosa and Zulu cul­tures as well as the Bush­men of the Kala­hari and the dozens of other tribes that make up South Africa. There are eleven offi­cial lan­guages! But our time is lim­ited, and the white Afrikaans cul­ture has proven most eas­ily acces­si­ble to us.

The Afrikaans are largely descended from the Dutch. The key word being largely? they are big! Dutch are big peo­ple to begin with. Then there is the inevitable fil­ter­ing process asso­ci­ated with any emi­gra­tion. The small and the weak are less likely to make the trek to a far away and chal­leng­ing place. Many Afrikaans are farm­ers, who gen­er­ally work hard and eat well. Throw into the mix a sense of being iso­lated in a fairly dan­ger­ous part of the world, and you begin to see why so many Afrikaans are big and healthy and con­fi­dent, and just a bit wild. Although I am not a large man phys­i­cally, I feel very at home here. Not unlike Amer­ica, South Africa is a land of extremes, and I find that extremes make life interesting.

Although apartheid is over, the eco­nomic dis­crep­ancy between black and white South Africans is still dra­matic. Around Johan­nes­burg for exam­ple, most whites enjoy a West­ern stan­dard of liv­ing with cars, houses, home enter­tain­ment sys­tems, com­put­ers, mobile phones and the rest. While much of the black major­ity still lives in the town­ships – large shan­ty­towns like Soweto – in con­di­tions rang­ing from mod­est to abysmal.

So obvi­ously, all extremes are not good, like extreme poverty or extreme vio­lence. When you stop at a red light and read an offi­cial road sign stat­ing “Warn­ing! Car-Jacking Zone” you have to won­der how South Africa is going to han­dle ram­pant crime, assim­i­la­tion of the mas­sive poor pop­u­la­tion into a West­ern soci­ety, racism (from both sides), tribal con­flicts, and a host of other great chal­lenges that still exist. We must hope that South Africa retains the pos­i­tive spirit of peo­ple like Man­dela, and does not go the way of neigh­bor­ing Zim­babwe, where Mugabe has obvi­ously con­tracted untreat­able syphilis, fog­ging his rea­son. No mat­ter what atroc­i­ties may have occurred his­tor­i­cally, allow­ing a band of aggres­sive blacks to humil­i­ate and even kill white farm­ers and redis­trib­ute (steal?) their land is obvi­ously not the most intel­li­gent way to address inequities.

Most of the white South Africans we meet remain pos­i­tive about the future. They are fairly com­fort­able talk­ing pol­i­tics with me, even if I delve into sen­si­tive areas. They are very proud of the coun­try, and, to our great ben­e­fit, they are some of the most hos­pitable peo­ple you could ever encounter. They spoil us with good food and cold beer, they love bar­be­quing, and we have not stayed in a hotel once since we arrived in the coun­try! Though the Buggy is not as novel here as it was in the rest of Africa, they mar­vel at the fact that we drove it down from Europe. They have writ­ten news­pa­per arti­cles about us and already fea­tured us on the national TV sta­tion, SABC. A local pub near our friend André’s house in Johan­nes­burg even made a party in our honor as if we were celebrities!

After half a year of rough­ing it through the back of beyond in unde­vel­oped Africa, it feels oddly won­der­ful to be here. The hard­ship is behind us, but the adven­ture con­tin­ues. For exam­ple, the day before yes­ter­day I had another visit to the hos­pi­tal to treat? A Lion Bite! I was play­ing with a young lioness that did not know her own strength and crunched down a bit hard on my right ankle. She was the size of a big dog, but about ten times as strong. I will sur­vive, with another great story to tell, and another inter­est­ing sequence for the film. Yes, Yoshiko had the cam­era rolling, even when I got a bunch of injec­tions that left my bum almost as sore as my ankle.

We are look­ing for­ward to the 1000 miles left to Cape Town now, and we are ready to return to Europe after that. But we expect to have even more sto­ries to tell before we leave here. The Wild Bug­gers – a Cape Town based beach-buggy orga­ni­za­tion – are threat­en­ing to meet us on the high­way when we arrive at our final des­ti­na­tion, and escort us to their club­house for a big party. There should be more media wait­ing as well. For the film and for us, South Africa seems to be turn­ing into a good fin­ish­ing line for our 25,000 kilo­me­ter African adven­ture. We’ll keep you informed.

So stay tuned!

Pic­tures:
1) Yoshiko in a good mood at a restau­rant in Mozam­bique.
2) The King! One of this guy’s daugh­ters bit my leg?
3) Look­ing for rhi­nos we got stuck in an irri­ga­tion ditch.
4) But then we found them, great white rhi­nos? wow!
5) Almost famous? Inter­viewed by SABC (national TV)

We Made It

Cape Town – the final fron­tier. These are the voy­ages of the Red­Buggy. Her mis­sion: To seek out and explore new worlds and civ­i­liza­tions, to carry us across the great expanses of Africa, to film and to enter­tain? to boldly go where no Buggy has gone before!

Captain’s Log; Star Date 2004, one hour north of Cape Town, South Africa.

We drove down out of the moun­tains through a spec­tac­u­lar pass with sheer cliffs, water­falls, and fan­tas­tic cloud for­ma­tions. A bit of cold rain reminded us that it is win­ter in South Africa, but it did not dampen our spir­its. True to their word, the Wild Bug­gers were wait­ing on the high­way a half an hour out­side of town with a bot­tle of cham­pagne and a 20 buggy strong escort to their club­house. There ensued a great bar­beque in our honor, and the beer and the con­ver­sa­tion flowed all night.

We have been received as con­quer­ing heroes in South Africa. Per­haps they have all the more appre­ci­a­tion of our jour­ney since they live on this enor­mously chal­leng­ing con­ti­nent. In good time for the end of this seven-month adven­ture my foot is dam­aged by my “play­ful” encounter with a young lioness. I won­der how many peo­ple in Swe­den will believe that a lion bit me when they ask me why I am limp­ing? And we just went cage div­ing with great white sharks! And though these sorts of things hope­fully never become rou­tine, they do feel like per­fectly nat­ural occur­rences in our day-to-day exis­tence on this trip.

But for all it’s wild­ness South Africa is also a good place to re-acclimatize to a West­ern lifestyle. I drink beer, speak Eng­lish, plan our trip home, and think about the huge process of edit­ing sixty hours of footage down to a one and a half hour film. And in between, I try to fig­ure out this amaz­ing coun­try. I have more ques­tions than answers. But at least I have fig­ured out how to describe it; South Africa is a micro­cosm of the earth. Listen.

Our planet is divided polit­i­cally between the West – includ­ing Japan, Aus­tralia, and New Zealand – and the Third World, often referred to as the devel­op­ing world. Then of course there are the NICs, or “Newly Indus­tri­al­ized Coun­tries” – for exam­ple South Korea – just to con­fuse mat­ters. But basi­cally we have divided our planet between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. Most of you read­ing this belong to the minor­ity of wealthy peo­ple liv­ing in rel­a­tive com­fort in democ­ra­cies with highly devel­oped infra­struc­tures. But the major­ity of the peo­ple in the world live in harsh con­di­tions where food and shel­ter are not taken for granted and where they have lit­tle or noth­ing to say about their sit­u­a­tion. This huge cleft between East and West – or more accu­rately between North and South – is the focus of much atten­tion in polit­i­cal sci­ence dis­cus­sions these days. We con­trol the wealth, but they account for the sky­rock­et­ing pop­u­la­tion. And we live pretty iso­lated lives, sep­a­rated by polit­i­cal bor­ders that few of us bother to cross. How can we ever hope to achieve any peace or bal­ance? An expert panel that looked at issues from nat­ural resources and food, to pol­lu­tion and waste, con­cluded that the Earth could sus­tain one and a quar­ter bil­lion peo­ple liv­ing a West­ern life style. That was the pop­u­la­tion in the year 1901. We are now over 6 bil­lion. Will the rich vol­un­tar­ily stop con­sum­ing? That is about as likely as the poor vol­un­tar­ily ceas­ing to repro­duce. But some­thing has to give? Oh I almost for­got, machines are going to take over and elim­i­nate us inef­fi­cient walk­ing chem­i­cal reac­tions so we don’t have to worry about the future, remember?

But when I do con­tem­plate this planet that my chil­dren are soon inher­it­ing, I real­ize that there is one place where the West­ern minor­ity and the unde­vel­oped major­ity are sort­ing out these chal­lenges as we speak. No, not Miami! I mean South Africa of course. This is the only coun­try where the haves and the have-nots share the same polit­i­cal bor­ders in rea­son­ably rep­re­sen­ta­tive num­bers – and the issues are many. It will be fas­ci­nat­ing to see how things develop here over the next decades. Now, I’ll stop talk­ing politics.

Yoshiko has gone shop­ping. The stores here are filled with all the famil­iar styles and brands – at half the price of the same prod­ucts in Japan. When she put on her new out­fit – a cute red top with tight black jeans – I was almost jeal­ous. She never looked like that on the road! But she did make it to the end of the line. And if you had been through what we have been through you would appre­ci­ate what an incred­i­ble achieve­ment that really was for a woman. Did I ever men­tion that Yoshiko was attacked in Ethiopia?

We were argu­ing, noth­ing new there. She had irri­tated me more than usual. Or maybe I was under extra stress and there­fore more irri­ta­ble? In any case, shortly after we entered a cheap restau­rant I stood up and told her she could go home – back to the hotel or back to Japan, I didn’t care at the time. I decided that I needed a beer alone so I walked down a main road in search of a cheap bar.

Yoshiko was angry and left too, with­out din­ner, and with no par­tic­u­lar sense of direc­tion. After a time, she decided she would try to find me. She fol­lowed the road in the direc­tion I had gone, but she was not alone. Two guys fol­lowed her. They began to bother her and ask her intel­lec­tual things like how much she charged for sex. It should be pointed out that Yoshiko reacts badly to low blood sugar lev­els, i.e. when she hasn’t eaten. These two losers had no way to know what they were get­ting them­selves into. She was angry AND hun­gry, a bad com­bi­na­tion in a Japan­ese Judo expert.

She tried to ignore them, but they pressed on. Even­tu­ally they got her annoyed and she told them where they could go in no uncer­tain terms. But they were real tough guys (do you detect a hint of sar­casm here?) and after she insulted them one punched her in the face! She took it and kept walk­ing, but cursed him out. So he hit her again. What a man. When he punched her a third time in the side of her head he caught her square on the tem­ple leav­ing a nice bruise, and Yoshiko saw stars.

And then she got mad.

She grabbed the guy who had punched her and flipped him to the ground. Though she cut her knee in the action she held him down while his brave buddy screamed at her to let him go. She says her­self that she was never too scared because there were cars pass­ing by all the time so some­one would hope­fully stop. Sure enough a UN jeep with Eng­lish speak­ing peo­ple pulled over about the same time that two local police arrived on the scene. These Ethiopian police pro­ceeded to beat the hell out of her two attack­ers with big sticks. Yoshiko was badly shaken, cut, and bruised, but basi­cally OK. She got a ride back to the hotel with the peo­ple in the jeep. I was thank­ful that the police saved me the trou­ble of track­ing down the two guys myself. I can’t help smil­ing when I think what an appro­pri­ate response these jerks got for their efforts.

As much as we have enjoyed the trip on the whole, seven months of intense inci­dents of vary­ing types have left us quite tired. After 25,000 kilo­me­ters, count­less car repairs, and even more adven­tures, we reached our final des­ti­na­tion, the Cape of Good Hope. Stand­ing on the south­ern tip of the African con­ti­nent I did a long slow zoom-in on Yoshiko and the Buggy. She posed patiently while I got a good film sequence. When she saw that I was sat­is­fied, she said sim­ply, “Let’s go home”.

One never knows what the future holds, but I am sure that I’ll see Yoshiko again? after a well deserved break. A month on the road is like a year together at home. We have shared things that no one else can ever know. Through seven years? err, I mean, seven months, we have expe­ri­enced the extremes of the African con­ti­nent in the most inti­mate way.

Now it is pos­si­ble that when Yoshiko said, “Let’s go home”, she sim­ply meant, “Let’s go back to our hotel”. But I inter­preted this com­ment to have a deeper meaning.

I under­stood it to mean that it was time for us to return to reality.

I under­stood it to mean that it was time for us to leave Africa.

And I knew that it was time for me to be with my daughters.

Char­lotte – a female Wild Bug­ger – has loaned us an empty garage in which to store the Buggy for a while, and I’ve decided to try and bring my kids down here for a few weeks around Christ­mas time. I’ll show them around South Africa, and maybe even Namibia and Botswana in the Buggy. How cool will that be! Then, I’ll ship the Buggy home. I’ll never sell it. Pernilla or Marika will inherit it when I pass on.

Right now I’m sit­ting on a Lufthansa Boe­ing 747, with plas­tic wrapped food and Teu­tonic punc­tu­al­ity. The con­trast is com­plete. I stare out the win­dow, down at the great sands of the Sahara that we drove over just a few months ago, and it seems like years. I’ll let you know how things are back in Swe­den in a cou­ple of weeks. I’m curi­ous myself. Until then remem­ber the old saying:

An adven­ture a day keeps the doc­tor away.

Pic­tures:
1) Not all the Wild Bugger’s cars were blue.
2) We felt very wel­come in South Africa.
3) Cape Town is one of the most spec­tac­u­lar cities in the world.
4) That’s four meters of great white shark cir­cling our boat.
5) Anton cooks up a fiery meal at the sec­ond party held in our honor.

Kerry vs. Bush

Even the worst Hol­ly­wood film has at least one good line. In “Bad Girls” four for­mer har­lots try­ing to leave the wild-west behind wan­der into a bandit’s hide­out in Mex­ico. The dumb blonde (Drew Bar­ry­more) speaks to the hard­ened out­law (Robert Loggia):

- Bar­ry­more, “We’re going to Ore­gon! We’re going to be farmers!”

- Log­gia, “Ore­gon huh? I’ve been there. They got too much rain, and too many laws. And I don’t like either one.”

Which pretty much sums up Swe­den for me.

Our mem­o­ries are very selective.

My mother died just after I turned eleven and my father was ill equipped to han­dle seven kids on his own. Psy­chol­o­gists labelled me a trou­bled youth. I took drugs, stole motor­cy­cles, got into fights, and rarely attended school. But grow­ing up was a won­drous time; I had the world by the tail. Lack­ing money for extreme sports, I cre­ated my own excite­ment. We, as a fam­ily, had real pain and hard­ship, but I loved my child­hood. I am genet­i­cally pre­dis­posed to enjoy­ing life – a nat­ural born hedo­nist with a need for speed -, which is why I loved doing this movie. I had a cool car, a hot babe, and an exotic des­ti­na­tion?

Talk about being in one’s element.

No, I haven’t for­got­ten about AK-47 wield­ing sol­diers, close calls with ele­phants, the lion bite, the death-defying entry into Sudan, or the loss of my appen­dix. Or that the only thing more chal­leng­ing than keep­ing the car together turned out to be keep­ing its occu­pants together. Yoshiko and I fought about every­thing includ­ing the weather, though it was sunny nearly every day. But mem­o­ries of pain and dif­fi­culty recede. Soon only the won­der and the romance will remain. I feel ready to do it all again.

But first I will edit the film. I’m broke and I have no money to live on, so I have to sell my Porsche to fin­ish mak­ing this movie, and that hurts. But what the hell, after I sweep the Acad­emy Awards, I’ll replace it with a yacht. Mean­while, I’m mak­ing up for lost time with my daugh­ters, who remind me by their mere exis­tence that I am blessed.

A few years ago British researchers iso­lated a sub­stance in the human body that makes peo­ple crave excite­ment. E-types have more of this stuff than nor­mal folks do and thrive on adren­a­line. They need to chal­lenge them­selves. They tend to live on the edge.

In Stock­holm, we have a wash­ing machine, a dryer, and a dish­washer in our apart­ment. We have four com­put­ers on-line. When I’m alone I surf porno sites. Only the free ones. I fear that the world – through some cyber-magic I can­not com­pre­hend – may find out what I’m doing if I give out my credit card info on the Net. When I’m not jerk­ing off I engage in men­tal mas­tur­ba­tion and dream myself away to the South Pacific aboard a sail­ing boat. I wan­der naked into the kitchen for some food, then flop onto the couch to eat in front of a 32 inch Trini­tron and watch intel­lec­tu­ally stim­u­lat­ing pro­grams like Ricky Lake. No won­der they invented gyms.

I am home.

It feels strange.

The seven-month adren­a­line rush is over and I am expe­ri­enc­ing with­drawal symptoms.

The pres­i­den­tial elec­tions do noth­ing to cheer me up either. On the one side we have an inde­ci­sive and unin­spir­ing wimp who looks bet­ter suited to being an accoun­tant than the most pow­er­ful man in the world. On the other side is a dan­ger­ous evan­gel­i­cal preacher who looks good in still pic­tures but is down­right embar­rass­ing when he opens his mouth. Is this really the best Amer­ica has to offer? Did you know that George bush lit­er­ally believes that every­one in the world who has not accepted Jesus Christ as his or her sav­iour is des­tined to eter­nal damna­tion? That scares me.

I don’t have a big issue with the war in Iraq. Many peo­ple didn’t when it started. It is the sort of thing that is extremely easy to crit­i­cize now that it is not going well. And while not hon­our­ing the Kyoto Agree­ment appears incred­i­bly stu­pid today, it is actu­ally irrel­e­vant since Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence will take over the planet and the envi­ron­ment will become the robots’ prob­lem. My biggest gripe with Bush is sim­ple; I believe that a pre­req­ui­site to hold­ing the office of Pres­i­dent of the United States of Amer­ica should be lit­er­acy. After the first Kerry/Bush debate the other night it became obvi­ous to me that George Bush can­not speak Eng­lish. I worry that this fact may send a “mexed mis­sage” (Bush’s words exactly) to the world about America’s abil­ity to lead. So I’m vot­ing for Kerry.

I get more depressed by the politi­cians and so-called film experts I encounter here than I did by the bor­ing bureau­crats that we had to deal with on the road. Before we left Swe­den for Africa we pro­duced a demo-film. You can see it by click­ing on the clap­board on this page. I used it to try to raise money for the movie. I approached the town­ship of Got­land (where I had a night-club and a radio sta­tion) hop­ing for some pos­i­tive coop­er­a­tion. After a meet­ing dur­ing which rep­re­sen­ta­tives dili­gently watched the DVD – that had been pro­duced on their island – they said there was noth­ing they could do with the film. I left them a copy hop­ing they would change their minds. They did.

After all we have been through on the road, after our won­der­ful recep­tion in South Africa by the media and the peo­ple there, and after suc­ceed­ing in every­thing we set out to accom­plish, I returned home to find a sum­mons from the police. Got­land – the town­ship – is bring­ing me up on charges of dri­ving the Buggy off-road. That is against the law in Swe­den. And they are using the demo-film I left them as evi­dence against me.

Wel­come home.

Pic­tures:
1) The rea­son I’m in Swe­den.
2) The infa­mous lion bite.
3) Good-bye sweet Porsche, you served me well!
4) My bed at home is a bit too com­fort­able.
5) What I’ll buy after I take home an Oscar?

Sex, Love, Life and the Tsunami

I am a dreamer.

I mean lit­er­ally. When I sleep I have fre­quent and extremely vivid dreams, which I often remem­ber in detail.

At the end of the eight­ies I lost my left arm in a motor­cy­cle acci­dent. I was a grown man with a strong self-image. In my dreams I con­tin­ued to have two arms. I won­dered how long it would take for my sub­con­scious to get wise to real­ity? It never did. I still ride motor­cy­cles in my dreams. I per­form stren­u­ous, even heroic deeds in my dreams. And I always have two arms. I still see myself as a strong and decent two-armed man. Though that “decent” aspect could be brought into ques­tion as well.

Years ago I got involved with an unusu­ally beau­ti­ful woman. Pic­ture Uma Thurman’s char­ac­ter in Pulp Fic­tion – but with con­sid­er­ably bet­ter curves – and you begin to get a pic­ture of Sari. Wher­ever she went heads turned, and not just on guys. I believe we were des­tined to bring calm to each other’s rest­less souls. But she had been born with a face that gave her lit­tle peace. And fate had bestowed me with an abnor­mal lust for life, and for women. Our rela­tion­ship was very sex­ual. We made “Nine and a Half Weeks” look like a Dis­ney car­toon. We were doomed from the start.

Sari was a fighter. She loved to argue. She some­times got vio­lent. I could deflect her blows, but I was glad that she never had a knife at those times. I felt bad after these argu­ments, shocked, hurt, and depressed. Sari would march out the door. Three hours later she would be back as if noth­ing had hap­pened. Was this an inge­nious way to blow off steam, or com­plete insan­ity? The only thing that could com­pete with our fight­ing was our sex.

My father said, “Tom, if you want the high-voltage, you’ve got to expect a few sparks”.

Sari had a huge heart to match her tem­per. She could be warm and sen­sual. At those times I felt I was the luck­i­est man on earth – with the most incred­i­ble woman. But our emo­tional roller coaster ride was mak­ing us both ill. As our sex got wilder, our fights got meaner. She screamed and yelled and walked away. And I learned the things to say to really hurt her. She worked on me and I worked right back. It was awful. I began to reduce her self-image. Instead of get­ting her help, I made her feel stu­pid. Revenge is not always sweet.

Mean­time in a par­al­lel dimen­sion – our sex-life was out of con­trol. We pro­gressed from exhaust­ing the Kama-Sutra a few hours every day – to employ­ing whips and chains and all man­ner of toys in our daily activ­i­ties. Sex became our main pas­time, and we were very good at it.

Back on planet Earth we had another bru­tal argu­ment. This time, instead of her walk­ing out, I threw her out. It was not a big deal… I knew she would come back.

I was wrong.

Each day I waited for her call, or her knock. I was too proud to con­tact her. The amaz­ing thing was not that it had finally ended, but that it had lasted two years. Humans are weak. Lone­li­ness and fear of the unknown con­spire to keep us in rela­tion­ships long after we should move on. Sari and I should have bro­ken up as soon as the bad feel­ings we gave each other out­weighed the good ones.

I still had a lot of her stuff in my house. She main­tained her own apart­ment, but had lived with me for two years. Her pos­ses­sions were both­er­ing me. I needed clo­sure. I packed her stuff in a few big bags. I had her key and decided to dump the bags at her house while she was at school. I’d lock her door behind me, and then throw the key in through the mail slot. Bril­liant. Life post-Sari could go on.

Of course, I hadn’t counted on find­ing her with an ex-lover. A Swedish news anchor I had heard about from her – includ­ing his mediocre bed­room per­for­mances. She was just using him to get over me, but at the moment I could not think of any­thing except the blow some­one had just dealt to my abdomen. I could not breathe. Sari yelled at me for arriv­ing unan­nounced. The guy dis­ap­peared before I knew what hap­pened. I sim­ply left the bags in her hall and walked out. I was tough. I’d be fine.

Five blocks down the road I had to pull the Porsche over. I was sick.

Bot­tles of liquor could not knock me out. I was in bad shape and get­ting worse. My sec­re­tary threw me out of my own office. I met a jerk at a party at four in the morn­ing who said I looked like shit (I did) so I broke his nose. More bot­tles of liquor – and more insom­nia. I began to hal­lu­ci­nate. I lay on my bed and saw my chest ripped open and my insides pour­ing out onto the floor like a Dali paint­ing. I lost touch with real­ity. Tem­po­rary insanity…

In my warped mind I sum­moned my best writ­ing skills and described in detail the extreme sex­ual exploits of Sari and myself. For good mea­sure I quoted Sari’s own descrip­tion of the guy’s com­i­cal machismo. I did my best to see to it that she would feel as bad as I did and that he would never be able to per­form in bed with her again. Then I packed our con­sid­er­able col­lec­tion of sex­ual imple­ments into a pack­age along with the let­ter and couri­ered it to the guy’s job at primetime.

I sent a copy to Sari.

I was feel­ing pretty smug. That would teach her not to mess with me.

I was rather sur­prised two days later when four police barged into my house and arrested me. I was thrown into soli­tary con­fine­ment with­out explanation.

Appar­ently Sari had no sense of humor at all.

She should have gra­ciously accepted defeat at the hands of a heavy­weight cham­pion like me; instead she took off the gloves and exacted her revenge. She walked into the Stock­holm police and told them that for the last two years I had been beat­ing her – abus­ing her physically.

I don’t beat women. After enjoy­ing the hos­pi­tal­ity of the Swedish state for a week the DA assigned to my case real­ized her mis­take and sent me home with­out an apol­ogy. But I knew in my heart that I was not com­pletely inno­cent. I had been abus­ing Sari men­tally, reduc­ing her self-image. I was guilty of mak­ing Sari feel bad about her­self. She had been wrong to lie to the police about me. But she had been right to leave me. Life is hard enough. We should not spend it with peo­ple who make us feel worse about ourselves.

We live and we learn. Some­times too late.

Armed with this hard-won knowl­edge, one might think I could have been more mag­nan­i­mous with Yoshiko when we fought in Africa. Her behav­ior is sim­i­lar to Sari’s. Yoshiko reg­u­larly gets so mad – often for no appar­ent rea­son – that I sus­pect I may never see her again. Hours later she is danc­ing around as if noth­ing happened.

Dejá-vu.

And Yoshiko fell in love. And I remained aloof.

After Africa I knew I needed a break. Yoshiko did not want to part ways, but I did not offer an alter­na­tive. So she went back to Japan. She is a dive instruc­tor and began look­ing for work. We spoke on the phone and e-mailed and chat­ted. We even got web-cams and tried cyber-sex. But it is not the same thing as being together. She was des­per­ate for my com­pany. So I went to visit her, but the dam­age had already been done.

Japan is noth­ing like I expected. I thought it would be as clean and orderly as Swe­den. It was more like the States, with huge indus­trial waste­lands, and cock­roaches on dirty street-cafe walls. And Tokyo is the only other city in the world with a pulse like New York. Yoshiko and I man­aged to argue even in Japan. So I hitch­hiked alone to Mt. Fuji to get some peace… and it broke her heart. You see to her – like to Sari – the fight­ing means noth­ing, but the sep­a­ra­tion means everything.

After I returned to Kobe we spent another week together, but the magic was gone. Soon it was time for her to leave Japan and start a new job at a resort in the Mal­dives, and for me to return to Stock­holm and cut this film.

We stayed in touch by e-mail. Yoshiko told me of her prob­lems adjust­ing to her new life. The for­eign work­ers hated their con­tract peri­ods on the resort, unless they were lucky enough to find a lover to help pass the time. The writ­ing was on the wall. In just a few weeks she hooked up with a 23-year-old Aus­tralian. That chap­ter in my life was over. But it still hurt.

Then came the Tsunami.

The Mal­dives are a group of islands south of India. Most are not more than a meter or two high. The wave washed right over the island Yoshiko was work­ing on, destroy­ing most of the lighter struc­tures. No one was killed but the resort will be closed for months to come. She and I started talk­ing again. Brad Pitt went back to Oz and Yoshiko returned to Japan, shocked, bored, and lonely. I took the oppor­tu­nity to invite her to visit me. Soon after she arrived we ran off to share the African sun again. But it is not the same.

Yoshiko is con­fused – her heart is torn. We fight as much as ever, but the sex is not as good or as fre­quent as it used to be. She is in con­trol now, and some­times abuses her new­found inde­pen­dence over me. I want to be happy for her. But mostly I am sad. Mostly she makes me feel bad. And my self-image is diminishing.

Last night I had a dream. I was walk­ing down a street in Man­hat­tan. The US was suf­fer­ing under for­eign occu­pa­tion. There were demon­stra­tors in the street. The occu­py­ing forces con­trolled the city’s park­ing and a curly-haired for­eign meter-maid wear­ing glasses was walk­ing ahead of me after hav­ing just issued a ticket. A big, good-looking, and very ath­letic Amer­i­can woman lost her tem­per and started harass­ing the meter-maid. I smiled. I did not like meter-maids or the occu­py­ing forces. But the sit­u­a­tion got ugly. The harass­ment turned vio­lent. Other peo­ple began to join in. An ori­en­tal man came to the aid of the meter-maid only to be attacked as well. The crowd began to throw things, fruits and garbage, even stones. Sud­denly it was like a scene with a Jew­ess run­ning for her life in Nazi Germany.

The meter-maid was scared, cry­ing, hurt, and des­per­ately try­ing to escape. The hand­some ath­letic woman caught her and knocked her down in a deep pud­dle. She put her foot firmly on the other woman’s head hold­ing her under­wa­ter, effec­tively drown­ing her, and pos­ing tri­umphantly. The mob cheered. I was fright­ened, but I had seen enough. I elbowed my way to the front of the crowd.

I decided to wres­tle the big woman’s foot off the other one’s face. If she fell, too bad. If she hit me, I could take it. If any guy in the crowd hit me, I would hit him back as hard and as quickly as I could. My pri­mary con­cern was to buy time for the meter-maid to escape – I knew I would sur­vive. I dropped down on one knee in the pud­dle beside them. I would place one hand firmly around the big woman’s ankle and jerk it up. I would grab the drown­ing girls head with my other hand free­ing her from the water and hope she had the sense and strength to run while I held the angry crowd at bay. I had to act fast…

NOW!

Then sud­denly it dawned on me… I only had one arm.

Pic­tures:
1) Hitch­hik­ing in Japan.
2) Yoshiko’s sis­ter Yuko invites us to lunch.
3) Hand-fed by a Japan­ese Princess.
4) Sushi on a con­veyor belt… and beer!
5) Did I men­tion that I would miss Yoshiko?

My Work Here is Done

Sam­ple Our Film Now!

After some tech­no­log­i­cal set­backs we have pro­duced a rep­re­sen­ta­tive six-minute trailer. We will use it as a teaser to drum up com­mer­cial inter­est in the project. We hope you enjoy our work so far; just click here to watch. It is a big file so you should have a fast con­nec­tion. Make sure your speak­ers are on, set your player to full screen, and enjoy!

How­ever, there is con­sid­er­able work left before the film is done and the title of this update refers to some­thing else completely…

The year is 1995. I am on my way to work via the day­care cen­ter where I will drop off my two daugh­ters; Pernilla aged 4, and Marika who is 2. Noth­ing will stand in the way of my suc­cess with Ban­dit, a radio sta­tion I recently founded. Ignor­ing the chat­ter of my kids in the back seat I am lis­ten­ing to our morn­ing pro­gram, talk­ing to my sec­re­tary on the car phone, and con­tem­plat­ing my strat­egy for a 9 AM meet­ing with Bon­niers – the pow­er­ful Swedish media con­glom­er­ate that is attempt­ing a hos­tile take-over of the sta­tion. I have been work­ing 15-hour days for more than a year. My mar­riage is already on the rocks. My social life con­sists of the occa­sional VIP party where I drink too much, sleep too lit­tle, and then go right back to work.

“Dad… ” It is Pernilla from the back seat.

“What?” It is a con­di­tioned response and does not indi­cate real inter­est on my part.

“DAD…” she is calm but deter­mined. Her per­sis­tence indi­cates that she requires actual atten­tion from me before she will deliver her question.

I hang up the phone and turn down the radio. With irri­tated res­ig­na­tion I glance in the rear-view mir­ror at Pernilla’s inquis­i­tive eyes.

“What IS it Pella?”

She deliv­ers her line matter-of-factly and with­out a trace of accusation.

“Dad, right now you are really busy with work at Ban­dit and stuff – but when we get older you are going to have more time for us, right?”

Marika, at two, can­not fully com­pre­hend the sig­nif­i­cance of her big sister’s state­ment – but she stares qui­etly at me as well. With moist eyes I stop the car, com­pose myself, and turn to face my kids.

“No Pernilla, I’m going to have more time for you start­ing right now”

Since that day I have strug­gled to keep my word. Despite trav­els and some time con­sum­ing projects I have cul­ti­vated deep rela­tion­ships with both of my chil­dren. Recently an old friend wit­nessed me laugh­ing and talk­ing with my daugh­ters and com­mented that my invest­ment in them would pay off for­ever. I think I glowed.

Swe­den has remained my base for the last sev­eral years despite being too cold for me. Recently my chil­dren gave me their per­mis­sion to push on, and we have set­tled upon Barcelona as a des­ti­na­tion – at least for a while. There are direct flights for the kids who are plan­ning to be there often. With an afternoon’s travel time and no jet­lag, week­end vis­its are no prob­lem. A Swedish friend and busi­ness asso­ciate there has already arranged an office and a three-bedroom apart­ment. We have an inter­ac­tive radio sta­tion to launch (www.tomsradio.com) and I will fin­ish this film.

AND… I will not be alone; Yoshiko will be join­ing me.

The old joke about women – can’t live with them and can’t live with­out them – comes to mind. After the last update Yoshiko returned to Japan and I resigned myself to a future with­out her. When mutual sep­a­ra­tion anx­i­ety got the bet­ter of us we got together in Barcelona for a month and had a lot more fun than we had in Feb­ru­ary. But we were still not sure we wanted to live together. I returned to Swe­den to con­sult my kids about mov­ing – and Yoshiko went to Bali to teach div­ing. Just when I sus­pected that the amorous aspect may have run its course in our rela­tion­ship, the trop­i­cal sun soft­ened her brain and she fell madly in love with me… again.

And I was glad.

Yoshiko and I are from two dif­fer­ent worlds; and we are both pas­sion­ate, tem­pera­men­tal, and impa­tient. As with any worth­while ven­ture there are risks involved – and a bro­ken heart is no laugh­ing mat­ter. We have a hard road ahead with pot­holes as big as Sudan’s no doubt. But with­out tak­ing risks life would prob­a­bly not be worth liv­ing. And expe­ri­ence has taught me not to be afraid of love. We sur­vived Africa – so I guess we have a chance to sur­vive anything.

We have dis­cussed briefly the idea of pilot­ing the Buggy back from Cape Town to Europe along Africa’s west coast, and Yoshiko is already demand­ing that she be allowed to drive a lot more than on the trip down. Smells like dis­sention brewing…

But my kids are fan­tas­tic, Yoshiko and I are in love, I’m mov­ing to the sunny south of Europe, and there is new work to be done there.

Did I men­tion that beer only costs a dol­lar in Spain?

To quote Desider­ata – With all its sham, drudgery, and bro­ken dreams, it is still a beau­ti­ful world. Be cheer­ful. Strive to be happy.

And enjoy the trailer!

Pic­tures:
1) Marika and Pernilla in the 90s.
2) Yoshiko above Sit­ges, Spain.
3) Tom on a Barcelona beach.
4) The mar­ket in Barceloneta…
5) And a cold beer we bought there!