The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (41 page)

Being a resident, I had earned the points toward this reward, but to redeem them I had to become a traveler. (A pilgrim, one of the most venerable types.) The second identity strengthened my already ineradicable ties to the country.

When I started traveling professionally, I was surprised and delighted to find that I could still make emotional connections to places. I discovered this for the first time in Portugal, where—after having schlepped around Spain—I met a young Dutch woman who introduced me to her friend, a colorful poet, who invited me to dinner (this after weeks of solitary meals) and then took me to a dive to hear men singing fado. It was in Lisbon that I discovered the secret of travel writing, which is also the secret of memorable travel: you approximate, as best you can, in the short time allotted you, the life of a local. Once back home and writing, I stumbled upon another secret: the
best
trips make the best stories. Though I had known this in theory from books like Patrick Leigh Fermor's
A Time of Gifts
and
Between the Woods and the Water,
which are nearly as crammed with friends as they are with learning.

I divide places I visit into two types: those I like okay (a part of one's critical skills is an ability to find what's attractive), write about, and don't think about much, and those that, in some fundamental way, touch me, and continue to haunt. This group, in order of appearance in my life, is made up of Alsace, Poland—both places I lived and worked—Portugal, Mexico, Vietnam, Turkey, Lithuania, and Brazil.

For someone who travels for a living, it might appear to be a surprisingly short list. Its size would seem to support Malcolm's theory of the “low-key emotional experience” of travel; its content, for the most part, my belief that the less-visited places often produce the most meaningful trips. In Spain I toured the guidebook cities—Madrid, Barcelona, Seville—where, not surprisingly, no one was particularly curious about foreigners. Many of the residents, you got the feeling, had had quite enough of us. Lisbon, off to the side, on the lower edge of the continent, was not besieged and, subsequently, was much more welcoming. Among other things, the Portuguese speak the best English in southern Europe (outside of Gibraltar and Malta). Sevillaños made me feel like a tourist; Lisboners made me feel like a guest.

Like most everybody who's been there, I love Italy. I've visited seven times, and every time I arrive in the country I feel happy, even when taking a train from France, a country I lived in and whose language I speak. The French, André Gide said, are Italians in a bad mood. (Alsatians are different, at least the farmers I worked with, who had little of the Gallic discontent.) I've had wonderful experiences in Italy, like most people who've been there; I've met good people and, with some of them, I've become friends. Yet I've never felt the emotional bond with Italy that I feel with Vietnam—possibly because there are so many people vying for her affections. She is the most popular girl in the school. I love Italy, but I've never gotten the feeling that Italy loves me back.

Loving the unloved, you assume the feeling is mutual. You may be wrong, as travelers often are. But it doesn't change the nature of your affection, or your relationship with the people you get talking to at the post office who invite you to their home, cook you dinner, and refill your glass and tell you stories of life under a dictatorship. At the end of the night, they insist on escorting you back to your hotel, where you exchange phone numbers and e-mail addresses. At that moment the place stops being just the site of your vacation; it becomes the home of your friends. It takes on a significance, and enters your heart.

FROM
Outside

 

D
AY ONE IS THURSDAY,
and we roll out of Juba, South Sudan, in the ambassador's official ride, a Toyota Land Cruiser in spotless white. The driver's door is showered with gold stars across a familiar sky-blue flag and the words
L'UNION EUROPÉENNE
,
the heraldry of someone who matters in this vast, imperiled infant of a nation.

The someone is Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, a lean, 55-year-old German, and ambassador, who is not the German ambassador. Sven actually holds an obscure but equivalent title, commissioner, and represents the European Union as a whole. That makes him a kind of supranational diplomat for 27 nations, with a major say in the spending of $395 million in European aid to South Sudan over the next two years. A former commando, he once toughened his feet by running barefoot in the snows of Lower Saxony and jumps out of airplanes to relax. I personally will hear him speak five languages before this trip is over. Also in the Land Cruiser are Italian photographer Marco Di Lauro and Sven's son David, a bushy-headed 26-year-old surfer and International Medical Corps programs officer already hardened by years of rolling around Africa chasing big waves.

The ambassador has a paraglider in the back of the Land Cruiser, crammed in with camping gear, food, and bottled water. We are headed out of the dismal capital, driving south for four hours toward the Imatong Mountains, where we hope to find and summit Mount Kinyeti, at 10,456 feet the highest peak in the country. The ambassador wants to tour the south of South Sudan, get some exercise, and then fling himself off the peak in his paraglider, avoiding a crash landing in the central African jungles while claiming some fun distinction like First Unpowered Descent from a Place No One Has Heard Of. The only problem as we leave town late Thursday: von Burgsdorff mentions that he has to be back in Juba on Sunday afternoon, which leaves us just Friday and Saturday to make a hike that should take three days.

But what are schedules out here? Only 15 minutes outside Juba we're held up by a potential land mine, one of untold numbers believed to be scattered around South Sudan after the 22 years of civil war that led to its independence from Sudan. A cluster of cars is pulled to the side, the passengers sitting under a tree, and down the road are a pair of armored bulldozers operated by remote control.

Ambassador Sven spends the break speed-reading a thick report on a typical messy dilemma in South Sudan: how to join the International Criminal Court without destroying relations with the nation's neighbor and former overlord, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, an indicted war criminal who holds the key to negotiating an oil deal. Sven makes neat marks in the margins and then fires up his satellite phone. With the thoughtless ease of a Type A
Übermensch,
he rocks four of his five languages in a couple of minutes: French with a colleague, English when reading back text, German to his son, and then, calling out the window to ask about the land mine, some Juba Arabic, a common dialect among soldiers and policemen here.

The robot bulldozers soon flatten whatever it is they've uncovered. There is no explosion. The road opens, and we start crawling forward again.

 

The newest country in the world is physically large—240,000 square miles, the size of France—and catastrophically ungoverned. It is a featureless grassland for most of its open, landlocked run. South Sudan is a landscape without clear divisions or functioning borders, touching Sudan and the Arab world to the north and the troubled Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central African Republic to the west, with East Africa pressing up from below. The waters of the Nile and thick seasonal rains drive a wedge of green grass across plains teeming with animals. National Geographic explorer Mike Fay made global headlines in 2007 when he completed the first aerial survey in 25 years and estimated that there were 1.3 million animals flowing across it, a great migratory river of white-eared kob and other antelope and gazelles dotted with a stash of elephants and a handful of species—including beisa oryx and Nile lechwe antelope—existing nowhere else on earth. Finding this many unknown animals anywhere was like finding El Dorado, Fay said at the time; finding them in war-torn Africa was even better.

Though no one has counted in decades, there might be 10 million people, too. South Sudan is quilted internally by some 60 tribes, many of them nomadic herders with long-standing antagonisms. But a year before my visit, on July 9, 2011, the Dinka, Nuer, Bari, Azande, and dozens of others came together to declare independence and raise the tricolor flag—black, red, and green—of a new nation. The president, a Dinka and former military officer named Salva Kiir, favors black cowboy hats and lives in hotels. A disorganized parliament struggles to create a host of new ministries out of empty buildings, and the national archives are a pile of crumbling documents on the floor of a tent.

Independence has added innumerable corrupt factions, including newly enriched local businessmen from the Tribe of Hummers. South Sudan is not a society in recovery: there never was any real infrastructure, government, civil society, rules, laws, or rule of law here, so there is nothing to recover. Instead it's a scratch country, invented as a solution to an insoluble problem of semipermanent war and defined by what it lacks. There is no electrical grid, no mail service, almost no roads even of the dirt kind, and perhaps a few hundred miles of asphalt if you count every paved block in Juba. The have-nots have a lot of not: barely a smidgen of schools, almost no health care, a population living on zero dollars per day in a subsistence-farming economy where cattle are traded like currency. There are more guns than people who can read; refugee camps are more common than towns; snow would be easier to find than a road sign.

South Sudan was carved from the much larger, Arab-dominated country of Sudan, the last in a series of remote governments, from ancient Egypt through the Ottoman Empire, which viewed the south chiefly as a source of converts or slaves. In the 19th century, British explorers traced the routes of the Blue and White Niles but left little impression on the land and evacuated in 1956, leaving the northerners—typically pale-skinned Arabs from Sudan's capital, Khartoum—in charge. The vast open spaces became a kind of formless border between the Middle East and Africa, with Muslims in the north and black Africans, often Christian or animist, in the south.

When people talk about the war here, they have several to choose from. They might mean the anti-British struggle of the 1950s or the coups and countercoups of the 1970s, but they probably mean the south-versus-north war that broke out in 1983 and lasted 22 years. In general, all the wars have pitted central authority in Khartoum against the margins, including the Darfur genocide that began in 2003 in Sudan's far west. The war in the south featured the same genocidal tactics as in Darfur but ran longer, immobilizing the region for decades.

Unlike Darfur, which still lingers under Sudan's rule, the southerners actually won. Hiding in the countryside, they wore out the Khartoum regime, which agreed to a peace treaty in 2005. More than five years later, a massive deployment by the UN helped midwife a truly independent South Sudan, and former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton and current ambassador Susan Page both pushed hard to make the peace deal stick. In 2011, USAID and other agencies spent more than $100 million on everything from schools to refugee camps, including an impressive array of road-building projects. That's only a quarter of the money promised by the U.S., but this year's budget calls for $244 million, easily the largest aid package in South Sudan, and Sven's European Union is also investing heavily in rural development and “capacity building,” the euphemism for helping the South Sudanese construct a government that isn't corrupt.

Good luck with that. President Kiir recently sent a pleading letter to his ministers asking for the return of $4 billion that he said had gone missing. Oil will be as much curse as blessing: some 75 percent of the old Sudan's oil fields are just inside the southern territory, while the only two pipelines go north, through Khartoum to the Red Sea. Since independence, relations between Sudan and South Sudan have declined rapidly, the north withholding payments for southern oil, the south retaliating by withholding the oil itself. (South Sudan lost 98 percent of its government revenues; the north was hurt almost as badly.) Meanwhile, continuing outbreaks of violence have threatened to ruin everything, and despite a new deal to restart the flow of oil and cash, neither was moving during my visit in late 2012. South Sudan had the desperate, inflated feel of a wartime country dependent on charities and aid, with Chinese contractors waiting in the wings for their turn.

Maybe the fighting will stop. Maybe the oil will start. But no matter what happens, almost anything will be an improvement.

 

Day two and the air is wet and warm, the voice of Africa a low rumble of water from a deep cleft. Somewhere down below the flat acacia trees, hidden in thick green bush, is Imatong Falls. South Sudan's other great resource is water, pouring copiously out of the high southern hills toward the northern deserts. We catch only a brief glimpse of the heavy, rushing cascade along with our first peek at the steep and jagged mountains overlooking the tree-filled valleys. Then we move on without pause. Sven is setting the pace and it is fast. No time for soaking our toes or for anything but walking.

The day before, in the Land Cruiser, the von Burgsdorffs engaged in what diplomats would call a frank discussion about the extent of paved roads in South Sudan.

“One thousand kilometers,” Sven said.

“No, Papa! No!”

“Yes, for sure. Minimum.”

“No, Papa. A thousand? You're crazy. It's like a hundred.”

Sven began naming towns with a few paved blocks here and there. “He's counting every sidewalk!” David shouted from the back. They could go at each other like this five times an hour, merciless, relentless, and still laughing. Sven takes pride in his son—even more in walking him into the ground and eating weirder things. If David surfs with great whites in Cape Town, Sven parachutes off a high cliff above Juba into the arms of waiting policemen (actual story). Somewhere between the dismal reality (a hundred kilometers of asphalt) and the diplomatic optimism (a thousand) is the real South Sudan, the one that matters.