The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (42 page)

It was night by the time we plunged down the final miles of the road south, passing the town of Torit and arriving in a small village called Kitere at the very end of the road ruts. We woke up on the dirt floor of a hut in darkness. “The adventure starts where the road ends,” Sven offered, and nothing was a cliché at 5:40
A.M.

Once we've gathered a guide and a few porters from Kitere—a biblically named crew called Daniel, David, Simon, John, and Joseph—we start ascending steeply up through fields of 10-foot-tall sorghum on a muddy path no wider than a single man. Even this begins to fade quickly, and after passing a few final primitive huts and cornfields, we climb an ever narrower track, slippery clay sending us crashing down repeatedly. Sunrise makes it clear that our route to Mount Kinyeti—about 31 miles round-trip, by Sven's calculation—will be painful. Impenetrable brush closes over the trail, which is soon reduced to a hunters' trace used by outsiders only about once a year. Daniel says he's brought five previous groups to the mountain since 2005.

We cross five streams the first morning: the first two are bridged, after a fashion, the logs wet with the spray of tumbling whitewater. The next streams aren't bridged at all. The guides, sure-footed in sandals or rubber boots, leap from rock to rock; I fall in once and use all three pairs of my socks on the first morning. Marco takes the cautious approach, crossing barefoot while swearing, “I'm never going to work with you again!”

The fact is, we're out of our league. Sven is a fitness freak and sets a pace that even the hardened Africans have trouble keeping. Back in Juba, I talked with Peter Meredith, a famed South African kayaker who is trying to launch the first commercial rafting trips in South Sudan, to take expats from the capital on floats down the White Nile. Meredith suggested doing the hike to Kinyeti in three or more days, but with Sven's meeting in Juba, we must travel 31 miles, get up to 10,000 feet, and be back at the road in a little over 48 hours.

Ferns enclose the trail, and the dramatic views of the pale green Imatongs are extinguished by triple-canopy jungle, a chaotic world of switchbacks amid stinging fireweed and stands of mint and wild cannabis. Eight hours pass this way, until we finally collapse at 7,500 feet next to a crude lean-to. We fumble into sleeping bags and tents; the disciples curl up on the ground under their jackets.

“On stone, on water,” Joseph tells me, “we sleep.”

 

Getting any view of South Sudan as a whole is tough. Juba is located well enough, sitting where the powerful White Nile drops out of the central African lakes, the mother water rolling northward past the city at running speed before it splits into meanders to form the vast, 11,500-square-mile Sudd wetland, among Africa's largest. Eventually, the waters regather, joining the Blue Nile in Sudan proper and pushing past Khartoum and on to Egypt.

But Juba is more encampment than city, a sprawling settlement of homely huts and instant apartments whose population has swelled to more than a million as waves of returning exiles and rural people have moved in. Many thousands of foreigners have come here as well, riding around in white Land Cruisers during the twice-a-day traffic jams that are a mark of pride for locals. The most common signage is anything beginning with the letters
UN,
and a trip across town uses reference points like “Go past WHO” and “Turn left at WFP.” Diplomats from the U.S., Europe, Africa, and China have set up shop, as well as hundreds of foreign NGOs, everyone from the Red Cross and Norwegian Church relief to War Child and—it's all about cattle here—Veterinarians Without Borders. In a place where hotel rooms are made from empty shipping containers and everything from gasoline to rice is imported on the back of a truck from Kenya, inflation has skyrocketed: a taxi across Juba costs twice as much as in New York, hastily built apartments are priced as if in central Rome, and locals can afford nothing but
asida,
or corn mush. Many foreigners are sweating out their lives in the northern refugee camps, healing and organizing, but in Juba the expat tone is that of a lunar colony with pool parties and endless paperwork.

In a two-story white building I meet Cirino Hiteng, one of the young country's rotating cast of ministers and its most dashing defender of wildlife. He wears a Nairobi-style short-sleeved suit in gray, topped with a narrow-brim trilby and accessorized with a South Sudanese flag pin, a flashy watch, two rings, and a Livestrong-style yellow bracelet reading
HOPE FAITH LOVE
. Hiteng may look like the minister of hip-hop, but his affection for animals is deep.

“I love nature,” he says plainly. “I have a spiritual connection. Every year I fly five hours up and down looking for animals. Elephants, oryx, ostrich, elands. I spotted a cheetah this year. I always spot the most.”

Hiteng is from a peasant family in Torit, near Mount Kinyeti, and he recalls walking to school (“Nine miles there, nine miles back”) to write his first letters in the sand with a stick. He got to Catholic school and eventually earned a PhD in international relations from the University of Kent, in Canterbury, England. A South Sudanese with an advanced degree is a rare thing, and Hiteng has rotated through an array of posts, serving as chief of staff to the president and now minister of what is called Culture, Youth, and Sports.

He tolls off the positives in South Sudan. There are, in theory, 12 game reserves and 6 national parks, and the annual antelope migration through the most famous, Boma National Park, is probably the second largest on the planet. There are dramatic rapids on the Nile and long stretches appropriate for the whitewater rafting that has become popular in Uganda. He thinks the Imatong Mountains will develop as a tourist destination and helicoptered to Kinyeti's summit with a UN team. “I planted the flag of South Sudan,” he says. “I tell the local people, Don't cut down the forest; it will bring the
mzunga,
the foreigner. Did you see Imatong Falls? Imagine if you put some cottages there. You have breathed the air of God.”

One moment Hiteng deflates his own enthusiasm (“It's too early! Even the backpackers are not here!”) and the next he's rapturing onward (“We could put some floating hotels in the Sudd; enjoy the birds. That would be amazing!”)

Still, Hiteng is well aware of South Sudan's problems. The parks, many of them dating back to British rule, have almost no staff funding, training, equipment, or infrastructure, and animals are constantly poached for meat. Giraffes—slow-moving and hard to miss—are shot first, and there are organized raids by horsemen from Sudan, who massacre elephants and carry the tusks hundreds of miles back to Omdurman, where artisans carve them and export them to China. The Chinese themselves are also here, building roads and hoping to invest, like Europeans and Americans, in the oil industry. The common denominator in all this, Hiteng concludes, is lack of infrastructure. “Roads!” he cries. “South Sudan is a huge land. It is almost impossible to travel across it.” Better roads will bring medical care and tourist dollars to the isolated tribal cultures that define both the glory and problems of South Sudan. They'll also open up more areas to poaching and illegal logging.

That afternoon I visit another minister, Gabriel Changson, the head of Wildlife Conservation and Tourism, crossing Juba on the back of a
boda boda,
the euphonious name for a motorcycle taxi. Changson is not as flamboyant as Hiteng—he sits calmly behind a desk the size of a lifeboat, wearing a pressed dress shirt. But, like Hiteng, he is well educated. A Nuer from near the border with Ethiopia, he has a background in banking and a master's in economics from Duke. (“Go Blue Devils!” he says.)

Changson doesn't know his own age (“About sixty,” he guesses), but he knows tourism will protect the animals of South Sudan. Like Hiteng, he talks about Kenyan-style eco-lodges, tent safaris, bird watchers in the Sudd swamp, and the need to train South Sudan's 14,000 wildlife rangers, army conscripts without equipment or skills. The country's paper parks are roadless and so large—Boma is 8,800 square miles, and the Zefah Game Reserve, in the Sudd, is 3,700—that they can't be patrolled.

“A hungry man will not listen to our rules,” Changson says, “but if we offer an alternative livelihood, they will pick it up.” His conservation agenda starts with humans: tribespeople need boreholes for clean drinking water, health centers, basic schools, and model villages. Then they will consider ecotourism. Until there is security, Changson candidly admits, “nobody will come.”

Right now nobody is coming. In two weeks I meet one tourist: a Japanese woman literally checking off a list of African countries. There is currently nothing for a tourist to do. I sign up for a safari to Boma, but it's canceled amid late-season rains and shifting paperwork. Meredith, the kayaker, says his hopes for a rafting business were curtailed when NGOs and embassies, out of security concerns, banned their Juba staffs from leaving the city on weekends.

The country has perhaps five years to transform itself into a conservation nation, American biologist Paul Elkan, country director for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), says. “What's important in South Sudan is intact ecosystems. Big blocks of wilderness. Some of the last great wilderness in Africa. The largest intact savanna in East Africa.”

There are many bright spots—more than a million if you count those migrating antelope. And the WCS has been able to count thousands of elephants in South Sudan, collaring 34 with satellite transmitters and tracking them daily. But the country's situation is changing rapidly, and for animals and ecosystems, Elkan says, “the pressures are higher,” as peace allows people to start moving around, exploiting resources. Several of those WCS-tagged elephants, in fact, have already been poached.

Keeping the animals alive will depend on law and order in the countryside, schools and boreholes, tourism of the right kind, legal and regulatory advances, training for rangers, and an infrastructure of roads, lodges, and spotting planes, all within five years. Without that seismic shift, the elephants will be wiped out, the hartebeests turned into bushmeat.

“It's a fixer-upper,” Elkan says.

 

Day three turns out to be surprisingly easy, for the simple reason that Marco and I never make it up the mountain. By the end of day two, we had reached the flanks of Kinyeti, the barren summit visible just once through the thicket of vegetation. But the slopes are steep and the journalists weak.

We huddle around a campfire well before first light, chilled and wet after a night on the ground. Daniel calculates that it will take the Germans 4 hours to ascend the last few miles, on a switchbacking trail that climbs 2,500 feet in thick forest before bursting into the clear. But Marco and I—Daniel calls us
la marwani,
the old men—will need 5 hours to summit, and that's before the hike back out to the road. All in all, we're looking at a 12-hour haul.

While we sulk in our tents, Sven and David storm the peak. They make it up in less than 4 hours, Sven hauling the 30-pound paraglider himself. On the misty top, they hold out South Sudan and European union flags in a snapping, cold wind. Too much wind: the glider stays in its pack. The von Burgsdorffs march back down and collect the shamefaced journalists for the hike out. Elapsed time: 7 hours.

So my cowardly day three is only this: a half dozen miles crashing down wet trails in dense brush, leaping rock to rock, pounding up and down spurs of mountain in a frantic effort to keep Sven in sight. Patient, merciful Daniel paces me for a while at the back of the column, pointing out the dangerous fireweed, whose hairy edges sting like coals, and a vine that coagulates wounds. When we're attacked by safari ants—stubborn black biters that crawl up inside our pant legs—he shows me how to find and kill them under the fabric. The disciples pause to scrape “honey” from a dark hole in a eucalyptus tree, actually a sweet sap loaded with crunchy insects. The forest gives up its secrets.

In the late afternoon we encounter two hunters, giddy young men running in circles, frantically searching for a slim, straight tree. Using machetes, they chop down something the thickness of an arm, cut it to 10 feet, and jog off into the bush, inviting us to follow.

Not far away, they've caught a boar. The pig is in a wire snare and has raged against the jungle for hours, clawing a circle of black dirt in the exact radius of its leash. Daniel warns me to climb up onto something: “If he comes for you, he will kill you.” Indeed, I can see the animal's three-inch incisors when it snarls.

The Imatongs are remote and untroubled, so this is one of the only places in South Sudan where no one carries a gun. The hunters have already fired an arrow into the pig's throat, with no effect. Now they set about beating it to death with their 10-foot pole. The men then swiftly bleed the carcass, truss it on the same pole, and lead us up and over a forest and down into a swamp where they've built a smoky fire. They devour a big pot of
asida
as the pork cooks. Later I hear that these men are poachers, but there are no rangers, no signs, no evidence of laws and rules, only hungry men of the bush crawling forward.

We move uphill onto dry ground in the last moments of light and pitch our tents under magnificent, ash-white eucalyptus, which climb 200 feet or more into the air. You don't normally see tall trees like these in South Sudan, but here is more evidence of what war has preserved. The trees grow in perfect rows—the area was a British plantation at the time of Sudan's independence in 1956 but has been neglected ever since.

Sven is looking everywhere for the future. Around the fire he outlines development ideas. There's potential for an eco-lodge at Imatong Falls. And down in Daniel's village, Kitere, they could form a cooperative and harvest some of these trees to pay for schools or farming equipment. Eventually they might start a sawmill, like in the old days, and have a small, sustainable business. All it will take is clearing the old British logging road, which is blocked with dead trees but otherwise in fine shape.