If I was crammed on a bus for 12 hours with Hitler,ÌęI could probably make friends with him. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but it is a thing.Ìę

I’ve spent decades now suffering in close quarters with people I don’t know. On cross-Haiti buses with international pack rats. Riding the rails around China in thirdÌęclass with Scandinavians. Spooned into a 4×4 in the high Atacama with Koreans for four days. I’ve mixed it up worldwide with PTSD Israelis, Brazilian ballerinas, German eco-warriors, and Kiwi bush pilots. Travel—and travel writing—has been one long introduction to the broadest of humanity. We aren’t perfect, but most members of our species are worth knowing.Ìę

So how do you get to know them? There are some simple rules for meeting the neighbors.Ìę

First, don’t wait. The awkwardness will only get worse over time, so introduce yourself while you still have the obvious excuse of newness. In planes, trains, and automobiles, just say hello right at the start—it only gets harder later, and if they don’t want to talk, you’ll know soon enough.Ìę

But also be ready with a song. It’s routine to bust out a microphone on Chilean bus journeys, and everything from Chinese rafting trips to an overnight ferry to Canada can be improved with some heartfelt karaoke. In the rest of the world, saying “I can’t sing” is like saying “I can’t eat.” In other words, it is no excuse. Just pick a short one (Ìęby Tom Jones, isÌę1:59), andÌęmake sure you actually know the words.Ìę

Share food. Nothing is more bonding than offering up some bread for their sausage or accepting a glass of wine after handing out chocolates. The food may be alien—say yes to the goat liver!—but the further you reach, the more people appreciate it. Peruvians like to share birthday beer. Be ready.Ìę

And while nobody likes a know-it-all, you will get invited to those meals more often if you do actually know something useful. Read good books about the place you are visiting, its history and its culture. And yes, that includes a phrase book. Just six words of any language—hello, please, thanks, yes, no, where—will take you very, very far.Ìę

And you are more appealing if you are about something other than yourself. Just taking the usual vacation isn’t very revealing; reach a place nobody goes to, immerse yourself in wilderness, dare to walk alone in the souk. Surviving difficulties with other people—whether it is a zip line, a border crossing at night, or getting lost in Seoul—is bonding, even romantic.Ìę(See the infamous bridge experiments in the 1974ÌęJournal of Personality and Social Psychology, )

Lastly, be ready to bail on the social engagement. A lot of climbing camps, fishing trips, and sailboat cabins have been riven by feuding, intergroup breakdowns, and creative differences. So getting out of the wrong conversation without wrecking days of mutual confinement is critical. Try the old rules: Bite your tongue on religion, politics, and hygiene. Insincerity was invented for a reason. Be polite, mention pressing needs, offer to follow up later, and then move on. There will be more strangers soon.

The post How to Make Friends with Strangers appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Patrick Symmes specializes in reporting from hot spots: He’s filed stories from Afghanistan, Venezuela, Timbuktu, Yemen, and Argentina. More recently, the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing editor spent three weeks reporting for the New York Times Magazine about the . We asked Symmes for a list of the stuff he always keeps at his side.

Patagonia Headway MLC Duffel ($342)

I never check a bag if I can help it; waiting for it slows you down when you land, or it never arrives at all. Like the name says, this is the , so you can cram it full. You can carry it with the backpack straps or, if you want to look classy arriving at your hotel, sling it over your shoulder with a single strap. Mine is yellow, so it’s harder to forget in the back of a taxi.

Bill’s Khakis ($155)

and modeled after the original World War II service khakis. They’re lightweight and great for hot weather, and they’ll hold up to repeated wearing if you can’t get your laundry done for a few days. I wore a pair day in and day out for four years, and my mother still asked me if they were new.

Aerostitch Money Belt ($16)

Sometimes I’ll bring a decoy wallet with me if I’m going someplace where mugging is common. I fill it with some mail-offer credit cards—the kind with “YOUR NAME HERE” stamped into them—and some obsolete Bolivian pesos. In Venezuela a few years ago, someone actually robbed me and took the decoy wallet. I had $500 stashed in so I could taxi home.

Earplugs ($19)

Sleeping is the only useful thing to do on an airplane. Wax earplugs block out more sound, but I go with the foam kind because they are cheap and easy.

Logitech Keys to Go Keyboard ($43)

Owning an iPad means I no longer have to carry around a nine-pound laptop and pile of books. I pair it with this rechargeable, spill-resistant keyboard, which weighs less than seven ounces. For backup, I also take photos of my handwritten notes and email the photos to myself. I once had my notebook confiscated in Yemen but was able to recover my notes this way.

My Trail Co Men’s Down Light Jacket ($99)

Nothing . My preferred version packs down to the size of two fists and weighs just 12 ounces. I bring it everywhere except the tropics.

DeLorme InReach Satellite Communicator ($300)

I got this after a solo fishing trip on the Deschutes River, in central Oregon, when I was hiking a trail and ran into a half-dozen rattlesnakes. beacon gives me peace of mind if something were to happen in a remote location. I wish I’d had it on various trips to Afghanistan and Africa, where cell service was spotty. It’ll be a staple in my reporting kit going forward.

Insight Guidebooks ($15)

The farther afield you go, the more fun it is, and the more you have to worry about battery life or lack of Wi-Fi. That’s why I still like paper guidebooks—the kind you can pull out in the pouring rain or a sketchy neighborhood. is great, too, but I like for the historical and cultural background. I’m taking this one with me to Argentina.

The post The 8 Tools Our Travel Writer Never Leaves Home Without appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

To reach Gati, a speck of life in the steep highlands of Nepal, you have to follow a long, circuitous path. We started at dawn with a three-mile hoof up the valley on a real road, then cut back up a rough, stone-paved jeep track for a mile to where the trail began. Then we switchbacked uphill for two hours on long paths, the kind worn smooth by villagers traveling on foot their whole lives.Ìę

At the top was Gati. Or used to be. Out of 155 houses in the hamlet, 152 were destroyed in the earthquake.Ìę

There are a lot of earthquakes up here, 60 miles west of Mount Everest. The tectonic smashing of India into Asia creates geologic upthrust, spectacular views, and scads of soft metamorphic rock that crumbles under pressure. , it shattered. Gati disappeared at 11:56 A.M., during a 7.8-­magnitude temblor that lasted three minutes. If you include the fatalities from a massive 7.3 aftershock two weeks later, on May 12, almost 9,000 people died in ­Nepal. More than 740,000 houses were ­damaged or destroyed, along with several of the sites. An avalanche swept through Everest Base Camp, killing 22 people. In Kathmandu ­itself, cheap apartment buildings pancaked, and the historic Dharahara Tower collapsed while it was full of photo-snapping backpackers and Nepalis, killing more than 180. But perhaps no place was hit worse than the steep, crowded, and poor Sindhupalchok District, which contains Gati.

I’d almost made it to the village when I heard a chipping sound from around a bend. Someone was hitting stone with a hammer. I rounded the corner and saw four Nepalis working on a house. Two were hauling rocks to make a wall; easy enough, since they were recycling stones from a collapsed building just steps away. Another dug a shallow trench with a pickax. The oldest man—dressed entirely in gray, from his traditional suruwal trousers to the cloth topi on his head—slipped each rough, broken block into the new foundation wall. Then, working almost as fast as the rocks were brought to him, he shaped them, tap tap, squared the edges, tap tap, and knocked the stones tightly into place.Ìę

The land here, up against the Tibetan border, is inherently unstable, its verticality a draw for climbers and a curse to residents. The wall building was fast for the same reason that the quakes were devastating: Nepal is made largely of schist and sandstone and other rock that is essentially compressed mud from ancient ocean floors. The old mason had only to thump the stones’ edges to chip them. This team of four was laying a foundation ­faster than American contractors could have poured cement.Ìę

Gati now consisted of tarps and tents. Only three houses—the three made of wood—had survived. Everything else, constructed of those loose, unmortared stones, came down. The mountain itself had shaken free, releasing a house-size boulder that rolled through the village, its path of destruction still visible amid the shattered foundations and sun-faded tents handed out by Chinese ­relief workers almost six months ago. Thirteen people had died here, one of them crushed when his house was buried. You could see his tiny living room, filledÌęalmost to the ceiling by a tsunami of rock.Ìę

The Nepalese government has done virtually nothing for Gati. Everyone in the country who lost a house received a one-time payment of about $150, which isn’t enough to feed a family through winter, let alone rebuild. On paper there was lots of help. I saw UN organizational charts showing that Sindhupalchok alone had been helped by 21 different organizations, includ­ing the United Nations Development Programme, the Red Cross, Oxfam, ACTED, CARE, HELP, Medair, ActionAid, HelpAge, Plan, and groups known to chart makers as SCI, WVI, MC, TLMN, ILO, BF, IOM, and “Govt”—the last presumably meaningÌęNepal itself. But there was no Govt in Gati. The school principal, a short, broad-shouldered 32-year-old named Roshan Raj Shrestha, told me he’d seen no evidence of government response. “Some money comes from Germans,” he said, referring to a charity that had been working in the village for 11 years. “But the rest we manage ourselves.”ÌęShrestha walked me through the ruins of the Shree Kalidevi Secondary School. The second floor had collapsed, but the quake happened on a Saturday, so no students were hurt. The first-floor walls were still standing, jagged and cracked like old teeth, bearing murals of human anatomy and charts of English verbs and prepositions.

Up the hill was the school’s replacement, an official Temporary Learning Center. This consisted of three rooms, with tin sheeting donated by the Kathmandu-based group Namaste Nepal. The walls were more tin, or chain-link fencing, or sometimes nothing at all. Wind and rain came right in; the tin roofing blew off in storms. The students had built it themselves, Shrestha explained with a mixture of pain and pride.

It was recess. In a small clearing, girls in gray uniform skirts played tag while boys in blue trousers chased a soccer ball that could fall 4,000 feet if they kicked it too hard.Ìę

One month afterÌęthe quake, globalÌędonors met in Kathmandu. Rapid surveys outlined an enormous challenge. The country had suffered $6.6 billion in damage. It would need at least $3.5 billion to reconstruct lost housing and infrastructure. The plan was to “build back better,” and there was much talk of swift action, transparency, and effectiveness. Led by Europe, the U.S., India, and China, donor nations committed $4.4 billion to the restoration.

Guess how that worked out.

After the initial days of heroic helicopter rescues and hand-digging through collapsed buildings, the first priority had been sheltering hundreds of thousands of homeless ­people. Summer, the rainy season in Nepal, was approaching fast. The government pledged to send tin roofing to the most remote villages—and then failed to deliver, with the money and supplies disappearing, or tin of the wrong size being sent, so that it cut the ankles of porters hauling it uphill. ­USAID distributed 6,200 rolls of plastic sheeting—enough to shelter 310,000 people—and much of it was still in use last October. Poor communities like Gati were last on the list to get help. The government prioritized its aid efforts according to a “scale of severity,” a map that ranked communities by how badly they were hit. But the scale was weighted toward large population centers, for efficiency in distribution, and tall buildings, because of the threat of collapse. On a 10-point scale, Kathmandu was rated 10, Gati 1.08. Those who had the least got the least.Ìę

When the rains stopped, in September, the government pledged to provide ­relief before winter arrived. But by the time I left ­Nepal, in November, almost nothing was ­being distributed. Blankets and medical equipment were scarce. According to the ­Nepali Times, much food aid was never handed out. Ten thousand tons of Chinese rice sat rotting inÌęKathmandu, nine months ­after delivery; it was finally sold on the open market by ­Nepali officials. India donated huge amounts of food and cooking oil, which were eventually sold, too. Officials blamed ­complicated transport regulations; this excuse turned true when the country was shut down by a fuel shortage last fall. Nepal had ­become locked in a political dispute with ­India, which supplies 100 percent of its fossil fuels, from gasoline to diesel to cooking gas. When India cut off deliveries in late September, earthquake ­relief all but ceased.Ìę

Nepalese politics is based on patronage systems, ethnic networks, and plain old corruption. For the major parties, that $4.4 billion in pledges was a pot of gold. To prevent it from being stolen or squandered, donors had insisted on a new agency in Kathmandu to handle the money, but it took until ­December for Parliament to finally pass a bill creating the Earthquake Reconstruction Authority. By then winter had already shut down most rebuilding efforts.

Smaller groups did what they could. The improvised Yellow House collective in Kathmandu, named for the hostel where it met, organized rescue missions by text message; it became the fourth-largest distributor of aid in the month after the quake. Korean church groups started feeding the hungry. Jennifer Lowe Anker, the mountaineer and wife of Conrad Anker, raised $100,000, some of which a student from Montana State carried, in cash, into the Khumbu Valley in a backpack to deliver to the village elders of Phortse. Nepalis, especially the small cadre of middle-class, tech-savvy young people, organized much of the initial response. But these were stopgaps and workarounds,Ìęheroic precisely because they weren’t supposed to happen. You can’t let an entire ­nation be dug out by kids with cell phones.

In the immediate aftermath, the UN, the Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders ­responded, often quickly and well. But inter­national relief can create a second disaster of its own. In the years since the 2010 Haiti earthquake, for example, massive amounts of international aid flowed in but accomplished little. (The Red Cross received half a billion dollars and did some good work, but its ambitious plan to rehouse Haitians, the journalism nonprofit ProPublica found, produced only six new homes.) In Nepal, big groups like Save the Children and CARE were able to continue delivering relief through long-standing programs. But with no effective partner, many other NGOs found their hands tied.Ìę

One day in Kathmandu, I spoke with a World Bank relief expert, a young Asian who asked that I not use his name. He ­assured me that, over the course of five years, 740,000 homes would be ­rebuilt. Each homeowner would receive a little ­moneyÌęfor building a foundation, a little more for putting up walls, and then more for raising a roof, with inspections at each step for each house to ensure quality and prevent corruption. I did the math: three inspections for each house came to 2.2 million site visits,Ìęminimum, in a nation whose terrain makes grown mountaineers cry. There would have to be inspectors hired and trained for thousands of affected villages—a whirlwind of paperwork and opportunities for bribery.

“Yes, it needs a lot of people,” the World Bank official conceded. “Next year, Nepal needs to train 50,000 masons. It’s a massive undertaking.” He could hear my skepticism but insisted the model was “piloted and tested.” The lights went out in the middle of our meeting, but even that didn’t phase him—he kept talking in total darkness.Ìę

From the Myanmar cyclone to the Indonesian tsunami, we’ve seen equally ineffective responses to national disasters, the unhappy marriage of a weak or corrupt state to a brief, social-media-driven spasm of foreign attention. The model was already broken when we choppered it into this impoverished old car­-pet kingdom, delivering a package predestined to fail.Ìę

“I was just having my first spoonful of dal bhat,” Megh Ale said, describing the moment when the after­shock hit last May. The lentil stew never made it to his lips. “It ­started and we ran outside,” he said. “You could see the wave moving through the beach and the clouds of dust from collapsing ­houses. Every­thing was shaking.”Ìę

We’d driven up into the mountains of Sindhupalchok, stopping for lunch at the same riverside place he’d been when the quake hit. I thought he meant he saw a wave of water. He shook his head. No, the shock waves had been moving through the stones on the beach, millions of pounds of rock shivering on the skin of the earth. He’d heard a weird rustling sound, too, from tens of thousands of trees slapping against each other, and then the deafening noise of landslides. We’d already seen where, in 2014, one slide, half a mile long, had buried 80 people and filled the riverbed, creating a dam of silt that stayed in place for 13 hours. When the water flowed out, houses emerged, half-buried in gray mud.Ìę

Ale, 55, the Nepali owner of a rafting company called Ultimate Descents Nepal, needed to check on the , his camp alongside the raging Bhotekosi River, which offers some of the steepest whitewater in Nepal. He had agreed to ­accompany me up from Kathmandu in a hired Land Cruiser if I paid the driver and sprang for the tank of black-market gasoline. Two months into the fuel crisis, smuggled gas and diesel were selling for ten and twenty times the normal price.

That afternoon, Ale had dropped me at the camp, a collection of comfortable thatch-roofed cabins, and the next morning I began my roundabout walk up to Gati. (It was his group, Namaste Nepal, that helped build the temporary school.) I was there just a few hours. Somehow, the walk down from the village felt harder—a direct drop on precipitous stairways and muddy paths into the Bhotekosi valley, slipping and sliding on eroded bluffs that overlook thousand-foot plunges. I lost altitude so fast my ears popped, as did my knees. Twice we encountered teams of villagers working to repair stone stairways. A Norwegian NGO was paying them with food: a month of part-time labor earned 130 pounds of lentils and 90 pounds of rice, enough to keep a family alive for the coming winter.Ìę

It was sunset when I limped back to Borderlands. Like most of the country, it had been empty of foreign tourists when I arrived. But now I saw that the camp’s tiny meadow was covered in orange tents. The camp manager, a wiry Nepali named Jit Tamang, told me that a relief mission had arrived, a group of foreign medical experts. I thought he said something about Doctors Without Borders. Finally, someone was here to help.

I rushed down to the dining area and found . The New Mexico–based group had brought a dozen practitioners from the U.S., Belgium, Ireland, and China to treat earthquake victims. Acupuncture is a credible treatment, traditional in Asia for everything from chronic pain to indigestion, but I couldn’t help but look around for a team of engineers carrying rebarÌęand foundation ties. This was it?

Diana Fried, the executive director of AWB, offered to prick me. I shook her off. “I’m fine,” I told her.

“It’s free,” she said.Ìę

After watching poor women lift rocks all day, I was reluctant to whimper about my knees. I told Fried I was fine, absolutely fine. Sometimes it’s OK to lie.

Slowly, rural women began to trickle in to the resort, wearing filthy red homespun dresses and busted sandals. One by one, the acupuncturists stuck their ears with small needles—a protocol believed to restore even the most traumatized nervous system to a state of calm—and then laid them out on soft blankets. The Nepali women rested there, eyes closed, blissful. A self-professed energy worker in yoga pants waved her hands over their chests, claiming to draw out toxins.

If the earthquake was Nepal’s only problem, then people would be fine, in the way of being fine when you lift stones all day to rebuild your house, watch your children die of communicable diseases, and see your local schoolhouse sit destroyed and empty for six months because the patrician class in Kathmandu can’t get organized to receive and spend $4.4 billion. They’d be fine in the tough way of Asian peasantry, their mute suffering ignored in the capital and labeled cultural resilience by foreigners.

But Nepal’s problems run deeper than any earthquake or fuel crisis. “What you are seeing in Nepal,” said Ben Ayers, country director of the Colorado- and Kathmandu-based , “is the government doesn’t give a shit about the people.”

Ayers, a 39-year-old American climber, has lived and worked in ­Nepal for 18 years—first with , a nonprofit he founded to help the trekking laborers who help carry Nepal’s tourism industry on their backs, and then, since 2007, as director of dZi, which aims to improve quality of life throughoutÌęremote ­Nepal. We drank black tea in his office in a two-­story house in Patan—once an ­ancient rival to Kathmandu, now a suburb with the space and charm of an older Nepal where a lot of aid groups and charities have set up shop. Ayers was part of that fast-and-light wave of quake response by young Nepalis.Ìę

Foreigners had taken part, too. A Cana­dian climber named Heather Geluk recal­led volunteers getting pinged each morning about where to meet a truck: the details would be worked out on the fly. But key to that quick response, Ayers said, was its reliance on Nepalis themselves.
“They didn’t have to ask directions,” he said. “They didn’t need a translator or maps. They didn’t wear funny hard hats and safety vests like many foreign aid groups require. They didn’t need to negotiate any of the traps that relief agencies do. They just went out and delivered aid.”Ìę

That might have been effective if the April 25 earthquake had been the end of the destruction. Two and a half weeks later, on May 12, a powerful aftershock hit—a 7.3 that lasted several minutes. Geluk was in both quakes, and she said the second was worse. During the first, she was on Shishapangma, just over the border in Tibet. After a few terrifying minutes, everything went back to normal, birds flitting overhead. But the aftershock hit a country already weakened and afraid. Caught on the third floor of a Kathmandu building, she saw terrified people fighting to get down the stairwell. Many structures left standing in the first shake fell down during the second.

“This is going to sound weird,” Ayers said, “but the earthquake just made Nepal more Nepal.” All the things foreigners love best about the country emerged during the quakes. People of all backgrounds came together. They showed “resilience and the ability to pick themselves up by the bootstraps,” he said. “On the other side, all the things that have made Nepal poor in the first place—the terrible governance, the resource issues, the geopolitics—the earthquake just amplified every­thing.”

Like Nepalis, I walked or hitchhiked everywhere. I walked far outside the storied and sensual old Kathmandu of cobbled lanes, carved wood, and birdlike pagodas, into the prosaic, somewhat ratty new city, built up since the 1970s by rural immigrants and now stuffed with people forced out of their mountain homes. I walked along the Bagmati River, once a sacred spring and now a brown sewer known to English speakers as the Bagmuddy, and joined a group of volunteers who’d met for 130 Saturdays in a row clearing out baskets of plastic scraps and unidentifiable organic waste, exposing green grass to the weak sun. Some things were still possible here.Ìę

On a cool Saturday morning, I stuck my thumb out and a young, formally dres­sed Nepali in a Volkswagen picked meÌęup. He was a radi­ologist at a ­local hospital. “I get a special allowance of gasoline,” he explained, so he felt obliged to give someone a ride. As bicyclists and pedestrians coursed around us, he paused to call up ­Judas Priest on his iPhone, andÌęwe headbanged our way down empty ave­nues. “All the politicians are getting rich on the fuel blockade,” he told me. He laughed with a cynic’s pleasure as he described how leaders spouted nonsense about building giant wind farms to solve the energy crisis; meanwhile, they didn’t bother to ­arrange for the import of vital medicines by air, and he knew of two patients who’d been sent home to die for lack of essential drugs. “Good luck,” he said as he dropped me off.

I was walking in Patan when I came across a line of white Mahindra pickup trucks, hundreds of them. A few fuel trucks were sneaking across the border every day, and the arrival of three from China was front-page news. The drivers at the head of the queue told me they had been waiting two days for diesel, those at the back just eight hours. Another line snaked out from a station a few miles away, thousands of motorcyclists waiting for gas with the calm patience that is Nepal’s blessing and curse.Ìę

The gas shortage was a new and cruel twist on the country’s suffering. It had begun when bitter rivals in Parliament all united to ram through a new constitution, one that gerrymandered the traditional hill tribes and high-caste politicians into power while diminishing the roles of women, promoting Hinduism over other religions, and excluding millions of Nepali-born people from full citizenship.

The excluded people, the Madhesis, lived in the lowland region that borders India. They make up perhaps half of Nepal’s population, and when their protests over the new constitution were met with tear gas, they occupied and eventually shut down main border crossings to India in the city of Birgunj. When Nepali police fired rubber bullets, the protestors burned several gasoline trucks from India, which in turn banned all further fuel deliveries.

Now there was no way to truck roofing tin, bricks, cement, rebar, wood, medicine, and schoolbooks toward the mountains. “The fuel blockade was worse than the earthquake,” Megh Ale had insisted. Taxis stopped running; for once the bicycle rickshaw drivers were kings. In Kathmandu, a man wobbling by on a mountain bike shouted at me, “Please, sir, India has done this! India is nonfriendly country to Nepal! Please we ask you to internationalize this problem!”
Tourism, only 9 percent of the economy, is nonetheless a crucial source of cash. During late 2015, the country felt ruinous, with both fuel and foreigners—the climbers, the hikers, the seekers, and the helpers—in short supply. Only 15 percent of trekking routes had been damaged, but according to the Kathmandu Post, the number of foreigners hiking in the Khumbu was down by half from the year before. By spring, the news was better. “Reconstruction is happening,” said Mingma Dorji Sherpa, of Last Frontiers Trekking, which runs REI’s adventures in the country. He talked about rebuilt stupas and historic sites in Kathmandu and more aid reaching the backcountry. “Life is back and we’re in business,” he said.Ìę

Still, 2015 was a gut punch. Even six months after the quake, I found the normally chaotic lanes of Kathmandu’s Thamel tourist quarter eerily quiet. One of the only groups of travelers I met was a bunch of Australian motorcyclists, a dozen tatted bad boys getting around on old Enfield Bullets fueled by filthy black-market petrol.

Two months into the blockade, violent protests were a daily event. Nineteen people had already died at the border. Around the time I finished drinking tea with Ayers, he looked at his phone and sighed. “One dead in Birgunj. About three hours ago.” A 19-year-old protester battling Nepali police had been shot; awkwardly, he turned out to be an ­Indian citizen.

It's only 54 milesÌęfrom Kathmandu to the border city of Birgunj, but in a country with no gasoline it was easier to fly. (The national airliners refilled in India daily, ­often leaving luggage behind to carry more fuel.) The 15-minute hop to Simara Airport was the shortest flight of my life. But no one had enough gasoline to run a motorcycle the final 15 miles to the border, and I had to spend the night. Finally, late the next morning, I rode on the back of a Honda motorbike through cool green fields and past burned fuel tankers into Birgunj. The town was teeming with blue-clad police and a few human-rights monitors. In the no-man’s-land between border posts, the Madhesi protesters had occupied the bridge to India. It was dappled with rocks and black banners and tenting. The arrival of a foreign journalist triggered a reality-distortion field—a hundred sleepy men got up, formed into lines, began chanting slogans (“Madhesi people power!” and “We are 50 percent of the country!”), then lectured me on imperialism for a while. Soon they were preparing to march, rocks in hand, on the local police station.Ìę

I hustled over there. A noncommissioned officer in blue fatigues and flip-flops admitted it was true, they had shot an “agitator” two days before, when he attacked themÌę
inside their police post. He was relaxed about the protest forming up on the bridge—itÌę
happened every day at this time.Ìę

He looked at his watch and said, “Curfew starts in 12 minutes.” It was only noon. He told me to grab my driver and clear out or face a long day and night trapped in town. We rolled out of Birgunj as the riot police were hitching up their armor and loading shotguns. By nightfall I had unwound my awkward journey back to Kathmandu.Ìę

In February, fuel deliveries finally resumed, eventually, mostly, sort of. A year after the quake, a government loan program has kicked in, tourism is rebounding, and reconstruction of temples, homes, and historic sites, often privately funded, is finally progressing. “It’s not rabbit speed,” Mingma Sherpa told me. “Things are moving slowly, but at least they are happening now.”Ìę

My last walk in Nepal was to Nagpuje, a village in Sindhupalchok located over a suspension bridge and up a set of steep trails, on the far side of the Bhotekosi from the villages I had seen before. After a few hours, I was dripping sweat and gasping when I topped out on the flat nose of land that stuck over the terraced rice fields below.

​Tamang, the Borderlands Resort manager, walked with me at first, and we discussed a nasty business feud that had affected the valley. Borderlands had been founded by the late David Allardice, a New Zealander, who was eventually pushed out by his partner, Ale. Most tourist businesses in Nepal seemed to crash this way, foreigners starting with good intentions and ending with disputes over who was owed what. “Money make Nepali people crazy,” Tamang said.

In Nagpuje, the local English teacher, a thoughtful, thin-haired city man named Bhopal Bahadur Sunuwar, walked me through the ruins. Of 415 people in the ­village, seven had been killed; in the largerÌęvillage district, 92 had died. “Not any ­houses survive,” Sunuwar said. Every family was living in a tent, under a tarp, or in a shed made by bending a single sheet of corrugated roofing into a tiny Quonset hut. Aside from a small payment of survivor benefits, “Nepali government, they have not given anything,” Sunuwar said.Ìę

The district’s 315 students were studying in the ruins of their old school, topped with new tin sheeting. Sunuwar showed me a cabinet holding the only equipment that had survived the earthquake: three microscopes and a single computer and printer. A few yards away was a large cement foundation; the iron rebar poking up from the four corners was the only evidence I saw in all of Nepal that any new construction would be built to a higher standard. It had been paid for by the US Nepal Welfare Society, a community group in Austin, Texas, one of many small nonprofits working outside the broken system in Kathmandu.Ìę

It was surreal to walk back out of the hills one last time, alone, down winding trails into the Bhotekosi valley. The hours went by in an endless, meditative slog, my boots finding their own way back to the road.Ìę

Instead of turning downhill, toward Borderlands, I headed uphill, walking another three miles to a spot high above the river. When the business dispute over Borderlands had blown up, the former owner simply started over, building a new, even nicer place called the Last Resort. Here, footsore and heartbroken, I settled in among tropical plants and Buddha statues, healing with the roar of the river as my medicine.Ìę

But there was a louder roar that night, and some combative boasting in Australian accents. I limped up to the dining area and found the motorcyclists I’d met in Kathmandu ten days before. They’d managed to shove their crappy Enfield Bullets all the way to the remote mountain kingdom of Mustang, through dust, mud, and the fuel blockade. They were sunburned, bruised, and utterly filthy, celebrating their last night on the road amid the comfy cushions of the Last Resort. We started drinking immediately. I didn’t have anything to celebrate, but I joined in the toasting, the selfies and Down Under cheer. It helped to listen to Sydney DJs and blow off steam. When did Nepal become so devastating?Ìę

I went to sleep in my safari tent that night, craving rest, but in the middle of the night I heard a desperate cry. Slowly, disbelieving, I realized it was the voice of my young son. He was pleading for me. Daddy, he was yelling. Daddy!

I gripped the bed, helpless, and dragged my brain up to consciousness only to find I was alone in a tent, a planet away from my family. My watch said it was 2:15 a.m.Ìę

At breakfast another guest—a geological surveyor from Kathmandu—smiled and asked how I had enjoyed the earthquake.Ìę

The what?

“Just an aftershock,” he said. “Four point two, maybe five.”

It had lasted ten seconds at most, he said, and the rattling of tin roofs had set some ­local children to screaming. People had run out of their houses in fear. He talked about the Hima­layan Front fault line, upon which we were sitting, and the performance of various rocks when placed under pressure.

“What time?” I asked.Ìę

“About 2:15.”Ìę

The post A Year After the Quake, Nepal Is Still a Mess appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In February, I was rolling in an old, squeaking taxi through Havana, headed back to my rented digs atop a house in the tiny Chinatown. I got the room in a way many travelers to Cuba will recognize: a friend passed me a phone number, which was never answered.

Eventually, days after arriving in Havana and after pursuing the owner halfway across the city in person, I booked the room, which had been available all along. That was how Cuba worked, or didn’t work. After 23 years reporting all over the island, I’d grown accustomed to the frustrating mixture of disciplined dictatorship and tropical chaos, the steady state of an island where nothing seemed to change, ever.

But travel is best in the cracks, in the unexpected encounters between appointments, in the crucial subtleties revealed when—according to our expectations and schedules—nothing is happening. So it was that night. My taxi passed by a restaurant, and I looked with exhausted envy at the warm interior, the soft lights, the well-dressed people eating from nice plates. Vibrant, disorganized music spilled out the doors, and a woman was dancing, spinning alone.

We kept moving, and I vowed to come back another day. But then a sudden doubt hit me. The place looked fun now, but would it be tomorrow? At the end of the block, I jumped out of the taxi and walked back.

The restaurant, , was unusual for Cuba, even weird: lots of cushions and low seating, eclectic decor, and a large and attentive staff serving food that arrived promptly. What’s with that? Even more unusual were the guests. I was used to Europeans and Canadians idling in the bars, but here were actual Cubans, including a pair of uniformed flight attendants for an airline I’d never heard of and a loud family celebrating something over beers and beef skewers. There was a good piano player and then a great one, playing song after song, many of them improvised or unheralded, a fusion of jazz and classical, an almost heedless performance cheered on by the increasingly drunken customers.

Was this really Havana, the grim citadel I’d been obsessing over for two decades? Was this the real Havana at last? A place as good as the legend?

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, cooling off, I noted the rest of the block. Dead. Dead and dark in the truly Cuban way. Both sides of the street were a long run of shuttered entrances and windows.

So what? I’d bought countless meals for Cubans in tourist places that they could never afford—or even enter—on their own. But this was the first time in 23 years I’d sat, eaten, danced on an equal footing with Cubans themselves, and it was for one simple reason: they could pay for it.

A nice restaurant, a good song, a cold drink. So what? So long to the old Cuba, that’s what.

Americans always say we want to see Cuba before. We don’t really say before what.

Before it changes into something else? Before Burger King gets there, before Nike and Spotify and global Taylorism turn Cuba into just another place? This is Cuba’s dilemma. Isolation and authenticity are its greatest lures, proof that the rebel island isn’t just anywhere. But they come at a terrible price. For Cubans, the quaint sleepiness that pops up in our viewfinders is a rusted poverty. And for foreigners, nothing is ever authentic enough.

Even stomach bugs don’t plague the modern traveler as much as the nagging suspicion that this isn’t really it. The it was always some time ago, in some other place. We fear we are missing Cuba the way it was, or was supposed to be. We don’t want to be those people, the ones who arrived too late.

But that’s nearly impossible. Today’s jet-setter expects, as travel writer and historian Tony Perrottet told me, “to be the only traveler in a remote Amazon village, the first to find a quote-unquote untouched outpost in New Guinea. This is at the heart of the frustration travelers will no doubt feel in Cuba.”

In other words, we want to see the island before we ourselves can get there to ruin it.

Bad news: everybody but us is already there. Cuba’s 60,000 hotel rooms are booked solid by more than two million tourists each year, mostly Canadians and Europeans who spend their visits at wrist-band beach resorts that have precisely zero correlation to unspoiled anything. The U.S. severed diplomatic ties and cut off trade with Cuba back in 1961, and for decades the Treasury Department has blocked Americans from using credit cards in the country. Those who visited Cuba legally had to book educational or cultural tours that were nominally sponsored by universities or nonprofits and supervised by polite functionaries of the Cuban state tourism authority. That meant being shuttled from the to a canned cabaret at the , with a stop in the colonial hill town of Trinidad and one afternoon of free time to encounter a Cuba off the books. It wasn’t all so bad: in the remote town of Baracoa, I once met a busload of drunk Americans who were here legally “studying Cuban rhythm.”

But tens of thousands of U.S. citizens snuck into Havana illegally every year, passing through CancĂșn or Nassau. (In some years, I tallied four of those visits.) During his first term, Obama zeroed out the funding to pursue such scofflaws, and since December a cascade of travel reforms has seen —a nonstop from JFK for authorized travelers—and a new plan for . Florida-based Carnival Cruise Line, the largest operator on the planet, has won approval from U.S. authorities to begin next May, using the Adonia, a 710-passenger ship themed around “social impact” voyages. At press time, in early August, Congress was debating lifting the trade embargo entirely. When that happens, up to a million Americans are expected to join the existing crowds.

The abrupt onset of reforms inside Cuba means that for the first time, individual, self-organized travel is becoming less onerous and expensive. A new generation of Americans will soon be able to explore Cuba at their own pace, doing things that should be perfectly routine but aren’t, like renting cars, climbing crags, or setting their own itineraries—all difficult or banned under Fidel Castro. Obama’s diplomatic opening gets much of the credit, but RaĂșl Castro has been making changes ever since he took the reins from his ailing brother nearly a decade ago. Only now, after years of glacial Cuban bureaucracy, have his simple economic reforms—legal self-employment, cheaper Internet access, increased rights to travel abroad, the licensing of hundreds of thousands of private businesses—begun to take effect.

As recently as 2013, I noticed little change in the day-to-day life of Cubans, but this February I was stunned to come back after two years and find the island transformed. I saw this even in small towns like CĂĄrdenas and Sancti SpĂ­ritus, but it is most obvious in Havana, where everything seemed to have a new coat of paint, including the old cars. For decades those old Chevys and Buicks were among the few private cars in Cuba, but they are increasingly shoved aside by fleets of Korean Kias and Chinese Geelys that are easier to import for the small new business class. Some 360,000 such enterprises, from repair shops to media companies, have been licensed since 2011, and out of 11 million Cubans, a million were released from mandatory and practically unpaid state employment to earn their own living. The result has been a surge in economic growth and optimism unseen in half a century.

The tourism business was the obvious winner, and Havana in particular is booming, the hotels full and the ancient alleys thronged with foreigners. Airbnb launched last April with 1,000 members—and doubled that number in 40 days. TripAdvisor now reviews 522 restaurants in Havana alone. (About one of my favorites, the hipster bar : “Everything was very good, which is an especially rare thing in Cuba.”) The home cafĂ©s called paladares, little places with just 12 chairs, have been superseded by large private restaurants with scores of employees and ingredients sourced from the first wave of private farms in the countryside. You already have to elbow your way through a crowd to get a mojito where Errol Flynn used to drink. But the changes go much deeper: the population is better fed, better dressed, and (crucially) sure that, with Havana and Washington both changing, their future has finally arrived.

I never fell in love with Cuba, not quite. My first visit, in 1991, was mercenary, a writer’s attempt to find a story no one else was seeing. The Cuban Revolution may have started with a giant party, but long before I arrived it became a dead hand on Cuban life, the easygoing, tropical version of a Warsaw Pact summer vacation. That first trip, I slept in a spartan “national” hotel in Havana that cost just $7 a night and came with a radio and an air conditioner labeled in Cyrillic. In 1993, in Cienfuegos, a once elegant sugar port on the south coast, food was so scarce that I waited in line for an hour and was questioned by two plainclothes cops before I was allowed to eat a small dish of paella. Flavored with iron and diesel, it was unforgettably the worst meal of my life—and yet a privilege in a country that was starving. Back in Havana, I watched two dogs fight to the death for a tiny pile of garbage.

Those were the hunger years, but for two decades I came back, inspired and awed by the ability of Cubans to not just survive but adapt and even thrive. I chronicled the island’s weaknesses—that would be the commie dictatorship, the repression of human and political rights, the petty controls over every aspect of life. But I also found and described strengths. I wrote about the stunning oceans and untouched coastlines, benignly neglected for decades by a revolution that could provide no gasoline and whose fishing boats disappeared routinely to Key West. I once lived for a month in Havana on the average Cuban salary, which amounted to dimes a day—an exercise in hunger but also solidarity. Cubans gave me a lesson in survival and an answer to why the best people live in the worst places.

Two books emerged from my obsession—one on Che Guevara, another on Fidel. Cuba’s edge was darker than other places, if less sharp. The benefits of free education and health care, as well as a ruthless police state, drowned out all opposition, and Havana in the nineties was a city of whispering and petty corruption, squalid deals and transparent jockeying for plates of chicken. Everyone lied every day. If you could swim in this queer pool, it was an unforgettable experience.

But was it authentic? No. Foreigners want a Cuba that doesn’t change, but Cubans want exactly that: change. “They want their iPhones,” says Alfredo Estrada, the Cuban-American author of . “They’ve been living in a very unnatural state of isolation, and they want to join the global community,” to get “very modern very quickly.”

We want them to keep driving those cute old cars. We’re nostalgic for a Cuba that shouldn’t exist—constrained by our embargo and crippled by dictatorship. Estrada calls the desire to visit an unchanged Cuba patronizing, as if the island is a museum, not a nation entitled to a future.

That future, he says, should include the careful preservation of all that does make Cuba distinct. Some of the first towns built in the Americas are here, including Santiago de Cuba, now the island’s second-largest city, a charming Caribbean destination despite losing much of its early architecture in fires and earthquakes. Havana, once the New York City of Latin America, avoided wholesale redevelopment after 1959 in “a fortunate accident,” says Estrada. “So let’s prolong the accident, because that’s what’s going to draw people to Havana. Keep the beauty and it will bring a lot of prosperity to the people of Havana.”

Foreigners still can’t buy real estate, but someday hotel companies and investors will snatch up the properties now moldering in historic parts of Cuba, and choice Old Havana houses may be worth millions in ten years. The Cuban government has mostly protected ordinary residents from displacement, but that will probably change. “A lot of those people are going to get screwed,” Estrada says with a sigh, before adding, “Hopefully not.”

But Havana, along with Cuba as a whole, is deservedly ripe for improvements. Much of Old Havana has been without running water for decades. The famous Malecón seafront promenade is in desperate condition, even abandoned in parts. “You are going to have all the usual tourist crap,” Estrada acknowledged, “but with that will come economic development, growth, restaurants, vendors. And it’s not just the physical hotels—it’s the industry, the people, the systems.”

“Go,” Estrada tells people. “Go as soon as possible. Who knows what will happen in five or ten years, what kind of transition will occur? Go now.”

Simple advice. We should go to Havana, not before it changes but so that it does change. So that it can change. The most authentic Cuba is the one still to come.

My own Cuban fantasy isn’t the daiquiri mulata, made with crùme de cacao, or an old Nash Rambler rumbling slowly through the rugged streets. There was always a time before we got there, but the past is easy in Cuba. What I want is the next chapter.

Once, a few years ago, I set off across Old Havana with Estrada’s history of the city in hand, reading as I walked, crossing from the founding stones at the Plaza de Armas to the extramural, literally the outside-the-walls development of the modern metropolis. This old colonial city, the largest remaining in the hemisphere, was belted with defensive walls in the late 17th century, some of which are still visible among the bars of Montseratte Street. Havana continued growing outward, an encyclopedia of architecture, often on the same block, with turn-of-the-century Baroque and Catalan Art Nouveau, MudĂ©jar movie palaces from the early 20th century, and an ambitious blast of 1950s Modernism, like the insanely atmospheric , a casino built by gangster Meyer Lansky far from the prying eyes of the FBI. This built history is the single most unshakable thing about Cuba, but the revolution added almost no gestures of its own to the city—the empty Plaza of the Revolution, the never-finished National Art School, and a few monuments to Che. The power elite preferred a modest setting like , a restaurant thatched like a peasant hut that still serves the best black beans and orange-marinated chicken in Cuba.

The pickled authenticity of Old Havana and a few magnets like , a Unesco World Heritage town to the southeast, will change quickly under the assault of decentralized tourism. But most of Cuba needs change. Continue just a mile or two from the gentrified zone along Obispo Street and you’ll find plenty of untouched, neglected authenticity, like El Cerro, where wrecked 19th-century mansions decorated with laundry spill down a long road, people living as if they have no holes in their roofs. Tourism has had little effect on such places. You can drink a thimble of sweet coffee from a street vendor and see no other foreigners, no matter how long you wait. Sometimes raw El Cerro feels more authentic than polished Old Havana.

Still, it can be hard to tell the real from the fake. Santería, the Afro-Cuban religion, is packaged nightly for tourists in Nikon-friendly events. A Cuban devotee assured me that this was faux Santería, not the true thing. Yet the chaotic, sweat-soaked home ceremonies I’d attended over the years were much the same: crowded initiation rites and birth celebrations that weren’t complete without rum, demonic possessions, and gifts of cash. What about the Riviera, for that matter? It was confiscated by the Castro government in 1959, but Lansky would be proud: it’s still a notorious hotel full of prostitutes, just like he always wanted.

Every walk around Havana unspools 500 complex years. In 15 minutes you pass from the stones laid by conquistadores to la esquina caliente, the “hot corner,” where men argue baseball all day. A few blocks and half a millennium later you’re in , where they serve the Hemingway daiquiri, a double made with grapefruit juice and (gasp!) no sugar at all.

Hemingway spent decades on the island, and called himself a sato, a run-of-the-mill Cuban. But I don’t know what he was thinking. Why would you want Cuba without the sweet stuff?

Contributing editor Patrick Symmes () is the author of , , and the forthcoming The Day Fidel Died.

The post The Golden Age of Havana Is Now appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

So an Irish American, a Mexican American, an African American, an Asian American, and an Irish-Ukranian-Filipino American walk into a bar. Actually, it’s a breakfast bar. It’s zero dark thirty on a cold January morning, and we’re at a tiny cafĂ© in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. After some coffee, we are going to chase winter steelhead.Ìę

But we don’t actually get to the steelhead, not yet. When the coffee comes, it’s still dark, and still winter. So the most multiethnic breakfast party in the history of Oregon sits down to talk. The sport of steelhead fishing has its own complicated rituals and lingo: there are “big sticks,” or double-handed fly rods, and “the D-loop,” a Jedi-style motion that can fling out a long, heavy line. Regular sticks are just oars. “Double Speys” and “snake rolls” are casting techniques from Scotland; “Scandis” are Swedish lines well adapted to these big Oregon waters.Ìę

Let’s deal with the fish right away. About 20 inches long, sometimes much more, steelhead are named for their dull silver, bullet-shaped heads, but depending on their life stage and the time of year, they can be silver-bright from the ocean or passionately colored like mutant rainbow trout. Big and strong, they have the habits of salmon, like going to sea and then, upon their return, refusing to bite a fisherman’s hook. They’re so hard to catch that they’re known as gray ghosts.

“You hear some anglers call them unicorns,” says Chad Brown, the black guy with the deep voice surrounded by fishing buddies. Unicorns are talked about but never seen. Chad’s been fishing for steelhead for four years and hasn’t caught one yet.Ìę

Steelhead are the real reason for this gathering, but Chad is the excuse. He’s a U.S. Navy veteran who participated in Desert Storm and Desert Shield, served at Guantánamo Bay, and saw combat during Operation Restore Hope, in Somalia, during the infamous Black Hawk Down era. That he came back with post-traumatic stress disorder is no news in this era—since 2001, more than 378,300 U.S. military personnel have sought treatment for potential PTSD from Veterans Affairs facilities—but he’s also an artist, designer, and educator who believes, he told me at breakfast, “in finding a way to radiate your pain outward to help others.”

That formula has produced , a left-right punch of fly-fishing lifestyle brand and do-gooder project that Chad founded in 2013. Soul River is a boutique storefront in the Kenton neighborhood of North Portland, one of the only substantially black areas in the city, where Chad sells gear, books trips, and invites anglers to sip kombucha and contemplate the artistic value of a size five purple Deal Breaker fly. He also sells his own line of gear and clothing, weaponized with touches of military-grade functionality that bring a little urban snazz to the dorky world of drip-dry. The boutique is also home to , the 501(c)(3) nonprofit through which Chad runs educational trips to help at-risk kids connect with the outdoors. His irresistible twist is to tap fellow veterans to mentor his students. Meanwhile, he’d like to catch a steelhead himself. Just once.Ìę

“They’ve been called the fish of a thousand casts,” says Michael Davidchik, the Filipino American, a 39-year-old emergency-room nurse. “Sometimes ten thousand.”Ìę

In fact, the state of Oregon estimates that anglers can spend up to 73 hours wetting a line for each steelhead they land. “If you are lucky,” says Brian Chou, a man so steeped in steelhead fishing that rod companies ask him to test their designs. Brian, a 38-year-old Asian American health coach and English tutor, is the man who oversaw Chad’s entry into the steelhead cult. “We’re the definition of lunacy,” he says. “We keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.”Ìę

Jaime Delgado, the Mexican American, isn’t having it. Born in San Diego, the 38-year-old is a cold killer on the water. He says he can cut the price of entry down to just 500 casts through a combination of fishing apps, cubic-feet-per-second flow figures, and—the whole table contributes to this list—a knowledge of water temperature, clarity, and (Chad’s addition) air pressure, combined with the right equipment, technique, depth, and presentation, along with care in choosing the place, season, and time of day. And they’re willing to let me—the Irish guy—into the circle of knowledge, provided I don’t share their secret fishing spots.Ìę

We head out after breakfast and drive up the banks of the [redacted], between the [deleted] and the [deleted]. We park at [nowhere] and drop two rafts in the river. We spend a long, cold morning drifting some of the river’s best-known holes, like [deleted], a sweeping run between two rapids. There are five of us: Jaime and Michael drift together, staring at the water; Chad and I ride at the ends of Brian’s cataraft. The boats are too small for much fishing, so we beach and then walk stretches, unfurling long casts, focused on the banks. The [redacted] is a fast river but slows during wide horseshoe bends or above and below rapids, and the steelhead gather in those places, resting.Ìę

We float seven miles but don’t catch a thing. Not even a nibble.

I swore not to reveal our whereabouts, but we were just [illegible] miles from Portland, and after lunch I slathered my photographic evidence all over Facebook.

I first met Chad Brown last October on the Deschutes, the classic steelhead river that runs through dry central Oregon. I’d had beginner’s luck, landing my first steelhead, a shining silver arrow 21 inches long that had literally pulled me into the cold river and left me soaked, renewed, and finally triumphant. As I dried out in the sunshine, Chad rolled past in a matte black Land Rover with tinted windows and a Thule cargo box on top. He was leading two other vehicles filled with kids, teens, and a few older men. Everyone was African American, which is slightly uncommon on the Deschutes. (Just 2 percent of Oregon’s population is black, and most of them live 100 miles west, around Portland and Eugene.)

Later I could see several big tents going up. On my way out, I stopped to help two of the kids find some cooking water and met Johnie Tucker, from the parks and recreation department of Vancouver, Washington, across the river from Portland. He and Chad were leading a series of outdoor-education trips to the Olympic Peninsula, the Deschutes, and the Sandy River. In the jargon, the youth—who on this trip ranged in age from six to seventeen—were “underserved,” from poor or minority backgrounds with little access to the outdoors. A few were in some kind of trouble, but others came from church groups or single-parent families that simply didn’t have the money, time, or culture of the outdoors.Ìę

“With a lot of inner-city kids, the forest is taboo,” Tucker explained. “That’s a cultural thing.” He’d joined forces with Chad and his team, which included Brian Chou and a young Seattle Army vet named Matthew Dahl, to teach them fly-fishing and all the things that come with it—etymology, camping, casting, and why a pair of Nike basketball shoes is not the best choice for wading through a river. “Think about it,” Chad told me as a cold wind whipped the campsite. “They’ve always been told, ‘Stay out of the water, it’s dangerous.’ ” But three hours east of the city, the kids were set free, in high spirits as they threw on their waders and posed for selfies.Ìę

“Are there really fish in there?” a skeptical girl of about ten asked me. I tried to inspire her with a detailed account of landing my steelhead, but all she heard was an old man talking. Everyone waddled down to the Deschutes, bravely stepping into the long nightmare that is steelheading.Ìę

“Chad’s the man,” Tucker told me, praising the vet’s ability to get through to a dozen slightly scruffy teens.Ìę

Recognizing that he was a veritable checklist of qualities it was seeking to promote—educator of children, veteran, entrepreneur, advocate for greater access to the nation’s wilderness areas—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service partnered with him to fund more trips. The agency brought him to Washington to speak on Capitol Hill, where he urged members of Congress to fund the , and is arranging for him to fly at-risk kids up to Alaska to fish with young Native American leaders. After a September 2014 speech to leaders of the National Wildlife Refuge Association, he was invited to join their board.Ìę

The fishing industry has taken note as well, with companies like Simms and Costa offering sponsorships and donating gear. Loop, the rod and reel manufacturer, hired Chad as a brand ambassador, filling its catalogs and social-media feeds with images of him. Loop USA’s lead salesman, James Park, says he liked Chad’s work with kids and his idea of using veterans to reach them. But Park is blunt about race as well. “To be frank, that’s the number-one reason I reached out to Chad,” he says. “I myself am Korean American and about the only Asian guy at my level in the industry. At any event, Chad and I stick out like sore thumbs.”Ìę

Park says that even when he’s had an appointment, he’s sometimes been greeted in fly shops by clerks who assumed he was lost and spoke extra slowly as they steered him back outside. The problem is not so much racism, Park says, as our collective River Runs Through It vision of Brad Pitt on the Bighorn—the expectation, reinforced in nearly all advertising, that fly-fishing is done by elite white males. But the sport, Park says, is already more diverse than its image. According to the , a nonprofit created by the Outdoor Industry Association to increase youth participation, 13.8 percent of people who said they fly-fished in 2013 self-identified as black or African American. Loop’s social-media posts about Chad get three times the average viewership, Park notes, but really any kind of diversity seems to work. (Posts about a 57-year-old woman angler got 13 times the usual interest.)Ìę

Chad’s many projects can be overwhelming, people’s expectations intense. Orvis wrote him out of the blue in March, asking if they had his e-mail address right, because he just won their inaugural (“We think the work you are doing for inner-city kids and veterans is awesome”) and the brand wanted to fly him to Montana to collect it in front of 500 dealers and guides.

Chad received a donation of equipment from another Oregon wilderness educator I know, Jeff Gottfried, who also works with marginalized kids. Gottfried says he’ll continue to help Chad “however I can, and more power to him.” But, he warns, “the biggest risk for him is burning out.” Chad has been fly-fishing for only a few years, yet he’s somehow supposed to educate Washington policymakers on the realities of conservation and advocate (and embody) getting minorities into our wild places. He’s supposed to link vets with kids and get them all in the wilderness but meanwhile support himself with a fishing boutique and a tenuous career as a gear designer.

People want to see Chad succeed, almost too much. People want to help.Ìę

“How could you not?” Park says.Ìę

In the bookÌęBlack Hawk Down, Mark Bowden describes how Army Rangers preparing to fast-rope from helicopters into the city of Mogadishu looked out to sea and saw a flotilla of Navy support ships filling the horizon. That was Chad out there.Ìę

It was 1993. He had joined the Navy at 20, and after two Gulf War deployments he found himself riding ashore in Somalia on a Navy landing craft, wearing body armor and carrying an M16. He was a combat stevedore; for ten months, he patrolled the piers where the Navy landed supplies and then convoyed them to a rusting aircraft hangar on the city’s edge, where strike troops lived. The hangar was depicted in the movie version of Black Hawk Down (accurately, Chad says) as a dirty oven full of Army snake eaters and Navy cowboys, CIA spooks and 19-year-old Rangers, sitting around customizing weapons and gear. Chad saw the fast and light approach of the Special Forces, the flexibility of search and rescue gear, the Navy penchant for bail-out buckles and instant access.Ìę

Each visit to the hangar meant passing through Mogadishu streets. There were hours spent guarding street corners, always on hair-trigger alert but governed by strict rules of engagement. On convoys the soldiers were trained to watch for anyone approaching the vehicle, but here in the city everyone approached all the time—men, women, and children crowding the narrow streets, curious. Chad’s pockets were full of zip ties for handcuffing potential threats.Ìę

“Mogadishu was nasty,” he says. “A beehive.” They were picked at by snipers and sometimes mortared. One of his buddies was killed.Ìę

“At the time, I was all gung-ho,” Chad says, but later he was troubled, wondering at his own role in reducing proud Somali men to prisoners.

He left the service in 1994 and, with help from the GI Bill, finished college and got a master’s in communication and design from the Pratt Institute in New York City. He spent seven or eight years in the Manhattan ad world, designing brands and campaigns, earning money, developing his taste for minimalist design. “New York was so fast,” he says, “my mind didn’t have time to relapse.”

Then came Oregon. In 2008, Chad took a contract job in Portland but was unmoored by the experience. “That’s when everything just went south for me,” he says. He was too far away from family—specifically his mother in North Carolina and his father, who still lives near Austin, Texas, where Chad grew up. Oregon’s slower pace gave him time to think, and remember, and to sink into a downward spiral. He started drinking, lost his contract job, and fell into depression, too ashamed to ask his parents for help.Ìę

“I was deteriorating every month I was away from my family,” he says. “No one to turn to. I was in a dark place.” He became “borderline homeless,” he says, routinely selling his blood for gas money. He felt broken in a way that couldn’t be fixed, and in the summer of 2009, he went to the Clackamas River, took out a gun, and prepared to shoot himself. Something, probably the river itself, with its steady pull of gentle power, held him back. He called his mother, who called the Veterans Affairs suicide hotline. He was placed in a padded room in a VA psychiatric ward.Ìę

At the VA, Chad was known by the last four digits of his social-security number. Every morning he was handed a paper cup full of two or three different medications. After four days he was let out of the psych ward, but he remained in a VA clinic, learning more about post-traumatic stress. A suite of ugly realities are swept up in the cozy abbreviation PTSD: tricks of memory, sleepless nights, emotional instability, substance abuse, depression, anxiety, thoughts of suicide, and flattening doses of pharmaceuticals. That all sounded about accurate to Chad, a description of who he had become.Ìę

The turning point came months later, when a VA attendant took him bass fishing. This was at Clackamette Park, a suburban oasis in Portland where the Clackamas and Willamette Rivers meet. On his first try, Chad accidentally hooked a jack (or early) salmon. He lost the fish, but “I was whooping and hollering,” he recalls. “It made me feel alive. I hadn’t smiled for so long.”Ìę

Back in Texas, the men in Chad’s family had been hunters, and his dad was an avid hiker. But Chad spent his childhood making art and never knew the atavistic thrill of a hooked fish. He kept going back to the park to try again. (“It’s not like I had anything else to do,” he says.) The next spring, on a road trip to the Umpqua River, an emerald ribbon in southern Oregon, he was floored more by the water’s colors than by any fish in it. That day he entered a tackle shop for the first time and found what would become his true therapy: fly-fishing. The reels fascinated him, and the brilliantly colored lines were beguiling. He was in debt but put down a credit card and bought a kit. He learned casting from YouTube and started heading out alone, with whatever flies the shops recommended.Ìę

In a haze of medication, Chad lost track of time, wandering out to rivers during 2010 and 2011. Finally, he got lucky again. He found the Sandy River so thick with fall salmon, he says, that “I thought I was in a National Geographic photo.” He waded in and hooked one on his fourth cast. This time the hook, line, and rod all held. Chad did not. The salmon fought hard and then abruptly turned upstream and came toward him, throwing a bow wake. “I actually got scared,” Chad says. “I didn’t know what to do, so I dropped my rod and started running in the opposite direction. I was screaming, ‘Help, the salmon is coming after me!’ and running.”Ìę

A lot of anglers watched the black man run up the river, chased by a salmon. Only one came over. That was Brian Chou.

Brian explained that there were ways to control a fish, even a big salmon. Over the next couple of years, as the two men ran into one another at fly shops and started fishing together, Chad’s interest became an obsession. He fished with Brian and without him, the hours on the water the most effective prescription possible.

“I’m medicated,” Chad told me once, referring to rivers. “That was my healing. Fishing evolved me to a place where I was ready to get back in society and kick ass.” On the Sandy one day in 2011, he says, “I was standing in the water waist deep, and I thought, This river has basically saved my life. I’ve got to do something for others. It became about more than just me, and that’s when my design side started to kick in.”

Chad’s dream was to imitate Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, using a gear business to fund education and conservation. He wanted to get kids on the water by soliciting donated equipment and grants to help reduce the cost of fly-fishing from “freaking expensive” to zero.Ìę

Working from his apartment, he tried designing fly reels but abandoned that for river-and-urban-friendly clothing and bags. He marketed the designs to fishermen at meetups, where his personal story earned him speaking invitations. In 2013, he got his first Fish and Wildlife contract to take kids out; in 2014, he landed his deal with Loop and by July had opened the boutique.Ìę

Chad calls Soul River a mashup of “art, design, humanity, fly-fishing, and outdoors.” In the small retail space, Soul River Runs Deep, he offers just a few exquisite examples of outdoor equipment: waterproof notebooks, clasp knives from New Zealand, and a spectacular array of flies, dated and signed by each creator and priced as works of art. One wall is filled with his own Soul River line. Backpack drybags come in subtle colors, for the “stream bank to boardroom” transition. A fishing jacket makes you look like Bruce Lee instead of Don Knotts. T-shirts and $25 caps feature his tattoo-style artwork of fish, trees, and nymphs. And Chad’s Soul River messenger bag justified the $220 price tag by solving a lot of problems for me: big enough for groceries, but with a pocket sized for an iPad, tie-downs for wet gear, and an unusually high and tight shoulder position that can survive motorcycling, yet pops off with a Special Forces–style Cobra quick release. But his real signature is a line of slightly transgressive American-flag kaffiyehs featuring Old Glory in alternate color schemes (desert camo or night-stalker black on green). “It’s antiwar, basically,” he says, but his designs are so distinctively his own that they need little explaining.Ìę

The boutique’s larger back room is home to Soul River Runs Wild, the nonprofit. Here, on a huge conference table hand-painted with his designs, Chad hosts advocacy events and fly-tying contests for kids. He dedicates 15 percent of what’s earned up front to the nonprofit in back.Ìę

Chad doesn’t make any money from Soul River, yet. There aren’t a lot of fly-fishermen in this neck of Portland; so far the website,Ìę, accounts for half his sales. But through a combination of education grants, speaking gigs, design consulting, and a small Navy disability check, this barely paid advocate for the healing power of wild places is finding his feet, financially and otherwise.

Having failed utterly to catch or even detect a steelhead in January, we head back out in February. This time we fish on foot. We park near [inaudible], where Brian has found a gate recently opened to the public. We cross onion fields and then clamber through forest to reach the banks of the [no signal] hole, a long run we fished on the float trip.Ìę

Under Brian’s expert direction, we mostly work the banks. Or, I should say, they work the banks. I’ve been fishing up to now with a conventional single-handed rod, but Chad passes over an extra Spey rod and teaches me the fundamentals of two-handed casting, where you pick up and then unroll the thick line. The rod is so big—typically 13 or 14 feet—that when it works, you can shoot dozens of yards of line across deep water.Ìę

After ten minutes of Chad’s instruction, I drop a hook 45 feet across the [redacted] and start throwing my quota of a thousand—or was it ten thousand?—casts.Ìę

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Hours. McKenzie drift boats float by. (“Anything?” “Nothing. How about you?” “Nothing.”) The fishing was good last week, like always, but this day the unicorns are in hiding.Ìę

Chad still hasn’t caught his first steelhead. (“The varmints!” he jokes.) This fish practically saved his life, but it’s sitting out there in the river right now, ignoring him.Ìę

A long cold day of defeat. So why is everyone so happy?Ìę

At one point, Brian jokingly orders Chad to fish a run by saying, “Go on, take your medicine.” But it doesn’t require the battle of Mogadishu to stress you past the breaking point. Brian is a compulsively busy guy, with two small businesses, the kind of man who reverse-engineers blended-plastic fly lines for relaxation. Michael works in an emergency room and is going through a custody battle. Jaime grew up in a rough patch of Southern California and would drive halfway across Oregon for the hope of a river, the tug of a fish. I’ve worked in five war zones and am looking for my own cure. We all want that sustained meditation that comes from standing by a river.Ìę

Yes, meditation. Like surf, tides, and rain, a fly-fishing river displays statistical reliability—the flow of water changes constantly but in a relaxing, predictable way. Moving water, researchers have found, permits a deep state of attention that is easy and restful, especially compared with the depleting alarms of electronic life, the flat harshness of living and working in boxes. By scientific standards, our fishing party is an oxytocin fest, our mirror neurons firing in tribal unison as we all flood with GABA, the feel-good neurochemical, and slow-burn endorphins. Even doctors know this works. In 2009, a Salt Lake City VA study of 67 veterans with PTSD showed that, surprise, after a four-day fishing trip, their salivary cortisol (and salivary immunoglobins, and urinary catecholamines) were way down. Which is good.

So you could get your drugs by sitting for eight hours in a VA waiting room. But you could also take the other medicine, what biologist Wallace J. Nichols has called the “blue mind” treatment of running water. Chad is doing both, taking his government meds but also hunting his steelhead, the long road of a tired small-business man struggling to live up to everyone’s hopes. On this trip he looks drawn and tired; he says the “low points” are back. Then he wades out into the river.Ìę

“When I am able to help Chad medicate,” Brian says, watching, “it makes me feel like I have a purpose.”

Aren’t we all taking our medicine in the outdoors? When did that become a joke? No, the joke is the fish itself. Chad doesn’t get his steelhead that day. But another drift boat passes by and suddenly, insultingly, hooks one. The anglers pull over and, right in front of us, play and land the fish on a $20 rod from Walmart, using a big pink spoon.

So much for Spey rods. So much for the never-seen unicorn. The gray ghost is right here, just another silvery fish flapping its gills. They bleed it out and put it on ice and leave.Ìę

We all stand around in the weak winter sunshine, happy. The drugs are beginning to take effect. ÌęÌę Ìę

Contributing editor Patrick Symmes () is the author of the forthcoming book The Day Fidel Died, on the Cuban revolution.Ìę

The post The PTSD River Cure appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I don't mean to pick a fight here, but Arabs are lousy drivers.

ïżŒïżŒïżŒIt's not a religious thing: Sunnis, Shiites, Maronite Catholics, Greek and Syrian Orthodox, the Druze and the Alawites—they're all equally bad. I actually met a guy in Beirut who owned a driving school. I laughed so hard beer came out my nose.

When my taxi first exploded from Lebanon into Syria, I wasn't laughing anymore. On the Lebanese side of the border I'd grabbed a mandatory-yellow Plymouth Gran Fury, an early-1970s behemoth with tassels hanging from every surface. The backseat was covered in shag and big enough for a dance party. The dash was equipped with a miniature fan, a verse from the Koran, and a framed picture of Syrian president-for-life Bashar al-Assad. The hood ornament had been pirated from a Cadillac El Dorado. Pimp my ride, Baathist edition.

I'd been counting on clearing customs with a tourist visa and a smile, but the camouflage-clad Syrian border guard wasn't buying. When he noticed the unusually large camera beside me on the seat—it more or less screamed “journalist”—he started yelling. I chuckled. He pointed an accusing finger. I made smiley faces. He thundered. But meanwhile the queue of cars behind us was growing, and in loud revolt. Harassed by the dunning of a dozen air horns and goaded by indignant drivers, the guard abruptly waved us through. The Gran Fury rocketed toward Damascus, one in a clot of cabs and cars unleashed all at once.

A true muscle car, the Fury had every advantage on a wide-open, curving expressway. We easily overtook a 1950s Nash Rambler, swerved around an overloaded minivan, and nipped past a Dodge Dart. As we topped 75 miles an hour, a titanium-silver fuel-injected 2005 Mercedes breezed past. Undaunted, my driver gunned it to 87. I was watching the speedometer because the Fury's seat belts had gone the way of the original eight-track.

Fifteen minutes, total, and Damascus came into sight. That was all it took to see the enemy capital in the distance. Fifteen minutes and you were further into the mystery of Syria than the United Nations was at the time. The UN is investigating Syrian officials for their widely assumed complicity in the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of neighboring Lebanon, in a Beirut car bombing last February. Just 15 minutes and you were closer than Saint Paul was when he was knocked off his horse. Fifteen minutes and you were as close as Muhammad supposedly ever came. Arriving with his armies in A.D. 630, he compared the first sight of Damascus to a glimpse of paradise, but he only saw the city from afar, at night, and never entered its gates.

Another 15 minutes across a dust bowl and we roared into the city and screeched into the central taxi yard so hot you'd think an Israeli tank column was on our tail.

In automobiles and other ways, Damascus, like Havana, can look like the city the world forgot. It is arguably the oldest living settlement in the world, inhabited for almost 10,000 years, yet now best known as a capital of tyranny, headquarters of a military regime isolated by international opprobrium and feared by its own people. Syria is your friendly neighborhood thug, its government a milder variant of the same Baath Party (secular, socialist, and sadistic) that held Saddam's Iraq in its grip. With the latter regime deposed, Syria has taken over the role of rogue state: accused of “support for terrorism,” “false statements,” and “interference in the affairs of its neighbors” (Condoleezza Rice); “helper and enabler” of terrorists (George W. Bush); “one of the major supporters of terrorism” (the Pentagon).

[quote]“The oldest living settlement in the world, Syria is still better known for tyranny and ethnic chaos than 10,000 years of culture. The country is Axis of Evil, Junior Division, while its people are even sweeter villains.”[/quote]

Axis of evil, junior division. But if Syria's government has been cast as the black hat in international affairs, the Syrians themselves make the sweetest of villains. The population of 18 million is about 70 percent Sunni Muslim but is controlled by the Alawites, a small Shiite offshoot—comprising roughly 12 percent of Syrians, including the Assad family—that deifies Muhammad's son-in-law Ali. Fearful of the Sunni majority, the Alawites keep a lock on military and security posts, and defend their secular regime tooth and nail: When dictator Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, after a nearly 30-year rule of defeat and stagnation, the constitution was literally rewritten overnight to elevate his 34-year-old son Bashar. Things began to look up when Assad the younger, an ophthalmologist trained in England, took over. Cell phones were made legal, then satellite dishes, which now crowd the skyline of the capital, challenging the monopoly on information. Tourism has grown 5 percent a year, with Europeans and even American Chris- tians drawn to a breathtaking stockpile of Greco-Roman-Byzantine-Crusader ruins, religious shrines, and social graces drawn from the golden age of Islamic civilization.

But the pleasures of Syria (uncountable historical treasures, sympathetic people, sublime food) come with drawbacks (blistering deserts, Mad Max roads, a murderous police state). Bashar's sham election earned him 92.79 percent of the vote, security forces killed at least two dozen Kurdish demonstrators in March 2004, and you can still find the leader of the 1985 Achille Lauro cruise-ship hijacking in the Damascus phone book. A year ago, the Syrian government dramatically enhanced its reputation for stupidity by allegedly sponsoring the assassination of Hariri, one of its sharpest critics. The massive car bomb that killed the former prime minister backfired: Street protests erupted throughout Lebanon, Muslims and Christians marching together in what became known as the Cedar Revolution. By last April the demonstrations had forced out the 20,000 Syrian troops that had occupied Lebanon since 1976. Humiliated, the last Baathist army of conquest retreated to Damascus.

Confused, defensive, under investigation, the Syrian government began to look shaky. Days before my arrival last fall, the New York Times advised that . Most fatefully for its future, Syria has become a kind of small-scale Cambodia to Iraq's Vietnam, a transit route and sanctuary for the insurgency next door. The foreign jihadis who slip over the 376-mile border are only a tiny minority in Iraq, but they have drawn Washington's wrath onto Damascus. In October, a White House meeting mapped a range of options for punishing Syria. Increased economic sanctions. Delta Force missions. Or simply the continued initiative to keep Bashar off balance—”rattling the cage.” In November, the Washington Post reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had ordered CentCom, the U.S. Central Command, to , the precursor to a war plan.

Only the smart bombs know the coordinates of the future. The one sure thing is that, squeezed between Iraq and a hard place, Syria is in for a bumpy ride. Like Cuba in 1957, this twilight shall not come again. And so, to the tune of the saber rattling, I went to sing the praises of the enemy one last time.

Everything in Damascus is fabulously, incomprehensibly filthy, coated in talcum-fine desert grit. It is a city of more than a million, with an outermost layer of cement plants and car dealerships, the dry skin shed by a snake. Inside that husk is a noir new city, a wilderness of empty architectural gestures, never-finished towers of rebar, and abstract avenues that lead to theoretical traffic circles. Orwell designed this Damascus: The Ministry of Information prevents anyone from having information, the Ministry of Economy and Trade strangles the economy, and the Ministry of the Interior meddles in other country's affairs. Every car, shop, and house carries a painting, photo, or decal of President al-Assad—Hafez or Bashar, take your pick.

At dusk, this new city drops its shutters, leaving scattered pockets of seedy nightlife—vinyl “superclubs” that open at midnight, stocked with expensive liquor and Ukrainian dancers. But in the mornings, a better Damascus emerges, the Old City. Still girded with an oval of Roman walls pierced with nine gates, this ancient Damascus is packed with sweet shops, antique dealers, minarets, and, at its heart, the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque, where the relics of many religions slumber side by side.

[quote]“Only the smart bombs know the coordinates of the future. The one sure thing is that, squeezed between Iraq and a hard place, Syria is in for a bumpy ride. I went to sing the praises of the enemy one last time.”[/quote]

On my first morning in town, the mosque was crowded with busloads of Shiites from Iran and Iraq. The black-clad women and weeping men moaned and beat themselves at the shrine of their great martyr, Hussein, whose death 1,300 years ago begat the long, passionate drama that is Shiism. But the mosque offered dreams for the faithful of all stripes: Greek lettering on the foundation stones, from when it was a Christian cathedral; the remains of a third-century Roman temple; and, in the main prayer hall, a marble-clad catafalque said to contain the head of John the Baptist, who was executed by Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, around A.D. 30. Some Shiites got the wrong idea and fell to their knees, mistakenly crying out, “Hussein! Hussein!”

You can't throw an egg in the Old City without hitting a monotheist. In the Christian quarter, I ran into a group of 36 Spanish Catholics walking in the footsteps of Saint Paul. Paul had been blinded (and unhorsed) outside the city by a “light from heaven,” and the Spaniards were now taking literally the injunction he'd received in Acts 9:11, to “arise and go into the street called Straight.” Today the Via Recta has finned Cadillacs on it, but you can still see the Roman arch Paul would have passed under. The pilgrims had just come from the Old City wall where, wanted by the authorities, the fugitive evangelist had escaped in a basket lowered on ropes.

“It's a revelation to finally know what they knew,” Juan Botey, a quiet, lean, gray-haired Catalan from Barcelona, explained. “To see the places they stood.”

The Spaniards were almost silent as we marched down to the arched basement where Paul had been cured—well, more or less the place, since the location of these spots changes every few centuries. Like the Shiites, though, the Catholics had enough wonder to overcome navigational difficulties, and they launched into a mass in their soft Catalan dialect, not too far from the Latin that Paul would have heard in his day.

On the way back through the Muslim quarter, lost in a maze of alleys, I passed a few coffee shops stocked with European hipsters smoking hubble-bubble pipes and stumbled onto a converted old mansion, the headquarters of the Syrian Environmental Association (SEA). They were holding an open house, showing off art projects made from recycled materialsÌęand handing out “Don't Mess with Damascus” brochures. The chairwoman, a former director of Kalamoun University named Dr. Warka Barmada, quickly admitted that there isn't much of an environmental movement in Syria. She pointed to the Barada River, once a mountain stream sparkling through Damascus. If Paul were baptized there today, he'd come up with a plastic bag on his head and a bad rash: The Barada is a putrid trickle down a garbage-laced culvert.

Beyond the city, problems are legion. Logging in the northwest hill country. Desertification. Uncontrolled pollution by unaccountable industries. (But few petroleum spills—sadly for Syria's sputtering economy, this is one Middle East sand trap with little oil.) President al-Assad has set up a few tiny nature reserves, and a population of endangered oryx has been restored in the desert; other than that, Barmada said, little has been done “that I'm aware of.”

“I'm not talking politics,” she quickly cautioned. Syrians can only talk about what she called “politics with a small p,” meaning issues of daily competence, the performance of government services. “We want to change from within,” she added, “not by opposition.”

But environmentalism can't help but carry a whiff of the capital P. The SEA, Friends of Damascus, and two other green groups are some of the only nongovernmental organizations in Syria. Aside from the dismal national soccer team, just about the only thing it is legal to complain about is the environment. Where else can young idealists go, if not to Dr. Barmada?

Syrians are largely indifferent to things like pollution, she said. “Since we have been a socialist country for a long time, people got used to saying the state will take care of every problem.” But attitudes were changing, she pointed out, “now that we are going through a transition.” She meant the vague changes Bashar had promised: economic reforms, the arrival of the Internet, even free speech. Little of it has come true.

[quote]“I learned three things in Damascus: The enemy has terrible taste in music. The Syrians probably invented food. And Muhammad had a point: At night, the grit disappears and the hillsides glitter with amber lights. Heaven, even here.”[/quote]

Transition is a Syrian euphemism. A transition to something unspecified, a world after. After Bashar? After a cruise-missile strike? A civil war? The country was a cipher to its own people. Meanwhile, the Baath elite partied in the thumping nightclubs of Bab Touma, just inside the Roman wall. No-neck men in black suits and T-shirts manned the doors there, whisking in lanky honeys in tight jeans. I spent an hour one night spying from a rooftop restaurant as military officers caroused in the beer garden below. While demolishing ranks of stuffed grape leaves, grilled peppers, and 2004 Lebanese petit verdot, I learned three things. First, the enemy has terrible taste in music. Second, Syrians probably invented food. And third, Muhammad had a point: At night, under a cold moon, all the grit disappears, and the hillsides glitter with amber lights. Heaven, even here.

Clashes on the Iraq border, foreign jihadis trickling eastward, U.S. Special Forces allegedly conducting covert incursions inside Syria itself: It seemed like a fine time for a road trip.

I had a guide in mind. In 1909, before he was “of Arabia” and when Syria was still part of the Ottoman Empire, 21-year-old T.E. Lawrence had set out in similar circumstances—instability, banditry, and halting Arabic—to write his Oxford thesis on the Crusader castles scattered along Syria's coast. For two months he mapped the dozens of visually linked keeps and signal towers built by the European invaders in the 11th and 12th centuries, sleeping in Arab houses and walking huge swaths of the Nusayriyah Mountains with a sketchbook, a pistol, and a Boy Scout shirt tailored by his mother with extra pockets. Except for the pistol and shirt, I was good to go.

Reaching the first and greatest of these castles, Krak des Chevaliers, was a three-hour drive on good roads and the edge of death. I'd quickly learned to pick older, feebler taxis, but the rounded Renault was still squeezed from both sides by trucks going 70 as grinning motorcyclists and panicked donkeys wove crosswise through the mix. Occasional interlopers shot at us headlong, down the wrong side of the divided highway. The bleak landscape was interrupted only by giant statues of the late dictator, Hafez al-Assad, and a road sign that read THANK YOU FOR VISITING HAMA. Hama is where dear old Hafez used tanks to kill at least 10,000 of his citizens while crushing a 1982 rebellion.

Tucked up inside a pass, controlling the high ground, was Krak des Chevaliers, Castle of the Knights, a staggering work of medieval ambition with exquisitely preserved double-curtain walls, towers, battlements, and, yes, a spot for dumping boiling oil on the enemy. Lawrence said it was better than any castle in Europe. From the top of a tower once occupied by Richard the Lionheart, I could see, a dozen miles to the northwest, a small fortress clearly visible against the sky, the next link in the Christian war machine that held much of this coast for close to two centuries.

The Lawrence trail led me to the quiet seaside town of Tartus, where sidewalk cafés gave off clouds of sweet apple tobacco under a full moon. The Crusader fort here had a good restaurant inside the walls. The next day I ran north in a rusted Mercedes 300D. The big Crusader fortress at Marqab, made of black basalt, loomed over the narrow coastal plain like a thundercloud, but the coast itself, a lost bit of Mediterranean Riviera that Lawrence had loved, was now a trash-strewn eyesore, decorated with absurdly huge cement plants and terminals for Syria's tiny oil industry. Even on the isle of Arwad, where a small castle marked the Europeans' last foothold in the East, nobody had gotten Dr. Barmada's memo. Scrap metal and oil slicks ruined the crashing of deep-blue waves.

Lawrence led me on. In Latakia, the country's main port, neon lit up the busiest nightlife north of Beirut. Home to the fiercely secular Alawite leadership, Latakia was the least conservative place in Syria, a small city with as many bars and restaurants as Damascus. The hotels were taken up with spectacular weddings, floral atrocities conducted to blaring pop music and live video feeds. Alcohol was everywhere, women went around in short skirts, and just once, at the beach the next day, I saw that rarest of all things, the Arab bikini.

Above the city, the last green juniper forests of Syria concealed another incomprehensible, absurdly grand castle, Qalat Saladin. My cheery Latakian driver screeched his Lada right to the edge of an overhang to show me why: Ringing a tiny mountaintop, the fortress was surrounded by steep ravines on three sides. The Crusaders had hewed out the rock on the fourth side to make an unassailable edifice. But in 1188, they'd been blasted out in just two days by the great Islamic general Saladin.

While standing there, imagining the giant catapults that had shattered the walls, I was nosed off the road by a minivan that disgorged 15 Dutch tourists. We glared at each other. Syria is like Turkey in the sixties: People expect to have a ruin all to themselves, thank you.

Their local guide broke into a grin when he learned where I was from.

“You see?” he said, turning to his Dutch clients. “There is no terrorism in Syria. Even the American is alive.”

“It was five o'clock on a winter's morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train…” It isn't often remembered how Agatha Christie's most famous book begins, but it was Syria that put the “Orient” in Murder on the Orient Express, and Aleppo, the great highland city of the north, where her sleuth, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, waited for his train. Christie was writing what she knew: Married to an archaeologist, she spent much of the 1930s living in a mud-brick house at a remote dig site outside Aleppo, typing furiously.

The UN had just sent its own Hercule Poirot into Syria to solve a case, namely, the assassination of Rafik Hariri in Beirut. The detective this time was Detlev Mehlis, a former prosecutor from Germany who, like Poirot on the Orient Express, had to sort through a rapidly expanding array of evidence that pointed him to the inescapable conclusion that, just like on the Orient Express, not only had almost everyone been involved but almost everyone was going to get away with it.

Who were the six men who shadowed the prime minister's convoy in Beirut? (They flew away 90 minutes after the bombing.) Who bought the six cell phones they used? (A Lebanese from a pro-Syria party.) Who drove the white Mitsubishi van into Lebanon? (A Syrian colonel.) Where was the van stored before being loaded with more than 2,200 pounds of TNT? (At a Syrian military base.) Which Syrian officials were present at the meeting last February where the crime was green-lighted? (The president's brother Maher and his brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat.)

For his own protection, Mehlis was stashed in a “secret location” outside Damascus—a red-roofed hospitality complex in the first range of hills, clearly visible from any Gran Fury crossing the border. Not long after he left, one of the suspects he'd interrogated, Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan, blew his own brains out. (Or was it murder?) Now the case had everything, even a smoking gun.

Like Poirot, I greeted the dawn on a train platform in Aleppo, having made the early run up from Latakia. The train was less Orient Express than early Brezhnev, and the Aleppo station had been improved with murals of Baathist astronauts and victorious Syrian armies. Despite the murals, Aleppo has changed at a glacial pace over the past 6,000 years. Recent big events have included a sacking by the Tartars, in 1260. They pulled down the glorious 11th-century hammam—marauders disdain bathing—but it was rebuilt, and a scalding trip through the steam room, a vicious pummeling, and a cold orange soda set me back $5.

I wandered Aleppo's enormous Armenian quarter, packed with ancient churches and vendors of delicate sweets. (They also have the head of John the Baptist's father, in case you didn't get your fill in Damascus.) There were miraculous and medieval sights around every corner—soccer-playing imams in one place and, down the next alley, cheery children hammering metal inside a Dickensian workshop. Like any police state, Syria has little crime, so the only danger I faced in the souk, the huge covered marketplace, was being run down by a donkey messenger. Crumbling but alive, too poor to be ruined by progress, decorated with old cars and European tourists, Aleppo is a desert flower that persists only in the adverse conditions of geopolitical hostility and a moribund dictatorship.

In the 1950s and '60s, a misguided attempt at modernization bulldozed some wide avenues through these old neighborhoods to make way for a few featureless plazas and office towers. Only a nitpicker of satanic proportions would obsess on how these few alterations had ruined the city, but there was such a man: Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11 attacks. A student of urban planning in Hamburg, Atta had come to Aleppo to write his college thesis. The young Egyptian loathed the way that a Le Corbusier grid had been superimposed on the crazed streets of Aleppo, which he viewed as a pure and organic expression of Islamic social relations. He left in 1994, nurturing a seed of hatred for Western architecture.Ìę

I poured gin and tonic on Atta's soul in the bar at Baron's Hotel, a symbol of everything he hated—grandly European, frankly colonial, a faded headquarters for Western cultural subversion. Christie lodged here in the 1930s; on the wall was a bill from April 1, 1914, made out to “Monsieur Laurence”:

[blockquote]4 jour pension menu a repas limonato

32 piastres 3 piastres 2 piastres.[/blockquote]

T. E. had walked much of the distance I'd just covered, arriving in Aleppo to discover himself reported dead in a local newspaper. He got over it: “Aleppo is all compact of colour, and sense of line,” he wrote in a letter home. “You inhale Orient in lungloads, and glut your appetite with silks and dyed fantasies of clothes.” The days were easy to fill as he had, roaming widely in the surrounding hills, consuming an endless buffet of ruins, civilizations piled atop one another. At the Dead Cities, a whole archipelago of old Roman towns, I met shepherd boys with the names of Christian emperors, and a Dutch archaeologist in a thrilled state of despair. Like Lawrence, like Atta, she was here for her thesis, trying to do six months of research on a one-month visa. Snooping where I shouldn't have, in fading light, I slipped and slid into a dank tomb. It was filled with cobwebs, a broken sarcophagus, and 1,500-year-old bones.

I shot out of that hole so fast, the shepherds were still laughing 10 minutes later.Ìę

Lawrence left Syria a student and returned a conqueror, at the head of the Arab Revolt in World War I. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Syria and Lebanon became French mandates, and since both attained independence in the 1940s, the two countries have been entangled in a bitter dance, partners in a bad marriage, each defined by the other. Syria has the plains, Lebanon the mountains; Syria the quiet uniformity of a terrorized population, Lebanon the raucous politics of balkanized factions ready to slit one another's throats. Syria, with its impoverished millions, has the big battalions; little Lebanon, with just under four million people, has the capitalism, the ski resorts, the wine, and the forests. Whatever happens to Damascus will also, most likely, happen to Beirut. So I took a detour.

The man who did the most to instigate the still unfolding divorce between Syria and Lebanon was Walid Jumblatt, clan chieftain and warlord of the Druze, an esoteric Islamic sect scattered through Syria, Israel, and especially southern Lebanon. I found the warlord at sunset in his fortified château in the Druze stronghold of Moukhtara, in the high, stony Shouf Mountains, an hour from the Syrian border. Druze guards with pistols frisked me with practiced ease as Jumblatt waited, talking on his cell phone. In his late fifties, he wore faded jeans and a collar-length fringe of long ringlets that tumbled down from his chrome dome. Surely he is the only warlord in the world who dresses like Frank Zappa, parties with Joe Cocker, and looks like Mr. Magoo.

[quote]“My Druze warlord host claimed not know who killed Prime Minister Hariri, even though the crimes were ongoing: Since Hariri's death, a dozen Lebanese critics of Syria had been dispatched, one by one, with blocks of plastic explosives.”[/quote]

The Druze were perhaps the only political winners in Lebanon's 15-year civil war. Just to review, Christians and Muslims slaughtered each other (1975), the Syrians invaded with 40,000 men ('76), the Sunnis and Shiites fought each other (throughout), the Israelis invaded ('78), there was a depraved free-for-all ('79–'81), followed by a Beirut bombing of U.S. Marines ('83), the return of the Israelis ('84), and daily-shifting alliances and all-out wars between the Druze, Shiites, and Sunnis, with endless rounds of backstabbing among the Palestinians, Christians, Druze, French, and Americans. The two things to remember are that everybody ran out of ammunition in 1990, and that 1975 is now the name of a chic Beirut nightclub with fake bullet holes and sandbags for chairs.

Since the friend of my enemy's enemy is the enemy of my friend's friend, Jumblatt combined the battlefield prowess of the Druze with a fleet sense for when to abandon an alliance. A longtime ally of the Syrians, he'd been the loudest in calling for their ouster, even before the Hariri assassination, and had ridden the 2005 Cedar Revolution to a position as one of the most powerful men in Parliament.

Jumblatt led me inside to sofas in his vaulted office, where we were joined by his five-month-old puppy, a sharpei named Oscar who gnawed on a coffee table. Following a time-honored Druze doctrine of takia, or protective dissimulation, my host pretended he didn't know who killed Prime Minister Hariri.

“Except rumors, I have no idea,” he said, not bothering to conceal a wry smile. “In Lebanon you can hear all kinds of gossip. Lebanese people know everything.” He did blame the Syrian government for decades of crude political manipulation. The crimes were ongoing: Since Hariri's death, a dozen Lebanese critics of Syria had been dispatched, one by one, with blocks of plastic explosives. The latest attack had occurred just two nights earlier: Not long after a popular journalist had attacked Syria on television, she turned the key on her Land Rover and it blew up.

Ìę

Jumblatt's office was a temple to warlord kitsch. A onetime client of the Soviets, he had a fabulous collection of their dress uniforms and vast canvases depicting the Red Army, along with velvet cases of Soviet, Lebanese, and Ottoman military insignia and medals. Since his father and grandfather were both assassinated, Jumblatt also kept a rack of six beautiful sniper rifles—and an artillery-spotting scope aimed over the valley below. When he stepped out to take a call, I inspected the vertical file folders on his desk. They were stuffed with pistols. Five semi-automatics, each sitting on a stack of five clips.

As the firepower hinted, Jumblatt was pessimistic. “The new Lebanon will be like the old Lebanon,” he warned. “Same old troubles. We will see. It depends on American policy.” He feared that the “neocon disaster” in Iraq would spill over into Syria. Any collapse would affect vulnerable, poorly balanced Lebanon.

Jumblatt led me back outside, past a huge marble sarcophagus. “Roman,” he said. “I got this in the time of looting, the eighties. I paid $10,000. Very cheap.” During the civil war, when half the antiquities in Lebanon were being sold abroad, Jumblatt had bought a priceless array of mosaics, which were now on display at an Ottoman palace across the valley. Joe Cocker played a good show there a few years ago, the warlord noted with satisfaction.

As we said goodbye, Jumblatt urged me not to miss Lebanon's famous cedar forests. King Solomon's temple was made from these strong, fragrant trees. There were only two stands of the old-growth giants left, one right here in the al-Shouf Cedar Nature Reserve.

Like his father, Jumblatt had ordered the Druze to plant cedars, three million young trees now growing inside special reserves up and down the mountain range. Although the cedars grow slowly, they can drive their roots down through the cracks in solid rock. Any man who plants three million trees can't be a total pessimist.

The next morning, a Druze park ranger named Hassam Ghanim took me up to 6,500 feet, and we entered the al-Shouf reserve. Ghanim led me to an impressively gnarled cedar, black with age, with two trunks rising in a V. “One thousand eight hundred years,” he said, “if you like and you love.”

I liked and I loved. The tree was my size when Muhammad preached, the height of a house when Byzantium fell and the Ottomans arrived. It had ridden out the civil war because the Shouf Mountains were a no-go zone, the scene of brutal massacres. Wild boar, porcupines, foxes, even wolves had endured here for the same reason.

Ghanim claimed, doubtfully, that this was the “oldmost tree” in Lebanon, but there was a rival stand of cedars in the north, and I wandered that way, hoping to find some enduring lesson in the old giants' survival. This meant heading up the Bekaa Valley, whose southern reaches were a stronghold of the radical anti-Western party Hezbollah. Syrian occupation of Lebanon had run deepest in the northern Bekaa, but now Lebanese soldiers controlled the checkpoints, waving amiably beneath murals of Kalashnikov-toting Shiite martyrs. Despite the Islamist atmosphere, the Bekaa is home to Lebanon's excellent wine industry, and I had a quick snort in the tasting rooms at Château Kasara. A mixed group of Finnish, French, Irish, and Austrian tourists was over from Beirut, wandering the cool cellars and comparing notes. (Hints of sectarian feuding, with lingering aftertaste of summary execution.)

Slurring what little Arabic I could now speak, I negotiated a taxi fare to the Qadisha Gorge—UNESCO World Heritage Site, holy land of the Maronite Catholics, and heartland of Lebanon's crazed Christian militias. The towns were festooned with huge posters of war criminals, but the gorge itself was Lord of the Rings territory: sheer cliffs decorated with waterfalls and vast Catholic cathedrals skewered in God beams of light. We finally topped out at the Cedars of Lebanon, one of five ski resorts in the country. Here was the last big stand—just a few acres—of old-growth cedars, some of them having lived 2,000 years. The dense canopy of evergreen branches created a green sky.

Ìę

I should have quit right there, but instead I made an impulsive and foolish dash the next morning up Lebanon's tallest peak, 10,131-foot Qurnat as Sawda, just behind the ski resort. Equipped with some croissants I'd stolen from the hotel breakfast, I hiked uphill for three hours, but was ultimately turned back by dense fog at about 9,000 feet. Using a compass, I navigated my way back to the top of the ski lift. It was off-season, but three construction workers built a trash fire to warm me up.

“USA good!” they shouted. “Bush good!” They were Christians. Anyone who bombed Muslims was “OK!” with them. This included Israel (“Very good!”) and Ariel Sharon (“Number one!”). They danced around the fire, shouting out their idiot ski-bum agenda for the future. “Drinks good,” they screamed. “Girls good! Marijuana good! Bomb all Muslims!”

Back in Damascus, the veneer didn't seem ready to crack. At a glossy restaurant row full of the Syrian elite, men jockeyed BMWs and Porsches in the valet lots, and Syrian valley girls chatted on their cell phones and ordered sushi as tropical fish swam beneath their feet. Well-educated people told me that, honestly, no Syrians were fighting in Iraq. (Sixty-six have been captured on the battlefield.) No Syrians had been involved in the assassination in Lebanon. (According to Detlev Mehlis, at least six Syrian officials were aware in advance.) President Bashar al-Assad was a farsighted leader, a lovely man. If I knew him for two minutes I would love him. Israel was behind it all.

[quote]“The Syrians are trying to close their 376-mile border, putting up a berm to stop vehicles and pleading for night-vision equipment to track illegal crossings. But it's too late: America is already here.”[/quote]

Meanwhile, the country held its breath. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű the great Umayyad Mosque, black cars disgorged “regime elements”: colonels, generals, and secret policemen in tracksuits and dark glasses. Shiites and Sunnis pushed up against each other, crowded by Christians and Kurds. Even a congenitalÌęatheist could be swept up in the riptide of faith. On my last afternoon in Damascus, I followed a stream of Iraqi Shiite pilgrims through the streets of the Old City to the tomb of Raquaya, the daughter of Ali. Five hundred people were trying to enter, and 200 to leave, and the alley changed in an instant from absurdly crowded to dangerously panicked. Amid screaming, shoving, wailing, and angry chants, an elderly woman was knocked down and trampled under a sea of black chadors. Frightened children were passed over the heads of the crowd, surfing the high emotions of a Shiite Lollapalooza. We were on the verge of another ritual, the holy stampede. I fought my way out of the crowd with a new appreciation for the enormous, devotional suffering at the heart of Shiism.

Out in the vast eastern deserts, new defeats await. At the Roman ruins of Palmyra, a sleepy guard waved me into the Temple of Bel when I appeared at first light, too early for the posted hours. “OK,” he said wearily, “you can look.” A once prosperous stop on the Silk Road, Palmyra may possess the greatest array of antiquities in all of the Middle East, which is really saying something. Colonnaded avenues led for three miles through temples, courts, senates, and bathhouses, ending finally, fittingly, in mortuary towers that ran into the far desert.

The futility of empire, the dusty brevity of human ambition, came crashing home, punctuated by the roar of Syrian MiGs passing overhead on their dawn patrol. Iraq was about 80 miles away. The Syrians are trying to close the border, putting up a berm to stop vehicles and pleading for night-vision equipment to track illegal crossings. But it is too late: America is already here. Army Rangers have already had bloody incidents of “friction” with Syrian patrols, and undercover commandos—”special-mission units,” in Pentagon parlance— have reportedly been sent in to stalk the safe houses of the Iraq insurgency. Like the past, the future is now.

Walking out of Palmyra at 7:15 in the sun-bright morning, I ran smack into the same Dutch tour group. Same minivan, same tour guide. “You see?” I told him. “The American is still alive.”

I left Palmyra in a powder-blue Mercedes with the voluptuous curves of the 1950s. For an hour we paralleled the invisible border, nothing but dust between here and the war. A traffic sign with a huge arrow pointed left: BAGHDAD, it read. I went right.

As we raced for Damascus, straight as an arrow, a huge chocolate-brown hawk dropped into formation beside the car. The bird coasted above the roadside ditch at 60 miles an hour, barely moving a feather, grazing the top of the weeds, head down, hunting.

The post Syria, as the World Closed In appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

People dress like kings and queens in the capital of Mali, even in the dirt streets on the far side of the river. The women walk down mud lanes wearing immaculate gowns with puffed shoulders, gold detailing, and beadwork. The dudes are natty, too, in safari suits, crisp office boy outfits, or the grand boubou, the national robing that makes any man walk like a giant. Only the heroic boys everywhere—young teens carrying loads, pushing groceries, directing trucks—go around in recycled jeans and T-shirts. In squalor the people must be regal.

We’d been circling the outskirts of Bamako for an hour, driving in a taxi from street to street, block to block, the confusion more effective than any blindfold. Out here, far from the government compounds and hotel towers of downtown, was the striving Africa, endless rows of two-story cement houses, barbershops, and mobile-phone kiosks. Finally, a boy on a motorcycle was sent to fetch us, and we followed him back through the sprawling neighborhood and into a courtyard, where the gate was quickly locked behind us.

Here a man in a red fez escorted me through the cool, dark house to an iron door painted red and freshly reinforced with cement and a strong padlock. It took a while for my eyes to adjust. Boxes. Boxes and boxes. There were 2,400 footlockers in this room.

The air reeked of decaying paper, the acid tang of the back stacks at a forgotten university. The trunks were brightly painted in the Malian style: black, green, and silver, with waving lines and diagonals and dots. They shone even in the deep shade of this cavernous room. Some were as small as suitcases, others large enough to hold a body. They climbed to the ceiling on three sides, with only a narrow passage down the middle.

The man who opened the door to this trove was Abdel Kader Haidara, 44, a round-bellied scholar from the Sahara, with a cloudy left eye and a simple white robe.

“Here,” said Haidara, gesturing for me to advance.

Before me was a vast cache of knowledge pulled literally from the fires of war. These were , the legendary caravan town that had thrived here between the 12th and 16th centuries.ÌęRelics of a sophisticated African trading culture that stretched from Mauritania to Zanzibar, they had emerged in the past decade as one of the great archaeological discoveries of our time, a hidden-in-plain-sight secret. Inside wrappings of rag paper or gazelle leather, scribed onto camel- and goatskin parchments, written on Italian Renaissance paper and even stones, the Timbuktu books were a mountain of literature in a supposedly illiterate part of Africa, the secret history of a continent before Europeans arrived.

And then, in January 2013, they were burned. Jihadi rebels occupying Timbuktu entered the town’s great library and set the manuscripts ablaze. The world condemned it as the most despicable act of vandalism since the Taliban dynamited the monumental Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001.

So how could this room exist?

I was having an Indiana Jones moment. I opened a trunk and gently swept my fingers over the tooled-leather bindings and the soft edges of rag paper. I picked out a book and opened it, the pages crackling, the calligraphy stunning after some 500 years of sitting in dark rooms. I found myself stroking the books, inhaling their smell.

I opened cases at random, discovering treasures that I would never be allowed to touch in a museum. The pages were caverned out by millimeter-wide book worms, some more tunnel than text. I opened another metal trunk and a cloud of dust emerged, the books inside more confetti than pages.

I won’t look good in 500 years, either.

The bonfire was the last act in a war that has simmered for decades in the Saharan desert, pitting the nomads who have traditionally controlled northern Mali against its weak national government. It’s no wonder you don’t know where Mali is: one of the world’s 25 poorest countries, this landlocked nation has seven neighbors and no luck, more than 30 languages, including the French of its colonizers, and its feet in wet West Africa and its head in the arid Arab north; it lies where the Sahara yields to the Sahel, the grassy promise of the tropics. The northerners are mostly , recognizing no governments unless paid to do so. (They’ve rebelled against Mali three times just since the 1990s.) Their version of Islam has long been relaxed and idiosyncratic, allowing relative freedom to women and embracing music, especially the electric guitar. In the 1990s, before things took a harder turn, Tuareg leader Iyad Ag Ghali wrote a song for the biggest rock band in the Sahara.

Timbuktu was known for tolerance as well, and for its love of sensual pleasures like music and tobacco. Founded around 1100 A.D. where the Sahara meets the Niger River, it became a trade hub fed by caravans that crossed the desert with salt and books, connected by camel to Cordoba and Constantinople. By the 15th century, Timbuktu was home to 100,000 people, with as many as 25,000 scholars crowding its dirt lanes. One urban quarter served as a medieval xerox machine, lined with scriptoriums where calligraphers churned out handmade copies. Only the rise of European sailing ships pushed it into obscurity.

In modern times, Timbuktu attracted musicians and Western seekers, a mixture of Afro-pop gods, young rockers, and ecstatic backpackers who gathered every January for the Festival of the Desert in the dunes west of town. That groovy vibe peaked in 2007, when Bono and Jimmy Buffet crashed the party, but the consensus of desert life was breaking down. Ag Ghali stopped smoking and dancing and embraced the arch-conservative Islam of Ansardine, a homegrown jihadi group, and AQIM, the North African affiliate of Al Qaeda, run by a one-eyed Algerian named Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who’d perfected the art of kidnapping for profit. In 2009, a Briton was grabbed—and later executed—after another music festival, and soon there were nine Western hostages in northern Mali. European governments paid $65 million in ransoms, which only emboldened the Tuaregs and drew in more cash-hungry fighters. Malian musicians were threatened with death for participating in t

Then the jihad arrived. Belmokhtar united about 2,000 Tuareg fighters with a smaller, hardened force of jihadis—a quicksand mixture of smugglers and holy warriors bolstered by perhaps 1,000 heavily armed mercenaries returning from Libya. That April, the Malian army abruptly collapsed and the rebels captured Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal, the desert’s main population centers. In Timbuktu, the Tuaregs promised tolerance and respect. But when the troops of Ansardine arrived, flying the black flags of Al Qaeda, the rebels set up Taliban-style rule across northern Mali, a place they called Azawad and governed with harsh sharia laws.

In previous wars—a Moroccan invasion at the end of the 16th century and a jihadi uprising in the 15th—manuscripts had been destroyed or looted, too. But centuries later, mountains of old paper were still there, in small family collections, preserved by the desert climate and Islam’s reverence for the written word. “We don’t care about books,” one Tuareg rebel had assured a local collector, but that didn’t last. While overwhelmingly Islamic, the books embraced secular science, Sufi magic, and intellectual argument—the wrong kind of Islam, at least for Al Qaeda.

The occupation lasted ten months. Then, on January 26, 2013, as a French military expedition approached the city, the retreating rebels paused to commit one final crime. Entering Timbuktu’s modern new library, the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, they carried more than 4,000 manuscripts into a courtyard, where they built a bonfire of words. One match and about 30 minutes of stirring was all it took.

The mayor of Timbuktu told The Guardian that the fire had destroyed not one but two libraries, “a devastating blow.” But smoke gets in your eyes. Although pictures emerged of torched manuscripts lying in piles, Malian officials soon backtracked. Only some books had been lost. Over the next few months, news reports emerged of a remarkable effort by ordinary Malians to smuggle out these treasures, by truck and trunk, donkey and canoe. The jihadis never knew how badly they themselves had been burned: before they lit their blaze of ignorance, the vast majority of the city’s manuscripts were already gone.

I learned some details about all this by speaking with Stephanie DiakitĂ©, a Seattle attorney and expert in West African law. She’d been so taken with the books when she first saw them 20 years ago that she’d trained as a conservator. Months after the war, DiakitĂ© was still preoccupied with their security and would not reveal their whereabouts or how Abdel Kader Haidara, with her assistance, had orchestrated much of the daring escape. Even in their current hiding places—that secret location I’d later visit in Bamako, as well as homes along the roads to Timbuktu—the books were at risk, she said, vulnerable to rain, theft, or another war.

Haidara revealed even less, concerned that the Timbuktu citizens who actually moved the books would be punished if the jihadis returned. The government’s official catalog listed 9,000 manuscripts, but rumors were circulating that the town had held 20 or even 30 times that. Less than one percent had been cataloged, let alone copied, and almost no scholars could reach the books or even read the necessary languages. Surprises were waiting inside those crumbling pages.

The problem with paper is that it goes out of date. My Lonely Planet West Africa was only two years old but radically, dangerously obsolete. It was August, seven months after the liberation of Timbuktu, and after glimpsing the surviving books in Bamako, Italian photographer Marco Di Lauro and I were determined to reach the old city, to meet the heroic, but unnamed, smugglers who’d gotten the books out. We wasted ten full days in Bamako trying to catch one of the rare UN flights that carried African peacekeeping troops into Timbuktu. There is a northern road through the Sahara, and a southern route through the Sahel, but fresh reports of shootings and kidnappings convinced us to avoid both. Instead we’d travel down the Niger, a 2,600-mile watercourse that flows west to east through five countries, curving like a question mark toward the Sahara. The river was the way many of the books had escaped and would be our route back.

After a day of driving, we spent the night in Djenné, a magical, mud-walled city surrounded by the rushing waters of the Bani River. Djenné is a sister city to Timbuktu, equally venerable, with a mind-blowing mud mosque and its own small library of worm-eaten medieval manuscripts in gold leaf.

An hour up the road was Mopti, the main port on the Niger. We slipped down the stone quay at 4:15 A.M., picking our way over exhausted stevedores sleeping on cardboard. Hundreds of these men and boys crowd Mopti’s teeming waterfront by day, shouting and dusty, but here was Africa motionless, silent, and cool. After shimmying over smaller pirogues to reach our boat, the captain cast off, and we drifted into the current of Africa’s third-largest river.

LP’s cigarette-paper pages described a peacetime world of swift tourist boats here, with cabins and meals, gliding backpackers past riverside mosques. What we got was a smelly cargo vessel on a rescue mission. Called a pinnace, it had the proportions of a river canoe but was larger: 130 feet long and 12 feet wide, made from planked boards held together with hope. A waterline cargo deck supported two thundering diesels made in France, a score of crated motorcycles, and 6,300 sacks of yellow split peas . The food was destined for the war-displaced nomads and starving villagers we would pass during the next 300 miles of riverbank. The motorcycles were a side business.

Swinging up an exterior ladder brought you to the lido deck, a passenger area sheltered by a very low roof of corrugated tin. There was room only to sit or lie down; bed was the tin deck and dinner was riz sauce, a fiery brown stew made with goat (once) or fish heads (the rest of the time). There were 14 others on board, all crew or their families. Seven months after the war, people were still paying to get out of Timbuktu, not in.

August was the low point for the river, but the first rains had arrived upstream, and our capitaine was attempting his debut passage of the season. Sitting at a wood steering wheel at the front of the top deck, he assured me that we would make the trip between Mopti and Timbuktu in two days and one night. “La nonstop,”he said. It turned out neither of us spoke French.

The boat marched down the brown river at the pace of a slow bicyclist, hour after hour of featureless mud banks and a couple of barren villages where police officers looked over our credentials. Twice on the first day we paused to pass down the heavy bags of yellow peas or the motorcycles, which were placed in canoes and paddled ashore by strong men.

But that afternoon, we came through widening channels to a village on an island and, despite all plans and pleas, la stop. Our captain and crew were members of the Bozo tribe, known since ancient times as the masters of the river. This was their largest village, Barkinelba, on the reedy edge of Lake DĂ©bo, a seasonal body of water that forms in the Niger.

In a gibberish of Bozo to Bambara to French to English, we heard that it was too windy to cross the lake. A quick walk across the island proved the point: whitecaps tore up the surface, and the Bozo fishing pirogues were all sheltered in back creeks, tied fore and aft. We were spending the night right here.

Barkinelba was nice, in the way of insanely poor places at sunset. A few thousand people lived in reed huts with dirt floors, but they were clean, well dressed, and working hard. By day the men fished with monofilament nets while the women pounded millet. At night I sat on the roof of our boat as people with flashlights wandered the dark lanes. The average life span in Mali is 55; children in villages like this die all the time for lack of clean water. Yet there was something romantic, even immortal, in the sight of women embroidering by the light of a battery-powered television set, filling the darkness with gossip and laughter.

The skies had been smudged with Saharan sands all day, but this blew out at night, leaving an enormous Milky Way overhead. When Scottish explorer Mungo Park first came down this river in 1795, he was astonished by what people requested: they wanted paper. In the 1840s, the explorer Heinrich Barth gave away reams of the stuff and described traders wandering the desert with nothing but books to sell. Illiterate Africa was a myth. Words—books—had always been necessary.

If going there is a dream, and getting there a nightmare, arriving in Timbuktu is one of the world’s great disappointments. Hungry and nearly insane with boredom, we endured days three and four of the two-day trip, staring limply at the banks of the Niger until the north shore gradually turned into the high khaki dunes of the Sahara. The south shore, the Sahel, offered a smattering of restorative grass, and this was Timbuktu’s real advantage. On the desert crossings that connected the Mediterranean world to Africa, it was the first or last stop, the place, they said, where the camel met the canoe.

Our big canoe ran aground just 400 yards off the quay at Kabara, Timbuktu’s port. We crossed through a sandy no-man’s-land in a dented Mercedes taxi with desert-soft tires. In ancient times, attacks on travelers were so common here that this patch of sand had its own sinister name, They Don’t Hear, reflecting the cries of victims.

We passed through rings of increasingly tense security, first Malian soldiers cradling AK-47’s, then technicals (weaponized pickup trucks), then African Union soldiers lurking behind sandbagged positions. There had been five suicide bombings linked to Al Qaeda affiliates in northern Mali since the occupation ended; now UN and African diplomats were overseeing the deployment of Minusma, a West African peacekeeping force that was supposed to replace French troops and create stability.

But the streets of Timbuktu seemed empty, the population of 54,000 gutted by war. Only a trickle of men attended prayers at the 14th-century mosque, built by the great emperor Musa, the ruler who gilded Timbuktu’s reputation forever by marching all the way to Mecca with so much West African gold that he crashed the Egyptian economy. Europeans absorbed this story like blood absorbs alcohol and spent centuries searching the Sahara for Tombouctou, a wondrous city of golden castles. When Frenchman RenĂ©-Auguste CailliĂ© finally reported in 1828 that it was actually a small and downtrodden oasis of mud houses, he was initially met with suspicion.

Alas, he was right. The Atlantis of the desert was a dumpy little place, 600 years past its prime, with sand in the streets and plastic bags in the trees. Almost every hotel and restaurant had closed, and when we found a room it was just in time, for a sandstorm blew in, followed by a chilly downpour that flattened the wattle roofs of poor herders in the backstreets, turning the avatar of mystery into a shivering hovel of mud.

In the morning, we went straight to the . After seven months, you could still see not merely the sooty starburst left on the floor by the bonfire of books, but the actual shreds and cinders of manuscripts themselves, which were swirling around in a sheltered area by the men’s room. I took a step to investigate and heard the crunching of ancient knowledge under my feet. Had I just crushed the only existing copy of an Ottoman geography or the final verses of a Moorish poet? It smelled like the fire happened yesterday.

The institute was founded in 1973 but only gained real traction in 1984, when Haidara joined, bridging the gap between state researchers and some 65 families with private collections. Like most, he retained physical control of his books, and his own 45,000 items make up by far the largest collection in Timbuktu. These were not just piles of old scraps. Often they were high-quality works with spectacular Arabic calligraphy, illuminated with bright red and blue inks and graced with gold-leaf arabesques that wrapped in infinite loops, reflecting the never-ending nature of God. In 2000, Mali greatly expanded the institute, and this new building opened in 2009 with a staff of 50 Malians trained to protect and digitize the books.

This was Big Data, Sahara edition. The books are “heirlooms of an African renaissance,” says South African historian Shamil Jeppie, who runs the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town. They include everything from astronomy to zoology, from Turkish maps to Jewish wedding contracts, along with a mother lode of commercial records about caravans and the salt trade. One of the few scholars to have examined the works firsthand, Jeppie has found law and theology but also poetry, a history of tea, and two sex manuals, which he describes as “very practical—I mean, very impractical.”

Yet, by 2012, . You couldn’t exactly slap them on a scanner: the paper was as fragile as a mummy, and the ink (typically made of charcoal mixed with gum arabic) could burst into flames from the hot beam of light. When the jihadis arrived to trash the library, this inefficiency turned out to be a partial blessing: compared with the tens of thousands in state hands, there were hundreds of thousands still in private homes, waiting their turn for restoration and copying with cold-circuit photography. The people of Timbuktu had been careful, even grudging, with their books. As in centuries past, this was a winning strategy.

The State Library building is big for Timbuktu—a whole block—but blends in nicely, with the trapezoidal walls and open galleries of a Saharan home. Out in the ochre-colored courtyard was Bouya Haidara. Short and sober faced, with a scruff of white chin hair and a white scholar’s cap, he was the guardian of the library, an important position with elements of security chief and casino greeter. From a loose pile of burned books sitting against a wall—books that had been outdoors for seven months—he pulled a cardboard box, black all over. Inside were stacked pages of beautiful calligraphy, perhaps a hundred sheets, all scorched around the edges.

I asked Bouya what this manuscript had been. A consultation was held; a bony man lounging on a mattress by the front door turned out to be a locally prominent scholar. He casually flicked through the charred contents, turning ancient pages that crumbled at his touch. “Botany,” he said, in French. “The useful plants of the desert. Flowers. Herbal medicines.”

He probed deeper into the pile. “Verses of the Holy Koran.” Yes, the jihadi warriors had thoughtlessly burned their own sacred book—multiple copies were destroyed in the fire, Bouya noted.

I leaned over for a whiff, but a desert blast swept the fine, powdery ash up my nose, into my eyes, into my suddenly gasping mouth. I gagged and couldn’t find water anywhere. In Mali, Koranic scholars sometimes sell amulets that contain tiny verses, and in extreme cases of need customers may soak the paper in a glass of water and drink the inky result, literally absorbing the words into their bodies. Maybe snorting parts of the Holy Koran was not blasphemy but a blessing.

We followed Bouya into the basement, where he showed me how he stood back that afternoon as the rebels ripped a locked gate off its hinges and entered the storage rooms, tossing books into piles on the floor.

Thousands of manuscripts were added to the fire, but French fighter jets were overhead, and the rebels left many behind. Even better, they missed two rooms entirely, including the Sale de Manuscripts No. 4, which held 14 shelves of uncataloged volumes. These were recent donations that no one had even opened yet: piles of paper were stacked everywhere. Some manuscripts were big and neatly bundled; others were tiny scraps, stuffed into French air-mail envelopes from decades ago.

Aboubacrine Abdou Maiga, the library director’s representative, was grieving like a man who had been stabbed—“Four hundred books from Andalusia were burned!” he moaned to me—but he produced a final tally: 4,203 books had been destroyed by fire, but another 10,487 had survived.

That’s not counting the works that had already been spirited out. Even though the rebels had been camping for ten months in the institute’s courtyard, Bouya and others had smuggled out some of the most important books inside their robe-like boubous. He mimed stuffing a parchment into his underwear and laughed at the awkward gait and unseemly bulge that ancient literature created.

This is why I had gone all the way to Timbuktu. To see how people acted under pressure, when there was no plan, only instinct. The librarians simply grabbed books and walked out, passing with fake confidence by armed men ready to kill them. The sound of a culture surviving was the discreet rustling of men’s underpants.

The news kept getting better. Bouya pointed out that thousands of other books were still across town at an old archive called the dispensary. The next day, we drove over to a one-story mud and stone building in a walled compound. There we met Hassine Traore, a 32-year-old whose grandfather had been the dispensary’s official guardian.

“The first day they penetrated the town, the rebels came,” Traore said. They looted computers and other equipment. The dispensary books—another mound of uncataloged mysteries—were in locked storerooms, and the rebels demanded entry.

“They came and faced us and said, ‘Give me the key to the manuscripts,’ and we answered that we didn’t have it,” Traore said. “They pushed. They came every day, asking, ‘Where are the manuscripts?’ ”

The rebels were put off again and again, for four long months, but the pressure was continuous, Traore said, and he and his father grew desperate. They talked with neighbors, with families that had donated the books, and with Haidara, who had fled to Bamako. Government officials in the capital were sympathetic but helpless.

“Then, in August, we found the solution,” Traore said. Late at night, they began to pack up manuscripts, stuffing them into old rice sacks. Just the packing took a full month and involved dozens of men from several book-owning families. Traore hired five donkey drivers to carry the thousands of manuscripts—no one could count them all—out of the dispensary around midnight, every night for a week. They loaded the donkeys, and then Traore’s 72-year-old grandfather, the retired guardian, walked point, scouting for jihadi patrols. Each night, they distributed books to a different house, joining the small number of high-priority works smuggled out of the main library by underwear.

Traore’s grandfather, Abba al-Hadi, was dozing in a chair nearby, his beard of white scruff touching his chest. He woke up when I approached; like me, he spoke little French, but he understood my question well enough: Can you read?

Non. An illiterate old man had gone out ahead, keeping the ink moving, the blood flowing in this system of survival.

By August 2012,Ìęit was clear that the books had to escape not just the library buildings but Timbuktu itself. That meant transporting them over one of two roads. The road through the Sahara was one of the world’s most unsafe and difficult pieces of terrain, controlled partly by Tuareg sentries who regarded looting as a kind of divine right. The road through the Sahel began in rebel territory but reached Mopti and government control after ten hours. That was in the best vehicle and conditions; now the rainy season was here. On August 28, Bouya and his colleagues at the state institute loaded 781 manuscripts into boxes, rolled them across town in a vegetable cart, and put them in the back of aÌęquatre-quatre,Ìęthe 4x4s that plow the desert. It was a test shipment. When it reached Mopti safely, they began shipping every day. They got about 24,000 state-owned manuscripts out by vehicle. But rain made the passages worse, and bandits were taking advantage of the war, robbing people in any part of Mali.Ìę

Although Haidara had fled Timbuktu by car himself, he left behind his own collection. In addition to the manuscripts escaping the library in those donkey-borne rice sacks, there were 27 major family collections still in Timbuktu houses, totaling at least 200,000 books. During the fall of 2012, Haidara urged those families to set up their own smuggling route. They bought up all the shipping trunks in Timbuktu’s Grand MarchĂ© and started sending them out by road to Bamako or hiding places along the way.

More than half the books were still stuck in Timbuktu, but war and chaos were about to close off the roads. The only other escape route—the Niger itself—was dangerous to the manuscripts in a new way.

Old rag paper and soluble inks do not belong on a river. Stephanie DiakitĂ©, the lawyer and conservator, said she nearly panicked when Haidara told her of his scheme. One tippy canoe could erase centuries of irreplaceable work. Reluctantly, she agreed.ÌęDuring early January 2013, cargo motorcycles and beater taxis began carrying a few trunks at a time away from the family libraries, to Kabara, the river port. Only light pirogues were available, and each could hold maybe a dozen boxes. Strong boys carried the footlockers down to the waterline, working for coins. The little chugging motors of the canoes kicked in, and the books of Timbuktu went out of the desert and onto the water for the first time in their lives. Three or four canoes left every day, headed upriver toward DjennĂ© or Mopti.Ìę

By mid-January, the war had entered a more deadly phase: a French rapid-reaction force was attacking the rebel coalition, and Gazelle gunships appeared over the Sahara.Ìę
Moving a few boxes at a time was suddenly no longer enough.

Haidara used his cell phone to encourage a book breakout. DiakitĂ© sat next to him some days. In the fall, she had been raising support from her international contacts:Ìęa Dutch royal charity gave money, and at one point a European embassy donated a paper bag full of cash. Now they had to funnel money to help comrades in Timbuktu pay off soldiers and functionaries. These traditionalÌęcadeaux,Ìęor gifts, are unsavory yet inescapable in Mali—when I refused to pay for an interview, one Koranic scholar told me, “You have your culture, we have ours.”

This makeshift book club then put together a bigger shipment: about 25 pirogues, leaving Timbuktu in one convoy. But as the boats crossed Lake DĂ©bo, they were intercepted by a French helicopter gunship. The Bozo skippers understood the innocence of paper; they opened some footlockers, showing that their cargo was not RPGs but worm-eaten books. The French pilot also understood; DiakitĂ© said that he saluted before flying away.Ìę

The conspirators now made one finalÌępush, sending a true fleet upriver past Mopti toÌęDjennĂ©. This lengthy convoy—45 pirogues in a row—drew more unwelcome attention. In the narrow channels westÌęof Lake DĂ©bo, armed men stopped the convoyÌęand demanded (and eventually got) a large ransom. They were robbers, not holy warriors; once paid, they let the boats move on.

The final convoy reached DjennĂ© just two weeks before the squad of jihadis arrived at the main library with orders to destroy every-thing they could find. But they were too late, or nearly so: hundreds of thousands of books had already escaped. Not one had been lost to the road or the river.Ìę

The threat now is from nature, not man. The arid Sahara has preserved this paper for centuries; Bamako’s humidity is a prescription for destroying it. (A calligrapher showed me works on salt slabs that were already fading.) Haidara’s stash, perhaps 90 percent of the known manuscripts, is still at risk, despite his efforts to install dehumidifiers and air-conditioning in the still-secret rooms. He estimated it would cost $10 million just to put them in acid-free boxes; conserving and copying them could take a decade. But, like the scores of families who trusted him with their books, he was determined to return them eventually, when Timbuktu was stable. “The books must go back,” he said.

Aside from the occasional suicide bombing, Mali was in recovery mode, and Marco and I that returned popular ex-president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, known as IBK, to the national palace. The environment was hardly safe: in November, two French radio journalists working in the desert were kidnapped and then executed, presumably by Al Qaeda leftovers, and French and Malian forces were still conducting sporadic raids on jihadi holdouts in the far north. Yet normalcy kept building, and in 2014, Malians would restage a Festival on the Niger, in the town of SĂ©gou, with some of Afropop’s biggest stars.

Last August, early in the rainy season, Timbuktu felt safe, even joyous. Marco and I walked the streets with caution, greeted with extraordinary warmth by a people hungry for outsiders, for tourists, for stability and trust. Grateful old men took my hand like I was Bill Clinton. We stumbled on an Islamic wedding, a noisy, wild event full of rapturous Sufis and unveiled women gyrating on the dance floor like so many Aretha Franklins. After the somber soldiers patrolling in technicals, after the nearly year-long rule of the jihadis, the dames of Timbuktu were literally letting their hair down, bursting out of short skirts and tight tops, throwing off head scarves and going down in butt-bumping contests.

Verdict from the dance floor: the jihad was over, and Timbuktu had won. Yet we left the party quickly, Marco warning that our very presence could draw a suicide bomber down on these people.

We spent days touring the small libraries of Timbuktu, empty for the first time in centuries. In one low adobe home, a robed Koranic teacher named Dramane Moulaye Haidara opened a small trunk and displayed what he’d hidden from the occupiers: a few illuminated manuscripts in vermilion and gold, works full of astrological diagrams. He made a living casting fortunes and putting blessings on people. This was how the war had been won, he told us, not with bombs but with magic. “We bombed them with charms,” he said of the jihadis. “So many charms.”

We looked up. It had started raining. The books were sitting outside, the rag pages getting pelted with fat drops of water. We rushed out and pulled the 16th century back to safety.

Marco and I left soon after that, catching a ride on an elderly MD-80 jet painted white and labeled UNITED NATIONS—the flight we had waited for in vain back in Bamako. It was extracting a fact-finding mission, which arrived in a convoy of commando-staffed pickup trucks and some black SUVs, delivering a vital top-level Italian diplomat shaped like a meatball and his boss, a lean and silent Nigerian general. On the plane I squeezed in next to a red-bearded Swedish officer sweating in his jungle fatigues.

Under my arm I had a book. Not one of the actual books, just a single page, copied out in calligraphy by a Timbuktu artist. The passage was from Ahmed Baba, the namesake of the research institute. In 1591, an army from Morocco had sacked Timbuktu, destroying many books and forcing scholars like him to flee across the desert. The lonely passage urged any traveler to “make a detour by Timbuktu, murmur my name to my friends and bring them the scented greeting of the exile.”

In the end, after many trials, Ahmed Baba was able to return. Someday, scanned and measured, conserved and protected, the books of Timbuktu will follow him home.

Contributing Editor Patrick Symmes () is the author of The Boys from Dolores.Ìę

The post The Real Rebels of Timbuktu appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Day 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 Kuhn 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 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 bull-dozers 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 ĂŒbermensch, 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. 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 gazelle 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 ten 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.

Ìę“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.

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 clichĂ© 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 ten-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 corn fields, 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 and to and—it’s all about cattle here—. 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 Ph.D. 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 six 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.”

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 60,” 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: tribes-people need bore holes 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 cancelled 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 (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 bore holes, 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 hartebeest 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 four 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 five 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 four 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 shame-faced journalists for the hike out. Elapsed time: seven 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 ten 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 Imatong 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 ten-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.

“Why don’t you clear the road?” he asks Daniel.

“The problem is the government,” Daniel answers.

Maybe Daniel is right—nothing happens until a big man gives his blessing. But Sven is frustrated by this kind of routine passivity. “Always,” he says bitterly, a rare crack in his diplomatic reserve. “It’s always the government’s fault.”

The wind sweeps the high branches back and forth, flakes of papery bark raining down on us like snow.

We make it out in the morning, hopping all the streams again at double speed, busting our humps to make it back to Juba on time. But then the Land Cruiser breaks down. After all that, Sven has to miss his meeting. He takes it well, sitting in the hot shade of Torit all afternoon, drinking tea, finally at rest.

LIKE THE GREAT migrations and towering eucalyptus, South Sudan’s human cultures have endured because war immobilized the country decade after decade, paralyzing progress. Questions about the survival of animals and habitat are not separate from the survival of man himself, and tribes here have persisted to a surprising degree, especially in the country’s cattle camps. These laagers, island-like villages that appear like beaten-down brown circles in the immense green of the savanna, form wherever seminomadic groups settle to let their cows graze.

In Juba, Marco and I hire a car and driver ($500 a day) and head north before dawn, hoping to find such a camp. After only an hour of bad-road driving, we spot a herd of Watusi cows, white beasts with great curved horns, scattered in the bush. A few hundred yards of walking brings us to a cattle camp, a dozen half-naked men and women gathered beside a smoldering dung fire. They’re Mundari, native to this region and known by the ash smeared on their bodies and the three V’s of ritual scarring across their foreheads.

They greet us with indifference (mostly) and wild threats (the largest man). A towering, ash-covered warrior wearing only a blanket, he immediately challenges me to a fight, but then calms down and allows us to settle in around the fire. The Mundari have blankets, a few plastic sheets for sheltering infants against the rain, and wooden goads, the short prods used to move cows. There are two cell phones in the camp, neither working. A couple of immensely tall women sit on blankets, steadily shaking gourds back and forth, churning the milk of the cows into a fermented, alcohol-like drink.

Cattle are bank account and social status—a hedge against hunger, an investment, and the key to getting married. (With some tribes, paying a dowry in cattle has become a human-rights concern, as girls as young as 12 are traded as child brides.) Cattle raids—organized stealing expeditions—are endorsed by both culture and economics here. In 2011, more than 1,000 people were killed during a cattle war between the Nuer and Murle, on the outskirts of Boma National Park. A hundred thousand cows were stolen, along with hundreds of women and children.

The men paint my face with dung ash, roaring with laughter at the result. Then Marco and I head off, passing a town—a few roadside kiosks selling gasoline in soda bottles alongside an empty refugee camp—before moving deeper into nothing. During a pee break, I’m zipping up by the roadside when three naked men walk out of the tall grass.

They aren’t here to herd cattle. Their scarring is Mundari, but they carry burnished cow-leather shields and carved fighting sticks, not normal goads. Their skinny, hard bodies are naked and oiled, as if for a wrestling match, but they’re in a good mood. We stare at each other for a while until we are interrupted by a tense hiss. They fall quiet, squinting. I follow their gaze back down the road. Another file of men, also naked, also prepared for fighting, has appeared in the distance.

Our guys wave a pennant in the air, a colorful homemade flag, and their guys break into song, jogging quickly forward. Moments later, all the men embrace and laugh. In the middle of the dirt road—it’s not like there’s any traffic—they break into new songs and put on a display of stick fighting, blows rattling the shields, their shiny bodies staging scenes straight from an Attic vase. The driver—a Ugandan—cowers in the car, saying, “I have never seen anything like this in my whole life!” If you want a romantic encounter with ancient Africa and don’t mind land mines, South Sudan is the place.

ON THE LAST DAY of my trip, rising for another East African dawn, I meet Paul Elkan at the WCS’s little compound near the airport. In the past seven years, Elkan has logged more than 1,000 hours flying over the plains of South Sudan, many of them with National Geographic’s Mike Fay, and has seen a genocidal civil war turn into a cold peace. Like many NGOs, the WCS is trying to build something from nothing, scraping together training programs and keeping two airplanes aloft. After some puttering around with the Cessna, the motor finally catches, and we’re off to see the biggest secret in South Sudan.

First, however, a charity traffic jam. In an almost roadless country, air transport is king, and there are more than 60 planes parked at the airport, mostly small grasshoppers from the UN, NGOs, and missionary groups. We taxi toward the runway but are edged out by an Ilyushin 76, a container ship to our rowboat. Elkan has to hold back the throttle as the cargo plane—marked WORLD FOOD PROGRAM—idles on the runway. “Juba Tango Charley,” Elkan calls, hoping to nip in ahead of the jet, “holding short and ready.” But there’s no answer from the tower, and after five minutes the Ilyushin finally lumbers into the sky with a reek of jet fuel and a searing roar that could jump-start a migration.

We pop up quickly, sailing over the tiny precincts of Juba at 1,000 feet, and then, still climbing, across the meandering Nile, leaving behind the charcoal smoke, the glitter of round tin roofs, the chaotic yards containing donkeys. Right there, we enter 3,900-square-mile Bandingilo National Park, which hosts huge migrations of antelope twice a year but is otherwise empty, without even the trace of red dirt that marks a walking trail. The plane buzzes along at 2,000 feet, rattling like a ’68 Beetle with wings, but Elkan is affectionate, praising the Cessna. (“All good planes come from one place,” he says. “Wichita.”)

We’ve put in an hour like this, pleasant and cool, the only easy travel in South Sudan, when Elkan points to patterns in the grass below. The vast plain—a flat horizon in every direction—is now touched with a few dark lines where antelope have moved northward. Animals follow the grass, which follows the rain; at the end of the dry season, that means migrating north, toward the retreating edge of the Sudd wetland. Elkan flings the plane over onto a wing tip, circling down on the first antelope. These are white-eared kob, the most common and the easiest to spot, thanks to white flashes on the males’ necks and ears. There are dozens, then hundreds, but it isn’t the time of year for dense gatherings, and we aren’t flying to see antelope. Elkan levels out the plane, climbs back to 2,000 feet, and heads 
Well, I can’t say where he heads. For another hour he follows a GPS signal toward a part of South Sudan that is seldom seen, one more vast wilderness in this land of empty spaces. The location is secret because of what is there: one of the last great elephant stands in East Africa. To poachers, every elephant herd is simply a collection of millions of dollars of ivory waiting to be shipped to China.

Two hours out from Juba, we drop back down to 300 feet. The grass shows patterns again, not the tiny depressions left by passing antelope but dark, wet zigs and zags, diamond patterns gathering tighter, trails crossing trails.

We probably could have found this herd just by looking for those shapes in the grass, but Elkan is running down the satellite trackers and knows they were, yesterday at least, just ahead of us. The grass turns to a beaten black mat, crushed flat in the bright sun, and then, against a splash of water, there are elephants. Ten. Then 20. Then 50. Then hundreds.

“Four hundred,” Elkan estimates.

That’s just one particular herd. There are thousands of elephants out here, beyond the reach of poachers, another secret of this hidden-in-plain-sight land. Here’s hoping some things are never found.ÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę

Contributing editor is the author of and .

The post A Wild Country Grows in South Sudan appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

“There are two stories,” a leader of the Rat Stabbers told me. We were filing through police lines toward the cylinder, the stadium of a powerful Buenos Aires soccer team called Racing. Inside, about 60,000 enemy fans waited to crucify us.

The Rat Stabbers are frisked in La Plata.

Rat Stabbers are herded in Banfield.

Boca Juniors cheerleaders in La Bombonera.

Racing’s barra brava, the Imperial Guard.

Boca Culture in Buenos Aires.

Independiente fans at a may antiviolence rally in Buenos Aires.

His name was Jorge Celestre—Georgie Blueskies—but he was explaining the name of his fan club, the . They were the diehard supporters of Estudiantes, a pro soccer team southeast of Buenos Aires.

The first story was about some medical students—owing to their lab work, “rat stabbers”—who founded Estudiantes more than a century ago. It was a nice story about a studious, successful Argentina, a country that started the 20th century with futuristic dreams and progressive ambitions.

“But the second story is more probable,” Celestre explained as we jostled our way toward lines of police. The original fans were some unemployed men who sat around parks killing rats for fun. That squalid image evoked another Argentina, the one that ended the 20th century with riots and a currency crash, a backstabbing society where life is, as one Argentine put it to me, “a war of all against all.”

I had met the Rat Stabbers by physically pushing into their red-and-white-clad column as they marched toward the Cylinder, a high-fascist coliseum built in the 1940s by dictator Juan Perón—a Racing fan—with public funds. The swooping concrete is still dominated by Perón’s swan-necked tower, its omniscient eye now filled with the cameras of Copresede—a police surveillance agency called the Provincial Committee on Sports Safety—who are charged with stopping the most violent soccer fans in the world.

We squeezed through funnels of policemen watched by lines of horsemen and backstopped by rows of cop infantry in full riot gear. Specialists in nitrile gloves patted down the males in our cohort. ­Behind them were plainclothes Copresede agents holding mug shots of some of the 400 Rat Stabbers banned from their own team’s games.

The Rat Stabbers started up their brass band, for courage, and with a hard push about 2,000 of us were swept up the stairs and jammed into the visitors’ terrace. Here, penned by metal fences and more police, we were pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, immobile, for two hours, a single screaming entity heaving up and down.

Problem: we had 2,000, but the Cylinder seats 64,000. It wasn’t absolutely full, but I’ll stick with my guess that we were outnumbered by 60,000. They were dancing in great waves, a sea of blue and white, their noise drowning out even the Rat Stabbers’ band.

The game went badly. Not for Racing, whose diehard fan club, the Imperial Guard, gathered below our terrace, taunting, calling up challenges. Come down here and say that to my face.

The Rat Stabbers retaliated by spitting, and they managed to heave firecrackers and a smoke bomb over two layers of fencing. Nobody would remember the game later, not even the score. But they would remember this, the battle.

Goals are nice. But fighting is forever.

I’VE BEEN FASCINATED—OR should I say terrified—by Argentina’s violent brand of soccer since 1996, when I saw the Buenos Aires team Boca Juniors play in their notoriously tight little stadium, La Bombonera. Boca is famous for the quality of its play but also for its fan club—, the 12th Man—which has occupied the same north terrace for half a century, always standing, always singing, usually fighting.

That night, Boca fans began the match in style, igniting Roman candles that spewed red flames, sparks, and smoke over their heads. Enormous blue-and-gold flags unfurled from the upper levels. It was intimidating to watch from the opposite end, where I stood with a few thousand supporters of a team called Gimnasia, 50,000 people hating on me and my new friends.

The unaccountable happened: the unheralded Gimnasia handed Boca its worst defeat in half a century, a 6–0 stomper that sent waves of Boca fans crashing against the fencing that protected us. Trash and cups filled with urine rained down on us. Fleeing with Gimnasia fans, I found the streets of a great capital awash in cavalry and tear gas.

Don’t cry for Argentina. Brazil may be more famous as a soccer nation, the beautiful game embodied today by the 20-year-old juggler Neymar. And Europe remains soccer’s ­center of gravity: English clubs like Manchester United and Chelsea rule the global bandwidth, and Spanish clubs have ruled the pitch, bringing home two European champion­ships in the past five years.

Yet, often enough the Europeans get there with an Argentine: Barcelona’s striker is the shaggy-haired, fertile-footed Lionel Messi, the dominant player of this age. Sergio “Kun” AgĂŒero and Carlos TĂ©vez, who led Manchester City to this year’s league championship, are both Argentines. So is Paris Saint-­Germain’s Javier Pastore. In 2009, Argentina surpassed Brazil as the world’s top producer of soccer talent, farming out 1,700 players to professional leagues abroad. Soccer goes deep here—the first league was founded in 1891, the third-oldest in the world after England and the Netherlands.

But what Argentina really excels at is not so much the play of soccer as the bloodsucking financial exploitation and mob atmosphere that accompanies it. Corruption, of course, is nothing new in the sport. Italian teams are suffering their second ­major gambling scandal in six years, with reports of one player drugging his own team. Sepp Blatter, the four-time president of soccer’s global body, —the FĂ©dĂ©ration Internationale de Football Association—has set a low standard, trailed by clouds of bribery allegations and the same marketing scandal that recently brought down Brazil’s longtime soccer boss Ricardo Teixeira.

Of course, many nations produce dangerous fans. Games in Milan feature knife fights, England has long had its “firms” of hooligans, and racist “ultras” are a problem in Italy and Eastern Europe, where last year Polish fans threw Nazi salutes at Russian rivals. But the English hooligans of the 1980s fought for bragging rights, not money, and now they’ve been tempered by a national surveillance state. Across Europe, working-class fans have been outpriced by a move to champions or premier leagues, with their transnational schedules and sky boxes and crowd control.

Argentina’s fan clubs, meanwhile, have become “not quite as violent as the Bloods and the Crips, but similar,” says Andy Markovits, a University of Michigan political scientist specializing in soccer culture. In the 1980s, Markovits says, the fan experience in South America was “a cakewalk” compared with what was happening in Europe. Today it’s the reverse.

With nicknames like the Drunkards of the Stands, the Garbage Men, the Blue Pirates, the Gangsters, and the Scoundrels, the fan clubs for the 40 professional teams playing at Argentina’s A and B levels have been around almost as long as the teams themselves. But over the years, many of them have morphed into organized syndicates called barras bravas—literally “rowdy gangs”—that control most ­aspects of the teams. South American teams are private clubs, owned by their members. That leaves fan clubs, with their big voting blocs, able to make or break club officials and thereby control coaches and athletes. The most notorious barras—Boca’s La Doce, River Plate’s Drunkards of the Stands, and Quilmes’s Indians around Buenos ­Aires, along with Rosario Central’s Gangsters and the Lepers of Newell’s Old Boys in the ­provinces—have captured their stadiums’ concessions, monopolizing sales of soda, hamburgers, and jerseys. La Doce has one of the best scams, taking in somewhere around $125,000 to $150,000 a week in parking fees for home games. The barras routinely skim off players’ salaries. And, like Sopranos of South America, the strongest assert a criminal influence at the global level, taking cuts of the ­transfer fees charged when an Argentine player leaves for the European premier leagues.

But the barras don’t stop at profiteering: they have also been implicated in crime—from petty drug dealing, narcotics trafficking, and money laundering to beating not just rival fans but sometimes their teams’ own players. Last October, after San Lorenzo defender Jonathan Bottinelli scored an own goal to lose a game, three barra soldiers walked onto the practice field and beat him up—in front of his teammates.

Surely Bottinelli knew the history of recent killings. In 2005, for example, there were six soccer ­murders, including the shooting of a Rat Stabber during a massive fight with ­police. Five died in 2006, including a fan killed with a rock in a train station, and four in 2007, including two in internal fan-club feuds. Six were killed in 2008, another eight died in 2009, and 2010 saw 11 deaths, including a Boca fan beaten by rivals at the World Cup in South Africa and the wine-bar assassination of the country’s most powerful barra leader.

When I landed in Argentina in May, the violence was mounting faster than ever. A Nueva Chicago supporter was beaten to death with a crowbar in an internal feud; a few days later, a rival was killed as payback. A faction leader from the Drunkards was shot in the head. Three Rosario fans were gunned down by someone from Newell’s, and during my visit, some Unión fans shooting at a Newell’s crowd accidentally killed a bystander. By the close of the season in June, the death toll was already nine. And a new season would begin in August.

That violence has degraded the game itself. Every player who can follows Lionel Messi abroad, and when these dispersed stars do ­reas­semble as a national team, they crumble rather than cohere. At the 2010 World Cup, Argentina covered the South African grass with talent but was humiliated: Messi was unable to score a single goal in the tournament, and the Germans packed their bags 4–0.

This sense of rising crisis, of a country and a sport destroying itself, was what lured me back to Argentina. The Argentines invented a new way to steal money, they used it to crush their enemies, and now they will ruin their own beautiful game. All while raining goals.

SUNSHINE KILLS MAFIAS, BUT the sun goes down early in the ­autumn streets of Buenos Aires, and the evening game is still hours away as photographer Marco Di Lauro and I turn up a small street and come face-to-face with about 500 members of La Doce, Boca’s notorious fan club. The hardcore of La Doce always rally before a game in a parking area three blocks from the stadium. Tetra Pak boxes of cheap wine are piled in pyramids, clouds of marijuana drift everywhere, and the testosterone flows freely. Everyone is dressed in blue and gold, including me. I’ve borrowed a natty blue zippered number, emblazoned in gold with an elaborate club seal: CABJ, for Club AtlĂ©tico Boca Juniors.

Boca. Not just the most famous team of any sport in South America but an icon, a myth. The Boca neighborhood is a grimy working-class port, and the team represents the poor man’s side in the class war that is Latin America. Boca has underdog charisma but wins like the ­Yankees: scores of national titles, as well as five South American championships in the past decade alone. It has its own museum, where you can buy thong underwear in team colors. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű you can get your picture taken with a statue of Diego Maradona, the avenger who rose from the slums to dominate the global game and humiliate England with his infamous Hand of God goal at the 1986 World Cup. Twenty-five years later, the sight of Boca’s blue-and-gold strikers coming up the field is enough to tighten the sphincter of any goalie.

Our guide is Sergio Caccialupi, known to everyone as Paco, a grizzled Boca fan and a member of La Doce since the 1970s. Paco has agreed to escort us for an extortionate ticketing fee ($150 apiece), typical at Boca games. He is thin-faced, jittery, and scarred—­according to his autobiography, sold at the stadium store, he spent the 1980s peddling 30 kilos of cocaine a week, survived two jail terms, and once went all the way to Rio to fight supporters of another team. (“Better a thief than a policeman,” his father told him.)

Despite my suit of blue armor, I’m immediately threatened with stabbing, robbery, and buggering. But that’s par for the course, a sign I’m being accepted, or at least tolerated. Taunting is the core of hooligan life, and I plaster a broad smile on my face and take a nip of whatever is handed to me—red wine mixed with Coca-Cola, then red wine with orange soda, then Fernet with lime soda.

Trying to establish my bona fides, I mention that I was present here when Boca suffered its worst defeat in half a cent—

“Six to zero,” Paco says.

“1996,” another voice says.

“Gimnasia,” a third man adds. “That was the worst day of my childhood.”

I’m losing friends quickly. The men talk among themselves in lunfardo, the rapid Italo-Spanish dialect of Buenos Aires. “They have to pay,” one man says. Another warns Paco, “Don’t let them see anything.” Another volunteers to his friends that he’ll rob me if he gets the chance.

I call him out. “Why are you going to rob me?”

“That’s what I do for a living,” he replies coolly. On weekends he goes to Boca games. Monday to Friday, he robs tourists in the same neighborhood. If I go walking around, he says, “90 percent chance we will rob you.”

Time for protection. We give Paco the agreed-upon fee for two ­entries to the La Doce terrace. Cash, no receipts. Paco assures me that numero uno himself—La Doce boss Mauro Martín—has approved our attendance, and indeed, a few minutes later Martín strolls past in a white track suit, his red eyes giving us a once-over.

We’re in.

NINETY MINUTES BEFORE THE game, Paco suddenly says, “Let’s go.” We follow him not toward La Bombonera, its steep concrete walls painted blue and gold, but down a side street, through a quiet tennis stadium, and into some locker rooms before emerging to face a high fence of sheet steel. A knock, and a door opens. We are suddenly at the stadium gates, having skipped three lines of security. It’s amusing to see a dozen Buenos Aires officers look away deliberately. We go straight to the entrance of the tribuna popular, the world of La Doce. It’s the celebrity treatment, the Paco passage.

We do have to go through the turnstiles themselves. “Where are you from?” a policeman asks as he pats me down. America, I tell him.

“Welcome,” he says. And, looking up from my ankles with a smile, “Good luck in there.”

Paco hands us our “tickets,” digital passes that belong to someone else—in my case, a youth named Mariano. Marco, an Italian war photog­rapher who has spent more than 1,300 nights embedded with troops in Afghanistan, is apparently my mother, Maria.

We climb slowly up four flights of stairs—Paco, worn by hard ­living, has to rest on each landing—to reach the terrace, perhaps the most feared and tightly defended real estate in world soccer. “You have to sit here,” Paco says, indicating a section on the left. “You can’t take pictures over there,” he says, turning toward the center. “Stay away from that part. It’s where the boss sits. Don’t even point your camera over there. You can take pictures in other directions, but don’t even look over there.”

The regular Boca fans pile in during the next hour. La Doce has no official membership—“Only the police keep a list,” Paco says—and our terrace packs in with four or five thousand fans. But just a few minutes before game time, the dedicated core of the barra brava march in. These are our 500 friends from the parking lot, singing and waving huge flags as they follow the band to that central forbidden zone. ­Mauro Martín is in there somewhere, hiding from photo­g­­raphers behind a ring of loyalists and a drapery of banners. (“If they become famous, they get arrested,” a police officer told me.)

Martín is not the only boss in the house. Diego Maradona has flown in from Dubai, where he coaches a team called Al Wasl. Various ­derailments—cocaine, tax evasion, a brief exile in Cuba—have only deepened the love affair between La Doce and their idol, who sits in a box at midfield.

The singing builds, the flags wave, and for a while we are inside the joyous machine of a fan club, exactly where I always dreaded, a stomping, jeering, cheering, and drunken band of warriors. The ­enemy—the Brazilian team Fluminense—takes the field amid a deafening chorus of 40,000 boos. When Boca comes out, La Bombonera explodes into a wall of bass drums and chanting: Dale, dale, Bo! Dale, dale, Bo! Dale, dale, Bo! Bo-ca! Let’s go, Boca!

The Brazilians give the stadium a scare: two quick attacks on goal. La Doce only sings louder, draining the atmosphere with a version of “Volare” for 20,000 voices. Yet few of us can even see the action. There are too many banners draped over our heads, and many fans sit facing not the field but the band. Petty drug sales are one of La Doce’s biggest rackets, and dark green buds are passed around openly, rolled up, and smoked in titanic quantities. Putting a buzz on top of a drunk leaves quite a few fans in the same state as Paco—so wasted, so early, that he lists to one side, nodding to the simple beat of the chants.

A string of menacing tough guys approaches, threatening us if we take pictures. One says, “This is our house. Nobody takes pictures in our house. Nobody.” Paco has promised us this access, but he’s too drunk to speak, and my Boca jacket has no magic here. A wiry, wide-eyed man screams at us bluntly: “You take one more picture, your cameras are going to fly through the fucking air!”

Game over. The Brazilians suffer a sudden setback, a red card to their player Carlinhos in the 34th minute. Two riot policemen escort him off the field under a hail of small objects tossed down by La Doce. The match turns into a mismatch: 11 Boca players grinding down 10 Fluminense rivals. The Boca striker Pablo Mouche eventually slides one across the mouth of the Brazilian goal.

Fluminense almost get an equalizer, but a Boca player blocks the shot with his right arm. It’s one of the few plays I witness, occurring right below us. But the referee doesn’t see it, and the fans don’t want to. Diego “Hand of God” Maradona is in the house. Boca wins 1–0.

THE FIRST MURDER SPAWNED by Argentinean soccer can be traced to 1924, when a Boca fan shot a Uruguayan rival during a tango-style showdown outside a luxury hotel in Montevideo. Sometime in the 1950s, the fan clubs organized for self-defense. La Doce took its fierce, fistfighting form in the 1970s. Then, around 1981, in the last violent days of Argentina’s military dictatorship, the fan killings ­accelerated. Journalist Amílcar Romero, who wrote a history of soccer—this country also produces philosophers and artists specializing in the sport—divided the violence into three ­periods. Only 12 fans had been killed during the roughly 30 years following that first hotel murder. In the next three decades there were 102. The next 30 years saw 144 dead.

But Romero counted only game-day deaths. The antiviolence group tallies 269 soccer-related deaths in its running count—with much of the killing moving off-site in recent years. In 2009, for example, the former Lepers leader Roberto “Pimpi” Camino was shot four times while leaving a wine bar late at night. Today the violence often takes place within the fan clubs themselves, in fights to control the barras’ growing incomes and the benefits of their power. “They fight over money and women,” one sportswriter told me. (He insisted on anonymity, saying, “No Argentine journalist could write this story,” for fear of retaliation.)

One of the few to take that risk is a five-foot-three-inch platinum blond lawyer from Buenos Aires. Forty-four-year-old Fabiana Rubeo is a Boca devotee, but she grew tired of seeing soccer ruined by its fans. In 2006, she founded an antiviolence non-profit called New Horizon for the World. Tiny and unthreatening, she charmed 160 leaders from more than 40 barras into attending a peace summit, where they agreed upon a Ten Commandments of barra etiquette.

Yet, the first thing Rubeo tells me when I show up at her office is that she has given up her campaign. She was threatened by criminals, ignored by the government, and mocked as “naive” by the Buenos Aires newspaper Pagina 12.

“Nobody supported us,” she says. “I don’t want to be Don Quixote tilting at windmills.” All that’s left of her effort is an agreement by gang leaders to throw back balls that land in the stands.

“Here, everything is mixed up between soccer and politics,” Rubeo says. She cites the example of Bebote (“Big Baby”), the current Red Devils leader from Independiente, whose real name is Pablo Alejandro Álvarez. Thanks to a close relationship with a trade-union leader and other politicians, Rubeo says, Big Baby got a lucrative travel concession, flying barra leaders to the 2010 World Cup at government expense. (South African authorities deported most of them immediately.) Likewise, Rafael Di Zeo, the former leader of La Doce, worked for the local legislature for years, before his love of publicity and stadium fighting combined to put him in jail.

Why doesn’t anyone fight back? Politicians keep the barras on speed dial, using them as paid flash mobs in the country’s fuerza de choque. This is the “collision of forces,” an Argentinean style of politics in which rightists, leftists, unionists, and any group that wants anything must put protestors in the streets. The fuerza de choque is a war of perpetual demonstrations and pickets, road disruptions and blockaded buildings. Soccer-style thuggery has infected the highest levels of politics; the president’s own son leads a nationalist “youth group” that stormed Congress in May, waving flags and shouting fight songs. Two years ago, an administration official who disliked a new book about inflation called on the fan club of Nueva Chicago. About 15 barra soldiers then raided the Buenos Aires Inter­national Book Fair, threw chairs, and fought secu­rity guards while chanting slogans against the startled author.

Rubeo puts me in touch with someone who knows one of these dangerous men—the head of the fan club for LanĂșs, a team from greater Buenos ­Aires. She wishes me luck but issues a warning. “FĂștbol,” she says, “is like a Mafia family. If you are not in the family, you don’t come inside.”

The gangster meets me in a tobacco-stained bar on a cool autumn afternoon. He is huge, mostly muscle but wrapped in a layer of fat and covered in ­tattoos from his neck to his wrists.

He says that I should “gratify” him, a refer­ence to money, not sex. A Spanish TV crew paid him $5,000, he notes. I demur.

“I’ve been the leader of this barra for 12 years,” he says, suddenly angry. “I’m the long­est-serving leader in any barra. You under­stand what that means? We’re wanted men. We don’t do this for free.

“Argentina’s the best in the world at this,” he boasts. If only he means soccer.

Four days later, before a LanĂșs home game against All Boys, three barras on motorcycles open fire on LanĂșs fans, killing 21-year-old Daniel Sosa and wounding five others. Police recover three guns from outside the stadium.

The game starts a few minutes later.

MURDER HAS A WAY of improving things. Until 2010, the Rat Stabbers were among the worst in a nation of bad fan clubs and had driven ordinary fans away from Estudiantes games. But late that year the Rat Stabbers went too far, killing a policeman during a brawl.

Copresede dismantled the club. Leaders were jailed, and 400 dangerous fans were banned from the games. Since then a more normal fan club has emerged. Three weeks ­after my first outing with the Rat Stabbers, Marco and I join them in their hometown, La Plata, a chilly city on the coast southeast of ­Buenos Aires. We find the fans milling around a red bus on a Saturday morning, wearing the red-and-white jerseys of their team.

Georgie Blueskies is here, leading a subgroup of the new Rat Stabbers. Stout and deep-voiced, he embodies the reformed, middle-aged new fan—his ponytail ­going silver, his demeanor reflective. Women and even children are back at the games, a glimpse of what fĂștbol could be in this most productive of fĂștbol nations.

“These are normal people,” Celestre emphasizes as he drives us across town in his (red) muscle car, following the (red) bus to pick up more (red-clad) fans. “We’ll see how long that lasts.” Without constant police pressure, he says, the old violence will return, because the opportunities for corruption are always present in soccer.

“Here at the local level, it’s normally just ticket sales, parking, a portion of travel costs,” he says. “In other clubs there’s more money: the sale of shirts, even a percentage of a player’s salary. The leaders are always ­allied with politicians, with whichever party is in power.” The barras are becoming “executive gangs,” he says; some leaders are lawyers and professionals who mix with politicians in the expensive seats.

Celestre isn’t impressed with Copresede, whose list of 400 banned fans turned out to include a lot of dead people and children. “They are useless,” he says. “They never protect us from anybody.” He complains that some Rat Stabbers were recently attacked with stones and bottles by my old friends from Gimnasia, their rivals across town.

We end up at a traffic circle outside La ­Plata, massing for the drive to a game with archrivals Banfield, southwest of Buenos Aires. Their last game was canceled after Rat Stabbers threw firecrackers at the Banfield goalkeeper.

There are thousands of other fans, in 13 buses and a fleet of private cars. We’re surrounded by 100 or so cops, including a ­police bus, a dozen squad cars, and motorcycle ­officers riding tiger-striped bikes and wearing shotguns slung across their backs. The cops frisk anyone suspicious, meaning all the dark-skinned or rough-looking young men.

I briefly meet the Rat Stabbers’ leader, the extremely tall Ruben Moreno, who is very mellow, befitting the ­Spicoli-grade stoning he appears to have going. (“Welcome, welcome, no problems here.”) He is one of the Rat Stabbers banned from the games, so he won’t be traveling with us. But he has to stand around in the mud handing out the fundamental currency of his patronage network: free tickets.

The cops toss the buses, throwing (empty) wine cartons out the windows, and after some negotiation—we’re warned off one bus set aside for extra-heavy pot smokers—we board the musicians’ bus, a relatively calm one with some grannies on it.

Our convoy moves at a crawl, stretching the 75-mile drive into a three-hour parade. We roll like contractors in Fallujah, preceded by a flying squad of motorcycle policemen, the 13 buses interspaced with squad cars, more motorbike cops patrolling the flanks. As soon as we are moving, the beer comes out (it was hidden by the driver, under his legs) and then the weed (it was stashed inside a drum). The clouds of dope are kept to the back of the bus, somewhat, but I think the grannies are affected, because the whole way they are singing at the top of their lungs: We’re the Rat Stabbers / We smoke marijuana / And run from the police! Or this one, specially composed, perhaps: Everyone from Banfield is a whore! / Everyone from Banfield is a whore!

Finally, we shudder to a halt near the pitch. “Women first!” every­one shouts, which leaves a thousand men free to urinate on every fence in the neighborhood. Hundreds of grilled chorizos are bought and wolfed down in seconds, and we jog toward the stadium like a red tsunami. Inside, the younger fans unfurl their flags and the Rat Stabbers begin to sing and jump in place, overwhelmed by the joyful, forging power of being outnumbered during a raid on hostile territory. Even better, Estudiantes scores early, and then scores again, creating an ecstasy not seen since the Oracle at Delphi.

The Banfield fan club—called the Band of the South—isn’t amused, but the reactions of a mob are notoriously hard to predict. Every Argen­tinean game is rated in advance as low, medium, or high risk for violence; today is high risk. But the police have learned a lot over the past decade of murder and mayhem, and enormous riot fences separate us from Banfield’s seething barra brava.

It turns out that the cops welcome journalists for the same reason the barras don’t: publicity hurts criminals. I climb a surveillance ­tower looming six stories over the stadium and join a Copresede security team in a small control room. The officers are using cameras to zoom in on a young Rat Stabber trying to tear down the fencing. Walkie-talkies let them coordinate with a uniformed cop reporting a fight in the Banfield section. As the fighting builds, a pudgy, curly-haired officer in a dark blue sweater, Guillermo Suarez, cries out, “We’re going to have a quilombo,” slang for a huge mess. “Get an infantry cordon over there!” But some fans intervene, and medics soon pull the victim away.

Bored, Suarez shows me how to aim a camera at any part of the stadium, even the hallways. The passivity of watching everything all the time brings out the psychoanalyst lurking in every Argentine. “There’s no line between barra and not-barra,” he observes. “Look at those stands over there. Those are good seats. You’d think they were rational people. Professors. Good people. But it’s incredible. They go crazy.”

From up here, I watch the Band of the South, which has unfurled banners demanding the release of their jailed leaders. Banfield is ­going down—the final score is 3–0 Estudiantes—but the Banda is up, roaring, cacophonous, undoing some of the misery of their defeat.

After the game, the hardcore barras from Banfield wait outside their stadium. A hundred men in green track suits are chanting their loyalty in the cold, muddy street. It’s a frankly fascist scene: the agitated young fans displaying power, their heads shaved or cut close, their chants, their groupthink, their insistence on the superiority of their own side. Juan Perón loved soccer crowds.

While Marco and I are gawking, police cordons push the Rat Stabbers back onto their buses, and they drive back to La Plata. Stuck on foot in nowheresville, we dodge the angry Banfield mob and grab a public bus heading back to Buenos Aires. But the Rat Stabbers’ day isn’t over. During a roadside stop, some local men throw rocks at their caravan; everyone defends themselves, the younger Rat Stabbers pouring off the buses to retaliate. Police fire tear gas and rubber bullets, and the bus with the grannies has its windows smashed by rocks.

This smackdown doesn’t make the news. Not even the ­soccer news, where a “temperature report” in the national newspaper ClarĂ­n ­records the week’s fĂștbol outrages. (Fans of a team called Italia threw syringes at their own coach; the president of Independiente got ­another death threat; after a loss, 44 members of a Cordoba fan club ambushed their own players’ bus, threatening “a bullet for everyone” if the team didn’t advance a division.)

A riot. Some rocks. Gas guns. It’s just background noise.

IN THE END I find a clásico, a match between historic rivals. This turns out to be Boca at Racing, the same stadium where it began for me three weeks earlier with the Rat Stabbers. Now it was La Doce’s turn to force their way into the Cylinder.

La Bombonera is only a few miles away, so La Doce always marches there, across the dirty Río Riachuela on the Old Bridge. It’s more an invasion than a parade, and Marco and I narrowly avert a beating from a fan leader who recognizes us from the previous game. He draws a finger across his neck and tells me, “If you take a picture, we’re going to throw you in the fucking river.”

His threat is backed by a surging crowd of several hundred hardmen pushing toward us across the bridge. Chanting and waving flags, La Doce pours toward the Cylinder, with Marco and I running just ahead of them. We find refuge in a taxi, duck down, and are scooped up at the stadium entrance by friendly Guillermo Suarez from Copresede. “You just saved our lives,” Marco says.

Racing’s Imperial Guard puts on a huge display of sound and fury; there is confetti, a blazing red marine flare, and firecrackers thrown across the moat at the Boca goalie (they miss). The Guard have a nearly 60,000-man advantage over La Doce, but the Boca fans unfurl some old Racing banners they stole during previous street fights, a dangerous taunt. Copresede phones a Boca leader, and the war prizes disappear within minutes.

Finally, here is a real game, worthy of the title clĂĄsico. Our pals in the police let us onto the field itself, where we sit at the midfield line, smelling sweat and the acrid tang of smoke bombs. We’re so close that Boca’s hawk-faced coach, Julio CĂ©sar Falcioni, nearly runs me over while disputing a call.

For a moment, I can live in the beautiful game. Some of the world’s top athletes are tearing up the grass, and the play is fast, passion­ate, and clean—men shaking hands after knockdowns, a display of sportsmanship so missing in the stands. Protected by perhaps 1,000 cops, I finally feel safe in an Argentinean stadium.

A bit later, up inside the swan-necked tower, I join Suarez and five of his colleagues in the cramped Copresede surveillance center. Fifteen screens show feeds from 14 fixed cameras and 13 mobile units. The very top of the tower holds a swiveling camera with a super­powerful telephoto lens that Suarez controls with a joystick. We watch a man lighting a joint, then another pissing in a corner and a third getting beaten up by members of his own fan club. (“Copy,” Suarez says to an ­officer out in the terraces. “It’s to the right of the Rolling Stones banner.”)

Someone is shining a green laser in the eyes of the referee. Abusing the ref is normal—at Maracanã stadium in Rio, I saw fans shoot flare guns at one official—but Suarez and two colleagues rewind the footage and quickly track the laser to one corner of the Imperial Guard terrace. Suarez swivels his joystick and the camera locks onto an acned, monobrowed individual in a striped Racing jersey, holding his left hand to his ear. “Got him,” Suarez says. A beefy technical assistant hits the print button, and four copies of the kid’s photo are dispatched to police at the four exits used by the Imperial Guard.

The game is playing on a small television in the corner, ignored. I go back down to the smoke-filled arena, to my privileged spot beside the grassy action. In the first half Racing presses hard, dominating the ball, running triangles and through passes, to the delight of the Imperial Guard. But in the second half, the Boca striker Lucas Viatri receives a lofted pass to the middle. Facing away from the goal, he splits his momentum—a back-footed tap to the right, a quick turn to the left.

It takes only a second to relieve an hour of tension. Stepping around a flat-footed defender, Viatri reunites with the ball on the first hop, drilling a roundhouse. Time stops, physics takes over. The back of the net billows out. It is improbable, beautiful. Not just a gol but a golazo, according to the next day’s Clarín.

In Argentina, tomorrow is always better than today.

The post The Beautiful Game appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

MOVIES MAKE EVERYTHING LOOK WORSE THAN IN REAL LIFE.

Left alone

Watch out

Gone

I used to stay up late watching the film of my bicycle being stolen. It’s amazing what you notice on the 38th replay of a surveillance tape, running the grainy recording backward and forward, pausing and advancing. Sometimes I’d back the tape up to before the 17 minutes that changed my life. All the way back to the part where I still had a bicycle.

Rewinding—past all the New Yorkers striding backward toward lunch; past the Algonquin and Royalton hotels inhaling crowds and the door of the Harvard Club admitting well-fed members; past the New York Yacht Club looming impassively like a beached galleon; past all the finery and civility of West 44th Street—you come to the beginning. You come to him.Ìę

The thief. There he is. Caught, if only on tape.Ìę

He walked into the frame on a beautiful sunny January afternoon, or what the camera mounted on the front of the Penn Club referred to as 13:29:36. He was dressed like pea bike messenger, but he didn’t have a bike. (Yet.) He looked at mine and took out his phone.Ìę

After the call, he sat on a standpipe and waited. I was inside the Penn Club, eating a hamburger and talking to my sister. The key to my lock—a foolishly thin flexible cable—was in my pocket.

I suppose I didn’t really believe in the little cable. Maybe I never believed in the bike, either—a blue Metro hybrid. Heavy and ugly, it was the second-cheapest model in my local shop. Maybe it was the sunshine in winter or the teeming crowds or the expensive real estate. Maybe it was the hope—naive, but apparently endemic—that it would never happen to me. Not that quickly. Not in broad daylight.Ìę

At 13:40, his partner rode up,ÌęÌędismounted, and locked his bike up alongside mine, a standard maneuver. The lock created an illusion, a bit of street theater. Two guys, two bikes, one plan.

At 13:41, they were making a sawing motion. After a few minutes, they tried a hammering motion. Then they switched to the Brennan—named for the San Francisco man who demonstrated on the Web that jamming the soft tube of a Bic pen into some locks can open them. After a 17-minute assault, the brave little Kryptonite softie finally gave.Ìę

By my count, 142 people had walked past in that time. Only one, the very last one, tried to do anything. As the lock yielded and the thief jumped onto my bike, an elderly black man in a Kangol cap lunged for them both. But it was too late. The blue Novara vanished into traffic.Ìę

After lunch, when I discovered and reported the theft, two detectives from Midtown South arrived in minutes. The Novara—Bike One, as I came to think of it—was assigned Complaint No. 1026. I never saw it again.Ìę

Late at night, though, I would get the DVD out. The building manager at the Penn Club had burned me a copy of the surveillance footage. I’d stay up, watching the injustice unfold, freezing, advancing, making screen grabs. I learned the whole drama by heart: the approach, the call, the partner, the battle with my lock, the civic hero in the Kangol.Ìę

When I’d look up, it would be 2 A.M.Ìę

I WANT MY BIKE BACK. So do we all. With the rise of the bicycle age has come a rise in bicycle robbery: FBI statistics claim that 204,000 bicycles were stolen nationwide in 2010, but those are only the documented thefts. , a bicycle advocacy group in New York City, estimates the unreported thefts at four or five times that—more than a million bikes a year. New York alone probably sees more than 100,000 bikes stolen annually. Whether in big biking cities like San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, or in sport-loving suburbs and small towns, theft is “one of the biggest reasons people don’t ride bikes,” Noah Budnick, deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, told me. Although bike commuting has increased by 100 percent in New York City during the past seven years, the lack of secure bike parking was ranked alongside bad drivers and traffic as a primary deterrent to riding more. It’s all about the (stolen) bike; even Lance Armstrong had his custom time-trial Trek nicked from the team van in 2009 after a race in California. Not every bike is that precious, but according to figures from the FBI and the , the value of stolen bikes is as much as $350 million a year.Ìę

That’s a lot of bike. Stolen bicycles have become a solvent in America’s underground economy, a currency in the world of drug addicts and petty thieves. Bikes are portable and easily converted to cash, and they usually vanish without a trace—in some places, only 5 percent are even reported stolen. Stealing one is routinely treated as a misdemeanor, even though, in the age of electronic derailleurs and $5,000 coffee-shop rides, many bike thefts easily surpass the fiscal definition of felony, which varies by state but is typically under the thousand-dollar mark. Yet police departments are reluctant to pull officers from robberies or murder investigations to hunt bike thieves. Even when they do, DAs rarely prosecute the thieves the police bring in.

“It’s just a low priority, to be honest with you,” says Sergeant Joe McCloskey, a bike-theft specialist with the San Francisco police department who estimates that, of the scores of bicycle thieves he has caught, not one did jail time for the crime. Whether police go hard after thieves often depends on whether the officers themselves are passionate riders, like McCloskey, who at one point during our conversation geeked out over his Pivot Mach 5 mountain bike. (“The guy named it Mach 5 because, you know, Speed Racer drove a Mach 5.”) Departments that can muster a peloton, like those in San Francisco, Portland, and Houston, are generally more proactive. By contrast, NYPD officers openly discouraged me from filing reports on the stolen bicycles mentioned in this article, probably because their precincts are judged by crime stats.

It’s nice to believe, as I once did, that there is some grand conspiracy at work, that catching a few bent dealers or bad-guy whole-salers will kill the business. Over the years, there have been a few tantalizing examples of a centralized trade in stolen bikes. In Miami in the 1980s, police found six freighters in the harbor holding hundreds of stolen bicycles, possibly headed for Haiti. Many bicycles stolen in Oregon crop up in San Francisco, evidence of an export network. In California, the Border Patrol has repeatedly caught pickup trucks entering Mexico that had been stuffed with high-end bikes stolen in Santa Cruz; drug dealers there take payment in valuable bikes, which they resell to the Mexican elite.Ìę

Certainly the king of bike thieves has been found. In 2008, a quirky Toronto bike-shop owner named Igor Kenk turned out to have 2,865 stolen bikes squirreled away in his store and various warehouses. Kenk, considered the most prolific bike thief in the world, is a messy, dyspeptic Slovenian intellectual who before he was caught lived in a fancy house and associated with the classical music scene. Yet his method was brutally mundane: Kenk was finally caught pointing out bikes he wanted stolen to a mentally ill person, whom he paid with drugs. He served just over a year in jail and is already back out.

I wanted to find a Kenk, to catch those two guys from West 44th Street. Over the long nights nursing my grudge, I thought I found my solution. What if I had followed them on the day they stole my bike? What if I had shadowed them, day after day, as they fenced it? What if I had tracked their every move and knew where my stolen bike was as soon as it got there? The simple vendetta that began that day in January grew to encompass three cities, seven bikes, and repeated encounters with the dangerous underworld of vanished bicycles.

BIKE TWO WILL BE an afterthought in this story but was pivotal all the same. It was a silver , heavy and scarred from city riding. We had our moments—dawn commutes over the Brooklyn Bridge, 17-degree rides during the December 2005 transit strike. But I never loved it enough to treat it carefully, and two years ago I made the same mistake I’d made years earlier with the Novara. I left it, poorly locked, behind my apartment building. Gone, baby, gone.Ìę

But Bike Two led me to act. I happened to be in Thailand a few months later and noticed a street vendor selling a small tracking device. The little gizmo, the love child of a GPS unit and a cell phone, was about half the size of a cigarette pack. Attached to my bike, it would respond to a phone prompt by firing back a location in digitized latitude and longitude. Supposedly, it could track and report continuously for days on end or sleep for weeks until, roused by movement, it would ding the satellites and report in. I brought one back from Bangkok and decided to rig my next bike with it. If—when—the bike was stolen, I’d know where it was. Then I could either steal it back or at least call the cops.Ìę

For that I needed a new bike—or rather, a not-new one. The purpose of stealing a bike, after all, is to sell it. SFPD’s McCloskey estimated that 90 percent of bike thieves are drug addicts. In America’s rough streets, there are four forms of currency—cash, sex, drugs, and bicycles. Of those, only one is routinely left outside unattended. So the story of bike thieves would not be complete without a trip through the second half of the transaction—the recycling of cycles.

Stolen bikes suffer many fates. In the Bay Area, they are often sold at flea markets, particularly in Alameda, just south of Oakland. In Portland, within hours of being taken, a few will appear at pawn shops just outside city limits, where documentation rules are lax. But just as they do in New York City, which shut down most ad hoc bike dealers years ago, the majority end up online, either on eBay or on Craigslist, the black hole of bicycles.Ìę

But how do you tell which ones are stolen? A Brooklyn bike-shop owner whose store had recently been robbed of 22 bikes pointed me toward “Bobby from Bay Ridge,” one of the most prolific sellers on the site. In a phone conversation, Bobby said he could find a bike in my size within a few days—which sounded almost like a snatch-to-order. But after riding the subway to outer Brooklyn, I found him—he’s not really named Bobby, and he does not live in Bay Ridge—to be less than sinister. He was middle-aged and living on a leafy block, with a garage full of used bikes. “I buy ’em at police auctions,” he said, mostly in New Jersey. I picked out a 1970s ten-speed—a , which would become Bike Three. It hardly had a scratch on it, meaning it was no New York City ride.

I flipped it over to look for a serial number, which is often carved on the bottom of a bike frame. Bobby blanched but recovered quickly. “It’s legal,” he said. “The police check ’em all before auctioning.”Ìę

Police departments do check all the bikes they recover against databases, but it’s a pointless exercise. The vast majority of bike thefts aren’t reported or are reported with no serial number. Bobby was just a cog in the machine.

I took Bike Three home, affixed the little black GPS tracker under the seat with epoxy, and left it locked behind my apartment, under a surveillance camera. A month later, the Schwinn disappeared.

But the Bangkok tracker didn’t work. When I dialed the number, no latitude or longitude messages came back. It had worked perfectly in tests. Maybe the tracker shorted out in the rain. Maybe the bike was stashed in the basement of a tall building that blocked satellite signals. Maybe a canny thief disabled it. Inexplicably, the surveillance camera had also failed—there was an 11-hour gap surrounding the disappearance. Only the flimsy cable lock was left behind, clipped neatly in two.Ìę

BIKE FOUR OFFERED a deeper dive into the cesspool of . Dialing the number in a listing for a mountain bike, I reached a clueless guy named Vic. “Yeah,” he explained. “I don’t exactly have the bike. My friend does. He’s got a friend who has the bike, at a friend’s place on 14th.”Ìę

The “place on 14th” turned out to be a piece of sidewalk. We agreed on a meeting time, but he immediately called back to request that it be sooner. When I balked at the price—$200—Vic cut it by a third. Cheap, rushed, anonymous. The omens were all bad.

We met in front of an eyeglasses shop on one of the trashiest blocks in Manhattan. Vic and his partner showed up, clean-cut and well dressed—muscle men with chains and patter. They pulled the bike out of a storeroom behind the shop. It was a green Huffy Luna comfort bike. They didn’t know anything about it, not the combination to the lock coiled around the seatpost nor that its tires were flat. The bike was brand-new—it still had packing foam wrapped around the fork, and the brakes had never been connected. Vic had no explanation for this. For $140 in cash, he threw in a tool kit and a helmet.Ìę

I handed over my money on the sidewalk, pumped the tires, paid my local bike shop $20 to secure the seat with a short length of bicycle chain, and attached a fancy Garmin device to the underside of it. After the failure of my Bangkok special, agreed to lend me several of its newest GPS locators, devices that allow you to keep tabs on your most prized possessions, be they children or a carbon-fiber 29er. (As gloating Web comments prove, these can also be used—illegally—to track a straying spouse.) The was slimmer than the Thai original—a little thicker than a pack of gum, almost invisible under the seat—and easier to track, thanks to Garmin’s slick mapping software and website. It was time for the Penn Club revenge. I rode the green Huffy into traffic for the first and last time.Ìę

I pedaled up to West 44th and, using a $20 cable lock, secured it to the same parking sign where Bike One had disappeared all those years before. For the next few days, checking from my home in Brooklyn, I could see that Bike Four was still sitting on West 44th. I’d hoped, irrationally, to catch the same two guys who’d robbed me previously, but nothing happened. A week later, I followed my wife to a temporary job in Portland and left Bike Four sitting there. The battery lasted a month, and the lock a little longer. But at the six-week mark, Peter Homberg, general manager of the Penn Club, called. An avid cyclist, Homberg had become devoted to my plot, and he relayed that the brakes had been stripped off.

Other parts began to vanish. The bike was slowly being cannibalized. When I returned in the fall, I expected to find at least the frame or a wheel. But there was nothing, not a trace. Bike Four had gone back to where it came from.

THERE HAS BEEN a war for decades, a steady escalation between locks and lock pickers. , which pioneered the U-lock in the 1970s, brags about its up-armored devices and has openly flattered New York City with them, first by issuing anywhere-but-New-York “anti-theft protection programs” for some of its regular locks, then by introducing the super-hardened, nearly-impossible-to-cut-with-hand-tools Fahgettaboudit series. But thieves always counter-attack with their own measures: car jacks to pry open U-locks, liquid Freon to freeze and shatter them, the notorious Brennan.Ìę

The futility of locking is shocking. We’re living in an age of surveillance and DNA swab kits; isn’t there a good all-American fix, a tool, gadget, or technology solution? Every technical panacea seems to have its own flaw. Victims of bike theft have created online registries for stolen bikes, but these are obituaries, not a way to preempt the crime. Some riders have urged manufacturers to install cheap RFID tags inside every bike they turn out, like those on clothing; with unique digital signatures, bikes would be completely traceable. But RFID tags can’t be tracked via satellite, only by handheld reader.Ìę

, a company in California, created a long-distance system for tracking bikes, which Sacramento police installed in the handlebars of a bait bike. It worked: when the wired bicycle was stolen, police located it across town and arrested the thief. Four months later, they tried it again; the same guy stole the same bike, threw it in a pool, and left the cops a note: “You got jacked U punk motherfucker.” Pegasus now sells a similar, consumer-grade device—the —for $178. To help avoid detection, it comes encapsulated inside a rear bike light. Which, of course, is all well and good until the thieves catch on. This past year, introduced a system of supposedly tamperproof security stickers, which can be scanned with a cell-phone camera for instant ownership checks. It’s a fine idea, but in our tests the stickers came off with a knife.

Maybe catharsis is all we have. YouTube is awash in surveillance-tape dramas like mine and patiently filmed revenge scenes, in which bike thieves are caught, busted, beaten, set up, tricked, shamed, and exposed, but it’s all to little or no avail. We are left with missing bikes and unlimited rage. Bike mechanics in Brooklyn can be found wearing T-shirts that read BIKE THIEVES SHOT ON SITE. It’s entirely possible that last word is misspelled.Ìę

In the end, we remain about where we were decades ago. I still rely on 1970s tech: a small hardened padlock and a three-foot length of hardware-store chain. For others, the most salient fact about a lock is not its strength but its convenience. The burden of big locks deters many people from riding, while others turn Kryptonite’s heavy-duty chain into a fashion statement, belted around the waist. (Don’t lose the key.)

Oddly, the sanest strategy I’ve encountered was outlined by musician and devoted rider . In his quirky memoir , Byrne advocates for folding bikes, which can be put in a closet. For the rest of us, he recommends security bolts on the wheels (harder to remove), smaller U-locks (harder to pry open), and cheap bikes (because everything gets stolen).

PORTLAND BILLS ITSELF as Bike City, USA. Like any new citizen, I needed a ride in my adopted city. The day after arriving in town I spotted a trio of dubious bike salesmen in the Southeast neighborhood. A line of 20 battered bikes and things like dishwashers and toaster ovens were for sale in front of their house. A transvestite with heavy face glitter sat on the curb, hawking the goods while knocking back malt liquor at 11:15 A.M. The shop assistant was shirtless, and the boss was a disabled man strapped into a wheelchair, plucking bike parts from buckets of spares arrayed around him—crates of grimy handlebars, dozens of cables, rows of wheels stripped from other rides.

To help conceal their identities, stolen bicycles are often converted into Frankenbikes—quick, haphazard rebuilds—which was likely what was going on here. I focused on a purple Giant Yukon. (“It’s your color!” the transvestite said.) Their negotiating tactic was to give in: they asked for $190 until I frowned, whereupon the price became $170; more silence brought it down to $160; when I started to walk away, they let it go for $70.Ìę

The Giant was a junker, but within an hour I had duct-taped a Garmin tracker beneath the seat and was headed down the Spring-water Corridor bike path to downtown Portland. On the way, I detoured through an area recommended to me by Portland police detective Joe Luiz. When I met him, Luiz, a devoted cyclist who had just returned from riding in the wine country of Walla Walla, Washington, had discussed the futility of many locks and then directed my attention to a freeway underpass along the Willamette River. I found the spot, home to dozens of homeless people in a semipermanent encampment. Most had bicycles; some had three. But Luiz and his colleagues were almost powerless here: for public relations reasons, police usually warn occupants in advance before searching the camp, which kind of nullifies the effort.

Luiz had also tipped me off to my final destination, Portland’s Central Library, across the river in the heart of downtown. Bikes vanished there all the time. I left the purple Giant unlocked and propped against a mailbox, at SW 10th and Alder, about two blocks from the library and its benches crowded with vagrants. I stepped across the street to the Governor Hotel, ordered a glass of Walla Walla white, and sat in a picture window, laptop open, camera at the ready. After two hours, I was briefly distracted. When I looked up, the bike was gone.

In the Wi-Fi bubble at the Governor, I watched on my laptop as my stolen bike progressed north and then east through downtown. Every few minutes, I pinged the GPS tracker, which got a fix and popped a marker onto the site’s map. Book ’em, Danno! Here was my stolen-bike fantasy brought to life, the unknowing thief tracked from the sky, his every move revealed in real time:

5:05 PM—at 303 SW 6th Ave less than a minute ago

5:11 PM—at 426 W Burnside St

less than a minute ago

5:13 PM—at 201 W Burnside St less than a minute ago
5:16 PM—NW Naito Parkway & NW Couch St less than a minute ago

Eventually, the thief decided to leave downtown and headed over the Steel Bridge, an ugly double-decker from 1912 with extra-wide bike lanes. But at 5:23 P.M., he changed his mind and returned to the west side. By 5:40, he’d pedaled south, .61 mile, to the Morrison Bridge, moving slowly (“1 MPH,” the GPS reported) but still moving. The Morrison Bridge points directly to that bike-dense homeless encampment I’d visited, but the thief seemed in no hurry to get there.Ìę

5:46 PM—at 82 SW Naito Parkway
5:50 PM—at 28 SW 1st St

He circumnavigated the Saturday Market, a spot for craft vendors, three times, but around 6 P.M. the readings became consistent. He was riding up and down the Waterfront Bike Trail, a green esplanade between the bridges. When I saw this pattern—north, then south, then north, at just 1 mph—I feared he was trolling for customers. I paid my bill and dived into a taxi.Ìę

AS WE APPROACHED the river, I no longer had a Wi-Fi signal. The Garmin unit works with some cell phones but not with mine, so I just picked a random point and told the cab driver to pull to the curb.Ìę

The very first thing I saw—seconds after exiting the cab—was a bearded white man on a familiar bike. He almost crashed into me. Indeed, he had to swerve to avoid me and nearly took out the fellow he was talking to.Ìę

When I’d told Luiz and his colleagues what I was up to, another detective had texted me: “If you need police help call 911 and we will figure out a mission to help in an undercover capacity. Have fun and be safe.” I’m no vigilante, and you really should call the police the moment you figure out where your bike is. But I was unprepared. Instead of being safe, I decided to have some fun.Ìę

The thief was talking to someone, and the only word I caught was “silver.” So, apropos of nothing, I blurted out, “Hey, are you into silver?” He stopped, and I launched into a nervous monologue. About silver. About colloidal silver. Silver prices. The color silver. Anything I could think of. It was idiotic but successful. The thief made conversation. Yes, he was into silver, he told me. Yes, he said, to whatever I said. He agreed completely.Ìę

After some crazy talk, I realized that the thief wasn’t just acting crazy. The silver was all hidden somewhere, he said. At the bottom of the ocean. He’d nearly died at the bottom of the ocean while in the Navy. He was in fact the legitimate son and heir of King Richard III. A trillion dollars in gold and silver—“All that money in the U.S. Treasury”—actually belonged to him.Ìę

This continued for about five minutes, until I pointed to the bike helmet tucked under my arm, and then the Giant Yukon he was riding. “I have a helmet,” I observed, “but no bike.”Ìę

“Oh,” he said, visibly deflating. “How did you find me so fast? It’s GPS, isn’t it?”

He didn’t mean my GPS, which was still pinging the satellites from under his rear end. He was schizophrenic, it seemed, and presumed he was always being followed. He got off the bike and handed it to me. We parted without drama.Ìę

I rode south for four miles, letting the grind of the pedals help my thinking. Richard IV was a thief but the wrong kind. He needed help, not vengeance. GPS units and police patrols and thick chains would never stop the lost legions of our streets.

This sad truth was reinforced when I later put Bike Five back on the street. I locked it this time, to avoid picking on someone like Richard IV. Yet no Kenkian mastermind or West 44th Street bad boys came to light. The bike just sat there, for days, then weeks:Ìę

Latitude: 45.51983498968184
Longitude: 122.68337331712246
Speed: 0 mph

After a month, the wheels had been removed. A few days after that, just after I removed the tracker, the seat was taken. Then someone who needed a fix stripped off the brakes. Bike Five—nothing left but a trapezoid of tubes—is sitting in my garage right now.Ìę

BIKE SIX, I LOVED YOU at first sight. Plucked from the streets of San Francisco, you were the finest I ever had, although that isn’t saying much.Ìę

Over the years, Sergeant McCloskey had launched dozens of stakeouts, stings, and reverse stings against bike thieves in the city’s Tenderloin District, becoming a legendary Lone Ranger in the bike wars, a one-man encyclopedia of cycle crime. He once spent an hour telling me his favorite techniques for catching thieves. The best spot was the San Francisco Public Library’s main branch, a few steps from Market Street. “We took a nice Cannondale and locked it to the bike rack there, set up a robbery detail, and watched the guys stealing the bikes,” he explained. “It worked really well. They’re very slick. They ride up on their own bike, park next to it. They have bolt cutters on a shoelace around their neck and lean down to cut it. They’re very fast. We did this successfully more than 20 times. We’ve only been skunked once. About 90 percent of the people we get are drug addicts, meth heads. Speeders, we call them.”Ìę

In Portland, Joe Luiz had confessed that he’d never quite figured out where all the bikes were going, but in San Francisco this wasn’t an issue. Stolen bikes were for sale, openly, at Market and 7th, a block from where Sergeant McCloskey got so many stolen.Ìę

I’d come to San Francisco for a funeral—my father-in-law had passed away. I drove downtown to pick up his ashes and, combining two errands into one, drove down Market Street to buy a stolen bike. I parked and walked to the corner of 7th, where there was an open-air market in fenced goods, from canned food to blue jeans to batteries. Within 60 seconds, a kid rode up on a black single-speed and smiled at me.Ìę

He wanted $175. When I bargained, he said, “It’s a $700 bicycle. I looked it up.”Ìę

We finally agreed on $125. As I counted out my money, two other bike deals were going down at the same moment. One, involving a delivery bike with a basket wired to the front, started to go bad, heading toward a fight. I shoved the cash at the kid and sprinted away on Bike Six.Ìę

Minutes later, I was driving around San Francisco with a stolen bike in back and my father-in-law’s ashes up front. The bike was beautiful—an IRO track bike, designed and built in Pennsylvania, with a flip-flop hub, slim handlebars, and a tiny leather seat. There was a serial number on it, but when I checked registries of stolen bikes online, no one in San Francisco—or anywhere else that I could find—had reported it missing.Ìę

The hot-bike market in downtown San Francisco was shameless, a disgrace to the city. But it wasn’t the Bay Area’s only dubious bicycle venue. The Alameda flea market was notorious for recycling stolen bikes, and in Golden Gate Park there was a chop shop where amateur mechanics swapped components and resold stolen bikes for profit.Ìę

I rode the IRO through verdant Golden Gate, enjoying the smooth ride. I’d always thought single-speeds were an illin’ pose, but the IRO was nimble and ridiculously light. Standing on the pedals, I climbed past 15-speeders in my only gear. It was like having a skinnier, younger girlfriend. I never found the chop shop or carried out my plan to sell the IRO. Later I called Sergeant McCloskey and told him about the track bike.Ìę

“You got burned,” he said. “You paid $25 too much.”

I put the IRO back in the car, near the old man’s ashes. I still have it, and I ride it everywhere, but I need to go straight. If you lost one in San Francisco, contact me with the serial number.Ìę

I NEVER OWNED Bike Seven, a.k.a. the Last Bike, which belongs (still) to the Portland police’s burglary task force. But it was an impressive machine, a brilliant silver Trek triathlon bike, valued at about $1,500. Not coincidentally, this sum qualified it as a felony theft in Oregon. It was light as a feather, despite the elbow rests and gear changers mounted on the upright bars.Ìę

At the Central Precinct one morning, Officer Hilary Scott, one of Detective Luiz’s colleagues, handed over Bike Seven, allowed me a few minutes to install a GPS tracker under the seat, and then walked me out of the building. A fellow committed rider, Scott gave me precise instructions on where to lock it up, and I set off through traffic, bugged and tailed, for Operation Steal My Bike.

I’d never ridden with aero bars and nearly smeared myself across a police cruiser before discovering there were no brakes up there. Only one gear worked. The robbery squad rides poky bikes, and they had disabled the bait bike’s other gears—they didn’t want to be outsprinted by some meth head channeling Mario Cipollini.

Eventually, I struggled up to the address Scott had picked. It was only half a block from where my Giant Yukon had been stolen by Richard IV. About 1,100 bikes had been reported stolen in Portland that year, some 600 of them here in the Central Precinct, and most of those within a short ride of this exact spot.

I locked up the bike, badly. Six cops were out here somewhere, watching in plain clothes. But I’d met only officer Scott. So where were the cops who supposedly had my back? Across the street was a fisherman-type guy in a blue windbreaker. He was waiting with a bike at a streetcar stop. A streetcar came and went, and he was still there.Ìę

My phone rang. From offstage Scott was watching me lock the bike. She had me change its position. Then she sent me to a Starbucks up the street while she stood by with a recovery team, uniformed officers charged with nabbing a thief.Ìę

A couple of hours went by. I drank too much coffee. Occasionally, I poked my head out into the street or walked around the block. The Fisherman in blue was still there. Who else was on the job? The guy in the white grocer’s smock? The happy couple laughing as they adjusted their bike helmets?Ìę

I logged on to the coffee shop’s Wi-Fi, and my laptop revealed the tracker’s position from all of a block away. I set the Garmin software to report every 30 seconds and to send me a text message if the bike moved.Ìę

Scott called. Cops get lunch breaks, and we quit for 90 minutes. I rode the fussy Trek back to my car. En route, bouncing up SW 3rd Avenue, I noticed the happy couple pedaling along behind me. They made a left turn, toward the Central Precinct.

WE DIDN’T catch anyone in the afternoon, either. We did a second shift, a few hours in different spots around town, ending at one of the sleaziest areas in Portland, under the bridge. The street was full of homeless people, addicts, preachers, drunks, the curious, the insane. I locked the bike—using a $5.99 kids’ model. Fisherman rode past on his bike, dismounting and pretending to make a phone call.Ìę

I got a coffee, checked the tracker, and glanced down the street. The happy couple was out there now. An hour later they’d separated, and Mrs. Happy Couple was chilling with the Fisherman instead. The police bike was sitting patiently, waiting to be stolen, the fate of all bikes.Ìę

Until the cannibalizing of Bike Four, I was optimistic, convinced that bike theft could be stopped by technology. Bike Five’s demolishing left me burned out, believing there’s little we can do about bike theft. Bike Six gave me back my joy, just as Bike Seven restored my resolve. This is a war of attrition. Like the police, we can and must resist, even when it’s futile. I’m still pimping around Portland on Bike Six, my little black IRO, with 11 pounds of chain wrapped around my waist and hex nuts on my wheels. All the partial solutions—a national bike registry, better serial numbering, more secure parking, GPS trackers disguised like bells and reflectors—are getting better. We aren’t going away.Ìę

Unfortunately, the thieves aren’t either. When I arrived back at Central Precinct, Mr. Happy Couple was in the robbery squad’s tight warren of cubicles, stripping off his sweaty gear and laughing about something. As he’d left the scene of the stakeout, an agitated man had called over to him.

“Hey,” he said, “I just had my bike stolen!”

I know how it is, brother. So many bikes, so little time. ÌęÌę

The post Who Pinched My Ride? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.