Tuareg Hygiene

When my two dogs have emptied their plates, they go lick each other’s. Hygiene is of course of no concern to them. And why should it, if it’s not an issue for so many people?

This reminds me of a scene that I was unable to photograph because it made me laugh so uncontrollably that, to avoid offending anyone, I had to move away.

It happened while I traveled with a Sahara Tuareg salt caravan. One man discovered before sitting down with his eight companions around a bowl of millet gruel that he had lost his spoon. I offered him the use of mine, but he rejected it as being too small. It was a metal table spoon. The other men had all larger spoons carved out of wood. If he used my spoon it would leave him at a disadvantage. He would be eating less than the other men. Those men worked way too hard for anyone of them to be forced to eat less than his already meager portion. But they had a ready solution. They simply passed their spoons around the circle. After each man had eaten a spoonful of millet, he passed his spoon to the man to the right, and took the one coming from the man to the left. And on and on until emptying the bowl. What was so comical was the matter-of-factness with which they did it.

Poor Tuareg! They have so little water, and it’s always so far from camp, that they can rarely bathe. I once saw them cool a dirty feverish baby in a big wooden bowl of water, after which they returned the used water to the drinking-water goatskin.

Cursed in Peru

South America is my favorite continent. Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, I have visited them all, and all of them repeatedly. In many ways they are as different from each other as they are, in other ways, similar. Grandiose and varied landscapes, warm-hearted people, fascinating cultures, archaeology, they have them all, each in their own way.

Except for Colombia and Ecuador, Peru is the one I know best. I have travelled to Peru so many times since 1971 that I could not say how many if my life depended on it. I was there last in June 2007, when covering the pre-Inca Chachapoya culture for Archaeology magazine (Archaeology January-February 2008).

The number, variety, and grandeur of Peru’s archaeological sites have no match on the continent. And with Argentina, it also has the best food. I have eaten well there even in the most remote villages. So I was rather surprised the morning that an old lady in black served me dirty milk in a big grubby bowl.

I had spent the night on her farm while traveling horseback across parts of the Andes Mountains with a Morochuco cattle herder to guide me cross-country. He had lost his way, and when we had asked the old lady for help, she had told us to wait until the next morning, when her nephew would guide us out of there. It was late anyway.

The woman had served my friend a much smaller bowl of dirty milk, and as hot milk nauseates me, and my friend Jose could never get enough of it, I had suggested that we exchange bowls. That had enraged the woman, who had thrown us out and cursed me.

“Uneducated Gringo!” she shouted as Jose and I rode away, “May you get lost, suffer scorching thirst, and meet bandits.” Curiously, all her wishes came through within a few days.

To read the story, please go to my website (www.victorenglebert.com), and read the article titled (how else?) Cursed.

Playing doctor in Borneo

Traveling far from the beaten path has sometimes forced me to play doctor. That can be problematic. First, how do I persuade my own doctor to prescribe me enough pills to help a few people? Besides, a few pills are never enough, for once I start medicating people, the procession of would-be patients never ends. And how do I pay for them? They’re expensive, and nobody helps me with the bill. Years ago, magazines paid for my travel expenses. But not any more.

When I was younger and foolish, I traveled light and did not bother carrying as much as aspirins with me. I thought I’d never die. I went on two 30-day camel journeys across the Sahara that way. That did not stop people to bring their sick relatives to me. Once it was a little Sahara Tuareg girl who had a small stone lodged inside her ear. Over time the flesh had grown over it. In another Tuareg camp it was a boy who had had the tip of his penis accidentally chopped off when circumcised. In Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression, a Danakil nomad also showed me his penis. It was rotten with infection.

I could have done nothing for those people if I had carried any drugs. I may not have been able to do much for myself if I had been in their shoes. And there’s always the danger that if you give a couple of aspirins to someone with high fever, and that person dies during the night, that you will be accused of the death.

However, when traveling across Borneo once, I made sure that I was carrying enough medicines for myself. I had no idea how long I would be living in the jungle, and the environment would be less healthy than that of the Sahara. My isolation among primitive tribes ended up lasting four months, and if anyone in my family had died meanwhile, that person might have been long buried by the time I got back home. It made me wonder how many relatives Marco Polo never saw again during his long years of travels.

When, somewhere in the middle of the island, a middle-aged man came to show me a large greenish wound in the middle of an awfully swollen forearm, I knew I had to try to help him. While hunting, a wild pig had bitten him, and his wound had festered for some time.

I was carrying four disposable syringes and antibiotic. I had never before given anyone an injection, but the needle got into his buttock as if through butter. I boiled the needle for possible reuse.

The man was back the next day. However, this time the used needle refused to get through his skin. After trying unsuccessfully different parts of his backside, the only option left to me was to stab him with the needle. Later, I boiled it again.

Next day the man was back once more, but this time he limped badly. I had just learned that disposable needles were just that, and that if I ever needed my three other needles, they would only be good for three injections. So I had to tell him that I had run out of antibiotic.

But I was of much more help to another poor devil. He was a man from Sumatra, a Batak in his mid-twenties, who the Dyak had held against his will for two years. Though he only had a fifth-grade education, a Swiss missionary had told him that if he went to teach Dyak children to read and write, they would pay him with gold.

Using the wood from the forest, the Dyak had built a one-room school on stilts. They had much gold, but never gave him any. He spoke a little English, and begged me to tell the Dyak that I needed him as an interpreter. I felt bad for the kids, but it was not right to keep this man from returning to his own people. So I accepted, and the Dyak consented to his release.

Unfortunately, that meant rushing to his help every time a leach hooked up on him during our eight-day forest crossing of the water divide. That must have been 30 to 40 times a day, and I had my own leeches to constantly pull off. But he screamed as a manias each time as if the leeches were killing him.

One evening he really shocked me. “Last night,” he said “I told the Dyak to kill you and take all your possessions.”

“Are you out of your mind?” I asked. “Why did you say such thing?”

“I wanted to be sure that they had no ill intentions toward you.”

“And what did they say?”

“They said that nowadays they can no longer do that. Your people would come after them if they did. They also said that they were afraid of you. Have you seen his eyes, they asked? Have you ever seen such eyes? They are blue!”

http://victorenglebert.com

Through Borneo, From Coast to Coast

In 1968, in a four-month journey across Borneo, the world’s third largest island, I traveled west to
east, up the Kapuas and Bungan rivers and down the Mahakkam, from Pontianak to Samarinda.
That was long before the loggers’ invasion, and long before any road was first hacked or bulldozed through the forest. I journeyed first by Chinese houseboat, and then by Dyak canoe. When rapids impeded our progress, which was often, we walked through the forest.

At the end of our upriver trip, we left our canoes on the Bungan and walked for eight days to the
Mahakkam through the jungle of the water divide. Because the Dyak had no use for money, I
needed eight porters to carry the trade goods that paid for services. Countless leeches hooked
onto us along the way, drawing streams of blood from our arms and legs.

The chain-smoking Dyak burned them off with cigarettes. A non-smoker, I plucked them off
by hand, sometimes leaving the head inside my skin. And since the leeches squeezed through my
shoes’ eyelets to lodge under my toenails, I had to walk through the jungle barefoot so as to spot
them quickly.

The Dyak, former headhunters, still had skulls hanging from their longhouses’ rafts, but they were
as hospitable as any people I had known, though they forced me to sing and dance for them before giving
me a place to sleep. Compared to their own amazing artistic shows, mine looked dismal, which I could see
on their faces.

Halfway down the Mahakkam, I ran out of trade goods when every hand was needed to harvest the
hill rice. I had to give away everything I owned except the clothes on my back and my photographic
equipment to find the help I needed to get out of the jungle.

http://victorenglebert.com

THE DOG THAT WENT BITING AROUND DURING THE NIGHT

THE DOG THAT WENT BITING AROUND DURING THE NIGHT

In northern Kenya, on a walking expedition with my friend Jeff Barr, I witnessed a dog behavior which might have cost the lives of at least two persons.

Jeff had taught my sons at the American school in Colombia where we both lived some years earlier. We’d hired three Turkana nomads to guide us and introduce us to their people along the way. They were also to lead six donkeys that carried mostly water, along with our personal belongings, camping equipment, and food for a little over a week. We needed a lot of water, for our itinerary was taking us across volcanic desert, through one of the hottest places on earth, the Suguta Valley, deep at the bottom of the Great Rift Valley, just south of Lake Turkana.

We had camped that night at a hundred paces from the two straw huts of a Turkana family--an old man and his two young wives and children. Yes, the Turkana can have as many wives as they can support. Like our Turkana companions, Jeff and I were sleeping under the sky and a nearly full moon, enjoying a relatively cool rest after a hellish day. Jeff was deservedly asleep, for he handled the cooking, which he loved to do, at the end of each exhausting day. My job, writing notes, cleaning cameras, and sorting film, was much more relaxing.

Something, a noise perhaps, wakened me. Immersing myself in thoughts after that, I was unable to close my eyes again.

Suddenly, I heard an angry cry, and saw Silale, our Turkana interpreter, get up to curse and run after something. I assumed a dog had stolen some food, and I added my voice to his, making loud silly noises which I wanted to sound threatening. It was a dog indeed, an ugly little yellow creature with the oblique and shuffling gait of a jackal. He was unimpressed, and trotted by me as though I did not exist. I’d seen him that afternoon sleeping under the tree where we had unloaded our luggage for the night.

"Look at that impudent bastard, cried Silale. He came to bite me in my sleep. Thanks God! I was wrapped up in my blanket."

That was strange, indeed.

By now having lost all hope to sleep, I got up to check if a stream, which had come down from the hills that afternoon after a rare downpour that take years to occur, was still running. It had been almost completely absorbed by the underlying sand, and by morning would have disappeared. Poor Turkana children, I thought; they would be disappointed, for the stream had made great impression on them. They had never before seen running water.

The night had not delivered its last surprise. Now, at two in the morning, a little girl in one of the huts woke up screaming, and then sobbing loudly. Her parents started a terrific commotion, and I wondered whether the old man was giving one of his wives a thrashing. At that, everyone else woke up, and our own three Turkana, spears in hand, ran wildly towards the huts.

Cries filled the night, but I couldn't understand a word. I thought the old man might be attempting to kill the woman, and that our friends were rushing to her rescue. Pulled out so violently from his sleep, Jeff was even more surprised by the pandemonium.

Before I had made any sense of the situation, the Turkana were all running at me now--the men with spears high, the women with pangas (small machetes). For a moment, I did not know whether to run too, and where. But no, why should these people want to spear me?

And then I saw the little yellow dog ahead of them—dashing straight at me. And in an instant I grasped the situation. The dog had sneaked inside the hut to bite the little girl, and must have been rabid. Now he intended to give me the kiss of death. Even as I grabbed up a thorny branch from the ground and shook it threateningly, he kept coming at me.
Luckily, my Turkana were fast on his heels, and he managed only one snap at me, just as I jumped sideways. Then the desert night swallowed him.

The Turkana could easily have killed him, but they would not, which was admirable of them. But they must not have known about rabies.

That was too bad, for the little yellow dog could bite other people, or other animals that would bite other people, and perhaps cause untold harm.

Thanks God, the damage had been only minor thus far. It turned out the dog had first tried to bite the little girl's leg through her blanket, causing only a minor scratch. He had then jumped onto her face, but in the nick of time she had pulled the blanket over it while screaming for help.

That was fortunate, for her parents would not have walked several days to bring her to a bush clinic They would have found no rabies antidote there anyway.

Concerned that the dog might return, Jeff and I did not sleep anymore that night. Still, Jeff thought that his unusually loud snoring had saved us thus far. It may have, as it scared me sometimes.

Every night, we had listened to the howling of distant jackals. That night the howling sounded different.

“That’s the little yellow dog howling,” Silale said.

http://victorenglebert.com

What You See May Not Be What You Think

While sitting one evening around the fire with a group of Tuareg men, Sahara nomads bound from Niger to Lybia with camels and sheep to sell there, a man walked into the edge of the circle of light. Tuareg men veil their faces, but in our intimacy some had lowered them somewhat. At the sight of the man, they immediately raised them back to their eyes.

Now the man felt confident to move forward. We saw that he was a stranger. Politely he exchanged greetings with us. Finally he said that his water bag was empty and that he had been thirsty for a very long time. A bowlful of water was poured, and he gulped it down after pronouncing the Moslem ritual praise to God.

“Since sunset,” he said. “I have been following sounds of pestles hitting mortars and of children crying, but every time I thought I was reaching an encampment, the sound stopped suddenly—only to start somewhere else.”

“Djinnen,” the men murmured, and the man nodded.

Though I do not believe in evil spirits, I was not in the least skeptical of the dangers our guest faced while he was lost. A Djinn could have got me killed too some weeks earlier.

At that time I was sharing the daily lives of a large Tuareg encampment of the noble Iullimiden tribe and the people of lower castes employed by them. One evening, I brought water in my collapsible canvas bucket to a thicket, away from Tuareg families, to bathe. I put the bucket down in the dark at the foot of a thorn tree, and as I did so, saw the vague shape of a man squat 15 paces away. He watched me intensely as I undressed and hung my clothes on a branch above my head, washed, and dried myself.

As I turned around to grab my clothes, a heavy branch hit my head, nearly knocking me out. There was no big branch that I could have brought down with my clothes, and the man had disappeared. He had obviously thrown the branch at me, though for what reason I could not fathom. I decided to tell Radwane, the Chief’s son, about that voyeur and his aggressive behavior.

“Let’s find him and beat him up,” Radwane said.

“Victor!” we suddenly heard from a terrified voice. “You gave me the fright of my life. I was passing through the scrub when I descried that tall unearthly silhouette (in the darkness the clothes above my head had added to my height) moving under a tree. Fear paralyzed me, and when I heard water running where there had never been any, I knew I was facing a djinn. At last, summoning my courage, I grabbed a thick branch and threw it at what had to be a djinn with all the strength I could muster.”

He concluded that to dare to dwell in dark thickets at night without absolute necessity I either had to be a super amahar (noble warrior) or be protected by powerful gris-gris.

“But do not laugh, Victor,” he scolded “Had I had a spear, you would be dead now.”

http://victorenglebert.com

Not all Honey is Easy to Get

My wife hates to go to the supermarket. “It’s so boring,” she complains. Yes, but how convenient!

Martha did not always feel like that. When we moved here from Colombia, her country, 12 years ago, walking through a supermarket made her actually very happy. Somewhat like a kid walking through Toys R’ Us. At least a Colombian kid. She had used supermarkets before of course, but never that filled with so many small wonders. However, time wore off the novelty.

“Don’t be ungrateful,” I tell her.” Think instead of all the people worldwide who still have to hunt to get meat. Those who spend as much as a day to get a little firewood and dirty drinking water.

My mother herself, when I was growing up in my native Belgium, lost a whole morning every day getting our fresh food from the baker, the butcher, the charcutier, the fish shop, the vegetable and fruit shop, and the milk and cheese shop. And she had to lug her purchases on foot from place to place. And wait in line while some other customers engaged in small talk with the vendors.

Having shared the lives of more than 30 indigenous peoples in every kind of environment, from Africa to Asia and South America, I know why those people, who are as intelligent and resourceful as we are, have developed so slowly. They lose way too much time meeting their most basic needs.

Take for instance that old Yanomami Indian, about 65, of the Amazon rain forest. He craved the honey he had spotted about 40 meters up a tree perhaps 50 times as thick as he was.

”When you want honey,” Martha, “you make a trip to the supermarket. And you get the rest of the food you need right there. But that man literally risked his life to get his honey.”

First he cut two thick 30-feet saplings and rid them of their branches and tendrils. Then he yanked down some lianas, and tied them to the ends of the saplings and to a long heavy logger's ax to pull them after him as he climbed a thinner tree nearby. Some 30 meters up that tree, he placed one sapling against a fork of the forest giant, tied the bottom of the improvised ladder to the thinner tree, and pulled himself up on the sapling. Once at the fork of the big tree, he repeated the operation using the second sapling that he pulled up after him with the ax.

Now, standing at that scary height on top of the thick branch that held the bees’ nest, and using both hands to swing his heavy ax on that very branch, he got it down with the honey without falling down himself. The branch made such a racket crashing to the ones below that I briefly thought that it was him falling. But he got down fast enough.

Once on the ground, he and a grandson that had accompanied him stuck their arms inside the hollow branch and pulled from it handfuls of honey on which they gorged greedily. Living a life of constant exercise, those people can eat as much honey as they want without ever gaining a pound.

Are they happy? I swear that I never saw happier people, except among some other indigenous people.

http://victorenglebert.com

Back from Colombia

I’m back from Colombia. Had a great trip. Better than I expected. The country is back to better times. And the people are as friendly as ever. But in that country you can never discount the bad guys, as I have learned firsthand several times.

Many years ago, on a December 26, I lived one of my most unpleasant Colombian experiences. The Cali Fair starts on that day, and at that time lasted two weeks. For the length of the fair, people worked only half days. They celebrated at the bullring, and later at outdoor cafes. It was a chaotic time of booze and irresponsible behavior.

The fair opens every year with a cabalgata, a cavalcade. Hundreds of people ride horseback across town. They stop here and there to greet family and friends among the thousands of people that line the avenues to watch the spectacle. Many of the riders keep drinking from bottles of aguardiente as they move along. Sometimes, too drunk to stick to the saddle, one drops to the ground.

Standing in the middle of the avenue, I photographed the oncoming procession of riders, all dressed up to look like South American cowboys and cowgirls. As I pointed my lens at two men, one of them leaning on the shoulder of the other as they rode side by side, all hell broke loose. Before I understood what was happening to me, four men had come galloping to surround and crush me between their horses from all sides while shouting obscenities at me.

“Give me your camera!” one of the men ordered. Only the powerful drug mafia could act so arrogantly, and I knew that I was in deep trouble. But I could not hand my camera to the first person who ordered it. It would make me feel like a worm.

“Why?” I asked, fearing the worst.

“Because you took our picture, idiot. That’s why. Give me your camera!”

“Let’s do it differently,” I said, striving to look as stupid as he said I was. “Give me your address, and I’ll send you prints.” That threw the man into a fit of worse rage.

“Gringo de mierda! Shitty gringo!” he shouted as he spat on me, immediately imitated by the other men, while they tightened their circle against me again.

Two policemen ran to my rescue. They were carrying machine guns.

“What’s going on here?” one of them asked.

“Hijos de putas! Sons of whores!’ the man who had been leaning on an aide and was drunk now shouted at the policemen. “Do you know who I am?”

The policemen looked up at him, lowered their heads, and turned away, leaving me alone to face those bandits.

“Bueno,” I said. “Here is my film.” And I pulled it out of my flat little Leica, which was fitted with a small wide-angle lens, and out of its cassette. I wanted the film to veil because it was the wrong film, and I did not want them to learn it later if they sent it to a photo lab for processing.

The mafia picture was inside my other camera, a bulkier Nikon, on which protruded a long lens. Not that I wanted to keep that picture and run into any any more troubles. But there were many other pictures on that film that I wanted to save. The Leica film had just been changed and had no more than five pictures on it. The man, who did not notice the deception, pulled the film out of my hands and signaled his minions to follow him as he rode away.

The good people who had watched the attack from the sidelines immediately came forward to lament it and make sure that I was all right. One teenager even wanted to give me his own pictures of the event. But I can’t use amateur pictures. Anyway, I was not finished doing my job, though I would be more careful now.

An hour later, as the horse riders stopped constantly to say hello along the way, I found myself ahead of the mafiosos again. As they passed by, their leader, the one who had been leaning on his lieutenant, saw me in the crowd and lifted his poncho to his eyes while staring at me for a long time, but he rode on.

Days later, having got my film back from processing, I showed the picture that had put me in trouble to a Colombian friend.

“Jesus!” he said. This guy could have killed you. He is the head of the North Cauca Valley cartel, the one responsible for all the corpses floating down the Cauca River with vultures riding on their bellies. He must have thought that you worked for the DEA.

The man ended up behind bars, where he got killed eventually. Fortunately, I'm still alive.

http://victorenglebert.com

Saying Good-bye for a While

I must say good-bye for a while. I’ll be flying to Colombia in the next two days to work on a new magazine story. I lived in that country for 23 years--self-published nine photo books on it, and explored its every corner. It can be dangerous sometimes, but always rewarding beyond expectations.

Colombia is one of the world’s most varied and beautiful countries, in its humanity as well as in its geography. However, the country’s best scenery, that which people have altered little, is generally difficult of access. Parts of Colombia are in the hands of a criminal guerilla, and delinquents stalk city streets.

Travel Can Save Money--a Lot Sometimes

How a Peru Trip Cut my Dentist’s Bill by Nearly 80% after Travel Expenses

Don’t let the weak dollar keep you from traveling. There are still countries where the greenback goes a long way. And life is too short not to try to see as much of the world before you get too old.
Nothing leaves deeper and warmer memories than travel. Nothing helps you better understand the world around you.

One way to pay for your trip, and even to leave you a little richer, is to combine your journey with health care, which is cheaper anywhere outside the United States. Dental work, for instance, can be had in some countries for only a fraction of what it costs here.

A year ago, I learned that two of my molars needed root canals--at $900 each. I had been planning a trip to Peru, and decided to have the work done there. But I waited too long, and both teeth had to be pulled out. Now, to fill those two tooth gaps, I would need two bridges, each one anchored on two adjacent teeth. Dentists count such bridges as three teeth. Plagued by bad luck, and only days later, one of the support teeth of an existing bridge broke. The bridge had filled a single gap, but a new one would now have to fill two gaps. To fill four gaps in my mouth, I now needed three bridges covering ten teeth. At $800 a tooth (more at fancier dentists), it would cost me $8,000.

I could wait no longer to travel to Peru. Through a friend in Lima, Peru’s capital, I found not only an excellent dentist, but also a well-lit and very comfortable small apartment for only $20.00 a night. Situated in a nice part of town, at a 15-minute walk from the dentist’s office, and looking down over the avenue below, It had private bath and furnished kitchen.

My meals in Lima cost me between $3.00 and $4.00 each, including drinks and tips. Just across from the dental clinic, for example, I paid $2.00, for a large and juicy barbecued chicken breast with salad and a mountain of real French fries.

Anyone preferring American fast-food would walk only minutes from the place I stayed in to Pizza Hut, Dominos, Kentucky Fried Chicken, MacDonald, Dunkin Donuts, and Starbuck, as well as to a supermarket selling all kinds of delicious prepared foods and snacks, all at prices well below American ones. An internet café across the street charged me $0.70 an hour. The cost of an average taxi ride was $2.00. Buses only cost pennies, though exposing one to possible pickpockets.

I sat at the dentist for three hours during four mornings--before, between, and after two different Andean trips. His office was not luxurious, but he was amazingly good and conscientious. To take care of those ten-tooth bridges, a cavity, and a cleaning, he charged me only $1,500.00—less than those two root canals would have cost me in Pennsylvania. The New York- Lima flight cost me $633.00.

For the price of two root canals in the US, a person could fly to Lima, have teeth fixed there, and enjoy a trip to Machu Picchu.

Benin. Atakora Mountains near Boukombe. Somba initiate with antelope horns on her straw-woven cap and a white stone jutting down from a hole under her lower lip.

Benin. Atakora Mountains near Boukombe. Somba initiate with antelope horns on her straw-woven cap and a white stone jutting down from a hole under her lower lip.

Benin. Atakora Mountains near Boukombe. Held down by two women, including her mother, a little four-year-old Somba girl is undergoing face scarification under the knife of a specialized man.

Benin: Barred From Access To My Car

People ask me sometimes whether I have faced danger among tribal people. To this I respond that it is considerably safer living among them than walking the streets of Allentown, Pennsylvania, where I live, at two in the morning. However, while photographing 35 indigenous peoples in three continents, I have inevitably run into occasional difficulties, as in the following case.

The man stood squarely against the driver's side of my car, a small Renault 4cv, arms and legs spread apart to impede my entrance. Except for a loincloth, he was naked, and his muscles bulged all over the black skin of a medium-height body. His left hand held tightly a big black dog by a chain. We were in the Atakora Mountains, in northwestern Benin, on the west coast of Africa. I was passing through on my way elsewhere, and was returning to my small French car after taking some pictures of the landscape that spread far below an escarpment on one side of the dirt road and of the fairyland miniature clay castles that dotted it.

"Pay!" the man said in French (until 1960, Benin was a French colony, and to this day its official language is French). He was a Somba tribesman, and I didn't need an explanation. The Somba, like many other Africans, demand money for being photographed.

I had not taken his picture, but assumed that one of those picturesque miniature castles, which the Sombas learned to build at a time when they had to defend themselves against the attacks of Moslem Bariba horsemen, belonged to him. I handed him the equivalent of one dollar, but he threw the money down furiously. I gave him five times the amount, but he flung it to the ground with equal scorn.

Considering that, due to the distance, the houses were a small part of my picture, I did not feel that I should have given him anything. But "Paie!" was the only French word he knew, and it was much simpler to part with some money than to try to explain anything to him.

I thought him unreasonable, however, for in 1969 five dollars was a lot of money for a primitive tribesman. And as I now saw other Somba men climbing the mountain in my direction, bows and arrows in hand, I understood that what they all had in mind was modeling fees for every resident. That was impossible, as I wasn't carrying much cash. The only way out was to retake my car by force, and quickly, before the men shot arrows through me.

Because I had boxed in my youth, I might have hoped to win a fist fight, but surely the dog would not watch quietly. What was I to do? I thought fast, evaluating my poor options, and quickly running out of time. And then I thought no longer, and hurled myself against the man. With an eye on the dog, I tried to shove him sideways, but I might as well have tried to move his house. He was immovable. The dog bit through my shoe, leaving a hole in it.

I jumped back and had a better look at the man. He was built like a gorilla, and he stared at me fiercely. I tried to look fierce myself, but it would take more than mean eyes to get out of this absurd situation.

Since I would not win this one by force, I decided to play it by wits. Pretending to suffer greatly from the dog bite, I slowly limped to the car hood, as if to brace myself against it. And then, suddenly nimble again, leaped over it, stormed through the opposite door, scrambled to the wheel, and started the engine.

Unfortunately, if I had left the doors unlocked when marching off to take my picture, I had also left the windows open because of the extreme heat. The dog, which the man immediately released, ran after me around the car, and jumped right through the window. As he landed on me, ready to bite again, I let loose in its ears such a loud and maniacal cry that he kept going right through the opposite window and into his master’s arms.

As I tried to drive away, however, the Somba tried to wrest the wheel from my hands while furiously banging the heavy dog chain on my car's hood. When I started gaining speed, he dropped the chain, grabbed the roof rack with his right hand, and with the left forced the car to turn towards the precipice down which I had photographed his people’s miniature castles. The other Somba, now only fifty paces away, came running faster with great whoops. Everything was happening much more rapidly than I could describe here.

By then, with no control over the car's direction, we were headed down towards the escarpment--I at least, for the Somba could jump off at any time. I had to get rid of the man quickly, and as this was my last option, I punched him in the face harder than I ever punched anyone in the ring. This time he rolled to the ground, and as I righted my car out of its deadly course, nearly ran over him. As I finally drove safely away under a shower of what sounded like insults, I saw in my rear mirror one of the men aim an arrow at the car. It hit it with force, and its metal point left a small hole in it, but I was already driving at full speed.

Four years later, as National Geographic was preparing to do a book on primitive peoples, I proposed to return to the Somba, who are as interesting as they can be aggressive, and to write one of the book’s chapter on them, which I did. This time I first talked to their priestess, and negotiated a price to be freely allowed to take the pictures I wanted. With the Somba as with other tribes, it’s always better to talk first.

Part Two - Back to Africa

In New York I spent two years working 16 hours a day in two waiter’s jobs, and sleeping little. Then, having saved enough to cover the purchase of additional photo equipment (I owned only one camera and two lenses), a journey on the cheap, and my family’s upkeep during my absence, I returned to Algiers. The year was 1963. Passing through Brussels, I overheard my father-in-law whisper that I was a boy scout who would not grow up. I understood his feelings and empathized, but was glad not to have grown up yet, or I might not have dared to risk another failure.

Through the Algerian part of the Sahara I rode on oil trucks. Through Niger and Benin I squeezed at the top of overloaded and overcrowded trucks that broke down continuously. Again, I had no budget for hotels or restaurants, but was hardly ever close to any. I lived on a dollar a day, plus what little I paid for transportation.

All through the Sahara I tried to pay Tuareg nomads to take me on a camel ride adventure, but they laughed and thought that I had lost my head. Back in the Sahara after Benin, I finally found two of them willing to do it. Over a month and 650 miles of desert, we would ride from Agadez (Niger) to Tamanrasset (Algeria) through the Air and Ahaggar Mountains, two beautiful parts of the Sahara.

Back in New York, I returned for a year to a 16-hour work day, though half of it as a photographer’s assistant this time. Meanwhile, Venture, published by Look Magazine, gave me the cover and ten pages of its third issue. Argosy, a man’s magazine, used my pictures to illustrate the story of a man’s jeep trip across the Sahara. And a photo agency sold a large numbers of my Algeria pictures. Not only had I recouped my journey’s expenses and the purchase of two camera bodies and lenses, but I was left with a profit.

It took National Geographic a whole year to decide not to use that story, which I had also submitted to them. Most of my shoot was in black and white, and at that time the editors thought that they would never run black-and-white pictures again, though they would return to that some day. They did give me some money to allow me to return to the Sahara the cheap way to ride with a Tuareg salt caravan and spend another three months sharing the Tuareg’ lives.

When those nomads refused to let me travel with them, saying that no Westerner would survive such an ordeal and that they had no business having to bury my bones in the desert sand, I offered them to share their work, which they could not resist, for they were undermanned. They might also have accepted me in exchange for money. But I had hardly enough left by then, and it would have to last four months. On my way there I had run into problems that had cost me much of what National Geographic had given me. It hadn’t been much anyway, as I was still an untested photographer and writer.

The 22 days that I traveled with the caravan, up to 16 hours a day, often without water to the limit of survival, and with very little food, would indeed be galley slavery, but I count them as the most wonderful days I ever lived.

National Geographic gave me the cover of its November 1965 issue, and Paris Match, the French counterpart of Life magazine, followed suit by publishing that story on 17 outsized pages. That story, and others that I would do later for NG, appeared in my book, Wind, Sand and Silence: Travels with Africa’s last Nomads, now out of print.

National Geographic asked me what else I had for them. And so they would give me another 11 assignments, resulting in articles and book chapters, three of which they would not publish. I would also travel for many other magazines, nearly all of them long out of business now.

To my everlasting wonder, I was now able to travel anywhere I wanted--in Africa, South America, and Asia—for assignments nearly always resulted from ideas I proposed. My interest in anthropology would push me to share the lives and cultures of more than 30 indigenous peoples. To this day, the Tuareg, whom I have visited again and again over the years, three times for National Geographic alone, remain my favorite people. But do I not owe them my career?

In 1974 I moved to Colombia. Up to 1996, when life there became fraught with problems, I self-published photo books on that country, while still traveling elsewhere on assignment. After that I had to move back to the United States.

Though all this happened a long time ago, I keep traveling to the places of my choice and producing articles on my trips. There is no money anywhere now for extended journeys, but I learned to do in two or three weeks what used to take me three to four months. I’ll do that until the end of my life, for I could not imagine a different life. To keep in shape I jog and work out at the gym three to four times a week. I learned that life is not what you get, but what you make it.

http://www.victorenglebert.com

Travel is Addictive

Travel is Addictive. I did not know it in 1957, when at age 24 I left my native Brussels on a 125cc Vespa scooter to ride across the length of Africa to Cape Town. I had already served two years in Occupied Germany as a Belgian army sergeant. I had worked on a ship that ferried people between Belgium and its colony, the former Belgian Congo. And I had spent a couple of years working in the Congo for Sabena Airlines.

But was that travel? Not to me. Travel had to be the stuff of dreams. It had to be adventure and discovery. No plans. No preparations. Just throw a few things in a bag and go. Face what comes. Eat what you find. And sleep where you may, mostly under the stars. My budget had no allowance for hotel rooms or restaurants. That’s how I embarked on my six-month adventure. I would pay dearly for failing to worry at least about the best months to travel there. But I would learn from that lesson and do better the next time.

As a kid I dreamed of becoming an explorer. Having learned that all the white spots on the world’s maps had been filled, I cursed the fate that had brought me to the world too late. From childhood to adulthood, I despaired of ever being able to enjoy the only life I could imagine for myself. I longed for adventure, and swore that if I ever managed to live at least one memorable escapade, I would never ask anything more from life. Such an escapade seemed so farfetched anyway. And it was.

I was, after all, like my younger brother, growing up in poverty. At age fifteen I had to leave school to help my family with a salary of my own, as would my brother a year later. I went to work in a restaurant, 12 hours a day and more, sometimes without a day off for two or three weeks. One of the reasons for our poverty was that my father had been away between 1939 and 1945--one year under arms, and five years as a prisoner of war in Germany. But there were others. And without him, my family had suffered great hunger every day of the war. Now, three years after it had ended, we were still paying its price.

So I was inevitably looking into a bleak future. But I had thrived in school, and it helped me see a light at the end of the tunnel. That light was self-education. I started with the self-study of several foreign languages, which, I thought, would at least help me find work overseas, if that was all that I could ever hope for. And I devoured books on exploration, geography, history, geology, archaeology, and anthropology.

Thanks to that, I had been able to live the memorable adventure that should have kept me forever happy. I had squeezed safely through a throat-slashing Algeria at war with France. I had found my way through the sandstorms of a hellish Sahara summer. I had sloshed through the mud of one of the worst rainy seasons in years throughout West and Central Africa. Except south of the Belgian Congo, Africa had no real roads, and sand and mud and stones and deep holes had constantly made me fly over my handlebar.

At night the blood-curdling shrieks, bellows, or roars of wild animals lurking around in the moonless bush or jungle had sometimes pulled me out of my sleeping bag to ride a light-less scooter away into the night (Africa was sparsely peopled, but teeming with wildlife). And scary storms had soaked me through in my sleep, tearing down trees and setting them on fire all around me. I had lived all that, and was still unhappy.

But I had seen too much too fast, and now I needed to return for a better look and understanding. First I would have to spend time with the Tuareg nomads. How I had envied the amazing freedom with which they moved from horizon to horizon, unaffected by the tyranny of trails, while the rarity of gas stations and the fear to get lost restricted me to the straightest courses between oases. No trails, in fact, only the tracks of trucks that had gone before, and which a sandstorm could erase at any moment. I wondered why I had not sold my Vespa to buy a camel and followed the Tuareg. But now that would have to be later.

I went on that journey with the intention of writing a book on it, or at least some magazine articles. Three years earlier, as I was photographing the people of a Congolese village, I had had an epiphany. I would become a magazine photographer and writer, and as such, would be able to travel to the world’s secret corners and get paid for it. Everyone who was aware of my background found my idea preposterous. I wondered why. But it would certainly be more difficult than I imagined.

At the end of my journey, the South African and Belgian media feasted me. And the Vespa Company gave me a brand new 150cc Vespa in exchange for the battered old 125cc one. They would exhibit the latter all over the country. I basked in my glory and expected good things from it. A magazine assignment, perhaps. Instead, I learned that my writing and photography were not of publishable quality.

Having run out of money, and glory, I was back at square one--to the waiter’s life that I had thought to have forever left behind at age nineteen. It did not help, of course, that I now had a baby daughter to raise, who would soon be followed by a baby son. I had married my girl friend before accepting the Congo job three years earlier.

I spent three unsuccessful years trying to find new employment in the Congo while saving what little I could for the next step I would take. Finally, at age 27, having lost patience, I moved my family to Canada. Having always recoiled from modernity, North America had never tempted me. But to travel where I really wanted to go, I first needed the money that I could only earn there. Fifteen months later, with $800 in my pocket, I put my family on a train from Montreal to New York for yet another life episode.

http://www.victorenglebert.com


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