A foolish reason to travel dangerously
Dragging my suitcase across the border, through a narrow gap in the barbed-wire fence, stepping foot from Uzbekistan into Tajikistan.
Neighbouring dictatorships that didn’t actually have any diplomatic relations or intercountry air travel and, at that time, allowed border traversing only through this one teensy portal, the Oybek post.
Then a bumpy flight to Dushanbe, on an aircraft held together with spit and goobers, thence a bouncy 14-hour drive over desert and dale to the Amu Darya, crossing the river on a raft that hove to a demined lane, thus delivered into the hands of mujahedeen in Afghanistan.
That’s how we did it in the early days, we being reporters covering the “War on Terror,” even before American B-52s struck Afghanistan post-9/11.
Huddled in a mud-walled hut, plastic sheeting in the windows sucking in and out with every bomb blast, thinking to myself: what the hell am I doing here?
Same thoughts and regrets I’ve had on lonely nights puttputting up the Congo, or early mornings choppering over the jungles of Central African Republic, or careering through the bandit-infested mountains of Albania in a commandeered cab, or rooming at a bordello knocked together out of shipping containers in East Timor, or, at the turn of the millennium New Year’s Eve, staking out a deserted Tongan isle on the international dateline. Mamma. What am I doing here?
But there was always a solid answer: my job.
Unlike clueless tourists and bumptious naïfs and la-dee-da hikers who think all the world’s their oyster and hey, let’s get crackin‘.
Journalists — and mercenaries — willingly put themselves in harm’s way, so nobody to blame if you get shot or abducted. Unlike, say, the doofus Joshua Boyle, who led his pregnant wife into Afghanistan while backpacking along the Pakistan border in 2012. Kidnapped by a group affiliated with the terrorist Haqqani network, the couple was held hostage for five years and had three babies while allegedly held against their will. Rescued by Pakistani groups in a risky operation, Boyle and family returned to Canada, feted with giddy media coverage. The narrative not long afterwards was yanked alarmingly sideways, as Boyle was arrested on various charges including assault, sexual assault, confinement and causing someone to take a noxious substance. A court order prohibits the publication of details that could identify the alleged victims or witnesses. Recently wife Caitlan Coleman moved home to the U.S., taking the kids with her.
Way back in the ’60s and early ’70s, Afghanistan was a popular destination on the “Hippie Trail” from Europe to South Asia, drugs very much part of the experience. Margaret Atwood wrote an essay for the New York Times Magazine, published a month after 9/11, recalling the two-week visit she’d made to Afghanistan with husband and baby in 1978, after attending a literary festival in Australia and against the advice of her father, who warned that war was coming. As indeed it did, a few weeks after Atwood’s depar- ture. But what she’d seen of Afghan women in their chadors and burqas and the theocracy of Afghanistan influenced her writing of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Adventurers too, I suppose, take extreme risks to satisfy extreme cravings; climb Mount Everest, sail solo across the Atlantic, ski avalanche-trembly backcountry trails, tumble into a crevice and await salvation by a rescue crew, a horribly expensive undertaking though the fault was completely your own. (And not to be confused with the recent heroic rescue of a dozen boys from a Thailand cave, inside which they ventured innocently, then trapped by sudden flooding of the passages.)
I have respect for fearless — sometimes reckless — bounders and excursionists who gallivant around the globe just because it’s there. Even more so those on missions of discovery when there were still earthbound frontiers to penetrate, seekers who dared to go where none had gone before, whether to find the source of the Nile (commissioned by government) or the missing Dr. Livingstone (commissioned by a New York newspaper). I am certainly beholden to intrepid travellers from the 19th and 20th centuries who ventured forth to chronicle the largely unknown nooks and crannies of the world in literary travel writing, a distinguished genre.
But galumphing tourists with zero grasp of geopolitical realities and the combustibility of tinderbox locales, I just don’t get.
Chancers on cycles, whistling along the risky highways of Central Asia — if the thieves and outlaws don’t get you, the thundering jingle-trucks will — I just don’t get. Fools for folly. It doesn’t surprise me that a group of like-minded peddlepushers, off seeing the world from astride a bicycle seat, would have somehow found each other. Seven of them convened in Tajikistan from various points of departure — a couple of Swiss fellows retracing the old Silk Road from Xi’an in China to Kyrgyzstan, a middle-aged Dutch couple pointing their handlebars towards Tehran (Tehran!) — and pleasure-cycling through the scenic Danghara district, along the Pamir Highway, about 60 miles (97 kilometres) south Dushanbe.
I know Dushanbe, a grimfaced capital of Soviet-era architecture, formerly called Stalinabad. The only bicycles I can remember seeing were rusty old things.
A septet of Western cyclists, with slick gear, would stick out like a sore thumb.
To be clear: there is no history in Tajikistan, a poor former Soviet satellite state, of terrorists attacking tourists. But it is very much the backside of the world. And a chunk of its population does have jihad sympathies. According to a recent report by the Soufan Group, at least 1,300 citizens of Tajikistan have travelled to fight in Iraq and Syria, among the largest numbers for a single country.
Last week, in what was a clearly a targeted attack, the cyclists were brutally, deliberately, hit by a vehicle that veered into the group. Militants then jumped out and stabbed the victims who’d survived the initial assault. Four of the cyclists were killed, including a couple from Washington, D.C., both 27, who, after quitting their office jobs, embarked on bicycle tour just over a year ago, docu- menting their intercontinental journey in online blogs.
“Badness exists, sure, but even that’s quite rare,” Jay Austin wrote in April. “By and large, humans are kind. Selfinterested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind. No greater revelation has come from our journey than this.”
But he and partner Lauren Geoghegan are dead, leaving families to grieve, even as they salute the wanderlust that brought loved ones to wretched doom.
Islamic State (Daesh) has predictably claimed responsibility for the attack. Although, in this case, it does appear as if the attackers were at least inspired by the terrorist organization, with IS releasing a video showing a group of men it claims was responsible for the killing joining hands under an Islamic State flag.
Tajikistan authorities reject the claim and have blamed a banned political party — the Islamic Renaissance Party — for masterminding the attack.
Hardly anyone believes that version of events.
It’s true, obviously, that terrorism-style violence can strike randomly close to home, in civilized societies, on Yonge St. and on Danforth Ave. But there’s a particular brand of risk-baiting, or simply disingenuousness, that exposes Westerners to potential peril.
Maybe the delights are worth the hazards. I don’t think so — not unless there’s a compelling reason to bear witness to a place, a people, an event.
Not for guileless self-indulgence.
The Global Peace Index 2018 in June published its list of nations ranked for safety, or unsafety. At the top of the latter: 1) Syria, 2) Afghanistan, 3) South Sudan, 4) Iraq, 5) Somalia.
In the latest advisories from the Canadian government, “avoid all travel” includes Burundi, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Mali, Chad, Iraq, Libya, Niger, Syria, Yemen, North Korea and Afghanistan.
Don’t be stupid.