Day trip to Lac Rose

I let Papi (my Ile de Goree guide) talk me into hiring him and a car and driver for a day trip to the pink lake and tortoise sanctuary—the former was considered a “must” by both the travel nurse and the LP; the latter I’d never heard of but sounded interesting. Mainly I wanted to get out of Dakar, which had proven short on tourist attractions and long on hassle. I expected that I was overpaying both the “real” price and my normal budget when I bargained him down to $100, and that it would be a lot less interesting than the last excursion on which I’d spent so much money for so little a time, the Aral Sea. But when you expect little, it’s hard to be disappointed—or so I told myself.

Lac Rose has an extremely high salt content, which is what makes it pink. During the rainy season, however, it gets sufficiently diluted to lose most of its signature color. When we arrived it was barely pink from shore, but pretty convincing once we got out on it in a “pirogue” (boat) with a salt-collector. We poled out to where his colleagues were standing up to their chests in water, pounding and scraping the lake bottom with six-foot-long hoes, dredging up piles of dripping salt which they passed to a partner in the boat, who sieved it through a fishing net. When full of salt, our boatman said, the boat would weigh 100 kilos. The digging process looked akin to Sisyphus rolling the boulder back up the hill: an enormous amount of pounding and scraping to produce only a few pounds of salt, much of which was water. It seemed they’d be lucky to fill the boat before dark, and the sun was remorseless. Even for these “professionals,” the work was too grueling to do every day: they worked four days a week and rested, ate, and pre-hydrated the other three. This is, of course, yet another example of the forgotten luxury of the American lifestyle: not what we have—TVs, cars, A/C—but what we don’t—backbreaking physical labor. Much of the salt wouldn’t even be high-quality enough for the table, but usable only for road-clearing and the like, meaning it would fetch only a pittance.

The shore of the lake resembled the salt-flats of Utah, but with piles and sacks of gathered salt everywhere, and colorful, ramshackle wooden boats here and there. The only sign of life, apart from a few boatmen, were men selling sand-paintings and women dressed rather like the Chiquita banana lady—whether consciously or not I wasn’t clear—all but demanding that I take their pictures, holding out slips of paper with their name and address for me to “send a copy.” This was obviously a ploy, since their head-baskets were filled with jewelry and trinkets; if they couldn’t extract a coin or two for the picture, they’d surely find a way to earn it back in beaded bracelets. They seemed rather shocked that I refused their advances so completely. I wouldn’t have minded a picture, and I don’t object to people charging for them, but I don’t like photography, which has the potential to be a form of spontaneous cultural exchange, reduced to a forced transaction. Nonetheless, the irony of the situation was not lost on me: one of the women was young and quite pretty, and I wondered when else in my life I’d be in the position to refuse to photograph, or talk to, or take the address of, an attractive woman.

Aside: Gambian women have the most wonderful posture: walking down the street in their semi-traditional garb (long batik skirts and headdresses with coordinating t-shirts), they somehow look even taller and more slender than they really are, as if the exaggeratedly long, lean figures in all the batiks and paintings aren’t exaggerated at all. Westerners slouch and swagger terribly by comparison. It’s commonly acknowledged, by Westerners at least, that “the women in Gambia do all the work,” and “if you want something done, you’d better talk to a woman.” Yet rather than bend their backs with fatigue, this labor seems to have lent women a special pride. Notwithstanding this, on the drive from Senegal I saw more than a few women stooped in the fields over ridiculously short hoes, digging away at the earth in that pose that always reminds me chillingly of slavery, the butt higher than the shoulders, the back seeming to know all too well how to bend.

The highlight of Lac Rose was swimming in it. True to legend, I floated like a feather. I’m not a naturally buoyant person, yet the salt made the water so heavy that I actually struggled to swim, much the way one does when wearing a life-jacket, or arm-floaties. It helped that the day was viciously hot, and the water so warm it wasn’t even shocking to immerse yourself, yet still cool enough to be refreshing. Afterward I paid a man to douse me with several buckets of water cold enough to make me wince, including, at his insistence, two buckets each down the front and back of my swim-trunks. All well and good to wash away the salt, I suppose, but this may be as close as I’ve ever come to paying for pain.

We had an extremely leisurely lunch of yassa poulet, broiled chicken breast with rice, onion sauce, and red chile sauce, the same thing I’d had the day before on Ile de Goree. Papi had said he always has fish for lunch and meat for dinner, but there are no fish in Lac Rose, while chicken farms surround it, thus this was the specialty. It was very good, though I don’t know that I would have guessed it had been slaughtered minutes before reaching the table.

Where's Barbaro?

WHERE AM I?

Banjo reminded me that folks might like some help locating Senegal and Gambia on a map. So here's the big picture, and the close-up. Ile de Goree, the subject of my last post, is a tiny island off to the west of Dakar, which is itself squeezed onto the Cape Vert peninsula, the westernmost point of the continent.

If you've got a couple minutes to kill, have a go at the African map quiz. I play this with my students sometimes to introduce Things Fall Apart; rare is the student who can get more than 5 or 10 correct: http://www.ilike2learn.com/ilike2learn/africa.html

If The Gambia (and yes, for some reason the article is part of the name) looks like a tiny British toehold in a sea of French former colonies, that's because it is. Surprisingly, though, one of the reasons the Brits were so eager to wedge themselves into this particular corner of the continent was to enforce the abolition of slavery (against the less-compliant French, presumably). So it's not all greed and aggression, I guess. A number of freed slaves from Sierra Leone were offered a home in what's now Gambia.

Today the border may in some ways be even more important, as a great many Brits, and some people from other English-speaking countries, flock to Gambia while passing over Senegal and all its francophonic neighbors simply because English is spoken. I'm wondering about even more trivial differences, i.e. must I really buy two separate phone cards, and carry two different currencies, for these two countries?

WHY AM I HERE?

I'm taking a breather from my habitual overland odysseys this year by joining a volunteer project in Fajara, a beach resort outside Banjul, Gambia--starting tomorrow. I'm just passing through Dakar on the way in, because it's basically impossible to fly direct to Gambia, and St. Louis, in the north of Senegal, on the way out, because it seems worth an extra week. (NB: It sure seemed impossible to book a flight into Gambia from the US, yet the flight I was on, Brussels Airlines, turns out to have been headed straight to Banjul; Dakar was only a stopover. Someday, after I've computed pi to a round number and split the atom manually, maybe I'll figure out the airline industry.)

People keep asking me, quite reasonably, what I'll be doing, but I know enough of how the developing world and volunteer organizations work to know that the only reasonable answer is "whatever I'm told." In theory, I'll be working with microfinance (If you don't know what that means, stop reading now and look up www.kiva.org; come back after you've lent money to at least one small business!), helping administer ASSET, a consortium of small hotels, restaurants, and other tourist-oriented businesses too small to compete with international operators one by one. If I'm lucky, this will involve talking to people about their needs and goals and methods. If I'm less lucky, it will involve troubleshooting computers and office work. If I'm even less lucky, it will involve teaching English. I want to get away from teaching and computers for the summer, but I've come to help, so I'll do whatever work is most needed.

The door of no return

Today I ventured to Ile de Goree, famous as a slave-port. It's a tiny island with no cars and many bougainvillea and baobab trees, lending it an oddly serene air. One has to work pretty hard to imagine eight million humans being trafficked through buildings which to all outward appearances look lovely, much like the French quarter of New Orleans.

The picture shows the inside of "La maison des esclaves" with its infamous "door of no return," through which so many hapless Africans were made to pass. Many died of plague before even reaching the door, due to being packed into horrendously small cells doubling as latrines. Many more grew sick aboard ship, at which point they were thrown to the sharks. Men and women were imprisoned separately at Goree--hence the oddly elegant symmetry of the architecture? Everyone was weighed upon entrance; those under 60 kg were put in separate chambers and force-fed until they were big enough to sell. There was a special room for young women so that the masters could have an easy time choosing which to rape. Some women were actually acquiescent to this treatment, because favor with a master might earn them freedom. They would have already lost their husbands and children, and, as has now been made famous by Alex Haley, their names.

This information all comes from my guide, "Papi," a 62-year-old Senegalese man. He claims to be the "pope" or "chief" of guides, and to have accompanied Clinton, Mandela, and Mitterand. (True to stereotype, Mitterand gave the smallest tip.) I wonder if Clinton or Mitterand found it as strange as I did to be guided through the slave house by a black man; at one point he urged a bunch of other tourists aside so that I could pose in the door-of-no-return for a picture, and I couldn't resist feeling an uncomfortable sense of privilege. He will not take African-Americans and whites in the same group, he says, because emotions run so high. Black visitors have been known to break into inconsolable sobs, fall to the ground in rapt prayer, and bang their heads against the wall until blood comes. Mandela crouched in one of the punishment cells for fifteen minutes weeping because it reminded him so acutely of Robben Island.

Like most people in Dakar, Papi speaks Wolof and French. He also speaks English, but I asked him to speak French so I could practice. My comprehension continues to outpace my speaking by a wide margin, but vocabulary and accent pose significant challenges with both.

The tour around Goree in general, and the slave house in particular, felt very rushed to me, and the whole place is swarming with tourists and souvenir-sellers. So it goes with world-famous places, I suppose, but I would have liked to take it a little slower, soaking up both the tragic aura of the slave house and the quiet beauty of the island. You can stay at a fine hotel there for less than I'm paying in Dakar, and I was tempted to do so, but the ferry connections would make it a bit awkward. The narrow, winding streets of 18th-century buildings, their saffron, ochre, and verdigris paints worn to textured patinas, would surely be enchanting in the late afternoon and early morning light. Locals commute here to enjoy the beach, an incongruously exuberant throng.

It boggles the mind that such brutality occurred, and continued for centuries. But I remind myself not to be too secure in the greater justice and humanity of modern life. Since arriving in Dakar I've walked past several dozen beggars, and children lying in the gutter too exhausted even to hold out their hands. I like to think I'm accomplishing something by greeting them, acknowledging their humanity, even if I rarely give. On the way out of a patisserie, feeling guilty for the delicacies I was about to consume, I watched a local step right over a supplicant with no hands or feet as if he were trash. I thought about marching right back to the patisserie, buying a loaf of bread, and handing it to the beggar. Maybe tomorrow.

Why this blog has no original pictures

Last summer, my trusty Pentax Super Program, which I’ve been using faithfully for nearly twenty years, since I got it as a gift for graduating from high school, failed—as many as a third of the 600-some slides I took of the “silk road” were hopelessly underexposed, indicating that the electronic “guts” had finally given up the ghost. For about five years now I’ve been rebuffing the urgings of friends and fellow-travellers that I join the 21st century and “go digital.” This isn’t just a camera, I tell them; this is my friend: from my first trip with it through the Rockies on Outward Bound, where it suffered its first “ding,” to the trip to the forbidden island where I knocked it off a chair, to jungles and deserts and glaciers and overstuffed backpacks and X-rays and Customs inspections, it’s valiantly accompanied me on every major trip of my life. It can’t do any of the digital tricks, but it has gotten shots few computerized cameras can. But when you go literally halfway around the world for a shot, as I do, you can’t afford to lose any due to equipment failure. The most painful of last summer’s losses were my photos of the ship cemetery in the remains of the Aral Sea; it cost me a lot of money, time, and trouble, to get out there, and, since the rusting hulks are being slowly cut up for scrap metal, I’ll never duplicate those shots even if I go back. So for a year now I’ve had in mind the need to buy a new camera.

My old Pentax cost about $250 new in 1991. If you go to the fascinating and imaginatively named website www.westegg.com/inflation, you can see that such a price would equal about $388 in today’s money. Yet “entry-level” DSLRs begin around $699, and anything “advanced” easily runs over $1000. Salesmen brush aside my cost concerns, boasting that the new cameras have far more features than my old one. Trouble is, most of these are features I don’t want, and, worse, many of them do more to get in the way than facilitate good photos. And in certain small but significant ways, modern cameras are actually worse—smaller, dimmer viewfinders, e.g., fewer direct manual controls, and, in the case of the Nikon D5000 I had my eye on, no depth-of-field preview. Then, of course, there’s the need for a recharging cord and power source, memory cards, computer connection, Biblical instruction manual, etc. Was I the only one left who appreciated the simplicity of film? Browsing www.kenrockwell.com lent support to my skepticism. So I started trolling the Internet for used cameras, and what should I find but my very own Pentax, body only, for $64 (I could continue using my existing lenses). Once again I’d be unable to post to this blog, email, etc., but I could buy a lot of film for the difference in cost between that and a new digital beast. This was a deal too good to pass up: the camera I’d always wanted, $200 less twenty years later!

Asking for a “physical scan” of my film at Newark airport made me doubt my decision momentarily: this took nearly ten minutes and involved wiping little swabs over my rolls of film and passing them through some malfunctioning machine, as well as patting me down manually, even though I’d already passed through the metal detector and X-rays like everyone else. “The film is the question, not me, right?” I asked the stone-faced woman in the smart blue TSA uniform. “It’s your camera, isn’t it?” she replied, as if that made some sort of sense. Gone are the days when you could reason with security officers.

But today, in Dakar, when I stopped to take a picture of several hundred women’s shoes lined up for sale on the sidewalk, two little boys begged me to snap their photo too. I agreed, but showed them the boring black back of my old camera, trying to explain in my halting French that they wouldn’t be able to see the result—I’ve learned on previous trips that some people in foreign countries have become so accustomed to digital cameras that they grow angry when shot with film. But they just smiled and nodded and urged me on. Flustered, I didn’t get exactly the exposure I wanted, but I’m pretty sure I got a workable one. I won’t know for six weeks, when I get home and develop the film. That’s the forgotten beauty of photography: enjoy the experience of taking the photo, and later, after you’ve all but fogotten the people, place, and moment, live it again.

Messing with success

I promised a list of remakes better than their originals (movies), but I confess I'm stumped: I can't think of a single one. If any of my loyal readers (or anyone at all) can, do tell.

Instead I'll offer a list of the worst remakes or sequels I can think of off the top of my head:

The Pink Panther (Steve Martin)

In one of those rare moments when I actually intended to watch TV, it was the only thing on. Oh god--it was even worse than I feared. I like Steve Martin, but come on--Peter Sellers in the original was one of the greatest comedic phenomenons ever captured on film. The new version is campy and clumsy and self-conscious and dull.

Star Wars, Episodes I-III

Here's a rare case of a movie not being campy enough. I barely made it through one of the three. The "force" comes from mitochondria in the blood?! Anakin went over to the dark side just because he was afraid his girlfriend might someday die?! Please, put away all the CGI and sanctimony and send me back to spaceships with strings attached and Harrison Ford smirking at everything.

The Lord of the Rings

The first installment almost belongs on my other list: nothing could eclipse the books, but Peter Jackson did more with Fellowship than I would have thought possible. Ian McKellan as Gandalf was almost too good to be true, and the opening sequence with poetry and the glowing ring gave me chills. And Gollum! But things foundered in Towers and Return: far too many battles, everyone racing around and shouting, New Age music, and Sam wimpering "Frodo!" until I wanted to slap him.

Not much of a list, but it's all I can think of for now...

Can a movie ever be better than the book?

People sometimes get frustrated with me for seeming always to prefer books to movies. But there are exceptions, and I thought it might be fun, maybe instructive, to list as many as I could think of. Here goes:

The Bridges of Madison County
this was on TV the other night, and thus my mind. One of the worst books I've ever read turned into a decent movie--quite a feat. Not a great movie, but worth seeing just for Meryl Streep's virtuosic accent (not just Italian, but Italian diluted by half a lifetime in Iowa).

Babette's Feast
Isak Dinesen, who wrote the story, was a master of minimalism, apparently blessed with the rare gift of more plotlines than she had time or patience to develop fully. Thus a fine but extremely short, almost "sketchy" story becomes something approximating a full novel in cinematic form. One of the tip-top movies I've ever seen.

Looking for Richard
Not really a true adaptation, this is a film about a film about Shakespeare's Richard the Second. But Pacino does more with snippets of the story than anyone else I've seen, including Ian McKellan, does with the whole thing.

Men of Respect
A lot of people have tried to translate and transplant Shakespeare, but for my taste it rarely works. This re-casting of Macbeth in the Mafia does. Lady Macbeth obsessively launders tablecloths, and the famous "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" soliloquy gets perfectly condensed to two words. Brilliant.

Hamlet (Mel Gibson)
People remember any number of famous lines from the play--it's a veritable Bartlet's all its own--but they forget that it's Shakespeare's longest by far, and thus notoriously unplayable in full form. Gibson gets a bit anachronistic in dueling with sabers instead of rapiers, but he got things exactly right in "cutting" the script. And for my money, neither Olivier nor Brannagh nor anyone else can touch his embodiment of almost-madness.

The Natural
I have a friend who seethes over this one. Maybe it depends whether you read it or saw it first. Call me sentimental (that'd be a first!), but by the time I got to the book I was fatally hooked on Redford's warmhearted version, buoyed by period costumes and all the visual loveliness that is baseball.

Like Water for Chocolate
Probably not a coincidence that Esquivel wrote both novel and screenplay. Turn-of-the-century Mexican costumes, furnishings, cars, and landscapes just don't reveal themselves well in prose. And then there's the food, and the sex. You don't realize how visual the book is until you see the movie. Nice music too.

No Country for Old Men
The most perfect adapation of a novel I've ever seen. Maybe even better than the original thanks to subtle visual plays (and ploys), and Javier Bardem bringing Shigeur to life in all his cold-blooded consistency. Maybe the most perfect movie I've ever seen--if I had to pick out a flaw, I'm not sure I could.

TO BE CONTINUED...

The Road (movie review)

Nearly two years ago, I read The Road. I started late at night, home alone, sober. Three mistakes. By the time I finished I barely wanted to relinquish the quasi-fetal position I'd assumed on the floor, let alone go to sleep. Strange as it sounds, though, this is a glowing review. I can't remember the last time a book moved so much with so little.

Almost one year ago I added the novel to a class I teach. I'd never taught anything like it, and I was not at all sure it would work. I tried to strip my pedagogy down to the austerity of McCarthy's prose, posing just one question per class, the first and most persistent being "What's the difference between surviving and living?" Surprisingly, the students took the meager bait and ran farther than they had with litanies of questions on other books.

Around the same time as my teaching experiment, rumors of the movie's release began to seem serious. Then mysterious delays were announced. I waited. Summer came and went. I waited some more. Fall came, and was nearly spent before we were told, finally, definitively, that the movie would open the day before Thanksgiving--which sounded like a tasteless joke but wasn't.

About a month ago, Banjo52 offered a review of the movie, which I avoided reading lest he give something away.

Last week, I tried to see the movie with a friend while visiting family for the holidays only to find it wasn't playing anywhere nearby.

Today, finally, I saw the movie myself.

The good news: though there are several significant changes from the novel in terms of action and dialogue, and virtually no narration survives, there's nothing wrong with anything about the adaptation. There's nothing wrong with it as a movie in its own right either. I know this sounds like terminally faint praise, but 95% of movies I see have at least a couple fatal flaws in realism, consistency, subtlety, etc.

More good news: some real imagination went into the scenery and filming, including some of the best computer-generated shots (grounded ships, vacant cities) I've ever seen. In fact, much as less is more with this story, I wouldn't mind more such shots.

The pace is slow, as it should be, yet it feels a bit busy somehow, as if the director is afraid we'll get "bored" with the emptiness. But McCarthy works so hard precisely to achieve that emptiness, that fatal boredom, that banality of everything, that I think it's a mistake to make the movie world so visually stimulating. More importantly, perhaps, I wish there were more obsessiveness over physicality--which largely means pain. We see a lot of fires, for example, but we never see the man struggle to build one. We hear about his preoccupation with food and shoes, and we see filthy, haggard faces, but we don't really feel the urgency of hunger, the way it gnaws at the mind and soul as well as body. I've done a lot of camping, and I know that it's the little rituals that make or break you: cold hands rolling up a tarp, lumpy ground against hips and shoulders, stiffness of knees after sitting. So few movies do justice to these kinds of details. (Castaway came close, in the first half.) McCarthy is such a physical writer, almost to the point of self-parody at times, that I hoped for more of this from the film. Less color wouldn't hurt either. Less music, or none at all, would be a major boon.

One thing we could use more of--but don't ask me how you do this on film--is blood, brutality, cannibalism, deformity, horror. There's not a huge amount of it in the novel in terms of pages, but they are some of the most teeth-chatteringly awful scenes I've ever read, forcing my students to think twice about the question "Is anything worse than death?" The environment seems more of a threat in the movie than man, and I'm not sure that's the right balance.

Some little oddities: there's a scene in the trailer of a newscaster narrating as the world comes to an end that never appears in the movie. Prob. just as well, but I don't think I've encountered such a disjuncture before. What we do see in the movie is Viggo awake to fire out the window, get up to look, and, with laughable calm, proceed to the bathroom to fill the tub with water. This is true to the novel in letter, but silly in spirit: the pacing is much too quick, emotion flat, as if he simply said, "Huh. It's the end of the world. Guess I'll go draw some water," without any hesitation or reflection. Unrelated gripe: the piano bothers me. I love pianos, and I don't mind the addition, as it makes for a nice motif and gives Viggo a rare chance to give in to grief, but I can't see any reason why he'd take an axe to it. The one thing that doesn't seem lacking throughout the story is wood. (Besides, it would be pretty hard to attack a piano without ruining your axe.)

Somehow Charlize Theron worked for me, even though she's really far too pretty. One of my main reservations about the story is the idea that a mother would kill herself while her son lives. This remains a problem in the film, I think, but somehow Charlize's beauty causes it to make a bit more sense, as if she doesn't quite belong with the man in the first place, let alone in the hideous new world.

As for Viggo, those eyes just ruin it for me. His acting is fine, but there's this self-conscious "special-ness" about his face usually reserved for cheesy made-for-TV movies about Jesus. Of course neither he nor the boy looks nearly thin enough. The boy works very well; though decidedly too old at first, he transitions beautifully toward the end into a being somehow more responsible, sober, mature.

I had just assumed that Robert Duvall would play the rescuer at the end, to the point that I'd imagined him quite vividly and successfully into that role. His appearance as the much less important geezer earlier was therefore more a distraction than it should have been. Too good a show of acting, oddly, and far too much makeup. I sympathize with Banjo52's reservations about the ending, but it's almost exactly rendered from the book--though the man should have had a bad eye and been older, the children were excessive, and the dog just silly. (Even dedicated non-cannibals would surely have eaten the dog, which begs the question, did Viggo and Charlize eat their horse?)

The verdict: see the movie, but don't neglect reading the book. It's true that I almost always prefer the book version, but this really is a special case, because so much of the novel's power comes from its language. Written with scarcely a verb in sight, Shakespearean-style inversion and Biblical diction, it almost drove me away, but after I persisted through ten or twenty pages, I became seduced.