Travel by DAR

Zimbabwe: Tracking Quayle

(First published in Madison)

(Is it because of "Bungi-gate" that the free world is still free?)

Travel tales come in three flavors: true, potentially true, and patently false. But even the downright disingenuous ones can be delicious if they help besmirch the reputation of public figures by purporting to catch them in kinky behavior they wouldn’t be caught dead in at home. I’m thinking of CEOs frolicking nude with cross-dressers on the rims of South Pacific volcanoes, that sort of thing. To the world’s murky trove of such tales I humbly offer this one, which with a little luck may help revive the time-honored tradition of dissing former vice president and non-JFK doppelganger, Dan Quayle, just in case he ever gets it in his head to run for president again. The fact that the tale didn't pan out is unimportant. What is vital is the potential, the scandal-laden potential for truth. Long may it wave.

It began when I found myself having dinner not long ago with the manager of a redoubtable old hotel adjacent Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. To give you an idea of the setting: Victoria Falls is the mightiest waterfall in the world, twice as high as Niagara. It's not far from that part of deepest darkest Africa where Stanley presumed to find Livingstone. You don't actually hear the roar of the waterfall itself from this highly formal, Edwardian dining room. What you hear is the band, four sweating black old-timers belting out Auld Lang Syne, interspersed with rather madcap screeches from the occasional baboon peeking in the windows. Outside, in the night all around, spiders are building nests strong enough to trap bats. So you get the atmosphere.

How hot is it? So hot the teak toilet seat is warm to the buttock, the pillow is warm to the cheek, the watch band is warm to the wrist. The flies are too hot to fly. An apple is almost too hot to bite into. Even the soap coming out of a dispenser is, as they say, tepid. Coupled with the ungodly heat is a distinctly colonial colloquialness, so that Victoria Falls is quaintly referred to as Vic Falls, just as the zebras and elephants roaming everywhere are referred to as zebs and eleys. At night you want to watch out for the latter. Evidence of eley “crush” is everywhere. (Not to worry about lions, though. The last person eaten live by a lion was over two months ago.)

To the evening in question. All five of us had adjourned from the "I Presume Bar:" me, my travel pal Spike, a barefoot local chieftain in clashing plaids, the hotel manager Nigel, and his beautiful wife Chloe. Nigel was the only Britisher I ever met who sounded like a Britisher from a Rudyard Kipling novel. He actually peppered his dialogue with "Tish tosh!” and "I say," and "at the end of the day." He was very adorable, in the manner of many Colonials who in his blitheness, his chipperiness, and his invisible but incessant insertion of extra “u”s in words that didn’t need them, considerably out-Britted the mother country itself.

His beautiful wife Chloe I was half in love with. She was very proper with a lascivious smile -- an enchanting combination: love among the antimacassars. She was eating fresh crocodile tail saut?ed in garlic butter. I was eating pickled wildebeest cutlets with orange and gherkin sauce. Separately and in concert, we were finding our mutual carniverousness mouth-watering, and being audible about it. It was our little way of flirting. Nigel seemed to find this amusing. "Tish tosh!” he was saying, squirming in his chair with pleasure and toasting us. Oh, it gets breezy in the tropics. We were all, shall we say, in our cups.

Around about the time the subject of circumcision came up, and my pal Spike was sportingly offering to circumcise the chieftain then and there with the butter knife, the topic of Dan Quayle arose.

"Stauyed here a few summers ago," Nigel reported. "Three dauys. Delightful chaup. Weunt bungi jumpiung."

Chatter around the eight course dinner went on for three more hours in this manner – talk of civets that make musk from their anus glands and insects that eat their own feces; standard upper crust African dinner conversation -- but my mind was ablaze. Our former VP, bungi jumping!? Like he had brain cells to waste, getting yanked by a 200 foot cord? This was something I wanted a photo of. It would make a priceless magazine cover. In our topsy-turvy political climate, it might even get him elected president. Of course, that would signal the end of the free world as we knew it, but that wasn't my problem. I was a travel writer: I could rationalize. Hey, why not vote for a guy who went bungi jumping over the Zambezi River, the highest bungi jump in the world? That's the kind of guy who could relate to Kim Jong Il. I could already see the bumper stickers: “We don't need lily-livered law school grads -- we need a bungi jumper.”

Thus rationalized, next afternoon Spike and I zipped to the photography shop which we'd learned kept the negatives of everyone who jumped. If they'd known what a big cheese they had, we figured the price would rocket accordingly, so we wanted to keep it as incognito as Quayle himself apparently had. Our M.O. was this: Spike wished to surprise his cousin Danny with a photo of himself. I would be the bad cop: "Dear boy, we don't need it." Spike would insist: "I say, Danny would be so tickled."

It worked. Soon Ms. Clobber Nbufu came back from the closet with reams of negatives from the date in question. But my hangover announced itself. For despite its charm, its breathtaking beauty, its awesome scenery and progressive animal management, Zimbabwe was still a third world country: Clobber had never heard of a magnifying glass. Without one, we couldn't tell if the open-mouthed crazies who inhabited these tiny negatives were men or women..

"Perhaps if you spoke to Mr. Hardware Chulu, who took the pictures," Clobber suggested.

A splendid suggestion. We found Hardware at a nearby bar, knocking back Malawi shandies. We told him our predicament. "This is not a problem," Hardware assured us. A sum ensued. Repairing to a pink antique Princess phone, Hardware called the jumping outfit itself, to have them check their records as to which negative corresponded with which name. But the lines were down.

"This is not a problem," Hardware said. A sum ensued. He would take us to meet Troy at the jumping outfit so we could inspect the records personally. It was just over the

river, in Zambia. The border wasn't to close for two hours yet. He slapped his wristwatch to remind it to keep time.

"But we don't have our passports with us," we protested.

A sum ensued and lo, the problem dissolved. Hardware purchased an unrefrigerated meat pie from the bartender, we hopped a cab, and soon were at the border. Turned out the border guard had a fancy for unrefrigerated meat pies and,

grinning his strong white teeth against his aubergine skin, he waved us inside the sovereign nation of Zambia.

We made our way to the town of Livingstone, ten kilometers inside. Walked the clay back roads past tin shacks till we found ourselves at a hippie commune amid severely nicked red plastic canoes standing in a row. A pet baby warthog. And a white man.

"Troy, I presume?"

He didn't signal recognition of this reference. But then, he wasn't particularly friendly. Expat hippie communes like these in far flung corners of the globe, I had found,

rarely tended to be places of peace and love. They tended to be macho and mean. Besides Troy, this one consisted of three unsmiling men and one unsmiling woman, all with blond dreadlocks and, it could be presumed, viable trust accounts. Trustafarians. The baby warthog started pulling on the Velcro of my Tivas.

My hangover reinvented itself, phoenix like, from the heat waves. My thirst redoubled. It was 110 degrees and so humid that the warthog was lapping sweat from my knees. After we paid him to look through his bookkeeping records, Troy helped himself and his communards to a pitcher of liquid refreshment, but no offer to us was forthcoming.

No trace of Dan Quayle, either. A crank rumor, as it turned out. Some pale-faced American politician had indeed gone to the bridge a while back, Troy recalled, but he'd taken one gander over the side and split. Nothing deterred, Hardware offered us consolations: He could sell us black market army uniforms, or show us topless Zambian teenagers.

“Thank you, no,” we said.

We were crestfallen. Spike began nibbling on his toenails, a sure sign that he was annoyed. We left, disappointed that for so little reward, we had paid through the nose -- probably a total of four dollars. But mostly we were thirsty. At the Livingstone town square, Hardware insisted on buying us a Coke with his own money. "Keep your wallets out of sight," he warned us. "See those ten gentlemen playing cards over there? They are all bloodthirsty criminals."

We kept our wallets out of sight.

“I have just saved you from an untimely bloody demise. Could you please repay the favor by giving me 280 zims?”

A small cash dispute ensued. I let Spike handle it, and I quote him word for word: "Listen Hardware, we're not going to pay you $280 zims. We're not your average American tourists. We're travel writers. That means we're broke. But we still want to be fair. So what we're going to do," he said, taking out his billfold and laying the greenbacks in Hardware’s soft hand, "is give you $10 US, and thank you very much.”

"Thank you very much," Hardware said, without so much as a blink.

“Masterful," I told Spike.

“Tish tosh,” said Spike, flicking his gaze skyward, the debonair foreign correspondent’s equivalent of a low-sweeping bow.

Slapping his watch, Hardware noted that we had six minutes till the border closed. Unhappily, the old border guard had gone off to enjoy his meat pie, and left a stranger

in his place.

"What kind of knife do you carry?" the new border guard asked me.

"I carry no knife."

"You carry no knife, how dismally unfortunate."

"Did Dan Quayle carry a knife?"

"Pardon?"

"Blond guy, medium build, with a propensity to misspell potato -- did he carry a knife?"

"Oh undoubtedly, most people carry knives."

"What for?"

"For eating, for cutting, what have you."

"For eating and cutting I have only, as you see, my notepad and pencil.”

"Dear, dear. Such a loss. And no salad bowl, either."

"Please could I cross without a bribe? I was only in your beautiful country for one hour."

"Oh that is a shame. In our country of Zambia we have the most lovely salad bowls, made from the amurullo tree."

"Next time I am in Zambia I promise I will bring you two lovely salad bowls."

"Fine," he said. He saluted me as I left his country. "Make good salads," he said. All in all, the nicest send-off I’ve ever received from the border guard of any country, third world or otherwise.

At the end of the day, no Dan Quayle. No photos. No scandal. But here's the burning question we are left with: Could it be that Dan really did bungi jump, after all? That it was a big cover-up which the Trustafarians and Clobber and Hardware and the pet warthog were all a part of? And even my lovely carnivore Chloe, forced to share a marriage bed with an unregenerate u-inserter? Could it be bungi which caused the "health problems" that landed Dan in the hospital twice the following winter, and kept him out of the ’96 presidential race? Is it because of Bungi-gate, in other words, that the free world is still free?

It’s possible. Bungi-jumping can cause headaches, lung clots, all the vague symptoms Dan complained of. Unless someone’s got a better tale to keep him from running in 2008. Anyone? Anyone?