Agra, 1977
My uncle was not merely a general. He was a legend of a particular and specific kind — the kind that accrues to men who have done things that cannot be undone or forgotten.
India
Africa
The Clerk who sent the Chairman to jail
Gyude Bryant was the Chairman of Liberia’s National Transitional Government. He was convicted of economic sabotage and misuse of public funds. The evidence that put him there came from a clerk in the Ministry of Finance named Kofi — a short man with a giant character — who handed it to a World Bank official and asked for nothing in return. Except, later, a phone.
Africa
The question I never asked
I travelled all over Ethiopia alone, in a Toyota 4Runner, sleeping in local hotels and eating injera in village restaurants. I loved it. This story is about one evening I have never been able to leave behind.
Africa
Black Label
Tugbeh N. Doe was a short, fat man who ran the best bar on the outskirts of Monrovia. He was also the Deputy Finance Minister. One evening, two men came and sat opposite him and said nothing at all. What happened next is something I have never fully explained to myself.
Africa
Black Cake
A dust storm, a Land Cruiser, a Japanese colleague who did not understand the desert, and a meal that was not what it appeared to be. A dispatch from the road to nowhere north of Khartoum.
Asia, Himalayas and other ranges
HMI Darjeeling
The Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling was founded by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954, in the wake of the first Everest ascent, with Tenzing Norgay himself as its first director of field training. It was, and remains, the most prestigious mountaineering institution in India. I loved every moment of my course there.
Europe
Mt. Blanc, 1976
I was twenty-one years old, fresh out of St. Stephen’s College, and I had already crossed the Himalayas on foot. Mont Blanc, I told myself, was practically a day trip. How wrong I was.
Too Fat for the Copilots Seat
I arrived in Nairobi not knowing I was about to enter a war zone. A week later I was flying an Aero Commander at 600 mph over South Sudan.
Trisul 1978
Trisul stands at 7,120 metres in the Kumaon Himalaya, a pyramid of rock and ice on the western rim of the Nanda Devi sanctuary.