The Great Migration

Around the world in twenty-one days.

Among legendary circumnavigations of our planet: Jules Verne’s 1873 tale of an epic journey by automobile, train, steamer, sledge, pilot-boat, horse-drawn carriage, and elephant, in which inventor Phileas Fogg wins his bet to make the trip in 80 days. Besting that fictional record in recent years: 24 days to fly around the world by helicopter, 13 days by balloon, just under two days by scheduled flights on commercial airlines (if you don’t stop to sightsee), and, once upon a time, 31 hours flying nonstop on the Concorde.

Granted traveling is not the same as a race, but this impending journey around the world via private jet, a 21-day trip operated by TCS World Travel, certainly invites comparison. John Glenn orbited the earth three times in four hours and 56 minutes; the more sensible Magellan took a leisurely three years.

I do the math, weighing Earth’s 24,903-mile circumference against the stack of literature I’ve received for the odyssey: We’ll head west in a private Boeing 757, flying from Washington D.C. all the way around the globe to London, spending 91 hours in the jet alone, which leaves us just over 17 days to drop in on a handful of islands and six continents to soak up the landscape and culture.

A GATHERING OF PILGRIMS

If a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, a journey burning 105,770 gallons of jet fuel begins with cocktails, dinner, speeches, luggage inspection, bagtag assignments, and briefings at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C., the nexus of our group of 72 travelers, three pilots, nine flight attendants, five expedition staff, two lecturers, two engineers, two caterers, a staff physician, and special guest (and Harrison Ford look-alike) Gil Grosvenor, chairman of the National Geographic Society’s board of trustees.

Although strangers, our group already has a few common bonds: We’re mostly over 50, and we’ve agreed to explore the far corners of the earth together under the wing of our expedition leaders, sharing the plane as our base away from home and paying upwards of $85,000 each for the experience.

This last says a lot about the group, which is predominately couples. You might think for that money people would prefer to spend three weeks with their significant other in a five-star suite in Paris rather than blasting off on a warp-speed tour of Peru, Easter Island, Samoa, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, Bhutan, India, and the Serengeti Plain in Tanzania. Not these souls. Given the mix of navy blue blazers, Timberland boots, Burberry, and the purple buzz cut at the cocktail reception, however, it’s clear we have varying ideas of what private jet travel might entail.

We mingle gamely, size each other up, swap travel tales, applaud our hosts. The evening’s excitement is as palpable as a first day at summer camp, and I lie awake in my room that night wondering what possesses us to undertake such madness.

wild creatures all migrate for a payoff: sustenance in the form of food, water, shelter, or spirited attempts at procreation, all of which, in theory anyway, we humans enjoy in abundance without leaving home.

Of all the species on the planet, humans take the prize for wanderlust. Not even birds come close to sharing our enthusiasm for travel. A common tern holds second place for distances covered with a one-way flight of 16,150 miles from Finland to Australia; humpback whales come in third, making round-trips of 12,000 miles. During the Serengeti’s seasonal migration more than a million wildebeests and zebras roam up to 2,000 miles. Of course, these wild creatures all migrate for a payoff: sustenance in the form of food, water, shelter, or spirited attempts at procreation, all of which, in theory anyway, we humans enjoy in abundance without leaving home.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

“This is Explorer I,” announces the captain, a paternal-sounding Brit, on the PA system. “At 9:30 we have liftoff.” Pink-suited flight attendants roll out the drink service while we buckle up for the ride. The inaugural leg of our journey, a seven-hour flight from Dulles to Lima, serves as orientation. Our chartered 757, reconfigured from the usual 188 seats to a more comfortable 88, hovers somewhere between business class and first. While the seats don’t convert to beds, we have all the other amenities plus a library, a French chef, and the promise of erudite lecturers.

First up to speak: marine biologist and IMAX filmmaker Soames Summerhays. “The universe is 40 million galaxies,” the British-born Californian begins after lunch, projecting PowerPoint slides onto overhead video screens while cottony clouds tear by the windows. “There are two billion stars in the Milky Way....”

Summerhays challenges us to ponder no less than the significance of our species and our planet relative to the solar system, deems the human body a superorganism akin to a termite colony, and makes impassioned leaps from the wonders of mitochondria to the land speed of the cheetah (“It runs so fast it would cook its brain if it went any faster”). I fight to make it to the end of his fascinating discourse but succumb to the sleep-inducing effects of Chef Jean-Marie Dumarché’s pan-roasted beef tenderloin in creamy Dijon sauce with potato dauphinoise. Anyway, I think I get Summerhays’s drift.

Turbulence rouses me for the second lecturer, Charles Doherty, an art historian and Fulbright scholar who divides his time between Wisconsin and Barcelona. Doherty confirms my take on our resident academics: They’re prepping us on ways to grasp the scope of our undertaking. Doherty is the macro man. “It’s hard to summarize a country in a few minutes,” he acknowledges while the plane stabilizes. “But connect the dots: guinea pigs, corn, pisco, coca leaves....”

Doherty suggests we draft ourselves a grid of destination highlights for later study, filling in the blanks as we go along. Two nights later, stretched out in a loft suite at Cuzco’s Hotel Monasterio, I pull out my notebook and give it a shot: Peru: Willy, weavers, Koricancha, Machu Picchu. It’s tougher than I thought.

Within a half-hour of our arrival in Lima, we were through customs and biting into hors d’oeuvres at Casa de Aliaga, an antique-laden, colonial-style mansion occupied by 17 generations of the same family (a record in the Americas), where archaeologist Guillermo “Willy” Cock welcomed us to Peru with an address about Puruchuco, his landmark discovery and National Geographic Society-funded study of 2,200 Inca mummies.

Within a half-hour of touch-down in Lima, we’re through customs and biting into hors d’oeuvres at a mansion occupied by 17 generations of the same family.

Willy and I first met in grad school, and I hadn’t seen him in ages. Catching up over pisco sours that night, we did what friends do: We talked into the wee hours, toasting to surmounting challenges (as chronicled in a documentary our group watched on the plane, he’d saved his priceless find from developers) and commiserating on how to grapple with the stresses of work. And then it’s sunrise and I’m off with the group in a charter plane, swooping down on Cuzco, the juncture of Inca and Spanish civilizations turned scenic metropolis perched in the Andes at 11,000 feet.

Now, I could easily go on at this stage about the joys of riding the historic Hiram Bingham train alongside Urubamba white water, or the grandeur of Machu Picchu, where minute blue forget-me-nots and delicate white orchids grow in crevices, maintenance guys in blue hard hats perch on yellow ladders, kids sell T-shirts emblazoned “COCA IS NOT A DRUG,” and interactive elements include poking your head into recesses in the walls to hear your “oms” resound like the voice of an Inca god.

Rivaling the above in my book: the ground guinea pig in cornflower pastry proffered during an alpaca-weaving demonstration in the courtyard of Cuzco’s Museum of Pre-Columbian Art (“like pâté, like pâté!” insisted the waiters). And before that, our visits to the city’s sixteenth-century cathedral, its gilded altars overflowing with scarlet gladiolas, and Koricancha, the fourteenth-century temple built of velvety andesite, the setting for reenactments of Inca ceremonies.

“They’re models,” said our guide, pointing out the costumed performers. “Same as the women and kids with baby llamas posing for photos in the plazas.”

“Him, too?” I asked, noting an imposing figure in pheasant-feather headdress delivering a soliloquy in Quechua.

“I’d say a model and an actor.” Connecting the dots, I sense modern Peru’s ties to my birthplace of Los Angeles.

BIG HEADS, LITTLE HEADS, PERT SHAMPOO

Somewhere between Chile and Tahiti, at 35,000 feet over the Pacific, those of us not reading or sleeping watched a silly albeit entertaining video. Kevin Costner’s Rapa Nui, a Hollywood-style love story set on Easter Island prior to European discovery in 1722, not only fabulates that Pitcairn Island was settled by Easter Islanders but, in casting residents as extras, it also caused a considerable stir during and after filming.

“People were calling themselves actors, running around naked, topless, painted in native costume for about a year after the movie came out,” says Patricia Vargas, director of the Easter Island Studies Institute at the University of Chile, an archaeologist serving as one of our guides on day five. “Even the mayor!”

She laughs as six of us trundle along with her in a Hyundai van across 45 square miles of scrubby terrain inhabited by 2,000 people living more than a thousand miles from landfall in any direction.

If there are celebrities among these striking Polynesians, Chileans, and Polynesian-Chileans these days, it would likely be scientists such as Vargas and her colleagues, who for the last few decades have battled erosion and the bureaucracies of academic funding to preserve Easter Island’s archaeological heritage—the 900 or so moai left behind by a society that rose around AD 1000 and, coinciding with deforestation, died out within 700 years. It seems those early islanders cut down all the palm trees in order to lug their statues around.

On Rapa Nui, luxury means a comfy bed, intermittent air conditioning, hot water, clean towels, and pert shampoo flown in on the two flights a week from Santiago.

Not even Vargas knows how these hulking heads of volcanic rock (averaging 13 feet tall and 14 tons) were erected or what function they served, but we learn the moai once formed a belt around the island, had eyes of white coral and black obsidian, and, so far, some 300 of them have been restored. The seven moai at Ahu Akivi on the island’s north end are the only ones facing the sea; these hawk perches watch our backs at Playa Anakena, where the expedition staff throws a barbecue surpassed only by the snorkeling offshore and the flowering banana tree outside my shower window back at the Taha Tai Hotel.

On Rapa Nui, where the main employment is tourism, luxury digs mean a comfortable bed, intermittent air conditioning, hot water on tap, clean towels, and Pert shampoo flown in on the two flights a week from Santiago. The privilege is to be here at all: Only 27,000 North Americans and Europeans have visited Easter Island since 1976.

BURGER AND INTERNET CRAVINGS

Now a week into the journey, we hit Samoa’s capital of Apia on Upolu Island on a drizzly afternoon. At the airport, we pile into buses that lumber two miles along the coast to Vailima, the house-turned-museum of Robert Louis Stevenson. The Scotsman settled here in 1889, passing his last five years on the 400-acre estate. Of his home (and final resting place) the Treasure Island author wrote:

This is a hard and interesting and beautiful life that we lead now. Our place is in a deep cleft of Vaea Mountain, some 600 feet about the sea, embowered in forest, which is our strangling enemy, and  which we combat with axes and dollars.

Bedraggled from a 5:30 a.m. wake-up call and two back-to-back flights totaling nine hours, fatigue would prevail as my “strangling enemy” were it not for the warm welcome we receive here: a dance troupe whose stylized moves suggest the proximity of Indonesia, tables laden with slices of cool pineapple, and an invitation to dip a cup in the ritual kava bowl.

Stevenson, suffering from tuberculosis, chose Upolu for its healthful climate. The island’s other claim to fame, the late hotelier Aggie Grey, was born here. The inspiration for her pal James Michener’s Bloody Mary in Tales of the South Pacific, Grey started a hamburger joint frequented by American servicemen during World War II that evolved into her eponymous family-run retreat. Checking in during one of the sudden downpours that gives rise to the island’s tangle of fig trees and lantana, schefflera and flowering ginger, a chunk of our group heads for the business center.

We patrol the buffet for oysters, for curry, for all-you-can-eat lobster, while tattooed wait staff in lavalavas take the stage in shifts to beat drums and twirl torches.

Email and news of home beckon for some; for others, it’s Vailima beers in the bar or the thought of room service and an Aggie Grey burger. I watch a gecko crawl across my bungalow ceiling while awaiting what must be the leathery precursor to the Egg McMuffin. The star turn of Grey’s progeny is instead their version of Samoa’s fiafia: an evening extravaganza of song and dance that unfolds in a poolside restaurant festooned with coconuts spray-painted gold.

We patrol the humongous buffet for oysters, for curry, for all-you-can-eat lobster, while tattooed wait staff in lavalavas take the stage in shifts to beat drums and twirl torches. “It’s a study in patience, endurance, and grace,” a fellow traveler comments of the trip thus far while eyeing banana cream pie on the dessert table.

That and unexpected sweetness. The handful of us who could forgo napping before dinner joined art expert Charles Doherty at a women’s craft center. The draw: bargains on bark-cloth wall hangings and handwoven mats of pandanus leaves. Within an hour, these disarming Samoan women had us, their first-ever visitors, talking the ins and outs of career paths, marriage, and divorce; dancing with them; and singing the popular WWII-era ditty, “You Are My Sunshine.”

REEF SQUID, CROCODILE TURF

En route to Australia we cross the International Dateline and lose 24 hours. Imagining ourselves a day younger on arrival, we suit up in Lycra snorkeling skins and, looking like an army of electric-blue Teletubbies, leap en masse from the Quicksilver Pontoon off Port Douglas into the sparkling deep. While this aluminum-and-steel outpost on the Great Barrier Reef could be a set piece for a Bond film, area marine life plays primeval in its abundance of spotted perch, sea turtles, iridescent squid, tridacna clams, brain coral, anemones, and barracudas....

It’s a giddy experience to scoot through the golden pendas and Kauri pines that form the canopy over the barron River below, the playground of freshwater crocodiles.

Ever the scientist, Summerhays rhapsodizes over the biodiversity in this tiny patch of the 1,250-mile-long marine sanctuary (“Now multiply this to the size of Great Britain!”), as well as the flora in nearby Barron Gorge National Park’s Kuranda rain forest, which we blast through on a four-mile aerial tram ride that afternoon. It’s a giddy experience to scoot on four hours’ sleep through towering red penda trees and Kauri pines that form the canopy over the Barron River below, the playground of unseen tortoises and freshwater crocodiles.

Even at the Sheraton Grand Mirage Resort in Port Douglas nature looms large, with guinea hens and five-inch beetles skittering through the gardens, catfish splashing in the lily ponds, cane toads pitted against each other in a jumping contest, and an oily ten-foot python slithering across the sidewalk.

STAPLE DIETS, DIET COKE

Forty-eight hours later we land in Papua New Guinea. From the capital of Port Moresby, half of us fly to the Highlands to see preening Huli warriors and birds of paradise. The rest of us board bush planes for the Sepik River region and more crocodile country. And it’s there, beneath the breadfruit trees in the Sepik’s Amboin village, that schoolchildren in grass skirts and face paint flip the Margaret Mead-style magnifying glass. Despite having danced barefoot over bamboo poles, sung their national anthem (in English), bestowed us with crowns of hibiscus and palm fronds, and fielded a battery of inquiries about Sepik customs, these beautiful kids turn shy when a foresighted woman in our group thinks to ask if they have any questions for us.

At the urging of his giggling classmates, one boy steps forward. “What is your staple diet?” he ventures, stumping us.

Burgers? Paleo? Tofu and organic vegetables? In any event, not sago-palm pancakes and needlefish. After much rumbling and debate we give up and take his next question. We do better on this one.

At the urging of his classmates, one boy steps forward. “What is your staple diet?” he ventures, stumping us. PALEO? Organic vegetables? In any event, not sago-palm pancakes and needlefish.

“How many days did you travel from your village to be here?”

I’m struck by the Sepik people’s enviable sureness of identity. Now nearly halfway around the globe—as the crow flies, 9,000 miles from where we started—we represent 18 of the United States among us and we struggle to give an answer.

“Two days,” we eventually reply.

Virtually unknown to Westerners until the late 1800s, Papua New Guinea often gets billing as a country in the Stone Age. It’s well documented that this island nation’s 5.3 million people have, due to choice and economic factors, retained much of their traditional culture; less so that a good many of them surf the Internet. For most travelers, it’s curiosity about those Papuans still living in direct contact with nature—wielding bows and arrows or catching fish by hand with baskets—that’s the draw here. We certainly hadn’t thought to ask our jovial Australian hosts—just 500 miles away—whether they had studied math, at what age they married, or what they typically ate for dinner.

Sipping Diet Coke and chardonnay on the deck of the Karawari Lodge late in the afternoon, we reflect on the day’s events: the kids at the school; riverboat rides to Amboin and Kundiman and other villages that see foreigners at most once or twice a year; the sing-sing dances and crafts markets; the buzz and flap of cicadas and fruit bats that rises around the lodge at sunset. It’s a magical spot. Virgin tropical forest spreads 300 feet below for as far as we can see; inside the main building, crocodile skulls adorn the bar and Sepik masks and carvings cover the walls.

I came this way once before. During the sing-sings I saw ten years ago, I mention to Doherty, none of the Sepik women covered their breasts. “As soon as we left Kundiman, off went the grass skirts; they had on shorts,” notes Gil Grosvenor, mulling over whether the sing-sings we videotaped were sacred ceremonies or staged preambles to the more modern rituals of crafts markets and international commerce. Or maybe both.

Even in the isolated Sepik region, times change. Does that make them any less authentic?

Doherty smiles. “When I’m in places like this,” he says, “I always like to examine my own culture.” The Fulbright scholar has a point. Representing the “indigenous style” of Southern California: my wrinkled pants, baggy shift, no jewelry, and mud-splattered boots. And take Grosvenor’s native costume: rumpled Dockers and long-sleeve shirt, tennis shoes, Casio watch, a Sony camcorder lashed to his wrist. I doubt it’s what Alexander Graham Bell’s great-grandson wears on social calls in Nova Scotia.

Perhaps we should take a cue from one of our fellow travelers, a well-known actor turned producer and philanthropist: In turquoise flower-print pants, jaunty visor, and spotless powder-blue pullover, this veteran adventurer could be the ambassador of East Hampton (and somehow, in this humid, 88-degree weather, she never even breaks a sweat).

OF COUNTRY CLUBS AND WATERING HOLES

On the heels of our Indiana Jones-ing in Papua New Guinea, the confines of the 757 feel like a country club. Reunited with our Highlands-going unit, we’re happy to be loosed in our natural habitat with air conditioning. We’re also surprisingly pleased to see each other.

By Day 13 we know one another as mid-lifers and retirees, mothers and daughters, the recently widowed and the newly wed, celebrants of milestone birthdays and anniversaries, aspiring photographers and historians, bons vivants and careerists reevaluating priorities, seasoned globetrotters and first-timers out of North America.

We’ve formed relationships. Like the human body or Summerhays’s termite colony, we’re a superorganism now. Together with the expedition staff and lecturers, the pilots and crew, we have a role to play to keep this operation moving forward. Our jobs, aside from appreciating the aforementioned’s masterful efforts: Show up on time in hotel lobbies with our bags repacked. Take a keen interest in the places we visit. Mind our manners. Listen and observe. Try to ask intelligent questions. We also look out for one another with growing affection. Which is not to say that the promise of a little time apart from each other in Cambodia does not positively shimmer on the horizon.

Arriving at night in Siem Reap, we face a tough choice in the morning: We can continue on with two days’ worth of excursions to Angkor and its thousand-year-old Hindu and Buddhist temples that were off the tourism map during Cambodia’s civil war. Or we can stay put at the French Colonial-style Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor for manicures, massages, laps in a fountain-studded pool, laundry, sunbathing, and bouts of luscious idleness or otherwise in our ceiling-fanned rooms.

we face a tough choice in the morning: continue on to Angkor and its hindu and buddhist temples off the tourism map during Cambodia’s civil war, Or stay put at Raffles.

Siem Reap turns out to be this superorganism’s watering hole. After breakfast half of us scatter like marbles. Banking on tomorrow for our spa fortifications, the rest of us hop 8 a.m. tour shuttles. My group gets particularly lucky.

“The Bayon is one of my favorite temples,” says Sith Savy, the hospitable guide for our vanload of eight. “Morning is the best time to see it.” Savy has been leading private groups here for seven years. We walk with him amid the Bayon’s 200 smiling stone faces and the jumbled ruins of Ta Prohm in the coolest, most serene hours of the day, before the souvenir hawkers have set up shop and more sightseers have descended upon them.

Ta Prohm turns out to be my favorite temple. Undergoing restorations with $5 million from India, this crumbling monument has melted into the surrounding vegetation over the centuries, the massive limbs and roots of ficus trees twining through it like veins. Some scientists claim these magnificent trees, many of them 150 feet tall, are destroying the site; others maintain it’s the trees that have held it together all this time.

“There’s a saying here,” Savy tells us. “‘Stones part of the tree; tree part of the stones.’”

At its peak, Ta Prohm is said to have housed a Khmer king and a court of 12,000 people. By mid-afternoon, the sun blazing overhead, the temple complex of Angkor Wat appears to have drawn that many tourists. One can’t help wondering how long this fragile site can sustain its popularity while cash-strapped Cambodia attends to rebuilding itself, but the upside of being here amid a carnival atmosphere of tour buses and elephant rides, picnickers and bridal parties, yapping dogs and scampering macaques, is to witness the pleasure the gracious Cambodians take in sharing their cultural treasures with the world.

IF IT’S MONDAY, THIS MUST BE BHUTAN

My first surprise in Bhutan is the french fries served with pork roast at Paro’s Olathang Hotel. “Did you make these just for us?” I ask a gho-clad server manning the lunch buffet.

“No, we like french fries,” he says, matter-of-factly. “We eat them all the time.”

And here I’d heard that in this, the last-surviving independent Buddhist state in the Himalaya, the staple diet was a regimen of fiery chilies heaped on red rice. More unexpected discoveries: Internet access in the business center and National Geographic Explorer reruns and Bollywood soap operas on TVs in our chalet-style quarters.

After that, Bhutan gets more complicated. We’ve arrived here in shifts by way of Nepal. An 18,000-square-mile kingdom tucked deep in a valley at an elevation of 7,000 feet, Bhutan has one airport, one carrier, and a total fleet of two Airbus A319s. Bhutan is equally conservative in its approach to tourism and just about everything else.

To set foot in Bhutan for the first time is, on the strangeness meter, probably weirder than walking on the moon—by Western standards, something between landing in medieval times, a seemingly utopian present, and a road-not-taken tomorrow that’s anybody’s guess.

The Olathang was among hotels built in Paro in 1974 for Bhutan’s inaugural mass gathering of foreigners: 287 guests attending the coronation of Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who, upon his father’s death, assumed the throne at age 17. Soon after, Bhutan first opened its doors to visitors, limiting the total to 200; of late that number topped out at 6,300—about the same as the number of troops in the royal army.

To set foot in Bhutan for the first time is probably weirder than walking on the moon—something between landing in medieval times and a seemingly utopian present.

Wedged between India and China, this monarchy is as remote as Easter Island in its own way, but its isolation is cultural and by choice. Romanticized in adventure guidebooks as the last Shangri-la, never colonized in its 300-year history but long dependent on assistance from India and the European Union, Bhutan champions self-sufficiency, equal opportunity, environmental conservation, conversion to a parliamentary democracy, and ideals of happiness and peace. On the other hand, you’ll not find any Frank Gehry-style whimsy or floral-splashed capris here. Decrees for this agrarian society (population 810,000 or 2.1 million, depending on whom you ask) include compulsory adherence to traditional culture, from the architecture right down to a dress code: ankle-length kira for women, knee-length gho for men—and these robelike garments strictly in geometric prints.

“Income tax has been instated in recent years; it’s very confusing,” says Gelay Jamtsho, our courtly guide, who has a degree in business from the University of Delhi but whose interests lean more toward web design and basketball.

As Jamtsho’s charges we learn that in Bhutan, even cloth is an expression of Buddhist devotion: hand-loomed, subdued, and exquisitely refined. We also learn to maintain decorum by walking clockwise through sacred sites such as Rinpong Dzong, which we call on in the afternoon. It’s a windblown fortress, built in 1646, where ravens ride thermals between gabled rooftops, pigeons swoop down to congregate on prayer-wheel-lined courtyards, and young monks—laughing boys in crimson robes—slip out of doorways and corridors, eye us quizzically, then skip off and disappear.

On our way to the capital city of Thimphu the next day we stop at Dratsang, an entrancing Buddhist nunnery. Picture 50 handsome women on a sunny afternoon gathered in shadows behind curtained doorways, playing the thung and other ancient musical instruments by candlelight. After that we swing by Bhutan’s textile museum, whose gift shop stocks artful weavings priced at upwards of 25,000 Nu (about US$500).

“Bill Gates’s family was involved in funding it,” Jamtsho says, then suggests I learn to weave rather than forking out for any of the inventory.

In the evening, we have the honor of a private audience with Datong Tulku Rimpoche—the Rimpoche Reincarnate—a dimpled, 40-something monk swathed in red and ocher, twin golden rings on his fingers, who gently offers up this insider’s view on life as a reincarnation of the founder of Tibetan Buddhism: “It’s too long and too boring and you are only here for two days!”

He beams.

EVEREST

On the dawn flight back to Kathmandu, Bhutan’s polite Druk Air pilots extend a kind invitation over the PA: Those of us who are interested may join them for a look at the view of Everest—from the cockpit.

At first we just sit there, as if we’re hearing voice-over documenting an era past.

The view is impossibly beautiful. There are no other planes in the sky. The peaks of the Central Himalaya fan out to the horizon. Cloud cover billows off the edge of the earth.

COMMERCIAL BREAK IN KATHMANDU

We land in Nepal with enough time on our hands to mob a hotel gift shop that conducts a year’s worth of business in the next 45 minutes. It’s one of the few times on this journey that this group of American capitalists has had to wait for anything, let alone a plane. Weather conditions have grounded our jet. Eventually we’re standing around, arms akimbo, at Tribhuvan International. It’s hot. It’s stuffy. It’s packed with commuters. Grimfaced security officers divide us by gender into two snail-paced boarding lines. In our 17 days on the fly, we have forgotten what this can be like.

LOVE, HONEYBEES, ROCK-SOLID DREAMS

Some of us are getting cranky. We begin to question our stamina. Where, where, where can we stretch out on satiny, multiple-thread-count sheets? In Agra.

We fall into maharaja-worthy quarters at the Oberoi Amarvilas long enough to praise the masterminds of our itinerary, clean up with sandalwood-perfumed soap, and catch the sun setting behind the Taj Majal from our balconies. A few of us skip the lavish dinner served poolside to retire early.

Agra by night feels haunting and mystical; by day, it’s more like a giant flea market, an overgrown city, population 1.5 million, that erupts with vitality and poverty, a place where monkeys and vultures scavenge atop dusty rooftops and free-range cows and pigs share littered streets with a crush of cars and buses, pedicabs, pedestrians, and motorbikes. It’s all of this that surrounds a monument built, with an eye for perfect symmetry, in the name of grief and love.

The curious thing about the Taj on this particular day is that it’s so reassuringly of this world—solid as concrete and as cool and minimalist as the mausoleum it is.

Like any great work of art, the Taj Mahal is as arresting up close as it is from a distance, its parts as captivating as the whole. Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s tribute to his wife, Mumtaz Mahal—who died in 1631 during the birth of their 14th child—the Taj is said to have required 22,000 laborers and 18 years to construct; its quarried white marble and semiprecious jewels were imported from Baghdad and Afghanistan and China. Along with the other 2.2 million people who visit it each year, we go through a security check and remove our shoes well before reaching its doors.

The curious thing about the Taj on this particular day is that, rather than looking ethereal, it’s so reassuringly of this world—solid as concrete and, on the inside, as cool and minimalist as the mausoleum it is. I’m more drawn to the red sandstone buildings that flank it: to the west a place of worship, a mosque facing Mecca; to the east, the mosque’s twin, an enigma known as the jawab, “the answer,” whose intended function other than architectural balance remains a mystery but which today houses turbaned guards armed with AK-47s who stand watch over the Taj from its corner towers. And hanging in the entryways of both these stunning structures? Enormous hives teeming with honeybees.

When we depart Agra at 6:40 a.m. the next morning, I do so with a mixture of longing and relief.

FIELD STUDY IN BLACK AND WHITE

Day 18. Bone weary and on historical and cultural overload, we forge on to Africa. At Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro Airport in Arusha we board a dozen 14-seater turbo-props that zip over Ngorongoro Crater to the Serengeti Plain. We press our faces to acrylic windows for glimpses of migrating wildebeests on acacia-studded ground below, so scored by hooves it could be the hide of a gargantuan elephant.

In the next 24 hours we see more creatures in the wild than most of us have seen in our lifetimes—the wildebeests and zebras, as well as hippos, giraffes, ostriches, egrets, cheetahs, gazelles, baboons, leopards, lions—by Summerhays’s count, more than 100 species.

By now I’m convinced that we survival-driven humans migrate to see ourselves in context. As a species, then, have we isolated ourselves a bit far from the herd?

Apparently not.

“Stay inside the vehicle,” says Yahaya Sawani, our guide, a nature-loving, game-drive veteran, as we roll around in a Land Cruiser equipped with two gas tanks, a crackling CB radio, a stack of Princeton field books, a basket of peanuts, and a first aid kit.

We press our faces to acrylic windows for glimpses of wildebeests on acacia-studded ground below so scored by hooves it could be the hide of a gargantuan elephant.

Sawani tells me his father once worked the Serengeti as a tracker for big-game hunters. “If you take two steps outside,” he warns, “the animals will either run away or jump you.”

It’s the zebras lining the dirt roads that manage to get to me.

Unlike the big cats and the wildebeests, who tend to ignore us, and the herds of impalas and other antelopes, who react so acutely to our presence that their heads actually swivel around in unison to face us, the zebras acknowledge us at their convenience.

And there are literally thousands of them. Zebra stallions fighting each other for harems. Zebra fillies kicking up their heels at lusty studs. Rogue zebras wandering off on their own. Old zebras snorting along, keeping apace. Zebra mothers watching over their newborns. Spindly zebra foals with tiny, spiky manes holding their ground for the first time.

So this is what it’s like to meet another successful species that’s healthy and flourishing on one patch of the planet that we seven billion humans have for the most part managed to leave alone.

The Serengeti is 5,800 square miles of land out of Earth’s 57 million, yet being here, watching these self-possessed creatures at ease in their environment, feels so peaceful—hopeful, even—as if our fate and theirs just might be larger than both of us.

As if this were my idea: After reaching a saturation point for profound and enlightening travel experiences, I’m ready to go home now.

REENTRY

The universe is 40 million galaxies. There are two billion stars in the Milky Way. We all have small roles to play on our large planet.

We pick up our luggage at baggage claim in London, exchange hugs and e-mail addresses, and dissolve into a network of connecting flights and freeways. In the end, our 28,000-mile marathon is as close as I may ever come to sensing the world as an organism, witnessing the curvature of the earth, seeing it as a ball. Like traveling to a village or city or country for the first time and falling in love with it, so this journey inspired devotion on a broader scale—as if, for one enchanting moment, I could embrace the whole planet in all its diversity.

And like any great trip, just when you’re starting to get the hang of it—like life after high school or life after college or life after 40—this one goes fast, heading rapidly toward a conclusion. In the interest of perspective, I can’t imagine it any other way. •

Virtuoso Life

By Trish Reynales. All rights reserved.

 
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