Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Travel

Out of the Blue
The agony of the long-distance commuter
For some flight attendants, three airports and 2,500 miles isn't a major trip -- it's a normal journey to work.
By Elliott Neal Hester
[11/02/99]

Pilgrim of the dead
To get a real dose of the meaning behind Halloween, visit the bone chapels of Europe.
By Summer McStravick
[10/30/99]

Wanderlust
Turning Parisienne
In Paris for our fifth anniversary, all I could think was: What's so seductive about French women? And how can I become one?
By J.A. Getzlaff
[10/29/99]

Travel Advisor
Holy hassle
Getting to the Vatican for New Year's Mass, plus advice for first-time cruisers and Auckland sightseers.
By Donald D. Groff
[10/28/99]

I booked it online
From mega-travel agencies to boutique sites, the Internet has exploded consumers' hotel-booking options. But what do the different sites really offer? And where are the hidden treasures?
By Judy Jacobs
[10/27/99]

Complete archives for Travel

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Despite iboga's common appearance, in those few nations that know of it, the plant is worshipped as the source of spiritual knowledge and as a tool for accessing the wisdom of the ancestors. The root bark -- scraped off, ground into powder and eaten -- contains one of the world's most powerful, long-lasting and mysterious psychedelic agents. The tribal religion associated with iboga is called Bwiti and exists in only two equatorial countries, Gabon and Cameroon. When Bwiti shamans eat iboga, they believe they are granted the power to see the future, to heal the sick and to speak with the dead.

"The Bwiti believe that before the initiation, the neophyte is nothing," my guide, Daniel Lieberman, told me on my first morning in Gabon, as we took a cab through Libreville, the nation's capital. "Through the ceremony, you become something."

"What do you become?" I asked.

"You become a baanzi, one who knows the other world, because you have seen it with your own eyes."

"How do the Bwiti think of iboga?" I asked

"The Bwiti believe that iboga is a superconscious spiritual entity that guides mankind," he said.

I had found Lieberman, a botanist from South Africa, on the Internet, where he offered to bring Westerners to a shaman's tribal village, for a fee. "I have spent time in the rain forests of Africa east and west, Madagascar and the Amazon working with shamans, brujos, witch doctors, healers," Lieberman e-mailed me beforehand. "Iboga I feel to be the one plant that needs to be introduced to the world, and urgently."

In person, the botanist was thin and pallid, in Teva sandals and safari clothes, and quite a bit younger then I expected. He said that his ghost-white complexion was due to a nearly fatal bout of cerebral malaria. "I caught it during a Bwiti ceremony a year ago," he told me. "It took me months to recover."

This was worrisome. I had expected my guide to be robust and adventurous. Instead, he turned out to be younger then me, and shakier.

Libreville was a hot and stagnant city. Sunlight reflected off gleaming glass corporate towers, the headquarters of oil companies. Because of its oil deposits, Gabon is richer and more secure than other countries in the region. Iboga is another natural resource, but one that has yet to be exploited by the Gabonese.

"Why would the Bwiti allow me to join their sect?" I asked my guide.

"Bwiti is like Buddhism," he replied. "Anyone can join. The word 'Bwiti' simply means the experience of iboga, which is the essence of love."

Over the last decades, iboga has developed a cult following in the United States and in Europe, where it is known as ibogaine. In the West, the psychedelic is being promoted as a potential one-shot cure for treating addiction to heroin and other drugs. Some researchers believe that ibogaine has the ability to "reset the switches" of addiction, freeing addicts from withdrawal symptoms and all drug cravings for up to six months. Animal tests seem to have reinforced these claims.

In America, scientists at Harvard, New York University and elsewhere are studying the ibogaine molecule, seeking to unlock its mechanism. Later this week, on Nov. 5 and 6, the NYU School of Medicine is hosting a conference on ibogaine's potential as a treatment for drug addiction. Papers will be presented by various scientists, including Kenneth Alper, the conference director and a professor of psychiatry and neurology at NYU; Stanley Glick, chairman of the Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience at Albany Medical College; and Zbigniew Binienda, a senior research scientist in the Department of Neurotoxicology at the FDA. James Fernandez, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, will talk on the Bwiti's ritual use of ibogaine. The NYU conference symbolizes the growing worldwide interest in the healing powers of the sacred plant.

Because of this growing interest, a music magazine had agreed to pay my expenses to Africa. The trip was not without its dangers -- malaria being one of them, the intense tropical heat throughout most of the year another. It was in the jungles of Gabon that the deadly ebola virus first appeared. Then there were the hazards of trying a little-known, long-acting hallucinogen far from the nearest hospital. After iboga is in your system for a while, it must be vomited out -- producing what one study euphemistically described as "tremendous cleansings." In rare cases, Bwiti initiates have overdosed and died during the initiation.

But none of this mattered to me. I was eager to try iboga for myself. I had reached a point in my New York life where I felt spiritually stunted, morally anesthetized, psychically detached. I was losing interest -- not in anything in particular, but in everything. I sometimes felt like I could float off the surface of the planet. Sick of my own culture, my own self, I yearned for access to a different dimension. But could I be guided into the African spirit world?

Next page | A mirror, a red parrot's feather, a machete and a woven mat