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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]

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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]

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"I just came from Bhutan, where I got a terrible bladder infection," she announced immediately, in a familiar accent. We were introduced. "You're from New York also? What a surprise! I'm a psychoanalyst in the West Village. Maybe you know my friend who works for the New York Times? Or my sister, the novelist?"

I nodded at the familiar names, trying to recover from the shock of unwanted familiarity. I had dreamt of some pristine experience of the exotic, the "other" that I had read about in the novels of Joseph Conrad and Paul Bowles. Instead, I had traveled 7,000 miles to share my tribal adventure with a woman I might have tried to avoid at a Manhattan cocktail party.

The botanist took us to the Libreville house of our shaman. Tsanga Jean Moutamba wore a purple robe that showed off a broad stomach and a necklace of lion's teeth. "Le Roi du Gabon Bwiti," as he called himself, had eight wives and 14 children, and members of his family kept passing through the sitting room as we spoke. His manner with us was a bit gruff but friendly. The tribe packed our bags into his jeep, and the king drove us down Gabon's single highway, four hours into the dense jungle foliage that unfolded monotonously around us. Moutamba's village was located 40 kilometers outside of Lambourene, the riverside town where Albert Schweitzer built his hospital.

Over the next days I tried to learn what Moutamba's status as "king of the Bwiti" meant. I received different answers; in Gabon, it was often difficult to separate truth from fantasy. Alain Borgia Dukaga, an English-speaking Gabonese who acted as our translator, told me: "Moutamba is like Jesus to us. Most of the people now are like lacking roots, they got tied to the Christian ways and forgot their culture. Moutamba is helping to bring back our culture. We hope soon they will start teaching Bwiti again in the schools." A few days later, when relations soured between us and our shaman, Borgia (as he asked us to call him) reversed himself. "Moutamba?" he scoffed. "He's not the king of anything. He just calls himself that."

The king's homestead consisted of a complex of wooden buildings in a jungle clearing where children, hens and roosters meandered about. One roofless structure decorated with palm fronds, the "Pygmy House," honored the region's natives for discovering "le bois sacre," the sacred wood, another name for iboga. The Pygmies still live in small bands in Gabon's interior jungles, and it is theoretically possible to have a Pygmy initiation. But I will have to save that experience for another trip. Or more likely a future life.

The temple's stone walls were decorated with crude portraits of the tribal ancestors. A large wooden statue of the first Bwiti couple stood at the entryway. I stared at that statue for a while. I had read about junkies who took ibogaine without knowing anything about Bwiti. On the drug, some of them had described meeting an original African mother and father similar to the tribe's mythical founders.

Not much is definitively known about the Bwiti. James Fernandez, a Princeton anthropologist who studied the sect, concluded that the Bwiti religion worked by "indirection and suggestion and other kinds of puzzlements," leaving "many loose ends and inconsistencies." Throughout his long book on the Bwiti, Fernandez was frustrated by his failure to grasp the belief system behind it. In the end, he threw up his hands, writing that "any attempt to demonstrate the coherence of the Bwiti cosmos founders upon the paradoxes with which it plays."

The night before the ceremony, the analyst, the botanist, the king and I slept in his temple, along with various members of the tribe. When we awoke, the king gave us what the Bwiti call La Liste, a long, traditional roster of things neophytes contribute to the ritual. La Liste includes a mirror, a tin bucket, a red parrot's feather, yards of fabric, a machete, a woven mat and supplies for the next day's feast for the tribe -- a live coq du village and a large quantity of sweet liquors such as rum and cassis. Lieberman, the analyst and I spent the morning driving around Lambourene with a few of Moutamba's sons, whose gravity as they assisted us made me aware of the serious nature of the ceremony. Everywhere we went in the virtually all-black township, people peered into our car with curiosity, and Moutamba's clan seemed proud to parade "les blancs" -- the whites -- around like exotic trophies.

Back at the village, the king called us into the temple. "It was good you stayed here last night," he said. "Last night, I dreamt that le journaliste" -- he pointed at me - "will have many wonderful visions. Now you must give us the rest of the money."

This was a surprise. We had already paid the agreed-upon $600 for the ceremony, double the fee for the average Gabonese. We reminded him of this, but the king started to shout. "You want to cheat me?" he screamed.

Next page | Eating the sacred iboga