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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]

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It was a long, awkward time before I began to see anything at all. Finally, out of the corner of my eye, I watched a large wooden statue, faceless and made of rough logs, walk across the room and sit in front of me. Then, in the scratched surface of the mirror, a small screen lit up. Pictures from New York City -- a window of my apartment, street scenes -- flashed with brief, hyperreal clarity.

"I see my apartment in New York," I said. "But nothing seems to be happening there."

"If you see a window, you must try to go through it," the king instructed me, "and if you meet somebody there, you must try to talk to them. Perhaps they have a message for you, some information."

The Bwiti insisted I should relate my visions out loud. I was not prepared for that. I had expected whatever I saw to be my own concern. But the Bwiti didn't sympathize with my ideas about privacy. "Everything you see must be shared," the king urged. "You might have a message for the tribe." But in my stoned state I was tongue-tied, and I sensed the Bwitis' rigid disapproval.

Other hallucinations passed before my eyes -- burning skulls and goblin faces, the figures of women in black dresses stretching out long white arms toward me from the edges of my vision -- but when I tried to speak of them, they disappeared. Meanwhile, the iboga was making me sick. I fought against waves of nausea. I wanted to reach the deeper visionary state, but I was also afraid of the drug. If iboga was indeed a "superconscious spiritual entity," I wasn't sure whether this entity liked or hated me. I suspected the latter was more likely. I started to perspire. My head seemed several times its normal size. I wondered if I was going to die. I vomited into my pail.

"Can I go to the hotel now?" I heard the analyst ask. The Bwiti laughed in response. "Oh, les pauvres, les pauvres," the king said, mocking us. The ceremony had many hours left to go.

I lay on a mat on the hard-packed earth, looking up at the unsympathetic faces of the tribesmen. I scorned my own foolishness: Who was I to try entering the African spirit world? In the future, I promised myself in a moment of insight, I would seek some easier assignments.

Closing my eyes, I saw Technicolor patterns. I fell into a trance, floating to the Bwiti music. Aspects of my past life flared up in my mind, like gleaming facets of a larger whole. I reviewed my childhood -- my parents' separation, my mother's loneliness, my own unhappiness. I felt myself as the product of all the forces that had acted upon me. Henry James once described human consciousness as "a helpless jelly poured into a mold." It seemed as if iboga compelled me to perceive the exact shape of that mold. It was dizzying and liberating.

Then the iboga trip became a cinematic cyclone, whirling images and ideas at me at high speed. A series of unknown houses appeared and I drifted down into them before they faded. Images of ex-lovers came and went, dancing away into the ether. I saw the sign of the now-defunct Manhattan restaurant, Teacher's Too, where I had met my first girlfriend. The letters of this sign spun around in space and reassembled, rebus-like, to spell the phrase, "Touchers Teach Too," which seemed to contain a message about my own future relationships. But what did it mean?

Sometimes the percussive music became deafening in the low-ceilinged temple. At other times the Bwiti's songs seemed awesome in their beauty. The rhythms seemed organic, as if the music was itself an emanation of the plant's essence. In my altered state, I understood the tribe's deep relationship with this plant that showed them things. I felt how complete their culture was in itself -- so complete that no outsider could disturb it.

Late at night, the Bwiti made us rise and dance with them. Then we watched as each tribesman danced around the temple, whirling a torch, scattering shadows across the walls like living forms. "After you take iboga you will know what Bwiti is," the king had told me the day before. I felt that iboga activated an ancient symbiosis between plant and human. Perhaps what Lieberman had suggested was true, that in Bwiti, like Buddhism, there is no single deity, just a play of forms and spirits spinning across the Void.

At dawn, the Bwiti led us outside to watch the sunrise. We sang with them. We were still woozy as the ritual ended, but the king started shouting again. "Now you have been initiated, you give me presents of money!" he screamed. "I demand more money!"

Next page | A second ceremony, and a vision