There are four Bescharyin tribesmen here at the teahouse with me, exotic figures, splendidly robed and armed, their hair teased out and glued into strands. I realize with a start that these must be the Fuzzie-wuzzies who fought so fanatically against Gordon at Khartoum. The contact between us is instantaneous and overwhelming.
There is a spirit in this tea, a magic solvent to wash away our differences. This is another reason why I am here: to experience (nothing less) the brotherhood of man. Imagine meeting these men in a London pub or an American diner. Impossible. They could never be there what they are here. They would be made small by the complexities, the paraphernalia that we have added to our lives, just as we are, although we have learned to pretend otherwise.
I had to come here to realize the full stature of man; here outside a grass hut, on a rough wooden bench, with no noise, no crowds, no appointments, no axe to grind, no secret to conceal, all the space and time in the world, and my heart as translucent as the glass of tea in my hand.
It was just the time of day when my hallucinations came to try me out. They were of the crassest kind possible. Usually they began with nothing more original than a cold bottle of beer. When my appetite was sufficiently inflamed I would go on to lobster, roast beef and real coffee, followed by an accidental meeting with a perfect and most loving woman in a large, clean bed. Sometimes I would conjure up the settings for these indulgences but it was hardly worth bothering. They were always roughly similar, and involved clean table linen, polished glassware, bathrooms with towels and an abundance of friendly hospitality and admiration.
“As the afternoons turned to evenings and I began to wonder where I would eat and sleep that night, this television set turned on in my head and subjected me to trial by advertisement, hitting me inexorably with every one of my known cravings in turn. It was not my appetite for cold beer or perfect loving women that shamed and appalled me at those times, it was the fact that I allowed these images to oppress me when they were clearly unattainable, and to make what was there and real and within my grasp seem undesirable. Under the influence of these lobster and champagne ravings I became the perfect sucker, vulnerable to the shoddiest substitutes.
“For lack of cold beer I would waste money on warm Coke, and hate it. I would fall prey to any hotel sign, knowing full well that far from enjoying a clean bed and loving women I would be shut up in a dirty, fetid box with a hundred mosquitoes. It is said that at three or four in the morning the body is physically at its lowest ebb, but it was at five in the afternoon, at the cocktail hour, that my morale slumped, and the temptations came to me in the wilderness.”
Jupiter’s Last Journey
A film about a man, his motorbike and his memory
by Manfred Waffender
The baking Sahara desert. The sun beats down. A trickle of sand shifts under the heat haze. Otherwise, nothing.
And then, a sight so strange that, if it wasn’t caught in the beauty of this camera shot, you’d swear it was a mirage. Over the ridge comes a motorcycle, fully laden, ridden by a tall figure wearing a leather jacket, goggles and helmet. He rides up to the camera and, full frame, takes off his headgear. We can see that he’s a European, and handsome. But we might not guess, even now, that he’s about to celebrate his seventieth birthday.
This is a film of memorable images of landscape and people. It’s a road movie which takes us through Europe and through the length of the African continent. It’s a film about travel, and what travel can do for the soul. And it’s a film about memory. At its heart is a compulsion, a compulsion experienced by a remarkable man a quarter of a century ago.
The first time I met Ted was more than twenty years ago. He was an accomplished writer who had just finished his book “Jupiter’s Travels” and I was an editor at Rowohlt, a German publishing house. The company had just bought the German language rights and it was my responsibility to oversee the translation and the publishing of the book in German.
I met him in a small flat in London and I remember how we were bending over his lighting table, looking at the slides from his four-year journey.
A few month ago we were looking at these slides again. They became the starting points in our preparation for this feature length documentary film.
Ted, at the age of 69, is going around the world on a motorbike again. And I, an independent producer of documentary films, am following him with a small film crew.
The film will use the slides and quotes from “Jupiter’s Travels” and connect them with his present journey. Ted is visiting the same places he visited 27 years ago, and trying to find the people he met at that time.
At the end of February, when we were following Ted in our van in Southern Italy and came to Roggiano, we observed how Ted was stopped by a small Fiat car. The driver of the car pointed at Ted, and in a strong southern Italian accent said, “Jupiter?”
He had seen the logo on the back of his bike. He turned out to be the son of Giuseppe Zanfini, a social activist, who Ted had met a quarter of a century ago.
The father had passed away a few years ago, but the son, who was twelve years old at the time of Ted’s visit, helped Ted to identify and find the people in his photographs.
A couple of days later, on our way to Tunis, we recorded a long interview with Ted. He said:
“Thousands of years ago it was written in the Baghavad Gita that without memory we are like monkeys, we are doomed to chaos and foolishness. Memory is, in my view, the most important single aspect of humanity. Because without it we have nothing to compare anything with: we can’t make stories, we can’t develop our imagination, everything depends on our ability to remember things. We all know: people who don’t remember are doomed to repeat their mistakes. The lesson has been told many times in many different ways. So for me the exercise of trying to relate what I find today with what I remember from 27 years ago is a very valid exercise, I think it will illuminate something. Just how much depends on my ability to remember and on my ability to write and describe what I am thinking and feeling. It is very early in the game at the moment, we have yet to see how it’s going to work out.
“Already just from the few contacts that we’ve had it begins to seem as though I can make something out of all this. We’ll have to see how far it goes”
On March 15th we met Ted in Atbara in Sudan. We went to find a small school in the middle of the desert – to see who would remember him – with dramatic results. In May we found him in Nairobi, celebrating his 70th birthday on crutches, after breaking a leg in the wilderness of the NW frontier.
This 90 minute film is available as VHS or DVD in a German version, and in an English version in PAL and NTSC from Manfred Waffender.
About the director
Manfred Waffender has been a freelance writer and director for TV and commercial films since 1985 and an independent producer since 1994. His recent films include:
Reise in die Nacht (Journey into the Night), 60 min, ZDF / ARTE 2000, TV-adaptation of a surreal music theatre piece by German composer Harald Weiss.
Bach Cantata Pilgrimage – John Eliot Gardiner with the Monteverdi Choir and The English Baroque Soloists, 60 min, BBC TWO 2000, documentary about the first half of a year long musical pilgrimage.
Filippa Giordano – eine Sängerin auf dem Weg zum Weltruhm ( A singer on her way to fame) 60 min, NDR / ARTE 2000, portrait of the Italian singer shot in Sicily, Rome, Bologna and Milan
Music City San Francisco. 45 min, ZDF / ARTE 1999; pilot for a series (subsequently commissioned) about the musical nature of famous cities; with Michael Tilson Thomas and the SF Symphony.
Lieder der Maori (Songs of the Maori), 53 min, MW Filmproduktion / ZDF / ARTE 1997, a documentary about the significance of song for the Maoris of New Zealand and their oral history.
Herzschlag der Kontinente (Heartbeat of the Continents), 70 min, ZDF/ARTE 1997, a documentary film about drumming; shot in India, Senegal and Germany; with the Karnataka
Toots, 60 min., NDR 1996; portrait of the 74-year old harmonica player Jean “Toots” Thielemanns, shot in Brussels, San Francisco and at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
Cyber City San Francisco, 60 min., ZDF / 3sat 1995; documentary about a real life simulation of the “global village”: San Francisco, California, USA.
In spite of wars and tourism and pictures by satellite, the world is just the same size it ever was. It is awesome to think how much of it I will never see. It is no trick to go round the world these days; you can pay a lot of money and fly round it nonstop in less than forty eight hours, but to know it, to smell it and feel it between your toes you have to crawl. There is no other way. Not flying, not floating. You have to stay on the ground and swallow the bugs as you go. Then the world is immense. The best you can do is trace your long, infinitesimally thin line through the dust and extrapolate. I drew the longest line I possibly could, that could still be seen as following a course.
Generally the great overland journeys follow the Asian land mass east until the traveler is at last forced to take to the water at Singapore. I chose a different way because I was powerfully attracted by the challenge of Africa, and in great awe of it too. If I could conquer Africa, I thought, I would be able to face the rest of the world with confidence. . .
I was aiming at self-sufficiency because I wanted to travel the way Livingstone did, or Columbus; as though anything could happen and all of it was unknown. It was going to be the journey of a lifetime, a journey that millions dream of and never make, and I wanted to do justice to all those dreams.
On the road to Mombasa, in Kenya, I fell in with three amiable African friends. Pius was a plump insurance salesman. Samson was a big policeman. Paul was the small, nervous manager of the BP gas station at Kibwezi. As we sat together after dark, drinking Tusker ale in the courtyard of the Currypot Hotel, Pius was trying to sell Paul a policy he couldn’t afford.
What is this insurance you are selling?” I asked Pius, lapsing involuntarily into the dialect.
“Persons are looking to me for protection of life and property,” he replied proudly.
I wondered what kind of accident was most common.
“Snakebite is a common matter. My policies are not covering for snakebite,” he added, as though this were a point in their favor.
I saw that Samson was moved by this information. He stirred and said in a surprised tone:
“What is this? You are selling accident insurance and you are not covering for snakebite?”
I was astonished myself.
“The snakebite is not an accident,” said Pius. “How can you say it is? The snake is not biting by accident. It is wanting to bite,” and to our gathering amazement he went on to state his triumphant conclusion.
“Where it is the agency of a living thing, this is not accident. That is the policy of my company.”
We all thought this outrageous.
“What about the man who was killed by a pig falling?” I cried. “The pig was kept on a balcony in Naples, and the balcony broke, and the pig fell on a pedestrian and killed him. That was an accident!”
“This was caused by persons putting pig on a balcony,” he said smugly. “Definitely this was not an accidental happening. It is all the same whether it may be a pig or a lion or a snake or what and what.”
“Well,” said Paul, “when the pig was hitting the man it may be already dead from heart attack, isn’t it. So to be killed by a dead pig is an accident.”
“There will be an inquest on the pig also, and a certificate showing time of death,” Samson contributed darkly from the shadow.
“I am not insuring for pig falls or snakebites in the Kibwezi region,” Pius said wildly. “Definitely.”
“I hope you explain all this to your clients,” I said.
“Absolutely. They like it very much,” he said.
The silliness stopped and we sank back into the peace of the Kenyan night. More Tuskers came. It seemed possible to drink any amount of beer without much effect. The table was almost invisible now under the empties, but I felt only a comfortable affection for the company and a frequent urge to visit the charcoal bed.
I think it was in Argentina that I turned professional. I had been on the road for a year; I had been very high and very low, and everywhere in between. The world no longer threatened me as it had; I felt I had the measure of it.
It must have helped that I was in horse country. I felt very much that I shared something of the gaucho’s view of the world, and my seat certainly fitted my saddle as closely as his. Riding the bike was as natural as sitting on a chair. It scarcely tired me at all. I could pack and unpack the bike with the automatic familiarity of shaving, and I did not allow the prospect of it to annoy me. The same was true for minor maintenance problems; a puncture, cleaning a chain, aligning the wheels, whatever it was, I did it without giving a thought to the inconvenience. These things were facts of life. I slept on the ground more often, and my bones began to arrange themselves accordingly. The air bed was punctured and I did not bother with it much. I had a hammock, a wonderful old hammock made for a married couple, and bequeathed to me by Lulu’s grandmother. I treasured it and used it as often as possible, finding it very comfortable.
I felt very much tried and seasoned, and no longer expected to make silly mistakes or confront unexpected hazards. I had also developed a battery of useful instincts. I knew when there were thieves around, when the bike had to be protected and when it was safe. More often than not it was safe. I knew when to expect trouble from strangers, and how to defuse it. I knew what drivers of cars and trucks were going to do before they knew it themselves. At times I think I could even read the minds of stray dogs . . .
