A few memories of past road trips on the planet
A question was recently fused in the Lonely Planet's Traveller's group: 'What is the darkest place you have ever visited'?
The word dark needs to be defined in order to answer more specifically to the question. Dark may imply something a bit scary often related to death, or simply a strange feeling in reaction to an obscure, deserted place generating such a feeling. It seems to resonate with Joseph Conrad's novel, “Heart of Darkness” (1899), which is set in central Africa.
As a traveler, I have kept some memories of a few dark places I visited in the past.
One of these places was a guided tour of the Catacombs of Paris. It was not particularly scary because there was a bunch of other people in the group. But I felt really strange to see so many skulls and bones literally stocked in piles everywhere.
I was a teenager at the time. But recently, I met someone, who actually went underneath the City of Paris on a speleologist adventure. His account took a special meaning as I had been there previously. Anyhow, I was surprised to hear that this covered a vast territory of galleries under the city, even passing under the Seine River. But the eeriest part of the account was that there are actually people living there! Some are dark artists making subterranean sculptures...
The next two dark places I ever visited were prisoners' camps, one in the Czech Republic and the other in Cambodia. It is interesting to note that one was a former Nazi camp and the other a Khmer Rouge torture prison.
As I was visiting friends in Prague, Czech Republic, I made a day trip to northern Bohemia in order
to visit the infamous Terezin concentration camp (Theresienstadt). The account of all the horrors generated by the Nazis was particularly moving and you never go out of a place like this without being deeply shaken. Talk of a dark place! I was touring the museum with a Malaysian Chinese, who had no clue of what to expect. When I saw him at the end of the tour, he was pale and said that he could actually feel the weight of all the dead spirits!
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| Czechia |
A few years later, I was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a few months after the Khmer Rouge genocide had ended. I was told to go to the Tool Sleng Genocide Museum, set in a former school in downtown Phnom Penh. Needless to say, it was a repeat of the awe I had in Terezin. I did see one of the Killing Field outside the capital. But ever since that time, I refuse to go to any of these dark places. While being in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), I had the opportunity to go and visit the Củ Chi tunnels (Viet Cong), but I turned the offer down.
After the Nazis, mankind thought that they were done with genocides but unfortunately, it was repeated in other places such as Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and even now in Myanmar!
As an expatriate, I spent a few years in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan, in Borneo. As a psychological tactic, the boss of the small company I was in, had organized a staff trip to welcome the two newcomers in the group. I was one of them.
We were a group of about ten people. The idea was to fly a small airplane into the heart of Borneo
near the source of the Mahakam River, and then go down the Mahakam on a large canoe spending a few nights in forest villages. The purpose is not to relate the whole journey but rather to introduce two occasions describing a particular feeling.
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| Map of the Mahakam in Borneo |
One of them was the first night I spent alone in a stilt-house on the riverbank. This was really in the heart of the Borneo rainforest in the 90s. The Dayaks were formerly known as head-hunters. And indeed, most houses had a few skulls at the entrance, probably from animals. At the time, many Dayak women had still long-ears even though it had been banned by the Indonesian government. It was all very picturesque in the daytime, but slightly different at night with the forest sounds!
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| The island of Borneo |
The second eerie experience dealt with the leeches. The upper section of the Mahakam is made of rapids, so you needed an experienced pilot at the back and a good watcher at the front to avoid rocks and boulders. At one point, we were asked to get off the boat and walk through the rainforest in order for the boat to go through a particularly dangerous area. The stifling humidity of the forest full of strange noises was impressive but although we had been warned about the leeches, I had no idea how they could possibly be found on the body. They often hang as thin threads from the branches and simply fall into a passing living body sliding invisibly anywhere on you. Well, once we reached the safer side of the river, we got rid of some of the protections only to discover that some leeches had been able to feed on our blood! The swollen dark nature of the leeches makes you see red...
The Indonesian archipelago has often been an occasion for many amazing experiences. But on one particular occasion has drawn me into the dark side of traveling. It happened on Sulawesi (the Celebes).
Tana Toraja (the Toraja Land) has now become a touristic hotspot. In the 90s it was only started to be
opened to the tourism industry. I took my parents, who were visiting, on a private tour out of Ujung Pandang (Makassar). The hotel was one of these picturesque ship-like stilt-houses rather typical of the Toraja culture. The effigies of the deceased are displayed on cliff balconies: a characteristics of this ethnic group. Seeing it on a picture is quite different from being right there! The Toraja are a group of locals, who literally live among the Dead! The tribe ancestors continue an afterlife among their descendants. Ethnologically speaking, this is interesting because the living learns not to be afraid of death. The Toraja are either Christians, Muslims or still follow former animist rites. Yet, another feature of this ethnic group is their association with the water buffaloes. Of course, they are not unique in this bull-like adoration. It is a common feature of all rural southeastern Asian countries. This is why most country houses have a gable ending with a V-shape symbolizing the bull's horns.
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| Map of the island of Sulawesi |
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| Picasso's Minotaur (1933) |
In all Mediterranean cultures, the bull has been a part of spirituality as an animal offered in sacrifice to the gods. As a child, Zeus was kept hidden in the Cretan mountains fed by a goat that generated the image of the Horn of Plenty. Later on, Zeus abducted Europe from the shores of Phoenicia disguised as a white bull and flew back to Crete. If you have ever wondered how to trace back the origin of the Latin bullfights, do not look any further. And Picasso had already made the connection with the Minotaur!
Whatsoever, to come back to the Toraja, their water-buffaloes were then sacrificed to the memory of the Dead. I said, then, because I believe this practice has now been prohibited. But at the time, it was a frequent occasion to be celebrated. Dozens of buffaloes were sacrificed in a blood orgy... So, the deep feeling that pervaded when I was there was one of awe. It was antagonistic both revealing an unseen curiosity and a sense of total disgust at seeing so much blood (a symbol of life) with recomposed corpses being exhibited (a symbol of death). I do not deny this is an interesting point for an ethnologist, but it is certainly not my cup of tea! To expand this ''dark'' feeling a little more, I later read the story of a French woman, who - in the early days of aviation – went on a single flying tour of the world. At one point, her aircraft had an engine trouble and she had to land in the Celebes. While the engine was being fixed, she spent a few days in the total darkness of a Toraja family's house, who were her hosts. She kept wondering why at night when sleeping, some water kept dripping on her. One day, she found out that she had been lying under the dead body of a family member, who had recently passed away!...
One summer, when I was still an undergraduate student, I traveled by land from Merida, Yucatan all the way down to Panama City. In 1973, there weren't many backpackers yet. I managed to go by land
using public buses except for the crossing of Belize, which was still called British Honduras (it became independent in 1981). So, in order to travel across the country as far as the Guatemala border, I had to hitch-hike the trucks that accepted to take a few passengers. All went ok until after Belmopan, now the capital city of Belize. All truck routes stopped at the border with Guatemala. So I had no other choice but to walk across the border and get to the nearest forest village on the other side. This is the Peten area, Central America's rainforest, where the Maya site of Tikal is located. But when I arrived at this place, it was already night and I had no other alternative to stay there until the next morning when the public bus to Flores would arrive. I was lucky to find a room in the local café, but the night I spent there, alone, in the middle of the rainforest, with no electricity, was certainly one of the best illustrations for an example of a ''dark'' place!
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| Belize & Guatemala |
This experience was repeated many years after at one end of the Fouta Djallon highlands of Guinea, near the border with Guinea-Bissau!
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| Map of Guinea-Conakry |
At the time, I was working in Guinea on the Atlantic coast near Boké on the western part of the country. A friend of mine had convinced me to accompany him on a tour of the highlands that we had locally hired with a vehicle having a driver and his assistant. There was absolutely nothing luxurious about this journey. Anyway, the day before being back, we had to spend the night in the hill town of Gaoual. But since there was no hotel around, we had to request the hospitality of the government guest hut. This was done in advance prior to our arrival. Each of us was then given a hut to spend the night. The place was filthy, I don't even remember if there was any water. But there was no electricity at night and I spent a night very similar to the one I had in the Peten Forest!
But the good thing is that I was not alone on that trip and we had some infrastructure to rely on. The next day, as we were on the dust track back to the south, we came across a group of barking Cynocephalus apes. We stopped the car. Then we saw a girl riding a bicycle going in the direction we were coming from! Now, you have to imagine this scene was happening in the middle of nowhere in the jungle with a group of apes nearby! Of course, we asked the girl if she needed any help because she actually had a problem with her bicycle. She was just by herself. She was an Asian girl living in Amsterdam cycling the area on her own! I would not call this situation ''dark'' but it was definitively surreal!
Now living in Thailand, I would like to share one more story that definitively belongs to the spheres of the ''dark'' places.
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| Door decoration at the Black House |
Chiang Rai is at the northernmost part of Thailand. This region belongs to the Lanna culture. A few kilometers north on the city, there is a place known as the Black House (Baandam, in Thai). This is one of the strangest place ever. Entirely designed by a contemporary Thai artist, it displays three main features all of them as bizarre, yet quite interesting, and truly intriguing. The wooden structures are Thai in style but seem to emphasize the usual proportions by becoming airier. They are filled with a collection of horns and animal skins or bones. Since all the buildings are mostly black in color, it is indeed in keeping with the name of the place. But there is a third element that puzzles visitors. Stones have been arranged to display giant designs showing a triangle, a spiral, a circle, or any other geometrical forms. There are no explanations but it looks like an obvious esoteric display. This is truly an illustration of another ''dark'' place.
Christian Sorand
A few interesting books regarding Borneo:
Almayer's Folly, by Joseph Conrad
Into the Heart of Borneo, by Redmond O'Hanlon
Stranger in the Forest, by Eric Hansen
