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  WHAT GREAT WRITERS ARE SAYING ABOUT BABOONS FOR LUNCH

  I think a proper story makes us laugh or feel sad or teaches us something important. James Dorsey tells those kinds of stories.

  —Tim Cahill, cofounder of Outside magazine, author of

  Hold the Enlightenment and Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

  James Dorsey’s writing stands out…and not just because of the remote places he visits, but because of how he views the world when he gets there, and later how he shares it with his readers. Few writers understand the story arc, how we need to start somewhere to get anywhere, and in the story, “Listening to the Silence,” we witness a complete transformation. He moves from a restless, distracted trekker, to an inward looking, humbled member of the human race. From a typical tourist to a reflective man, who is, like all of us, searching, but who has found more than many have. His writing always provides not only a glimpse of the outside, but an endearing look at the inside, what he is thinking, and this adds a richness that few authors attempt.

  —Max Hartshorne, editor and publisher of GoNomad.com

  These stories are a reminder to us all that there is more to this world than what we see on TV news. Thank goodness! That there are welcoming and warm hearts in every corner happily willing to accommodate a wayfarer who sees them with open eyes and mind. Dorsey’s Tales give us permission to be silly, soulful, and serendipitous on this adventure we call life, and a reminder of the transformative power of travel on us and on our misconceptions.

  —Kimberley Lovato, travel journalist,

  author of Walnut Wine and Truffle Groves

  Whether dodging poop balls hurled by resident monkeys of a Burmese Monastery, or reflecting on the collective consciousness of mankind, while visiting a shaman in Northwestern China, award-winning author James Michael Dorsey has opened his heart and mind to the cultural pulse of the societies he has encountered. Baboons for Lunch is a fascinating, moving, and memorable read.

  —Darrin DuFord, author of Breakfast for Alligators

  and Is There a Hole in the Boat?

  These travel stories are big, burly, and bold—rather like James Dorsey. He also exudes humility and kindness. In Baboons for Lunch Dorsey masters crafting the perfect sentence and spinning an enthralling yarn. He lures us to faraway places. “At this bend of Mali’s Niger River the lethargic water resembles dark roasted coffee as it slowly meanders on toward the fabled city of Timbuktu.” (“Jordan’s Bull”)

  In “From the Ashes”: “The smoke of wood fires dulls the sunrise, silhouetting the spires of Angkor Wat as if in an impressionist painting, and as the sun climbs, I watch their hazy shadow retreat from my feet like an ebbing tide.”

  Dorsey’s stories are like inviting cave mouths, yawning wide with promises of crystals, bats, and mystery, with characters both charming and eccentric. Can I resist not diving into, “Breaking Bread in Kansas”: “In far Northwestern China, where a shark fin outline on a map punches Russia in the belly and divides Kazakhstan from Mongolia, invisible spirits and deities roam the land.”

  James Dorsey’s storytelling casts a spell that is poetic, funny, and poignant. His travels take us on sweeping adventures most of us will never experience.

  —Lisa Alpine, author of Wildlife: Travel Adventures of a Worldly Woman

  A master storyteller, James Dorsey took me from one side of the world to the other with this collection of travel tales. Edgy, descriptive, hold your breath writing. Once you begin reading, this bastion of the American travel narrative will steal your afternoon. Pull up an armchair and enjoy the journey.

  —Amy Gigi Alexander, explorer, writer,

  publisher of Panorama Journal

  As the editor of Perceptive Travel I’ve had the pleasure of publishing some of James’ stories—a few appear in this book—and I always know that what he sends me won’t be boring. A true explorer with more courage to face the unknown than most 20-somethings, he throws himself headlong into each situation and puts his faith in his newfound cast of local characters. With a keen eye and the patience to listen, he will continue to pile up writing awards on his memento-crowded desk back home.

  — Tim Leffel, editor of Perceptive Travel

  Ancient Societies, nomadic people: this is the travel world of cultural explorer James Dorsey. Delving into unchartered territory seems only commonplace for the curious Dorsey. The storyteller takes us to undiscovered lands, the likes of hidden regions so far from the commonplace tourist trail, excavating deep into the far regions of the Manyara Highlands that conquer western Tanzania, where he has an astounding interaction with Hadzabe Bushmen. Dorsey weaves tales of Africa that conjure up Stanley and Livingstone, interactions with delicate vanishing civilizations that few of us will ever experience.He enlightens and leaves us lingering for the serendipitous moments of travel, far from the average tale. Life lessons exquisitely told by the humanizing pilgrim author lead us down a path that involves, clans, tribes, and rare minglings, far from the human eye. The astute chronicler, Dorsey rolls the dice on life and lost societies, and has truly come out the winner.

  —Nick Kontis, author of Going Local

  When you read James Dorsey’s book, Baboons for Lunch, be prepared to wander off the beaten path. This is a beautifully written travel memoir that explores the far reaches of the planet, from Africa to Asia, Alaska to South America, and even to mythical Timbuktu. From the humorous, to the sublime, Dorsey’s prose covers the terrain of intuitive travel, and a life examined and well lived. James Dorsey is a unique and gifted writer, a nineteenth century adventurer trapped in the body of a twenty-first century writer. I suspect we haven’t heard the last of James Dorsey’s tales of exploration. A must read for travel enthusiasts and those who love a good Sir Richard Burton-like tale to stir the imagination.

  —Tor Torkildson, series editor of The Walkabout Chronicles

  ALSO BY JAMES MICHAEL DORSEY

  Tears, Fear and Adventure

  (30 Years of Travel Off the Beaten Path)

  Vanishing Tales from Ancient Trails

  Copyright © 2018 by James Michael Dorsey

  All Photos Copyright © 2018 by James Michael Dorsey

  Travelers’ Tales and Solas House are trademarks of Solas House, Inc., Palo Alto, California. travelerstales.com | solashouse.com

  Cover Design: Kimberley Nelson

  Cover Photograph: © James Michael Dorsey

  Interior Design and Page Layout: Howie Severson

  All photos by James Michael Dorsey

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Dorsey, James Michael, 1949- author.

  Title: Baboons for lunch : and other sordid adventures : a collection of personal narratives / by James Michael Dorsey.

  Description: Palo Alto, California : Travelers’ Tales, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017052524 (print) | LCCN 2018002856 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609521264 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609521257 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Dorsey, James Michael, 1949---Travel. | Travel--Anecdotes. | Travelers--Anecdotes.

  Classification: LCC G465 (ebook) | LCC G465 .D67 2018 (print) | DDC 910.4--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052524

  Printed in the United States

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to my wife and best friend, Irene.

  Without her, none of this would have ever happened.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Preface

  Introduction

  PART ONE: Humorous Travels

  Monks and Monkey Poop on the Mountain

  Me and Tea in Burma

  Commies, Crickets, and Kitties in China

 
; Burrowing Beneath Budapest

  Mekong Moonshine

  PART TWO: Discoveries and Revelations

  Jordan’s Bull

  From the Ashes

  My Maasai Night

  My Mexican Bus

  A Life Not Chosen

  PART THREE: Adrenalin

  Common Ground in the Kasbah

  To Live or Die in the Danakil

  Conversations with a Caveman

  PART FOUR: Emotional Journeys

  A Kiss for the Condemned

  A Stone for Henry Leman

  Homecoming

  Limping Home from Kashgar

  Death and Remembrance

  PART FIVE: Personal Stories

  Photo Ops with Buddha

  Breaking Bread in Kanas

  Kingpin

  Of Email and Kings

  The Sahara Dialogues

  Walking with Markus

  The Last Muezzin of Timbuktu

  PART SIX: Personal Essays

  Listening to the Silence

  Thoughts of a World Traveler

  Travels with Layla

  Until the Next Journey

  About the Author

  Author’s Preface

  As a young child, I preferred watching travel programs on television to playing with my friends, and each month I waited for the latest issue of National Geographic to take me to faraway lands.

  My child’s mind understood little of what I was seeing or reading, but that did not matter. They were exotic images that stirred something inside of me that I knew would take me to those places one day.

  That was long before the term “adventure travel” had entered the general lexicon, because international air travel was in its infancy and the world was still recovering from a world war. Somehow, over the years, I managed to merge a talent for story telling with my lust for wandering, and joined the ranks of those known as travel writers.

  Now I’m willing to concede that storytelling is most likely not the worlds’ oldest profession, but I believe it to be a close second.

  Most of us know what the oldest profession is generally considered to be, but I would wager the first storyteller was the fellow who just finished utilizing that profession and wanted to brag about it to his male friends.

  Since none of us were present when the first story was told, we can really only speculate about its origin, but, it probably happened not long after mankind realized that making sounds gave weight to thought. If you are Christian the first story was told by Eve to Adam when she said it was okay to eat that apple. That was the beginning of fiction. For others, the first story was probably told around a fire inside a cave and might have gone something like this, “long ago and far away…”

  No? Well, consider this.

  You are probably thinking about that first story now and maybe even smiling, because a good story should inform and entertain while provoking thought. If you throw in “educate” you’ve got a very cool definition.

  Fortunately for us storytellers, the Mesopotamians got tired of simply talking and conjured up the written word around 5,000 years ago, and that created a whole new profession: Writer.

  I have always thought of myself as a storyteller first and a writer second, due to a lack of formal education in the latter, but, if I am a writer at all, my stories have been about my travels, so call me a travel writer.

  Travel writing is big business these days, even though it took a while to stand shoulder to shoulder with its haughtier cousin…li-ter-a-ture…but, acknowledgment is confirmation. Today, travel writing holds its place among the very best literature, and many of its practitioners rank among the finest writers on Earth. But, this travel writer would argue that our kind has been enlightening and entertaining the world from the very early days.

  As proof, I would offer Pausanias who left behind a most readable travelogue of his Greek homeland back in the second century. Granted, since then, almost eight centuries passed before we got the first Lonely Planet Guide, but, travel writing really gained some altitude in 1145 when Ibn Jubayr, hailing from what is now modern Spain, published his travel journals to great public acclaim. If only he had some slides to show with them. That account was most likely read by another Ibn, named Battuta, who spent the following 30 years roaming the then known world and sharing it with one and all in his epic work, Rihlah, the Arabic word for “journey.” It is still popular today. After Mister Battuta, our kind proliferated like rabbits.

  From the double Battutas to Mark Twain, from Freya Stark to Tim Cahill, travel writers have been capturing our planet, its places and people, in words, and bringing all of it home to those who are unable, unwilling, or simply disinclined to venture forth on their own. Travel writers are artists who have chosen words as their medium rather than paint or clay, and whose work will stand the test of time just as the works of Michelangelo and Bernini.

  To those among you who prefer an armchair to an airline seat, I say, “Bravo!” I have always hated crowds when I travel, and the fewer of us there are out there, the more of you there are to buy our books about where you have not been. And to those hardcore travelers among you who do journey into the world and still read other peoples’ stories about where you have been, God bless you!

  But whether you are a world cruiser or couch potato, please consider why travel is so important. It is easy to form a stereotype of someone from a thirty-second sound bite on the evening news, but difficult to hate that same person when you have shaken their hand and looked them in the eye. To quote the venerable Mr. Twain, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”

  For me, travel has always been a learning process in my continuing education. It has also been the great equalizer and antidote to a privileged Western lifestyle. While I would not want to trade places with someone who lives in a mud or grass hut, I have yet to meet a person who lived in one who would prefer my life to their own. Travel has taught me that wherever we come from, whatever our social status, our home is our home and no one way of living is any better than another; they are all simply different.

  Travel has shown me that some of the most materially poor are among the happiest and most spiritually blessed of people, and many have made me think long and hard about my own life and how I live it, while a few of them have actually enlightened me enough to make personal changes. Travel has taught me to slow down and appreciate the world around me. It has gifted me with the ability to see a ballet in the jump of a fish, and hear an aria in the chirp of a cricket.

  Travel has taught me not to judge people by the color of their skin or the way they dress, because that guy sleeping under the overpass may be a down on his luck astrophysicist, and the girl serving your chili fries might be a great poet.

  There are countless cultures out there right now that will disappear with little of the world ever knowing they existed, and they are doing so at an alarming rate. The great anthropologist Wade Davis has suggested that the final speaker of a language passes from this earth every week, and when that happens, it takes an entire culture with it. That, to quote an old African saying is, “like a library burning.” The death of each of these cultures leaves a hole in our collective consciousness, and while the current world order is in no immediate threat of collapse, each time one small part of it goes; it tears a page from the story of mankind.

  I have spent two thirds of my life wandering the most remote places in order to meet my brothers and sisters, learn about their lives, and to share them with interested readers. If by “walking a mile in their shoes,” I have stirred your imagination enough for you to want to go and see new places for yourself, then I have been successful.

  So, I am a storyteller and these are my stories. Their real success is if you, the reader, enjoy them. They span almost four decades of my wandering, mostly in places few others wish to go. The more I have traveled the more I have developed a sens
e of obligation to share what I have experienced, especially from places few others have seen. Visiting remote cultures, mostly those with no written language, has given me a sense of purpose to provide such people with a voice, even though it is a tiny one, it is a voice to tell the world, “We exist!”

  Now come with me and I will take you around the world.

  Introduction

  James Dorsey is a rare combination: swashbuckling adventurer and spiritual seeker, whose immersion in the traditions, histories, and people of places near and far, ignite transformation over and over again.

  Infused with humor, insight, and heart, each story contains a scene when time slows and James goes deep into the moment to truly transport readers. We swelter in the Danakil Desert, shiver on a ledge in a cave underneath Budapest, gaze at the stars above Kilimanjaro, and face a shrieking baboon in Tanzania.

  But this book does much more than merely transport. In Baboons for Lunch, during the day we hang out with ancient tribesmen and wise elders, ascend a staircase {under unique fire}in Burma, meet a monk at Angkor Wat who survived the Khmer Rouge, are pursued through the Marrakech souk, and imbibe with a bootlegger in Laos and a Russian grandmother. And at night, the characters, images, and scenes that so often haunt Dorsey’s dreams now visit ours as well and we become as James writes, “Captured by a vortex beyond comprehension.”

  —Erin Byrne,

  author of Wings: Gifts of Art, Life and Travel in France

  editor of Vignettes and Postcards from Morocco

  editor of Vignettes and Postcards from Paris

  PART ONE

  Humorous Travels

  Techno monks

  Monks and Monkey Poop on the Mountain

  At first sight, the temple on the mountain seemed a folk tale come to life.

  On my journey through Burma, the gleaming temple on the rock that guards Mount Popa, had become my challenge, my grail, my pilgrimage, and there it towered above me like a finger of God pointing toward heaven.