Ted Botha

For every thousand travelers who avoid a country because it's too dangerous, there's someone who wants to go there and see what all the fuss is about

Two weeks before leaving for western Uganda, I got the news. Eighty schoolchildren living near the town of Fort Portal had been locked inside their dormitory by a group of guerrillas known as the Allied Democratic Forces and were then burnt alive. A hundred other pupils were kidnapped and marched into the Ruwenzoris, where they were to be used by the ADF as slaves and fighters.

The atrocity, which I heard about from a source in East Africa, never made it to NPR or The New York Times. When I mentioned the glaring omission to friends, they were incredulous but for another reason altogether. "And you're still going there?" they asked. It had never even crossed my mind to do otherwise. No bandit was going to put me off my holiday. In fact, the threat of armed thugs lent my destination an unexpected air of excitement. Some may think me foolhardy, but I'm by no means the only traveler who is lured by risky destinations. To quote the essayist Lance Morrow: "Real travel is work, and may profit from an edge of danger."

It's a flip side of travel I indulged in most foolishly in the late eighties. I had decided to go overland from Cape Town to Cairo, not a particularly wise thing to do at the time. Relations between South Africa and the rest of the continent were bad, so you had to take precautions that to an outsider would seem paranoid. I not only kept my passport free of incriminating stamps and changed placenames in my diary, but even scraped the place of origin off my toothpaste tube. However, there was something I couldn't hide: I had the same surname as he South African president, who, a week before I was to set off, sent warplanes to bomb Harare. As it happened, the Zimbabwean capital was to be my first stop across the border, and on the train north I kept cursing my name. I might as well have been an American with the surname Hitler blithely hitchhiking across Western Europe in 1946.

In most countries, I had to endure countless questions and lengthy hours of immigration officers disappearing into back rooms with my documents. Although it became less daunting each time it happened - and I made it through to the other side - I knew that the hardest country lay ahead: Tanzania. The immigration officials there were so thorough that they had gained a reputation across the continent: If you'd been anywhere south of the Limpopo River, they'd find out. While this made Tanzania scary, it also added an inexplicable allure. For the first time in my life I was confronted by the relation between geographic prohibition and desire. The more off-limits a place, the more some travelers want to get there. (Who didn't dream of going behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War? How many Americans don't continue to flout the ban on travel to Cuba? As for the Forbidden City, its very name begged penetration from the moment the first foreigner heard its name uttered.)

To improve my chances, I chose the smallest and most obscure borderpost at which to enter Tanzania. It was so far off the beaten track, used only by an occasional trucker taking a backroad through Central Africa, that it still had an aura of the otherworldly about it. I was sure that whoever was manning the borderpost would know little about politics, and would care even less. But the two men inside the little shack were so up-to-date on South Africa, they could have been receiving daily bulletins from the politburo in Dar es Salaam.

One of them had hardly opened my documents when he uttered my name and then, making the nominal connection, added, "South Africa." Within minutes, he had stamped the words 'Prohibited Immigrant' across an entire page of my passport while his colleague irritably fidgeted with his revolver. Then they both began shouting at me, and I was unceremoniously pushed out onto the 50-mile dirt road leading back south through no-man's-land into Malawi. My heart was pounding with fear, but also with another feeling I couldn't immediately identify. As I carried on walking, nervously waiting for bullets to start kicking up dust around me, I thought about the subterfuge, the anxiety, and the trepidation of the past two weeks. It was only much later that the truth sunk in: Being evicted from Tanzania has got to be as exciting as getting into it. In fact, it's even better. Crossing into that country years later without anyone so much as batting an eyelid just didn't have the same impact as being confronted by gun-wielding officers and then being kicked out.

Over the years I have met numerous travelers who've had to deal with a lot worse than extradition. They have been locked in prison and had AK-47s stuck in their faces. And rather than being put off by it, many of them are won over, choosing for their holidays São Tomé rather than Santorini, Monrovia not Moravia, Tirana instead of the Tirol. They have experienced the traveler's version of a sensation Winston Churchill put into words at least one hundred years ago.

"Nothing in life is so exhilarating," he wrote, "as to be shot at without result."

Tony Horwitz, author of Baghdad Without a Map, expresses it another way: "There's an insane adrenaline rush in vicariously experiencing danger." Journalist Robert D. Kaplan, who has also traveled through the Middle East as well as to numerous other global hot spots, says the effect can be almost addictive. While he was covering the Kurdish war against the Soviets in the 1980s, he repeatedly saw how some reporters would be away from the battlefront for only two days before they got the urge to go back again. "They weren't happy unless they were inside."

The nature of their profession brought Kaplan and Horwitz mostly into contact with foreigners like themselves - journalists rather than sojourners, although the boundary between the two often got blurred. Some travelers turned out to be "journalists in disguise," while Horwitz recalls meeting a traveler who eventually swapped his bag for a notepad, only to almost get killed covering the factional war in Somalia. Occasionally, though, the travelers had no agenda other than being on the road to Freetown, Tehran, or Phnom Penh. "I've met very brave backpackers," says Kaplan. "They put up with danger because I think they just love it."

The same way some people revel in a day at the Uffizi or springtime in Paris, there is a breed who prefer to stay close to, if not directly in, harm's way. They achieve it by design (book a tour of, say, Sri Lanka or Chad) or simply by leaving it up to fate (hitchhike in Kashmir). State Department warnings don't deter them, because they believe that Tbilisi and military-controlled Myanmar are as much a part of the travel experience as Tokyo at cherry blossom time. They conveniently forget the young Norwegian beheaded in Afghanistan, the bird watchers taken by FARC in Columbia, the four tourists recently killed during a botched mass kidnapping in Yemen.

What motivates danger travelers is often no more than a desire to steer clear of the world's well-trodden routes. "The more simulated and regimented life and travel become," Kaplan says, "the greater the need to escape." Avoiding the global village, however, invariably means heading into its wrong neighborhoods. The thrill then is to discover not only a new state but also a new state of mind, to go not just to the edge of the world, but to the very edge.

Political flashpoints are the more obvious destinations, although nature can take you just as close to the precipice. The writer-naturalist Redmond O'Hanlon has proved this in three books, his most recent, No Mercy, being about a trip up the Zaire River. A British mechanic I met not long ago traveled the massive waterway at the same time as O'Hanlon, but to a different part and with nowhere near as much preparation or belated recognition. (As Kaplan notes, danger travelers seldom write for publication - while those who do become journalists - which means their stories, sadly, go untold.)

On a whim the mechanic bought a dugout canoe in Kisangani and, never having paddled a day in his life before, headed south to a part of the river that the ferries didn't ply. Every night he made sure to go ashore when he saw a village, where he would look for the local chief, and then sleep there. "I had learnt a few words, enough to make contact. I knew that if I stayed out on my own, I would have been killed - by crocodiles, hippos, soldiers, or cannibals, but by something."

Besides escaping the humdrum, there's another, less obvious reason some travelers push the envelope: a desire to see war firsthand. During his travels, Horwitz noticed a similarity between many of the itinerants he met: "They are young, male, romantic, and they think they're bulletproof." But for their lack of uniforms and weapons, they could have been soldiers. "We are the first generation of American males who haven't had to serve in the military. There's a curiosity to know what it's like."

Horwitz himself found that he would sometimes do things - such as going into a minefield on the Saudi border - not because he wanted to but because of curiosity and peer pressure. "As far as physical danger goes, I'm a chicken, but I still find it fascinating."

He stopped tempting fate after witnessing the carnage of Bosnia, for as exhilarating as it might be to survive being shot at, a part of you inevitably gets wounded. "There's a decadence about going to these places," he says. "You can walk away - whether it's from a Sudanese refugee camp or a bombed-out building in Beirut. You start to get a little numb. Then you are left with disgust and fear." Horwitz's latest book still deals with warfare, but it hasn't required him to walk through any minefields - it's about the Civil War.

By the time I finally reached Fort Portal, the site of the huge kidnapping, I'd had two weeks on the road through East Africa to steel myself for any danger the ADF rebel group might throw my way. Trouble is, there was no trouble at all. In fact, I never even heard a bullet, let alone got to dodge one. The kidnappings I'd heard about via phone in New York several weeks earlier were still the main story in the news, but it was for a reason other than I'd imagined.

An article on the front page of the daily Monitor explained it all: government troops had that very week gone into the Ruwenzoris, clashed with the ADF, and had set the one hundred captured children free. An incident which had begun so murderously had reached a very happy ending. I came to Fort Portal expecting danger and instead met joy. So, in the end, there was a sense of exhilaration about my destination, even though it wasn't exactly the kind the adventurous young Churchill might have had in mind.

Commissioned and bought by Condé Nast Traveler , but never ran because it was considered too sensitive.