My Bus Trip to Ségou

Despite what most Westerners think, living in the third world isn't all horrible all the time. My exposure to the third world was as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa. There are certainly a lot of huge, fundamental forces that make life difficult in Mali. The net result is a life expectancy rate 30 years lower than in the U.S. But day to day life in a village in Mali can be nice. It's peaceful. You wake up with the sunrise. You have a clear view of the bright stars at night. You get to know goats by name. Telemarketers never call.

But travel in the third world really is horrible. Fortunately, there is sometimes a very fine line between horrible and hilarious.

A Peace Corps stint in Mali starts out with ten weeks of in-country training at a Peace Corps camp outside of Bamako, the capital. One week into training, after the fresh-faced volunteers have learned the bare essentials of living in Africa - things you would have thought we would know how to do already, like showering (but with a bucket), eating (but with your hands) and ass wiping (see previous parenthetical) - volunteers are sent off for a weekend visit with other volunteers who have been in the country for a while. This is what the Peace Corps calls the "demystification visit."

It's a good term. Demystification. The mystificated version of Peace Corps life - what you read about in Lonely Planet and daydream about recounting at sophisticated cocktail parties later in life when you're hip and successful - is supposed to be instantly transformed into the demystificated version - "holy SHIT; what have I done?" It also sends the fainter-of-heart volunteers packing for Cleveland earlier rather than later (if you ever wonder why Peace Corps houses all over the world have posters of Steven Spielberg’s 1982 "phone home" alien hanging on the walls, it's because "E.T.", in Peace Corps speak, means "early termination").

Anyway, my demystification visit was to Ségou. A Peace Corps staff member took me and five other volunteers - Matt, Misha, Andy, John and Tom - to a big dirt parking lot in Bamako and somehow figured out which bus we were supposed to get on. The bus was the sketchiest, most death trap-looking thing I had ever seen in my life. Little did I know that this would be the highest-end traveling I ever did in the country. Later trips would involve snuggling up with animals, having a wheel rip off a car, riding in the bed of an industrial dump truck, and sucking carbon monoxide two inches from where an exhaust pipe had maybe once been. Looking back, this demystification bus, with its individual seats and glass windows, would seem downright pretentious. The six of us got on the bus. Like cool fourth graders, we went straight to the back row.

The trip started off as an exciting adventure. We weren't in Kansas (or Indiana or Ithaca, NY) anymore. We clicked away on our new going-away present cameras, snapping photos of the endless, dry landscape, the mud huts, the donkey carts. We drank Peace Corps-issued bottled water. We talked about Jerry Garcia, who had just died the week before. Then, out of the blue, there was a loud KA-POW, and the front windshield of the bus shattered into a million pieces, showering glass all over the driver. The driver slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road. The other passengers glanced over towards the driver for a few seconds, then went on talking as they had been. The driver brushed himself off, smoked a cigarette, put his sunglasses back on, tied a bandana over his nose and mouth and pulled the bus back onto the road.

We couldn't believe it. If something like this had happened back in our homeland, a Fox news helicopter, a fleet of emergency vehicles, a lieutenant governor and two dozen personal injury lawyers would have been on the scene within minutes. A 60 Minutes expose and some congressional sub-committee inquiries would have followed within the week. Then there would be lawsuits, CEO press releases, workers comp claims, tell-all interviews and maybe even a book deal. But in Mali, this wouldn't even merit a longer-than-usual answer to the question "how was your trip?"

We got settled back into our seats by the rear window. It was hard to talk because of all the wind hurricaning through the bus, there being no windshield and all. But we laughed our asses off, slapped each other on the back, and were generally exhilarated to have been part of such a crazy experience. Not ten minutes later, probably because of the aforementioned skin-peeling wind raging through the bus, the back window ripped out of its bracket. It just popped right out - boink - landed in the road and smashed into another million pieces. Once again, everyone turned to take a quick look and went right back to their conversations. This time the bus didn't even stop. We were beside ourselves. "This is soooo insane!!!!" "No-one's even gonna BELIEVE this!!!"

But the volunteers who met us in Ségou did believe it. And they weren't that impressed. "Huh," they said, "Is it true that Jerry's dead?" "Any cute chicks in the new training group?" And that was that. We all wrote letters home about our crazy bus ride. But after a few months in the country, after we had become really, truly demystified, we stopped telling stories like that altogether. They didn't even rank. Yup, life in the third world doesn’t always suck, but travel in the third world always, always does.

Air Schadenfreude – Travels with a Decomposing Roadkill Elite Member

The days when commercial flying was glamorous and exciting are obviously long, long gone. The experience of flying went from luxurious and fun, to mundane but tolerable, and has now become an almost comic pain in the ass. Teetering perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy, airlines have to give the impression of value by charging low-seeming fares while at the same time squeezing every possible nickel out of each passenger. As with most products and services, the marginal cost of adding a passenger – the actual cost to the airline of having one more person come on board an already scheduled flight – is virtually nothing. So if a seat is available, and a person is willing to pay anything at all for it, the airline should take his money and welcome him on board. But, at the same time, an airline doesn’t want to cannibalize the rest of its sales by tempting people who would be willing to pay more for a ticket to wait and try to get a lower fare. The solution is for airlines to try to convince people that there are lots of different options available, each distinguishable from the others.

There have always been first class and coach class seats. At some point the intermediate business class arrived on the scene. Now it seems like seats on a plane have been divided up into a thousand different levels, each with a different price tag. Emergency exit row seats with extra leg room. Non-bulkhead seats with more storage for bags. Seats closer to the front of the plane. Seats just outside of the range of where you can smell the toilet. Aisle seats. Seats without a window. Seats near where the stewardess is going to stand during half the flight with her big ass in your face. And while it used to be luck of the draw where you were seated, now every minute distinction is up for auction. A strange airline lingo has evolved to try to make everyday junk sound enticing. Somehow, talking about “beverage service” and “in-flight dining offerings” must make people happier to spend nine bucks on a warm can of Bud Light and a six pack of orange peanut butter crackers.

But the most important factor in the experience of flying, much more potent than the actual physical characteristics of a seat you’re in or the services you’ve paid for, is the sense of where you stand in the hierarchy of flyers. However squished you are in your seat, whatever add-on fee you had to pay to scratch yourself while at cruising altitude, however many rain delays and runway holds and terminal changes and misplaced flight crews you have to endure, it’s all OK as long as someone else is worse off than you are. Air Schadenfreude. The mission for the airline is to make each passenger aware of what caste they are a part of and, more importantly, who among them is of a lesser order. Enter the loyalty reward program.

The airlines will never tell you this, but every person on a plane takes off and lands at the exact same time. Being bestowed with the honor of getting on the plane first really just means that you get to spend twelve extra minutes cramped in your uncomfortable seat. The twenty minute boarding ritual is a modern pageant designed to showcase to the passengers who is a member of what caste. A sort of debutante ball for overweight road warriors. The art of the membership awards program is to create an aura of exclusivity based on nothing. The fact that a lot of airlines actually lay down a red industrial carpet in their first class boarding lines is so laughably ridiculous that it almost qualifies as entertainment (except that there's no additional $6 fee for it).

The tried and true way to imply privileged exclusivity is to name a thing after a rare material. Metals have traditionally been popular. But while silver and gold and platinum status may have had some cache at some point, the words have been overused to the point of becoming not just meaningless, but almost insulting (credit card companies are the main instigators of this trend, but that's a story for another day). Even the proudest Platinum Elite member has to scratch his head when he realizes that dinner is going to be nine lightly salted peanuts in an extremely difficult to open little bag (and that's only if there's not a kid on the plane with a nut allergy). The problem now is that there are not many more rare substances whose names can be tapped. The airlines may be able to conjure up a few more exclusive categories - Hope Diamond Faberge Egg Elite Plus? Weapon-Grade Uranium Preferred? Bead of Sweat from the Furrowed Brow of the Dali Lama Select? - but at some point, they are going to hit the ceiling of elite-sounding physical substances.

There is a solution, though. Since what matters is not the intrinsic, objective level of the hierarchy, but the relative level as compared to others, it would be equally effective to start re-branding status categories at the low end. So instead of referring to the base level class simply as "coach," the low end could be pushed even lower. Even if you are a lowly Plywood Laminate member, you'd feel OK if you knew you'd be able to board the plane ahead of the Festering Flesh Wound members. And if you had purchased a Raw Unfiltered Sewage class ticket but were offered a free upgrade to a Decomposing Roadkill seat (not right next to the door of the bathroom, but still no window or ability to recline the seat), you'd feel like the king of the world.

So the next time you're stuck on a runway, 275th in line for take-off, sandwiched between two morbidly obese vacationers, wondering who really buys the automatic hot dog cooker / bun toaster from the SkyMall catalog, double check your ticket to see what your status level is. Maybe next time you can upgrade. Or at least make a creative suggestion to the stewardess on your way out for a new loyalty reward program level name.