Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip by Rogers Jim

Author:Rogers, Jim [Rogers, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

The only night Paige cried from fear was the night we were forced by an Angolan army general to camp with his soldiers on the front line they were holding in their war with UNITA rebels.

It was when we reached the top of the hill that everything was made clear to us. About three hundred meters beyond the hill was a bridge. And the reason we had been refused passage was that by the time we arrived, the bridge, as it was every night, had been mined. They mined the bridge to prevent the rebel forces from either crossing it or mining it themselves. They removed the mines every morning. Had we crossed the night before, as the young soldier had been prepared to let us do before his commanding officer intervened, we would have been blown to pieces.

We met the general—more soldiers, more Polaroids—crossed the bridge, and drove into Benguela, a glorious town, uncluttered by foreigners, where we ate wonderful seafood. (Along this stretch of coast one finds the largest crabs of their kind in the world, and, largely un-harvested because of the war, they are available, all you can eat, for a dollar.) As we traveled farther south, we traversed some of the most beautiful countryside we had seen on the whole trip, completely untouched, untrammeled by tourists (as I suppose one would expect of a war zone).

The border crossing into Namibia, the former South-West Africa, took a matter of minutes. The customs agent seemed excited to have us. The immigration agent actually said, “Welcome to Namibia. I hope you will bring investors.” He did not know I was an investor; he was simply giving voice to government policy. The country’s openness to investment was sincere and had trickled down to the grass roots. Our reception stood in stark contrast to the treatment we received in Mali, for example. There we had come upon a billboard encouraging investment in the country, and our cameraman had been arrested for filming it. We had been subjected to more harassment at the hands of the police in Mali than we had anywhere other than Georgia and Russia. In Namibia, they actually seemed glad to have us there.

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