Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Tight spots in foreign places: Travels in post-colonial lands

Sunday, April 15, 2001

Yak Pizza to Go: Travels in an age of Vanishing Cultures and Extinction ,

by Phil Karber, Minerva Publishing Co., 445 pages, with 32 illustrations and 11 maps, $24.95

Review by Billy D. Higgins

Special to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Fort Smith native Phil Karber prefers to travel alone. He likes his chances of seeing inside vanishing cultures better that way. Three decades ago, during the Vietnam War, Karber had just turned 18 when the U.S. Army sent him to Ramason Station, an intelligence-gathering base of the Thai-Laotian border. He served as a clerk-typist and copied into a notebook all new words that he encountered.

When the tour of duty ended, Karber passed up a C-130 flight out. With duffel bag and dog-eared notebook in hand, he boarded a train for Bangkok, a Thai ex-girlfriend in hot pursuit.

Thirty years later, having set foot in seven continents and eaten at least that many yak pizzas, Phil Karber has produced his first volume of stories. Published by Minerva and illustrated with the authors's photographs, the book opens with a 1997 visit to old army haunts in South Vietnam. Karber rented car and driver for a trip into rice paddy country, where a chilling altercation with Communist militiamen quickened his pulse. Such risky incidents spice the travels of Karber, who tackles his self-designed and often rigorous itineraries armed with wit, camera and instincts for conversation.

His humor eases him through a few tight spots in foreign places. Ultra-curious, Karber pores over literature, geography, anthropology and political economy of regions that he plans to visit. He travels, thus steeped, seeking out the people, places and ironies that a tinseled world normally overlooks.

Karber set out from Hanoi ("a throbbing farrago of old world Asian charm visibly imprinted with Sino-Viet tradition, polished and overlaid in French provincial elegance") to visit Dien Bien Phu. Hiring a driver, Giao, and his Russian jeep, Karber journeyed far into the interior mountains where the French built the post-World War II stronghold that the thought would reassert their colonial empire in Indochina. En route he encounters hamlets of Black Thai and Hmong people, rope suspension bridges, micro-hydropower generators and grass-roofed guest houses that feature Coke, 7Up and Tiger Beer to wash away the road dust.

Occasionally in such native quarters, his hosts, older Vietnamese men sporting blue French berets, broke out the tobacco for "a brain-jarring dose of nicotine from a water pipe."

Karber's knack for transcending language barriers and his openness inspire confidence among ordinary village people who are shy, or suspicious or aghast at tour-group-insulated foreigners.

After a few days and nights on the road, Karber reached Dien Bien Phu. His account of the geography and history of the epic 1954 battle between the French and the Vietminh gives his readers fresh insights into colonialism and struggles in Southeast Asia, a morass that eventually included the United States.

Near the Chinese-Vietnamese border lies the cave of Pac Bo that once sheltered Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the North Vietnam during its war with America. As a young man in the period between the two World Wars, Ho Chi Minh worked on ships and at odd jobs picking up English, French, German, Mandarin Chinese and Russian. In London and Paris, he learned about Lenin. Straddling Lenin Stream, Pac Bo provides a backdrop to Karber's flashbacks on the life of the shadowy, determined man who was responsible for unifying Vietnam under Communist rule.

In Uganda, Karber joined in a budget safari to see the mountain gorillas of the Virunga National Park. Karber relates the natural history of gorillas and the political history of Uganda, which includes the infamous reign of self-proclaimed heavyweight champion Idi Amin.

The night before climbing slippery volcanic slopes in the hope of seeing gorillas, Karber zipped his way out of his pup tent on nearby Traveler's Rest Hotel, established in 1950 by a German, Walter Baumgartel. Karber wanted to meet Baumgartel, who years ago first contacted paleontologist Louis Leakey about recognizing the worth of a species so close in evolution to humans. Leakey responded to the innkeeper's alert by recruiting Dian Fossey to study the Virunga gorillas. Karber was late by one year, Baumgartel having just died in Germany but not before writing his own book on gorillas.

As a stopover on the way to the Galapagos Islands, Karber and his wife, Joellen, landed at the airport in Quito, Ecuador. They were met by "a tour operator with an uncanny likeness to a young Dan Aykroyd [who] like many European guides we've met in the developing world affected the can-do bravado and skin-deep mystique of a Kenyan cowboy. He gave us a ride ... in his gadget-encumbered Jeep - whip antennas, cell phones, radio, dash-mounted jumbo steel flashlight and roof netting for maps with a short-necked lamp for reading them, while sporting his yellow and black 'Zero Latitudes' jacket, the bumblebee look."

The next day the Karbers flew 600 miles due west to the Galapagos, "the fabled islands of Darwinian legend," landing at Balra airport, which was built by the United States in 1942 to guard the Panama Canal. Karber's accounts of skin diving with sea lions and of Charles Darwin's penumbras entertain and edify. Readers are treated to essays on "The Origins of 'Going Postal'" and "Adam and Eve in the Galapagos," the latter an amazing whodunit murder mystery played out on these remote islands fated to become the "flywheel for evolution."

On a trip to the interior of Madagascar, Karber explored cultural artifacts and biological oddities of the world's fourth largest island. Before reading Yak Pizza to Go , who would have already known that lemurs are found only on Madagascar and Comoros, have round, bewitching eyes, and leap incredible distances and sing, and that at least one species mates for life?

One wonders how well Karber's digestive tract weathers the fare and the swill that he writes about. Take, for instance, his night on the town with friends, the town being actually a village, Le Mat, five miles from the center of Hanoi, where the restaurant of choice served fresh cobra.

"We were give a chance to hold the snakes and become more intimate with our dinner, providing a final live photo-op." The restaurant, fortunately, served rice whiskey to steady the nerve and dull the memory. By comparision, yak pizza in a Lhasa hole-in-the-wall seems downright appetizing.

Always with discerning purpose in mind, but spontaneous and slyly humorous, too, Karber plunges us into post-colonial lands, where meeting the daily necessities of life far from Western comforts can be a bit of a eye-opener to the modern person. Yet compulsive travelers like Karber who savor the getting there as much as the destination and who write well command one of literature's most delightful (and informative) genres. Readers who enjoy wow-packed adventure travel books will be eagerly anticipating their time with Yak Pizza to Go .

(Billy D. Higgins is an instructor of history and geography at Westark College in Fort Smith.)

The Dallas Morning News

By MICHAEL PRECKER

Texas Living

07/31/2001

Phil Karber could have stayed in the oil and gas business and kept on "piling up money," as he puts it. But there was a whole world to see, with time running out – for him and the world.

So five years ago, at age 44, the Arkansas native moved to Kenya and then to Vietnam, using both as bases to get off the beaten path and pile up life adventures.

"It's much easier to do than most people think," says Mr. Karber, on the phone from a remote hotel on the Vietnam/Cambodia border.

"I came from the same sort of insulated world that most people in business come from. You get up and go to work 49 weeks a year. The kids play ball and go to camp, and you think you're locked in. But you don't have to be."

Thanks to e-mail, Mr. Karber could keep in touch with friends back home and share his yarns of scouting mountain gorillas in Uganda, eating fresh cobra in Vietnam, hanging out with lemurs in Madagascar – and chatting up interesting people along the way. Their responses prodded him to chronicle his journeys in a travel book with a memorable name: Yak Pizza To Go! (Minerva, $24.95)

Yes, he's had a few (Lhasa, in Tibet, offers some of the best). Mr. Karber picks them any time over continental cuisine at the conventional destinations of American tourists.

"I love all those places – Paris, the British Museum," he says. "But they're not going anywhere. I really think it's important to get to the more remote Third World destinations while these cultures are still thriving. Until you start visiting some of these places, you don't realize how fast they're changing."

There are plenty of examples, from threatened species such as mountain gorillas to distinct societies being swallowed up in Vietnam and Tibet to the recent destruction of ancient statues by the Muslim fundamentalist rulers of Afghanistan.

"It's such a fabulous learning experience," Mr. Karber says. "When I go somewhere, I really absorb it. It's like the way some people approach mechanical things. You can't describe to them how it works. You have to show it to them.

"For me, it's the same way with travel," he says. "I just have to be somewhere and smell it and taste it. Once you get a sense of how that works, you get hooked."

The author, who first saw Southeast Asia courtesy of the U.S. Army, caught the travel bug early. He acknowledges he had more advantages in his quest than most.

Trained as an accountant, he wound up working in the oil and gas business in Fort Smith, Ark.

"I'd spend six months reading about some place and then I'd take all my vacation time to go there," he says. "That's sort of what I lived for."

Mr. Karber also wound up with enough of a stake in several companies that he could step off the work-vacation-work treadmill. After his children finished school, he could make a clean break. An old friend was beckoning the single dad to Nairobi, Kenya, where she ran a health program for women (the two now live in Hanoi, Vietnam).

"I'm not wealthy, but I figured if I managed my investments right I wouldn't have to work again." he says. "So when I announced I was going to leave my job and marry a woman in Africa, some people were shocked. It was like I was telling them I didn't want to be in their world anymore. It wasn't a betrayal or anything. It's just where I needed to be."

There are less drastic paths to discovering the world, and Mr. Karber hopes his book will encourage business travelers to take a few tentative steps.

You can pick out a new and different destination for the next vacation, or volunteer for an overseas program, or just sneak in an extra day for yourself on a business trip, avoiding Hiltons and McDonald's along the way.

"It's a breath of fresh air," he promises.

South China Morning Post

Ed Peters

Yak Pizza To Go!

by Phil Karber

PHIL KARBER IS A former US Army serviceman and it's tempting to think of him - with a nod to Graham Greene - as the Unquiet American. Unquiet because not only does this native of Arkansas have a lot to say about what he sees on his travels, but much of what he sees disturbs him.

Karber is in the fortunate position of being financially secure, in his early 40s, fit enough to globe trot reasonably rough and be recently married to one Joellen Lambiotte who is posted to Africa and Asia, where he accompanies her as 'dependent spouse'. From these bases he sets off on a fairly well-beaten tourist track: the pyramids in Egypt, the ancient city of Petra in Jordan, Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields in Cambodia, hill tribes in Indo-China, pagodas in Burma, the jungles of Nepal. There's also a side trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos.

Karber is a curious traveller, always well-informed about where he goes and eager to highlight the problems he observes. He's extremely well-read - in the space of a dozen pages he refers to books by Norman Lewis, Devla Murphy, John Steinbeck and Jon Swain - and generally knowledgeable, so he is no innocent abroad.