Lomé, Togo

I am in Togo. I am not really sure why.

I actually know, or once knew, a fair bit about Togo. I knew the political parties, the important dates and places, and the human rights violations. They were one of our biggest constituencies at the time, Togolese asylum seekers. I remember one guy in particular, whose case dragged on for months, as I sat with him through re-interview after re-interview, trying to put together the missing pieces, the strained itinerary that led him from somewhere near where I am typing right now, over continents and across oceans, all the way to the UNHCR offices at 250 Shanghai Street, a half-hour taxi ride from where I grew up.

But I am not here, in Togo, to flip a script. As interesting as I found interviewing asylum seekers, it doesn’t exactly make you want to visit the places they were running from. And as far I knew before opening up the Togo section of my West Africa Lonely Planet, there wasn’t much to visit here anyway. Even after opening up the Togo section, there doesn’t seem to be much to visit. It’s not you, though, Togo. It’s me.

And yet here I am, here in Togo, just because.

Just because it was somewhere else to go, another border to cross. I enjoyed the volunteer gig in Ghana over the last 10 days more than I thought I would, but still would have felt cheated if I had flown all the way out here, dropped all that money on that pricey plane ticket (and a multiple-entry visa), and not gone to at least one other country, not crossed one more border. Just. One. More.

I am slightly addicted to border-crossings. I seek them out wherever I go, insisting on going overland even when it is not only more time-consuming and draining but often more expensive, too. I get a mild high whenever I enter the short--or sometimes not so short--strip of land between immigration checkpoints, always pausing to think about what happens when something happens in these no man’s lands. I am also always just a little afraid, ever ready to run through my options if they won’t take my passport, or ask for a bribe, or for whatever reason just go nuts on me for making their day.

Most of all, I am always, always in awe of how real a border crossing is, how removed it is from the newspaper headlines and presidential summits that proclaim something can be done about the way people move. Nothing gives the finger to international treaties and migration policies negotiated behind closed doors at the highest levels of diplomacy like a couple Togolese immigration officers sitting under half a wooden shack, their plastic chairs sinking into the sand as they write down my passport details by hand in a ginormous ledger book whose binding is on duct-tape life support. I get an unhappy grunt when I motion to borrow a pen to fill out the visa application. I do not borrow the pen. While I am being processed, whatever that means, dozens of others cross the line from Ghana to Togo behind me, and all the immigration officers can do is yell at them. Some stop. Some don’t.

When I pay my 10,000 CFA visa fee with a handful of small bills, the officer takes them and without a word hands them to the hustler who has been bugging me about giving me a ride into the city. Plan B begins rolling in my head, replaying the familiar, but still untested, dilemma of whether it is riskier to refuse to pay a bribe or to offer to pay a bribe. The hustler hands the officer back a nice, single 10,000 CFA bill. It turns out he is a human cash register/money changer/taxi driver dispatcher. I get dispatched, but not before my driver storms out of the car because, I gather, the hustler wants a commission from my taxi fare. The driver gets back in, everyone is still yelling, but I just want to go. So I close my door as the hustler asks me for some money, hoping very much that I am not closing it on his hand, and the driver becomes my best friend forever in the whole country as he drives away with purpose, ignoring the hustler’s repeated banging on the side of the car.

I record these details not because it is anything so crazy or out of the ordinary. I picked Togo because it was the less crazy country to go to that was adjacent to Ghana, and though each time I cross a border there is a good chance it is the only time I will ever cross that border, I know there are plenty other travelers--all of them psychotic--who do this all the time, all over the world.

No, I record all this because it is a way to relieve the exhaustion, because I am exhausted, and it is time to begin the process of accepting that really, I am just too old for this shit. Not because I think 27 is too old to be dragging yourself through dodgy border crossings. Much more because the thrill is dissipating. Instead of wanting to see more, I count down the days before I get to go home, wherever that is. The images still fascinate me, the impossibly wide and always very dusty cavern between policy and reality. The sounds, the scenes, still entice me, another slice of the human experience to fill in on this atlas, my coloring book. But the thrill; the thrill seems to be giving way to stress, to crossing over the fine line between, and yielding to frustration, to not this again, and what am I doing here, and why am I here alone?

Togo, this place where I can’t answer those questions, may just be the place where I hang up my too-worn solo travel sneakers. I am about done with this whole traveling alone deal. It’s time I take my talents to South Beach, time to stop going places just to go places, time to start going somewhere, with someone. It could be Togo, it could be Hong Kong, it could be anywhere; I still want to go everywhere. Just not like this anymore.