Aloha Wanderwell

EIGHT

THE LAST CHANCE TO BE FIRST

In the wake of the ordeal of Massawa, Aloha’s days aboard the Nippon would have been languid and luxurious, providing everything her half-starved ordeal aboard the Borulus did not: a clean bed, delicious food, English tea, and laundry service. The Italian staff was gallant and flattering, and treated Aloha with a “polite impetuosity” that kept her giggling. But really it was the porcelain that made her swoon.

My first request was for a bath, the passage was cleared as a steward escorted me to a spotless bagno. I found no peephole in the door, so submerged in the huge tub, the brackish water piercing like needles attacked every prickly-heat clogged pore the body over. Ah, what relief!1

When the Nippon arrived at Aden’s sun-soaked port two days later, Aloha was on deck, peering through binoculars to spot Captain Wanderwell. He eventually arrived, courtesy of a police launch, and was third up the gangway. Rather than the emotional greeting she’d imagined, Walter simply strolled towards her, grinning, and handed her a khaki skirt. Aloha looked at him and then her mouth fell open:

“You don’t mean to say . . .”

“That was just about it, half the trouble at least — you girls running around in shorts . . . . The Resident asked me to beg the young lady to wear a skirt.”2

So much trouble all because one man did not approve of women in shorts. Shaking her head, Aloha wondered if the Resident “was aware of our doorless cars!” Still, she was glad to be safely ashore in Aden, being treated “as though I owned the world” with solicitous treatment from officials who “took my new Italian passport³ [issued in Massawa] and returned it stamped.”⁴

While awaiting transportation to the subcontinent, their time in Aden passed quietly. Whether because of the oppressive heat or the knowledge that they would be moving on in two days, neither one felt inclined to any great exertions. “We live like Royalty, loung[ing] around. . . . When hunger pushes we go back into the native village and secure a couple of pounds of dates, some bread and fresh milk and return to our luxurious apartment.”⁵ And yet Aloha was not exactly satisfied. Walter spent the balance of most days leafing through ancient and derelict editions of the Saturday Evening Post, while Aloha listened to “oriental love songs” on the gramophone. “There is nothing to do. When away, I long to be with him and when I get back we bore one another.”6

Aloha passed the time filling her journal with elaborate descriptions of her surroundings, from the natives’ mud and wattle houses, to the myriad cafés where locals read Egyptian newspapers and shouted politics. She saved her kindest words for the beaches and Arab dhows of the waterfront, where she and Walter went swimming after sunset, despite warnings of sharks.

By now, Aloha had made up her mind to drive around the globe, a decision that, in 1924, was like deciding to grow feathers — bizarre and probably impossible. She was increasingly confident of her abilities. If she could handle Poland and Paris and Aden and Massawa, she could handle anything — including Joannie van der Ray. So, on May 11, Aloha and Walter left their hotel paradise and drove to Steamer Point, where they met the City of Hankow, climbed a rope onto the ship’s deck, and met the waiting captain and crew. Aloha noted that some of the officers were “unmistakably astonished to see a girl there and it [occurred] to me that Walter had not mentioned my sex when procuring the deck passage tickets and arranging with the Captain about the cars. Ha! Ha!”7 She soon demonstrated her mettle. While Walter set up his camera, Aloha arranged for the cars to be hoisted onto the ship. With ropes secured around each axle, she leapt on to the hood of Unit N^o II and, grasping one of the ropes, gave a thumbs up to the crane operator. “Then what a rush . . . up into the air with the flivvers while Walter made stills from an upper deck.”8 It was a stunt they would reprise in several countries.

The whirring eye of Prong’s Reef Lighthouse signalled their arrival at Bombay’s Alexandra Docks. It was Saturday, May 24, and the cars were packed and ready for unloading. As the boat drew into port, Wanderwell checked and rechecked that their paperwork was in order. Bombay was the gateway to the rest of Asia and the lynchpin of the Around the World adventure. Aloha was still travelling on a temporary passport, and Walter worried that some overzealous clerk might bar her from landing. Aloha’s permits were stamped without fuss, but they lingered over Wanderwell’s assorted documents until the junior official, panicked by unconventional papers, decided that someone further up the chain of command was required. “You, you must wait until Monday,” the clerk insisted.9 No relevant government official would resume work before then.

The cars and equipment could not land, but Aloha and Walter were permitted to go ashore on Sunday to collect their forwarded mail, arrange for advertising, and most crucially, book theatres. Four shows were booked for the coming week at the Madan Theatre, one of a large chain of movie houses established by Jamshedji Framji Madan, a pioneer of the Indian film industry. By the mid-1920s, the Madan organization owned 172 theatres and controlled half of the country’s box office.10 Their local dominance virtually guaranteed that the Wanderwell shows would be adequately promoted.

Pages from one of Aloha’s passports, this one issued in Bombay, India, and assigned to “Miss Idris A. Hall, alias Wanderwell,” May 28, 1924.

On Monday, Unit N^o II was unloaded at sunrise. Dangling from the crane rope and amid a whorl of curious seabirds, it was placed on the pier in expectation of Walter’s impending release. By mid-morning, however, no passport officials had arrived, so he sent Aloha into town to “wake them up.” Aloha was nervous about driving without a navigator, but directions were the least of her troubles. Before even leaving the wharf she had swerved to avoid incautious workers, dodged around wandering buffaloes and nearly collided with a “bullock cart (which) dawdled plum in front of me.” The city streets were exponentially worse, filled with ambling pedestrians, bicycles, darting children, and road-hogging carts. It didn’t help that something was wrong with the steering.

N^o II has so much compression 11 it is simply terrible to steer. In fact, I have to get right out of my seat in order to make a corner. And the heat!!! If some of those fake “Round the World” cars back in the USA had ever nearly done half of what they profess, they would not, I am certain, speak so lightly of their “3^rd trip around the globe.”

In the stress and confusion, she forgot to drive on the left-hand side of the road, which resulted in her clipping a gharry horse.¹² The driver was understandably outraged and before long “some 150 natives had gathered and . . . I could not get away!” Her luck held, however, when “a large gentleman hopped out of a car, caught the driver by the neck and hurled him across the street. That cleared the way and I proceeded.”¹³

Same passport as previous page. Note that her birthdate has been “adjusted” from 1906 to 1908.

Her errand took all afternoon. The customs house was deserted, so she attempted to gain the assistance of the American consul who happened to be napping.¹⁴ Once awakened, he informed Aloha that he would need to look into things before any action could be taken. This obliged Aloha to drive back to the customs house, where this time, officials were present and she finally discovered the real nature of the problem: they were deciding how to charge extra duties and deposits. “After some two hours of talking I persuaded [them] to allow the cars in free.”¹⁵

Bombay flung open its arms to the expedition: the cars were pampered at the Ford garage, rooms were donated by the posh Majestic Hotel, and when they visited a film lab to develop the Egypt and Aden footage, Aloha was greeted by the “large gentleman” who had come to her rescue after the gharry incident. Mr. G.W. Allan turned out to be the Agfa Film representative for India, an organization with whom Wanderwell had already established an advertising contract in Berlin. Allan’s firm provided 3,600 feet of 35 mm negative film and wrote a letter of introduction to the Agfa representatives in Hollywood.16 Within two days, the expedition had acquired bookings, accommodations, repairs, and film supplies. Only fuel was needed to carry them forward, and even this was granted by the Asiatic Petroleum Company: 100 gallons of Shell petrol in return for “displaying an advertisement of this petrol on your entire run between Bombay and Calcutta.”17 Their success was assisted by lavish newspaper coverage and headlines such as “Young Lady to Cross India by Motorcar.” “We were discovered by Bombay! The hotel gave a dance in our honour. I acquired on loan a suitable frock [sic], shoes . . . . We were swamped with invitations to be seen or be shown.”¹⁸

By June it was clear that Joannie van der Ray was not coming. Aloha later admitted in her journal that she had intercepted a letter from van der Ray for Wanderwell in Bombay but didn’t deliver it to him, leaving it at the post office marked Return to Sender.

Walter made attempts to hire local talent without success. It was time to leave Bombay, but he worried that the route ahead would prove too difficult without extra hands. Aloha felt differently. A larger crew, she pointed out, cost more and would add weight to the cars. Then there was the headache of training new members and the possibility that they would quit. Most importantly, Aloha wanted to drive N^o III on her own. It was good for publicity and it was a chance for her to accomplish something important: Aloha could become the first female to drive solo across India — no mean feat. Walter, nervous and still annoyed about van der Ray, finally agreed. They would leave on Monday.

Everybody looked dolefully at our prospect of crossing in June, the hottest month of the year, the time of fever and the peak of the monsoon. People were full of advice about drinking water and cholera and women raised their hands in horror to think of me driving a car alone and heavy tropical rains and winds . . . . It certainly didn’t look a very cheerful prospect and I looked forward to it with dread and fear, every day the heat was getting worse and worse.19

The plan was to travel an ancient highway called the Grand Trunk Road. Kipling called it “the road of Hindustan,”20 and with portions dating back 3,500 years, the road had played an important role in the political, cultural, and spiritual development of India. For all its grand history though, in 1924 vast stretches of the Grand Trunk Road were little more than dirt tracks meandering from village to village and clogged with horses, ox-carts, and barefoot pedestrians. Bridges, if they existed, were not designed to support the weight of cars, and while there were numerous caravansaries,²¹ they offered food and shelter but little else.

Their route would take them over 1,200 miles, not including detours for floods, fires, or bandits and would be run in two “laps.” The first from Bombay through Dhule, Indore, Guna, Jhansi, Agra to Kanpur; the second would commence in Allahabad and take them through Benares, Gaya, Asansol, and Calcutta.

They began on Tuesday, June 4, 1924, with Aloha in the lead. Their progress was slow, barely 15 miles in an hour but even this fell by half as night set. Aloha hunched over her steering wheel and squinted through her car’s feeble light, swerving to avoid the bullock carts that had been parked for the night in the middle of the road. The intention had been to make Nashik, but they were not even through the treacherous Kasara Ghat, a steep pass through the Western Ghats mountain range. Eventually, Aloha simply gave up and pulled up under a clump of pipal trees, suggesting they make camp. They were already low on water and had no rations with them save for some dried beans — a terrible oversight. Walter declared he would sleep outside on some flat rocks. “I told him if he didn’t mind the snakes and the beetles, he could do so.”22 They spent the night together in N^o III.

The next morning Aloha unzipped one of the car’s canvas walls and poked her head out. The sky was swimming with a weak orange light but already the road was busy with caravans, travelling as far as possible before the sun became fierce. Walter and Aloha knew they should do the same. Some of the country’s most treacherous roads lay ahead and they wanted to tackle them before the daytime traffic became heavy.

At the Kasara Ghat, Aloha looked out over a vast and undulating rocky terrain. A loss of control could easily send the car over a cliff. She took the lead and tested the car through the first tight turns. To her surprise, she found that the area’s steep drops and hairpin bends “presented no difficulty in the daylight.” Her confidence surged. “I knew he must have been on pins and needles for fear I burn the brakes out as it was my first real hill, but N^o III’s lightness allowed her to sail down on her own compression.”²³

Aloha’s driving skills blossomed. For her, the real challenge was not India’s vague roadways, wandering cattle, gambolling children, or suicidal chickens, but the stewing heat. By noon, temperatures shot to over 95°F and, as in Egypt, Aloha withered. She wore her pith helmet at all times and had affixed a wimple to the hat’s rear brim to shade her neck. She had no idea that the Western Ghats are one of the more temperate regions of India. The real heat was still to come.

By June 8 — the same day that George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were last seen “going strong for the top”24 of Mount Everest — they’d made it as far as the Kadwa River, only to find there was no bridge. Walter, as usual, was unfazed. He approached some local farmers and, using hand gestures to explain their situation, proposed a solution.25 He returned with several men and a team of oxen. He told Aloha to stack the blankets and luggage on the roof while the oxen were hitched to the front of her car. With everything ready, she got back into the car to steer. Walter, meanwhile, filmed. At his signal the oxen were urged forward. The ropes tightened and the car rolled into the brisk current, water cresting up against the wheels in a gurgling whoosh of whirlpools. Soon the tires were submerged and water swirled into the footwells, soaking Aloha’s boots. The car jittered and seemed to slide sideways and for a brief moment Aloha wondered if she would be swept away. But after some shouts from the ox drivers, she emerged soaked but unscathed on the opposite bank.

N^o II was next. Since she was already soaked, Aloha took the wheel again while Walter filmed from a slightly different angle. Once again the car nosed into the rushing river, filling the footwells. Halfway across, however, the oxen stopped. The car’s heavier weight had caused it to sink into the riverbed and the oxen were unable to pull it free. With rising alarm, Aloha and Walter told the ox drivers to leave their animals and lift the car. The drivers did not understand. Walter left his camera and raced into the water. He crouched until only his head was visible and grabbed a front tire.

“Get out and lift!” he shouted.

Aloha leapt over the door and grabbed the opposite tire. This the drivers understood. Two men immediately did likewise, hoisting the vehicle while the oxen resumed pulling it forward. Back on dry land, water gushed out from the car, “shoes, topi and fruit all afloat.”26

In the days ahead, water continued to be a major concern. At every village they replenished their supplies from native wells. “Peasants gladly hauled buckets of the green scum water [and] we added drops of iodine. A theory was, when there were frogs in the well, the water was OK.”²⁷ Aloha drove with a gasoline can of water beside her, a few large leaves pressed overtop to prevent splashing. At regular intervals she pulled off her hat, filled it with water and then slapped it back on.

On one particularly hot day they spent ten hours on the road. Aloha was worn out by the heat and reeling from a searing headache. Her only thought was to find a Dak Bungalow — a government-run roadhouse. A writer for the New York Times described these bungalows as “not by any means sumptuously furnished,”28 while Rudyard Kipling described them as “objectionable places to put up in . . . generally very old, always dirty, [and] the khansamah [keeper] is as ancient as the bungalow.”29 But to Aloha they were salvation. Arriving through the gate, she tumbled out of her car, mumbled “Mehrbani se. Chai,” to the khansamah and ordered buckets of water. “I submerged in a zinc tub, shorts and all, then dragged my sopping body to a thong cot.”³⁰

After the rocky heights of the Western Ghats, the road descended to an open, fertile plateau. Aloha found it monotonous and each day longed to arrive in some village, to see people or interesting attractions, to find food and water or at least to stretch her legs and take a photograph. “We placed a vague trust in the next village . . . . We sought for it with our eyes, hastened towards it as though the sight of it were to cease the strain, the heat, the loneliness and the great dazzling light which seemed to be mastering us, driving us on and on.”³¹

Aloha with her pet monkey, Kim.

At Gwalior they rested for a few days. Agra was next, and they wanted to be ready to film the main attraction: the Taj Mahal. They stayed as guests of a family in service to the maharajah of Gwalior, also known as the maharajah of Scindia, a line of royalty stretching from 1726. Aloha was impressed by the luxurious family home whose exterior was cooled by “coconut matting screens drenched with intermittent sloshing of water by garden wallahs.” They gave a private showing of their films to the maharajah’s household and, in return, were treated to a spectacle of elephants being dressed in ceremonial costume. Later on, Aloha was “asked to accept a young elephant as a gift. Be grand to tow the cars.” Not knowing how to politely decline, Aloha was eventually rescued by a British resident who brokered a compromise: Aloha would instead accept a small monkey to accompany her. The monkey was a Bonnet Macaque, cute, mischievous. “Christened Kim, he would ride beside me and be on stage . . . . He loved to be cuddled, observed everything, hated mangy pariah dogs, bared his teeth at low caste men — he was great company for me.”32

The push to Agra was hampered by violent dust storms, with one twister fierce enough to stall N^o III and tear the skin on Aloha’s face. When Cap pulled up to check on her, “He looked at me as he might stare at a pet pony with a broken leg. He, coated ochre, his sunburned eyes ringed red. My mouth and hair, full of grit — so horrible we burst out laughing.”33

Arriving in Agra, Aloha found the city hot, dirty, and poor. She was annoyed by the endless caste taboos, with their myriad rules governing every possible human action. Still, by the evening of their first day they could not resist heading east to visit India’s most famous monument. As they passed through the gateway to the gardens, they were awed by the Taj Mahal’s shimmering glow in the orange light of evening. According to Aloha, there were guards and “one lone native” but otherwise they had the monument to themselves. “I was spellbound by the beauty of the sepulchre,” she wrote. “[A] monument to the love with which woman touched a man — the magic with which God touched an artist.”34

They returned early the next morning, cameras in tow, selecting angles, planning for shadows cast by the sun, and once the camera arm was cranking, signalling to passersby that they should keep on walking and please ignore the camera. By the time they completed the day’s filming, they were giddy with excitement. Walter, no doubt, was busy imagining what audiences back in the United States would say. Certainly there were dozens of showmen claiming to have travelled the world, but how many of them could prove it? With the exception of Burton Holmes, and Martin and Osa Johnson, no one else was constructing the same kind of ongoing, world-roving travelogue — and thanks to Agfa, the Wanderwell Expedition had all the film they could possibly need. “Through the heat of mid-afternoon I checked the exposed footage, wrapped cans in felt and stored them in the car for developing at Calcutta.”35

By mid-June the Wanderwell Expedition was nearly two-thirds of the way along their route to Calcutta and had arrived at the legendary city of Benares. Nestled on the banks of the Ganges River, Benares is the oldest city in India and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.36 In Following the Equator Mark Twain remarked on the city’s age: “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.”37 He also noted that “the city is as unsanitary as it is sacred, and smells like the rind of the dorian.”³⁸ When the Wanderwells arrived, they found Benares in the midst of an outbreak of bubonic plague.39 At the university where they were to lecture, Aloha saw “a gutter rat the size of a cat” scurrying along. A sign tacked up at the entrance read, “Closed due to plague.”⁴⁰

Aloha loved Benares and was mesmerized by the city’s confluence of religious traditions. According to Hindu lore, the city was created as the centre of the world by Shiva himself. More recently, Gautama Buddha gave his first sermon at nearby Sarnath in 528 BCE.41 Jains, Muslims, and even Christians have had a historic presence in the city. The variety of religious expression combined with the city’s astonishing age made Benares the most intriguing, and the most non-Westernized place they’d yet encountered. The pyramids at Giza were mystical, but they were monuments to the ancient dead. Benares was thronging with life.

We stopped in the utter congestion of the banks of the sacred Ganges; miles of temples dedicated to the worship of its waters . . . aware of the narrow creeds of our upbringing. As a youngster I began to perceive discrepancies, then gleaned from Cap’s theories [about how] to observe not one true religion but many sources adopting and adapting from each other’s prophets . . . . [I] no longer saw pagans or heathens, but obviously a Supreme Creator.42

By the third week of June, Aloha and Walter had left Benares and were moving through a parched landscape in the province of Bihar. Despite the heat, they had been lucky with the weather — the monsoon had not yet arrived. Hardly 80 miles from Benares, however, their luck ran out.

The monsoon hit, flogging the parched soil with a vengeance, smacking the aluminum bonnet [and turning to] steam. The rain’s advancing sheets blanked out the landscape . . . . Water splashed in. I got Kim [Aloha’s monkey] into his nesting box and locked the unreachable clasp. I began shivering. My soaked goggles fogged, mud splashed up my shorts and slush oozed down my neck — Lord, the bitter cold!43

Aloha and Walter drove as fast as possible, anxious to outrun the storm but the Sone River, when they reached it, was glutted with tumbling water and impossible to cross. They were stranded. With rain hammering down, they discussed their options: return to Benares, look for a village, or attempt to cross the railway bridge that spanned the river. Walter spotted some buildings at the distant edge of a field. He ran off to investigate and returned an hour later. “Fabulous news,” he said.44 The buildings were the home of a Scottish railway engineer and he’d invited them to wait out the storm inside.

A grateful Aloha and Walter were served a hot lunch and tea laced with Scotch. The railway engineer’s wife was thrilled to have company and spoke almost non-stop. It was here they learned that a team of American flyers were due to land in Calcutta in a few days’ time. Called the Douglas World Cruisers, the airmen were engaged in a race to become the first men to fly around the world. The engineer’s wife found it curious that the Wanderwell Expedition should be attempting essentially the same feat by car. Wouldn’t it be marvellous, she thought, if the two expeditions could meet? Walter’s mind began whirling.

Despite their plans to visit Gaya and Asansol, Walter now proposed that they push straight through to Calcutta. Aloha agreed. When the rains lessened, the engineer organized a crew of workers to place lengths of wood across the railway bridge, moving and removing each plank as the cars progressed. After hours of effort, the cars crossed and, after a last check of their map and a thank you to their hosts, Aloha and Walter headed for Calcutta.

They flew through storms and wild temperature variations, charging across muddy plains and up rocky hills, pushing their stamina to the limit during “forty-eight hours of driving. No sleep, no dry rags.”

The feat took a toll on Aloha. “I ached with wracking shivers, my fingers were seized to the wood steering.”45 The roads were often flooded and the intensity of the rain made it difficult to see. Aloha wrapped herself in a tarp and pressed on until they reached Bengal, where the rains and windy landscape gave way to soft sunlight slipping through dense jungle greenery. It was like waking into paradise. Kim squealed and chattered at the sounds of the jungle and Aloha spotted large monkeys swinging through the trees and racing alongside the cars.

Late on the second day, Cap signalled Aloha to pull over. He hobbled to her car and said he thought they could reach Calcutta by nightfall, another 60 miles or so, that is, if she could continue. “The shakes were so severe I couldn’t open my mouth. With teeth clenched I shook my head up-down . . . . It had to end.” Over the next few hours the scenery continued to change. “The jungle became the old Trunk Road . . . villages. We drove belly-to-the-ground, sheets of water spewing out from wheels, drenching pedestrians.”46 They arrived in Calcutta just after dark on June 25, 1924, having covered more than 1,200 miles, a third of that on monsoon-battered roads. It was gruelling but they were in time to meet the American flyers. Amazingly, neither Aloha nor Walter gave themselves the luxury of realizing a world record had been set. A thoroughly exhausted seventeen-year-old Aloha Wanderwell had just become the first woman to drive solo across India.

Local and international newspapers ran headlines such as “The Yanks are Coming!” In the London Times’ “Telegrams in Brief,” only the Wanderwell Expedition received mention, describing how “Captain and Miss Aloha Wanderwell . . . who are doing a world tour in a Ford motor-car, arrived in Calcutta from Allahabad yesterday. So far they have passed through 39 countries.”47

The next afternoon, the pontoon aircraft of the Douglas World Cruisers settled on the Hooghly River, where they were collected by mechanics from the USS Sicard, an American naval destroyer that had shadowed the pilots’ progress from Hong Kong to Rangoon, Burma, and onward to Calcutta. Mechanics removed the pontoons, installed landing gear, and brought the planes to a grassy area at the centre of town, where they were parked alongside the two Wanderwell cars.

A blitz of flashbulbs erupted as the two expeditions met for the first time. Walter cranked the camera while Aloha met the pilots.

They joined us on the sprawling, grassy Maidan Parade Grounds among acres and acres of people, press, cameras. A tall, young hero in cocked topi and grease-sodden overalls greeted officialdom. When I stepped up, the sight of a girl in khaki switched his haggard expression to a real grin.

“Guess you fellows are seeing something of the world down here all right. We don’t see much up there,” said Captain Lowell Smith, Commander of the Expedition, pilot of the DWC Chicago.48

Aloha meets the Douglas World Cruisers in Calcutta, India, 1924.(L-R) Lowell Smith, Erik Nelson, Aloha, (unknown), and Leigh Wade.

Footage shows Aloha holding court with American pilots Lowell Smith, Erik Nelson, and Leigh Wade. Unit N^o III is parked beside one of the planes while Aloha leans back against the car with her elbows. This pose was typical when she appeared with men shorter than her. Other photographs show N^o III surrounded by naval servicemen and holding the American flag aloft, or what appear to be Captains Smith and Nelson dressed in tennis whites and topis,49 leaning against N^o II and regarding a radiant Aloha.50 The expression on the Americans’ faces is a mixture of amusement, fascination, and lust.

The films and photographs are remarkable, not only for the events they capture but also for what they say about the fortitude and composure of a seventeen-year-old girl who had slept less than eight of the last sixty hours and still had reserves to parade for the cameras, offer humorous quips to the press, and entrance a band of intrepid pilots.

Aloha and members of the US Navy and the press with the Douglas World Cruisers, Calcutta, India, 1924.

Decades later, an elderly Aloha would be interviewed for a documentary film about the Douglas World Cruisers. She recalled shaking hands with the dashing Captain Lowell Smith, who winced. “Careful,” he said. “I fell off the fuselage yesterday and broke some ribs.”51 He had also contracted dysentery in Thailand, a secret he would keep until the Douglas World Cruisers landed in Seattle on September 28, by which time Aloha would be almost 1,300 miles away in the middle of a civil war.