Documentary : Threading Through a Surreal World on the Way to Tragedy in Rwanda : Armed with a computer, candy bars and whiskey, a writer negotiates the bureaucracy.

What I had forgotten, in being gone from Africa for so long, is that nothing in Africa is impossible.

The man at the airport tells you the plane is full, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get a seat. The man at the border says it is impossible to cross into Rwanda, but he doesn’t mean it’s totally impossible. Sometimes it takes words, sometimes money. But with patience and the right touch, you can accomplish almost anything in this unstructured, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants world.

So here I was, on foot, on the bridge over the Kagera River that separates Tanzania and Rwanda, the swirling waters below filled with bodies from a massacre of unimaginable proportions, and six slovenly Tanzanian soldiers were waving their rifles at me. They were sprawled in positions of semi-slumber against the hulk of a cannibalized car, and they did not move at all. Only their rifles did.

“It is impossible to cross,” one of them finally said. “The border is closed.”

The Pakistani photographer I was traveling with turned to leave. I took his arm, signaling him to have patience, and offered the soldier cigarettes. A few words of greetings in Swahili floated out of the past and into grasp. The man wearing corporal stripes stared hard at me through puffs of smoke and smiled. I knew I would get across the bridge to Rwanda.

I had arrived at the Benaco refugee camp up the road from the bridge the day before, lugging my portable computer and a plastic hotel laundry bag containing half a dozen candy bars, three cans of spaghetti, a roll of toilet paper and a pint of whiskey. My mind spun with hurried travel: an overnight flight from Washington to London; another from London to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya; a frantic scramble to get aboard a twin-engine plane that a journalist colleague had chartered for the 300-mile trip from Nairobi to a dirt strip in an isolated region of Tanzania, an hour’s drive from the camp.

The airstrip was on an utterly barren plain. There was not a building, not a person, not a sign of civilization in sight. The pilot waved farewell. He taxied down the runway and, in a cloud of dust, disappeared over the horizon. I can’t remember ever feeling more misplaced, and it seemed certain I was doomed to spend the rest of my days lost in some forgotten corner of Africa.

Two days before, I had been enjoying springtime in Washington, and now . . . The thought was interrupted by an echo of past lessons learned in Africa. No. 1: Don’t get rattled. Time is inconsequential, and everything eventually works out. Suddenly, out of nowhere, on a rutted road that had not even been visible to me, a man named Omar appeared in his shiny Range Rover. We shared no common language, but it was quickly negotiated that for $50 he would take me and my photographer to the refugee camp.

The camp was an awesome sight. Blue-and-white tents supplied by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees stretched as far as I could see, through the valley, up the hillsides and down into the ravines. There were people everywhere, shoulder to shoulder, 300,000 of them, lined up for food, walking in an endless procession to a river-fed pond, waiting for medicine, moving with their cattle and goats--a blur of humanity made homeless by war, its future of no particular concern to those fighting for control of Rwanda.

The International Red Cross had set up a cluster of tents for its staff, and a nurse told me I could stake out one of them for my residence. There was no electricity, no telephones, no running water in this tent city that had sprung up on the empty plain in a matter of days. It was growing dark when I found Bryan Murphy of the Associated Press and asked him how to get into Rwanda.

“Just go to the border and ask for a man named Tony,” he said.

We set off at dawn the next morning. Omar was in a cheerful mood; we had agreed to reward him generously for the trip into Rwanda.

The border was 30 minutes away, marked by a large sign that said “Pepsi-Cola, It’s Your Choice.” A Tanzanian policeman in a spotless white uniform greeted us warmly there and said it might be a long wait; he didn’t know when the immigration officer would return.

African Lesson No. 2: If you wait for things to happen you may wait forever; take control. We drove back to the immigration officer’s village, two miles away, found his home and rousted him out of bed. He accompanied us back to the dreary little checkpoint that served as the immigration office. He said there might be a problem with my exit visa, but it turned out he didn’t really mean a problem, just a minor inconvenience that could be fixed with a gratuity.

He sent us on foot down to the one-lane bridge, 200 yards away, and said that if we could talk our way past the Tanzanian soldiers and into Rwanda, Omar would be allowed to follow with his vehicle. When another group of journalists had passed this way two days earlier, one of the Tanzanian soldiers had said, “You know, we could shoot you right here and no one would know.” He was taunting more than threatening. This time, with the gift of American cigarettes, we were allowed to pass.

A Tanzanian soldier with a torn uniform escorted us across the bridge, pausing to point out the bodies that floated in the river below. They crashed against the stone walls of the gorge like department store mannequins, as if they had never contained human life. The whirlpool currents swung them to and fro and banged them against the rocks.

“Look, here comes another one,” the soldier said with a small chuckle. And down a 100-foot-high, thundering waterfall another corpse was propelled into a free fall, arms flailing.

Two young rebels from the Rwandan Patriotic Front guarded the village on the Rwandan side of the bridge.

“Is there a man named Tony here?” I asked.

“Yes, he is about,” one of the youths replied.

“Can we talk to him?”

“You can if he agrees.”

Tony ambled down from the shambles of a police station from which government troops had been driven a few weeks earlier. He was a lieutenant in the guerrilla army, a handsome, articulate man of about 30. He spoke perfect English with a slight British accent and was, I later learned, a combatant-turned-press-officer--a sure sign that knowledge of the value of public relations and press agentry has reached even the most distant outposts of the world.

I introduced myself and said I worked for The Times. “It is good to meet you,” he said. “I have read your book.”

I was flabbergasted. Fourteen years earlier, I had written a book on Africa that had been banned by every black African country, and rather than being complimented, my mind raced, asking, “Oh, God, did I say something about the Tutsis or Hutus that’s going to get me into trouble now?” It turned out I hadn’t. Tony sent for Omar.

With two armed guards for security and Tony for enlightenment, we set off on a daylong journey through rebel-held territory, passing abandoned villages, visiting a hospital where massacre victims with terrible wounds lay, stopping at a beautiful little Roman Catholic church in a grove of spruce. Five hundred bodies were clustered in the church and throughout the still grounds outside.

That night, back at the refugee camp in Benaco, on a starlit plain as beautiful as those the African-born writer Elspeth Huxley adored, a plain far removed in distance and spirit from the familiar trappings of home, I plugged my computer into the Associated Press’ generator, sat in my tent, the computer cradled in my lap, and wrote a story for The Times. Children who had never seen a white man, much less one of the strange devices I held, pressed against the barbed-wire fence and called out to me in a friendly Swahili greeting: “Mazungu, mazungu!” White man, white man.

There was not a Tanzanian telephone for 50 miles around in any direction. But later, just after midnight, I pointed the AP’s portable satellite phone toward a satellite over Sao Paulo, Brazil. I dictated my story to a woman at the newspaper who identified herself as “transcription,” then dialed my wife, Sandy, in Virginia and over a crystal-clear connection told her all that I saw and heard outside my tent. It seemed odd that our two different worlds should be connected by this invisible link through the distant skies.

I told her, among other things, of the dozens of international and African relief specialists I had met in camp. The United Nations, the Red Cross, Concern, CARE--they were all there, and I came to hold them and the work they do in great admiration. I was only passing through, but endless tragedies like this were their life’s work. Somalia, the Sudan, Turkey, Ethiopia and now Tanzania--each passport stamp testified to some great disaster.

My journey to Benaco and Rwanda lasted four days. I slept on the ground for the first time since Vietnam, tried hard to remain constipated and was surprised at how easily I adapted to not shaving, bathing or eating meals. Yesterday I gave a colleague my leftover candy bars and drove to the airstrip in the back of a refugee’s pickup truck. It took me 12 hours to hitchhike a ride back to Nairobi, Kenya, first on a single-engine plane of unknown origin to Mwanza, on the Tanzanian shore of Lake Victoria, then on a Red Cross charter piloted by Ken Maurce, who said, “It’s a bloody shame what people do to each other, isn’t it?”

The Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi found me lodging despite my unsavory appearance and odor, and a doctor today examined the scores of dime-sized red welts that have itched their way up my back and down my legs. “Maybe insect bites, maybe a reaction to Africa,” she said.

I am now freshly clothed and well fed and of respectable countenance. I am again part of Africa’s privileged class, something the long-suffering refugees in Benaco can never be. On the radio I have just heard that there is a potential pollution threat on the Ugandan side of Lake Victoria: The corpses I saw from the bridge over the Kagera have completed their journey and are now washing ashore alongside the huge lake. But a Kenyan official says that the decomposed bodies will not threaten Kenya’s supply of drinking water or fish.