On the journey

Bateman: We sat down with a school atlas one Sunday afternoon in Toronto and planned it out.

Foster: We did it in red and pink, meaning across the British Empire. The Belgian Congo was a big exception, and that was tricky. Certain parts of the world are good to avoid because they are dangerous — more dangerous now than when we did the trip. There are far more guns and more stress between different groups of people.

Bateman: That’s very true. Most people go in big cruise ships now. They take their whole life with them around the world. They eat the food they had at home and have all the friends they had at home, and they’re not isolated with other cultures or other species of wildlife. It’s nothing like what we did.

On encountering other cultures

Bateman: I consider the Bambuti [Indigenous Peoples of the Iruti forest in the eastern Congo Basin] the most perfect people that I’ve ever met. They live in total harmony with nature. They worshipped the forest. If they had bad luck, their reaction to it was to sing a cheerful song: “Come on, forest. You’ve been taking care of us up until now. You must have dozed off a little bit. So come on, wake up! We need you to help us out here!”

Foster: They were talking like ecologists. They had never been to university, but they were full of knowledge. That was inspiring for us because it wasn’t some professor in a university; it was people out of the forest.

Bateman: There’s a saying referring to nature, but it also applies to cultures around the world: “Nature is not only more complicated than you know; it’s more complicated than you can know.” You can never fully understand all the complications that are just out the window here. And that’s the same with culture.