We walked gingerly through the cattle camp like we had just landed on the goddamned moon. An eerie smoke coated the desolate landscape as we weaved between bulls with gigantic curved horns and wary-looking cows. Dinka tribespeople greeted us apprehensively as they appeared like apparitions out of the gray smoke. Why’s it so smoky everywhere? And where’s all the cow shit? Suddenly both questions were answered at once: The manure was on fire. We were walking through a massive cloud of shitsmoke.

On the drive in we had passed a massive smoking pile of something, slightly too small to be a hill but too big to be a pile of anything I could think of. Holes perforated the pile at regular intervals in a horizontal ring, and smoke belched out of these vents. Huh. So that was a massive, flaming pile of shit. Like Cats.

We were spending the night with the nomadic, cattle-herding Dinka people of South Sudan. The tribe had just arrived at this spot this morning, and were busy using clubs to drive wooden stakes into the ground to tie their cattle to. Each ring of stakes circled an ashy pile of what had recently been manure, but was now the very air we were breathing.

The camp was a temporary home to about 100 Dinka and about 1,000 cows. Huh. This place should smell AWFUL. But it didn’t. All we could smell was the strangely aromatic spice of the shitsmoke. I immediately resolved to use the word shitsmoke on at least a daily basis.

Why don’t more cattle farmers do this? It certainly makes cattle-rearing more cinematic. Cows and Dinka drifted by, momentarily visible through the ashy smoke. A breeze swept through the camp and I suddenly realized there were absolutely no flies whatsoever. We are definiitely on the moon.

This week somebody told me that more cattle farmers don’t do this because burning mature releases arsenic. So, you know, it’s been fun knowing you guys and everything.

The Dinka smeared the ever-present ash on their cows and themselves, to keep the mosquitos away. We were in one of the worst malaria zones in the entire world. We clung to our Malarone and Doxycycline, which I suddenly realized was a much more expensive alternative to smearing yourself with hot, smoking poop ash.

After our surreal tour of the camp, we walked across the field and were shown where we’d be sleeping for the night. I immediately snapped a photo of one of the cows pissing on my friend Andrew’s tent.

Walking through the camp was like some kind of perverse video game, as you squeezed between bulls and cows, eager to not catch a huge set of bull horns to the crotch, but equally happy to be neither shat or pissed on by the gauntlet of cow asses we were constantly passing within inches of, which seemed to erupt at regular intervals like some kind of man-eating plant in Super Mario Bros.

Camping that night was a delicate balancing act between getting your tent far enough away from your snoring tent neighbors, and yet not too close to the constantly moo-ing cows or the donkeys who knew the late night was their time to bray. Getting up in the middle of the night and wandering out into the dark night to find a private spot to pee, I never, not once, not a single time, failed to have a little kid wander up to me mid-piss for an awkward nighttime encounter. Why are they wandering around in the dark? Must not be able to sleep through all the moo-ing.

One of the most important reasons to travel is to become more cultured, and you accomplish this by watching people get pissed on. The Kardashian-like tastemakers from the Dinka and Mundari tribes prize red hair, and the best way to attain this fresh-from-the-salon look is to have a cow piss on your head.

“I never know when you’re kidding in your blog, Sean.”

I’m never kidding. You think I would make this stuff up? What kind of pervert do you think you’re dealing with here?

A tall one? OK.

Traveling to the bizarre and forgotten corners of the world like it was going out of style, you will find yourself doing and saying things you’d never previously imagined yourself doing or saying. And that’s how I found myself saying to our tall and dignified guide Mayoum on more than one occasion:

“So. Are we gonna see somebody get pissed on or what?”

Eventually the magic hour came, one morning when the cows were all full of piss and one of the Mundari suddenly realized his hair wasn’t red enough, which I’d been pointing out all trip long.

Another member of the tribe brandished a plastic pitcher like a magician about to perform some kind of impressive beverage-related illusion, and then whisked it under a nearby cow like it was a soda fountain. Impressively without pause, the cow began pissing on demand. This part may not have been as impressive as it may have sounded, as the cows were pissing all the time. If you put a pitcher under any random cow at any time of day or night there’s at least an 80% chance the cow will piss in it, or on you, or on a nearby child.

Unfortunately this cow was only able to produce about a gallon of hot, steaming urine, so the piss magician had to stop at another cow to top off his pitcher of naughty lemonade. Once it was full to the brim, the pitcher, which I can only desperately hope was never used for any other purpose whatsoever but I think that’s probably pretty unlikely, was ceremoniously held up in the air. The fashionista who needed his hair to be more alluringly orange bent over, and before anyone could protest, a pitcher of the freshest cow piss imaginable was dumped on his waiting head.

This took an agonizingly long time, and I felt terrible for the guy. I tell you, the things we do to look more like a Halloween decoration. Once the pitcher ran out, the golden showeree surprised all assembled by suddenly deciding that he wasn’t quite ready to be done getting pissed on, and he ran over and ducked under a nearby cow’s ass. The cow immediately obliged and topped him off with a fresh squirt of piss.

Well, I did ask to see this. If anyone needs me I’ll be over there in my tent, reconsidering my life decisions.

“Bullshit!” you cry out. “Surely nothing so disgusting and cow-related exists in this wide wonderful world of ours.”

Dude, I started with the easy one. Now it’s time to blow up a cow’s vagina. Buckle up.

When a cow loses a calf, it stops producing milk, which is a pain in the ass if you’re an East African cattle herder who lives primarily off of cow’s milk. What’s a bro to do? You find your least favorite child in the cattle camp, and let him know his life is about to get a whole lot worse.

Apparently the only way to fix this problem is to have a small child stick his face way up the cow’s vagina and inflate it like the world’s least fun birthday party balloon.

Look, that’s what they told us. Maybe they were fucking with us but if so they were fucking with this poor little kid too.

After an agonizingly long inflation, the milk-averse cow drenches the little boy in four gallons of god knows what, and he goes off to my tent to reconsider his life decisions.

Note to self: Get the Mundari a fireplace bellows for Christmas. Or maybe an air compressor. Also, keep this whole thing in your back pocket in case you ever have kids and they misbehave.

“Go to your room.”

“Gladly! Wait, why is there a cow in here?”

“All I can say is you really should have taken the trash out.”

These are the two gold-star experiences you have to have if you’re going to visit the South Sudanese cattle herding people. Mike and I also set out to have a third: To get a photo with the coolest motherfucker in the world.

The cool motherfucker is an elusive species. He does not like being photographed, in spite of the fact that his beret and badass sunglasses practically scream out, daring you to photograph him. Is he actually pissed at us, or is it just the ritual scarification on his forehead that gives him that perpetual scowl? Mysteries of the universe. My fried Mike had managed the above photo, which prompted me to ask “Great, but why can’t we get a photo WITH the cool motherfucker?”

We proceeded to wander around the camp, through the smoke and cows, hoping to spot the CMF. Eventually we got tired of this and asked one of the locals where the cool motherfucker was. The local looked confused. We showed him the photo above. He laughed and pointed in the CMF’s direction.

Eventually we found him, and through much insistence and probably bodily risk to our own persons, we managed to get the cool motherfucker to stand still long enough to take a photo with us.

I like that it looks like CMF and I are in a band together, and we hate each other but we have to stick it out because our album is selling like crazy.

There are other things to see when you’re camping with the cattle herding people. There’s the wrestling.

My favorite aspect of this were the ring girls who pranced ceremoniously across the battlefield between rounds.

There are the opportunities to take photos with the tribespeople and their machine guns, kept always at the ready in case cattle rustling assholes from other tribes should show up and need a good machine gunning.

Mike and I were understandably nervous and lectured everyone on the proper way to handle a machine gun so that everybody could leave the photo shoot with ten fingers.

There were, even better, the astonishingly adorable baby goats.

I had just kissed a baby goat on the head when I realized this was probably not the cleanest thing I’d ever done and began to will myself into not having some crazy goat-flavored bacterial infection.

We got to witness the tribe cutting the horns off a young bull, which was way bloodier than I had expected. The horns are cut off in a specific way to inspire them to grow back at the crazy sideways angles we’d seen in the adult bulls around the camp.

My favorite activity in all of South Sudan, though was the tribal dance. While we were camping with the Mundari, night fell and we heard an indescribable commotion in the distance. Our guide took us two camps over, where a couple hundred tribespeople were gathered in a flat empty field, all in the pitch black.

The scene was chaotic, and we wandered through the throng of locals milling about, some of them singing together. It sounded like about 100 people each singing a totally different song, all at the same time. One guy had started a fire and was using it to heat the head of his drum, which he pounded on with a stick, apparently tuning it to just the right note to suit the cacophony of sound all around us.

We were all tired from the long day and had agreed to come to the dance “for maybe 30 minutes” just to check it out before collapsing into bed. Now any sense of this schedule was completely out the window. Is this the dance? Has it started? Drums beat out incompatible beats and long horns honked atonally.

Our group was somewhere in the middle of the fray, backs to each other in a defensive circle, like we were preparing for a gang fight. Little local kids were running around in the dark and hitting each other with sticks.

Well, if nothing else this is interesting! Women on one side of the crowd began singing more insistently, harmonizing together. The drums began to fall into line with their melody, and the honking of the horns gradually began to cooperate. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, all the chaotic noise congealed into an actual song, and the tribespeople began to bob up and down in time to the music.

I looked around at our bewildered group. Mike, Michelle and I wandered away from our sheepish friends and into the midst of the locals. We shrugged at each other and began to bounce up and down to the music. Is this how you do it?

The music clicked in harder and the locals began to jump up and down in time to the beat. We joined in.

Occasionally a local would turn and realize there were white people dancing with them, which they were shocked and greatly amused by. They began to show us how to raise your arms over your head as you jumped up and down, and then burst out laughing when we joined in.

Wow! This is a lot of jumping! I wish I’d eaten a lot less for dinner!

The crowd began to revolve in a circle, jumping up and down and pogo-ing in a counter-clockwise loop, revolving around our bewildered friends in the center. It took a few minutes to get the hang of jumping in exact sync with the locals, but once you did, the effect was magical. You’d leap up into the air but you weren’t moving at all relative to everyone around you, the whole crowd rising up in sync. It felt like you were somehow standing still and the Earth was suddenly falling away from you, then rebounding to shoot up and meet your feet again.

Every few minutes I’d stop to catch my breath, bringing my heart rate down for a second so I wouldn’t barf. Where did Mike go? Michelle and I were still laughing and dancing with the locals. Oh man. I’m not going to be able to walk tomorrow.

A local man put his hand on my shoulder.

“I will be your friend. I’ll show you how to do the dance.”

OK dude. The one guy there who spoke any English at all led me around the circle, both of us jumping up and down, until the song suddenly ended and the tribespeople broke up mysteriously into groups.

My new friend led me over to his family group and within ten seconds tried to set me up with his sister.

“You should be her boyfriend!”

What? Hello!- Dude, it’s really dark but I think she’s like 15. Oh you guys don’t have that concept here. Well that’s really sweet but I left my dowry cows in my other pants.

My new friend told me about his school in Juba where he was learning English, and explained the tribe’s nomadic ways, where they had come from the week before and where they travel to up on the mountain during the rainy season.

Several kids ran over and surrounded me. My friend translated their questions to English for me.

“You really know how to dance!”

“Thank you!”

“You have hair like a girl!”

“I sure do!”

They took turns feeling my hair.

“How long did it take to grow that hair?”

“Uhm… My lifetime?”

My friend explained that he wanted to grow his hair long now too but he was afraid it would just grow straight up. Real talk, I think it might, dude.

Eventually our guide Mayoum tracked me down, emerging out of the crowd with a flashlight.

“Sean! We lost you, you just disappeared into the tribe. Nobody knew where you were. You look like you’re having a good time, ha ha!”

Goodbye my new Mundari family! If I can walk at all tomorrow I’ll stop by and say hello!

When we left the Mundari camp, we donated our leftover breakfast spaghetti, which the children hilariously ran around eating with their bare hands, complete with the sauce.

South Sudan isn’t all cattle camps, it also has the sprawling metropolis of Juba, the capital of the youngest country in the world. This title is doubly fitting, both because South Sudan only became a country in 2011 after years of this Christian region fighting to split off from Muslim Sudan, and because something like 57% of South Sudan’s population is under the age of 18.

Returning to Juba after three nights in the cattle camps, we were grateful for hot showers and the chance to wash our catastrophically dirty clothes. My friend Mike washed his pants five times and on the fifth try the rinse water was still a solid black swirling down the drain.

Juba is kind of less of a city and more of a big mess, so much so that South Sudan is trying to build a proper city from scratch in the center of the country so they can move the capital there. You’ll have to take my word for what Juba is like, since taking photos there is completely forbidden, and we were continuously warned that we would end up in jail if we attempted to sneak one. Sometimes you hear this in places and you can kind of roll your eyes but here it was clearly 100% serious and not worth taking a chance on.

This was of course torturous, as there were many Jubian wonders we couldn’t get photographic proof of. Like Oscar’s, the lounge/laundromat next to our hotel. Or the D’Nile restaurant where we had dinner along the river. Or the De Space Car Wash & Sports Bar. South Sudan seems to love hybrids of weird things together in the same building.

My biggest regret was not being able to get a photo of the graffiti in the alleyway near our hotel, which read in big black handwritten letters:

NO URINE EVER AGAIN IN THIS SPOT

...above an arrow pointing down to a very specific spot in the alley.

What’s that sign on the road say? JUBA FOR JESUS? OK then.

Almost as torturous was our visit to the outdoor market in Juba, which was stuffed with photogenic wonders.

Two adorable little boys walking through the alleys with their arms around each other’s shoulders? Awwww.

A mannequin wearing a tee-shirt that said NEVER REGULAR? Oh god, that is the perfect shirt for Africa. I had diahrrea for two years straight and all I got was this lousy shirt.

A motorcycle parked in front of one of the stalls that had quite a lot of text stenciled on the seat?

I WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR YOU GUYS

A hundred bees swirling around a bucket of… sand? Buckets of Hersey’s syrup? A one-eyed little girl mannequin wearing a polka dot dress? Dammit Juba.

I quickly realized I have a pavlovian instinctual response to get my phone out for a photo without even being consciously aware that I’m doing it. I had to walk through the market with my arms crossed just to stay out of jail.

We began to joke with each other that we were going to see Bigfoot, Elvis and Hitler all walking down the street together arm in arm because we wouldn’t be able to get photos of any of them. This is torture.

I hadn’t even brought a proper camera to South Sudan because the process to do so was such a pain in the ass. You had to register your camera and each lens in advance before entering the country, all of which was checked at the airport when you arrived.

We’d also been warned, at great length, that the corrupt officials at the airport were definitely going to try to shake us down for bribes when we arrived. You don’t have 12 blank pages in your passport? That’s a problem. Middle name’s Matthew? Uh-oh. You have your vaccination for the summertime blues, right? No? That’s gonna cost ya.

We were advised that we’d be pulled aside into a tiny room and sweated for bribes, and it was up to us if we wanted to pay them or stand our ground. So this is going to be interesting!

Four people from our group flew in a night early and didn’t have any problems getting through the airport. Oh, okay, so the trouble must have been overstated. We landed the next day and were working our way through the chaos getting through immigration, when I noticed the immigration guy giving my friend Jess ahead of me some trouble. Suddenly the guy pointed at a tiny room off to one side.

Jess turned around to me.

“And so it begins!” he laughed.

“Oh man, sucks to be you! What did they get you for?”

“Not enough blank passport pages. I only have three and they’re saying I need six.”

Ahhhhhhh shit. I had just realized that morning that I only had five blank pages left in my passport, after Chad had used up two full pages, and Sudan had taken up another one just to be dicks. I’d both overestimated how many pages I had left before the trip started and underestimated how frequently these African countries were going to take up a whole page with a visa sticker and another with some registration bullshit, instead of the standard country entry stamp that takes up 1/8th of a page. I was going to have to return unexpectedly to the US half-way through this twelve week trip just to get an emergency passport renewal before I could continue on.

Hmm, now I might be going home even sooner than that.

Jess disappeared into the interrogation hole and the immigration guy flipped through my passport briefly before pointing me in the same direction. Here we go!

Inside, the room was slightly smaller than a queen sized bed and had about eight people in it, all with their luggage. The guy flipped through the passports like a cartoon character making a club sandwich and mine came out on top.

“SEEN MATEW?”

Yeah that’s me.

“NOT ENOUGH PASSPORT PAGES.”

I have five.

“SHOW ME.”

I flipped to the first blank page.

“NOT BLANK”

He pointed to a tiny stain in the corner of the page, which was a stamp from the other side of the paper that had bled through in one spot. I got caught in an absolute downpour in Zimbabwe last year and my passport in my pocket was utterly drenched, so basically the entire thing was a mess of smeared ink and stamps bleeding through the paper.

“Yeah that’s just a stamp from the other side. This page is blank.”

“CAN’T ACCEPT. NOT BLANK.”

“Yeah well you’re wrong about that.”

I had decided my best strategy was to be as annoying as possible and make it not worth his time to keep me in that hot little room.

I flipped to the next blank page.

“NOT BLANK!” he announced, pointing at a pen mark or mashed mosquito or whatever was on the corner of the page.

At that moment three more people entered the room somehow and where attempting to push past me into a tiny closet behind us. My crotch was pressed up against the immigration bribe guy's head as the three people behind me tried to squeeze through the space between my butt cheeks.

I looked down at the immigration bribe guy and he looked up at me.

“Look, isn’t there a smaller room we could do this in?” I asked.

Jess burst out laughing. The immigration guy looked up at me, clearly pissed off, and pointed to the door.

“Get out! Go!”

Woohoo!

I later found out the two guys behind me in line paid the guy $100 in bribes. Jess had refused to pay and was eventually let go. We’d been in the country for 30 whole minutes.

Welcome to South Sudan.