by Ramona Koval
Thubron’s romantic views of Tibet were stocked by a memory of reading James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon as a boy. I saw the film made in 1937 by Frank Capra on a tiny screen on a plane between Paris and Tokyo, imagining the scenes as I flew over the same territory. The story of the dashing writer—soldier—diplomat who rescues some westerners from China was my kind of tale of derring-do. The plane is hijacked, runs out of fuel and crashes in the Himalayas, but the group is rescued and taken to Shangri-la. Here you begin to hear the heavenly Hollywood tones of pure and mystical music, the kind they play in massage rooms at health spas. Everyone there is happy and the discontented westerners begin to lose all their troubles too.
Thubron imagined he would find in Tibet a government of seers, of prophets, and a pure sort of holy people, who would eventually be the salvation of the world. He was fired up by legends of monks who could levitate and fly, of lamas who could break rocks with their voices, and of the lung-pa, the wind men, who drifted over the landscape with their feet barely touching it. He was possessed by the idea that this land, in its extraordinary isolation, was a place of purity and promise, where all the poor things in human nature would in some way be redeemed.
But Thubron is not a proselytiser for Eastern ways. His reading taught him that the history of Tibet is dotted with wars. In the seventh and eighth centuries the Tibetans brought the great Chinese Tang dynasty to its knees. They sacked Xian. Their armies, wearing armour that was the finest in the world, reached the borders of Burma.
And even as late as the fifteenth century the great Tibetan monasteries weren’t just places of worship and meditation, but also armed camps where monks from different sects would be at war with one another. Into the twentieth century the Dalai Lamas, if they weren’t murdered in childhood, were sometimes complicit in violence. The idea of the Dalai Lama being a peaceable figure has arrived only with the present one.
Thubron told me about sky burial, the way the Tibetans dispose of their dead. ‘The fact the ground is so hard, it’s very hard to bury anyway,’ he said, ‘and they think that to place people in the soil is horrible, that we place our dead in the cold earth.’ The ‘sky master of burial’ cuts up the corpse and pounds the bones, then feeds these morsels to vultures which assemble for the purpose.
‘So the dead are completely consumed by vultures. And they believe that vultures are sacred; they say that you never see a dead one, that when they die they simply fly up towards the sun until the wind takes them apart. And so they, with the dead, simply disappear and that’s their favourite way of disposing of corpses. And all this gives a kind of haunting feeling to us in the west about death and how you treat it.’
Reading about this is even more poignant because Thubron was walking to remember his dead—his parents, and his sister who died at just twenty-one—and in describing what happens to the corpses he must also be imagining the bodies of his own family.
If humility and an intelligent but highly informed light touch are keys to good travel narratives, I was wonderfully served by the books of the late Ryszard Kapuscinski, which are well represented on my shelves. He worked as a foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, covering the African continent for more than forty years, during which twenty-seven revolutions and coups took place.
I met Kapuscinski in Melbourne when I interviewed him at the writers festival and he invited me to stay in touch. The following year I travelled to Poland to make a radio documentary and he invited me to his home in Warsaw. He made me coffee and served me cake in his book-lined study upstairs, where he was deep in the research for a new book about Africa. Energetic and humble, hospitable and warm, like many foreign correspondents he seemed to be less comfortable in easy urban quarters than in the harsh terrain, writing about difficult politics far from his home.
Kapuscinski wrote about the fall of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the collapse of Portuguese colonialism in Angola, the last days of the Shah of Persia, the end of the Soviet Union and in The Shadow of the Sun about his long love affair with Africa, which he described as an ‘African fever’.
Reading Kapuscinski throws you in to a strange world of metaphor and hyper-realism. He had a sharp eye for character, particularly of those in power and of those who fawn to them.
A few months after his death in 2007 at the age of seventy-four, the Polish edition of Newsweek exposed Kapuscinski’s collaboration with his nation’s secret police between 1967 and 1972. But it’s hard to see how his work abroad would have been permitted without such a liaison. It seems that nothing that Kapuscinski reported to his would-be masters was of much interest to them. In fact his reports were carefully innocuous. He betrayed nobody. His books, especially The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat in which he recounted the fall of Haile Selassie, were read in Poland as veiled allegories of the Communist regime, and in 1981 his working credentials were withdrawn under Jaruzelski’s martial law.
Kapuscinski said, after the fall of communism, that his writing about the travesties of power was always understood by his Polish readers to be a coded commentary on what was happening at home.
The first time Kapuscinski left on a foreign assignment, his editor gave him a copy of The Histories, Herodotus’s witty, broadminded and cosmopolitan account of the ancient world. It became companion and guide to many of his travels. In 2004, he wrote Travels with Herodotus about these first trips, but it was only published in English after his death.
He took us to places where he never let us forget that we were strangers and his approach was to wonder at the ways that people found to make their lives. Here is Kapuscinski on arriving in the heat of an African summer. Unlike the old journeys, which were slow and enabled the traveller to grow used to other climates and landscapes, the new arrival flies in and is plunged into the heat, the sounds and, above all, the smells:
Perhaps he’s had intimations of it. It is the scent that permeated Mr Kanzman’s little shop, Colonial and Other Goods, on Perec Street in my hometown of Pinsk. Almonds, cloves, dates and cocoa. Vanilla and laurel leaves, oranges and bananas, cardamom and saffron. And Drohobych. The interiors of Bruno Schulz’s cinnamon shops? Didn’t their ‘dimly lit, dark and solemn interiors’ smell intensely of paints, lacquer, incense, the aroma of faraway countries and rare substances? Yet the actual smell of the tropics is somewhat different. We instantly recognise its weight, its sticky materiality. The smell makes us at once aware that we are at that point on earth where an exuberant and indefatigable nature labours, incessantly reproducing itself, spreading and blooming, even as it sickens, disintegrates, festers and decays.
It is the smell of a sweating body and drying fish, of spoiling meat and roasting cassava, of fresh flowers and putrid algae—in short, of everything that is at once pleasant and irritating, that attracts and repels, seduces and disgusts.
Can you smell it, as I can, the fetid and the sweet, the rich and the pungent, the flinty and the smooth? Kapuscinski is not only experiencing this at firsthand but he is imagining the realities described by the Jewish-Polish writer Bruno Schulz. All in two paragraphs.
He weaves history and philosophy together too, as he transports his reader to a world of complexities—amid the confusions and terrors of war he shows how difficult it can be to work out what is really going on. In his book on the fall of the Soviet Union, Imperium, he describes the lengths he went to in order to cover a 1990 conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The fighting was being suppressed by the Soviets, and Kapuscinski was finding it hard to get to Armenia to report.
His Armenian friends offer a solution—he will pretend to be an Aeroflot pilot. He dons the uniform and, with the cooperation of some Armenian pilots, he boards the plane, surrounded by crowds of angry passengers who have been waiting for a flight for days. After landing he gets into the back seat of the waiting car, and lies down, pretending to be dead drunk. It works. This little detail, like so many Kapuscinski details, tells so much—in the Soviet Union a drunk pilot was completely normal.
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In a 1994 discussion published by the New York Review of Books, Kapuscinski said that during his life of travelling he developed a dislike for descriptions of people as politically on the right or the left, and for judging people according to their nationality:
If someone tells me he is a left-wing Portuguese he tells me nothing about himself, because I still know nothing about the two characteristics which really count: what he is worth as a person and what sort of heart he has. Or in more flowery terms: whether he is clever and is a good human being. These are qualities which are of no interest to the policeman at the frontier who stretches out his hand for your passport, the only thing that matters to him is what passport you have, not whether you are a rogue or a genius. And that is what is so humiliating.
I’m deeply attracted to what I judge is the European sensibility in much of what Kapuscinski writes, his use and understanding of history and philosophy and literature. And, in Australia, we are lucky to be able to rely on another such sensibility, in the work of writer and journalist Nicolas Rothwell. His imagination, clarity, seriousness of purpose and willingness to write about difficult landscapes, both social and geographic, make reading his prose a dreamy pleasure for me.
Born in New York, half-Czech and half-Australian, Rothwell is a polyglot polymath who has been based in northern Australia as correspondent for the Australian for many years. He has also worked extensively as a foreign correspondent for the paper, away from his beloved Darwin, which he calls ‘the capital of the second chance’.
His books out of the north include Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway and Journeys to the Interior. Oxford-educated in classics, and with a sophisticated and diverse literary sensibility, Rothwell is an able and experienced traveller who can turn himself to bush mechanics and the remote Australian ethos when required:
Geometry and disorder; law and lawlessness; a king tide of human classifying fervour, an ebbing away of pattern in nature itself; such is the north, where words multiply inside the wordlessness of the world, and where all human endeavours seem dwarfed from the moment of their undertaking.
Rothwell follows the trails of the explorers of remote Australia—Ludwig Leichhardt, Charles Sturt and Ernest Giles—of anthropologists and artists, of Aboriginal healers and leaders, of miners and archaeologists and travellers who want to lose themselves in the magical north. While his journalism is clear-eyed, his more discursive writing is romantic, seeking character and fate, exploring beauty and horror. Not strictly travel writing, his fictions and tales, essays and dreamscapes will take you on the kind of journey you could never make on your own.
Another person who became my friend and eccentric travelling companion was the English writer Roger Deakin. I was introduced to him in a Mongolian yurt that had been erected in Charlotte Square in Edinburgh for the writers festival. He was a boyish man of sixty, lean and keen and laughing easily, with a head of longish grey curly hair. He was leaving for the station to catch the train for London, and asked if I knew his old friend Tony Barrell. Indeed I did know the late gifted radio documentary-maker, who was then a colleague. That was the end of the conversation. A few months later Roger Deakin’s book was published in Australia and I interviewed him on the line from London.
He was a late bloomer who first made a career in advertising and then in documentary film-making. His celebrated first work was Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain. After the break-up of a long relationship, Roger had the idea to swim his heart out beyond the confines of the ancient moat in which he swam lengths on his farm in Suffolk. He began to swim in and take notes about rivers and pools and seas and lakes throughout England:
When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is—water—and it begins to move with the water around it. No wonder we feel such sympathy for beached whales; we are beached at birth ourselves. To swim is to experience how it was before you were born. Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb. These amniotic waters are both utterly safe and yet terrifying, for at birth anything could go wrong, and you are assailed by all kinds of unknown forces over which you have no control.
Roger was sometimes called a ‘nature writer’, a term he disagreed with, as if you could hive off nature from life. His book is a physical and emotional geography of his beloved country and of his heart and soul. It’s the best kind of travel writing. His last major work Wildwood: A Journey through Trees was finished four months before he died in 2007, of a brain tumour at sixty-three. This was another eccentric collection of notes about his meanderings through the forests of England, and through those as far afield as Kyrgyzstan and even Central Australia, on a trip we did together. As we travelled around I introduced him to people I had met on previous visits. At night, as we camped in dry creek beds, he would write notes in his journal, often till late. He’d call across to where I lay in my swag with entertaining interpretations of our experiences that day.
Once Roger tried to tell me that my fire-building technique (learned from Pitjanjatjara elders on a previous trip) would never do, and he showed me the proper British Boy Scout method of piling wood up. It didn’t work, much to my pleasure. We went back to my method. A few days later he chastised me for pointing at a tree full of budgerigars, saying that no self-respecting naturalist would ever point at birds. It frightens them. He taught me to say ‘budgerigars at three o’clock’ if I must say anything at all. It was like travelling with a British public school headmaster crossed with one of the chaps from Monty Python.
Reading through Waterlog and Wildwood again, I am reminded how books can keep alive the voices of friends who have died, and make you smile again to remember the conversations and the days you have shared.
CHAPTER 11
A knife, a tobacco-pipe
When I was a radio broadcaster specialising in writing, reading and ideas, one of the highlights of the work was the torrent of books that came pouring into my office from all over the world. Some of these managed to survive my treatment of close-reading, note-taking in margins and on the endpapers. I didn’t offer them to colleagues or charities or to friends. They made it through to line the walls of my home. If I look at my shelves, certain patterns emerge and form themselves into collections. A library is a kind of autobiography of interests, of fads and life stages.
If novels are a way to explore fields of imagined places and characters, what are my books about exploration for? Why do I gravitate to travellers’ tales? Where does my affection for explorers, particularly of polar regions, spring from? I love a survival story. Especially in wild places. Preferably with detailed directions about what to pack, how to use one’s wits to negotiate what the fates present, and how to improve one’s fortunes.
I have a feeling it began with Robinson Crusoe. I’m sure I read one of the many abridged versions for children that followed the 1719 publication of Daniel Defoe’s novel The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely delivered by Pirates.
It wasn’t a girl’s book, and I was brought up in an era where the chasm between what was expected of girls and boys was wide. My library edition smelled of linoleum and sellotape. I imagined it might have smelled of boys.
So I decided to read the unabridged text. Robinson Crusoe goes to sea against the wishes of his father, becomes a slave, hunts for slaves and is eventually shipwrecked on an island, alone and with ‘nothing about me but a knife, a tobacco-pipe, and a little tobacco in a box’.
This fascinated me, even more than the episode in which Crusoe discovers the ritual cannibalism of the visiting savages, or the footprint on the sand after he has been alone for many months. Man Friday is a welcome human companion, but the real question is, how do yo
u survive on a desert island?
Crusoe begins to salvage all kinds of things from the shipwreck. And how clever he is in making use of such objects; he builds a home, a fort, and a ladder to pull up behind him as he secures his realm from attacks. He observes his discarded rat-eaten grains of dust which almost miraculously yield a few stalks of grain-bearing grasses, and with them he patiently cultivates his own stock of barley and corn from which he might finally in some long-distant future make himself some delicious bread.
Crusoe is aware that he knows nothing of threshing grain and making flour meal, of fashioning the loaf and baking the bread. He ponders on the many steps necessary to make this one article that he has until now taken for granted. It made me think of all those things that I have no idea how to make: soap, candles, matches—the list is long.
What would I do in Crusoe’s situation? Would I ever have the luck, the perseverance and the patience not to gobble the grains at once, but to wait like the Little Red Hen, for the time when I could mill the grain and bake the bread?
I am reminded of Robinson Crusoe as I open my copy of Thor Heyerdahl’s 1951 edition of The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft across the South Seas. Who can fail to be seduced by the tone of Heyerdahl’s (translated) prose, and his introduction, which takes place in medias res, in the middle of the story, exactly as the ancient poet Horace advised?
It is 1947 and Heyerdahl, with five fellow adventurers, is on a balsawood raft in the Pacific. He has just found ‘seven flying fish on deck, one squid on the cabin roof, and one unknown fish in Torstein’s sleeping bag’—a stroke of luck as Torstein Raaby is the cook this day. Now Heyerdahl is writing in his damp log-book on which is perched a green parrot, as one of his bearded companions is reading Goethe in the shadowy cabin beside him.