The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  A stone’s throw away, on Long Street, I found an abundance of second hand bookshops and antique emporia packed with 1930s junk. It’s a real treasure trove of a place. And, in a wildly vibrant backdrop of cultural colour, you can find every imaginable cuisine too – from sushi to Ethiopian ngira, and from Indian thalis to Brazilian barbecue.

  Pace slowly down Long Street and you can’t help but glimpse Cape Town’s past. What affects me most is the utterly genteel quality of it all. There’s a sense that this is where the seed of Cape Town fell long ago. Squint a little and, in the canary yellow light of afternoon, you savour the village feel beneath the bustle of city life.

  A twist and a turn and you reach Adderley Street, where the shops are a little larger, but where the atmosphere is straight out of the ’fifties. Woolworths stands in pride of place – not a haven for the downtrodden, but a shelter of subtle sophistication. There’s a wonderful flower market, too, on the east side of the street, the stalls ablaze with tropical blooms.

  It might not look like it, but this main thoroughfare dates back centuries, to the time of the first Dutch settlers – who arrived more than three hundred and fifty years ago. A sanctuary of safety from the dangers of the unknown lurking inland, Adderley Street quickly became the commercial hub for the Dutch East India Company, what eventually became the thriving Cape Colony.

  The most heartrending reminder of this time – one forged on servitude – can be found at the Slave Lodge, now housing a museum of culture. Over the years, many thousands of slaves were imprisoned there, a great number succumbing to the terrible conditions, malnutrition and disease.

  In line with Adderley Street, are the celebrated Company Gardens, which I failed to ever find on my last visit. It’s there that the East India Company’s master gardener, Hendrik Bloom, laid out the first garden in 1652. At first it was vegetables and fruit that were grown, to sustain the droves of immigrants who had begun to arrive. As time passed, the gardens were turned over to medicinal and botanical species, and gradually became the idyll they are today.

  For me, the most touching place of all in old Cape Town is St. George’s Cathedral, on the north-east edge of the Company Gardens. It was from there that Archbishop Desmond Tutu led his peaceful protest against Apartheid, a demonstration of dignity.

  Visit Cape Town and history is never far from your grasp. It lingers in the air, a scent on the breeze, an explanation of circumstance that shaped the Rainbow People. Stroll around the old downtown and it’s impossible not to be affected by the trials and tribulations of the struggle. But, in many ways, it is the sense of triumph in the face of such adversity that makes the experience all the more poignant.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  On The River of God

  THE JUNGLE CANOPY hung like a tremendous emerald barricade, concealing us from our world.

  There was an energy about it, a power, a sense of consciousness, as if it were watching our miserable procession, faltering ahead through the interminable undergrowth. For more than sixteen weeks we had been in the cloud-forest. Most of that time had been spent staggering inch by inch through the raging, waist-deep waters of the Madre de Dios River, the so-called ‘Mother of God’.

  My porters were broken men. They had all lost the skin on their feet, weeks before. Most were lame, plagued with chronic diarrhoea, and guinea worms, which bored out from the soft tissue of our inner thighs. There was dengue fever too. It turned strong men into whimpering wrecks, crushing their bones, and dessicating their flesh. During the long insect-ridden nights we would huddle under the makeshift tent, shaking like crack addicts going cold turkey.

  As leader of the expedition, it fell to me to drag the porters forward whether they liked it or not. But men stripped of health and enthusiasm for life are a dead weight. They missed their wives and the comforts of their village, and lacked the raw ambition which kept me going. I could feel that we were close now – close to Paititi, the greatest lost city in history. Endure the unendurable a little longer and, I felt sure, the El Dorado of the Incas would soon be mine.

  I was not the first to go in search of Paititi, and I fear I will not be the last. For five centuries, soldiers, adventurers, explorers and warrior-priests, have hacked through the Peruvian jungle on the quest of the lost city, the Holy Grail of exploration. Most of them have followed the same clue.

  The theory is that, as the Spanish Conquistadores swept through Peru in the 1500s, the Incas retreated with their most prized possessions, taking refuge in the densest cloud-forest on Earth. There, according to legend, they constructed a new city, more fabulous than anything South America had ever known.

  After first hearing the legend ten years ago, the corrosive allure of Paititi ran wild in my mind. Like so many before me, my motivation was founded on an overwhelming greed. Not for gold, but for glory. Discover a lost city and I would be transformed overnight from a humble traveller into the world’s most famous explorer.

  To have a real chance of finding Paititi, I would have to unearth clues in the chronicles of the Conquistadores. I read them, spending months trawling through library stacks – thousands of books, many written four centuries ago. The recurring name was Madre de Dios, the vast impenetrable jungle, east of the Andes, on the southern cusp of the Amazon.

  But there comes a point when the library research must come to an end. You must draw a line, and begin the expedition in earnest. From the outset, it was clear that mine would have to be an expedition born of economy. My bank balance was pathetically dry. All I managed to withdraw for expedition gear was £200.

  So I bought a copy of the free advertisement newspaper, Loot, spread its pink pages out on my sitting-room floor, and searched for equipment worthy of a budget lost city expedition.

  Within an hour I had found an old Zodiac dinghy, a pair of used jungle Altama boots, two shovels, six canvas kit-bags, three tarpaulins and a pair of Chinese-made lanterns. With the money that was left, I went to a hardware store and bought some rubble sacks, the kind used by builders to carry gravel, and a few rolls of plastic bin liners.

  Lastly, I went down to Safeway and snapped up their entire stock of six hundred Pot Noodles, charged to my credit card. Pervious experience had taught me that an expedition marches on its stomach.

  Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship. It is true that exploration can entail much misery, but anyone can find some used gear, buy a cheap airline ticket, and set out on a grand adventure. You don’t have to be Indiana Jones to go in search of a lost city.

  In addition to being overloaded with unnecessary supplies, I felt that the big expeditions which had searched for Paititi had failed for another key reason: their arrogance. They considered themselves far superior to the indigenous tribes, the very people who know the jungle inside-out.

  As far as I was concerned, in order to locate Paititi, I would have to become trusted by the people who made the Madre de Dios their home – the Machiguenga. After all, I reasoned, it must be very hard to lose a city, especially one as important as the El Dorado of the Incas.

  I flew to Lima, along with the rubber boat, the jungle boots and the mountain of Pot Noodles. Then I took the local bus across the Cordillera, the mountainous ridge than runs down the country like the spine on a chameleon’s back. At Cusco, the former Incan capital, I heard that six well-funded teams had recently entered the cloud-forest in search of the very same prize as me. One of them boasted a million-dollar budget, and every contrivance from chemical toilets to air-conditioned tents. They even had a military field hospital.

  Undeterred by the modesty of my own expedition, I clambered aboard the worn-out bus which occasionally ran the route from the highlands, down into the jungle. At the start, the landscape was desolate, abandoned, a thousand shades of grey; but as we descended, the vegetation changed. Prehistoric flowers and bronze-green fronds gave way to bamboo and bromeliads, to waterfalls and acres of trees.

 
Where the bus ride ended, I hitched a lift on a truck full of pigs and, three days later, I was at the edge of the Machiguenga tribe’s ancestral lands.

  The first contact is always the hardest.

  But a lucky break came in the form of an old man, called Hector. A dreamer and a Seventh Day Adventist, he too yearned to mount an expedition to find the ruined city. Yet his real value was in his close connections to the tribe.

  Hector had no doubt that the lost city existed. He said there was a man, a tribal warrior called Pancho, who had stumbled upon the ruins long ago in his youth, while out searching for new hunting grounds. Pancho was the key. After weeks of coaxing Hector, he agreed to take me to meet the warrior.

  Fine-boned and fragile, Pancho was at first reluctant to talk about the jungle or what secrets lay within it. We spent the afternoon at his hut, drinking gallons of warm masato, a vile white beer made from manioc, chewed by old village crones and fermented in their saliva.

  As late afternoon slipped into night, I realized that Pancho’s ambition was the mirror image of my own. While I yearned to find a lost city, overgrown and deserted, he yearned to go to a live city, bustling with life, and the cars he had never seen.

  Missionaries had told him of wayward places called discos, where coloured lights flashed, music blared, and beer flowed; and they had talked of high-class brothels where large-breasted women would service a humble man’s needs. Grinning, Pancho whispered that he would like to go to the city and taste the vice for himself.

  We made a pact: if he could take me to the ruins of Paititi, then I would take him to Cusco.

  The journey that followed was the hardest of my life.

  We felled a copse of balsa trees and pinned the trunks together with homemade nails, carved from the wood of chonta palms. Rafts were the only craft that could ascend the rapids. The jagged rocks tore at our feet, crippling the porters, the freezing water sapping their strength. Each mile was a struggle, earned in sweat, sores and disease.

  Each night I would rally the men, cajole them to face the dawn with the brevity and conviction of heroes. I would heap their plates high with food, and never eat until the last of them was full. After all, nothing was so important as the well-being as the men.

  But, with each mile, their resentment grew a little more. At first they laughed it off, humoured me for my pushing them. And, as days became weeks, and weeks slipped into months, the mood changed.

  All of a sudden, men who would have given everything at the start, regarded me with poisoned stares and hatred. It was then that I felt the greatest challenge. Not only did I have to talk myself into carrying on, but I had to drag the men along with me.

  From a fireside armchair, in a home with central heating and all mod cons, the idea of searching for a lost city is appealing. But, spend months in the jungle with rotting feet and terrible stomach problems, infested with worms and shaking from fever, the glory of it all wears painfully thin.

  And, as the weeks passed, I found myself questioning why anyone would want to set themselves such an insane quest, why I couldn’t make do with a nine to five job like everyone else.

  I dared not allow the men know my feelings though.

  It sounds clichéd, but ground down by weeks of fever, by guinea worms and putrid sores, I came to know myself. More importantly, I developed an astonishing respect for the jungle and its delicate web of life.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that finding Paititi was a death sentence for the jungle and the tribes. Within weeks the great trees would be felled, and package tourists would be trouping through. Pancho and his peers would be bell-hops in swish hotels before they knew it. I cursed myself for thinking of the fame and glory, and swore that even if I found Paititi, I would pretend I had never been there at all.

  As for Pancho, he returned to the city with me, where he tasted vice, and saw the curiosities of our urban life. He drove in a car, watched television, ate ice cream, and even tried a cappuccino.

  At the end of a week, he said he wanted to go home to his village. when I asked him what he thought of our world, he was silent for a moment. Then he screwed up his face:

  ‘What a terrible, terrible place this is,’ he said. ‘I thought it would be a lot better!’

  The next day I took Pancho back to the emerald forest. He shook my hand and grinned hard once we were at his village. I said that I hoped we would meet again. The great hunter smiled one last time.

  ‘You know where to find me,’ he said.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  On the Skeleton Coast

  STREWN WITH HUGE BLEACHED WHALE-BONES, shipwrecks, and the occasional human skull, Namibia’s Skeleton Coast is one of the most desolate shorelines on the African continent. Known to the Khoisan Bushmen of the interior as ‘The Land God Created in Anger’, it’s where the freezing waters of the Atlantic meet the scorched sands of the Namib desert.

  Stretching from the Angolan border, at the Kunene River in the north, down beyond the diamond ghost-town of Kolmanskop in the south, the Namib is a vast swathe of undulating dunes. Far too dry to sustain much life, the flora and fauna found there have adapted, enabling them to glean just enough moisture from the ocean’s fog that spills inland at dawn.

  Venture to the Skeleton Coast, and you get the sense that nature is warding you away right from the start. There are bones everywhere, flotsam and jetsam, the crumbling hulks of wrecks, dead plants, and the footprints of infrequent desert creatures, all of them on the constant and desperate search for sustenance.

  Hanging in the balance, a slim no man’s land between life and death, I was reminded time and again by the struggle to survive. It was a point never more powerfully made than on my first morning on the Skeleton Coast.

  I was moving clumsily across a towering sand dune which rolled down to the beach and into the foaming white breakers. There were no plants, no animals, no hint of anything alive, just the spectre of Death all around. As I took a swig of water from my flask, a male oryx came out of nowhere. Alone and weak from thirst, he stumbled down to the shore, tasted the salt water, and collapsed on the beach.

  A great uncompromising chunk of Africa, Namibia is one of the last true wildernesses. It’s a place where a few drops of water have at times been far more precious than the diamonds that famously litter its coastal sands. Nonetheless, it’s blessed with a stable government and decent infrastructure, something you can’t say about a good many countries on the African continent.

  Tearing south-west up from Antarctica, the trade winds of the Benguela system batter the shoreline night and day. No one knows quite how many ships they’ve swept onto the barren rocks of the Skeleton Coast. But, making your way southward, you spot wreckage every few miles.

  There are the remnants of ocean liners and trawlers, galleons, clippers and gunboats – testament to the perfidious current and the unrelenting winds. The wreckage is only one piece of the puzzle, but one with which we all readily identify – the crushed remains a reminder of our own fragility.

  The most infamous of the wrecks is the Dunedin Star. A Blue Star liner, it was washed ashore in 1942. Laden with munitions, crew, and a few paying passengers, the ship’s rescue has gone down in history as a catalogue of error. A Ventura bomber and a tug-boat, both sent to help, floundered as well. Their wreckage can still clearly be seen. And a slew of other vessels with good intentions were unable to get close. Forced to turn around, they left the stranded survivors on the desert. Yet, amazingly, most of them were rescued in the end.

  Not so lucky was the shipwrecked crew of an unknown vessel, washed up in 1860. Seventy years ago their twelve headless skeletons were found clustered together on the beach, along with a slate buried in the sand. It read, ‘I am proceeding to a river sixty miles north, and should anyone find this and follow me, God will help him.’

  The remains of the writer have never been found.

  My guide, Gotfod, drove us towards another wreck a little further down the coast. A quiet man with ove
rsized hands and a wry smile, he’d made sacrifices to be there. His wife and family lived so far away that he only saw them a few times a year. The Skeleton Coast is no place for family life.

  Slowing the Land Rover, he cocked his head out towards a twisted heap of rust and old iron chains.

  ‘That’s the Suiderkus,’ he said darkly, ‘a trawler wrecked on her maiden voyage forty years ago. Every time I pass it, there’s a little less left.’ Gotfod glanced towards the rocks. ‘Sometimes I wonder how many ships have met their end here,’ he added pensively. ‘The wreckage disappears over time, but the ghosts are left.’

  It’s not hard to imagine the elation of a shipwrecked survivor clawing his way to shore, only to be confronted by a new terror – yet another ocean stretching north, south and east, an endless barrier of dunes.

  Shifting constantly, the mighty mountains of sand are born when a few grains collect around a nest of quick-grass. Gradually, the little mound gets larger, kills the plant, develops into a dune, and roams the desert for eternity.

  Not far from the mortal remains of the Suiderkus, at Möwe Bay, is surely the word’s most remote police station. It’s so cut off that the handful of officers rush out at the sound of an engine. They man a tiny museum, filled with remnants of wreckage, bones, and more bones. Inside are human skulls, and life-vests from Japanese whalers, the sand-worn figurehead from an ancient galleon, delicate wooden balustrades, brass cannons, rigging and sea-worn chains.

  Walk along the lines of skulls outside, and you’re reminded once again that the Skeleton Coast is a place where Death looms large.

  But there is life, too.

  Travelling down the shoreline, we came upon a huge colony of Cape fur seals. There were thousands of them. Jet black and glistening, they were basking on the rocks like mermaids, or slipping easily into the freezing Atlantic waters to feast on the schools of sardines.