OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  I flew home a day before my school entrance exam. My maths was awful but I scraped in on the power of my story: about a New York yellow cab and a poor little lost boy called Rizzo.

  THE INTERVENING YEARS did nothing to stem my obsession: Taxi Driver set me off again and that was it: yellow cab, yellow cab. Once Upon a Time in America reignited my love for Manhattan and later, Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth had me telling the Unemployment Office in Ross-on-Wye that I wanted to be an immigrant and a New York cabbie. I couldn’t drive; I still can’t.

  I did, though, end up living in Manhattan. I couldn’t help it. I lived there for eight years. There are many yellow cab memories: a boy kissed me – unexpectedly – in one; each time I took one from JFK or Newark, I would watch Manhattan rise before me and I’d grin. My best cab memory is a night the New York Yankees won the World Series. I sat in the back of a cab driving up Eighth Avenue while cars honked horns and flashed lights. I wound down the window and stuck my head out, and there was Queen Latifah, head and torso sticking out of a limo’s sunroof in the next lane. ‘The Yankees won, man!’ she yelled at me and laughed. My yellow cab accelerated with that V8 roar that can only roll forward; I waved goodbye; the fare ticked.

  It was a New York moment.

  I was in Manhattan during the era of the Ford Crown Victorian, and, at the end of the 1990s, there was the strange sight of a Toyota people-carrier (a yellow cab people-carrier!). I was told to ‘buckle up’ by Whoopi Goldberg on recorded loop, and the cabs – a little like Giuliani’s city – became too shiny for me. None of these vehicles compared to the black-and-yellow Checker cabs I’d first seen on my TV in Ye Olde England (although, when I could find them on the streets, I’d yell for them). Perhaps during my time in New York I was chasing something that was fading, something that wasn’t necessarily there. The last Checker cab was decommissioned in July 1999. It had almost one million miles on its milometer. I left Manhattan the same year.

  It’s simple math, as the Americans say. The yellow cab I first saw on American TV when I was eight years old represented everything I couldn’t grasp at the time; freedom, adventure, opportunity, power; it truly was everything that my life up on that hill wasn’t. I didn’t dream about London or Paris or anywhere in Europe in the same way. It is a coming-of-age cliché, but my obsession with the yellow cabs of New York City became my escape. The opening line of The Godfather is, ‘I believe in America,’ and I think that up in my damp bedroom that’s how I felt, in spite of all the sentiment and contradiction that this statement holds. To me America, and specifically Manhattan, was a gloriously bright (and yellow) world somewhere magical, and every child believes in magic.

  Of course the lasting irony is that now, in my nearing middle age, I’m back on a rural hill. There are no missionary monks here, there is no gamekeeper; this is Forestry Commission land. I still don’t drive, but there are two roads that lead up to my hill. There is some evolution then, but I miss New York City and those yellow cabs with all my heart.

  The Orchid Lady

  ROBIN HANBURY-TENISON (born London, 1936) is a writer and explorer. He made the longest river journey in the world – alone – from the mouth of the Orinoco 10,000 km to the River Plate, and has led over thirty expeditions, including the massive Royal Geographical Society expedition to the heart of Borneo, which sparked global concern for tropical rainforests. He was one of the founders of Survival International, and remains its President, working since 1969 for the rights of indigenous people. He is the author of over twenty books, notably The Great Explorers and The Oxford Book of Explorers.

  The Orchid Lady

  ROBIN HANBURY-TENISON

  When I was twenty-eight years old, in 1964, I was persuaded by Sebastian Snow to join him in an attempt to be the first people to bisect South America by river. Sebastian was famous as the first man to have gone the whole length of the Amazon from source to mouth; and six years before my friend Richard Mason and I had become the first people to cross the South American continent at its widest point from east to west.

  Sebastian and I decided to do the journey from north to south, travelling in a small boat from the mouth of the Orinoco to the River Plate. We acquired enough sponsorship to buy a thirteen-foot Avon Red Cat and two 18hp motors, tried the boat out on the lake on my farm on Bodmin Moor and shipped it out to Venezuela. Two collapsible rubber petrol containers, each holding fifty gallons when full, took up most of the floor space, leaving precious little room for us and our meagre equipment. We perched on each side and bounced through the waves as we set off up the wide Orinoco. After a thousand miles we passed into Brazil and joined the Rio Negro, having navigated the Casiquiare Canal, an extraordinary phenomenon of a river which runs over the watershed between the vast basins of the Orinoco and the Amazon. The Brazilian border consisted of a smart little military post with a row of whitewashed thatched huts. The commandant barely glanced at our passports, invited us to stay and regaled us with his only 78 record: Harry James’ Orchestra playing ‘Sleepy Lagoon’. We found out much later that we had entered Brazil completely illegally, since strict permits were required to drive, let alone import, a boat. When it came to leaving the country and crossing into Paraguay, I had to try and do so at night pretending to be a patch of floating weed. But that all lay far ahead.

  Sebastian, who was always eccentric, had begun to behave even more irrationally than usual. I thought at first that this might have been because he had managed to acquire a dose of clap during the week he had been in Venezuela ahead of me, a week in which he had run through a fair part of the expedition funds on riotous living. The doctor in Puerto Ordaz, whom we visited the day before setting off, prescribed massive doses of penicillin, which I had to inject nightly into Sebastian’s bottom. Our first chore on making camp was to boil our sole syringe and needle. However, his symptoms began to worsen to include an almost complete loss of balance, which was not a good thing when spending all day in a small open boat. He also had a tendency to drop vital pieces of equipment overboard. I was beginning to worry about him.

  A hundred miles downstream on the Rio Negro, we came to our first rapids at Uapés and, beside them, the first major settlement, the Salesian mission São Gabriel da Cachóeira. Here we were greeted by seven elderly priests, two of them with flowing white beards, one of whom said he had been there for forty years. They gave us a room in the small hospital and we dined simply with them in the refectory. Nuns in flowing white habits flitted around and one came to sit and talk with us. She told us that an Englishwoman had been staying a few days before but was now out in the forest collecting plants.

  NEXT MORNING I was pottering about in our boat, repacking our stores and checking for leaks, when I looked up to see a striking blonde in a bush shirt, her hair an unruly mass of curls tumbling over her shoulders. She was Margaret Mee, the legendary botanical artist, then on the third of fifteen astonishing journeys she was to make into the remotest parts of the rainforest, collecting and painting plants. In her book, published twenty-four years later, she describes the meeting:

  When we landed in Uapés, I saw to my astonishment a rubber boat with two powerful outboard motors tied at the bank among the other river craft. On further examination I noted a couple of crash helmets [she must have imagined those. We never had crash helmets], British and Brazilian flags and a nice Paisley scarf, so by deduction I concluded that the boat was British owned. A blond, suntanned young man came up to greet me as ‘the English woman they have been telling me about’. Who was he, and where was he going? I wanted to know. His name was Robin Hanbury-Tenison and his companion was Sebastian Snow, both young travellers already experienced in exploring the Amazon … writing a book about the longest river journey on record. That evening we supped together at the invitation of Sister Elza and talked late into the night.

  Robin Hanbury-Tenison and Sebastion Snow on their Amazon expedition

  Margaret Mee – back in the Amazon in the 1980s

  Margaret had been having a
n exciting time. After a week botanising far up a tributary of the Negro and climbing a small mountain, which had probably not been visited since Richard Spruce had been there a hundred and twelve years before, she had spent a few days at an Indian village recovering. While she was there a rough party of prospectors had arrived by motorised canoe and the leader had made a pass at her, which she had repelled. When he and his companions returned drunk, she was ready for them. With her money, camera and her mother’s engagement ring hidden in the hut, she was sitting on a chair with her loaded revolver in her hand. Laughing at his agitated retreat with his hands in the air, she chased him back to the boat and they drove away. I was impressed.

  We needed a guide to show us the way through the rapids and the tangled mass of islands and sandbanks which lay downstream of us. The only problem was that there was barely room for another body on board our heavily laden little boat and extra weight made it difficult to get it to ‘plane’ and so go at a decent speed. Sebastian and I achieved this each time we started by having one of us scrambling over the petrol containers to the bow and bouncing up and down while the other gunned the engines at full throttle. We would need a very small guide. Margaret said that she knew just the man, and he happened to be the best pilot on the river.

  Manolo el Tucuma was a wizened old person who claimed to be seventy-three, but he had a saintly nature, a large black umbrella, which he opened against the spray, and a good sense of humour, which he maintained throughout the dramas we endured on the way to Manaus. These included discovering that we had been sold kerosene instead of petrol at São Gabriel. Of course, we only found out when we had refilled the tanks and so this necessitated Manolo and me struggling forty miles back upstream with coughing motors to remonstrate with the trader from whom we had bought it. We left Sebastian, who was no help in a crisis, at an Indian village, to be collected later.

  My bonus was that I got to spend another evening listening to Margaret’s extraordinary adventures. She was then fifty-five years old and still very good-looking, with her striking hair. She completed her fifteenth collecting expedition in her eightieth year and her Amazon Collection of sixty paintings and many plants new to science are now housed at Kew. When my old schoolteacher at Eton, the distinguished art critic and historian Wilfred Blunt, brother of the spy Anthony Blunt, first saw Margaret’s superb botanical drawings, he said: ‘They could stand without shame in the high company of such masters as Georg Dionysius Ehret and Redouté.’

  Manolo and I duly collected Sebastian and made our way to Manaus. There Manolo met his son, whom he had not seen for twenty years, and Sebastian flew home. It turned out that he was suffering from Ménière’s disease, a disorder of the inner ear, which causes dizziness and loss of balance. This was cured and, he told me later, it was confirmed that my injections had also done the trick. I continued alone through the rivers of South America and eventually reached Buenos Aires about two months later.

  BACK IN LONDON, I was invited to lunch at Buckingham Palace, where I found myself seated next to Prince Philip, who grilled me about the point of this journey. ‘Does it have any economic significance?’ he asked. Floundering to give a positive answer, I explained that many of the rivers I had traversed had been very shallow and interspersed with sandbanks and rapids. ‘The only boat that could take passengers would be this new thing I’ve heard about called a Hovercraft, as that would skim over all obstacles and so everyone could go and see what I have seen,’ I said, rather unconvincingly. To my genuine astonishment he turned to the man on his other side and said, ‘Mr Cockerell, you had better give this young man one of your machines!’

  The man who invented the Hovercraft, later to become Sir Christopher, was not best pleased with what sounded like a Royal Command, but that conversation did result in the first major Hovercraft expedition in 1968, when with twenty-two assorted scientists, journalists and film-makers we took an SRN6 off its day job as the Isle of Wight ferry and followed my route from Manaus to the mouth of the Orinoco in reverse. When we reached Uapés I told the captain that we had our first dangerous rapids to ascend. He had a look at them and opined that he didn’t think they would pose much problem to a craft that rode a metre above the rocks and waves. I suggested that, as a special favour to me, he requested the services of the best pilot on the river, who happened to live in nearby São Gabriel.

  There I tracked down Manolo el Tucuma. He now looked the old man he was and I found him living in severely reduced circumstances in a hovel, where his family brought him food from time to time. I explained that his special skills were once more required. Carrying his battered old black umbrella and walking tall, Manolo passed through the crowd surrounding the beached hovercraft and shook the Captain’s hand. With a mighty roar the engines were started up and the great machine slid onto the surface of the water and forged easily up the cataract, as the crowd ran along the bank cheering. Manolo stood in the front indicating the safest route, as he had so many times in the past. I like to think it was his finest hour.

  Twenty-four years after our meeting, in November 1988, Margaret Mee gave a talk at the Royal Geographical Society in London, at which her superbly illustrated book, In Search of Flowers of the Amazon Forests was launched. I arrived late and sat in the gallery enthralled both by her pictures and the passionate way Margaret described what was happening to her beloved Amazon as loggers and cattle ranchers destroyed great swathes of it. At the end, I decided not to fight my way through the crowd of those congratulating her, but to renew our friendship later. I bought a copy of the book and was astonished, when I arrived home and read it, to find how much she had written about our chance encounter so long before. I was about to try and contact her when I heard that on the 30th of November, the anniversary of our last meeting, she had been killed in a car crash in Leicestershire.

  With Eyes Wide Open

  RAJA SHEHADEH (born Ramallah, Palestine, 1951) is the author of three highly acclaimed memoirs, Strangers in the House, When the Bulbul Stopped Singing and A Rift in Time, as well as a travel book, Palestinian Walks, which won the Orwell Prize in 2008. He is a Palestinian lawyer and writer who lives in Ramallah – his family were forced from their home in Jaffa in 1948 – and is the founder of the pioneering, non-partisan human rights organisation, Al Haq (Law in the Service of Man).

  With Eyes Wide Open

  RAJA SHEHADEH

  The electric kettle and coffee mugs rattled in their plastic bag as we drove up north. We hadn’t bothered to pack them well, our trip was just a short hour and forty-five minute drive. Now we worried they might break but decided not to stop. We wanted to get to the Galilee hills in time for an afternoon walk.

  The route we took went through the Jordan Valley – part of the Great Rift Valley that extends from the Taurus Mountains in Turkey to Central Africa in the south. Here is one of the best places to observe how the Rift majestically meanders along the fault in the earth formed millions of years earlier by the movement of the tectonic plates deep in the ground.

  The hodgepodge of stuff we were carrying did not all fit in the trunk. After placing the two pairs of walking boots and sticks, a suitcase with our bed clothes and toiletries, and our two backpacks, there was no space left. The books, towels, swimwear, packed lunch, kettle and coffee things had to go on the back seat. By the time we finished hauling in our stuff, the car was quite a sight. But we didn’t mind. It was but a short hop to the Galilee.

  What a relief it was, we thought, to take a holiday that did not involve flying, with all the hassle of airport lines and searches. We looked forward to the drive down the wadi to the cultivated fields on this clear, crisp winter morning. My wife, Penny, and I had for several months been working long hours, hardly leaving our house in confined Ramallah, and we needed time, as Penny put it, to air our brains. A breezy walk along the hills of the Galilee was sure to accomplish this. If not, then surely sitting in the quiet serenity of the large stone patio overlooking Lake Tiberias at the pilgrims’ retreat would do t
he job. The only fault in this otherwise perfect refuge from the turbulence of life in our region was that it had no room service and did not offer the possibility of preparing coffee in your room. And Penny cannot wake up without her morning coffee. Which was why we were travelling with our coffee-making gear.

  THE IMPOVERISHED PALESTINIAN farming villages we passed on the sides of the road were a sharp contrast to the highly subsidised Israeli settlements with their red-tiled roofs and spacious gardens, established since Israel occupied the West Bank on confiscated Palestinian land.

  Three-quarters of an hour after we started we had already passed the first three of the four checkpoints along the way. At every stop we had to present our Israeli identification cards. The profiling Israeli officials practise at airports is not necessary here. These variously coloured and coded IDs tell everything about their holder, creating segregation amongst the Palestinian population that mirrors the fragmentation of the land by borders, checkpoints and settlements. So far, though, we were doing well and getting waved through without any question asked. And we were not unduly concerned about the last checkpoint ahead – the one separating the West Bank from Israel – because we had often passed it without incident. We were enjoying the drive, too, along a narrow two-lane road; we both dread highways where we find the zooming cars speeding on both sides of our slow-moving vehicle nerve-racking. So we were in a tranquil state of mind.