by Mark Austin
Being there is the name of the game, the most important thing. If you are not there, you are nothing. It is the foreign correspondent’s worst nightmare to be stranded while the opposition is in the thick of it, broadcasting from location – and, quite often, pointing out on air that they’re ‘the only British broadcasters’ reporting from wherever. Not being there is journalistic purgatory.
But getting there is often awkward, uncomfortable, troublesome or downright dangerous. I have done some crazy things in the name of ‘getting there’. I have flown in helicopters clearly unfit for service (in Sierra Leone); I have ridden on horseback down mountainsides (in Afghanistan); I have driven through minefields (unknowingly in Iraq); I have taken boats that leaked (in Indonesia); and I have ridden on the back of a motorbike controlled, or rather not controlled, by a mad twenty-year-old high on drugs (during riots, also in Indonesia). I have also been carried aloft, across a raging river (well, a rushing stream), by six men and a woman (in India).
It is true that occasionally the opposite applies. I have been lucky enough to fly on private jets, on Concorde, in first class; I have travelled on luxury trains, in plush limos, on super-yachts and even the Aga Khan’s private helicopter. But those journeys are the exception, not the rule. More often than not it is uncomfortable, unpleasant and hair-raising.
One of the most treacherous journeys I have ever undertaken was not in some war zone, but rather while covering a sporting event. I never thought I was going to die on a road trip quite as much as I did during the Cricket World Cup in India in 1987.
In those days we had to film the games ourselves with our own cameras and do the best we could. We were blessed at ITN with one of the best cricket cameramen in the business, Derek Seymour. He was a former war cameraman who had pretty much seen and done everything, but even he wasn’t prepared for the road journey by minibus from Bombay to Pune. It was a distance of about 100 miles but involved travelling along one of the most notoriously dangerous roads in India. With luck, we were told, we should make it in about four or five hours.
We had to get there for the following day’s game between England and Sri Lanka, and the first mistake we made was to delay our departure to do an interview in Bombay. The one piece of advice we had been given was not to make the journey in darkness. So what did we do? We left at dusk.
Well, to be honest, that wasn’t actually the first mistake we made. No, the first mistake was allowing Sanjay to drive us. Sanjay seemed a sound enough guy. Plenty of smiles and that shaking of the head Indians do when they mean ‘yes, OK’, if not much English. ‘No problem’ was about the extent of it. We were to hear a lot of that. But he was quite possibly the worst driver I have ever had the misfortune of encountering. The minibus company had briefed him on our destination, the Nehru Stadium in Pune, where we hoped to drop off our heavy equipment for the match coverage.
Weaving through the Bombay traffic, all seemed calm enough, if a little bewildering. Even in the big cities of India there seem to be no rules when it comes to driving. Not much looking in rear-view mirrors or wing mirrors goes on. Just a huge amount of horn use.
So we honked our way through the suburbs, narrowly avoiding cyclists, overladen tuk-tuks, wandering cows, dogs and pedestrians. But essentially all seemed borderline OK.
How that changed when we reached the madness of route NH 4. Sanjay suddenly turned into a man possessed by some strange driving demon. Firstly, I have to give you a sense of the road we were using. Nowadays, the Mumbai-Pune Expressway is a modern multi-lane highway; not so in 1987. Then, it was a winding single-lane mountain pass with steep inclines and equally steep drops, with no barriers to prevent cars, trucks or minibuses careering down the rocky hillside. Looking down, one could see vehicles of all descriptions, smashed-up, unreachable and abandoned. The fate of the vehicle obvious, the fate of their drivers and passengers unknown but predictable.
It was also self-evident how they ended up there. The road was full of gaudily decorated trucks bombing down the mountain with gay and reckless abandon; the drivers failing to adhere to any speed limit or lane discipline. Indeed, it was clear that which side of the road you occupied was entirely optional.
All this would just about be tolerable in daylight and sunshine. But by now we were travelling in darkness and rain. And then, of course, there was Sanjay.
He was clearly undecided whether to occupy the middle of the road and stubbornly stand his ground, relying on the oncoming vehicles to swerve around us, or to drive along the extreme edge of the road where no approaching driver would be insane enough to venture. He tried both, with mixed success.
It was absolutely terrifying, and we hadn’t even really got started. Derek yelled at Sanjay to slow down. ‘No problem,’ came the response, with no discernible reduction in speed. In fact, the louder Derek shouted at him, the more Sanjay thought he was being told to get a move on.
The bends were the worst; you would suddenly see the lights in front of you, and I mean right in front of you, and Sanjay and the other driver would take avoiding action right at the last moment. And with every sharp turn, the heavy editing equipment mounted on the seats at the back of the minibus would crash from one side to the other. That was lethal in itself.
‘No problem,’ Sanjay kept repeating, as the rain intensified and I began to think this would not end well. It was one of those moments when, had mobile phones been invented, I would have been texting loved ones to say goodbye.
Then suddenly, mercifully, without warning, it was over. At least temporarily. Sanjay decided we should take a break. He stopped at a roadside restaurant called Ramakant’s, a well-known resting place on this road from hell. We all ate rotis and drank beer and wondered whether we would survive. Sanjay paid a man to check the engine, top up the oil and wipe the windscreen. And then we were on our way again. ‘No problem.’
By now we were entering tunnel after tunnel, some lit, some not. All absolutely petrifying. The already narrow road narrowed still further in the tunnels, and how we avoided a collision remains a mystery to this day.
The road signs were hilarious. Or they would have been, had they not filled us all with dread and foreboding: ‘OVERSPEED IS A KNIFE THAT CUT A LIFE’, read one. ‘BE GENTLE ON MY CURVES’, said another. And then, ‘LIFE IS SHORT, DON’T MAKE IT SHORTER’. Why were they in English? I wondered. I didn’t need to read them – Sanjay did, for God’s sake. And he quite obviously couldn’t. There was not a single sign saying ‘No problem’ on the entire stretch of road.
Then there was the sign that really did it for me: ‘WATER ON ROAD DURING RAIN’. Well I never, thanks for that. Very useful.
By now Derek and our soundman, Alan, had both somehow gone to sleep. Or at least their eyes remained steadfastly shut. I, on the other hand, couldn’t stop watching the road. The lights, the horns blaring, the sudden jolting swerves, the whole, wretched roller-coaster ride was somehow mesmerizing. And then Sanjay started shouting in Urdu. ‘No problem’ had now become ‘big problem’. Yup, we had a puncture, and we limped into the next village and came to a slow, grinding halt. It was infuriating, but at the same time offered much-needed relief from the ordeal.
Eventually, tyre repaired at the roadside, we made it into Pune – never have I been so relieved to pull up at a Pearl-Continental Hotel. We unloaded our equipment and bags and bade farewell to Sanjay. ‘No problem,’ he said.
Duncan Jones, our picture editor who had gone on ahead to sort out camera positions and passes and other admin, had his own rather alarming experience in Pune. As he left the stadium after meeting the club secretary and scouting out a good camera position for Derek, he was surrounded by locals thrusting their autograph books and scraps of paper at him. Duncan was utterly bewildered, but decided the only thing to do was to sign them. Within minutes he was being mobbed, and police had to weigh in, beating away the throng with batons. It turns out the cricket fans thought that Duncan was the star Australian batsman, Dean Jones. Both apparently share the same
initials, D.M. Jones, and that was what was written on the accreditation Duncan had hanging around his neck. It was all quite bizarre.
It was some day, and some journey. And for the record, England beat Sri Lanka by eight wickets. No problem.
If you use subterfuge to get into the most reclusive, secretive and oppressive communist state in the world, then you’d better make sure you don’t get caught. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened when my cameraman Mick Deane and I managed to get into North Korea in the early nineties. Our escape was truly extraordinary.
First, though, some background. In those days it was almost unheard of for Westerners, and certainly Western journalists, to enter North Korea, but we’d discovered a small North Korean company in Hong Kong that had begun organizing visits for carefully vetted tour groups. We’d heard they were particularly keen to allow teachers in to see their new showpiece school in the capital, Pyongyang. So we applied, posing as two secondary-school teachers, and a few weeks later, much to our surprise, we were offered visas and told to pick them up in Beijing.
Armed with a small, tourist-style video camera, we flew into Pyongyang to be met by our government contact, Mr Kim, who was to be our guide, driver, bodyguard and minder. He would be with us every hour of every day, and would see us to our hotel rooms in the evening, where a hidden camera would take over the monitoring of us. It was quite simply the most bizarre, nightmarish, Orwellian, fascinating but ultimately depressing place I have ever been to, before or since. This was in the dying days of the rule of Kim Il-sung, the so-called Great Leader, characterized by an all-pervasive personality cult, a ruthless indoctrination of the people, and the brutal elimination of any opposition whatsoever. It was a fortress-state with a million-man army, a much-feared secret security service and widespread poverty.
It was in the news at the time because, even then, there were huge fears internationally that the regime was beginning the process of building a nuclear bomb. The North Koreans were threatening to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty rather than allow the inspections demanded by the West, and the United States and South Korea were pressing for international sanctions against Pyongyang. It seemed as good a time as any to visit. And what a place it was.
We arrived at night and were taken in a government Volvo straight to the only international hotel. It was Swedish-built and at least twelve storeys high, but didn’t seem to have any other guests. We were the only two people – three including our minder – in the massive dining room. There was no menu, and we were given a vegetable soup and bread and a Korean beer.
The following day, we were first driven to a station on the city’s brand-new underground. We drove along vast, wide avenues with barely any traffic whatsoever. A few other official-looking cars, the odd bicyclist, but very few people. There were more street sweepers than pedestrians. Every so often, large groups of very young soldiers would march past. Everyone we saw wore buttons of Kim Il-sung on their lapels, and there were hoardings and posters and giant statues of him everywhere. At the station we descended the escalators to the sound of rousing piped music with lyrics that extolled the virtues of the Great Leader. Once down on the platform, the walls were decorated with murals depicting his military heroics. Here it was much busier, the brainwashed subjects of the Kim regime on their daily commute to government offices. They all looked cheerful, but when cameras are around I presume there is an unspoken order to smile.
We were then taken to a huge department store… full of merchandise, mainly from China, but virtually empty of people. And then the highlight of the day, according to Mr Kim – a visit to the huge bronze statue of Kim Il-sung on Mansu Hill. Hundreds of schoolchildren had gathered there and were staring in wonderment at the seventy-foot-high monument in front of them. Their teachers were telling them what to think. I was wondering what they really thought.
It all made for good pictures and I did a piece to camera, telling Mr Kim that I wanted to record something for my own pupils back in Hong Kong. He seemed to believe me. Basically, we filmed what they wanted us to film, but we also got footage of some stuff they didn’t, like the marching, singing troops. We were managing to build up some sort of picture of what life was like in the city.
That evening, just before midnight, we were taken to the main station to catch a train to the DMZ, the demilitarized zone on the border with South Korea. It was obvious to us that we were travelling at night so we would be unable to see anything of life outside the showpiece capital city. Mr Kim made sure the blinds in our carriage were pulled down for the entire journey.
The train moved very slowly and noisily through the night, and would make long stops en route. We tried to get some sleep. It was daylight when we arrived, and we found ourselves in the middle of the most militarized border region on earth. The peace treaty at the end of the Korean War was never signed, so technically a state of war still exists between North and South Korea.
On either side of the DMZ, soldiers stood all day staring at the enemy. They were surprisingly close; in places, just a few yards apart. In a prefabricated building, we were introduced to a senior North Korean soldier who, with a wall map and a huge model of the area laid out before him, pointed out the deployment of his forces on the border. We filmed the talk and got a brief chance to ask him about whether they were building the bomb. The translator and Mr Kim looked alarmed, but the soldier shook his head vigorously and laughed. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. I laughed too, and the tension was broken. Mr Kim, though, was becoming suspicious. Too many questions from this mathematics teacher from Hong Kong.
His suspicions grew a day later when, back in Pyongyang, we were taken to the biggest, most modern school in the city. It was truly impressive, and the pupils – model students all – were clearly well drilled in what to do and say in the presence of foreigners. They gave thanks to one man for the privilege of studying there: the Great Leader. ‘A father to all of us, better in every way to our own fathers,’ said one boy.
But Mr Kim had a surprise for us. He took us into a classroom where the subject being taught was mathematics. There was a translator on hand, and it suddenly dawned on me we were in trouble. The school had arranged for me to take the maths class. ‘Go ahead,’ said Mr Kim.
Mick realized we had a problem. He knew that not only had I never taught maths to anyone, but I had also failed to pass any maths exam ever. I am basically as innumerate as it is possible to be. I can’t even count my blessings. It had, in fact, been Mick’s little jest to put ‘maths teacher’ on our visa form. Now, suddenly, it didn’t seem that funny.
I basically bluffed and fluffed my way through five minutes of basic maths before trying to turn the subject to whether they liked the school and what they wanted to do when they left. It was all pretty unconvincing, and Mr Kim was obviously unimpressed. Later that night, over vegetable soup and dumplings, he leaned forward and asked us if we ‘really were teachers’ or something else altogether. ‘You behave,’ he said, ‘a bit like journalists.’
Mick laughed and said that we were asking so many questions and taking so many pictures because we wanted to make a film for our own school. But we went to bed that night thinking we had been rumbled, and were left contemplating several years in a North Korean labour camp. I, for one, was seriously concerned.
In the middle of the night, Mick came to my room and asked to speak to me in the corridor, thinking the rooms were definitely bugged. He said he thought we should leave, even though the scheduled tour had two more days to go. I agreed, but I couldn’t think how we could get out without arousing yet more suspicion. We knew there was a daily flight to Beijing, but how would we get to the airport, and how would we even get booked on the flight? With no way of communicating with the outside world, we were isolated, freezing cold (it was minus 20 degrees) and very frightened.
We decided to take our chance and tell Mr Kim that we had a personal emergency and had to fly back early. When he arrived to pick us up the following morning, I spok
e with him and said that we needed to leave due to a family illness. He looked flustered by what we were saying and quickly disappeared into the back office of the hotel. We feared the worst. If they found out we were journalists, we could be in very serious trouble.
Mr Kim came back and told us it was impossible to leave because the flights were full. We had no way of knowing whether that was true or not. This was before mobile phones or easy access to the Internet, so we were cut off, at the mercy of the regime – or at least of Mr Kim. Then, suddenly, he took me aside and asked to talk privately. He led me outside into the bitter cold and asked me if we were telling the truth. I had to make a rapid calculation. I reckoned he had only taken me outside so that no one could eavesdrop on the conversation. Why else? I figured he may be on our side and I was going to come clean. I was about to answer, when he abruptly told me to go get our bags. I walked back into the foyer, told Mick to pack and returned to my room to do the same.
Within minutes, we were driving at some speed to the airport. It had begun to snow heavily, the sky leaden and grey. At the airport, Mr Kim acquired our tickets, saw us through security and made to leave. Then he stopped, turned back to me, leaned into my ear and said, ‘Good luck with the film… for your school.’ Then he was gone.
To this day, I don’t know whether Mr Kim knew what we were up to and wanted to help us or whether he suspected nothing. He was Kim the inscrutable. But we owe him.
What I do know, however, is that we were about to embark on the most crazy flight I have ever taken. Just boarding the Russian-built Ilyushin aircraft was alarming enough. The wings were covered with ice and snow, and no attempt was being made to remove it. You could sit anywhere and Mick and I managed to grab a couple of seats by the emergency exit. But all around us there was utter chaos. People were boarding overloaded with baggage, there were fights over space in the overhead lockers and the airline staff – in the bright red of the national flag – couldn’t have been less interested.