Himalaya (2004)

by Michael Palin

  The casualties of this rush to modernize are the remnants of old Lijiang. Those traditional wood and mud-brick houses that have the misfortune to lie outside UNESCO’s protection can be seen like fish left behind by the tide, circled by the diggers and graders, waiting to be swept away.

  Kunming, with a population just short of 4 million, is the biggest city we’ve seen since leaving Lahore. Armies of bicycles, traffic lights with numerical count-downs and paradoxical reminders everywhere that this burgeoning expanse of glass and concrete is a garden city, boasting one of the most generous climates in China.

  For us, the City of Eternal Spring is another welcome step down from the high plateau. At a little over 6000 feet (1830 m), it’s half as high as Lhasa and a third the height of Everest Base Camp. The air is positively balmy and a premature holiday mood grips us all as we put some distance between ourselves and the high mountains.

  We lunch at a restaurant that serves Kunming’s speciality, Across the Bridge Noodles. The story behind the name is both romantic and utilitarian. A scholar seeking peace and quiet retires to a cottage on an island. His wife brings him his food, but the bridge is so long it’s cold by the time she gets across. She discovers one day that by pouring a layer of oil on top of the broth it would stay hot. So she poured on the oil, took the broth over the bridge, put in the various cuts of meat when she got there and a new dish was born. (I think the story says a lot about the importance of food to the Chinese. In England he’d have been lucky to get a sandwich.)

  So we have set in front of us a bowl of very hot soup flavoured with chicken stock, duck and spare ribs and arrayed round it, with no regard for the size of the table, a multitude of side dishes including raw chicken and Yunnan ham, liver, fish, pork, spinach, onions and all sorts of other vegetables as well as chilli pepper to add to the fun.

  It’s a huge but quite delicate meal, with impeccably fresh ingredients.

  Kunming is not only a floral showplace, still basking in the glow of having hosted Expo ‘99 Flower and Plant Festival, but the capital of a province with more ethnic minorities than any other. Gardens and ethnic diversity meet in a landscaped, 90-hectare site on the shores of Lake Dian, south of the city. Called the Yunnan Nationalities Villages, in essence it’s an ethnic minorities theme park.

  I’m taken round on a white golf buggy by an obliging, if a little brisk guide called Ms Mi, who is herself in minority national costume.

  Rather like feeding times at the zoo, there is a strict schedule of which minority is ‘performing’ when, and we’re swiftly off to the Dai village, where, in front of a tall, white, instant pagoda, men and women dance, the women conspicuous by dainty scarlet straps over their red schoolgirl shoes. Along with light blue and orange tunics they look rather odd, like a tribe of air hostesses. Then we’re off to the Tibetans, who dance in front of an impressive reproduction of the Jokhang in Lhasa, incongruously set against a backdrop of banana trees and bougainvillea. A small crowd, watching without any apparent engagement, becomes even smaller as the show goes on, leaving only ourselves and an old sick man in a wheelchair, who stares mutely ahead, his grandson perched on his lap.

  If it’s four o’clock it must be the performing elephants, and soon Ms Mi, who is Yi, and me are at the back of a somewhat larger crowd, watching a group of rather dry elephants being led into position in a concreted performance area.

  ‘Are elephants a minority in China?’ I ask Ms Mi.

  She looks at me with vague irritation.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I wondered if elephants were a minority in China.’

  She looks deeply concerned, more, I think, for my sanity, than anything else. After appearing to consider the question for a polite amount of time, she frowns and shakes her head.

  The attempt to make elephants look cute by pumping disco music from the loudspeakers and then tugging at their legs is a most depressing spectacle and the jokey compere seems thoroughly unpleasant. Maybe I’m just not getting the jokes, so I ask Basil, who confirms that he is indeed thoroughly unpleasant.

  The weather’s clouded over and the vast area of the park is almost empty, but the shows must go on and at five o’clock we’re at the Mosuo stand. Their ‘event’ takes place in a smaller version of Namu’s hotel, with log walls and lots of cowboy hats and line dancing. The audience walk in and walk out, talk and photograph each other as if the performers were invisible. There seems not the slightest respect, or, indeed, enthusiasm for the fact these are live performers.

  This whole Yunnan Nationalities park has been like a weird, dreamlike playback of many of the places and the people we’ve met these past few weeks, and has the effect of making me feel enormously fortunate to have met our minorities in the wild, as it were.

  Day Eighty Eight : Kunming

  The first English-language newspapers since we left Kathmandu. It’s not often I read the papers these days and feel cheered up, but The China Daily‘s news of the first full ceasefire in Kashmir for 14 years is heartening. Kashmir was the most traumatized of all the areas we’ve been through on the Himalayan journey and its problems seemed insoluble. Now, President Musharraf has ordered a ceasefire along the Line of Control and there is a suggestion that he will allow talks to go ahead on the future of Kashmir without prior conditions. Previously, the Pakistan government has regarded a plebiscite in Kashmir as a sine qua non of any talks.

  The Bank Hotel in Kunming is one of exceptional comfort but in the short time I’ve been here I’ve had to call someone to fix both the heating and the lights. Now I find that my bathroom scales don’t function. This is not, I realize, a big deal, but we’re paying for this little bit of luxury so we might as well get it right. I ring for assistance and have a not altogether satisfactory conversation with someone who seems unfamiliar with the word ‘scales’, but happier with ‘bathroom’.

  Within less than a minute the doorbell goes. Standing there is a hefty girl with a plastic cap on, flanked by two men in protective overalls, one holding a red rubber plunger and the other an enormous wrench. They stand there motionless for a moment, like figures on a coat of arms. I have the distinct feeling they would rather not be here.

  It’s quite a squeeze with all four of us in the bathroom, and, as we shuffle round, the man with the plunger gestures nervously towards the toilet bowl. When I shake my head and hand them the defective scales, their manner changes completely and, with lavatory-unclogging off the menu, we are one happy family, nodding and smiling and joking.

  Taps are turned on and off as if to demonstrate something, but it’s only after they’ve gone that I notice a small sign on the side of the shower apologizing for problems with the water supply.

  ‘Please bare with us,’ it reads.

  Catch up with my notes, then walk into the central square of Kunming. The old city has been razed but the tall, arched West Gate has been rebuilt. This was once the Chinese end of one of the most famous highways in the world. Marco Polo knew it as the Southern Silk Road, an extension of the trade route that connected Asia with Europe, which we’ve touched on in several places on our journey. In the Second World War it was reopened as the Burma Road, a supply line that cost thousands of lives to build and extended through the appallingly difficult country of the eastern Himalaya to come out in Assam in north India.

  Little is made now of its wartime connotations, but 100 yards away is the Hump Bar. The Hump in this case refers to the name given to the 500 miles of Himalaya between here and India by the AVG, American Volunteer Group, known as the Flying Tigers, who flew perilous supply flights across this towering mountain wilderness from 1941 until the end of the war. Six hundred and seven planes were lost crossing the Hump.

  The walls of this comfortable, congenial old bar are covered in memorabilia of the period: maps and posters and black and white photos of the Flying Tigers standing beside planes with bared teeth painted on their sides.

  The next port of call on our journey will be over the other side of the Hi
malaya, where the planes landed and the Burma Road broke out of the jungle.

  Two last good memories of China, both meals. A lunch of fish in lemon grass, asparagus, chicken and delectable pork cooked beneath a vegetable crust, and a last evening thank you to our long-suffering Chinese fixers, minders and helpers in a chic restaurant, with photos of the old Kunming railway on the walls.

  So I’m very happy tonight, and only wish John Pritchard were here to share our enormous sense of relief at having, in not much more than a month, crossed the hardest terrain we’ve ever travelled.

  Nagaland and Assam

  Day Ninety : Longwa

  In the remote hill village of Longwa I can stand with one leg in India and the other in Myanmar, or Burma, as it used to be known. (I like the word Burma and take heart from the fact that Myanmar’s national anthem remains ‘Gba mjay Bma’ - ‘We Shall Love Burma for Ever’.) Longwa, a collection of palm-thatched huts, a tin-roofed church and a huge satellite dish, isn’t marked on any maps I have. It’s at the end of the line, on the very edge of Indian administration.

  It’s also the home of the largest building made entirely from vegetation that I think I’ve ever seen. The chief’s hut, or in this case, mega-hut, is some 200 feet long and covered with a striking roof of palm leaves that sweeps down from an apex of 50 feet or more to within 3 feet of the ground.

  The hut occupies the highest point of a 4700-foot (1430 m) ridge, on either side of which the land falls away in a series of crinkly valleys. Along the top runs the India-Myanmar border. In fact, it slices right down the middle of the chief’s hut, so he can walk between the two countries without ever leaving home.

  Throughout the Himalaya, in Kashmir, on the North-West Frontier, in Tibet and Nepal, we’ve encountered a tension between the hill people, determined to preserve their customs and traditions, and the plains people wanting to build nations and impose control and conformity. It’s no different here. There are a dozen different Naga tribes in these hills, who until very recently fought each other and themselves, took heads as trophies and were generally left alone. From the middle of the 19th century, the British took an interest, but of an avuncular sort, never trying to subdue them but keeping them as a loose but friendly tribal area, which they called Nagaland. They were followed by American missionaries, who tried to persuade them to love God, grow crops and stop fighting.

  When India was granted independence, the Nagas were not happy. Assimilation and domination by their Assamese lowland neighbours was seen as infinitely worse than staying with the British, and they made things difficult for India, boycotting general elections and fighting a fierce independence war against central government right up until the 1990s.

  In January 2003, after 40 years of bloodshed, the NSCN, National Socialist Council of Nagaland, met in Delhi and announced that the war was over. Others are not so sure. They claim that the dream of an independent Nagaland will never go away.

  The problem is that the Naga tribes remain essentially a trans-border people who don’t fit neatly into any of the boxes that the politicians have created for them. This may vex central government but it also means I can stand astride this particular frontier without fear of being mined, electrocuted or shot.

  The people of Longwa are Konyak Nagas, the most numerous of 16 sub-tribes. They used to be known as the Naked Nagas, the title of a book by an Austrian anthropologist who worked here in the 1930s, some of whose observations, such as ‘Virginity wins no halo in the Naga heaven’, suggest reasons for his fascination with them.

  Today, things are very different. Such has been the success of the American Baptist Church that 99 per cent of the Naga have been converted to Christianity. Nakedness is a thing of the past, as is the once common custom of head-hunting. (Though a recent National Geographic article reported evidence of active head-hunters as recently as 1991.)

  We have come here with Shingwong, whose official title is Extra Assistant to the Deputy District Commissioner. He’s a soft-spoken Konyak, with square, grave features, more Tibetan than Indian. He wears a Western jacket and trousers. Tomorrow there will be a big spring festival here and the guest of honour will be the local MP.

  The MP has asked to meet us and after our meal tonight Shing-wong takes us to see him, in a small, dark barn, with a hard earth floor. By the looks of things the MP’s had a few. His eyes are unfocussed and his mouth seems to have collapsed at one side, making him look not only unattractive, but dangerous.

  Squatting on stools around him and lit only by flickering firelight is gathered a cross-section of mountain people, who seem to be from a completely different world. Most have red shawls thrown over bare shoulders and round their waists are aprons, held in place by belts made of bamboo cane. Some have bones in their hair and through their ears and small bronze skulls hanging from a necklace. These represent the heads that man has taken.

  They grin vaguely at us as our purpose is explained.

  ‘BBC. Journey round the Himalaya.’

  But none of it’s going in. They’re all completely rat-arsed.

  Day Ninety One : Longwa

  The concrete walls of our rooms in the government guesthouse seem to attract and trap the cold. I get up early. Outside, the mist lies in the valleys, as thick as fresh snow. I walk around the chief’s hut, in and out of India, measuring its circumference as 250 yards. I’m full of admiration that something on this scale is built entirely from leaf, stalk, bark, branch and trunk. Shingwong tells me the whole village helps in the construction of these longhouses.

  A little further along the ridge, a cluster of tall stones rises from a grassy mound. It looks like a graveyard but is more of a trophy room. These stones represent the number of heads brought into the village.

  A crudely dug, stone-stepped pathway runs down from the top of the ridge to a wide flat area with the white cross of a newly built church (by far the biggest building in Longwa) looming over the festival site. Stalls have been set out round the side of it, selling antique gongs, rattan umbrellas, wooden figurines as well as essentials like clothes, cooking pots and local medicines such as cinnamon sticks for toothache. Food ranges from lemon grass and betel leaves to porcupine, bred for eating. Its strong, tangy, venison-like flavour is considered a delicacy round here, and the quills are cut up and made into necklaces.

  In fashion, the generational difference is marked. The young favour saris, jeans and T-shirts but the grannies and grandfathers still go barefoot, their thin, spindly legs often pocked with sores and unhealed grazes.

  One very senior citizen leans proudly on an old flintlock rifle. Bamboo sticks have worn long, distended holes in his earlobes. He has skull medallions round his neck and is clearly very proud of his hunting past. He obligingly confirms that he has taken five heads.

  His face, like those of many of the older generation, has what looks like a black stain running across it. On closer examination I see these are tattoos and not black but deep indigo, made of a number of very fine pin-prick marks. He pulls aside his shawl to show me that the tattoos extend across his chest and stomach and round onto his back. The old man knows Shingwong. He used to help his father, a surveyor working for the British on the first maps of Nagaland. He says he was ten years old when he first saw an Englishman. At first he had been frightened to go near them, they were so white he assumed they had no blood.

  I ask if this old man with the skulls round his neck and headdress of boar’s teeth and hornbill feathers is now a Christian and he nods emphatically.

  Shingwong thinks that conversion was made easier among the Nagas because their belief system was always based around one invisible god, one creator, which made the transition to Christianity seem less drastic.

  Despite the grip of the Baptist church, the Konyak culture is still taught in schools and pre-Christian dances form the highlight of today’s festival.

  Women process down from the ridge, four abreast, holding hands and wearing coral bead necklaces, headdresses, blue or black tunics and s
kirts with striped hoops. They form wide circles and move round infinitely slowly, chanting almost sotto voce. The slow, dirge-like pace is dictated by purely practical considerations. The jewellery of each dancer weighs 10 to 25 lb (5 to 10 kilos) alone.

  The men then perform a war dance, which recreates the story of a head-hunting party. They appear, ironically enough, from behind the Baptist church, armed with machetes in one hand and rifles or spears decorated with goats’ fur in the other. On their heads are bear-skin caps and hornbill feathers, round their waists aprons and cane belts, squeezed tight to help puff out their chests, and on their feet incongruous black leather shoes of the sort you might wear to the office. On their backs are baskets in which to bring the heads home.

  There follows a dramatic enactment of a raid on another village. Children cover their ears as the rifles are discharged, and the men end up with a celebratory python dance, in which their gyrations cause the sun to catch the glaze of their feathers and thus recreate the sinuous movement of the snake.

  In the afternoon the arena is cleared and football posts are put up for a game between Longwa and Khemoi, a village in Myanmar. As there are no official games between the two countries, this is the closest there is to an India v Myanmar international. Despite a hard-fought first half, the Blues of India pip the Reds of Myanmar 8-2 and, to add insult to injury, the defeated team from Khemoi has a two and a half-hour walk home.

  In the evening I have an opportunity to see inside the chief’s house. He’s agreed to be interviewed, and, armed with a bottle of rum as a present, I clamber through an entrance at one end. It is a cavernous space inside, like being in the upturned hull of some great ship. As there is hardly any natural light coming in, the soaring height of the roof is lost in gloom. I find myself in a long chamber, empty save for two huge, hollowed-out tree trunks, which Shing-wong says are war-canoes, and an aircraft seat, which they say came from a bomber shot down in the war. The Nagas are proud of the fact that they saved nine Allied airmen.