We are the Pilgrims master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond the last blue mountain barred with snow,
Across that angry or that glimmering sea.
James Elroy Flecker. The Golden Journey to Samarkand
For Maggie.
Impatiently waiting
Acknowledgements
Heartfelt thanks are due to a number of rare and helpful individuals. Foremost, to my wife Maggie for her indulgence of an absent traveller, her forbearance as first in line for the tiresome task of reading a first draft and for her pithy advice. I am grateful to the Authoright team of James Wharton who gathered me into the self publishing fold, Chris Sansom who held my literary hand during this book’s gestation and to Jordan Koluch for deciphering my scribbles and for her skills in the design and setting out of the text and sketches. I was also fortunate to have the corrections, suggestions and improvements of Mary Douglas-Bate, Margie Charnock and Rosie Morton Jack, and special thanks are owed to Vicky Jardine-Paterson for her professional proofreading, sentient comments and encouragement. In America, the constructive review of the manuscript by Allan Talbot and Judy Goldring has been most valuable as has been their support.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Washington for the Weekend
January 1994
Egypt for the Weekend
January 1995
Weekend in Palm Beach
February 1995
Namibia and Botswana
August 1995
Vietnam
February 1996
Peru
July 1996
Singapore to Bangkok
November 1997
Thailand, Cambodia and Laos
February 1998
Madagascar
October 1998
Burma I
February 1999
Brazil
September 1999
Ethiopia and Eritrea
November 1999
Oman
January 2000
Antarctica
January 2001
India I
February 2001
St Petersburg for the Weekend
February 2002
Mali
November 2002
Sabah
August 2003
Shangri La
June 2004
Dubrovnik for the Weekend
October 2005
Chile
November 2005
South Africa
March 2006
Ethiopia II
December 2006
Burma II
January 2007
Gabon
August 2007
Tibet
September 2007
Burma III
January 2008
Italy
July 2008
Canada
September 2008
Burma IV
March 2009
Uganda
October 2009
Kalimantan
November 2009
Colombia
February 2010
Malta for the Weekend
March 2010
Kamchatka
August 2010
Ladakh
March 2011
Australia
October 2011
India II
January 2012
American Train Trip
March 2012
Guyana, Tobago and Panama
November 2013
Acknowledgements
Introduction
‘Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong Kong’ – Vita Sackville West
When the Sunderland flying boat of Imperial Airways took off from the Irrawaddy River bound for the Hooghly River in north east India, on the morning of 8th March 1942, on board were my mother, my sister, an English nanny and myself. This would be the last flight from Rangoon for three years. The 214th Infantry Regiment of the 33rd Division of the 15th Army of the Imperial Japanese Forces entered Rangoon the next day and Colonel Takanobu Sakuma, the commander of Rangoon District, settled himself into my parents’ old home – it had a nice position beside Inya Lake. Since I was only one year old at the time, I did not realise that I might never see my father again, nor that this long journey was the first of so many to come.
From India, we travelled to Quetta in Pakistan and when my father arrived six months later, tragically thin, we moved to Ootacamund in southern India. Two years later, we were all on a troop ship that zig-zagged around the eastern Atlantic to avoid U Boats. My grandfather, an admiral in naval intelligence, knew the rough positions of the U Boats and the exact position of his whole family. Arriving in Liverpool we boarded the train for London and my sister and I carefully unpacked our little suitcases and put out our pyjamas; we had never been on a train journey of less than two days. My father always maintained that any wanderlust I might have acquired had come from 20,000 miles of travel before I was three.
I write spontaneously and in what some of my friends might describe as unusual places: a village house in Upper Burma, a guest house beside a Siberian volcano, a tent in a Himalayan winter or a hammock under an Amazonian kapok tree. These places are not very unusual of course, simply a little off the track heavily beaten by the groups of organised tourists. Friends tend to go to the Mediterranean, spend two days in the Uffizi and will scramble for days over the ruins of Carthage. These may be interesting and occasionally fun, but they are not for Travellers; at least, not this one. As a boy, I was fascinated by the story of Colonel Fawcett who entered Brazil’s Matto Grosso never to be seen again. Under the bedclothes of the senior dorm at Abberley Hall, my torch shone upon the pages of such excitements as The Lost City and Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure. Later, with a little more worldliness, the realities of a lingering death from a curare-smeared spear did not seem so attractive and my adventurer loyalties switched to Frank Kingdon Ward. Part of me, the romantic and possibly morbid part, follows this energetic plant hunter as he hacks his way through the forests of Northern Burma or struggles through the steep valleys to discover the uncharted course of the Tsangpo River, collecting the original material for my garden as he goes. How dreadful it would be to expire in the humdrum hinterland of John Lewis, falling between haberdashery and hardware.
On the whole, cities do not hold many attractions for me; there are no horizons, little honesty, they tend to be electronic and their inhabitants are concerned only for themselves. They hold many testaments to man’s creative genius but in spite of attending many courses on all forms of art, I prefer the spaces in between the art. Paul Theroux puts it this way:
‘.... people who are glamorised by big cities and think of themselves as urbane are at heart country mice – simple, fearful, over domesticated provincials dazzled by city lights.’
This meander is simply to explain that I am not a pioneering adventurer who drags tyres around muddy fields to limber up for rigours to come; not an expert in anything nor even passionate about particular places. I just like to observe the silent beauty of the wild, disturbed only by birds and beasts, and enjoy the quirks of human nature wherever they are found – preferably indigenous although fellow travellers can be interesting too. A wet tent is bearable for a short time, but the more so if you know it will be followed by a deep and hot bath, a whisky sour, soft pillows and crisp linen.
My wife Maggie is not an enthusiastic traveller. This is disappointing as one of the pleasures of travel is to share the good and the bad moments and reminisce about the day in a post-mortem of praise, criticism
and discussion. After we had travelled the Silk Road from Tashkent to Beijing, she said she would never travel with me again. It was, of course, hot and dusty and the edge of the Taklimakan Desert is depressingly boring but the bit she loved best was getting stuck in an unseasonable June blizzard that blanketed the Tien Shan Mountains and being holed up for a day and a night in a yak herder’s tent. (I am glad to say that we have travelled again together many times since.) As I do not always have her witty and comforting companionship, I sometimes go alone or with a group. Both of these have their merits and disadvantages but unless the group is certain to be congenial, the lone traveller option is usually the best.
The travel pieces you may be about to sample do not record every journey. The Silk Road, for example, is not here, nor are nor are Alaska, Bali, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Costa Rica and Lapland amongst others and most of Europe. The pieces here are not chosen because I enjoyed the places most; it is simply that they are the only places I wrote about at the time.
These are not a travelogues – heaven forbid! – but it seems a pity to waste some of the moments on the way that have entertained or excited. If any of these pieces tickle your spirit, get out there fast, for the byways are being trampled into a tourist track every day.
A fellow Wykehamist, Ian Graham, an expert in Mayan iconography and a real life Indiana Jones in the ’40s, described himself as ‘A bushwacker outfitted with a camera, a pencil, some grains of common sense and an instinct for self-preservation’. That would be a headstone I think I might like.
Chipping Norton
June 2014
Washington for the Weekend
January 1994
‘To awake quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world’
– Freya Stark
The Potomac was frozen, there was snow in the street, ice on the sidewalks, the first five cab drivers were Afghan ex-mujahidin and the waiters seemed to be all Puerto Rican. I hailed a stubbled freedom fighter and there, between Constitution and Pennsylvania, stood the White House. So this was Washington after all. A blizzard littered the highways with skewed cars as the townies slithered to their country homes but it swept on to Virginia and left behind a bright, clear weekend.
I was fortunate; winter weekends are not known for balmy weather but take off for a city trans-Atlantic and you are assured of bargains galore. The cheapest fares of the year, hotel staff anxious to please, short queues at the high spots; a city at your feet, empty of tourists and commuters but full of the bonhomie of local traders who have not yet honed their sales pitch on the whetstone of the holiday trade. Never mind a few murky days, escape to the galleries, the tea shops and theatres and a king sized bed bought for the price of a summer pillow.
Washington is on the boundary of the Confederate and Northern states and although firmly Yankee, there seemed to be an even distribution of generals cast in the bronze of posterity; with school-boy familiarity one came upon Grant, Sherman, Jackson and Lee. It is a city of monuments and memorials, huge and arrogant in the past, humbler in the present. The massive bronze (the largest ever cast) of raising the stars and stripes at Iwo Jima is unashamedly vainglorious, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial stark in its simplicity.
If you removed the few blocks of Georgetown and Alexandria there would be little left to charm but plenty to be in awe of. The buildings of the Smithsonian on Independence Avenue lie on one side of the great green expanse in front of Capitol Hill while opposite, along Madison Drive, are the great national museums. At the Library of Congress is one of the world’s greatest repositories of knowledge with a scale to dominate and impress. The Castle, the original headquarters of the Smithsonian Institution, seems curiously out of place with its turreted and eccentric skyline – an American pastiche whose architecture reflects the Liverpudlian origins of its benefactor, Henry Smithson. In the crisp air, the subway steamed through the pavement grilles and the mere scattering of people gave an eerie feeling. I felt the humility of a mouse on a harvested prairie but with Doctor Strangelove at my elbow. Suddenly the melancholy but fruity notes of a tenor sax cut into self-indulgence. Here on a deserted sidewalk, black, aged, grey haired, stubbled, darned and stooped was unwelcome reality. Like a junior rope rigger caught in the footlights of the Metropolitan, the uncomfortable truth of what lies behind the grand façade stubbed my sprightly toe. I put a dollar in the musician’s hat and for a while winced each time his faulty A flat tarnished the blues.
The cordoned queues at the FBI building indicated the popularity of its tours but on an off-season Monday we were only eight and not a G man in sight. We wandered down endless corridors, occasionally peering through plate glass into laboratories that examined bullets, matched DNA and identified the pin head flakes of paint of a getaway car. The inactivity was disturbing but perhaps crime too was out of season. The shooting demonstration in the basement range gave a tweak of excitement and here a genuine agent with a Beretta revolver and a Koch submachine gun convincingly pumped 40 lead slugs through the heart of a paper cut out. The agents are tested four times a year; ‘Hostage and Rescue’ require 95% accuracy but for others 75% is sufficient. As I left I pondered on the fact that in a shootout the good guy has a one in four chance of being shot.
South of the Potomac in Virginia on gently sloping ground amid maple, oak, ash and linden America buries it military heroes and political heavyweights in Arlington National Cemetery. It is tranquil, serene and compassionate and the rise and fall of the ground prevents too many of the two hundred thousand headstones being seen at once; the graves of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy are poignant in their simplicity. The leafless trees are elegant but sombre.
‘Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet bird sang.’
I hurried up the hill towards Robert E. Lee’s old house to watch the changing of the guard by the tombs of the unknown soldiers from World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam. Europeans, whose military pageantry tends to be colourful, musical and large scale, find this is a tame affair. A single soldier from the Old Guard – America’s oldest infantry unit, head cropped as close as a coconut, is replaced for another via a staff sergeant who inspects the rifle of each in an elaborate ritual of much slapping of butts and rattling of bolts; whether to ensure that the rifle is loaded or unloaded I was not sure.
On a Sunday morning the old tobacco port of Georgetown had a middle class, middle browed but moneyed feel with BMWs, Saabs and Volvos, designer tracksuits for dog walkers, and dressing gowned figures taking the first strenuous exercise of the day as they pick up 2½lbs (1 kilo) of Sunday papers. A corner shop beckoned with the smell of fresh brewed coffee and toast (rye, wholewheat, sour dough, black, brown, thick or thin), eggs (up, down, scrambled, trampled, winking, blinking) and most enticing of all, bacon fried to a crisp. I expected Woody Allen to open a door rubbing his eyes or Meryl Streep to flash a crooked smile. This was a setting for romantic comedy, secure, comforting and fun. Saunter past an agreeable palette of ranch red ochre, prairie green, mustard and cornflower and you might bump into Norman Rockwell painting on a street corner or Mable Lucie Attwell spreading a gingham table cloth, but come Monday morning, although the set remains, the dream vanishes in a flurry of overcoated executives, career wives and traffic jams.
Add a fourth day and you could take in Baltimore (an ancient port and wonderful aquarium) and Annapolis (an 18th century architectural gem) and with a fifth day, Williamsburg (living history) and Yorktown (where Admiral Cornwallis surrendered). But stretch a weekend this far and the thrill of a few stolen days will snap. I hurried home to humdrum and to reach for the atlas – winter had another six weeks to go.
Egypt for the Weekend
January 1995
‘But why, oh why do the wrong people travel when the right people stay at home?’
– Noel Coward
Never ask an Egyptian taxi to hurry – at least not in Cairo. Speed is their creed, daring their hero. If you escape being maimed by a taxi, you will probably die
of fright inside one. Cairo has the worst drivers on earth and its taxi drivers come from hell.
This is a monster of a city. Clogged, chaotic, cacophonous; it heaves and writhes giving birth to new cement-grey suburban blocks each week which in turn strain services already convulsed. Dominated and divided by the Nile, the river carries surprisingly little traffic. Bright feluccas, sullen in the lack of wind, floating restaurants and flocks of seagulls feeding on the detritus of fifteen million inhabitants are about all that moves. But step onto the Corniche el Nil and press further into the tangle of back streets and there nothing is still or silent. Rusty buses, mangy donkeys, shiny Mercedes and 10,000 black and white taxis jostle with people, people, and people. Women in berber black galabiyas, academics in grey, clerics in white, sharp suited businessmen, tradesmen in sweaters so hideous they would never make the final reduction rail of a north country market, rags and this year’s best seller, dayglo pink trimmed with nylon lace. Architecturally barren (although the newer mosques in white limestone and marble have a refreshing delicacy), the charm comes from the people who seem universally glad to see one. Information will be smilingly volunteered and although there may often be a commercial motive for bonhomie, once it is clear that you already have ten packs of postcards, enough rugs for a warehouse and papyrus pictures by the gross, it is likely you will be genuinely wished a happy stay.
Commerce is the single ingredient that binds the vastly varied colours, religions and incomes of Egypt. Passengers pass through duty free shops to enter the country (the attractions include immersion heaters, refrigerators and central heating components) and in the last week of the year, Mohammed slips temporarily into the shadows to make way for the more profitable Father Christmas. A Muslim, desert, third-world country is strange enough to a visitor from frozen Oxfordshire; add ‘Merry Christmas’ 14 feet (4m) high across the façade of the Nile Hilton and the effect is surreal.
The Last Blue Mountain Page 1