The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  Berenty, beside the Mandrave River in the Southern province of Androy, has as much rain as Paris but all in one month. It was here that I met the first of the lemurs to capture my sentimental heart. Gentle and enquiring, wide eyed, long fingered and friendly, each seemed to wear a label that said ‘Be My Friend’. They come in almost fifty varieties from sun loving to nocturnal, brown, polar white, pied and variegated, with combinations in between. The smallest, the mouse lemur, is the size of a hamster and the largest, the sifakas, can reach up to your waist on their dancing legs but all have a tree climbing agility to shame a monkey. Hold out a banana to a Ringtail and a dozen will shin down a trunk quicker than firemen, hesitate as though too hasty an approach might betray bad manners and then with great courtesy, stretch forward a furry arm and gently take the banana with hands that seem moulded of neoprene and wearing gloves of the softest chamois leather.

  The rain forest of Perinet National Park, half way down the Central Highlands as they slope eastwards towards the Indian Ocean, was a total contrast. Steep terrain divided by clear streams, reputedly full of crayfish, is densely covered by lush subtropical trees and plants; nothing giant, but cool and glistening in the daily rain. Three hours of walking were rewarded by the rarest Malagasy bird, the pigmy kingfisher and several chameleons including Parson’s chameleon, the world’s largest at 18 inches (45cms) nose to tail tip. Its eyes, each independent and swivelling through 180 degrees, scanned me around the compass as I offered it a grasshopper. It declined (perhaps it liked to catch its own dinner) and then coiled up its tail, shut down the two search lights and carried on its snooze. It is the only species that does not change colour, its size being enough to deter the hungry. Earlier, another species when moved on to my hand, changed rapidly from Crème de Menthe to Baileys and curled its tail around my finger thinking it had landed on another branch. With more than five thousand different species of flora it could be forgiven thinking that a warm brown arm was simply one of the many that had yet to be identified.

  Perinet is the home of the Indri lemur, the largest and most elusive of all the lemurs. Family groups establish their territory vocally and their glass shattering cries mixing a wail, a howl and a bellow, echo through the forest canopy as though the Spanish Inquisition was ferociously at work. I found a pair and their adolescent offspring clinging one above each other on a slender tree trunk and they looked down with the shocked and surprised expression that seems common to all lemurs; as though someone had exploded a fart in the Royal Enclosure. Not wishing to be associated with tourists, they bounded off through the forest leaping with wonderful gymnastic agility from tree to tree.

  Sunday was a day of rest and Sunday best and the small town of Andasibe had a Caribbean feel to it as churchgoers, men in T-shirts and jackets, women in straw hats and girls in lacy white cotton dresses, meandered to church exchanging greetings as they went. Around them on the red dusty road, children played with a stick and hoop, a stone dragged on a piece of string or a small wheel nailed to the end of a bamboo. Chickens and chicks pecked amongst the poles of the stilted wooden houses while geese and goslings paddled in muddy pools.

  The Catholic church was stone-walled, solid and pew-packed by the suited and straw-hatted. On the other side of town, the Protestant church, wooden walled under a rusty roof, was less well attended but for me carried away the singing prize as with much clapping and occasional stamping, the praise to the Lord rocked through the rotten rafters. This choral fervour drowned the harmonium where the player’s knees squeezed the bellows with such enthusiasm that I was anxious for the short fourth leg of his chair as it balanced on a bible and a brick.

  The electricity failed one night. It chose an awkward moment as I was left in underpants and a flannel-sized towel halfway between my wooden hut and the shower. The horned gecko by the light bulb would be deprived of dinner this evening. Dressed, I made my way by torch light to the Hotel de la Gare hoping my dinner had not also have been abandoned. M. Joseph, le patron, immaculate in a double breasted white suit (a pity about the flip-flops), beamed a smile of matching dazzle and waved me into the beamed railway booking hall that glowed with candles propped in the bottles of yesterday’s dinner. After a meal to rival any on the Rive Gauche, the coffee, locally grown, freshly roasted and crushed was all the more authentic for the accompanying Nestlé sweetened and condensed milk that oozed from a sticky punctured tin. As I paid the £3 bill (and that included the beer), le patron apologised profusely for the inability of the cook to produce a better dinner: “He has tried his best but the charcoal was damp.”

  The road to the coast twisted through fields robbed of forest and left to the scrub of wild rubus and grevillea. In a small local town all but two of the many stalls sold fruit. Bananas were in several varieties – large plantains, pigmy ‘ladies’ fingers’, stubby over-ripe red ones and sculptural green ones; here were custard apples, jackfruit, papaya, mangosteen and others I could not recognise. The exceptions were a table piled with the blackened hoops of smoked eels and one where wine was being poured into little bottles through a paper funnel – this had the longest queue. We turned off the road down a track heavily fissured by previous storms and now turned to toffee by the present rain. Réné, our driver, kept the bus going with safari skill but at a wooden bridge where only two rows of single planks were provided, a front wheel slipped off to wedge in the gap between the beams. The seven widows, giggling with fright or the adventure of it all, crept off the bus while the three men lifted the wheels back and as cameras were held ready to catch the moment I fell into the mud of the river.

  At our thatched beach hotel, rum punches in three kaleidoscopic layers that matched the sunset were served up on the house and I added a few extra on the bill. How quickly a damp, dull evening can be brightened by a punch or three! The shore of the Indian Ocean is unfriendly here, with great breakers, a fierce undertow and sharks. Our sand bar, only 300 ft (90m) wide, keeps the ocean from swallowing the fresh water lakes and canals of the Pangalanes that run north south along the eastern coast. Along the sand bar there is a railway but the trains stopped five years ago, abandoned for lack of mechanical expertise and spares and the booking halls of the little stations now provided homes for families of brown babies, black chickens and green geckos. Tropical weeds cracked open the platforms. The track of rusted rails was now for foot traffic only but the stones were sharp and the rotting sleepers irregular, so the locals walked along a rail like brown skinned Blondins; if you spend your life carrying your possessions and your shopping on your head, balance requires little effort or concentration.

  I had a visitor as I slept. Four biscuits left on the table for tomorrow morning’s early tea had vanished and two tomatoes bought in one of the colonised railway stations had been nibbled. Opinions around the breakfast table varied from ten-recs (a type of hedgehog) to hypogeonys (a giant jumping rat). Our leader, David Sayers met a spider as big as his hand and when he squashed it, it bounced across the wooden boards like a rubber ball; I was rather apprehensive that its vengeful brother might have come and demand a retribution ransom of Butter Osbornes that night. I had my Swiss army knife ready.

  The roof of my hut blew off; the rain was a degree off horizontal, my bed lifted in each gust and the sea surfed through the door and swept me out of the back window. I awoke from my dream to find that the downpour had discovered convenient spots in the palm thatch to drip onto my pillow and camera. But with the storm past, the diamond studded skies of indigo velvet, the dawn, the chattering of wild life waking and the surf marking the rippling boundary of the warm ocean, all gave the island the romance so exploited by tellers of tropical tales.

  In the early morning we pushed off in the African Queen, a wooden boat from which weevils had had several good meals and with a patched canopy to shield the sun. It seemed the perfect way to chug through the inland waterways, hung around on either bank by eucalyptus, palms, elephant leaves and strands of strappy grasses. Our sinewy boatman with three teeth and a
poor razor sat on the outboard motor while his friend in the bows spotted for stray bamboo logs and propeller clogging clumps of water hyacinth. Fishermen in pirogues hollowed from a tree trunk were out tending fish and eel traps or wading with a weighted net near the shore. After four hours the activity on the river and the banks increased. Wooden planks lashed haphazardly together and topped with a makeshift shelter were being laboriously poled and there were pirogues loaded with wood, some with a pathetic sail patched from sacks.

  The landing at Tamatave, beside the oil refinery with its sour and shiftless water of a curious green and dense viscosity, was reached after six hours. Our transport had not appeared – plus ça change – and I took a pousse-pousse rickshaw to the Hotel Joffre, the hangout of the ex-pats. The journey was hazardous as my sweating ‘driver’ negotiated truck sized pot holes, cars that drove on the pavement to avoid them, piles of rubbish and the familiar assortment of fritter fryers, chickens, children and now, in this important regional town, a colourful scatter of smart young women and demure nuns. The town was devastated by cyclone Geraldo in 1994 and on many roofs of corrugated iron, tyres or bags of sand lay in anticipation of the next big blow. The pousse-pousse had a twisted wheel and a loose shaft and the strange corkscrew movement brought back a memory lost for 40 years of riding a lame camel from Bir Fucquum to the town of Aden. At the Joffre, the biggest crevettes are known as ‘Coriande’ and I had half a dozen swimming in garlic and served on white china and a less than white table cloth. The hotel provided the salvation for all those returning from a few days in the bush – a hot shower.

  On the forest road a convoy of taxi-brousse and vans waited to cross a river on a pontoon poled across with sweating effort by two boys. At the centre of the river pirogues were tethered while divers with scoops and buckets gathered sand from the river bed six feet (2m) below. When full to the water line, the pirogues were pulled to the shore and the sand shovelled up the high steep banks in four separate stages to await sale by the track. At other places, women hammered at boulders to reduce them to walnut sized pieces for use in concrete. Clumps of arum lilies grew on the margins, each throwing up 20 or more waxy white trumpets and in the forest, methonia ablaze with scarlet and orange flowers, lit up the canopy, its petals scattered on the ground like tropical confetti. The peeling bark of eucalyptus was caught in sunlight and wild cinnamon spiced the air.

  My neighbour on the returning Air France flight was short and hairy with a Neanderthal jawbone and clad ankle to wrist in scarlet robes embroidered with intricate patterns. I took him for an Ethiopian bishop. Silent for an hour, he suddenly asked to borrow my two week old Economist, checked the bond prices, uttered disapproving tut tuts and then, putting a thumb in each ear, hummed for an hour or two. Whether in prayer to ease a private fear, to lessen the pain of falling financial futures or as a composer I could not tell. It seemed an appropriate farewell to an island where the unexpected was the convention and the only surprise was a day that lacked surprises.

  Burma I

  February 1999

  ‘The Burmese are a curious crew;

  The girls wear skirts and boys do too.

  The boys wear hats but girls refrain

  And view such fads with much disdain.’

  – U Myint Thein (1900-1994)

  The plane from Bangkok to Rangoon seemed full of old walnuts – smiling, nodding and for the most part spectacled walnuts. A Burmese Buddhist contingent was returning home, probably from their last monkish convention judging from the wrinkled faces that melded by colour, crease and crinkle into the brown robes wrapped around them. Searching inside his cotton shell, one venerable pulled out a packet of sandwiches which were chomped between two rows of gold teeth and each had a fan in an embroidered zippered cover – monks too collect souvenirs.

  Arriving at the country of my birth 55 years later was not quite as nostalgically thrilling as I had expected – “A bit of a wet firework?” Johnny my guide remarked later. The airport was too large, too clean and too imposing for memories nurtured on family albums half a century old but later at the Hotel Pansea, nostalgia returned. Converted from an old merchant house the hotel attractively combined teak, stone, flowing water, flowering plants and noisy birds and in the cooling day, on a huge shady veranda, amongst rattan furniture and potted plants, I drank tea brought soft-footed across teak boards by sweet smiling boys skirted in longyis. For a moment the Old Burma of faded photographs and family tales surrounded me and close at hand, my mother laughing and my father calling his bearer.

  A search for my infant haunts was both frustrating and fascinating. With my guides, Johnny, Joshua and George – oddly all Anglican Christians, we questioned old inhabitants and searched older maps to identify English addresses renamed in a post-independence burst of nationalism. A copy of my birth certificate from the Corporation of Rangoon drew a big smile from the superintendent of the Dufferin Women’s Hospital; one home remained undiscovered but another, in an idyllic spot beside Inya Lake, was intact. Trees taller, a swimming pool added and secured by guards and high walls but otherwise exactly as the little photograph I carried. When it turned out that this was the home of President Ne Win’s daughter, Joshua turned pale. Telephone calls and the story of my family’s occupation opened the gates, I took new photographs, left a note and returned to my greatly impressed guides.

  On my last day, just as I was packing for the third time a basket of cabin trunk proportions to fit in my purchases, U Moe Zaw, Dr Win’s husband telephoned. “We live on the way to the airport as you know, so why not just pop in?” He and his wife were charming, interested in the history of the house and offered egg sandwiches and tea of a strength usually found on building sites in cold weather. Although there were two large black Mercedes in the drive, the house was simple, plain, airy but without air-conditioning. “It was an absolute wreck when we came. We had to do it over top to toe.” I felt I might have been visiting a friend showing off a newly restored farmhouse. I showed them the old photograph and we chatted about our children, travelling in the countryside and congestion in the towns. I made a wide detour around politics, a neighbour came to call and then it was time to go. Considering I had been entertained by one of the most powerful and influential couples in the country – a president’s daughter and the president of several of the country’s largest companies – my visit was remarkable in its normality. Johnny was ecstatic with the story he could tell and the driver almost hit the gatepost his hands quivered so on the wheel.

  Lack of paint and the rigours of tropical decay have left grand old colonial buildings in downtown Rangoon looking forlorn and unloved. The exotic, bustling images from the family photograph book were now fractured, abused, frail, shabby and weary. It was a city sad and skeletal. Old Burma hands might shed a tear but many buildings are preserved by the present regime so that new money from Singapore and Hong Kong, intent on new offices and hotels, must leave exteriors intact. Ochre wash, fretwork balconies and dormers, wooden window frames, classical façades, turrets and brick to match the medium roast complexion of the passersby, remain to mask the air-conditioned interiors. Many multi-storey blocks of flats were under construction and their lower floors were at a premium since the absence of lifts and the lack of water pressure make the top floors attractive only for the fit or impecunious. In the streets, crowded buses dating from World War II jostled with Japanese cars and pedalled rickshaws. Isolated by a military dictatorship, Rangoon was helpless. There was no bounce or buzz; instead it was a city without ambition which, like a family dominated by drunken parents, had succumbed to despair. There was no challenge and no defiance.

  The ferry to Twante was as rusty a hulk of dented metal as ever had the miracle to float. Oozing oil into the Rangoon River with every riveted plate complaining in buckled protest of labouring on decades after a visit to the scrap yard would have brought an honourable end, the double-decked tub turned into the rising sun, swung north on the ebbing tide and headed upstream. On the decks, amon
gst the fumes of diesel, the stink of old fish and pungency of chilli and spices from the stern kitchen, squatted farmers, monks, giggling teenage nuns draped in cherry pink, dour soldiers, cheroot-smoking grannies and an assortment of children. Smaller cross-river ferries rowed or powered, darted about like gnats and later on, as we belched between the banks of flat land, barges, lighters and all manner of river traffic universally overburdened with goods or humanity hooted as we passed as though in mutual recognition of the good fortune of surviving this far. I shunned the first class section, distinguished only by a table and a slatted bench, and sat down with my back to the funnel to watch the early morning mist rise off the dry paddy fields where families were already busy winnowing rice.

  Any piece on Burma cannot avoid mentioning that formidable and defiant champion of the people, Aung San Suu Kyi. I could not get closer than a couple of hundred yards (180m) to her house as the street was blocked and a guardhouse was built at each end; to have walked down the street would have meant certain arrest and probable deportation. Johnny summarised what he felt was the national mood.

  “In people’s hearts, Suu Kyi is already elected. We are simply waiting Ne Win’s death and the subsequent revolution.”

  He needed patience; Ne Win was then eighty-eight and reputedly booked into a Singapore hospital each year for a full service including, disgustingly, a total transfusion with teenagers’ blood. Johnny, thirtyish and intelligent, was a Karen whose people were something of a thorn in the sensitive flesh of the government (and all previous governments) since they sought autonomy. A different view of The Lady was told to me over dinner with an English businessman resident in Rangoon for four years and about to give up the unequal struggle of international communications.