Despite the city’s civilised and prosperous appearance, a warning from a passerby to remove a gold chain necklace and hide a large camera shook our confidence; morality here does not march with commercial success. Later, in the hotel where dark suited and swarthy security men were intentionally conspicuous, we dined among a respectable looking bunch of fellow guests. Leaving a bag on her chair to graze along the buffet, M was shocked to find on returning that it had been strapped and shackled to the arms. We never discovered whether this was a gross overkill by management ensuring that they were never troubled by any complaint of a straying possession or a sensible precaution against endemic kleptomania.
We lunched in the fish market, where endless rows of shining scales on shapes as long and as thin as a pipe or as round and flat as a plate lay in mortuary precision on the marble slabs in filleted shades of pink, white and grey. Prawns, so red they seemed bred in a sea of blood, reached our plates within a few hours of death; anointed with garlic butter and lime juice, they did not die in vain.
At Gate 17A, the other 98 passengers for the Falkland Islands, the MV Explorer and the frozen south eyed each other up. Suddenly we were aware of our own youthfulness and fitness. The brochure’s description of steep stairs, narrow corridors, precipitous and icy gangplanks had seemingly gone unread by those who now waited leaning on a stick, checking a pacemaker or breathing heavily from the strain of standing. Not all of course, but as we marvelled at the spirit of those who might be rather closer to salvation than ourselves, we were also anxious as to the possible task of supporting them.
Mount Pleasant military airport on East Falklands was as small and efficient as it should have been, considering its post-war construction. Several good looking women soldiers in camouflage and big boots guided us through with warnings of ‘No photographs please’. A sign stated ‘FOD hazard. Please remove your hat’; we never discovered the hazard, but we all removed our hats. Another sign told us that the Alert State was ‘Glacier White’ – this seemed reasonably stable, although not entirely static. An hour’s drive over the campo was wall to wall peat, ‘rock rivers’ and large sheep, each with ten acres (4 hectares) to graze. Jim O’Callaghan, an ex-engineer sergeant, “demobbed, liked it and stayed”, gave a commentary in the single sentences of the parade ground. “Minefield on right.” “Settler farm on left.” Port Stanley, twinned with Whitby, was compact and single storied, with painted tin roofs and timber façades that spread along the waterfront like lines of naval flags. At the Upland Goose Hotel there was a huge tea of cucumber sandwiches, scones laden with jam and cream, slabs of fruitcake and tea the colour and consistency of the Amazon estuary. We strolled past Thatcher Drive, cottage gardens blooming with lupins, fuchsias and marigolds – it was high summer after all – and then reached our floating home. The Explorer, ‘The Little Red Ship’, was newly provisioned, freshly painted, the brass shone and the crew were welcoming. We had come halfway across the world, leaving on the northern hemisphere’s shortest day and arriving on the southern hemisphere’s longest day and now we were off on our frozen adventure.
After two days around the outer islands of the Falklands shining in sunshine and peaceful with calm waters, we headed south to enter Drake’s Passage, the stormiest waters of the world where, at the Atlantic Convergence, the planet’s largest seas battle for oceanic sovereignty. Friendship increased with the familiarity that comes from grabbing the same stabilising rail or the shared apprehension of waves that washed the windows of the boat deck, thirty feet above the Plimsoll line. Universal inebriation seemed endemic as we swayed, rolled, pirouetted and twirled in involuntary choreography into the arms of an unexpected partner and waiters performed extraordinary feats of acrobatics. Most passengers stumbled along on half bent knees like one of those illustrations that show the ascent of man from an anthropoid ape but they may have been descending to pray. Cutlery and china set up a chattering rhythm in the dining room, suckling pig with rich gravy went untouched, jellies become animated and the soup tureen, in a mini ocean of its own, developed a froth of cresting waves. At the stern, slate grey skies met granite grey sea and southern giant petrels, black browed albatrosses and storm petrels revelled in the spray and updrafts of the element they were bred for.
Those of us accustomed to the warm and familiar feelings of Christmas in England tend to remember those that do not follow the traditional arrangements with particular clarity. If, after 54 Christmases in a tangle of family, wrapping paper, an oversized turkey and seven pints of bread sauce, one finds oneself anchored NNE off the Antarctic Peninsula with a carolling Filipino crew, the sight of 1,000 Magellanic penguins and a sea broken by the grey and white flanks of Connerson’s dolphins, then that clarity is indelibly etched into the memory bank. Captain Ulrich Demel (“Feel free to call me Captain”) was the archetypal seafarer with straight back, spade beard, steely eye and dreadful jokes. Before the festivities began he introduced his officers: English first officer (jolly good), German first engineer (jawohl), Polish radio officer (possibly, but how is his English?), American doctor (maybe), Austrian chef (hooray) and Scottish expedition director (three cheers).
New Year’s Eve started grey but ended bright. Blued hued growlers like cast offs from a Murano glassworks, drifted benignly en flottant in front of a meringue horizon topped by a cloud of whipped cream. The cry of, “Whale, 2 o’clock starboard,” started a frenzy amongst the camera crowd. Mart, our steward, got flattened in the bodily onslaught; there were bodies on board so broad that they filled the corridors completely; light was momentarily excluded and a vacuum created before the bulging frames swept each wall and exploded onto the deck.
Some New Year Eve’s parties come and go, stuffed with food and blurred by champagne and the kisses from those to whom you have not even extended a hand. Others remain vivid and this was one of those. We sat with the Captain and Chief Engineer for seven courses that any Ritz would have been proud of before the entertainment began. Edna Everidge, aka the cruise director (ex-Coronation Street), poured into bulging blouse and sequinned skirt, tried his best to warm up an audience too bashful to enter into the spirit of the evening and was followed by the individual talents of some of the Filipino crew. The upper deck steward, bizarrely dressed in a towelling robe with a tablecloth turban, dropped all his conjuring cards; the female purser, brave but tearful, stood smiling for a full five minutes as successive inept hands struggled with the amplifier; an engine room hand, unaccountably togged out in pyjamas with a floor mop on his head, gave up his much rehearsed guitar number but with admirable spontaneity, belted out We Wish You a Merry Christmas. And as a finale, seven waiters in an enthusiastic number with much arm waving that resembled a desperate semaphore message stripped off their shirts to reveal tattoos and lacy bras. We forgave all the technical problems, cheering and clapping them on before we trooped out to the fo’c’sle for the oldest passenger to ring out the old year and the youngest to ring in the new. Stopping for a last glance at the rippled ocean, a humped back whale sublimely displayed its flukes as it dived into the grey depths.
“All landings will be wet,” instructed our charming, female, 30-plus expedition director in her gentle Scottish brogue. She did not explain at the time that riding in a zodiac inflatable over cresting waves at full speed in weather notorious for its unpredictability in practice meant a thorough soaking. Clad in several layers of wool, Polartec jacket, scarlet waterproof parka, two pairs of trousers – the outer pair waterproof – topped by ear protectors, a hat pulled down to eyebrows and a neck warmer pulled up to nostrils, thick gloves, a life jacket and a backpack, we looked like dirigibles. To then waddle down a ship-side gangplank swaying in the swell and step into a rubber dingy that corkscrewed off a launching platform momentarily disappearing in a grey froth required an agility that had not been adequately described in the brochure. Some bounced, some fell, many hands reached out but we all laughed. In any case we were, of course, all in the same boat. Ashore, in a magical transformation, penguins,
seals and nesting petrels removed all sense of the cumbersome, the biting wind ignored the layers of Merino and the eyes and mind went into full alert. This is what we had come for.
It is a strange anomaly that four tons (4,000 kilos) of blubber with a bad attack of dermatitis can have charm but an elephant seal, beached on a sandy spot, looking at you through eyes like two tumblers of amontillado, is a heart melting experience. But look away from an individual soft face and a group takes on a different aspect. Bunched together like a pan of giant sausages, grumpy, grunting, belching, bloated, farting, itching, sweating, snorting and stinking, they seemed wedged together in obese discontent like a band of bad tempered bachelors. Snowy sheathbills scavenged around the perimeter picking off pieces of moulted skin, while chinstrap, gentoo and rock hopper penguins waddled along on their pink flippered feet in a continuous trek between sea and nest. The chinstraps became my favourite; the thin black line under their chins gave them a permanent smile and an expression of continuous surprise that their hat may have blown off. Bold and inquisitive, it seemed as though it was they rather than ourselves who were doing the sightseeing. Arms akimbo, head tipped to one side and swaying slightly as they balanced on the rocks, they regarded our intrusion with interest. When south polar skuas on their continuous patrol for unprotected chicks swooped over head, penguin necks stretched vertically skyward and a raucous chorus began while their little wings flapped in alarm.
Icebergs floated in the open sea; the smallest like a cathedral, the largest county-sized. Under clear skies and bright sun they were majestic and would retain their sovereignty for up to ten years but in the great storms of the southern oceans, they become a serious hazard. The bones of many thousands of whalers, sealers and seamen lie on the seabed, their moaning souls frozen in perpetuity as a result of fatal collisions with these polar giants. Inland, where explorers have struggled against the coldest and most fearsome weather on the planet, the icy hand of death has grasped other souls. No wonder the names along the coast echo cries of desperation and sorrow: Cape Longing, Exasperation Inlet, Deception Island, Cape Disappointment.
Then, at the point that this polar wilderness might become addictive, we headed back North. Drake’s Passage was kind and Cape Horn magical in the dawn light. The Beagle Channel, with its shores edged by northofagus, led us to Ushuaia – the world’s southernmost city. And then on to Buenos Aires, suffering a heatwave that had its ten million people perspiring in 104°F (40°C) under a smoggy sky.
For a day we wilted and then took a bus tour where the air conditioning and the microphone collapsed in a premature siesta at 9 am and a distraught tour leader paced up and down the aisle calling out the city’s sights in four languages: the presidential palace, painted pink on the façade where Eva Peron rallied the underprivileged, several grand avenues named after dates that commemorated revolutions and several more named after generals who either started or suppressed them, the Italian quarter of La Boca painted in a pallet of primary colours, the old docks now reclaimed for upmarket housing, the Palermo district of great grassy parks and trees scattered with picnicking porteños and professional dog walkers and finally the fashionable Recoleta area where we de-bussed and where, in a maze of marble mausoleums of the country’s rich and powerful, we sought out the resting place of Eva Peron.
In shaded squares and by street cafés, impromptu tango dancers animated those sepia photographs that we thought were simply romantic ideals. Absurdly handsome men in chalk striped grey suits, scuffed shoes and fedora hats tilted over black greasy hair and dark brooding eyes clasped slim women dressed in colourful frocks cut low in the front and generously around the hem. Moving with passion and precision with arching backs and nimble feet to the toe-tapping music of an accordionist or a scratchy record of Carlos Gardel, they put on an exhibition for the surrounding voyeurs of fully clothed, open air, vertical sex.
Later we escaped across the dark brown estuary waters of the Rio Plata to Uruguay and its charming riverside town of Colonia. Whitewashed cobbled streets, shady fig trees, bougainvillea and a languid attitude to life gave the town great charm. We lunched outside a small restaurant with check tablecloths, low beams and a piano player who, in his braces, hat and drooping cigarette, came from the same faded postcard album as the tango dancers. From a menu, stuck inside two driftwood planks, we ordered ‘Chivito’. The brief description seemed to suggest a kind of salade nicoise or perhaps an antipasti of sorts, not quite the spicy sausage we expected. The reference to fries seemed a little unusual but a plate of these on the side might well have been welcome if the salad was a little meagre. There was additionally the description as ‘A typical Uruguayan dish’. All in all, just the thing for a light summer lunch for a first time visitor.
When we enquired of a young American at the next table who looked as though he had worn out a backpack or two, what the dish comprised, he simply said, “Gaucho’s Breakfast.” M thought that this probably referred to the gauchos working along the Piranha River estuary who enjoyed a bit of fish now and again. We should have smelt a rat, particularly when the young American’s companion added, “It’s a nice meal.” In retrospect, remembering his door-sized shoulders and his whale of a waist, this was another clue that passed us by. But M was looking forward to this snack; something to keep her going for an afternoon stroll before a more substantial meal back at Buenos Aires. Our table in this cosy little restaurant was small but solid and our final hint that something that did not quite fit the menu’s description came with the removal of the restaurant trivia. In fact, the table’s entire surface was the subject of a short but sustained programme of land clearance.
Held aloft on a pewter charger of cartwheel proportions came the morning morsel. Uruguay’s gauchos might well be hungry at daybreak but this was not just breakfast, it was lunch, tea and dinner all on the same plate. I don’t know how large gauchos grow, they may all be direct descendants of Goliath; but to anyone who regards themselves as near to the human average, this plate of breakfast was a whole bingeing weekend.
At the foothills of this food mountain and spreading out to most points of the compass was Russian salad, tuna with onions, calamari with capers, octopus in batter and assorted chunks of tomato and cucumber with boulders of olives arranged in a mayonnaise lake. The fries gave the base its bulk and the stability to support in successive layers, a paving slab of beef, rashers of bacon, ham and cheese and then, at the peak, flowing down the ravines and crowning the crest, a pierced fried egg. The summit was suitably acknowledged by a flag with the enigmatic inscription ‘Free Drammer’. We never discovered who Drammer was or why he should be freed. We were only halfway up the north face of these mountains of meat when a rainstorm of an intensity that only Noah could have previously experienced, tipped out of the sky. To her credit, M had demolished base camp and got half way up the south col when the klaxon blast announced our ferry’s departure and denied her the final push to the summit.
Back in Buenos Aires, the urban millions had traded sweat for squelch. In a bar of chatter and polished mahogany, I struggled with indigestion and shivered from the air conditioning that cooled my soaking wet clothes and I remembered my chinstrapped friends, the carving glaciers, the heavy swell and the white silence of the uttermost end of the earth.
India I
February 2001
‘There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it’
– Charles Dudley Wilson
I left a frosty Oxfordshire at dusk with a sore throat, a bad cough but with high hopes. Ten hours later, at noon, I was clattering through the heat, haze, dust and clamour of the southern suburbs of Delhi in a battered Ambassador, in the company of a young guide with a bad lisp and a driver with a scowl and the looks of a brigand, to be dropped at Tikli Bottom. In this oasis of tranquillity I swapped notes on mutual friends with my charming hosts and then, after a restless night and a short flight, lay down in the last available room in Varanasi. The plumbing was being dismantled with
sledgehammers, a chanting gang of Tamils were pick-axing up the road, the adjacent lift lobby was a children’s playground and the television next door was being watched by a family who seemed to suffer from congenital deafness. I collapsed on a bed whose mattress would have been hard to penetrate with a nail, took another swig of cough mixture, sucked on a Fisherman’s Friend and wondered at the changing scenes of travel and the waywardness of a wish to experience them.
But back to that oasis. At the head of a small valley and gently nurtured in the embrace of the Aravally Hills, Tikli Bottom lies like an architectural jewel of Delhi’s imperial past. Reproducing the classical style of Lutyens with lofty rooms, a shady courtyard, joinery of oiled teak, floors of polished stone and country house furnishings, Martin and Annie Howard have built themselves an extraordinary home. To have had the energy, foresight and imagination to create this in such an isolated rural area is astonishing. To then share it with strangers seemed perverse. To a gardener from a windswept Cotswold hill, an arboretum that shoots up three feet a year (with teak and poplar four feet and bombax malabarensis six feet), this was the stuff of myth and envy, but then the Oxfordshire Uplands do not have families of porcupine that ravage through the gladioli crop or herds of nilghai antelope that munch through the young growth of mango and guava orchards.
The Last Blue Mountain Page 14