Brian’s vehicle was in the lead and had just stopped to allow its occupants to observe a red junglefowl. When it started off again it almost immediately came into a long stretch of track that was no more than a series of muddy holes joined together by a series of muddy ruts. It got through this hazard, but only because its driver exhibited a criminal disregard for its engine, pushing its rev-level into Formula One territory. It screamed as though it was about to die, smelt as though it had died, and sounded none too well even when the rev-level subsided. But it was through. It was the same for the second jeep – although this one nearly came to a stop, and just possibly the mud-menace was getting worse. The little traction there had been was now degrading under the wheels of each vehicle as it passed.
No surprise then that jeep number three did stop. Right in the middle of the mud-bath. The initial reaction to this was to attempt to push a piston rod through the engine block as quickly as possible. The jeep’s engine wasn’t so much screaming now as shrieking in pain. If Brian had been carrying a gun, he would have wanted to shoot it. Put it out of its pain and let it lie where it had died – in the middle of a mud pool. But then the revs died instead, and the other drivers and Imran advanced towards the stricken vehicle with sticks and branches, which they then proceeded to place under its wheels. This was a tried and tested means of providing more traction. However… when the revs were applied again the jeep didn’t move an inch – other than downwards and even deeper into the mud. Only when more branches were pushed under the wheels and the two assisting drivers mounted the sides of the jeep to give it greater weight, did it move forwards. And even then it was slowly, and not without further shrieking. It also entailed a lot of mud-splattering. Pamela and Julian had been sitting in the back of this jeep and they were now sitting there in mud-splattered shirts. As the jeep’s wheels had spun, so had the mud flown up and onto their clothes. They looked like a couple of human Jackson Pollocks. But they didn’t seem to mind. Maybe they were Pollock fans.
After this there were more buffalo, more junglefowl, and a tree full of vultures. This caused a bit of a stir, in that it could have been a sign of a recent kill – by a tiger. Tigers were, after all, resident in Kaziranga. But no. They were not here today, and Brian and his companions would have to console themselves with a well-earned lunch, back on the Sukapha. Their first jeep safari was now at an end, and it was time to don their life-jackets again and return to the boat.
Lunch was a curry of local Brahmaputra fish with the usual accompaniments. Brian made do with just the accompaniments. He’d seen how many bones there were in the fish – and how little flesh they had, an observation not apparently made by Ron. Ron was the husband of Irene and an ex-employee of Jaguar. When he’d worked for this company he’d worked as a technician. He’d been involved in some of their special vehicles and occasionally in the launch of their new models. He had worked with his hands. This was just as well, as he now needed all the manual dexterity he possessed to extract a mass of needles from his mouth, his hopes that the fish-bones would merely melt in his mouth having clearly been dashed with his very first mouthful. And Irene was trying to ignore him.
These were the pair who had already won the “most down to earth” award in Brian’s assessment of the whole party. They were always willing to chat and Ron, in particular, always had something to say. Irene was less verbose, but she was rather more confiding. She even confessed to Brian her opinions on certain sensitive issues back home, opinions that wouldn’t have earned her too many plaudits from the liberal establishment in that country, but opinions that didn’t upset Brian in the least. Oh, and Irene was afflicted with the stomach bug. She was sitting at the lunch table with a banana and a slice of bread on her plate
So was Tim. Tim was an accountant from West Yorkshire. Now, many people regard accountants as dull and unworthy of any real respect. Brian, however, did not. This was primarily because he had been one himself, and like Tim, had worked as a partner in one of the “Big Four” firms of accountants, the quartet of “professional services” firms whose activities span the world. He therefore knew how demanding an accountant’s job could be, how difficult it was to meet all these demands for a whole lifetime – and also how many accountants, despite all the rumours to the contrary, were almost normal. They were also, he knew (when they had remained in the profession), not bankers, not “no win, no fee” lawyers, not estate agents, not politicians, and most importantly, not civil servants. And these credentials alone, he thought, should have earned them rather more respect than they received.
Tim was a prime example of this breed of professional heroes. He had done his time with one of Brian’s firm’s competitors, and was now semi-retired and doing just some specialist work for this same firm on a salaried basis. He was also seeing the value of his retirement pot shrinking rapidly (through the efforts of bankers, politicians and civil servants). But that is another story and has no place in an account of an expedition to India. Just let it be said that he and Brian shared some very similar views, and although they had formerly been in competition with each other, they were now in complete harmony on many issues concerning both the creation of wealth and its rampant consumption.
Tim also had a charming wife: Karen. She was slim, beautifully turned out (even when occupying the rear of a tiny jeep in near-tropical temperatures), and she had a delightful vice. According to informants she was a bit of a boy-racer. Tim had retained his dependable mid-range Mercedes Benz when he had semi-retired. Karen, on the contrary, had retained her interest in burning rubber, and now raced around the environs of Leeds in her convertible Porsche. Brian just hoped she knew where all the speed cameras were.
This last thought was drifting through Brian’s mind as the Sukapha now drifted down the river. They were now moving a small way down the Brahmaputra to enable a mooring to be established closer to the next entrance to Kaziranga, the entrance they would be using the following day. So it was time to relax again and time to absorb more of the surroundings. Yes, one could take in more of the grandeur of the river itself, and if one was feeling very active, one could look out for dolphins.
Brian found it difficult to believe, but this river was so immense it really could sustain its own species of this higher mammal – in the shape of the “Gangetic dolphin”. He had seen one on his very first day on the boat. Just a glimpse, but it had been the very obvious shape of a curved dolphin back as this wonderful creature emerged silently from the water and disappeared immediately beneath it. It was difficult to see more. The water was full of silt and impossible to peer through. Gangetic dolphins do not jump out of the water; they only ever just break its surface. So it is almost pot luck. Be looking in the right direction at the right time and you might see one emerge. And if you’re very lucky it might be really close and it might emerge towards you, and then you can see its face and its head as well as its back and its tail. That was what Brian was doing now, having some time ago forgotten about speed cameras around Leeds. He was still doing it as they arrived at their mooring.
This was the previous mooring’s twin brother. It had the same expanse of unstable-at-the-edges sand and it required the same dig-and-bury mooring technique. However there was a difference here. The boat had arrived early enough to allow time for a game of beach-volleyball!
Yes, as soon as the mooring ropes had been secured, the moorers turned their attention to creating a volleyball court. Two long bamboo poles were driven into the sand and between them was hung a volleyball net. As this was going on, one of the crew, who had been blessed with a sense of accuracy found in few men and a sense of spatial awareness found in no women at all, drew out the boundaries of the court with his foot. He simply drew it through the sand in one uninterrupted movement, taking it through the right angles at the corners as though he had a GPS fitted in him. Then the court was ready for use.
Regrettably, in neither team were there any ladies kitted out in miniscule Lycra bikinis with large expanses of tanned, bare f
lesh on show. There weren’t even any lady Nature-seekers on show. There were just the fit and athletic crew members. But almost all of them, it seemed. Brian even picked out the ship’s master from his gallery vantage point on the ship’s sundeck. And he was pretty good too. Although not quite as captivating as a nubile young woman in Lycra. Brian quitted his seat in the gallery and went off to prepare himself for the evening.
This began in its conventional manner with a listing session in the lounge. But then there was something different. The evening meal was to be an Indian barbecue on the “beach”.
And there it was. As Brian followed Sandra down the narrow gangplank to the sandy shore, before him was a pole with a light at its top and a car battery at its bottom, and around this pole in a large circle were two dozen plastic chairs straight out of “You’ve Been Framed” and the raw material for hundreds of those Harry Hill quips. This was a little disconcerting. A wind was now getting up, and unless Brian and Sandra were joined by their fellow Nature-seekers and they all sat themselves on those chairs pretty damn soon, there was a very good chance that they would all be blown away and end up in Bangladesh in a couple of weeks’ time. They really did look as though they were about to be whisked off.
Fortunately, the other Nature-seekers were very soon assembled, and Brian’s concerns evaporated as twenty-three middle-aged bums were brought into action as chair-weights. The danger had passed. Now all he needed to do was secure a drink for himself and his wife and wait to see what happened. He had never attended an Indian barbecue before and he didn’t know how it might work. He did suspect it wouldn’t entail too many burgers or too many beer guts, and he doubted there’d be any serious accidents with lighter fuel. But other than this he just didn’t know what to expect.
Well, in the event, it was delightful, and a great deal more genteel than many of the barbecues he had attended in England. In the first place the portions were manageable. They were little more than bite-size. But they kept on coming. All sorts of wonderful ingredients and tastes. Like curried prawns and curried fish and differently curried lamb and a dozen other delicacies. And all delivered on silver platters by the ship’s two waitresses – and all delicious. This seemed to go on forever, and it gave Brian and Sandra an opportunity to meet the final instalment of their Sunderbans team, the last couple making up the ten Nature-seekers who would be going on to that further destination when Assam was behind them. This was the spouse and spouse duo of Alan and Lynn.
Alan was a revelation. Like Brian, he had studied chemistry at university, and like Brian, he had abandoned it immediately. But unlike Brian, he had not then sought sanctuary in the bosom of a profession, but had hurled himself into commercialism in the shape of a management career with the Royal Mail. He had done well and he’d ended up as one of its directors. But then there was never going to be any other outcome. Alan was not just very intelligent, he was also an addict. Yes, he was addicted to challenges. He simply could not resist them, and this had taken him far. It had not only taken him into a Royal Mail directorship, but it had also taken him into the higher echelons of Deutsche Post and then into running the Post Office in Ireland. And that addiction was still there. He had eventually retired. But now, in his mid-sixties, he was back in again, this time taking on the challenge of a startup business. Brian wasn’t quite sure what it did. But it was something to do with a mail service. And it was all about satisfying his addiction. Or satisfying it nearly…
Work challenges were not enough. Alan was a heavy user, and before he’d retired officially he had supplemented his fixes through work with some fixes through sport. He’d been an orienteer, a competitive orienteer. But now his body had decided that this tramping around the countryside was no longer on and he needed a new competitive challenge, something that, like orienteering at the highest levels, would take him around the world, something indeed like “competitive” bird-spotting – where the competition was all about the number of birds he could spot. How many of the world’s nearly ten thousand species he could observe and record.
This makes Alan sound a little like a nerd. Like a train-spotter in a badly fitting anorak, scribbling numbers in a notepad. But Alan was anything but a nerd. He was bright, engaging, always ready to laugh, and he was just enjoying himself with the sort of challenge that allowed him to take himself and his wife to some of the most remarkable places on Earth. He was, therefore, just like Brian, only just a little bit keener on his bird-count. And on top of all this he looked like a cross between Michael Bentine and Clint Eastwood, and he had a jacket. Sitting here, at this Indian barbecue, he was wearing a smart tropical jacket – and it was uncreased! But how had he done that? How had he managed to get all the way to the Brahmaputra with an item of apparel that was so free of creases? Brian never found out.
His wife was uncreased as well. This was Lynn, smooth-skinned and young-looking, not least because she was an awful lot younger than her husband and indeed may have been no more than forty. But this was of no consequence. She still shared his enthusiasm, his intelligence and his interest in wildlife. Albeit she wasn’t quite so addicted to a challenge. Brian discovered that she had other interests: cooking, swimming and reading, and these served her just as well as Alan’s more focused attention on birds.
She also liked food. This was apparent when a more substantial part of the piecemeal barbecue arrived. She managed a full plate. Brian and Sandra did not. They had already had too many of the countless nibble-size bits of the feast and could face no more. They were also aware of the time. It was almost ten o’clock and they were very conscious that tomorrow’s planned escapade would require them to rise from their bed at four in the morning!
They therefore made their excuses and retired for the night, comfortable in the knowledge that they had met another pair of people on this cruise who might prove to be the most amiable and interesting pair in the party. And who didn’t seem too interested in photography…
5.
The generator burst into life. This was the boat’s alarm clock. It was so noisy that it was impossible to sleep through. And although a minute or so after it had been switched on, one of the boat’s crew would knock discreetly on everyone’s door to ensure they were awake, there was no way they’d not be. It was now rumbling away, and Brian was trying to drag himself into consciousness. Four in the morning was really pushing it, and he still had to shave…
He managed, and by 4.45 he, with all the other Nature-seekers, was sitting on the country boat, encased in a life-jacket and coming to terms with the day. He was also counting his companions. They were all here, a further testament to the efficacy of Imodium and, he suspected, the growing realisation within the group that as long as you didn’t fart, even if your stomach was at the peak of its upset, you’d probably be OK.
The boat trip took just minutes, barely longer than it took to put on and take off a life-jacket. And now they had disembarked and were walking towards two minibuses. They were the same two buses that had ferried them to the gibbon sanctuary on their first day. They must have followed them down the river, shadowing the progress of the Sukapha and stationing themselves for their next use by its passengers. Brian was impressed. Rajan was obviously good.
Brian chose a back seat. He thought that a clear view of the road ahead might not be a very good idea this early in the morning, and a shunt in the back didn’t hold quite the same degree of terror as a head-on collision. He needn’t have been so concerned. The road trip was short, uneventful (at least for those at the back), and it was now over. They had arrived at an entrance to the Kaziranga National Park that gave them access to its extensive grasslands – and to its elephant rides!
Brian was quite excited. He might have ridden a donkey when he was very small, but he had never ridden a horse and neither had he ever been on a “holiday” camel. But here he was, about to mount a bloody great pachyderm, the riding equivalent of jumping in at the deep end. And probably with minimal Health and Safety. It was worth getting up for.
The buses came to a stop, and there they were, a dozen or so saddled elephants, waiting in a neat line like a row of bulbous, grey taxis. And the first thing that struck Brian was that they weren’t bloody great pachyderms at all, but that they were quite small pachyderms. Compared to African elephants he had seen, they were lightweights, just like those Indian bananas… Brian thought that if Hannibal had made it over the Alps with the African variety, then maybe these chaps might just about manage the Mendips. But then he thought that possibly it was Indian elephants that Hannibal had got his hands on, which rather undermined his first thought, but did remind him again of how little he knew about anything and the wonder he found in ignorance.
They were bigger when one came to mount them. This boarding process took place in a concrete edifice that looked a little like an unfinished water-tower. One climbed up some concrete steps, an elephant squeezed its way through the tower’s concrete pillars, and when it had come to rest adjacent to the top of the steps, one pulled oneself on. Without being allowed to give it any considered thought, one was then on its saddle, a broad, three-seater saddle with each of the seats facing forward. Now, just to make this clear, this means that one was now sitting on an elephant in the same way that one would sit on a horse, with one’s legs hanging down either side. Only, of course, they don’t hang at all; they splay. The back of even a modest-sized elephant is a great deal wider than that of any horse, and riding one of these creatures involves doing the splits for as long as one is on it. And testing splits. Brian soon decided that elephant riding of this sort would plainly be inadvisable for many, and especially for the arthritic, for the obese, for the infirm and for the intact. And maybe it wasn’t going to be too good an idea for him.
He was on an elephant with Pamela and Julian and their new change of shirts. Sandra had become separated in the mounting tower and was now on another elephant with Bill and Tina. They both seemed to have forgotten Brian’s injudicious reference to the uniqueness of snipe at the dinner table and had made Sandra welcome. She’d even been given the front seat – just behind the mahout. And what a strange word that is, thought Brian. It sounds more Scottish than Indian. As in: ‘Duncan had a fine wee mahout, which he kept tucked away in his sporran’. Or maybe it might be a Scottish term of abuse…
Brian on the Brahmaputra Page 6