Home is behind, the world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadows to the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight.
Then world behind and home ahead,
We'll wander back to home and bed.
***
Trying to pick a book set in London to read on the way home has made me realise the cheek of what I've been trying to do in this blog. Because no random author could capture London the way I see it.
One of the reasons people travel is to expand their horizons, to see life lived in ways very different to their own, to learn that the world is a vast place and they are only one small person living in one small patch of it. All of this is true, and all of it is good to learn.
But after four months away from home, I've been wondering how much you can really learn about the world as a tourist. In India, I downloaded the complete works of Rudyard Kiping, and it came with some interesting essays on his work. One that has stuck with me is by GK Chesterton. Unlike other readers of Kipling, he wasn't that impressed with the exotic nature of Kipling's work, pointing out that
"the globe trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing an air of locality... The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men... The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men... Mr Kipling, with all his merits, is a globe trotter; he has not the patience to become part of anything."
Chesterton argues that travel does not make the world bigger, but smaller. He suggests that the only way to understand some of the greatest things in life is to look for them with a microscope, not a telescope; not as "tourists or inquirers" but "with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets".
There are important practical, moral and spiritual lessons to learn as a stranger. I've noticed incredible things that people who have lived in a place their whole lives no longer see. I've realised that I'm often more vulnerable than I'd like to think, and noticed how often I have to rely on the goodwill and understanding of others who don't even know me. I've had time to think about the experience of exile and separation, and what Christianity says about it and how it can impact my faith.
But now I want to go where I'm known. I want to have "the patience to be part of something", to commit to and invest in my community in its various forms. I want to help plan my sister's wedding, discuss all the books I've been reading with my mum, and beg my dad's help with my scary upcoming business exams. I want to see the clock tower at King's Cross, the fairy lights on the South Bank, and my own front door.
So I haven't read any books set in London. Because I don't just want a snapshot of it.
Instead, I'll finish by stealing from Tolkien again. There is a great scene in The Lord of the Rings where Frodo thinks about going home, and how much he wants to see Bilbo. And I feel exactly as he does: dear friends, "I would rather see [you] than all the towers and palaces in the world".
***
Oh, and it turns out I really do love books.
Friday 19 July 2013
Thursday 18 July 2013
"And all the land beneath our feet would be our own": Australia
The opening pages of My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin insist that it is an Australian tale; not a romance, nor a novel but "simply a yarn - a real yarn". On its publication in 1901, Henry Lawson, another Australian author, described it as "born of the bush" and a book "true to Australia - the truest I ever read."
On first reading, however, there doesn't seem to be much to set it apart from the nineteenth century English classics. Despite declaring that she is "only a common little bush girl", Sybylla Melvin, the young protagonist and narrator, seems as though she would fit right in with the headstrong yet sympathetic heroines of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.
In the same way, when I arrived in Australia it immediately felt very familiar. Constrained by time and getting tired, I've stuck mainly to the major cities, and with the "weird witchery of the mighty bush" hidden underneath concrete and behind tall buildings, it's hard to believe that I'm geographically further from home than I've ever been. When you can get a decent cup of tea, you feel you must be close to home.
As My Brilliant Career progresses, however, you start to realise that Sybylla is no typical heroine. Lizzy Bennett was never called upon to help put out a bush fire. Jane Eyre never lifted a cow. And when Harold Beecham - "a tall grand man, and honest and true and rich" - proposes and the time comes for Sybylla to put aside her notions of independence and get married, she cracks him across the face with a whip. Sybylla is a "child of the mighty bush" and she will not be tamed.
Similarly, despite all the home comforts, there is much about Australia that is weird and wonderful. I've been scuba diving with a fish almost as big as I am, and with sharks much bigger (and fortunately much further away). I've petted kangaroos and koalas, and been creeped out by enormous snakes and crocodiles behind glass at the zoo. After about ten minutes at Bondi beach, sipping flat whites in the sunshine and watching surfers drift in the waves, I understood completely why my two cousins have forsaken Northern Ireland to live here instead.
***
The problem with Australia feeling so familiar, and with it being my last stop after so many weeks on the move, is that at times it's made me desperately homesick. In many ways, that's appropriate for a visit here, a land largely built by people from somewhere else. I feel homesick for England and Ireland because so many people here before me have been too, and have created Australia in the image of the homes they left behind.
Longing for home is an overarching theme of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, a fictionalised autobiography of Ned Kelly, the notorious Australian outlaw. Kelly comes from an Irish peasant family, his "brave parents... ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history" leaving "every dear familiar thing... abandoned on the docks". Although the novel covers his criminal exploits, it makes it clear that his motivation is always his desire to restore his family and fulfil their dreams of creating a stable home for themselves, to possess land they "could walk on from breakfast until [they] saw the last kookaburra marking its boundary across the evening sky". But, sent away at thirteen and never really able to return, Ned remains a "boy without a home", moving from place to place, from hidden den to hidden den, never fully attaining the one thing he truly wants; a "place on earth to call his own".
Unlike Kelly, I've been in self-imposed exile. It's been my choice to roam, to go walkabout, to see radically different things and do things I wouldn't usually do. It's been amazing. But it takes its toll. And though I'm now in fairly familiar surroundings, with friends and family, and most of the home comforts I'd been craving, I've realised that there's nothing quite like being in a place you can call your own.
I'd like to go home now.
***
Carey, Peter, True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
Franklin, Miles, My Brilliant Career (1901)
On first reading, however, there doesn't seem to be much to set it apart from the nineteenth century English classics. Despite declaring that she is "only a common little bush girl", Sybylla Melvin, the young protagonist and narrator, seems as though she would fit right in with the headstrong yet sympathetic heroines of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.
In the same way, when I arrived in Australia it immediately felt very familiar. Constrained by time and getting tired, I've stuck mainly to the major cities, and with the "weird witchery of the mighty bush" hidden underneath concrete and behind tall buildings, it's hard to believe that I'm geographically further from home than I've ever been. When you can get a decent cup of tea, you feel you must be close to home.
As My Brilliant Career progresses, however, you start to realise that Sybylla is no typical heroine. Lizzy Bennett was never called upon to help put out a bush fire. Jane Eyre never lifted a cow. And when Harold Beecham - "a tall grand man, and honest and true and rich" - proposes and the time comes for Sybylla to put aside her notions of independence and get married, she cracks him across the face with a whip. Sybylla is a "child of the mighty bush" and she will not be tamed.
Similarly, despite all the home comforts, there is much about Australia that is weird and wonderful. I've been scuba diving with a fish almost as big as I am, and with sharks much bigger (and fortunately much further away). I've petted kangaroos and koalas, and been creeped out by enormous snakes and crocodiles behind glass at the zoo. After about ten minutes at Bondi beach, sipping flat whites in the sunshine and watching surfers drift in the waves, I understood completely why my two cousins have forsaken Northern Ireland to live here instead.
***
The problem with Australia feeling so familiar, and with it being my last stop after so many weeks on the move, is that at times it's made me desperately homesick. In many ways, that's appropriate for a visit here, a land largely built by people from somewhere else. I feel homesick for England and Ireland because so many people here before me have been too, and have created Australia in the image of the homes they left behind.
Longing for home is an overarching theme of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, a fictionalised autobiography of Ned Kelly, the notorious Australian outlaw. Kelly comes from an Irish peasant family, his "brave parents... ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history" leaving "every dear familiar thing... abandoned on the docks". Although the novel covers his criminal exploits, it makes it clear that his motivation is always his desire to restore his family and fulfil their dreams of creating a stable home for themselves, to possess land they "could walk on from breakfast until [they] saw the last kookaburra marking its boundary across the evening sky". But, sent away at thirteen and never really able to return, Ned remains a "boy without a home", moving from place to place, from hidden den to hidden den, never fully attaining the one thing he truly wants; a "place on earth to call his own".
Unlike Kelly, I've been in self-imposed exile. It's been my choice to roam, to go walkabout, to see radically different things and do things I wouldn't usually do. It's been amazing. But it takes its toll. And though I'm now in fairly familiar surroundings, with friends and family, and most of the home comforts I'd been craving, I've realised that there's nothing quite like being in a place you can call your own.
I'd like to go home now.
***
Carey, Peter, True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
Franklin, Miles, My Brilliant Career (1901)
Tuesday 2 July 2013
"Bombs aren't for boys from Boston": Vietnam
There is a certain romance to being in Saigon. Reading Graham Greene's The Quiet American while drinking the best coffee I've ever had, surrounded by the grand colonial architecture of the rue Catinat, I could almost believe I was in the era of the novel, that hey day of the war correspondent armed with his portable typewriter on his exotic, noble mission. But only almost; Saigon is, of course, now Ho Chi Minh City, the rue Catinat is Dong Khoi, and "the girls in white silk trousers bicycl[ing] home" have been replaced by ladies in high heels buzzing along on their scooters. Today, Ho Chi Minh is hectic, noisy, traffic-consumed, and very fun. A few months in Asia has quashed the underlying feeling of being slightly overwhelmed that accompanied me in the first cities I visited, so I spent my time there indulging in two of the great joys of Asian travel: street food and zooming around on the back of a motorbike (all on an organised tour, I'm not that brave).
Meeting people at the airport may be even better than being met yourself. All of the joy, none of the travel. Hannah and Lucy arrived from London to spend two weeks travelling from Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi with me. Travelling solo is great, but you can't beat being ridiculously profound and profoundly ridiculous with good friends on long bus journeys and over cheap cocktails.
***
Our whistle stop journey north began with visits to the War Remnants Museum and the Cu Chi Tunnels, major tourist attractions educating visitors on the "American War". Before I came to Vietnam, I'd assumed that I had a fairly neutral view on the war. It was only when I was faced with naively unexpected, gut-wrenching photographs of American war crimes, and when I watched in horror as the Cu Chi guide proudly demonstrated the grizzly booby traps used on the "enemy" by the Viet Cong, that I realised how subconsciously and strongly influenced by the American narrative I've been.
Matterhorn by Karl Malantes offered a perspective on the war more familiar to me. While the conflict whispers at the edges of The Quiet American, the heart of this novel, written by a former Marine, is the war of "jungle and mountain and marsh". Both novels give an entirely Western viewpoint, and the Vietnamese remain strange and unknowable. In The Quiet American, Phuong, the woman fought over by the two male protagonists, could stand for Vietnam itself; batted between Westerners who see her as "wonderfully ignorant" of events going on around her and in need of defence, she remains inscrutable to those who claim to love her. In Matterhorn, the Vietnamese are the shadows in the jungle, the faceless "enemy" whose rare appearance is both desired and feared. The only close encounter between Lieutenant Mellas, the main character, and an NVA soldier emphasises the impossibility of communication between them:
"the kid must have guessed that if he didn't throw the grenade Mellas wasn't going to shoot. But he threw the grenade anyway, his lips curling back from his teeth. Fuck you then, Mellas thought bitterly."
This gulf between the Westerners and the Vietnamese in the novels, even those on the same 'side' of the fighting, illustrates the glaring questions posed by the war "attractions"; if the French, then American forces didn't know the Vietnamese, didn't know what they wanted, or really what they themselves wanted to achieve, what was the point of it all? What were they doing there in the first place?
War, always awful in reality, is a good subject for writers. As Marlantes points out in his author's note, "novels need heroes and villains". Then, when these roles get blurred in the mess of war, the author can get to the real stuff of being human. Pyle, the "quiet American", sees himself as a hero, "determined... to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world". Yet his destructive actions force Fowler, the narrator, who prides himself on his detachment, to stop being a simple "reporter" and step in. And Fowler is no hero either, with his unclear and unclean motives. At first, Matterhorn seems more straightforward. Mellas arrives in Vietnam with a clear mission: kill enough of the enemy, and look brave enough doing it, to get a medal and swift promotion. But as war "break[s] life apart and splinter[s] it", and his friends die around him, he becomes desperate for "meaning". Knowledge of the author's own experience of Vietnam adds a terrible pathos to Mellas' attempts to figure it out:
"it occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good and evil through caring. He could nullify the indifferent world. But in so doing he opened himself to the pain of watching it get blown away... he had participated in evil, but this evil had hurt him as well. He also understood that his participation in evil was a result of being human. Being human was the best he could do."
***
After over a month in Cambodia and Vietnam, I got tired of reading about conflict. So I decided to put down the books for a while, and focus on Vietnam as it is today. So much misery seemed impossible in such a beautiful country. It is a visual feast, a photographer's dream. It seemed that every time I turned my head, a picture perfect composition arranged itself for me: boats like giant coconut shells bobbing on the turquoise waters of An Bang beach; jewel-toned lanterns glowing through the twilight in Hoi An; incense smoke clouding the damp air at Thien Mu Pagoda; women in conical hats walking flower-laden bicycles down the heaving streets of Hanoi's Old Quarter. It's too bad I'm a terrible photographer. I'd better go back to the books.
***
Greene, Graham, The Quiet American (1955)
Marlantes, Karl, Matterhorn, (2010)
Meeting people at the airport may be even better than being met yourself. All of the joy, none of the travel. Hannah and Lucy arrived from London to spend two weeks travelling from Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi with me. Travelling solo is great, but you can't beat being ridiculously profound and profoundly ridiculous with good friends on long bus journeys and over cheap cocktails.
***
Our whistle stop journey north began with visits to the War Remnants Museum and the Cu Chi Tunnels, major tourist attractions educating visitors on the "American War". Before I came to Vietnam, I'd assumed that I had a fairly neutral view on the war. It was only when I was faced with naively unexpected, gut-wrenching photographs of American war crimes, and when I watched in horror as the Cu Chi guide proudly demonstrated the grizzly booby traps used on the "enemy" by the Viet Cong, that I realised how subconsciously and strongly influenced by the American narrative I've been.
Matterhorn by Karl Malantes offered a perspective on the war more familiar to me. While the conflict whispers at the edges of The Quiet American, the heart of this novel, written by a former Marine, is the war of "jungle and mountain and marsh". Both novels give an entirely Western viewpoint, and the Vietnamese remain strange and unknowable. In The Quiet American, Phuong, the woman fought over by the two male protagonists, could stand for Vietnam itself; batted between Westerners who see her as "wonderfully ignorant" of events going on around her and in need of defence, she remains inscrutable to those who claim to love her. In Matterhorn, the Vietnamese are the shadows in the jungle, the faceless "enemy" whose rare appearance is both desired and feared. The only close encounter between Lieutenant Mellas, the main character, and an NVA soldier emphasises the impossibility of communication between them:
"the kid must have guessed that if he didn't throw the grenade Mellas wasn't going to shoot. But he threw the grenade anyway, his lips curling back from his teeth. Fuck you then, Mellas thought bitterly."
This gulf between the Westerners and the Vietnamese in the novels, even those on the same 'side' of the fighting, illustrates the glaring questions posed by the war "attractions"; if the French, then American forces didn't know the Vietnamese, didn't know what they wanted, or really what they themselves wanted to achieve, what was the point of it all? What were they doing there in the first place?
War, always awful in reality, is a good subject for writers. As Marlantes points out in his author's note, "novels need heroes and villains". Then, when these roles get blurred in the mess of war, the author can get to the real stuff of being human. Pyle, the "quiet American", sees himself as a hero, "determined... to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world". Yet his destructive actions force Fowler, the narrator, who prides himself on his detachment, to stop being a simple "reporter" and step in. And Fowler is no hero either, with his unclear and unclean motives. At first, Matterhorn seems more straightforward. Mellas arrives in Vietnam with a clear mission: kill enough of the enemy, and look brave enough doing it, to get a medal and swift promotion. But as war "break[s] life apart and splinter[s] it", and his friends die around him, he becomes desperate for "meaning". Knowledge of the author's own experience of Vietnam adds a terrible pathos to Mellas' attempts to figure it out:
"it occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good and evil through caring. He could nullify the indifferent world. But in so doing he opened himself to the pain of watching it get blown away... he had participated in evil, but this evil had hurt him as well. He also understood that his participation in evil was a result of being human. Being human was the best he could do."
***
After over a month in Cambodia and Vietnam, I got tired of reading about conflict. So I decided to put down the books for a while, and focus on Vietnam as it is today. So much misery seemed impossible in such a beautiful country. It is a visual feast, a photographer's dream. It seemed that every time I turned my head, a picture perfect composition arranged itself for me: boats like giant coconut shells bobbing on the turquoise waters of An Bang beach; jewel-toned lanterns glowing through the twilight in Hoi An; incense smoke clouding the damp air at Thien Mu Pagoda; women in conical hats walking flower-laden bicycles down the heaving streets of Hanoi's Old Quarter. It's too bad I'm a terrible photographer. I'd better go back to the books.
***
Greene, Graham, The Quiet American (1955)
Marlantes, Karl, Matterhorn, (2010)
Tuesday 11 June 2013
"A Mad Riot of Destruction": Cambodia
Helen Churchill Candee was a remarkable woman. She survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 (rumour has it that the infamous "I'm flying Jack" scene in James Cameron's film was inspired by her escapades on board). In 1918, as a war nurse in Italy, she aided in the recovery of an injured Ernest Hemingway. And in 1922, she wrote Angkor the Magnificent, an account of her visit to the Angkor temple complex in Cambodia.
Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious building, is one of those monuments that seems too vast to adequately describe. The inclination is to snap a picture of it instead, to let a pixellated screen do the work for you. Mrs Churchill Candee didn't have that luxury, and though her descriptions are a little gushing, you can sense her desire to communicate her wonder with readers who were unlikely to ever see the Wat rising "in fair majesty against the heavens" for themselves.
Maybe I don't have as active an imagination as she did, or maybe it's that the temple was packed with Japanese tourists, but I found it difficult to people the scene with "kings and guards of other days". But the architecture as it stands now is intriguing enough: the "symmetric mountains of ornamental stone", "companions of the sky, sisters of the clouds"; the "marvellous decorations carved in low relief" "sprinkled over the Wat as though a spirit of joy and beauty had laid them there"; the huge faces carved in the nearby Bayon temple, "enigmatic, powerful, heroic as fate is heroic and relentless."
As I cruised around the complex in my tuk tuk, sipping a Coca Cola, I thought that Mrs Churchill Candee, with her pioneering spirit, might not be very impressed with me. As it turns out, she was ferried around on an elephant and "buzzed home to luncheon" in a car each day, which made me feel better. She would be dismayed, however, at how her predictions about future tourism at the site have come true. She worried that if one could "in a few minutes reach the ruins and hastily scramble over" them, one of the world's greatest wonders might "fail to thrill the souls of such a hasty audience". She was right; I was in the complex for two days and can't really remember anything past noon of either day, other than that I saw a lot of temples and it was hot.
There were moments, however, when I did feel the thrill of exploration, and could pretend that I had found a "gem... still unknown to modern man". Arriving at Banteay Srey temple just after dawn, I was the only visitor there. A policeman came towards me, and I assumed he was going to tell me off for leaning on the wall. Instead, he grabbed my camera and ushered me into the roped off area where the best preserved carvings in the complex are hidden, taking pictures of me and everything in sight with an entertainly mischievous expression. In another deserted temple, I found an isolated shady spot where a huge tree had wrapped its roots around a wall and "thrown down [the stones] as if in a rage". It must have seemed a wonder to the first European to stumble upon it and, even with the construction work going on around it, it is still a striking and poignant image, a reminder that even the most magnificent works of Men can be taken back by the earth they were raised from.
***
Loung Ung is another remarkable woman. First They Killed My Father is an account of her and her family's experience under the Khmer Rouge regime. While Helen Candee Churchill's remarkable experiences were unique, Loung Ung's author's note reminds us that hers were not:
"This is a story of survival: my own and my family's. Though these events constitute my experience, my story mirrors that of millions of Cambodians. If you had been living in Cambodia during this period, this would be your story too."
On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge, a communist force, won the country's civil war and took Phnom Penh. They cleared the city, marching everyone into the countryside to be 're-educated' and ready to take their place in the new agrarian society. Over the next four years, an estimated two million people, almost a quarter of the country's population, were killed "through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labour". The victims included Luong Ung's parents, and two of her sisters.
Helen Churchill Candee describes the Angkor temples as a "mad riot of destruction". The same could be said of what the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodia, as they tore society apart by the seams:
"This new country has no law or order. City people are killed for no reason. Anyone can be viewed as a threat to the Angkar - former civil servants, monks, doctors, nurses, artists, teachers, students - even people who wear glasses, as the soldiers view this as a sign of intelligence."
People can intellectualise about extreme left wing politics, or the disconnect between radical theory and its application, or the phenomenon of megalomaniacal leaders, or the capacity of individuals to commit horrible atrocities when they are sanctioned by authority. But ultimately, what happened here seems impossible to comprehend.
It's difficult to know how to respond as a tourist visiting the memorial sites. In Battambang, I visited a 'Killing Cave'. The young guide I was with pointed up to a hole in the roof of the cave, and told me that people were executed by being thrown down the hole, because bullets were expensive. He looked at me expectantly for a while, waiting for my reaction. I didn't know what to say. In Phnom Penh, I visited the 'Killing Fields' and Tuol Sleng Museum, a high school building which was turned into a prison under the regime. The exhibitions there are excellent, but the information still seemed surreal. Maybe it's subconscious self-preservation. Maybe it's a lifetime of watching horrible images from around the world on the morning news and carrying on eating my breakfast. Maybe it's because I still can't believe deep down that such horror can be real.
That's why Loung Ung is so remarkable. Not only did she survive and rebuild her life, but she's been able to tell her story. That two million people died can be filed in your mind as an awful but straight forward statistic. It's more difficult to dismiss the horrifying experience of an individual. Stories are important. And though it's so hard to wrap your mind around what happened in those memorial sites, it's still important to go, to stand and bear witness, to be reminded that we need to pay attention and make sure the world is watching when future leaders begin to insidiously inflict horrible damage on their populations.
Today, Phnom Penh is a great town. It's been such a joy to see my friend Meghan, who works for an NGO here, to catch up with her, see how the expats live, and have a break from travelling for a few days (Grey's Anatomy Series Nine has played an important role). And while Meghan's been at work, I've been hanging out in cafes, eavesdropping on the conversations of other NGO workers, listening to how things have been and are being rebuilt here. It's focused my mind on one question that ties together my two weeks in Cambodia: what can I do to be constructive in a world where so many things seem to be broken?
When I figure it out I'll let you know.
***
Churchill Candee, Helen, Angkor the Magnificent (1924)
Ung, Luong, First They Killed My Father (2001)
Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious building, is one of those monuments that seems too vast to adequately describe. The inclination is to snap a picture of it instead, to let a pixellated screen do the work for you. Mrs Churchill Candee didn't have that luxury, and though her descriptions are a little gushing, you can sense her desire to communicate her wonder with readers who were unlikely to ever see the Wat rising "in fair majesty against the heavens" for themselves.
Maybe I don't have as active an imagination as she did, or maybe it's that the temple was packed with Japanese tourists, but I found it difficult to people the scene with "kings and guards of other days". But the architecture as it stands now is intriguing enough: the "symmetric mountains of ornamental stone", "companions of the sky, sisters of the clouds"; the "marvellous decorations carved in low relief" "sprinkled over the Wat as though a spirit of joy and beauty had laid them there"; the huge faces carved in the nearby Bayon temple, "enigmatic, powerful, heroic as fate is heroic and relentless."
As I cruised around the complex in my tuk tuk, sipping a Coca Cola, I thought that Mrs Churchill Candee, with her pioneering spirit, might not be very impressed with me. As it turns out, she was ferried around on an elephant and "buzzed home to luncheon" in a car each day, which made me feel better. She would be dismayed, however, at how her predictions about future tourism at the site have come true. She worried that if one could "in a few minutes reach the ruins and hastily scramble over" them, one of the world's greatest wonders might "fail to thrill the souls of such a hasty audience". She was right; I was in the complex for two days and can't really remember anything past noon of either day, other than that I saw a lot of temples and it was hot.
There were moments, however, when I did feel the thrill of exploration, and could pretend that I had found a "gem... still unknown to modern man". Arriving at Banteay Srey temple just after dawn, I was the only visitor there. A policeman came towards me, and I assumed he was going to tell me off for leaning on the wall. Instead, he grabbed my camera and ushered me into the roped off area where the best preserved carvings in the complex are hidden, taking pictures of me and everything in sight with an entertainly mischievous expression. In another deserted temple, I found an isolated shady spot where a huge tree had wrapped its roots around a wall and "thrown down [the stones] as if in a rage". It must have seemed a wonder to the first European to stumble upon it and, even with the construction work going on around it, it is still a striking and poignant image, a reminder that even the most magnificent works of Men can be taken back by the earth they were raised from.
***
Loung Ung is another remarkable woman. First They Killed My Father is an account of her and her family's experience under the Khmer Rouge regime. While Helen Candee Churchill's remarkable experiences were unique, Loung Ung's author's note reminds us that hers were not:
"This is a story of survival: my own and my family's. Though these events constitute my experience, my story mirrors that of millions of Cambodians. If you had been living in Cambodia during this period, this would be your story too."
On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge, a communist force, won the country's civil war and took Phnom Penh. They cleared the city, marching everyone into the countryside to be 're-educated' and ready to take their place in the new agrarian society. Over the next four years, an estimated two million people, almost a quarter of the country's population, were killed "through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labour". The victims included Luong Ung's parents, and two of her sisters.
Helen Churchill Candee describes the Angkor temples as a "mad riot of destruction". The same could be said of what the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodia, as they tore society apart by the seams:
"This new country has no law or order. City people are killed for no reason. Anyone can be viewed as a threat to the Angkar - former civil servants, monks, doctors, nurses, artists, teachers, students - even people who wear glasses, as the soldiers view this as a sign of intelligence."
People can intellectualise about extreme left wing politics, or the disconnect between radical theory and its application, or the phenomenon of megalomaniacal leaders, or the capacity of individuals to commit horrible atrocities when they are sanctioned by authority. But ultimately, what happened here seems impossible to comprehend.
It's difficult to know how to respond as a tourist visiting the memorial sites. In Battambang, I visited a 'Killing Cave'. The young guide I was with pointed up to a hole in the roof of the cave, and told me that people were executed by being thrown down the hole, because bullets were expensive. He looked at me expectantly for a while, waiting for my reaction. I didn't know what to say. In Phnom Penh, I visited the 'Killing Fields' and Tuol Sleng Museum, a high school building which was turned into a prison under the regime. The exhibitions there are excellent, but the information still seemed surreal. Maybe it's subconscious self-preservation. Maybe it's a lifetime of watching horrible images from around the world on the morning news and carrying on eating my breakfast. Maybe it's because I still can't believe deep down that such horror can be real.
That's why Loung Ung is so remarkable. Not only did she survive and rebuild her life, but she's been able to tell her story. That two million people died can be filed in your mind as an awful but straight forward statistic. It's more difficult to dismiss the horrifying experience of an individual. Stories are important. And though it's so hard to wrap your mind around what happened in those memorial sites, it's still important to go, to stand and bear witness, to be reminded that we need to pay attention and make sure the world is watching when future leaders begin to insidiously inflict horrible damage on their populations.
Today, Phnom Penh is a great town. It's been such a joy to see my friend Meghan, who works for an NGO here, to catch up with her, see how the expats live, and have a break from travelling for a few days (Grey's Anatomy Series Nine has played an important role). And while Meghan's been at work, I've been hanging out in cafes, eavesdropping on the conversations of other NGO workers, listening to how things have been and are being rebuilt here. It's focused my mind on one question that ties together my two weeks in Cambodia: what can I do to be constructive in a world where so many things seem to be broken?
When I figure it out I'll let you know.
***
Churchill Candee, Helen, Angkor the Magnificent (1924)
Ung, Luong, First They Killed My Father (2001)
Wednesday 29 May 2013
"It would be sad to be bored of Eden, no?": Thailand and The Beach
Halfway through my trip seemed a good time to collect some of my thoughts on travelling. And Thailand "of all places, backpacker central, land of the beaten track" is the perfect location to do it in.
The Beach by Alex Garland is a backpacker classic. Underwhelmed by the standard destinations that have been "spoiled" by "too many tourists", a group of travellers set up an isolated beach camp on a protected island. Richard, the novel's narrator, is told about the beach by a man who then commits suicide in their Bangkok hostel, and sets off to find it with a French couple he's just met. The novel charts how they gain the paradise they've been searching for, then rapidly lose it as the camp descends into violence and madness.
I arrived in Bangkok at the beginning of week ten of my trip. It was the first time I had landed in a new country and didn't feel the "sudden warm swell of happiness [wash] over me". All I felt was very tired. Two days in hectic Bangkok didn't do much to restore me, so I headed north to Chiang Mai looking for some respite. Like the French couple in the novel, I did what people do in Chiang Mai; I trekked, I rafted, I visited the elephants. And to my horror, I started to show signs of becoming a bit like the kind of travellers that set my teeth on edge when I first started this trip.
First were the know-it-all travellers, the ones who have been everywhere and done everything. Like Bugs, one of the original founders of the beach camp, who
"had an irritating competitive streak. If you'd watched the sun rise over Borobudur, he'd tell you that you should have seen the sun set, or if you knew of a good place to eat in Singapore, he'd know of one better."
The jaded traveller is a close relative of the know-it-all. They've been wandering for so long that they've already had every 'experience' possible and are constantly comparing the present moment with some past, and usually superior, event. Which is fine, if they would just keep their thoughts to themselves. Travel supposedly broadens the mind and helps people to lay aside their preconceptions. Lots of the 'long term' travellers I've met haven't been more open-minded and open-hearted though, they've been cynical and egocentric. I've found it difficult to understand why they're still on the road.
Yet as we trekked through the jungle near Chiang Mai, I was still trying to process everything I'd seen and done in the past few weeks, and unfavourable comparisons crept into my conversations. I knew that I wasn't taking in or appreciating what I was doing; like when Richard is "more interested in finding a soft spot on [his] backpack to use as a pillow" than looking at the islands when they first arrive, I stood outside our bamboo lodge, watching a rainstorm roll in over the Thai mountains, and just wanted to go to bed.
From Chiang Mai, I took the winding road to Pai, a chilled mountain village. In an attempt to get myself out of my rut, and in the interests of embracing the travel 'experience', I decided to do as the backpackers do, and went for a big night out. I drank rum from a bucket, I talked drunken nonsense with virtual strangers, I ate a suspect toastie from 7-Eleven at 2am. And woke up the next morning feeling wretched. I suddenly understood why the people in my hostel in Chiang Mai hadn't seemed interested in exploring, and just sat around all day watching films; they were all hideously hungover. I started to wonder what the point of it all was, what could make 'travelling' like this more than a colossal waste of time and resources.
At first I thought that Thailand itself could be responsible for my loss of travel mojo. The Beach was published in 1996, and there has been plenty of time since then for the "tourist hordes" to get their Lonely Planet-guided feet on the path blazed by the "travellers" years ago. I've met more than one person who's feeling a bit disappointed by the firmly established backpacker subculture here; at times Pai seems like a CentreParcs. It feels like there is nothing left to discover here. As Etienne laments,
"[E]verybody wants to do something different. But we all do the same thing... We come for an adventure, but we find this."
The opportunity to meet new people on the road is also lost on an introvert like me. There is no shortage of friendly people to chat to when you feel "starved of conversation and company" as a solo traveller. But most conversations never get past the initial Big Five questions (What's your name, where are you from, what do you do at home, how long have you been here, how long are you travelling for?) and I find all the small talk exhausting. The people living on the Beach epitomise the strange nature of the traveller 'community'; even after months at the camp, Richard realises that he knows "nothing about the past lives of [his] companions, except their place of origin".
The Beach doesn't offer much wisdom on what makes travelling worthwhile. Richard's "primary goal" when he starts to travel is "collecting memories, or experiences", seeing and doing exciting things that will sustain him in his normal life at home. Yet he soon tires of this, and is disappointed when the beach doesn't provide "an ideology or something. A purpose." He's horrified at the suggestion that he's just on "holiday", but can't articulate what makes 'travellers' different.
I think a sense of purpose can be more easily grasped by moving away from the language of 'travelling' and drawing on an older model: the pilgrimage. A great article by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman articulates the difference between the tourist and the pilgrim. The pilgrim is concerned with building their identity through their journey, telling their life as a "'sense-making' story" in which "each event [is] the effect of the event before and the cause of the event after". In contrast, the postmodern tourist has a horror of being trapped in a single overarching life story, and leaves their "real face" at home, demanding and consuming isolated and episodic "experiences".
Richard's only clear philosophy is that "escape through travel works". But surely there's more value in seeing time away not as an escape from your "real life" but as a chance to step back, reassess and figure out how to make "a whole out of the fragmentary". You are part of the place you're in, and if it isn't serving your desire for "experience", it's at least as much your fault as your location's. I'll most likely go home and realise that the best souvenirs from my travels aren't great photographs or memories of cool "experiences", but the things I've learned about myself that I hadn't spotted before (some good, some not so good...) and being a few steps closer to the answers to questions I've been wrestling with. As well as the key realisation that those answers never lie in the bottom of a bucket of rum.
***
Bauman, Zygmunt, 'From Pilgrim to Tourist - or a short history of identity'
Garland, Alex, The Beach (1996)
The Beach by Alex Garland is a backpacker classic. Underwhelmed by the standard destinations that have been "spoiled" by "too many tourists", a group of travellers set up an isolated beach camp on a protected island. Richard, the novel's narrator, is told about the beach by a man who then commits suicide in their Bangkok hostel, and sets off to find it with a French couple he's just met. The novel charts how they gain the paradise they've been searching for, then rapidly lose it as the camp descends into violence and madness.
I arrived in Bangkok at the beginning of week ten of my trip. It was the first time I had landed in a new country and didn't feel the "sudden warm swell of happiness [wash] over me". All I felt was very tired. Two days in hectic Bangkok didn't do much to restore me, so I headed north to Chiang Mai looking for some respite. Like the French couple in the novel, I did what people do in Chiang Mai; I trekked, I rafted, I visited the elephants. And to my horror, I started to show signs of becoming a bit like the kind of travellers that set my teeth on edge when I first started this trip.
First were the know-it-all travellers, the ones who have been everywhere and done everything. Like Bugs, one of the original founders of the beach camp, who
"had an irritating competitive streak. If you'd watched the sun rise over Borobudur, he'd tell you that you should have seen the sun set, or if you knew of a good place to eat in Singapore, he'd know of one better."
The jaded traveller is a close relative of the know-it-all. They've been wandering for so long that they've already had every 'experience' possible and are constantly comparing the present moment with some past, and usually superior, event. Which is fine, if they would just keep their thoughts to themselves. Travel supposedly broadens the mind and helps people to lay aside their preconceptions. Lots of the 'long term' travellers I've met haven't been more open-minded and open-hearted though, they've been cynical and egocentric. I've found it difficult to understand why they're still on the road.
Yet as we trekked through the jungle near Chiang Mai, I was still trying to process everything I'd seen and done in the past few weeks, and unfavourable comparisons crept into my conversations. I knew that I wasn't taking in or appreciating what I was doing; like when Richard is "more interested in finding a soft spot on [his] backpack to use as a pillow" than looking at the islands when they first arrive, I stood outside our bamboo lodge, watching a rainstorm roll in over the Thai mountains, and just wanted to go to bed.
From Chiang Mai, I took the winding road to Pai, a chilled mountain village. In an attempt to get myself out of my rut, and in the interests of embracing the travel 'experience', I decided to do as the backpackers do, and went for a big night out. I drank rum from a bucket, I talked drunken nonsense with virtual strangers, I ate a suspect toastie from 7-Eleven at 2am. And woke up the next morning feeling wretched. I suddenly understood why the people in my hostel in Chiang Mai hadn't seemed interested in exploring, and just sat around all day watching films; they were all hideously hungover. I started to wonder what the point of it all was, what could make 'travelling' like this more than a colossal waste of time and resources.
At first I thought that Thailand itself could be responsible for my loss of travel mojo. The Beach was published in 1996, and there has been plenty of time since then for the "tourist hordes" to get their Lonely Planet-guided feet on the path blazed by the "travellers" years ago. I've met more than one person who's feeling a bit disappointed by the firmly established backpacker subculture here; at times Pai seems like a CentreParcs. It feels like there is nothing left to discover here. As Etienne laments,
"[E]verybody wants to do something different. But we all do the same thing... We come for an adventure, but we find this."
The opportunity to meet new people on the road is also lost on an introvert like me. There is no shortage of friendly people to chat to when you feel "starved of conversation and company" as a solo traveller. But most conversations never get past the initial Big Five questions (What's your name, where are you from, what do you do at home, how long have you been here, how long are you travelling for?) and I find all the small talk exhausting. The people living on the Beach epitomise the strange nature of the traveller 'community'; even after months at the camp, Richard realises that he knows "nothing about the past lives of [his] companions, except their place of origin".
The Beach doesn't offer much wisdom on what makes travelling worthwhile. Richard's "primary goal" when he starts to travel is "collecting memories, or experiences", seeing and doing exciting things that will sustain him in his normal life at home. Yet he soon tires of this, and is disappointed when the beach doesn't provide "an ideology or something. A purpose." He's horrified at the suggestion that he's just on "holiday", but can't articulate what makes 'travellers' different.
I think a sense of purpose can be more easily grasped by moving away from the language of 'travelling' and drawing on an older model: the pilgrimage. A great article by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman articulates the difference between the tourist and the pilgrim. The pilgrim is concerned with building their identity through their journey, telling their life as a "'sense-making' story" in which "each event [is] the effect of the event before and the cause of the event after". In contrast, the postmodern tourist has a horror of being trapped in a single overarching life story, and leaves their "real face" at home, demanding and consuming isolated and episodic "experiences".
Richard's only clear philosophy is that "escape through travel works". But surely there's more value in seeing time away not as an escape from your "real life" but as a chance to step back, reassess and figure out how to make "a whole out of the fragmentary". You are part of the place you're in, and if it isn't serving your desire for "experience", it's at least as much your fault as your location's. I'll most likely go home and realise that the best souvenirs from my travels aren't great photographs or memories of cool "experiences", but the things I've learned about myself that I hadn't spotted before (some good, some not so good...) and being a few steps closer to the answers to questions I've been wrestling with. As well as the key realisation that those answers never lie in the bottom of a bucket of rum.
***
Bauman, Zygmunt, 'From Pilgrim to Tourist - or a short history of identity'
Garland, Alex, The Beach (1996)
Sunday 19 May 2013
"Ineffable grace in the midst of squalor": India
Of all the countries I'm visiting on this trip, I had the most preconceptions about India.
There were the scary ones, with high profile news stories leading me to the conclusion that every Indian man would be out to attack me, and people raising eyebrows at my choosing to come here at all ("Alone? Why?!"). And there were the idealised ones, the assurances that I'd find it magical, seductive and life changing. Waiting in Kathmandu airport, reading The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - a novel about a group of British pensioners who can't afford their retirement at home and move to Bangalore - I couldn't predict which kind of traveller I'd be; one "who would surrender to [India's] allure" or one "who would be baffled and distressed".
On my first day in Delhi, armed with my best '**** off and leave me alone' face, perfected in three years as a Londoner, I steeled myself for the onslaught of the streets. It was disconcerting at first that, like Evelyn in the novel, I found that "always, everywhere, eyes were upon [me] - people wanting to serve [me],to sell [me] something, people simply wanting to accompany [me] in a desire to be helpful." But though it could be "somewhat wearing", it was never threatening.
It's off-season for tourists, so my tour group was just me and two Canadian girls. As we moved out of Delhi into less touristy areas, we attracted a fair amount of attention. It was like being a celebrity followed by very polite and complimentary paparazzi. Everywhere we went, so many people seemed genuinely pleased to see us. After the evening worship ceremony at the ghat in Haridwar, the old lady sitting behind me took my arm and thanked me profusely, for what I still have no idea. When our guide and I crashed the graduation party of a group of Allahabad anaesthesiologists in our hotel, I was welcomed with open arms and installed in the centre of the dance floor. When a group of men turned up at our campsite, staring at us ominously and muttering in Hindi, it turned out that they'd just been daring each other to speak to the white girls, and all the one brave soul who did had to say for himself was "Have a nice day!".
Our tour took us down the the Ganges river, hitting some of the holiest spots in the country on the way. For the first few days, I wasn't getting the spiritual vibe. Our first stop was Rishikesh, yoga central, filled with spacy-looking, unwashed Westerners in silly trousers. In The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Evelyn's daughter Theresa is one of these pilgrims, travelling from one ashram to another for the spiritual "high", trying to "find the love that had so far eluded her" by visiting the "Hugging Mother" swami (rather than her own mother just a few miles away). At the beautiful evening aarti ceremony by the river, I found myself judging the white people meditating in Indian dress, wondering why they couldn't find this kind of spiritual contentment in their own context, their own communities. I wondered if it was true that Westerners always "romanticise" India, taking "what we want from it" then getting "the hell out".
From Rishikesh we took the train to Agra, and I ticked a key point off my travel bucket list: the Taj Mahal. After an overnight train to Allahabad, we drove back to the Ganges for a leisurely two day sailing trip. When I woke up after a night's camping on the river bank, and paddled in the Ganges at dawn, drinking a cup of chai tea, I started to feel the spirituality of India getting under my skin.
Life of Pi, Yann Martel's novel about an Indian boy who survives a shipwreck in a lifeboat with a tiger, makes the bold claim to be "a story that will make you believe in God". I started reading it in our next destination: Varanasi, the burning city, home of the largest Hindu university (which made me think of it as the Oxford of India) and second on Pi's list of cities to visit before he dies. Martel's hypnotically rhythmic description of Pi's Hinduism describes the overwhelming "sense impressions" of being in Varanasi, and helped me begin to understand the underlying pulse of Hinduism for the first time:
"I am a Hindu because of sculptured cones of red kumkum powder and baskets of yellow turmeric nuggets, because of garlands of flowers and pieces of broken coconut, because of the clanging of bells to announce one's arrival to God... because of the fragrance of incense, because of flames of aarti lamps circling in the darkness... because of foreheads carrying, variously signified, the same word - faith."
Pi's easy acceptance of being a Christian, a Muslim and a Hindu simultaneously made me take a fresh look at the "sweaty, chatty Son" of my Christianity and consider some questions I hadn't really thought about before. The juxtaposition of dead bodies burning by the Ganges with children swimming just a few metres further up and hundreds of people worshipping a few metres further down made me wonder whether our horror and sanitisation of death is really the best response. I don't believe in Fortune or Karma, but maybe Western culture's metanarrative of unimpeded ascent and insatiable progress (surely formed in part by our Christian history) doesn't account for the random cruelty of life, and the fact that not everyone has the resources and good luck to be successful. I don't believe that desire is the root of all suffering, but walking around Mahabodhi temple, built in the place where the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment, I thought about the amount of pain the gap between what we want and reality causes, and how much it might be eased if we did live fully in the moment.
As Alain de Botton has put it, the most boring question you can ask of a religion is "Is it true?". I'm not converting to a different faith any time soon, but maybe there is room in our understanding of life for more than one story. Maybe the story with the animals is the better story. In India, I started to see that everything can have "a trace of the divine in it" and "anything can be holy".
Then I spent nine hours in a station waiting for a train that never appeared. And sat on the platform with a beggar whose foot was so infected that it was swarming with flies and people were giving him money to make him go away. That seems to be the paradox of India: being reminded of the great potential of the spiritual world, where your heart soars and you think anything could be possible. And being brought back to earth with a bump, because the trains don't run on time, and for all the spiritual glory, a poor man can't get his foot fixed.
***
Martel, Yann, Life of Pi (2001)
Moggach, Deborah, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2004)
There were the scary ones, with high profile news stories leading me to the conclusion that every Indian man would be out to attack me, and people raising eyebrows at my choosing to come here at all ("Alone? Why?!"). And there were the idealised ones, the assurances that I'd find it magical, seductive and life changing. Waiting in Kathmandu airport, reading The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - a novel about a group of British pensioners who can't afford their retirement at home and move to Bangalore - I couldn't predict which kind of traveller I'd be; one "who would surrender to [India's] allure" or one "who would be baffled and distressed".
On my first day in Delhi, armed with my best '**** off and leave me alone' face, perfected in three years as a Londoner, I steeled myself for the onslaught of the streets. It was disconcerting at first that, like Evelyn in the novel, I found that "always, everywhere, eyes were upon [me] - people wanting to serve [me],to sell [me] something, people simply wanting to accompany [me] in a desire to be helpful." But though it could be "somewhat wearing", it was never threatening.
It's off-season for tourists, so my tour group was just me and two Canadian girls. As we moved out of Delhi into less touristy areas, we attracted a fair amount of attention. It was like being a celebrity followed by very polite and complimentary paparazzi. Everywhere we went, so many people seemed genuinely pleased to see us. After the evening worship ceremony at the ghat in Haridwar, the old lady sitting behind me took my arm and thanked me profusely, for what I still have no idea. When our guide and I crashed the graduation party of a group of Allahabad anaesthesiologists in our hotel, I was welcomed with open arms and installed in the centre of the dance floor. When a group of men turned up at our campsite, staring at us ominously and muttering in Hindi, it turned out that they'd just been daring each other to speak to the white girls, and all the one brave soul who did had to say for himself was "Have a nice day!".
Our tour took us down the the Ganges river, hitting some of the holiest spots in the country on the way. For the first few days, I wasn't getting the spiritual vibe. Our first stop was Rishikesh, yoga central, filled with spacy-looking, unwashed Westerners in silly trousers. In The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Evelyn's daughter Theresa is one of these pilgrims, travelling from one ashram to another for the spiritual "high", trying to "find the love that had so far eluded her" by visiting the "Hugging Mother" swami (rather than her own mother just a few miles away). At the beautiful evening aarti ceremony by the river, I found myself judging the white people meditating in Indian dress, wondering why they couldn't find this kind of spiritual contentment in their own context, their own communities. I wondered if it was true that Westerners always "romanticise" India, taking "what we want from it" then getting "the hell out".
From Rishikesh we took the train to Agra, and I ticked a key point off my travel bucket list: the Taj Mahal. After an overnight train to Allahabad, we drove back to the Ganges for a leisurely two day sailing trip. When I woke up after a night's camping on the river bank, and paddled in the Ganges at dawn, drinking a cup of chai tea, I started to feel the spirituality of India getting under my skin.
Life of Pi, Yann Martel's novel about an Indian boy who survives a shipwreck in a lifeboat with a tiger, makes the bold claim to be "a story that will make you believe in God". I started reading it in our next destination: Varanasi, the burning city, home of the largest Hindu university (which made me think of it as the Oxford of India) and second on Pi's list of cities to visit before he dies. Martel's hypnotically rhythmic description of Pi's Hinduism describes the overwhelming "sense impressions" of being in Varanasi, and helped me begin to understand the underlying pulse of Hinduism for the first time:
"I am a Hindu because of sculptured cones of red kumkum powder and baskets of yellow turmeric nuggets, because of garlands of flowers and pieces of broken coconut, because of the clanging of bells to announce one's arrival to God... because of the fragrance of incense, because of flames of aarti lamps circling in the darkness... because of foreheads carrying, variously signified, the same word - faith."
Pi's easy acceptance of being a Christian, a Muslim and a Hindu simultaneously made me take a fresh look at the "sweaty, chatty Son" of my Christianity and consider some questions I hadn't really thought about before. The juxtaposition of dead bodies burning by the Ganges with children swimming just a few metres further up and hundreds of people worshipping a few metres further down made me wonder whether our horror and sanitisation of death is really the best response. I don't believe in Fortune or Karma, but maybe Western culture's metanarrative of unimpeded ascent and insatiable progress (surely formed in part by our Christian history) doesn't account for the random cruelty of life, and the fact that not everyone has the resources and good luck to be successful. I don't believe that desire is the root of all suffering, but walking around Mahabodhi temple, built in the place where the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment, I thought about the amount of pain the gap between what we want and reality causes, and how much it might be eased if we did live fully in the moment.
As Alain de Botton has put it, the most boring question you can ask of a religion is "Is it true?". I'm not converting to a different faith any time soon, but maybe there is room in our understanding of life for more than one story. Maybe the story with the animals is the better story. In India, I started to see that everything can have "a trace of the divine in it" and "anything can be holy".
Then I spent nine hours in a station waiting for a train that never appeared. And sat on the platform with a beggar whose foot was so infected that it was swarming with flies and people were giving him money to make him go away. That seems to be the paradox of India: being reminded of the great potential of the spiritual world, where your heart soars and you think anything could be possible. And being brought back to earth with a bump, because the trains don't run on time, and for all the spiritual glory, a poor man can't get his foot fixed.
***
Martel, Yann, Life of Pi (2001)
Moggach, Deborah, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2004)
Wednesday 1 May 2013
"The Road goes ever on and on": Nepal and The Lord of the Rings
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then, I cannot say.
***
I wasn't able to find any novels set in Nepal, and since most of my time here was to be spent trekking, I decided that I should read some sort of quest narrative instead, preferably one involving mountains. It seemed the perfect opportunity to read The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time. There's also the added bonus of the nine-hour movie marathon when I get home.
After the craziest taxi ride of my life from the airport - the road not being fully built yet apparently isn't a valid reason not to drive on it - I met my trekking group in Kathmandu. We were a merry crew: not wizards, hobbits, elves and dwarves but seven sherpas, four doctors, two guides, a pharmacist, a nurse practitioner, a trainee lawyer, an environmental planner, a salesman, a social care worker, a biochemist, a chemical engineer, a librarian and one unemployed vagrant (me).
We spent a few days sightseeing in Kathmandu, and then headed to Pokhara, a seven hour bus ride away on the Nepalese 'highway'. By the time the first day of the trek arrived, we were all itching to go; like Frodo leaving the Shire, we felt like walking and couldn't "bear any more hanging about."
The first few days were challenging as we got used to the constant climbing and descending (as our guide kept reminding us, there's no such thing as 'flat' in Nepal). The landscape more than made up for the hard work. We wandered through rhododendron forests, where it looked like a giant had splashed magenta paint all over the mountainside. We scrambled up boulders with babbling streams running over our feet. We picked our way down muddy slopes, with rain water dripping from moss hanging like old men's beards over jagged rock faces.
It was such a great setting in which to be reading The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien manages to find words for settings that seem too vast to describe, with so many "white peaks glimmering among the clouds". The others all knew what I was reading - it was hard the miss the thousand-page paperback that a poor porter was carrying up the mountain for me - and every so often one of the boys would come up behind me whispering "Shi-ire... Bagginses..." in their best impression of Gollum.
Each day I tried to pick a little mantra to keep me going when I got tired. Sometimes it was Psalm 121 ("I lift my eyes up to the mountains, where does my help come from?") and sometimes it was the Buddhist mantra 'Om Mani Padme Hum' ("Make your life as beautiful as the jewel on the lotus" - which seems difficult when you haven't had a decent shower in four days). More often than not it was some classic Tolkien wisdom:
"There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow."
On the sixth day, I needed all the courage I could muster. The morning started well enough. It was raining, but the climbing was easy and the line of people in dark cloak-like rain ponchos ahead of me in the fog made it feel a bit like a Lord of the Rings theme park. Then the snow began to fall. I couldn't help but wonder if maybe the Himalayas hadn't been the best place to begin my trekking career.
I've spent a lot of this part of my reading journey identifying with Samwise Gangee. Like him, I'm fairly attached to home comforts, and constantly paranoid that I've forgotten something I'll need later. I also now share his opinion that "[s]now's all right on a fine morning, but I like to be in bed while it's falling." Last year I fell while skiing, and fractured my leg. I hadn't realised that being back on snow would be such a big issue for me. But after I slipped down a steep drop in the path and had to be held back from the edge of what seemed to be a rather large cliff, I started to feel really frightened. The slope rapidly became my very own Mount Doom. Ever tortured by my imagination, I had visions of having to cut my trip short and go home in plaster, and of being stranded in a teahouse for days, running out of food and water, and of my parents holding a funeral with no body because I was under one of the avalanches rumbling on the other side of the valley.
We finally made it to Machhapuchhare Base Camp where we were due to stop for lunch. I had a total meltdown. Like Frodo, I felt "very small, and uprooted, and well - desperate". Luckily, my wonderful companions were on hand with hugs, tea, and an all important Mars bar. I'd been convinced that there was no way we could continue that afternoon to Annapurna Base Camp, our ultimate destination. But our guide said yes, of course we were going, and anyway the Sherpas were already there with our bags so we had to follow. Though it looked "from afar... that the mountain was covered with storm", we pressed on.
After lunch, everything changed. Within a few minutes we were above the clouds, and the snow stopped. Everything was blinding white: the sun, the sky, the clouds, the mountains. The sharp cliff edges disappeared, and the worst that could happen was falling into a cushion of spongy, powdery snow. Annapurna South, all 7,219 metres of it, rose up majestically from a bed of cloud with the sun blazing on it. It was beautiful. I could have wept with joy, if I hadn't been dehydrated from all the crying earlier and worried about getting altitude sickness. We reached Base Camp, exhausted but euphoric, and had a celebratory pizza. Maybe it wasn't as epic a quest as the Fellowship of the Ring's, but I felt pretty proud of myself.
After the snow day, the last few days of our trek seemed easy. The biggest challenges were the unfamiliar creatures blocking our path. My Balrog was a massive water buffalo, with mean looking horns, wedged across the steps ahead of me when I was walking alone. Our hoard of Orcs was a herd of fifty goats, all staring at us good naturedly, but in no hurry to move as we battled our way through them.
After a much needed hot shower in Pokhara, we returned to Kathmandu, and my new friends departed. Now I'm spending a few days away from the noise of Kathmandu in Bakhtapur, a beautifully preserved medieval city. With no fixed plan, I intend to spend lots of time with my feet up, moving from cafe to cafe drinking copious amounts of tea, and finding out if Frodo ever manages to get rid of the Ring. After ten days of intense activity, it's a relief to potter around for a while. After all, "not all who wander are lost."
***
Tolkien, J.R.R, The Lord of the Rings, (first published in one volume 1968)
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then, I cannot say.
***
I wasn't able to find any novels set in Nepal, and since most of my time here was to be spent trekking, I decided that I should read some sort of quest narrative instead, preferably one involving mountains. It seemed the perfect opportunity to read The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time. There's also the added bonus of the nine-hour movie marathon when I get home.
After the craziest taxi ride of my life from the airport - the road not being fully built yet apparently isn't a valid reason not to drive on it - I met my trekking group in Kathmandu. We were a merry crew: not wizards, hobbits, elves and dwarves but seven sherpas, four doctors, two guides, a pharmacist, a nurse practitioner, a trainee lawyer, an environmental planner, a salesman, a social care worker, a biochemist, a chemical engineer, a librarian and one unemployed vagrant (me).
We spent a few days sightseeing in Kathmandu, and then headed to Pokhara, a seven hour bus ride away on the Nepalese 'highway'. By the time the first day of the trek arrived, we were all itching to go; like Frodo leaving the Shire, we felt like walking and couldn't "bear any more hanging about."
The first few days were challenging as we got used to the constant climbing and descending (as our guide kept reminding us, there's no such thing as 'flat' in Nepal). The landscape more than made up for the hard work. We wandered through rhododendron forests, where it looked like a giant had splashed magenta paint all over the mountainside. We scrambled up boulders with babbling streams running over our feet. We picked our way down muddy slopes, with rain water dripping from moss hanging like old men's beards over jagged rock faces.
It was such a great setting in which to be reading The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien manages to find words for settings that seem too vast to describe, with so many "white peaks glimmering among the clouds". The others all knew what I was reading - it was hard the miss the thousand-page paperback that a poor porter was carrying up the mountain for me - and every so often one of the boys would come up behind me whispering "Shi-ire... Bagginses..." in their best impression of Gollum.
Each day I tried to pick a little mantra to keep me going when I got tired. Sometimes it was Psalm 121 ("I lift my eyes up to the mountains, where does my help come from?") and sometimes it was the Buddhist mantra 'Om Mani Padme Hum' ("Make your life as beautiful as the jewel on the lotus" - which seems difficult when you haven't had a decent shower in four days). More often than not it was some classic Tolkien wisdom:
"There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow."
On the sixth day, I needed all the courage I could muster. The morning started well enough. It was raining, but the climbing was easy and the line of people in dark cloak-like rain ponchos ahead of me in the fog made it feel a bit like a Lord of the Rings theme park. Then the snow began to fall. I couldn't help but wonder if maybe the Himalayas hadn't been the best place to begin my trekking career.
I've spent a lot of this part of my reading journey identifying with Samwise Gangee. Like him, I'm fairly attached to home comforts, and constantly paranoid that I've forgotten something I'll need later. I also now share his opinion that "[s]now's all right on a fine morning, but I like to be in bed while it's falling." Last year I fell while skiing, and fractured my leg. I hadn't realised that being back on snow would be such a big issue for me. But after I slipped down a steep drop in the path and had to be held back from the edge of what seemed to be a rather large cliff, I started to feel really frightened. The slope rapidly became my very own Mount Doom. Ever tortured by my imagination, I had visions of having to cut my trip short and go home in plaster, and of being stranded in a teahouse for days, running out of food and water, and of my parents holding a funeral with no body because I was under one of the avalanches rumbling on the other side of the valley.
We finally made it to Machhapuchhare Base Camp where we were due to stop for lunch. I had a total meltdown. Like Frodo, I felt "very small, and uprooted, and well - desperate". Luckily, my wonderful companions were on hand with hugs, tea, and an all important Mars bar. I'd been convinced that there was no way we could continue that afternoon to Annapurna Base Camp, our ultimate destination. But our guide said yes, of course we were going, and anyway the Sherpas were already there with our bags so we had to follow. Though it looked "from afar... that the mountain was covered with storm", we pressed on.
After lunch, everything changed. Within a few minutes we were above the clouds, and the snow stopped. Everything was blinding white: the sun, the sky, the clouds, the mountains. The sharp cliff edges disappeared, and the worst that could happen was falling into a cushion of spongy, powdery snow. Annapurna South, all 7,219 metres of it, rose up majestically from a bed of cloud with the sun blazing on it. It was beautiful. I could have wept with joy, if I hadn't been dehydrated from all the crying earlier and worried about getting altitude sickness. We reached Base Camp, exhausted but euphoric, and had a celebratory pizza. Maybe it wasn't as epic a quest as the Fellowship of the Ring's, but I felt pretty proud of myself.
After the snow day, the last few days of our trek seemed easy. The biggest challenges were the unfamiliar creatures blocking our path. My Balrog was a massive water buffalo, with mean looking horns, wedged across the steps ahead of me when I was walking alone. Our hoard of Orcs was a herd of fifty goats, all staring at us good naturedly, but in no hurry to move as we battled our way through them.
After a much needed hot shower in Pokhara, we returned to Kathmandu, and my new friends departed. Now I'm spending a few days away from the noise of Kathmandu in Bakhtapur, a beautifully preserved medieval city. With no fixed plan, I intend to spend lots of time with my feet up, moving from cafe to cafe drinking copious amounts of tea, and finding out if Frodo ever manages to get rid of the Ring. After ten days of intense activity, it's a relief to potter around for a while. After all, "not all who wander are lost."
***
Tolkien, J.R.R, The Lord of the Rings, (first published in one volume 1968)
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