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)
Saturday, 13 April 2013
"All In It Together": Singapore and Malaysia
From Borneo, Tammie and I flew to Singapore, the setting for JG Farrell's The Singapore Grip and a city which, according to Farrell, was "simply invented one morning early in the nineteenth century by a man looking at a map". Thanks to the kindness of a friend of Tammie's, we stayed where most of the action of the novel takes place, in one of "the gentler parts of the city", "the elegant European suburb of Tanglin". Like the Blacketts living in Singapore in the early 1940s, I was loving the "peaceful and leisurely life" there, particularly the "luxuriously refrigerated air". I was continually struck by the fact that, though I knew I was far from home, there were so many familiar elements in Singapore (although, in this city where everything seems to work as it should, there is less of the rage that afflicts so many Londoners).
Tammie flew home, and I headed for Melacca, a colonial shipping town on the Malaysian peninsula. One of the narrators of Tash Aw's The Harmony Silk Factory visits for a day trip, and like him, I found the Stadhuys, the Dutch administrative buildings and main tourist attraction, oddly "shiny and... orange". In a bid to break up a very long bus journey, I detoured to Kuala Lumpur to visit the Batu caves, which could have been the caves described in the novel where "for over a century, Hindus have worshipped... at the shrines of Subramanium and Ganesh". The slight problem with my location theory is that the Japanese soldiers who ambush a group of Chinese communists at the caves in the novel would have had to climb the 272 steps to the entrance to do so, but I'm claiming some artistic license.
I met Charlotte in Penang, the only element of our week together that we'd managed to plan from London. A visit to Fort Cornwallis, the first British landing point on the island, gained an additional level of history when, the day after we visited, one of the characters in The Singapore Grip was forced to take cover from a Japanese air raid behind its "ruined walls and grassy banks". A visit to Cheong Fatt Tze's restored clan house with its meticulous symmetry and hidden symbols of good fortune brought alive the vast and elegant home of TK Soong, the father of the female narrator of The Harmony Silk Factory.
***
Singapore and Malaysia are diverse countries, with Malay, Chinese, Indian and European communities. A stroll through Georgetown on Penang emphasized this: wandering through Chinatown's ramshackle streets of incense-burning altars and red lanterns, we suddenly found ourselves in Little India, complete with blaring Bollywood music and hostile glances from men selling saris. A few minutes later, we were amid the remnants of Victorian architecture from British rule at the coast. A key benefit of this mingling of cultures is the great food here. From Nonya tarts - crumbly pineapple Jammie Dodgers - to Cendol - a dessert which looks like a child has combined kidney beans, lurid green apple sweetie laces, gravy and ice, but is surprisingly tasty - we have eaten very well in this "land of honeyed aromas and silken textures".
Malaysia is a melting pot, but Farrell continually asks whether it is "one in which the ingredients [have] failed to melt". The Singapore Grip revolves around the Japanese invasion of 1941, and contains considerable debate on whether this society "whose only culture and reason for existence was [European] commercial self-interest... without traditions, without common beliefs or language" could possibly survive the onslaught. Walter Blackett, Chairman of a prosperous British merchant company, spends much of the novel distracted by preparations for his firm's jubilee parade. Wilfully ignorant of the fact the parade will never happen, he creates bizarre and grotesque floats celebrating the firm's social contribution, one of which is covered with human arms "painted variously dark brown, light brown, yellow and white... stretching out side by side to reach for prosperity above massive signboards reading... ALL IN IT TOGETHER." At this point, it's clear to everyone else that the only thing they're in together is serious trouble. The only time the disparate communities come together is when fighting fires in bombed buildings; because the men's "hands and faces [are] so blackened and blistered", it becomes "difficult to tell them apart". But this unity is short-lived, and most Europeans flee the island, leaving the majority of the 'natives' to fend for themselves.
The Harmony Silk Factory also circles around the Japanese invasion, but it is more concerned with describing the life of Johnny, a Chinese textiles merchant. Three narrators - Johnny's son, his wife and his English friend - attempt to give an insight into Johnny's actions and motivations, but none can see very far past their own viewpoint. Though he is the novel's main character, Johnny remains mysterious and inscrutable. The author might be creating a parallel with the distinct communities in Malaysia; although they're living through the same events, none are telling the same story.
***
Obviously, Malaysia and Singapore have come a long way since 1941. But Farrell, writing in 1978, leaves his novel largely unresolved because, he claims, it doesn't matter what happens to his characters as so little has changed. Even after independence "some other, perhaps native, elite [has] merely replaced the British", and the hierarchy of communities remains. I've only been here for a month, and it would be fairly misguided to claim that I have a firm grasp on these countries' obviously complicated politics. I've also experienced nothing but kindness from the people here. There is, however, a sense that Malaysia in particular is still filled with conflicting interests. A national election is due, and the government's 'One Malaysia' campaign is being promoted everywhere (the song about unity sung by a diverse choir of teenagers playing on loop on a train was particularly special). But the country is still a contested space; the election keeps being postponed because of an emergency situation in the state of Sabah, where a Filipino clan have claimed ancient rights to the land and the military is attempting to apprehend them. If there really was a sense of 'One Malaysia', I wonder if the government would feel the need to labour the point so much.
***
Aw, Tash, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005)
Farrell, JG, The Singapore Grip (1978)
Tammie flew home, and I headed for Melacca, a colonial shipping town on the Malaysian peninsula. One of the narrators of Tash Aw's The Harmony Silk Factory visits for a day trip, and like him, I found the Stadhuys, the Dutch administrative buildings and main tourist attraction, oddly "shiny and... orange". In a bid to break up a very long bus journey, I detoured to Kuala Lumpur to visit the Batu caves, which could have been the caves described in the novel where "for over a century, Hindus have worshipped... at the shrines of Subramanium and Ganesh". The slight problem with my location theory is that the Japanese soldiers who ambush a group of Chinese communists at the caves in the novel would have had to climb the 272 steps to the entrance to do so, but I'm claiming some artistic license.
I met Charlotte in Penang, the only element of our week together that we'd managed to plan from London. A visit to Fort Cornwallis, the first British landing point on the island, gained an additional level of history when, the day after we visited, one of the characters in The Singapore Grip was forced to take cover from a Japanese air raid behind its "ruined walls and grassy banks". A visit to Cheong Fatt Tze's restored clan house with its meticulous symmetry and hidden symbols of good fortune brought alive the vast and elegant home of TK Soong, the father of the female narrator of The Harmony Silk Factory.
***
Singapore and Malaysia are diverse countries, with Malay, Chinese, Indian and European communities. A stroll through Georgetown on Penang emphasized this: wandering through Chinatown's ramshackle streets of incense-burning altars and red lanterns, we suddenly found ourselves in Little India, complete with blaring Bollywood music and hostile glances from men selling saris. A few minutes later, we were amid the remnants of Victorian architecture from British rule at the coast. A key benefit of this mingling of cultures is the great food here. From Nonya tarts - crumbly pineapple Jammie Dodgers - to Cendol - a dessert which looks like a child has combined kidney beans, lurid green apple sweetie laces, gravy and ice, but is surprisingly tasty - we have eaten very well in this "land of honeyed aromas and silken textures".
Malaysia is a melting pot, but Farrell continually asks whether it is "one in which the ingredients [have] failed to melt". The Singapore Grip revolves around the Japanese invasion of 1941, and contains considerable debate on whether this society "whose only culture and reason for existence was [European] commercial self-interest... without traditions, without common beliefs or language" could possibly survive the onslaught. Walter Blackett, Chairman of a prosperous British merchant company, spends much of the novel distracted by preparations for his firm's jubilee parade. Wilfully ignorant of the fact the parade will never happen, he creates bizarre and grotesque floats celebrating the firm's social contribution, one of which is covered with human arms "painted variously dark brown, light brown, yellow and white... stretching out side by side to reach for prosperity above massive signboards reading... ALL IN IT TOGETHER." At this point, it's clear to everyone else that the only thing they're in together is serious trouble. The only time the disparate communities come together is when fighting fires in bombed buildings; because the men's "hands and faces [are] so blackened and blistered", it becomes "difficult to tell them apart". But this unity is short-lived, and most Europeans flee the island, leaving the majority of the 'natives' to fend for themselves.
The Harmony Silk Factory also circles around the Japanese invasion, but it is more concerned with describing the life of Johnny, a Chinese textiles merchant. Three narrators - Johnny's son, his wife and his English friend - attempt to give an insight into Johnny's actions and motivations, but none can see very far past their own viewpoint. Though he is the novel's main character, Johnny remains mysterious and inscrutable. The author might be creating a parallel with the distinct communities in Malaysia; although they're living through the same events, none are telling the same story.
***
Obviously, Malaysia and Singapore have come a long way since 1941. But Farrell, writing in 1978, leaves his novel largely unresolved because, he claims, it doesn't matter what happens to his characters as so little has changed. Even after independence "some other, perhaps native, elite [has] merely replaced the British", and the hierarchy of communities remains. I've only been here for a month, and it would be fairly misguided to claim that I have a firm grasp on these countries' obviously complicated politics. I've also experienced nothing but kindness from the people here. There is, however, a sense that Malaysia in particular is still filled with conflicting interests. A national election is due, and the government's 'One Malaysia' campaign is being promoted everywhere (the song about unity sung by a diverse choir of teenagers playing on loop on a train was particularly special). But the country is still a contested space; the election keeps being postponed because of an emergency situation in the state of Sabah, where a Filipino clan have claimed ancient rights to the land and the military is attempting to apprehend them. If there really was a sense of 'One Malaysia', I wonder if the government would feel the need to labour the point so much.
***
Aw, Tash, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005)
Farrell, JG, The Singapore Grip (1978)
Friday, 29 March 2013
"The Eternal Peace of the Eastern Sea and Sky": Borneo and Lord Jim
I didn't much like Joseph Conrad's novels when I first tried to read them at university. They're long, and dense, and because it takes him so many words to tell you what's going on, his work isn't really conducive to reading four novels and writing an essay about them in the space of three days.
I decided to give him another chance, and read Lord Jim in Borneo. For such a long book, it has a very simple plot. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jim is part of the crew of a ship full of Muslim pilgrims. The ship is holed, and believing it will sink and all on board are beyond rescue, he abandons ship. The ship is saved by a passing vessel and Jim is put on trial. Unable to bear the disgrace, he accepts a post on the island of Patusan, and finds redemption. Many people believe that the fictitious island is actually Borneo, and that Jim is based on James Brooke, an Englishman who became Rajah of Sarawak in 1841.
When I stopped trying to read Conrad for the plot, and took time over his discursive way of saying things, I realised that his descriptions of "the Eastern sea and sky" are beautiful. From "the blue peaks inland to the white ribbon of surf on the coast", he expresses what this place is like far better than I ever could.
Our encounter with the sea was much less dramatic than Jim's. Tammie and I met in Kota Kinabalu, and from there we flew to Tawau and went to Mabul island, off the east coast. We went on a whim, deciding that it might be fun to try scuba diving, completely unaware that it's one of the top ten best places to dive in the world. We also inadvertently found ourselves staying in a pretty chalet by the beach and spending the evenings, to steal Conrad's words, "on a verandah draped in motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery cigar ends."
Learning to dive was hard work - I knew that something had gone horribly wrong with my trip when I found myself taking an exam on Day Three - but brilliant. There were no disasters at sea: our most perilous moment was when Tammie didn't notice the turtle swimming directly for her head and I, being a bad diving buddy, was too far away to point it out and had to wait for it to startle her, trying not to giggle underwater.
***
Jim goes to Patusan as an employee of Mr Stein, a European naturalist who, when discussing what can be done with Jim, ponders the nature of man's desire to conquer the world:
"Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a very great noise about himself?"
There is one thing I now know for sure. There is no place for the Irish in the jungle.
From Mabul, we went north to Sandakan, and spent two nights at Uncle Tan's Jungle Camp on the Kinabatangan river. Throughout Lord Jim, a number of people refer to Jim's posting in Patusan as a terrible punishment. By midday on our only full day in the jungle, I was beginning to understand why. It was *hot*. And very humid. After many layers of suncream, multiple paranoid applications of bug repellent and a river water bucket shower, we weren't quite "beplastered with filth out of all semblance of a human being", as Jim is on his first trip into the jungle, but we felt pretty close.
So why would you go? Westerners have historically been drawn to "the East" not just for the adventure of a strange land, but for what they can take from it. On this lust for resources, Conrad points out that
"for a bag of pepper they would cut each others throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls, of which they were so careful otherwise: the bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes - the unknown seas, the loathsome and strange diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence and despair."
Jim's redemption comes from finding his place in a community, and the love of his wife, who he calls Jewel, in Patusan. But those already there are convinced that he only stays because he's found some great material treasure; they assume the jewel is real. You can see the volume of resources still being taken out of Borneo as you drive past plantation after plantation of trees planted in perfect rows. Our jungle guide told us that they now mainly produce palm oil, which is highly unsustainable, but as it seems to be in so many of the things I eat, and as my life wouldn't be complete without daily doses of tea and chocolate, other key exports, I don't feel like I'm in a position to be morally outraged...
We went in search of different riches of the jungle. We spotted the elusive orang utan. We watched gibbons swing between trees and sat underneath a proboscis monkey tucking into his dinner in a tree. We seriously considered taking up ornithology as an extracurricular activity after watching eagles and kingfishers. We saw a monitor lizard lumber along the river bank, like a prehistoric creature clambering out of the primordial ooze. We drew the line at going into the jungle in the dark to be eaten by mosquitoes in search of snakes and frogs. We crashed a Norweigan couple's river cruise and looked for owls and crocodiles instead.
This is why you go to the jungle, so you can see
"Nature - the balance of colossal forces. Every star is so - and every blade of grass stands so - and the mighty Kosmos in perfect equilibrium produces - this. This wonder; this masterpiece of Nature- the great artist."
A twilight trip on "the shining sinuousity of the river like an immense letter S of beaten silver" made the hateful day of heat worthwhile. After "the sun, whose concentrated glare dwarfs the earth into a restless mote of dust, had sunk behind the forest... the diffused light from an opal sky seemed to cast upon the world without shadows and without brilliance the illusion of a calm and pensive greatness."
***
With two nights in the jungle behind us, we returned to civilisation in Sandakan. And promptly checked into a rather nice hotel. Don't judge us too harshly, I'm a beginner backpacker.
***
Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim (1917)
I decided to give him another chance, and read Lord Jim in Borneo. For such a long book, it has a very simple plot. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jim is part of the crew of a ship full of Muslim pilgrims. The ship is holed, and believing it will sink and all on board are beyond rescue, he abandons ship. The ship is saved by a passing vessel and Jim is put on trial. Unable to bear the disgrace, he accepts a post on the island of Patusan, and finds redemption. Many people believe that the fictitious island is actually Borneo, and that Jim is based on James Brooke, an Englishman who became Rajah of Sarawak in 1841.
When I stopped trying to read Conrad for the plot, and took time over his discursive way of saying things, I realised that his descriptions of "the Eastern sea and sky" are beautiful. From "the blue peaks inland to the white ribbon of surf on the coast", he expresses what this place is like far better than I ever could.
Our encounter with the sea was much less dramatic than Jim's. Tammie and I met in Kota Kinabalu, and from there we flew to Tawau and went to Mabul island, off the east coast. We went on a whim, deciding that it might be fun to try scuba diving, completely unaware that it's one of the top ten best places to dive in the world. We also inadvertently found ourselves staying in a pretty chalet by the beach and spending the evenings, to steal Conrad's words, "on a verandah draped in motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery cigar ends."
Learning to dive was hard work - I knew that something had gone horribly wrong with my trip when I found myself taking an exam on Day Three - but brilliant. There were no disasters at sea: our most perilous moment was when Tammie didn't notice the turtle swimming directly for her head and I, being a bad diving buddy, was too far away to point it out and had to wait for it to startle her, trying not to giggle underwater.
***
Jim goes to Patusan as an employee of Mr Stein, a European naturalist who, when discussing what can be done with Jim, ponders the nature of man's desire to conquer the world:
"Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a very great noise about himself?"
There is one thing I now know for sure. There is no place for the Irish in the jungle.
From Mabul, we went north to Sandakan, and spent two nights at Uncle Tan's Jungle Camp on the Kinabatangan river. Throughout Lord Jim, a number of people refer to Jim's posting in Patusan as a terrible punishment. By midday on our only full day in the jungle, I was beginning to understand why. It was *hot*. And very humid. After many layers of suncream, multiple paranoid applications of bug repellent and a river water bucket shower, we weren't quite "beplastered with filth out of all semblance of a human being", as Jim is on his first trip into the jungle, but we felt pretty close.
So why would you go? Westerners have historically been drawn to "the East" not just for the adventure of a strange land, but for what they can take from it. On this lust for resources, Conrad points out that
"for a bag of pepper they would cut each others throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls, of which they were so careful otherwise: the bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes - the unknown seas, the loathsome and strange diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence and despair."
Jim's redemption comes from finding his place in a community, and the love of his wife, who he calls Jewel, in Patusan. But those already there are convinced that he only stays because he's found some great material treasure; they assume the jewel is real. You can see the volume of resources still being taken out of Borneo as you drive past plantation after plantation of trees planted in perfect rows. Our jungle guide told us that they now mainly produce palm oil, which is highly unsustainable, but as it seems to be in so many of the things I eat, and as my life wouldn't be complete without daily doses of tea and chocolate, other key exports, I don't feel like I'm in a position to be morally outraged...
We went in search of different riches of the jungle. We spotted the elusive orang utan. We watched gibbons swing between trees and sat underneath a proboscis monkey tucking into his dinner in a tree. We seriously considered taking up ornithology as an extracurricular activity after watching eagles and kingfishers. We saw a monitor lizard lumber along the river bank, like a prehistoric creature clambering out of the primordial ooze. We drew the line at going into the jungle in the dark to be eaten by mosquitoes in search of snakes and frogs. We crashed a Norweigan couple's river cruise and looked for owls and crocodiles instead.
This is why you go to the jungle, so you can see
"Nature - the balance of colossal forces. Every star is so - and every blade of grass stands so - and the mighty Kosmos in perfect equilibrium produces - this. This wonder; this masterpiece of Nature- the great artist."
A twilight trip on "the shining sinuousity of the river like an immense letter S of beaten silver" made the hateful day of heat worthwhile. After "the sun, whose concentrated glare dwarfs the earth into a restless mote of dust, had sunk behind the forest... the diffused light from an opal sky seemed to cast upon the world without shadows and without brilliance the illusion of a calm and pensive greatness."
***
With two nights in the jungle behind us, we returned to civilisation in Sandakan. And promptly checked into a rather nice hotel. Don't judge us too harshly, I'm a beginner backpacker.
***
Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim (1917)
Sunday, 17 March 2013
An Extended Prelude
My ridiculous itinerary involves a lot of time on aeroplanes, so I thought it would be fitting to include some books about airports on my list. As it turned out, my first day provided ample time for airport reading and musing, with a six-hour delay at Heathrow leading to a missed connection at Kuala Lumpur. Lucky me.
There are two key problems with books about flying. One: books revolving around aeroplanes and airports tend to focus on their potential as settings for disaster. Not something I particularly want to think about. Two: when nothing is going terribly badly wrong, airports are pretty dull.Nevertheless, I pressed on, and read two books the main purpose of which was to convince me that airports are valuable, interesting places to spend extended amounts of time.
The first was The Textual Life of Airports by Christopher Schaberg. This is a book about "the common stories of airports that circulate in everyday life, and about the secret stories of airports - the disturbing, uncomfortable, or smoothed over tales that lie just beneath the surface of these sites." A noble exercise, but his thesis is a bit confused, and by the end of the book I still wasn't quite sure what he was trying to get at.
On the other hand, A Week at the Airport, by Alain de Botton is a beautiful ode to the airport, taking us from departures to arrivals in a lovely narrative arc. While Schaberg always wants to complicate the airport, adding layers and layers of meaning we didn't (want to) know existed, De Botton points out the simple humanity of the airport that is right in front of us, if only we'd look for it.
Schaberg starts from the position that the airport is a 'non-place' of 'super modernity', where identities are troubled and politicised. In contrast, De Botton is keen to stress that who we are when we're travelling is inseparable from who we are the rest of the time. He illustrates this through the anecdote of an office worker who has been dreaming of his family holiday for months, but has a fight with his wife the night before, and is forced into the "unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing *himself* with him on his holiday." This messes with the idea of the 'gap yah' as a time when you go off to 'find yourself'; as it turns out, you've been there all the time, whether you like it or not.
Schaberg spends a lot of time on the double identity of airports as a place for those on holiday and as a place of work. There are so many layers of everyday activity that go on with passengers barely noticing, until something goes wrong. Like a six hour delay, for example. As I waited in the very long check-in queue with the ranty passengers, I couldn't help feeling sorry for the ground staff; it must be difficult to arrive at work, see that a service is delayed, and know that you're going to spend a considerable portion of your day being yelled at. Spending a week living at the airport, De Botton gets to see the other side of the airport too, and makes this very sensible point on staff-passenger relations:
"However skilfully designed it's incentive structure, the airline could in the end do very little to guarantee that its staff would actually add to their dealings with customers that almost imperceptible measure of good will which elevates service from mere efficiency to tangible warmth... The real origins of these qualities lay... in the loving atmosphere that reigned in a house in Cheshire, where two parents had brought up a future staff member with benevolence and good humour..."
Schaberg points out that the 'textuality' of airports expressed in signs and written instructions codifies the space, making acceptable and appropriate behaviour obvious to all. Which makes the airport sound like a temple of beautiful order, until you miss your connecting flight because you spent five minutes running around a circular terminal following signs for a transfers counter that never materialised. Signs pointing to the trees in the middle of said circular terminal are of no help to me, Kuala Lumpur International.
A lengthy delay also takes the shine off the dream of flying that De Botton is keen to recover; the idea of the airport as a gateway to luxurious "hours in the air free from encumbrance, [feeling] spurred on to formulate hopeful plans for the future by the views of coasts and forests below." At this point you become acutely aware of the fact that De Botton's patron is the airport authority, and the dream he's talking about is the one they're always trying to sell us. Sitting on a hard bench with a very numb bum, I'm struggling to value the airline for "its ability to stir the soul."
But waiting for what De Botton describes as the airport's "emotional climax" makes it a bit more bearable. He very poignantly expresses one of the truly great joys of travelling a long way:
"There is no one, however lonely or isolated, however pessimistic about the human race... who does not in the end expect that someone significant will come to say hello at arrivals... Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be very busy... it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never have made it this far)."
And Tammie was there to meet me at the other end.
***
Botton, Alain, A Week at the Airport (2009)
Schaberg, Christopher The Textual Life of Airports (2012)
There are two key problems with books about flying. One: books revolving around aeroplanes and airports tend to focus on their potential as settings for disaster. Not something I particularly want to think about. Two: when nothing is going terribly badly wrong, airports are pretty dull.Nevertheless, I pressed on, and read two books the main purpose of which was to convince me that airports are valuable, interesting places to spend extended amounts of time.
The first was The Textual Life of Airports by Christopher Schaberg. This is a book about "the common stories of airports that circulate in everyday life, and about the secret stories of airports - the disturbing, uncomfortable, or smoothed over tales that lie just beneath the surface of these sites." A noble exercise, but his thesis is a bit confused, and by the end of the book I still wasn't quite sure what he was trying to get at.
On the other hand, A Week at the Airport, by Alain de Botton is a beautiful ode to the airport, taking us from departures to arrivals in a lovely narrative arc. While Schaberg always wants to complicate the airport, adding layers and layers of meaning we didn't (want to) know existed, De Botton points out the simple humanity of the airport that is right in front of us, if only we'd look for it.
Schaberg starts from the position that the airport is a 'non-place' of 'super modernity', where identities are troubled and politicised. In contrast, De Botton is keen to stress that who we are when we're travelling is inseparable from who we are the rest of the time. He illustrates this through the anecdote of an office worker who has been dreaming of his family holiday for months, but has a fight with his wife the night before, and is forced into the "unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing *himself* with him on his holiday." This messes with the idea of the 'gap yah' as a time when you go off to 'find yourself'; as it turns out, you've been there all the time, whether you like it or not.
Schaberg spends a lot of time on the double identity of airports as a place for those on holiday and as a place of work. There are so many layers of everyday activity that go on with passengers barely noticing, until something goes wrong. Like a six hour delay, for example. As I waited in the very long check-in queue with the ranty passengers, I couldn't help feeling sorry for the ground staff; it must be difficult to arrive at work, see that a service is delayed, and know that you're going to spend a considerable portion of your day being yelled at. Spending a week living at the airport, De Botton gets to see the other side of the airport too, and makes this very sensible point on staff-passenger relations:
"However skilfully designed it's incentive structure, the airline could in the end do very little to guarantee that its staff would actually add to their dealings with customers that almost imperceptible measure of good will which elevates service from mere efficiency to tangible warmth... The real origins of these qualities lay... in the loving atmosphere that reigned in a house in Cheshire, where two parents had brought up a future staff member with benevolence and good humour..."
Schaberg points out that the 'textuality' of airports expressed in signs and written instructions codifies the space, making acceptable and appropriate behaviour obvious to all. Which makes the airport sound like a temple of beautiful order, until you miss your connecting flight because you spent five minutes running around a circular terminal following signs for a transfers counter that never materialised. Signs pointing to the trees in the middle of said circular terminal are of no help to me, Kuala Lumpur International.
A lengthy delay also takes the shine off the dream of flying that De Botton is keen to recover; the idea of the airport as a gateway to luxurious "hours in the air free from encumbrance, [feeling] spurred on to formulate hopeful plans for the future by the views of coasts and forests below." At this point you become acutely aware of the fact that De Botton's patron is the airport authority, and the dream he's talking about is the one they're always trying to sell us. Sitting on a hard bench with a very numb bum, I'm struggling to value the airline for "its ability to stir the soul."
But waiting for what De Botton describes as the airport's "emotional climax" makes it a bit more bearable. He very poignantly expresses one of the truly great joys of travelling a long way:
"There is no one, however lonely or isolated, however pessimistic about the human race... who does not in the end expect that someone significant will come to say hello at arrivals... Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be very busy... it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never have made it this far)."
And Tammie was there to meet me at the other end.
***
Botton, Alain, A Week at the Airport (2009)
Schaberg, Christopher The Textual Life of Airports (2012)
Wednesday, 13 March 2013
Preliminaries
This blog was inspired by Dan Kieran’s The Idle Traveller. Dan is an advocate of ‘slow travel’, the idea that a trip shouldn’t be just about arriving somewhere, doing the ‘must-see’ things and then getting on the plane back home, having ‘done’ another country on your bucket list. Instead, he talks about going to fewer places, by slower means of transport, and really getting to grips with them, taking your time to absorb the strangeness of new places.
In planning my own trip, I have completely failed to follow his advice on many counts (see ridiculous itinerary below), but I was really enthused by his idea that you can gain deeper insight into a strange country by putting down the Lonely Planet – with its “boxes for you to tick and to-do lists that you already know you won’t get around to” - and using novels and biographies as your travel guides.
This appealed to me for two reasons. One, as those of you who know me well will have realised, I love a project. The romantic ideal of aimless wandering in wide-open spaces for four months makes me nervous. Turning the trip into a project with goals and an end product is much more appealing. I’m sure my inner free-wheeling, no-plan-making hippie will be released the moment I touch down in Borneo, but for now I’m going armed with a reading list and that makes me pretty happy.
The second reason is that this trip marks the end of my three-year career in publishing. I got into publishing in the first place when a fit of pre-Finals, ‘what am I going to do with my life’ fear led to applying for an publishing MA, and sheer good luck led to being offered my first job soon after, when I hadn’t really had a chance to think it through. My reasons for leaving publishing - in what I like to tell myself is a ‘strategic career switch’ - are many and difficult to articulate. But a byproduct of the last three years is that my love of books has been slightly dented. While it’s amazing to love what you do, and do what you love, there’s something to be said for not knowing what goes on behind the scenes. So I’m going to read my way around South-East Asia, and some of the Indian subcontinent and Australia, and attempt to piece my experiences and the books together in this blog. And hopefully remember why I loved books in the first place in the process.
***
The Plan
For those of you interested in where I might be at any given time, the current plan is this:
16th March – 13th April: Borneo, Singapore and pensinsular Malaysia
13th April – 3rd May: Nepal
3rd May – 18th May: India
18th May – 28th June: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam
28th June – 20th July: Australia, via Hong Kong
21st July: back in London town
If you’ve read any books set in any of these places (and that are available on Kindle!) send them my way.
Thanks for reading, and hope you enjoy!
PS. If my blog turns into a complete disaster, feel free to divert your attention to Freckles from Foreign Lands by the wonderful Tamara Dyer, which is well worth a read.
***
Kieran, Dan The Idle Traveller: The Art of Slow Travel (2012)
In planning my own trip, I have completely failed to follow his advice on many counts (see ridiculous itinerary below), but I was really enthused by his idea that you can gain deeper insight into a strange country by putting down the Lonely Planet – with its “boxes for you to tick and to-do lists that you already know you won’t get around to” - and using novels and biographies as your travel guides.
This appealed to me for two reasons. One, as those of you who know me well will have realised, I love a project. The romantic ideal of aimless wandering in wide-open spaces for four months makes me nervous. Turning the trip into a project with goals and an end product is much more appealing. I’m sure my inner free-wheeling, no-plan-making hippie will be released the moment I touch down in Borneo, but for now I’m going armed with a reading list and that makes me pretty happy.
The second reason is that this trip marks the end of my three-year career in publishing. I got into publishing in the first place when a fit of pre-Finals, ‘what am I going to do with my life’ fear led to applying for an publishing MA, and sheer good luck led to being offered my first job soon after, when I hadn’t really had a chance to think it through. My reasons for leaving publishing - in what I like to tell myself is a ‘strategic career switch’ - are many and difficult to articulate. But a byproduct of the last three years is that my love of books has been slightly dented. While it’s amazing to love what you do, and do what you love, there’s something to be said for not knowing what goes on behind the scenes. So I’m going to read my way around South-East Asia, and some of the Indian subcontinent and Australia, and attempt to piece my experiences and the books together in this blog. And hopefully remember why I loved books in the first place in the process.
***
The Plan
For those of you interested in where I might be at any given time, the current plan is this:
16th March – 13th April: Borneo, Singapore and pensinsular Malaysia
13th April – 3rd May: Nepal
3rd May – 18th May: India
18th May – 28th June: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam
28th June – 20th July: Australia, via Hong Kong
21st July: back in London town
If you’ve read any books set in any of these places (and that are available on Kindle!) send them my way.
Thanks for reading, and hope you enjoy!
PS. If my blog turns into a complete disaster, feel free to divert your attention to Freckles from Foreign Lands by the wonderful Tamara Dyer, which is well worth a read.
***
Kieran, Dan The Idle Traveller: The Art of Slow Travel (2012)
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