Friday, 14 December 2007

Pakistan

… And seeing the mountains from the plane as it started to run in towards Islamabad, and the sunlight catching on the high ice, blue and yellow, and straining my neck in the economy class seat and trying to work out if it was Tirich Mir I was looking at, or one of the giants further east. And the first feeling of the livid heat wriggling against my face at the top of the steps from the plane. The smell of hot plastic and rust in the battered yellow taxi, and the shiny prayer disc dangling from the windscreen as we bounced along the Murree Road. And hearing the muezzin for the first time, cutting through the jet-lag sleep and realising that I was back. The first scalding mouthful of sweet tea, and mutton karahi from a sizzling pan with a pile of naan with the taste of the tandoor still on it, eaten in a dark, dark chaikhana somewhere off the Qissa Khwani, and all the other men eating with their red-stained eyes and hollow cheeks and grey beards.

Standing out on the little crooked balcony over the street in ‘Pindi as the sun went down and seeing the kites going up into the dense air all across the city and the colour of the sky fading from purple to red to orange to pale, pale blue up high, and the muezzin again.
Going north on the Karakorum Highway, and feeling the air change and seeing a man in the bazaar in Abbottabad with a knife in his hand, holding a struggling chicken over a block, and turning, but not seeing the knife fall as the bus sped on. And dozing with my head rolling on the back of the seat and knowing when we were passing through a town because of the sweet-sickly-bitter-spiced smell of the bazaars. And being already in the high mountains by sunset, and stopping in the humming dark for the men to pray beside the road in a space of brushed dust, and a man who hadn’t even been speaking to me paying for my food. And coming over the Lowari Pass from the South and feeling that I was leaving the world behind as the minibus began to wind down through the pouring switchbacks.
And staying at Ingineer Khan’s in Rumbur valley, and drinking wine, and the silence after dark, and the stars, and in the morning hearing a Kalash girl playing a flute as she sat under a walnut tree, and villagers all the way along the valley stopping me and pressing handfuls of walnuts on me until my bag was full.

The light coming gold on the high peaks behind Sor Laspur and being high between Gilgit and Chitral in October, and the blue, blue of the river, and the colour of the poplars and how slow the journey was before they metalled the road, and the bitter wind on the pass. Eating pomegranates with a Chitrali prince, in a crumbling palace high over the valley, and sitting in the dark in the freezing cold in Khapalu clustered around an oil lamp with three huge Pashtuns from Waziristan who were singing love songs about beautiful young men, and how good it felt to reach Astor coming down from the rain on the Deosi. And feeling lonely, for just a fraction of a minute in Skardu until a man from Gilgit paid for my kebabs. And the clatter of hooves and polo sticks and the red dust from the hooves and the smell of horsesweat, and being jostled through and pushed into a seat with the VIPs, and everyone stopping for a moment when the prayercall went up, then play starting again.

And in Gilgit in the Medina Guesthouse and Yaqoob refusing to take anything more than half of the money I owed after I stayed for five days, and finally having to turn back from the Rakaposhi base camp when the snow was up to my knees and everything was white and then how still and calm it was in the valley below and stumbling onto the carcass of a dead horse in the damp meadow. And walking north, across the valley from the highway, and gusts of dusty wind coming along the track and the mountains being so huge, and a man and a woman and a small child walking past me with only a smile and a nod, then a hundred yards on the man sending the little boy running back to give me an apple. And coffee and cake in the Café de Hunza. And warm bread for breakfast in Passu and the long light on the Tuppopdan Spires and a man digging potatoes from a hole under the moraine of the Passu glacier giving me tea with salt in it, and the road up there being smooth and blue and it being so, so cold at night. And feeling like I couldn’t be further from every trouble in the world.

And in Charpusan asking Alam Jan if the people in the valley were fasting for Ramadan, and him smiling and saying “Ramadan? What is Ramadan?”And being high, high up the valley, and knowing that if I had been there a month earlier I could have walked into Afghanistan and no one would have stopped me. And waking in the tiny little room in Baba Ghundi, where I was the only person left but the policeman and his daughter who fed me the night before, and knowing before I opened the door that it had snowed in the night…

And the feeling of aching longing, again, stronger than the last time even as the rattling red jeep pulled away from the Chinese border post, almost buried in snow, and began to roll downhill towards Tashkurgan…

© Tim Hannigan 2007

Wednesday, 12 December 2007

Before the Fall

Long ago and far away I had dinner with a prince. He was a very old man and his palace was frayed around the edges. It stood on a high promontory among the poplars and willows above a wide valley between huge, hard mountains. On the flat roofs of the houses in the village below there were walnuts and apricots drying in the clear October sunlight, and it was already cold at night. Inside the plain rooms of the palace there were cracks in the rammed earth walls and in a damp recess there were mouldering books with titles like “The Sportsman’s Guide to the Beasts of India”. The planking of the veranda was uneven under foot and a preying mantis was hunting lazily under the eaves.

But he was a real prince, of the ul Mulk family who had ruled over the Vale of Chitral for more than a century. Chitral was a locked world: away to the northwest the great rough dagger of Tirich Mir rose white to a pale blue sky; not far from the palace the valleys suddenly tightened into the three purdahed gorges where the last pagans in the Hindukush lived and girls with cowry shells braided into their hair sat playing reed flutes under the walnut trees and the men and the boys burnt fragrant juniper branches in the high goat pastures. And beyond those valleys was a land that everyone had forgotten called Afghanistan, and the whole place was surrounded by mountains.

In the lower rooms of the palace the prince’s two wives lived (he said that the Islamic injunction that allowed a man to have as many as four wives was troublesome – even two was too many, for he was always caught in the middle of their bickering). There were three young retainers in creamy white shalwaar kamises who cooked and cleaned and kept the garden with its tall trees and exotic shrubs just on the right side of wilderness.

We ate at a round, wood-wormed table in an upper room in the flickering light of a low-wattage bulb. The table was broken, and to keep our plates from flying up in our faces we each had to grip the edge with our free hand as we ate (there were three of us: the prince, my father and myself).

The prince had grown up in the days of the Raj when his family ruled the little mountain fastness the way they had done for generations, and there was only a British Resident to watch that they committed no terrible excesses (Chitral was a lonely outpost, but close to such a sensitive frontier the Resdient had to be a capable man, not some exiled failure). The prince spoke fondly of the fair play and order of those days and complained that since electricity had come to the valley the amplified prayer calls from the village mosques disturbed his sleep. We ate pomegranate seeds that someone in a downstairs kitchen had already meticulously picked from the fruit leaving no fragment of yellow pith.

In the morning the light was sharper than broken glass. There was a powdered dust of new snow on the ragged peaks beyond the terraces and poplar-lined irrigation channels across the valley, and though you could still feel the weight of the sun on the back of your neck it was clear that the Indian Summer was beginning to fade and before long Chitral would be bolted shut for six months…

Long ago and far away… except that it wasn’t really so long ago: it was in the last months of the last century.

***

I have a collection of old travel books that I bought in second-hand shops. They have faded cloth-bound covers – green or claret-red mostly – and thick pages marked with rust-red blemishes. The titles embossed on the broken spines, some almost too faint to read, are simple statements for the most part, not the punning witticisms of today: Forbidden Journey, A Year in Marrakech, Travels in Tartary, My Travels…

A few of them – very few – are by people still known today, and you can still buy the books (with bright white pages, and an attractive photograph on the cover); some are by people remembered and revered, but only by true aficionados of travel literature (Peter Flemming, Fitzroy MacLean). Some are masters who somehow missed being designated as such (Peter Mayne – The Narrow Smile is out of print and forgotten, but one of the best travel books ever written), but most are quite ordinary, quite obliterated from any memory but mine.

When the weather is good in august I like to lay a blanket on the uncut grass in the little garden between the hard-faced wall of the house and the crooked apple tree and read those books. I like the way they smell and the way they feel, and I like the way the journeys and people they describe are so very far gone, and so very long ago… and yet…

I am a very, very young man, and I have spent less than a decade wandering around, but when I think about those first journeys, when I think about eating pomegranates with the prince in the Indian Summer at the end of the last century I can see every image, every shadow in the cobwebbed corners of the palace quite clearly, but I can also smell the crushed summer grass under the blanket, and the peel of the orange I ate between chapters, and the soft-rough perfume of the old pages as if the images come from one of those books, written far away and long ago by people who are long, long gone…

© Tim Hannigan 2007

Sunday, 9 December 2007

Arrival

It was in Cairo that I first realised that Arrival had lost its stinging impact. In the aching, dry-eyed, gut-aching tiredness after long flights and passport queues and hours in the metallic night-lights of Athens airport jadedness was to be expected. But this was something more.
It was the scrag-end of darkness: the time when there is still no edge of dawn, but the night is unmistakeably dead and the earliest of the day’s risers are beginning to crawl over its carcass. In England they used to be milkmen; in Indonesia it was fat Chinese businessmen jogging slowly and walking backwards around middle class compounds. In Cairo I only remember a pair of men on bicycles.

As the taxi sped over roads worn smooth and cracked and edged with yellow dirt I peered, as always, through the window.
An Ottoman-style mosque on a hilltop, minarets rocketing into a sky that now was showing a faint white stain on its eastern edge; the long sprawl of yellow-brown gravestones, crooked under orange street lamps, in the City of the Dead; figures in twisted head -cloths standing in the roadside dust, and by the time I arrived where I was going, somewhere in the southern suburb of Maadi the flat light that runs before heat had made its break across the city, and there was a skinny white cat mincing along a red wall with a tangle of creepers behind it.
All I wanted was to go to bed.

It doesn’t take long for the tender skin of your feet to thicken into great callused pads when the summer comes and you stop wearing shoes to walk over the yellow stones of the yard and to clamber over warm granite beside the clear-sharp water. It seems the same thing can happen to your eyes, and you ears and your nose – and almost as quickly.

***

The first foreign country I visited was Spain when I was sixteen – not very long ago. I still think that Spain is the most exotic country I’ve ever seen, though it’s impossible to explain why without tumbling hopelessly among clichés. I came down the good way, from the ferry in Santander. It was morning – and you should always arrive in the morning. There was smooth-purple water outside the porthole in the first light, and strips of white sand with green trees behind and then the sun came up and there was a chaos of traffic and they didn’t check our passports and the streets were laid out in a grid and then we were all on a bus going west, along the coast to Galicia.

That was my first long bus ride, and I think it was where my perverse love of road journeys with a big window to look out of at a new countryside started.
This was the first time I’d seen anything foreign. I think I took only shallow, quickened breaths the whole day, and scarcely stopped blinking, rapidly, urgently. And I had a cramp in my neck from twisting it to the right for hours (it was dusk when we rolled into the bleak industrial suburbs of el Ferrol. The others (we were a team of watersportsmen) lolled their heads back or threw up in sandwich boxes, but I looked out of the window.

Little farmsteads with flat roofs and a patch of maize with limp leaves, and a small tractor parked beside the door, or sometimes a wooden cart with the timbers grey and scored with deep cracks; thin-needled pine trees and the sun on the high cliff faces when the road cut through a tight range of mountains with thin green grass and yellow flowers and goats on the lower slopes, and the way there was real coffee from a silver machine and baguettes stuffed with ham the colour of lovebites wrapped in thin cling-film in the service station, and there were two policemen in military-green sitting on high stools at the counter, drinking coffee, and I couldn’t stop staring at the pistols in the holsters that hung loose at their hips. There were openings of narrow water, and sometimes broad, wind-touched bays under a yellow sky. In the afternoon when the light was long and turning to copper and time was slowing down a little there was high country and empty villages with white walls and a village square full of trees with trunks as thick around as a small car, but scarcely taller than the little one-storey houses. There were benches painted blue under the trees, and when it was growing darker there was broken country with quarries and railway lines running uphill and a train with open trucks, each carrying a great roll of steel, fresh from the foundry, and there were bleak towerblocks in the gloaming when we came to Ferrol. And there were other things I saw in the five days I spent there, which was probably all Arrival if you think about it: two men in blue jeans riding great muscular horses along the edge of the road beside the flat water of the docks, near the tower blocks. It was evening and they wore no helmets and rode western-style and the horses moved like they were wild. There was wine and pilsner beer and white cheese and olives; and being able to smell the pine trees even when you were in the water, out beyond the line of the breaking surf at the beach at Doniňos, and the sand hot underfoot and the way the ground looked so soft and green between the trees that ran back from the road and how I wanted to get off the bus and go and sleep there at night. The little pilgrims’ parade and how it looked like they would drop the statue of the Virgin from its pall as they turned into the courtyard of the tiny chapel beside the great deep-water harbour where I came third in the sea kayak race, and the waiter in the little bar that was called the Table of the Six Pines who gave us burning liquor with three coffee beans floating in it for free after we ate the fried pork and good fresh bread… and the girl with black eyes and hair in ringlets and the high old buildings with their fine windows and the straight alleyways around the slab-stone square and the crooked alleyways near the harbour lined with dark little bars that someone told us were brothels and the sound of cicadas… and I didn’t stop breathing in short, urgent gasps.

And then you grow those thick, leathery calluses and all that slips past them is the outline of an Ottoman mosque and the image of a thin cat on a red wall, and the man behind the formica-topped counter in the narrow, shabby hallway who is thumbing your passport with thick brown thumbs might as well be a Pakistani or an Indonesian or a Maghrebi or a Bengali or a Spaniard as an Egyptian Arab and all you want to do is sleep
***

The thickening on the soles of your feet goes away after a winter on soft carpets in socks and shoes, but until then it’s always there so you can walk upright without flinching over the sharp black gravel of the lane when the tar is melting in the August heat. The other thickenings – the calluses that numb your sense of Arrival – are not a problem once you know they are there; you just have to learn to keep yourself looking, actively, because you will no longer do it automatically… I remember thinking that as I went down like a drowning man into a leaden sleep, still wearing my clothes, on my back on a hard bed in a shabby bedroom with a broken sink in the southern suburbs of Cairo: keep looking, keep looking…

© Tim Hannigan 2007

Saturday, 8 December 2007

Point of Departure

My name is Tim Hannigan. I am currently being treated for cancer.
This will not be about my cancer or my treatment. There are endless columns, books, blogs, personal stories about “battles with cancer”, most of them “inspiring”. In any case, my prognosis is excellent, and I have no wish to overplay my own condition. This will not involve lengthy descriptions of chemotherapy, or doctor’s waiting rooms, or light-hearted nurses… this is not about that; this is about something else.
The crux of my short adult life has been travelling. For a decade – less than that even – my years have been marked by where I went, which journey I made. It became my trade.
Where did I go? Nowhere truly remarkable: many of my journeys were standard backpacker fodder, but I like to think I travelled with a sharper eye than many. I have a bundle of hardback notebooks with lined pages and red or black covers, and a peeling white sticker on the spine marked with clumsy letters: “Pakistan 2004”, “Indonesia 2005”, “India/Bangladesh 2002”.
For the moment I see strip-lit corridors and narrow beds, too high off the floor – and if I am lucky perhaps a head-twist window giving out onto grey concrete and a winter sky. But if I close my eyes I can still see the yellow road between the bending poplar trees that runs to the pass in the bitter wind… so I will write about that.

© Tim Hannigan 2007