Young men in cheap suits, too big for their lean bodies, smoked hungrily as they jogged down the splay of marble steps outside Haydarpasa station on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus. There were girls with long faces and thick, coarse hair wearing jeans or loose skirts. Little children in woollen jumpers skipped over the cold puddles on the paving. The ferries came slugging in across the grey water under the scatterings of pale gulls and the needling Ottoman skyline of the western shore was memory-hazed behind cold, damp mist, run down-channel from the Black Sea. Ramadan had ended two days earlier and the damp, late-autumn cold carried an air of frenzied relief. There was a smell of salt and estuary mud, and tea and fresh bread.
I sat on the steps eating warm, crisp simit – thin bagels caked with sesame seeds – I had bought from a shabby, chin-stubbled man beside an old grey-green tomb on the waterfront.
The stone of the steps was cold and damp to touch and behind me the great caverns of the station with its long white platforms and tarnished brass railings hummed with curdled voices. I already had my ticket; my train would leave in 30 minutes.
I had woken with a headache that morning, lying on the floor under the strip lights of a London airport; the cheap flight had roared out of morning fog and landed four hours later in a screaming rainstorm on the eastern edge of Istanbul. A bus took me into a grey city with busy streets. Concrete housing, grim and mildewed in the cold-wet light, stepped up hillsides, and strips of oddly accented letters marked the shop-fronts. Only the towering, rocketing pencil-minarets of the grey-ribbed mosques – absurdly, almost impossibly tall and slender – marked this as somewhere special.
It had been two and a half years since I had been in these places: places where you were only a certain number of bus and train rides in one direction from China and India, or in another direction from Africa and red-stone gulf shores. That night I would sleep in the cold capital drifting on the great emptiness of the Anatolian steppe; in 48 hours I would be somewhere under icy, glass-sharp sunlight in the hard brown mountains near the Iranian frontier.
It had stopped raining by the time I reached Hayderpasa station. I bought my ticket to Ankara, went outside and bought two simit wrapped in a scrap of newspaper, and sat on the steps to wait.
And then the Feeling hit me. Across the smoke-grey straight I could see the outline of the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia; over my shoulder and starting from the white platforms of the station ran a thousand miles of train track and straight road over cold, empty land under huge, empty sky.
Little flickering sparks of pleasure went pulsing up from my belly, across my shoulders and down the lengths of my arms. It made me move, sitting there on the cold marble steps; I wriggled, twisting my spine as the Feeling pulsed over me again, and I grinned like an idiot. Then I swung myself upright, lifted my pack – which seemed to weigh nothing – and skipped up through the station gates to catch my train.
The Feeling is not the same thing as the regular, reliable pleasure of travel; nor is it the sense-drunk immersion of a new morning in a new country after an hours-of-darkness arrival. And it is not the awed-honoured privilege that comes from being on some high pass or opening mountain wall or white coral shore. All those things are perfectly predictable. You can mark them in your diary with a scratch of blue-black ink ahead of time, knowing that they will be there like a departure date, waiting for you.
The Feeling is not like that. It is elusive and unpredictable, and it is rare. It comes suddenly at odd, unexpected moments, not those that ought to prompt it, but it is unmistakeable. You cannot chase it, cannot create it artificially – that’s what makes it the Feeling.
I once spent six months moving through the shattered islands of Southeast Asia, and then through the hot green-yellow countryside and welding-spark and mechanic’s-grease cities of old Indochina. I enjoyed it all immensely, but the feeling only came to me once, only three days before I flew back to the UK. I was on a third class train, rattling towards Bangkok from the Cambodian border. The carriage was half-empty and it rained through the afternoon as we stopped at neat country stations with white-and-brown latticework waiting halls, and trimmed flowerbeds and smooth-faced stationmasters standing straight-backed in the rain, saluting the train as it departed. Later the rain eased and the sky was a great layered slab of pearly grey. The countryside was flat and marked with overgrown fields where the heavy trees and bushes clambered over one another. Away to the north, as the soft-blue daylight began to fail, there was a long, solid bank of blue hills, with a sky showing salmon-coloured behind them.
I leant on the open window and the air was damp and cool and clean-smelling and we would not arrive in the city until long after dark and I knew that there was a cheap Chinese hotel near the station where I could take a room. And then, quite unexpectedly, the Feeling hit me. I was tired, and I had been travelling for half a year, and Vietnam had tried my patience, but it hit me just the same. I tingled all over and wriggled in my seat as the train bent away over the flat-heavy farmland towards Bangkok.
It came on another occasion, more feasibly, in Morocco. I had been working in a job I didn’t like for over six months since I came back from some long bout of travelling. I quit the day before I flew out for two weeks walking in the High Atlas. And two day later I was sitting on the floor of a dirty minibus between legs and sacks as we juddered up the road to Imlil. They’ve surfaced it with smooth tarmac now, but then it was just a long, bending scar of broken stones. It was souk day in Asni and the minibus was full of villagers and I found myself in a tormented space on the floor. All I could see was dusty sunlight, and occasionally a flash of autumn-turning poplar leaves or high brown mountain wall through a square of dust-grease window, but I started to giggle. The Berbers giggled back at me, thinking I was laughing at the absurd discomfort of my position as the minibus bucked over the ruts; but it was not that: even as my legs cramped up and my back began to ache, even though I could see nothing of the towering landscapes, the Feeling had hit me.
I remember it too on a ruin of a bus, pulling away into India from the border post at Wagah, the heavy white morning of the Punjab frying away to a scorching yellow. They were harvesting in the flat, canal-cut fields, and my bag was still filthy with the grey dust of the Karakoram. And in other places too.
Not for trafficking alone…
I only spent one week in Turkey on that trip that began in the cold dampness outside Haydarpasa, but the Feeling hit me twice. It was the middle of November last year.
The second time was five days later, in the cold of the afternoon above Dogubayazit, twenty miles from the Iranian border, Armenia to the north, Mount Ararat blazing to the west across an empty, flat-bellied valley. I was walking down the running road from the flaming crags and the Ishak Pasa palace, a ruined eyrie of honeyed sandstone on a high buttress. It was stunningly cold and the wind was like broken glass, but the light was harder and brighter than granite and the hills were stark and ragged. This landscape, this hardness, this openness ran in every direction, all the way back to Europe, south to Mesopotamia and east all the way to the cold desert fringe of China. Kurdish boys in threadbare jackets were chasing flocks of woolly brown goats over the thin, sour soil and I kept my hands deep inside my pockets.
The Feeling hit me suddenly with the cold wind as I headed back towards the scruffy little town. I started laughing, aloud, and the pace of my walking broke into ragged skips, and – quite honestly – I could have danced.
© Tim Hannigan 2008
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Travelling Without Moving
The top of the pass was a broad, broken saddle of stones and goat-cropped grass. The heat of the morning had followed me uphill from the valley bottom, and I swung my pack off my shoulders and felt the lightest of breezes drying the greasy sweat of my forehead and my back. I drank the lukewarm water from my battered bottle hungrily, breathing rapidly between mouthfuls, and looked back the way I had come.
The great ragged brown ranges of the High Atlas ran back in tier after tier of dust-brown fading to purple with the snow-ribbed ridges of highest peaks rising over all. Here in the glaring sunlight of the day it was hot – too hot really. But in the evening when the light turned copper-coloured and the nearest mountain walls seemed to drift away to an impossible distance, it was cold.
There was a smell of sheep and fresh-cut wood, and voices from the last village below the pass.
From here I could pick out one of my earlier campsites, on high stony ground below the Tizi-n-Eddi where the view was longest of all. From there the next pass – the little Tizi-n-Tamatert – was far below, and the ice-buttress of the high core of the Toubkal Massif rose almost close enough to touch across a valley of stones and willows and villages grown out of the mountain walls like flat-capped fungi. The moonlight had been so bright that night that the glare from the snow-heights of Aksoual had been almost too sharp to look at and I could read without my torch long after sunset. Later in the night a hard, dirty wind came up and buffeted my little tent, but the sun had returned in the morning. Picking my way down the steep mountainside I had passed Berber women in red headscarves cutting the yellow grass of the slopes for kindling, and a little way above the village of Tacheddirt I startled a red fox. It went springing away down the hillside like a gazelle, whipping its white-tipped ginger tail behind it.
I had crossed seven passes in the last week, some of them still marked with dripping, icy skeins of winter snow, even now at the end of April; this would be the last. I had slept alone at high campgrounds among hard stones, or between the crippled forms of mountain junipers, and gone on my way early, startling coveys of grey grouse from under the thorn bushes, and pausing at midday on some high col to eat cheese and tinned sardines and to watch eagles circling in the thin air of a clear, yellow-edged sky. My feet were battered and strapped up with pieces of tape, and the night before, spending a night in the trekkers’ trailhead village at Imlil, I had eaten a bad tagine, and my stomach was now in a state of severe fragility. But I felt the tremendous happiness that comes of moving through high country alone and on foot, and carrying everything with you.
There was a crooked tree with a spreading canopy of thorny branches at the crest of the little pass. I sat in its shade and boiled water for tea. While I was squatting beside the guttering primus stove a herd of goats came squawking and blethering up from the lower slopes, and the goatherd, a thin man with scored cheeks and a long brown jellabiya wandered across to cadge a drink from me. I made him tea and he took it wordlessly and drank it quickly, then, with fragments of French in one direction and fragments of Arabic in the other, he told me that it was far to Ouirgane and that I should not linger if I was to get there by nightfall.
He was right: it was a long way, along a narrowing, descending valley, growing hotter and hotter and stiller and stiller as I went, my feet more painful, my stomach more tender. I saw no people along the way, though once, amid broken fields by the stream, a donkey galloped along the path ahead of me, kicking and whinnying hysterically. I stumbled into the big village on the road in a humming turquoise dusk, exhausted and thirsty.
My stomach was worse the next day and I took a beige grande taxi down the running road through the iron-coloured lower hills to Marrakech. The city was hot and dusty and the pavements gave off a pulse of angry heat. I had left a bag in a guesthouse on a yellow alleyway south of the Jema el Fna. I collected it, went to the terminal, and caught a bus to Essaouira.
My feet were ruined and the stomach problem lingered, but I found a cheap hotel on a long white street of pottery-sellers and skinny cats. It was a tall building with echoing stairwells and dusty corridors. But it was the tallest building in the medina – except the mosques – and my room was on the top floor, high-ceilinged, bare and clean. There was a mirror and a washbasin in the corner, and a bed, and the walls were painted white, and a little blue-edged window opened through the thick wall, and you could see the jumble of white rooftops and the block-square Moroccan minarets, and beyond that the sea. From the rooftop itself you could see the whole town, all flaking white walls and blue windows and seagulls and a long breeze run up the Atlantic coast of Africa. You could hear the sea breaking on the black rocks and smell the thoyya wood from the markets.
I was there for five days while my stomach settled and my feet mended. In the mornings I wandered down the dark-hollow stairs and along the dust-cut white street with their uneven cubist lines and sudden pools of bright sunlight, to the bakery on the edge of the place. It had a tiled courtyard and cast iron chairs and good coffee and pain au chocolat. Sometimes after breakfast I wandered along the harbour past the fish-market and the bow-backed sardine boats with the smell of tar and diesel and salt and old rope familiar from childhood. Sometimes I stopped for coffee on the way back and read the paper, then drank another coffee, and then another, or moved slowly through the white-blue-sun-shade byways of the old town in aimless circles.
But mostly I sat on the bed in my high white room while the clean light moved in slow circles on the bare walls, or cleared myself a place to sit amongst the dust and seagull shit and broken buckets on the roof, and read. The bag I had collected in Marrakech was full of books.
You can travel a very long way without moving at all.
***
When you cannot go anywhere there are always books, and books can take you elsewhere very, very quickly. You can smell the wet, brown rot of a Bangkok canal, or the sweat-and-blood of some wild gathering. You can feel the hard stones beneath your feet and shiver at the cold desert edge without leaving your bed. And it is very good indeed.
There are travellers well-known, and you know that you can go to their books – in a high white room or on a dreary English train journey in winter or in a summer garden under the apple tree – and be sure of the journey you will make. Like Wilfred Thesiger. I can take a tattered, second-hand copy of one of his books – like the one I found on the bottom shelf in a bookshop in Byron Bay with carpet on the floor – with blemishes and the pages falling out, and know that very soon I will be able to see the light coming through the reeds, and the long boats moving slowly along stagnant waterways, or watch a slim youth with long black hair padding barefoot over the hot sand.
Sometimes it is more the company that the places that they show you that matters – Robert Byron, smirking, digging you in the ribs, James Cameron, sharper than lime juice. Still others give pleasure by making it how plain what an objectionably belligerent companion they would be – Paul Theroux for one. Sometimes they are new and delightful surprise, like Jason Elliot wandering in his melancholy Unexpected Light, or Rory Stewart walking across Afghanistan in winter.
And then there are those – found in dark shelves at the back of shops down side streets in summer, with the door open to the bright street and the smell of dust and damp cardboard – who might now belong only to me. Does anyone else know, for example, that The Narrow Smile, by Peter Mayne, is probably the very best travel book of the mid-20th Century by an Englishman? Better than The Road to Oxiana certainly; suffused with perfect self-deprecation and glittering wit and lightness of touch and bittersweet melancholy. It has been out of print for decades and I found it by chance.
But favourite above all, for the sheer perfection of his style – and I reread two of his books in that white room in Essaouira – is Bruce Chatwin. The pared-down simplicity of the description makes you stop and hold the book closed for a moment to shiver with delight, then reread the passage again. You hear and feel and smell Afghanistan or Patagonia coming off the page in three or four words where anyone else would have used fifty. And how could he have been so spectacularly endowed that he knew that while Alice Springs’ grid of scorching streets mattered, that the long white socks of the men there were important, what would really make the reader twitch for a moment and involuntarily flick at the whining outback fly that they imagined had buzzed at their ear, even though they were on a train to London or in a guesthouse in Essaouira, was the fact that those men were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers?
How could you know that that – in and out – was what was so crucial in that scene?
But there is one problem, one niggling doubt when you read Chatwin, and that is this: there is no line, no boundary between fiction and reality. He might have known how to sketch out a room or a street or a scene so sharply that you could almost reach out and touch it, but you have no idea whether what he wrote had really happened or not.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but for the record, everything I have written here is perfectly true.
© Tim Hannigan 2008
The great ragged brown ranges of the High Atlas ran back in tier after tier of dust-brown fading to purple with the snow-ribbed ridges of highest peaks rising over all. Here in the glaring sunlight of the day it was hot – too hot really. But in the evening when the light turned copper-coloured and the nearest mountain walls seemed to drift away to an impossible distance, it was cold.
There was a smell of sheep and fresh-cut wood, and voices from the last village below the pass.
From here I could pick out one of my earlier campsites, on high stony ground below the Tizi-n-Eddi where the view was longest of all. From there the next pass – the little Tizi-n-Tamatert – was far below, and the ice-buttress of the high core of the Toubkal Massif rose almost close enough to touch across a valley of stones and willows and villages grown out of the mountain walls like flat-capped fungi. The moonlight had been so bright that night that the glare from the snow-heights of Aksoual had been almost too sharp to look at and I could read without my torch long after sunset. Later in the night a hard, dirty wind came up and buffeted my little tent, but the sun had returned in the morning. Picking my way down the steep mountainside I had passed Berber women in red headscarves cutting the yellow grass of the slopes for kindling, and a little way above the village of Tacheddirt I startled a red fox. It went springing away down the hillside like a gazelle, whipping its white-tipped ginger tail behind it.
I had crossed seven passes in the last week, some of them still marked with dripping, icy skeins of winter snow, even now at the end of April; this would be the last. I had slept alone at high campgrounds among hard stones, or between the crippled forms of mountain junipers, and gone on my way early, startling coveys of grey grouse from under the thorn bushes, and pausing at midday on some high col to eat cheese and tinned sardines and to watch eagles circling in the thin air of a clear, yellow-edged sky. My feet were battered and strapped up with pieces of tape, and the night before, spending a night in the trekkers’ trailhead village at Imlil, I had eaten a bad tagine, and my stomach was now in a state of severe fragility. But I felt the tremendous happiness that comes of moving through high country alone and on foot, and carrying everything with you.
There was a crooked tree with a spreading canopy of thorny branches at the crest of the little pass. I sat in its shade and boiled water for tea. While I was squatting beside the guttering primus stove a herd of goats came squawking and blethering up from the lower slopes, and the goatherd, a thin man with scored cheeks and a long brown jellabiya wandered across to cadge a drink from me. I made him tea and he took it wordlessly and drank it quickly, then, with fragments of French in one direction and fragments of Arabic in the other, he told me that it was far to Ouirgane and that I should not linger if I was to get there by nightfall.
He was right: it was a long way, along a narrowing, descending valley, growing hotter and hotter and stiller and stiller as I went, my feet more painful, my stomach more tender. I saw no people along the way, though once, amid broken fields by the stream, a donkey galloped along the path ahead of me, kicking and whinnying hysterically. I stumbled into the big village on the road in a humming turquoise dusk, exhausted and thirsty.
My stomach was worse the next day and I took a beige grande taxi down the running road through the iron-coloured lower hills to Marrakech. The city was hot and dusty and the pavements gave off a pulse of angry heat. I had left a bag in a guesthouse on a yellow alleyway south of the Jema el Fna. I collected it, went to the terminal, and caught a bus to Essaouira.
My feet were ruined and the stomach problem lingered, but I found a cheap hotel on a long white street of pottery-sellers and skinny cats. It was a tall building with echoing stairwells and dusty corridors. But it was the tallest building in the medina – except the mosques – and my room was on the top floor, high-ceilinged, bare and clean. There was a mirror and a washbasin in the corner, and a bed, and the walls were painted white, and a little blue-edged window opened through the thick wall, and you could see the jumble of white rooftops and the block-square Moroccan minarets, and beyond that the sea. From the rooftop itself you could see the whole town, all flaking white walls and blue windows and seagulls and a long breeze run up the Atlantic coast of Africa. You could hear the sea breaking on the black rocks and smell the thoyya wood from the markets.
I was there for five days while my stomach settled and my feet mended. In the mornings I wandered down the dark-hollow stairs and along the dust-cut white street with their uneven cubist lines and sudden pools of bright sunlight, to the bakery on the edge of the place. It had a tiled courtyard and cast iron chairs and good coffee and pain au chocolat. Sometimes after breakfast I wandered along the harbour past the fish-market and the bow-backed sardine boats with the smell of tar and diesel and salt and old rope familiar from childhood. Sometimes I stopped for coffee on the way back and read the paper, then drank another coffee, and then another, or moved slowly through the white-blue-sun-shade byways of the old town in aimless circles.
But mostly I sat on the bed in my high white room while the clean light moved in slow circles on the bare walls, or cleared myself a place to sit amongst the dust and seagull shit and broken buckets on the roof, and read. The bag I had collected in Marrakech was full of books.
You can travel a very long way without moving at all.
***
When you cannot go anywhere there are always books, and books can take you elsewhere very, very quickly. You can smell the wet, brown rot of a Bangkok canal, or the sweat-and-blood of some wild gathering. You can feel the hard stones beneath your feet and shiver at the cold desert edge without leaving your bed. And it is very good indeed.
There are travellers well-known, and you know that you can go to their books – in a high white room or on a dreary English train journey in winter or in a summer garden under the apple tree – and be sure of the journey you will make. Like Wilfred Thesiger. I can take a tattered, second-hand copy of one of his books – like the one I found on the bottom shelf in a bookshop in Byron Bay with carpet on the floor – with blemishes and the pages falling out, and know that very soon I will be able to see the light coming through the reeds, and the long boats moving slowly along stagnant waterways, or watch a slim youth with long black hair padding barefoot over the hot sand.
Sometimes it is more the company that the places that they show you that matters – Robert Byron, smirking, digging you in the ribs, James Cameron, sharper than lime juice. Still others give pleasure by making it how plain what an objectionably belligerent companion they would be – Paul Theroux for one. Sometimes they are new and delightful surprise, like Jason Elliot wandering in his melancholy Unexpected Light, or Rory Stewart walking across Afghanistan in winter.
And then there are those – found in dark shelves at the back of shops down side streets in summer, with the door open to the bright street and the smell of dust and damp cardboard – who might now belong only to me. Does anyone else know, for example, that The Narrow Smile, by Peter Mayne, is probably the very best travel book of the mid-20th Century by an Englishman? Better than The Road to Oxiana certainly; suffused with perfect self-deprecation and glittering wit and lightness of touch and bittersweet melancholy. It has been out of print for decades and I found it by chance.
But favourite above all, for the sheer perfection of his style – and I reread two of his books in that white room in Essaouira – is Bruce Chatwin. The pared-down simplicity of the description makes you stop and hold the book closed for a moment to shiver with delight, then reread the passage again. You hear and feel and smell Afghanistan or Patagonia coming off the page in three or four words where anyone else would have used fifty. And how could he have been so spectacularly endowed that he knew that while Alice Springs’ grid of scorching streets mattered, that the long white socks of the men there were important, what would really make the reader twitch for a moment and involuntarily flick at the whining outback fly that they imagined had buzzed at their ear, even though they were on a train to London or in a guesthouse in Essaouira, was the fact that those men were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers?
How could you know that that – in and out – was what was so crucial in that scene?
But there is one problem, one niggling doubt when you read Chatwin, and that is this: there is no line, no boundary between fiction and reality. He might have known how to sketch out a room or a street or a scene so sharply that you could almost reach out and touch it, but you have no idea whether what he wrote had really happened or not.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but for the record, everything I have written here is perfectly true.
© Tim Hannigan 2008
Monday, 14 July 2008
Bad Things Happened Here
It was cool inside the cave and the water-smoothed surfaces of the rock were damp under my finders. The air was green-tinted beneath the ragged square of white light at the head of the steps. There were creepers and thorn-tangles, and the Buddhist prayer flags hung in limp lines from the rough green-brown of the cave walls. It was very quiet, but you could hear the sound of water dripping somewhere, and small birds fluttering and chirruping on the edge of the daylight. There was a smell of green moisture in the place.
The gape-eyed skulls and the long, slender tibias and the shattered pelvises and cracked ribs had all been piled very carefully into metal cages, bone, slotting neatly alongside bone. They had all turned to a waxy yellow, and in the damp air of the cave moss and green algae was beginning to grow on the smooth surfaces.
Phnom Sampean – the Boat Hill – rose out of strange, still countryside south of Battambang. There was something odd about the land here: the roads were strips of hissing white earth, and the ditches were clogged with weeds. It was dry, and a yellow breeze scurried over the untilled fields in sudden, unexpected moments. There were trees with great spreading-heavy canopies that shifted in the wind, and everything seemed very fertile and soft-edged. But there was something half-abandoned about it all. Occasional white cattle grazed fugitively along field boundaries, and small girls with sun-touched hair and dirty tee-shirts dawdled on the roadside. But it looked almost as though someone had forgotten to work the land, forgotten to regiment it, to press it into busy, endlessly productive service. It was not like Bali or Java, or even Thailand, just forty miles to the west.
Phnom Sampean stood up abrupt like something manmade from the unremitting yellow-green flatness. There were concrete steps up its knobbly limestone flanks under the jackfruit trees with their huge, swollen fruits, already mildewed and mouldering before they were ripe.
There were long low buildings of blank concrete on the levelled platform near the outcrop’s summit. The rooms were bare now, and a few lean monks with heavy eyebrows and thick orange draperies padded along the corridors or swept the walkways with bundles of twigs. It was all very still and silent under the hot breeze. The caves – three of them – were just beyond the buildings, crooked cavities in the blunt molar-tooth of the hill.
They had held people – monks and collaborators and intellectuals – in the low concrete buildings under the jackfruit trees. They had tortured them and killed them, then tossed them into the caves – separate caves for the men, the women and the children. The senseless absurdity of this segregation made it worse somehow. Sometimes they tossed people down into the green, putrid gloom when they were still alive, people said; they killed 10,000 here, people said. You cannot verify any of these things, but it doesn’t matter.
Now the monks had swept the concrete compound clean and turned it into a monastery. They had arranged the bones in their neat cages and hung their prayer flags in the gloomy caverns. There were little altars and grey twists of incense ash beside the bones.
Sometimes tourists, like me, hired a motorbike from Battambang and rode out to the hill and climbed the steps under the trees and stood for a few minutes down in the cool dankness near the piled skulls, silent with the half-sincere reverence of tombs and antique churches. Then they went back to town and continued across the border to the beaches and fleshpots of Thailand.
I went back out into the daylight and looked out over the strange flat earth of western Cambodia, a tree-speckled blank, a lost white road, and an empty horizon. Bad things happened here.
***
The Golan Heights were like Dartmoor in winter. Sodden, bone-chilling mist ran over the thin, sour soil of the swelling, rocky hillsides and rain wriggled like tantrum-teardrops over the windscreen of the bus. The dank backrooms of the Syrian checkpoints along the road smelt of paraffin and coffee and stale cigarettes, and the soldiers who checked my passport and permit shivered and wore green balaclavas.
There were broken barricades and muddy puddles wrinkled by the wet gusts before Quneitra, then there was what was left of the town. It was a place of sick concrete, but all the walls had been blown away and fractured flat roofs lay on top of the rubble like drunken mushrooms. The roads were full of shell holes and everything was sodden-damp.
A few cows grazed on the thin grass between the ruins. Only the church and the mosque and the hospital were still standing, bare and blank-eyed. Like skulls. The floors inside were thick with broken glass and shards of mortar. It crunched noisily underfoot whenever you moved, uncomfortably so.
Inside the skeleton of the hospital there were smears of charcoal and places where some missile had gone through more than one wall, and shivering on the flat roof you could look out over the cold, wet sweep of land beyond what was left of the little town to where the hills rolled upwards into the mist again. You could pick out the blurred headlights of cars moving along a narrow road over in the Israeli-held part of the Heights.
Down beyond the last of the pathetic concrete-mushrooms of the blown-out houses was the checkpoint of the de facto border. You could see the blue and white Israeli flag snapping in the wet wind, and the Danish peacekeepers in their green uniforms and blue UN berets. They looked much bigger and happier than the Syrian soldiers back along the road to Damascus. There were tangles of barbed wire, and little red signs, creaking in the wind, marked with a single word in English and Arabic: mines.
The Syrian government, in a moment of uncharacteristic understatement had added only one small piece of propaganda paintwork to the place: a blue sign on the bullet-riddled wall of the hospital. "Destructed by Zionists" it said. Even that was unnecessary.
Bad things happened here.
On the noisy street in the middle of Kuta twittering Javanese schoolgirls in white headdresses and Japanese with cameras and paunchy Australians, red-faced and squinting in the heat paused for a moment before the bomb memorial and scanned the list of the 202 dead, and stood with their hands on their hips frowning at the fenced-off vacant lot, fuzzed over with coarse tropical grass, where the Sari Club used to stand. Then they went on their way and within twenty yards normal conversation had resumed. Bad things happened here too.
But it was all much too easy. Too easy to make those half-sincere pilgrimages to Phnom Sampean or Quneitra or the War Crimes Museum in Saigon, or the other killing fields outside Phnom Penn, to pause for a moment before an incongruous gap between the shops of Jalan Legian in glib silence, aping the rhythms of a foreign faith, with pressing palms and dipping heads – bad things happened here – then move on, back into bright sunlight.
Bad things did happen here, but take a minibus out of Kuta up into the heavy green hills in the ageless countryside and amphitheatre-steps of the rice fields near Ubud. Bad things – worse things – happened here. They went berserk here, ran amok here, hacked people to death here, and the army, who had egged them on to kill the communists in Java, lost their nerve as the fire ran wild in Bali. There are mass graves beneath the luxury hotels at Nusa Dua, people say. You cannot verify any of these things, but it doesn’t matter. Bad things happened here.
Bad things happened all the way back along the road to Damascus, and they hunted people along the ditches all the way through that strange flat countryside beyond the Boat Hill. Unspeakable things happened in every village in China and every village in Indonesia and every village everywhere. And anywhere you go between Delhi and Rawalpindi they hacked at people with long knives and stabbed at them with sharpened bamboo staves and they cut off men’s genitals and stuffed them in their mouths and they chopped babies in half and sent trains full of corpses in both directions, east and west, and they had to hose down the station platforms in Lahore and Amritsar to get rid of the blood. And when you drive across the scorched core of Spain if you pull over on some white road in the heat of the afternoon and walk away slowly in the shimmering light over the stones and yellow grass you might find bones buried under the rocks, hundreds of them, thousands of them. And there is a reason why all those Armenian churches are empty-echo ruins now, under the heart-breakingly clear blue light of Eastern Anatolia. Bad things happened here, very bad things.
Bad things happened here; bad things happened everywhere, and pausing in the cool, green damp of the cave for a moment, and pushing a dirty, tattered Riel note into the monks’ collection box then leaving the hill and riding back into town and going on merrily with your journey is not enough.
© Tim Hannigan 2008
The gape-eyed skulls and the long, slender tibias and the shattered pelvises and cracked ribs had all been piled very carefully into metal cages, bone, slotting neatly alongside bone. They had all turned to a waxy yellow, and in the damp air of the cave moss and green algae was beginning to grow on the smooth surfaces.
Phnom Sampean – the Boat Hill – rose out of strange, still countryside south of Battambang. There was something odd about the land here: the roads were strips of hissing white earth, and the ditches were clogged with weeds. It was dry, and a yellow breeze scurried over the untilled fields in sudden, unexpected moments. There were trees with great spreading-heavy canopies that shifted in the wind, and everything seemed very fertile and soft-edged. But there was something half-abandoned about it all. Occasional white cattle grazed fugitively along field boundaries, and small girls with sun-touched hair and dirty tee-shirts dawdled on the roadside. But it looked almost as though someone had forgotten to work the land, forgotten to regiment it, to press it into busy, endlessly productive service. It was not like Bali or Java, or even Thailand, just forty miles to the west.
Phnom Sampean stood up abrupt like something manmade from the unremitting yellow-green flatness. There were concrete steps up its knobbly limestone flanks under the jackfruit trees with their huge, swollen fruits, already mildewed and mouldering before they were ripe.
There were long low buildings of blank concrete on the levelled platform near the outcrop’s summit. The rooms were bare now, and a few lean monks with heavy eyebrows and thick orange draperies padded along the corridors or swept the walkways with bundles of twigs. It was all very still and silent under the hot breeze. The caves – three of them – were just beyond the buildings, crooked cavities in the blunt molar-tooth of the hill.
They had held people – monks and collaborators and intellectuals – in the low concrete buildings under the jackfruit trees. They had tortured them and killed them, then tossed them into the caves – separate caves for the men, the women and the children. The senseless absurdity of this segregation made it worse somehow. Sometimes they tossed people down into the green, putrid gloom when they were still alive, people said; they killed 10,000 here, people said. You cannot verify any of these things, but it doesn’t matter.
Now the monks had swept the concrete compound clean and turned it into a monastery. They had arranged the bones in their neat cages and hung their prayer flags in the gloomy caverns. There were little altars and grey twists of incense ash beside the bones.
Sometimes tourists, like me, hired a motorbike from Battambang and rode out to the hill and climbed the steps under the trees and stood for a few minutes down in the cool dankness near the piled skulls, silent with the half-sincere reverence of tombs and antique churches. Then they went back to town and continued across the border to the beaches and fleshpots of Thailand.
I went back out into the daylight and looked out over the strange flat earth of western Cambodia, a tree-speckled blank, a lost white road, and an empty horizon. Bad things happened here.
***
The Golan Heights were like Dartmoor in winter. Sodden, bone-chilling mist ran over the thin, sour soil of the swelling, rocky hillsides and rain wriggled like tantrum-teardrops over the windscreen of the bus. The dank backrooms of the Syrian checkpoints along the road smelt of paraffin and coffee and stale cigarettes, and the soldiers who checked my passport and permit shivered and wore green balaclavas.
There were broken barricades and muddy puddles wrinkled by the wet gusts before Quneitra, then there was what was left of the town. It was a place of sick concrete, but all the walls had been blown away and fractured flat roofs lay on top of the rubble like drunken mushrooms. The roads were full of shell holes and everything was sodden-damp.
A few cows grazed on the thin grass between the ruins. Only the church and the mosque and the hospital were still standing, bare and blank-eyed. Like skulls. The floors inside were thick with broken glass and shards of mortar. It crunched noisily underfoot whenever you moved, uncomfortably so.
Inside the skeleton of the hospital there were smears of charcoal and places where some missile had gone through more than one wall, and shivering on the flat roof you could look out over the cold, wet sweep of land beyond what was left of the little town to where the hills rolled upwards into the mist again. You could pick out the blurred headlights of cars moving along a narrow road over in the Israeli-held part of the Heights.
Down beyond the last of the pathetic concrete-mushrooms of the blown-out houses was the checkpoint of the de facto border. You could see the blue and white Israeli flag snapping in the wet wind, and the Danish peacekeepers in their green uniforms and blue UN berets. They looked much bigger and happier than the Syrian soldiers back along the road to Damascus. There were tangles of barbed wire, and little red signs, creaking in the wind, marked with a single word in English and Arabic: mines.
The Syrian government, in a moment of uncharacteristic understatement had added only one small piece of propaganda paintwork to the place: a blue sign on the bullet-riddled wall of the hospital. "Destructed by Zionists" it said. Even that was unnecessary.
Bad things happened here.
On the noisy street in the middle of Kuta twittering Javanese schoolgirls in white headdresses and Japanese with cameras and paunchy Australians, red-faced and squinting in the heat paused for a moment before the bomb memorial and scanned the list of the 202 dead, and stood with their hands on their hips frowning at the fenced-off vacant lot, fuzzed over with coarse tropical grass, where the Sari Club used to stand. Then they went on their way and within twenty yards normal conversation had resumed. Bad things happened here too.
But it was all much too easy. Too easy to make those half-sincere pilgrimages to Phnom Sampean or Quneitra or the War Crimes Museum in Saigon, or the other killing fields outside Phnom Penn, to pause for a moment before an incongruous gap between the shops of Jalan Legian in glib silence, aping the rhythms of a foreign faith, with pressing palms and dipping heads – bad things happened here – then move on, back into bright sunlight.
Bad things did happen here, but take a minibus out of Kuta up into the heavy green hills in the ageless countryside and amphitheatre-steps of the rice fields near Ubud. Bad things – worse things – happened here. They went berserk here, ran amok here, hacked people to death here, and the army, who had egged them on to kill the communists in Java, lost their nerve as the fire ran wild in Bali. There are mass graves beneath the luxury hotels at Nusa Dua, people say. You cannot verify any of these things, but it doesn’t matter. Bad things happened here.
Bad things happened all the way back along the road to Damascus, and they hunted people along the ditches all the way through that strange flat countryside beyond the Boat Hill. Unspeakable things happened in every village in China and every village in Indonesia and every village everywhere. And anywhere you go between Delhi and Rawalpindi they hacked at people with long knives and stabbed at them with sharpened bamboo staves and they cut off men’s genitals and stuffed them in their mouths and they chopped babies in half and sent trains full of corpses in both directions, east and west, and they had to hose down the station platforms in Lahore and Amritsar to get rid of the blood. And when you drive across the scorched core of Spain if you pull over on some white road in the heat of the afternoon and walk away slowly in the shimmering light over the stones and yellow grass you might find bones buried under the rocks, hundreds of them, thousands of them. And there is a reason why all those Armenian churches are empty-echo ruins now, under the heart-breakingly clear blue light of Eastern Anatolia. Bad things happened here, very bad things.
Bad things happened here; bad things happened everywhere, and pausing in the cool, green damp of the cave for a moment, and pushing a dirty, tattered Riel note into the monks’ collection box then leaving the hill and riding back into town and going on merrily with your journey is not enough.
© Tim Hannigan 2008
Saturday, 5 July 2008
Bureaucracy
Rain and flyovers and buildings of bad concrete tilting drunkenly against one another, and the demonic sparks of blue fire from the oil-black caverns of the welders’ shops. The bus rolled into Saigon.
I had given up. Ever since I tripped over the border somewhere in the middle of Vietnam’s drawn-out, emaciated torso I had been flailing hopelessly in the flow, battling against it, clinging desperately – and ill-temperedly – at passing branches, tying to haul myself onto unto banks and sandspits.
I had never been to a country like it. Tourism was stupendously regimented: a neat, army-ant column of foreign visitors trailing compliantly along the country’s narrow strip of road and rail, from designated stop to designated stop. It made no difference whether they were be-backpacked and braided or wore chinos and panama hats: all followed the same route in the same way.
I like to get to the bus station and find the correct bus myself, but it didn’t work in Vietnam. I realised something was wrong when the bus boy on the first battered minibus I caught down the coast to Hue demanded my fare in US dollars. And from then at every yellow-dirt public bus station, on every rattling public bus they first looked at me askance, and then asked me double, triple, quadruple the true fare – as often as not in US dollars. This, quite simply, was not the way you were expected to travel in Vietnam.
I headed south in the rain and my mood worsened. I met other tourists with nothing but good to say about Vietnam; about its elegantly decrepit cities, its charming people, its food. They were collected from the doorstep of their budget guesthouses by air-conditioned tourist minibuses, booked by the desk clerk the night before, and deposited some hours later at the sister establishment of the same guesthouse in the next city along the coast. Then they booked the budget tour to the village, or waterfall, or beach or palace, or whatever it may be, and they loved Vietnam.
I scowled, and grumbled snobbishly, unwilling to concede the very obvious fact: they were approaching Vietnam in the right way; I had it horribly wrong.
But by the time I reached Dalat, with its thin pines and cold rain and rust-red tin roofs and strawberries, I had had enough. I booked a ticket on a tourist shuttle bus from a travel agent and rolled down through the damp gunpowder grey of the morning to Saigon. The bus dropped me on the pavement right outside a budget guesthouse in the backpacker ghetto. Without a word of protest I stepped through the door and took the first room they showed me.
I wanted to go to Cambodia; everyone wanted to go to Cambodia. There were cafes and agents selling trips to the Mekong Delta, tours to the Cu Chi tunnels, tours of the city, transport to the border. But first I needed a Cambodian visa.
***
It was bitterly cold in Darjeeling in February. The whole town spilt from the razorback of a high ridge in the high hills, and looked as though it could slide free, down into the stony valley at any moment.
The sky was grey and empty and there were hawkers on the ladder-steps of the bazaar selling second-hand woolly jumpers and bobble hats from piles on the pavement. There was a smell of woodsmoke over all the tilting, crumbling eaves of the bungalows, and the monkeys sat on the slanting tin roofs sulkily hunching their shoulders against the chill. Everyone walked with their hands deep in their pockets and the Tibetan soup with thick noodles from the little cafes near the jeep-stand tasted fabulous. Only once, in the earliest morning when the rough concrete floor in the little bathroom of the guesthouse was so cold it burnt the soles of my feet through my threadbare socks, did the far-high massif of Kanchenjunga show, the colour of poached salmon, floating over long strips of white haze.
It was necessary to get a permit to go to Sikkim. First I had to walk downhill, back and forth through the switchbacks of the alleyways below the Mall. There was no wind at all, and no sun, and you could hear every noise, every clatter of hooves every crunch of a land rover’s gear change, every cackle of voices from the bazaar, very, very clearly.
On the edge of town, where the pine trees thickened a little before the slopes poured away down to the cool-stubbled tea gardens, was the District Magistrate’s Office. It was a fine old building of peeling white clapboard and broken guttering. The windows were jammed shut from a century of white gloss paint and there was moss on the doorstep. Inside it was full of offices of mouldering bundles of paper and men with moustaches and scarves and scratched desks.
In the District Magistrate’s office they gave you your form. Then you had to scramble back up through the gutter-alleys and step-flights and uphills of the bazaar, past the hawkers with their mounds of winter clothes, past the jeep-stand and under the white dormers of the old hotels beneath the pine-ridges to the Foreigners’ Registration Office. The building stood in a crook of the hillside where it was colder than anywhere.
The office was dark and ancient, and the light came in milky and pale from the high old window. There were dusty typewriters and sheaves of old yellow documents. There was a smell of tea and paraffin and the floorboards creaked underfoot. The clerks sat at their old desks with scarves bound up over their mouths and hats pulled down over their ears and coarse blankets over their shoulders. Their breath steamed in the still, dust-cut air of the room. There was a fire in a broken grate in the dark corner. It crackled, as if the air was too thin for it truly to breathe.
The clerks fumbled with my form in their fingerless gloves and stamped and signed where stamps and signatures were needed, then I walked back into the still, stinging air of the town, back down the hill, past the hawkers and the land rovers, back to the District Magistrates office. And they gave me my permit.
It was cold in Skardu too – far to the west along the same mountain range – colder than it should have been this early in the autumn. When I got back to town from Khapalu the grey murk that had swum along the hard ridge beyond the Indus cleared suddenly and there was new snow far down the mountainsides.
Skardu lay where the vast torment of mountains had drawn breath for a moment and let the great grey river stretch itself into a plain of grey gravel. But it was still a place hemmed in: there was no way out of here that didn’t mean hundreds of miles of travel along crack-platforms of broken road carved from sheer cliff faces above churning water.
I needed a visa extension.
The Deputy Commissioner’s office was on a grey hillside on the eastern edge of Skardu. From the scrappy gravel yard outside you could see the slanting sprawl of the town in its bed of thinning polar trees, and the grey gouge of the floodplain beyond.
The Deputy Commissioner had just taken over the post. He saw me personally in his carpeted office. There was an embossed coat of arms and a pastel-coloured portrait of Jinnah – drawn-cheeked and cold-eyed – on the wall behind his yellow desk.
The Deputy Commissioner was a big man with a trimmed black beard and a warm, deep voice. He called for tea and cream-filled biscuits, and he shook my hand and welcomed me. And of course he would allow me to have an extension on my visa, for as many days as I wanted – a month? Only a month? Why not make it three months, just to be sure?
We sat. He smiled and folded his huge hands on his ample belly.
"Please," he said, "have another biscuit."
"How long will it take to process the extension?" I asked.
"One, maybe two hours only. This is not a problem. More tea?"
"I’d really like to start the process now, if possible."
"Yes of course, but unfortunately, today it is not possible. The passport officer is on tour."
It was Friday; the passport officer would not be back until Monday. I caught a bus to Khapalu. There was a thin, freezing rain falling from the high grey mountains and I spent two evenings drinking green tea by flickering lamp light with huge Pashtuns from Waziristan who were in Baltistan selling socks and ladies’ underwear.
I was back in Skardu on Monday morning, and I went back to the Deputy Commissioner’s office under the new blue sky with the new white snow showing on the razor ridges around the town.
It was a long, low, one-storey building of those old familiar rooms of rough desks and bundled papers. A kindly man who worked in the ID card office gave me a place to sit, and a cup of tea. He had a neat moustache and hair that was sandy-coloured at the edges. He liked cricket. Village men in ragged turbans and threadbare shalwar kamises hobbled in and handed over forms for counter-signature in triplicate, then shuffled out again, along the corridor to some other chamber.
It was more than an hour before the Passport Officer arrived. He was an ancient man with a long, wiry tangle of grey beard and a dirty black and white keffiyah around his neck. His hands trembled and his eyes were cloudy and buried deep inside his old head. But he smiled warmly and shook my hand.
He riffled through various collapsing files, turning over torn and creased sheets of inky paper before he found the list he was looking for. For British citizens it seemed, there was no fee to extend a visa. He smiled proudly; the man with the neat moustache shook my hand.
"Congratulations!" he said; "This process is free for you! You are a very lucky man!"
The fee structure had no obvious logic too it. Together we went through the list of nationalities – and every country in the world was represented. The highest fee was, bizarrely, for citizens of Peru. For them it would cost several hundred dollars to extend a visa.
The man with the moustache laughed. "You are very lucky you are not from Peru," he said.
But there was another problem. There was a particular rubber stamp essential for the extension process, but it was not available. With the shuffling, trembling old Passport Officer, who flicked the ragged end of his keffiyah once around his neck as we crossed the yard, I went back to the Deputy Commissioner’s office.
He was again seated behind his desk under the portrait of Jinnah, hands folded on his belly, drinking tea. The requisite stamp was, perhaps, in the drawer of his desk, but he was new in the job. His predecessor had taken a new post in Gilgit, and, unhappily, he had taken his keys with him. The Deputy Commissioner rattled the drawer to prove that it was locked.
"This desk is government property," he said; "it cannot be damaged. It is highly irregular that he should have taken the key…"
There is sometimes – often – a bribe to be paid in these processes, but something in the faint air of grand bemusement that came from the Deputy Commissioner like a low electronic hum as he sipped his tea made me sure that this was not it.
We went back to the other office. The old Passport Officer looked utterly miserable and stood, shrugged, trembling. What could he do? He felt that he had let me down. He and the man with the moustache discussed, debated, and finally with a moment of grinning brightness came to a solution: the Passport Officer would go to the bazaar; he would have a new rubber stamp made. In the meantime, I must drink more tea.
I sat; I drank. More and more obsequious village people crept through the doorway, humbly proffering their tatty forms for signatures. Bundles of loose sheets were leafed through, shuffled and dropped into unmarked draws or slipped into unmarked files and piled onto sagging shelves. More tea was drunk.
I had been in other offices like this all over the Subcontinent, waiting for inner line permits or visa extensions.
Niggling, wriggling guilt seethed in my belly: we, the British, did this awful damage, created this absurd bureaucracy of forms in two or more incompatible languages, of signatures and countersignatures and counter-countersignatures and carbon paper and passport photos in quadruplicate. We blighted them with this mess that required an army of people with adequate but uninspiring education, and into which every new idea, new project, new plan disappears, bundled with the carbon copy and one signature space still unfilled in a damp grey folder on an unmarked shelf above a rusty filing cabinet and a broken typewriter.
It was two hours before the Passport Officer shuffled back, grinning and holding the new stamp proudly above his head with a trembling fist. It said: "Muhammad Shafa. Deputy Commissioner. Skardu." The letters were not quite lined up properly.
We went to the Passport Officer’s own office – a damp, bare room at the end of a corridor with flaking walls. Two dozen people were waiting outside for him, clutching forms and letters. He tutted and waved them aside as they crowded into the room after him. All of them – and I – watched him expectantly, agonised, as he shuffled with the mess of papers on his desk, losing the form, losing the stamp, the inkpad, my passport in the chaos. Then, on a sudden whim, he decided to go slowly through the great wad of past visa extension forms – dating back years to the happier days when some foreign tourists actually came to Skardu – numbering each page with a scratchy old fountain pen. There was an audible groan from the watching men with their forms, all of which needed nothing more than his signature.
Eventually he was done, and he pressed the smudgy, inky stamps into my passport, then hobbled outside again, back towards the Deputy Commissioner’s personal office. The DC was about to leave to drive to Gilgit – perhaps in pursuit of the lost keys. He took my passport and signed the extension on the bonnet of his jeep, shook my hand warmly and drove away into the bright midday.
We went back to the main building. Finally, with the waiting supplicants still watching desperately, the Passport Officer took from a cupboard a huge stamp embossed with the name of the Government of the Northern Areas of Pakistan, and using his whole meagre bodyweight to press it down onto the page of my passport, he provided the final validation for the extension.
A sigh of relief went around the crowd. He handed my passport back to me with a smile of such warmth and triumph that I wanted to cry.
"Done!" he said, his hands trembling. And there was not a single rupee to pay for it. It had taken only four hours.
I went back out into the pale sunlight and walked along the rough grey road into town. There were dust devils scurrying over the gravel-plains beside the Indus.
***
I woke in Saigon the morning after I arrived from Dalat with a headache. My bedroom was on the first floor, and I peered down onto the noisy street from the narrow window. There were motorbikes and bicycles clattering along the pavement edges and a raw cacophony of engine noise and horns. The sky was the colour of mud; it would rain again later.
Across the street, outside a café with bamboo tables, a gaggle of European backpackers were waiting for the minibus to take them on their organised tour of the Mekong Delta. They wore shorts and faded vest-tops. Their legs looked absurdly long and the young men amongst them stood – or sprawled – with their arms folded, as if there was something vital and difficult that they would shortly be called upon to do.
I showered and tried to wash the heavy, greasy sleep out of my eyes, then I did the most sensible thing I had done since arriving in Vietnam: I went to the little travel agent across the street from the guesthouse. A pretty girl with an American accent and glasses and a small mole under her right eye took my passport and photo and twenty crisp dollars. She gave me a little receipt on pale green paper and told me that my Cambodian visa would be processed by tea time; I could collect my passport from her then, or if I liked she would deliver it to the reception of my guesthouse – and, if I was interested, there was a minibus tour to the Cu Chi tunnels leaving shortly.
I smiled and thanked her, but declined, and went back out to the street. I had absolutely nothing to do. I spent the day drinking cold beer and eating banana pancakes in a café with bamboo tables…
© Tim Hannigan 2008
I had given up. Ever since I tripped over the border somewhere in the middle of Vietnam’s drawn-out, emaciated torso I had been flailing hopelessly in the flow, battling against it, clinging desperately – and ill-temperedly – at passing branches, tying to haul myself onto unto banks and sandspits.
I had never been to a country like it. Tourism was stupendously regimented: a neat, army-ant column of foreign visitors trailing compliantly along the country’s narrow strip of road and rail, from designated stop to designated stop. It made no difference whether they were be-backpacked and braided or wore chinos and panama hats: all followed the same route in the same way.
I like to get to the bus station and find the correct bus myself, but it didn’t work in Vietnam. I realised something was wrong when the bus boy on the first battered minibus I caught down the coast to Hue demanded my fare in US dollars. And from then at every yellow-dirt public bus station, on every rattling public bus they first looked at me askance, and then asked me double, triple, quadruple the true fare – as often as not in US dollars. This, quite simply, was not the way you were expected to travel in Vietnam.
I headed south in the rain and my mood worsened. I met other tourists with nothing but good to say about Vietnam; about its elegantly decrepit cities, its charming people, its food. They were collected from the doorstep of their budget guesthouses by air-conditioned tourist minibuses, booked by the desk clerk the night before, and deposited some hours later at the sister establishment of the same guesthouse in the next city along the coast. Then they booked the budget tour to the village, or waterfall, or beach or palace, or whatever it may be, and they loved Vietnam.
I scowled, and grumbled snobbishly, unwilling to concede the very obvious fact: they were approaching Vietnam in the right way; I had it horribly wrong.
But by the time I reached Dalat, with its thin pines and cold rain and rust-red tin roofs and strawberries, I had had enough. I booked a ticket on a tourist shuttle bus from a travel agent and rolled down through the damp gunpowder grey of the morning to Saigon. The bus dropped me on the pavement right outside a budget guesthouse in the backpacker ghetto. Without a word of protest I stepped through the door and took the first room they showed me.
I wanted to go to Cambodia; everyone wanted to go to Cambodia. There were cafes and agents selling trips to the Mekong Delta, tours to the Cu Chi tunnels, tours of the city, transport to the border. But first I needed a Cambodian visa.
***
It was bitterly cold in Darjeeling in February. The whole town spilt from the razorback of a high ridge in the high hills, and looked as though it could slide free, down into the stony valley at any moment.
The sky was grey and empty and there were hawkers on the ladder-steps of the bazaar selling second-hand woolly jumpers and bobble hats from piles on the pavement. There was a smell of woodsmoke over all the tilting, crumbling eaves of the bungalows, and the monkeys sat on the slanting tin roofs sulkily hunching their shoulders against the chill. Everyone walked with their hands deep in their pockets and the Tibetan soup with thick noodles from the little cafes near the jeep-stand tasted fabulous. Only once, in the earliest morning when the rough concrete floor in the little bathroom of the guesthouse was so cold it burnt the soles of my feet through my threadbare socks, did the far-high massif of Kanchenjunga show, the colour of poached salmon, floating over long strips of white haze.
It was necessary to get a permit to go to Sikkim. First I had to walk downhill, back and forth through the switchbacks of the alleyways below the Mall. There was no wind at all, and no sun, and you could hear every noise, every clatter of hooves every crunch of a land rover’s gear change, every cackle of voices from the bazaar, very, very clearly.
On the edge of town, where the pine trees thickened a little before the slopes poured away down to the cool-stubbled tea gardens, was the District Magistrate’s Office. It was a fine old building of peeling white clapboard and broken guttering. The windows were jammed shut from a century of white gloss paint and there was moss on the doorstep. Inside it was full of offices of mouldering bundles of paper and men with moustaches and scarves and scratched desks.
In the District Magistrate’s office they gave you your form. Then you had to scramble back up through the gutter-alleys and step-flights and uphills of the bazaar, past the hawkers with their mounds of winter clothes, past the jeep-stand and under the white dormers of the old hotels beneath the pine-ridges to the Foreigners’ Registration Office. The building stood in a crook of the hillside where it was colder than anywhere.
The office was dark and ancient, and the light came in milky and pale from the high old window. There were dusty typewriters and sheaves of old yellow documents. There was a smell of tea and paraffin and the floorboards creaked underfoot. The clerks sat at their old desks with scarves bound up over their mouths and hats pulled down over their ears and coarse blankets over their shoulders. Their breath steamed in the still, dust-cut air of the room. There was a fire in a broken grate in the dark corner. It crackled, as if the air was too thin for it truly to breathe.
The clerks fumbled with my form in their fingerless gloves and stamped and signed where stamps and signatures were needed, then I walked back into the still, stinging air of the town, back down the hill, past the hawkers and the land rovers, back to the District Magistrates office. And they gave me my permit.
It was cold in Skardu too – far to the west along the same mountain range – colder than it should have been this early in the autumn. When I got back to town from Khapalu the grey murk that had swum along the hard ridge beyond the Indus cleared suddenly and there was new snow far down the mountainsides.
Skardu lay where the vast torment of mountains had drawn breath for a moment and let the great grey river stretch itself into a plain of grey gravel. But it was still a place hemmed in: there was no way out of here that didn’t mean hundreds of miles of travel along crack-platforms of broken road carved from sheer cliff faces above churning water.
I needed a visa extension.
The Deputy Commissioner’s office was on a grey hillside on the eastern edge of Skardu. From the scrappy gravel yard outside you could see the slanting sprawl of the town in its bed of thinning polar trees, and the grey gouge of the floodplain beyond.
The Deputy Commissioner had just taken over the post. He saw me personally in his carpeted office. There was an embossed coat of arms and a pastel-coloured portrait of Jinnah – drawn-cheeked and cold-eyed – on the wall behind his yellow desk.
The Deputy Commissioner was a big man with a trimmed black beard and a warm, deep voice. He called for tea and cream-filled biscuits, and he shook my hand and welcomed me. And of course he would allow me to have an extension on my visa, for as many days as I wanted – a month? Only a month? Why not make it three months, just to be sure?
We sat. He smiled and folded his huge hands on his ample belly.
"Please," he said, "have another biscuit."
"How long will it take to process the extension?" I asked.
"One, maybe two hours only. This is not a problem. More tea?"
"I’d really like to start the process now, if possible."
"Yes of course, but unfortunately, today it is not possible. The passport officer is on tour."
It was Friday; the passport officer would not be back until Monday. I caught a bus to Khapalu. There was a thin, freezing rain falling from the high grey mountains and I spent two evenings drinking green tea by flickering lamp light with huge Pashtuns from Waziristan who were in Baltistan selling socks and ladies’ underwear.
I was back in Skardu on Monday morning, and I went back to the Deputy Commissioner’s office under the new blue sky with the new white snow showing on the razor ridges around the town.
It was a long, low, one-storey building of those old familiar rooms of rough desks and bundled papers. A kindly man who worked in the ID card office gave me a place to sit, and a cup of tea. He had a neat moustache and hair that was sandy-coloured at the edges. He liked cricket. Village men in ragged turbans and threadbare shalwar kamises hobbled in and handed over forms for counter-signature in triplicate, then shuffled out again, along the corridor to some other chamber.
It was more than an hour before the Passport Officer arrived. He was an ancient man with a long, wiry tangle of grey beard and a dirty black and white keffiyah around his neck. His hands trembled and his eyes were cloudy and buried deep inside his old head. But he smiled warmly and shook my hand.
He riffled through various collapsing files, turning over torn and creased sheets of inky paper before he found the list he was looking for. For British citizens it seemed, there was no fee to extend a visa. He smiled proudly; the man with the neat moustache shook my hand.
"Congratulations!" he said; "This process is free for you! You are a very lucky man!"
The fee structure had no obvious logic too it. Together we went through the list of nationalities – and every country in the world was represented. The highest fee was, bizarrely, for citizens of Peru. For them it would cost several hundred dollars to extend a visa.
The man with the moustache laughed. "You are very lucky you are not from Peru," he said.
But there was another problem. There was a particular rubber stamp essential for the extension process, but it was not available. With the shuffling, trembling old Passport Officer, who flicked the ragged end of his keffiyah once around his neck as we crossed the yard, I went back to the Deputy Commissioner’s office.
He was again seated behind his desk under the portrait of Jinnah, hands folded on his belly, drinking tea. The requisite stamp was, perhaps, in the drawer of his desk, but he was new in the job. His predecessor had taken a new post in Gilgit, and, unhappily, he had taken his keys with him. The Deputy Commissioner rattled the drawer to prove that it was locked.
"This desk is government property," he said; "it cannot be damaged. It is highly irregular that he should have taken the key…"
There is sometimes – often – a bribe to be paid in these processes, but something in the faint air of grand bemusement that came from the Deputy Commissioner like a low electronic hum as he sipped his tea made me sure that this was not it.
We went back to the other office. The old Passport Officer looked utterly miserable and stood, shrugged, trembling. What could he do? He felt that he had let me down. He and the man with the moustache discussed, debated, and finally with a moment of grinning brightness came to a solution: the Passport Officer would go to the bazaar; he would have a new rubber stamp made. In the meantime, I must drink more tea.
I sat; I drank. More and more obsequious village people crept through the doorway, humbly proffering their tatty forms for signatures. Bundles of loose sheets were leafed through, shuffled and dropped into unmarked draws or slipped into unmarked files and piled onto sagging shelves. More tea was drunk.
I had been in other offices like this all over the Subcontinent, waiting for inner line permits or visa extensions.
Niggling, wriggling guilt seethed in my belly: we, the British, did this awful damage, created this absurd bureaucracy of forms in two or more incompatible languages, of signatures and countersignatures and counter-countersignatures and carbon paper and passport photos in quadruplicate. We blighted them with this mess that required an army of people with adequate but uninspiring education, and into which every new idea, new project, new plan disappears, bundled with the carbon copy and one signature space still unfilled in a damp grey folder on an unmarked shelf above a rusty filing cabinet and a broken typewriter.
It was two hours before the Passport Officer shuffled back, grinning and holding the new stamp proudly above his head with a trembling fist. It said: "Muhammad Shafa. Deputy Commissioner. Skardu." The letters were not quite lined up properly.
We went to the Passport Officer’s own office – a damp, bare room at the end of a corridor with flaking walls. Two dozen people were waiting outside for him, clutching forms and letters. He tutted and waved them aside as they crowded into the room after him. All of them – and I – watched him expectantly, agonised, as he shuffled with the mess of papers on his desk, losing the form, losing the stamp, the inkpad, my passport in the chaos. Then, on a sudden whim, he decided to go slowly through the great wad of past visa extension forms – dating back years to the happier days when some foreign tourists actually came to Skardu – numbering each page with a scratchy old fountain pen. There was an audible groan from the watching men with their forms, all of which needed nothing more than his signature.
Eventually he was done, and he pressed the smudgy, inky stamps into my passport, then hobbled outside again, back towards the Deputy Commissioner’s personal office. The DC was about to leave to drive to Gilgit – perhaps in pursuit of the lost keys. He took my passport and signed the extension on the bonnet of his jeep, shook my hand warmly and drove away into the bright midday.
We went back to the main building. Finally, with the waiting supplicants still watching desperately, the Passport Officer took from a cupboard a huge stamp embossed with the name of the Government of the Northern Areas of Pakistan, and using his whole meagre bodyweight to press it down onto the page of my passport, he provided the final validation for the extension.
A sigh of relief went around the crowd. He handed my passport back to me with a smile of such warmth and triumph that I wanted to cry.
"Done!" he said, his hands trembling. And there was not a single rupee to pay for it. It had taken only four hours.
I went back out into the pale sunlight and walked along the rough grey road into town. There were dust devils scurrying over the gravel-plains beside the Indus.
***
I woke in Saigon the morning after I arrived from Dalat with a headache. My bedroom was on the first floor, and I peered down onto the noisy street from the narrow window. There were motorbikes and bicycles clattering along the pavement edges and a raw cacophony of engine noise and horns. The sky was the colour of mud; it would rain again later.
Across the street, outside a café with bamboo tables, a gaggle of European backpackers were waiting for the minibus to take them on their organised tour of the Mekong Delta. They wore shorts and faded vest-tops. Their legs looked absurdly long and the young men amongst them stood – or sprawled – with their arms folded, as if there was something vital and difficult that they would shortly be called upon to do.
I showered and tried to wash the heavy, greasy sleep out of my eyes, then I did the most sensible thing I had done since arriving in Vietnam: I went to the little travel agent across the street from the guesthouse. A pretty girl with an American accent and glasses and a small mole under her right eye took my passport and photo and twenty crisp dollars. She gave me a little receipt on pale green paper and told me that my Cambodian visa would be processed by tea time; I could collect my passport from her then, or if I liked she would deliver it to the reception of my guesthouse – and, if I was interested, there was a minibus tour to the Cu Chi tunnels leaving shortly.
I smiled and thanked her, but declined, and went back out to the street. I had absolutely nothing to do. I spent the day drinking cold beer and eating banana pancakes in a café with bamboo tables…
© Tim Hannigan 2008
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