Always a little further...

The Feeling

2008-07-30T15:34:00.000-07:00

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

Travelling Without Moving

2008-07-22T04:17:00.000-07:00

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

Bad Things Happened Here

2008-07-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

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

Bureaucracy

2008-07-05T07:48:00.000-07:00

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

Grief

2008-06-15T12:35:00.000-07:00

The sky was heavy and yellow over Damascus on the Tenth of Moharram, and I took a taxi to the tomb of the Prophet’s granddaughter. We passed through heavy-packed streets in the poorer quarters on the southern edge of the city. There was bad building work and loose wire, and I saw the head and neck of a slaughtered camel hanging outside a butcher’s stall, eyes dust-touched, fleshy lips pointed at the pavement. It still had its woolly winter coat.

The mausoleum of Sayidda Zeinab was in a grubby Shia suburb of dust and yellow concrete. The streets were already crowded and the great golden swelling of the dome rose above the compound walls against the heavy sky. All along the pavements there were stalls, full of prayer beads in long spaghetti-strings and topple-piles of skullcaps and inlay-spined books of prayer and theology. And there were posters of the Shia Imams, together like a multiplicity of stern Jesuses with the blinding white blank of the Hidden Imam at the centre, or singly: Ali and Hussein, green-turbaned and black-bearded and fiery-eyed.
Lean youths in jeans and black tee shirts and women in black head-scarves and little children in their best clothes and shabby men in old jackets and here and there a tall figure in robes and turban: they surged along the grubby street and around the corner and into the gate of the compound, past the soldiers who searched bags and pockets as best they could. I went with them, though the gateway, and inside.

The tomb, under its great dome, lay ahead, people clamouring up the steps, tripping over discarded shoes. It was flanked with cupped arches of blue-green tile-work and a band of golden calligraphy framed the roofline – "Peace upon Zeinab the Great" it said. The courtyard was full of people and there was a smell of sweat and hot breath, like at protest marches and outdoor concerts. From the space behind the tomb I could hear the slow-rising pulse of voices and a hollow-marching sound: thump, thump, thump.
A dozen young men, dressed in black, bands of green tied tight around their brows, formed a ragged band – mourners, like everyone here, for the Imam Hussein, killed at Kerbala – with his baby son in his arms, they say.
They were led by a man with curly brown hair, rising in knots above his head band. His face was blotched red with furious grief and his eyes brimmed with tears. His voice cracked as he chanted – "Oh Martyr! Oh Hussein!" And with each chant he brought his bolted fist high up above his head and swung it down with mighty force onto his own chest. The others matched the beats, fists pounding in time against breasts. Thwump! Oh Martyr! Thwump! Oh Hussein! They swung their bodies together in time so that it was like a dance. Their eyes were red and the brows gleamed with sweat.
A small boy stood in the crowd nearby. He was wearing a ragged woollen jumper and up above his head he held a crudely painted placard, marked with two words in white on black and splattered red: Martyr; Hussein. He stood on tiptoes, straining to hold the sign as high as he could. His mouth was tight with determination.
Thwump, thwump, twhump!
There was a roar from the courtyard gate and a new mob of young flagellants came surging through under waving green banners. They swept past the gate of the tomb in a seething knot beating out a mighty rhythm on their own flesh.
I stepped back a little, out of the way, onto the raised platform at the edge of the compound. A girl with pale brown eyes in a black headscarf smiled at me. I nodded back, a little startled.
"Where are you from?" she asked – and I was still more startled by her accent.
"From England," I said, "like you…"
She smiled again; she was very beautiful. She was born in Iraq but she had been brought up in London. She was training to be a doctor. "Where exactly are you from?" she asked.
"From Cornwall."
"You don’t have a Cornish accent," she said.
"You don’t have a London accent," I said. Hers was crystal clear but without superior sharpness.
"I went to a good school," she said; "I suppose you did too."
"Hardly…"
The mourning youths surged past us on another circuit of the courtyard, fists pounding into flesh. Some of them were sobbing as they chanted.
"I must say," she said, "I’m surprised to see a… a…"
"Tourist?" I suggested.
"Yes! I’m surprised to see a tourist here."
"But you’re from England too."
"But I’m a… I’m a… this is my culture," she struggled, but smiled at the absurdity. "Actually this is the first time I’ve been to Ashura celebrations in a Muslim country. Of course, I would like to have been in Iraq, in my homeland…" she trailed off.
I told her I had wanted to see the Ashura parades in Pakistan, but that it was too dangerous there where the commemoration of ancient bloodshed all too often gave way to new sectarian atrocities.
She said that was sad. She was very beautiful.

They kept coming, all day, flowing into the confines of the tomb. I peered over shoulders and piled shoes and saw the golds and silvers and mosaics of the inner chamber, and the dozens of hands reaching out to touch the metalwork around the grave.
Outside the tomb courtyard there were rags and scraps of paper and plastic and spilt food underfoot, and the sky hung heavier above crooked television aerials and jagged rooflines. Taxis and minibuses and donkey carts were howling over cracked tarmac and there was an edge of frenzy on the air.
I met an acquaintance, a Swiss-German who had studied Arabic in Damascus and was serving an internship at the Swiss embassy. The courtyard was more crowded now and we were jostled through the gateway again, past the struggling soldiers.
There would be no sunset over the Lebanon Ranges tonight, but the light was fading, thickening to a murky grey. There were Iranians, and I remembered a little Persian – What is your name? Where are you from? America? No, not America.
When the light was all gone there were lamps around the courtyard and it shone back of the dome of the tomb, and in the corner, close to the gateway I saw men in pale shalwar kamises. They were chanting, but not like the youths of earlier: it was singing really, to the glorious heart-beat rhythms of Qawalli. Their faces shone in the lamplight, and they only slapped at their chests with loose palms. I went across quickly, unable to resist, and yes, they were from Pakistan, of course, and very quickly they were all around me smiling, and they pressed a chocolate bar and a carton a fruit juice on me and there was a tiny woman, all in black except her face, and she spoke immaculate English, and in a matter of minutes I had an address scribbled down and a very genuine offer of a place to stay in Karachi next time I came to Pakistan.
"But…" I began, and she smiled tenderly.
"Of course, I know you would not normally be coming to Karachi; it is a dangerous place. But you will be safe if you stay with us…"
I left them and picked through the seething crowds. The Swiss-German was speaking Arabic with a group of angry men. His face was lined and serious, and he was touching his mouth uncertainly with the ends of his fingers. The men had tense faces and furious eyes.
He glanced at me as I came up. "Ah."
The angry-eyed men looked at and asked something. I knew enough to understand the question: "England," I said.
His eyes flared and he tilted his head back and said, defiantly, "Iraq!"
One man was at the head of the group. He was broad-shouldered and he wore a black jacket that made him look broader. He spoke with angry passion, and raised his finger as he did so.
The Swiss-German made conciliatory noises.
"What are you talking about?" I asked.
He glanced at me, "They are talking about politics. Actually, I am not really comfortable with this conversation…" There were cracks of grief and anger in the voice of the speaking man, and the others clustered behind him, nodding furiously as he spoke.
He said something, then said it again, half-shouting, beating at his own chest. I didn’t need a translation: "I am a Shia!" he was saying; "I am a Shia and even I am saying this!"
The Swiss-German mumbled and touched his mouth. "He is saying that with Saddam gone Iraq is destroyed; he is saying that even though he hated Saddam, everyone knows that only Saddam could keep Iraq peaceful. He says Iraq needs a strong hand and the Americans are like children; he is saying ‘what have they done, what have they done’. He is very angry. Actually this is not really a political idea that I subscribe too. I think we should go." He started to move away.
I lingered for a moment.
"Peace upon you," I said, and held out my hand.
The man stared at me for the briefest of moments, then shook it firmly and warmly, his eyes blazing. "Thank you!" he said, in English, "thank you!"

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Other People's Journeys IV

2008-06-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

His name was James. He lived in the little room at the back of the cabin. He came from Seattle and he had been on the North Shore of Oahu for three months.

There was always a warm after-the-rain smell on the North Shore, green and fresh and muddy, and a little sweet. We had arrived in the night and came up from the South Shore by taxi. It dropped us in the wrong place and we set out on foot, struggling along the Kam Highway in the sticky darkness, surfboards over our shoulders, overloaded packs on our backs. We could hear the sound of the waves slapping onto the sand. We were both just eighteen, Simon and I.

The North Shore was empty and deserted and there were no cars on the road and the windows of the houses in the palm trees were blank. We sweated, and staggered under the weight of our baggage, and didn’t really know where we were going. The air was thick and warm and damp, and scented.
There was a car parked in the sandy lot in front of Sunset, and a Californian woman sitting in the driver’s seat called us over. She had stringy blonde hair and a thin, lined face. She asked where we were going. We said we didn’t know. That same morning we had ridden across a grey January London on the Piccadilly Line. She gave us a lift to a hostel at the other end of the Shore.
Her car smelt of rust and old plastic and I sat on the back seat among our jumbled baggage while her pit-bull terrier growled at me.
“He’s friendly,” she said, as she swung the car back into the road, “when he gets to know you.”
I saw the half-empty whisky bottle in its brown paper bag wedged into the space between her seat and the handbrake, but not until we were already barrelling along the coast.
She had been on this hot, bright stretch of coast for ten years, she said; before that she had drifted.
“It takes a long time to find out where you belong.”
She dropped us outside the hostel. It was all shut up for the night and we slept in the garden under the bougainvillea in a thin, warm rain.

Later we moved into the cabin and James lived in the little room in the back. James came from Seattle. He had a thin, freckled face and cropped hair.
The cabin was small with graffiti on the back of the door and sand between the white tiles of the floor. The stove didn’t work properly but there were palm trees to shade it outside, and a little veranda, and from the doorway you could see the swell rolling onto the yellow rocks at Shark’s Cove.

James didn’t surf. He came from Seattle. Someone had given him an old board, but the North Shore was hardly the place to learn. People were always giving James things when they left. He had already seen a lot of surfers come and go. Most stayed for a few weeks, or for a month; most of them gave him something when they left.
“I like it here,” he said. James didn’t say very much, but you could see the marks on his thin, freckled arms where he had cut himself. There were many scars, but they were old now, healed over and shiny white.

The North Shore was a strange place, a long garden suburb without a town. The Kam Highway, just two lanes of cracked blue tarmac, ran the length of the coast, and the strip of yellow sand lay just beyond it, stretching two miles between Sunset and Waimea. I bought an old bicycle with flat tires and no brakes and road it along the flat strip of the coast between palm trees and banana plants.
From the beach you could look west and see the long, steep ridge of the Ko’olau Range, running out in a falling dragon’s back to where it dropped away to the ocean at Ka’ena Point. In the morning it looked clear and green, and you could see the ribbing on its flanks; in the evening it was a dark purple blank.

James had a job. He worked for a surf-shop owner, not in the shop, but in a warehouse where the stock arrived from the mainland. The warehouse was on the other coast, in Honolulu. James caught the bus every day from the North Shore, down through the pineapple fields, through the grubby grid of strip bars and pawn shops at Wahiawa where it was always cloudy, on through Pearl city, and past the airport where you could catch a glimpse of the stretch of white water at Pearl Harbour. It took an hour.
“Why don’t you find somewhere to live in Honolulu?” I asked; “It would be much cheaper down there.”
“I like it here,” James said.

On the days when the hot afternoon trade winds turned in on the island and spoilt the surf we would go body-surfing at Keiki or Waimea. James would come with us. It felt so good to swim through the warm, clear water, pushing yourself down against the sand as surging shorebreak waves broke over you and coming up in a blinding star of white light.
James was clumsy and uncertain in the surf, letting the waves slap him about, not knowing how to move with the water. But he never stopped smiling when we went body-surfing.
He was only seventeen. I was astonished when he told me; I thought he was older than I was. He had run away from home.
“Aren’t your parents worried about you?” I said.
“I don’t think my dad even knows,” he said. “I’ve told my mum now, though; she knows where I am.”

James ate nothing but instant noodles, because they were cheap. Then I told him that rice was cheaper than noodles; a big bag of rice would feed you for weeks. He went to the supermarket and bought rice the next day. He wrote terrible poems and drew beautiful sketches. He told me that if you drink a whole bottle of cough medicine you get wild hallucinations.

The North Shore was just a narrow plateau between the beach and the surf and the steep bank of the Waianae Range. One day I walked inland, up into the hills and got lost in the tangle of high forest. There were the footprints of wild pigs on the black mud of the trails, and the trees were full of birds.

We stayed for a month. Our flight home was in the morning. The surf was small the night before, but I stayed out at Log Cabins until I was the only one left in the water. The sun went down behind Ka’ena Point and it was pink and red and orange all along the horizon and the mountains were blue. I stayed in the water until I could barely see my hand in front of my face, and very suddenly I got scared of sharks and floundered ashore and jogged up the beach in the warm-soft dusk.

In the morning before we caught the bus I gave James my broken bicycle; Simon gave him a pair of swimming fins he could use when he went body-surfing.
A few days before we left a package had arrived for James. The address was written in clumsy, childish handwriting. It had a Seattle post mark.
There was no letter inside, just a sketchpad. His mother had sent it to him. She had written on the front: There must be so many beautiful things to draw out there. I am so glad that you’ve found happiness. I love you.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

What am I doing here?

2008-05-26T01:02:00.000-07:00

The whole world was blue in the morning when I stepped out of my little cabin and lent over the white railing. The ship was not moving and there was a cold smell of rust and oil and condensation and salt, and beyond that the rot-dark smell of the land: mud and fetid canal-cuts and buffalos and dried fish. But the land was out of sight. Everything was out of sight. There was no sky and no water and no horizon; just pale, damp blue nothing. Every few moments the haze-black outline of a little arch-prowed fishing boat would drift into view out of the murk, figures standing straight-backed and wrapped in blankets on the deck, before floating silently away again into nothing.

The ship had slithered out of Barisal at ten o clock the night before. I ate yellow biriyani with cardamom and shreds of chicken in a smoky brown room on the dock, then picked past dented oil barrels and up the greasy gangplank and the ship eased off into the velvet darkness of the delta, creeping along mud channels, sweeping the gloom with a flickering searchlight.
The cabin was little bigger than a cupboard, with a floor of rust and a dangling light-bulb, and brown linoleum tacked to the walls. The bed was barely two feet wide, and when I lay down I could hear the cockroaches scratching between the boards. I turned the light on and crushed five or six of them with my boots – they were the size of my thumb – but more always scurried out from under the sleeping platform, so I covered my face with the sheets and slept a heavy, leaden sleep.
And in the morning it was all blue.

This was a strange world: the frayed end of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Delta where the land loses itself in one direction and the sea loses itself in another, and there is a hundred miles where neither holds sway. A strange world, in a strange country of mud and creeping mist and boats and rickshaws and water-hyacinth and bright white darkness.
I slept again for an hour, and when I came out of the cabin onto the narrow green gangway a liquid yellow sunlight was seeping down through an air like milk in water. A ghosted stand of tall palms and a rotten bank of mud-crab shoreline had risen, very close, and the ship was turning in a creamy circle, and we slipped away with a slow-beating engine into the pale morning. The water was like grey smoked-glass and the black-tar fishing boats swam in and out of view.
The ship had a rust-and-soot-streaked yellow funnel, and a wheelhouse of dirty white with no glass in the windows, and we were due to reach the great smoke-and-grit port of Chittagong, on the eastern edge of the mud-delta where the land turns south and runs on, past Cox’s Bazaar to Burma, before sunset.

The blue of the dawn paled to a hot yellow, and hollowed to an aching white noon, and we rolled on under a great blank sky over empty brown water and there were no more fishing boats until we swung to a mooring in the running tide off Hattia Island at midday.
The shore was a hundred metres away, and it looked like all the shores in Bangladesh: smudged with a yellow haze, a long, level bank of mud with a long, low wall of palms further back behind it. There were hundreds of people ranked along the water’s edge, watching the ship, and dozens of the high-prowed black boats were cutting across the current towards us with clattering engines and crowded decks. They brought chickens on board to sell in the markets in Chittagong. They were packed into great wicker baskets like old-fashioned lobster pots and they swung them up over the sides and stacked them on deck and the ship smelt like a farmyard drifting in the mud-salt of the delta.
When we pulled away from Hattia the water was full of swirling brown eddies, and the deck was crowded with chicken farmers and clucking baskets, and the sky was yellow and there were no more boats and no more land.
I ate boiled rice and boiled vegetables and boiled river fish at a crooked table, nailed to the floor in a space under the bridge, and the light fell in through the rust-edged doorway in white sheets and the cook asked me if I was married.

The afternoon stretched and lengthened and softened behind us and the water was brown and there was no land. People, many of them, dozed among the oily ropes and the chicken baskets on the deck, limbs thin and angular under cotton lunghis and grubby white vests. Below deck in the third class dormitory it was noisy with the roar of the engine and the crying of babies and there was a smell of diesel and vomit and sweat, and I went back on deck thinking, a little absurdly, and a little nervously, of the pilgrim ship in Lord Jim.
I lent over the railing watching the water surging past. It was a silky opaque brown; you could see nothing through it. There was something about it that seemed shallow; it lacked the great pulsing confidence of the open ocean, and I wondered just how deep it was. And as I did I felt the whole ship rise a little, rear up a little, the voice of the engine changed to a shriller, straining pitch, and we stopped moving. Then the engine went astern and the water churned around us and we eased down lower, settled, and were hard aground. The water of the Bay of Bengal was very shallow indeed.

The haze had cleared enough to show that the nearest land was somewhere beyond the lost horizon, and it had been hours since the last fishing boat slid past. The dozing passengers on the deck shifted a little; a couple stood and peered over the sides.
I went up rusting flights of steps to the bridge. Crewmen in white vests were peering into the yellow distance in all directions; one of them, a short man with a thick grey beard, grinned at me a little nervously.
Some of the other passengers had clambered up the stairs too; the crewmen were ignoring them. There was a schoolteacher with a white skullcap and a young man from Khulna who was travelling with his sister and her five-year-old son. They both spoke English. The schoolteacher was angry; the man from Khulna was frightened.
The schoolteacher tilted his head back and clicked his teeth. “This country!” he said. “You know, the captain, he told me, he works for the shipping company, but they provide nothing, no equipment. You know this thing, what do you call this?”
“Binoculars.”
“Yes; he must buy his own binoculars with his own money. They have no navigation equipment so they don’t know where they are, and the radio is broken.” He clicked his teeth again.
“We are lost?” asked the young man from Khulna, nervously.
“Yes,” said the teacher, “and radio is broken.”
The young man shot me an agonised look; I smiled, sympathetically, and not wanting to be infected with his nervousness, I went back to my cabin.

Two hours later the sun was going down behind us and the water was draining on all sides, turning to a smooth blue-grey in the failing light. The warmth of the day was evaporating swiftly; it was January, and at night cold air moved down the delta from the north and you needed a blanket. We should have been in Chittagong by now. The lean chicken farmers were stalking around the deck, shivering and hugging themselves and peering into the wicker baskets.
Up at the bridge the crewmen were still peering in all directions. The schoolteacher was still angry.
“Every year we are having so many transportation accidents in this country,” he said; “every year so many boats are sinking, so many people are dying, and our government is doing nothing to improve safety standards.”
The young man from Khulna was increasingly frantic. “Have you seen the lifeboat?” he asked. It was hanging in a cradle over the starboard side of the ship. At some point, docking clumsily perhaps, the ship had been rammed; something sharp had hit the lifeboat and it had been cleaved almost in half. They had never replaced it, not that it mattered anyway – it was twelve feet long; there were hundreds of people on board.
The sun went away and the strange blue light returned, and the water emptied around us still further, and the great banks of black mud appeared in the murky gloaming, and we were dry on vast, empty mudflats. This really was a world where neither land nor sea was in control.
I wandered on the deck. The chickens were clucking more feebly now, and the shivering farmers were peering angrily into the baskets. Every so often they would haul out a limp, damp carcass, shake it, flick its feet, then, when they were sure it was dead, fling it overboard.
Down below the smell of diesel and vomit was stronger and the babies were crying harder. It was already very cold.
The young man from Khulna found me on deck.
“These men are angry,” he said. “Their chickens are dying. We should be in Chittagong already so they can sell them, but they think they will all die in the night.”
We went to his cabin. His sister sat on the edge of her bed smiling politely; her little son was curled miserably under a coarse grey blanket.
They young man was on the edge of panic. “There is no water on this ship, and so many people. The radio is broken; the captain is lost, the lifeboat is broken. I don’t know what will happen to us.”
I did my best to reassure him. “Don’t worry,” I said; “after a few hours the tide will come in and then we’ll continue; it’s fine.” But I was not so sure. I had been counting the hours on my fingers and was certain we had gone aground before high water. If that was true we would never refloat.
He shook his head. “I spoke to the captain. He is proud so he tells me everything is fine, but I can see that he is very worried because he is lost and he doesn’t know where we are.”
“But it will be fine,” I said; “the ship isn’t sinking – it can’t sink! The water’s too shallow! If we just wait here nothing bad will happen to us.”
He pouted and looked at me from lowered eyes: “There is no drinking water on this ship.”

I left him and went outside, but his fear was infectious. It was dark now and there was a single yellow lamp burning outside the wheelhouse but the night around us was utterly blank and empty. There was nothing out there and we were adrift in a vast void of land-sea-mud. I had horrible visions of hundreds of people surging over the sides into a broken lifeboat in a running brown current, and screams, and the water full of mud and chicken feathers. Or perhaps of a long file of thin people, hungry and desperately thirsty, scrambling down the anchor chain when the tide was low and walking away across the clinging mud towards an invisible and imagined shoreline, and the mist coming down, and the tide coming in very, very fast, the way it does in river deltas.
There was a full bottle of water and a grey blanket in my cabin, but I thought of the crying babies down below deck. Every few minutes there was the sound of a soggy thwump as the scrawny carcass of another dead chicken was flung overboard, down onto the mud.

I went back to my cabin and sat on the edge of the narrow bed, watching the thumb-sized cockroaches scuttling over the rusty floor. Quite suddenly I felt ridiculous, and selfish, and hopelessly self-indulgent. What was I doing here? What had possessed me to come to this country, to travel to these places where peoples’ lives were hopelessly grim; where there were horrible diseases and the drinking water was filthy and where several times a year ferries loaded to the brim with passengers went down through the mud and the water hyacinth and hundreds of people drowned? What was I doing here, in the name of – in the name of what exactly? Experience? A good story to tell? It was self-indulgent and selfish – no, worse than that: it was obscene. How dare I! How dare I flippantly wander around these places, revelling in my own absurd ability to find pleasure in dangerous and uncomfortable modes of transport; in dirty lodgings and filthy food. How dare I flippantly snatch my exotic photographs and scribble my flowery little notes. It was entirely reprehensible. There was no lifeboat and no radio, and no land, and no water and the chickens were dying, and how long would it be before the babies started dying too?
I turned off the light and lay down and listened to the scurrying cockroaches. I wasn’t at all scared like the man from Khulna; I was just angry with myself. What am I doing here?

***

I woke long after midnight and the ship was moving. I stepped out of the cabin and we were rolling over a vast sea, and for once there was no haze or mist or cloud, and far out across dark sea I could see a long horizon, unmarked by ship or land, and the sky was a great star-smeared dome and the water around us looked very deep indeed. There was no one on deck and no light at the bridge and the night was silver-bright.
I went back to sleep, and when I woke again we were at anchor, surrounded by water, and the familiar heavy-blank Bengali darkness had returned and I almost wondered if the strange starlit interlude had been a dream.
I peered over the rail, but the night gave nothing back. The mist had come down again, and we were, I guessed, still lost, far out at sea. And then, in a moment of such strangeness that a little pulse of electricity passed down the length of my spine, a dog barked, somewhere very close at hand in the darkness. Then I heard the sound of a motorbike engine, and then the pre-dawn prayer-call, echoing from some village mosque on an invisible shoreline.

When it was light there was an intense mist all around us, so thick that if you stood in the middle of the ship near the bridge you could see neither the bow nor the stern. Crewmen stood, leaning from the rails calling into the murk, and voices called back, and small boats nosed out of the fog from the shore and brought passengers and cargo aboard. This was a scheduled stop; we were late, but we were no longer lost.

It was midday before the fog cleared, very suddenly, as if someone was pouring molten gold down onto the ship, brighter and brighter every second, and then suddenly a palm-lined shore, and black village houses formed like a photograph, almost close enough to touch, and very quickly the day had lost all its strangeness, and it was the usual yellow light and vast white sky and we steamed on.
The farmers were going through the baskets: not all the chickens had died.
The teacher and the man from Khulna joined me leaning over the rail as we came into Chittagong at the end of the afternoon.
The teacher grumbled. “We are late more than 24 hours,” he said.
The young man from Khulna seemed a little bashful, ashamed of his very obvious fear the night before.
There were huge freighters moored in the channels. They dwarfed our little ship as we swung to a berth on an oily dock and the farmers leapt overboard even before we had squeezed onto the old tires, and began heaving the baskets of chickens ashore. People surged down the narrow gangplank and I was borne along in the flow, along the quay and into a maelstrom of bicycle rickshaws, all bells and chimes and bright decorations.
I clambered into one and the driver strained at creaking peddles and we pulled through a chaos of streets and gusts of cooking smells hit me from the pavement kitchens: oil and fish and coriander and grilling meat and I was suddenly hungry. The road was yellow and the light was long, and by the time I reached the cheap hotel on an alleyway near a roaring market I had quite forgotten my troubled moment the night before, somewhere out in the darkness of the delta, and I knew exactly what I was doing here.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

The Big Country

2008-05-19T05:44:00.000-07:00

The land was flat and yellow and old and empty after the harvest, and the road was straight. It was hot and the light was harder than granite.
In Kadina almost nothing moved, and when it did it did so very, very slowly. It was a town given too much space: it had struggled to hold itself together. I walked along the hot, empty streets and felt the sun pressing on my back and very quickly tarmac gave way to gravel, and then to dirt, and then the roads faded away altogether. There were heat-cracked houses built of wood with flaking, bolted window shutters standing in patches of tall yellow weeds. There were no people though I saw one horse picking in an overgrown paddock of yellow dust. It had been fitted with a leather hood and its eyes were covered. But it heard me walking by and lifted its head, ears turning, and stood there, twitching and shivering in the yellow heat, blindly following my course along the gravel road.
Then the town gave way altogether. There were more of the one-storey warped-wood houses with cobweb porches, but the yellow scrub-weeds had grown so high around them that you knew they were abandoned. There was rusting farm machinery and old cars with the windows all broken out and then hard, thorny red-earth scrub, and then nothing. It was as if the town had, after an initial expansive moment, suddenly lost its nerve in the great emptiness of the country around it and retreated. The whole of Australia was like that.
I spent the night in a room above a pub. No one had slept there for a long time and the corridor was dusty.

In the morning I waited for the bus to Moonta. A thin youth with the sides of his head shaved and his lean, hollow-chested torso bare to the hard, hot morning light was drinking liquor from a bottle in a brown paper bag in the little square of coarse-cropped grass over the road.
There were two other men waiting for the bus. One of them had a fishing rod. Their conversation moved so slowly that after a moment I was struck by a strange kind of despair and had to stop listening.
"I catch loads of fish mate. First year I was in Wallaroo I didn’t eat nothin’ but fish."
"Nothin’ but fish…"
"No meat…"
"Didn’t like meat…"
"Nah, not that mate, didn’t need to…"
"Didn’t need to…"

In Moonta – another tiny, slow-moving place – the town had only managed to run in three directions; the fourth was bounded by the sea. I walked down to a hopeless jetty. The water was flat and blindingly bright, and utterly empty. It looked different from other seas: other seas ran busy with ships; other seas led somewhere. Even the great broad yawn of the Atlantic back home in Cornwall led, eventually, to America. This blank yellow sea led nowhere.
The light was so intense I wanted to cower beneath it.
There was a shop in a low building with white walls at the stump of the jetty. The light was a heavy murk inside and there was an aborigine girl in a pink and yellow dress behind the counter. I bought two bottles of water and started walking up the empty coastline.

***

In my grandmother’s house, on the bottom shelf of the bureau in the corner of the living room, there were three books. They were old hardback books with the covers wrapped in cellophane, full of photographs, black and white or pale-candy aquatinted. The books were about Australia.
I used to love leafing through them, sitting cross-legged on the green-white-patterned sofa. There were pictures huge coastlines, and grinning men with beards and big boots and broken hats sitting beside camp fires. There were shots of sheep under tall trees on empty plains, and country towns with broad streets and wood-boarded shop fronts where it was very obvious that nothing was moving. There was a picture too of a thin white woman cooking in a dark farmhouse kitchen, while a pair of heavy-boned aboriginal girls in limp and dirty dresses scrubbed pans in the shadows behind her. The serving girls had no shoes and the white woman was wearing incongruous high-heels. There were rabbit hunters and buckaroos, and strange, open landscapes where the contours of the land did not seem to conform to those of other places.
The books had belonged to my great-grandmother. My grandmother never left the country, but her mother – a working class widow in her mid-fifties – had taken a ten-pound passage on a steamship to Australia, and had worked on a sheep station in a place called the "outback".
There was too, in my grandmother’s loft, a brown cardboard box tied with coarse string. In it, brittle and hard and rough to touch, there were the pieces of coral that my great-grandmother had brought back from the Great Barrier Reef. Sometimes grandma would get it down from the loft and untie the string, and I would sit at the high table, carefully handling the bone-white pieces, fingering the sharp edges. Grandma said that her mother had told her that when it was alive in the water the coral was vividly coloured.
My great-grandmother was, by all accounts, a very difficult woman. But later, when she had come back from Australia and was running a guesthouse in Penzance with my grandmother, she would, every winter, take the train to Dover and catch the cross-channel ferry. She would disappear for a month, riding third class trains to strange places in Eastern Europe. This was fifty years ago. She wrote no diaries and the box of coral has been lost, though I still have the books. I would like to have met her.

***

I walked on along the top of the empty beach, sweating and bothered by flies. The tide was out and the sea was a long way away and there were five black swans out on the flats. They took off as I watched, beating low upwind and barely off the ground, then they banked suddenly and went away north with the breeze, very fast.
The wind was coming from behind me and here was a weather front going over in a long bank, arcing out to the horizons, into sea to my left, into flat land to my right. There was cloud chased out thin in the clear air ahead of it. It was hot. There were banks of dried weed all along the top of the beach, with dense, dry scrub behind it. At one point, miles from anywhere, a broken windmill, rusted and creaking, rose from the bush.
I stopped to take a photograph. The scratch of the shutter noise was both very loud and very tiny in the vast, emptiness around me, and I was suddenly unnerved and unsettled and even oppressed by it, and I understood that you could very easily panic for no reason in a place like this.
There is no country as foreign and strange and unsettling as Australia for someone from England.

At the head of the long, empty beach there was a low, scrubby point, cut across with sandy tracks. The hot yellow breeze was blowing harder behind me and the running water was wind-cut in blinding white to my left. Lying in one track was the dried-out carcass of a little Port Jackson shark. It was just a rigid piece of hide with the little spiky roller they have instead of teeth very white in the dry gape of its mouth.
The flies crowded around my face and the straps of my rucksack cut into my shoulders. I was a little higher above the sea now and I could see the great, empty scrubland running inland, and far ahead, flickering in pale haze, there were the grain silos at Wallaroo.
I walked on. The sun fell away over the empty sea but the land got no smaller. I came stumbling through the scrub in the dusk. Wallaroo was the same as Kadina, but this time I came in from the edge, not out from the centre, and there was rusting metal and abandoned huts in the yellow scrub, then a dirt track and then tarmac, still warm after sunset. There were houses but there were no people and nothing was moving. The flies were still following me. I spent the night in a room above a pub where no one had slept for a long time.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Haji Achmad

2008-05-08T03:36:00.001-07:00

In the village of Lanleki on the edge of a narrow, glass-blue bay on the island of Alor I met a man who had seen a dragon.
His name was Achmad. He was an old man, but he still walked tall and straight and upright. He was a Haji, a returned pilgrim, and the only man in the village to have left Indonesia and travelled to Mecca.
In a house of red brick and tin sheets he told me how the dragon had come scrabbling over the smooth-shining boulders at the edge of the surging water beside the path to the village. Its long body was blood-red, and it had the arched horns of a water buffalo. Seven lizard’s tongues flickered from its mouth and it snorted like a bull as it reached the path. Achmad – it was a long time ago, before he made the pilgrimage – turned and bolted through the trees. The aching yellow-blue of the bay glittered to his right and the forest was dark to the left. He heard the dragon snorting behind him as he ran. He pushed himself faster and faster, propelled by the gunshot-force of fear. The broken sunlight of the forest flashed in red-black starbursts before his eyes and his lungs screamed. He could hear the dragon’s long, scaly claws pounding at the packed earth of the path, closer and closer. Achmad ran faster, faster than he thought possible, and burst into the clearing of Lanleki and fell gasping to his knees, glancing fearfully back.
The dragon had halted in the green shade at the edge of the forest. It would not cross the threshold of the village. It swung its heavy head from side to side, snorted furiously, and turned back into the trees.

***

Islands. Islands shattered against the horizon and cast in sunken arcs. Islands where Asia began to drop off the map in a stuttering ellipsis. Islands of long white beaches and banks of dark lontar palms. Islands where half-naked figures paddled offshore in outrigger canoes across turquoise sandbars, and rusting tin mosques stood beneath the trees. Islands where volcanoes smoked against a pearl-lined sky as the old ferries moved slowly over the dull water and girls with black eyes watched me silently sitting in the dust-cut sunlight on the upper deck.
I had come a long way to reach this place, waking at dawn the day before on the deck of a rusting ship that slugged through the low swell of this lost sea. Great mountain-islands lay on the brink of the horizon, cast in primeval silhouettes. There were tiny fishing skiffs running with the morning breeze under blue triangles of sail. The other passengers, village people who chewed betel nut, stared at me.
I saw a whale breach close to the boat.

And then I came ashore in a place of mildewed tin mosques and rotting Makassar schooners, and then, a little while later, I met Haji Achmad, and Haji Achmad had seen a dragon.

***

The air was thick with the heat of the yellow afternoon as we sat in the small guest room of the village house. I was sweating, and the other people – the village elders – were blank-faced and silent. Only Achmad spoke, pushing his white Haji’s skullcap back on his head.
He spoke slowly and clearly, without emphasis, without excitement, but in great detail, sketching out the dragon’s movements – the low roll of its head, the shifting of its dog-lizard shoulders – and the shape of its horned, flared head with his long, weathered hands.
Outside the wind tugged at the lontar palms. I could hear the blue water hissing onto the hot sand of the white beach beyond the village. In the white blank of the doorway the children of Lanleki jostled in a cluster of bright eyes and nervous grins, straining to get a look at me.

Haji Achmad had finished speaking. His face was thin and lined and his cheeks were hollow below sharp cheekbones. He sat with his hands dropped loose in his lap now that he had no further need of them to trace out the lines of his story. He nodded very gently to indicate that he had no more to tell.
The other people in the room sat limply, silently. There was no reaction to the tale of the dragon; it was so well known in Lanleki that it no longer had impact.
The children were still jostling, staring wide-eyed and astonished at me.

“Haji Achmad,” I began, uncertainly, strangling my words a little; “Haji Achmad you have made the pilgrimage…”
“I have,” he said.
“Haji Achmad, you have been to Mecca, to Saudi Arabia…”
“I have.”
“You have been on an aeroplane, Haji Achmad.”
He nodded, gently, blankly, passively.
The long yellow wind ran through the high heads of the lontars and the swell sizzled on the beach. I could hear chickens and distant voices in the forest. The light came in pale and bleached through the open doorway. I mopped my brow.
“Haji Achmad…” I paused, then started again: “But, Haji Achmad, you have seen a dragon…”
He nodded again, passively and without emotion. “I have.”

© Tim Hannigan 2008

2008-05-08T03:36:00.000-07:00

The Place at the End of the World II

2008-04-04T10:51:00.000-07:00

We drove out of Sumbawa Besar in the hard morning light. The road ran close to the coast through Balinese transmigrant villages with concrete temples. Dark hills showed to the south, and sometimes the land gave way grudgingly to mud and mangroves on the right. There were dogs and chickens and dirty children at the roadside, and the sunlight shone back from the steel domes of the village mosques in blinding stars.

Sumbawa was poorer and dirtier and emptier than Bali or Lombok. We had left Bali the morning before, driven our little jeep, loaded with surfboards, along the howling main road of Lombok, Rinjani away to the north. We had to wait two hours for the ferry in the yellow-wretched heat among the flies at Labuan Lombok. The channel here looked almost narrow enough to swim, but we were passing beyond the reach of heavy inter-island traffic: at the next crossing, at the far end of Sumbawa, there was only one ferry a day.

We had come to Sumbawa Besar, a township of failed imagination, after dark. The room we shared – three of us – had flaking walls and many mosquitoes, and in the morning we drove back to the west then turned south at a filthy junction village of broken buses and bruised vegetables called Alas. Ahead the road ran towards the dark, broken hills.

The only guidebook we had was five years out of date. The one line it gave to Maluk, the place to which we were going, was quite open in its admission that the author had never been there. It spoke only of a rumoured beach and the vague possibility of staying with a village headman. We already knew that things had changed a little since then: two months earlier, still in the sodden-rot of the rains, we had met a monumentally broad-shouldered Australian with a face rotted by beer and sunshine. He was a surfer of sorts, and a drunk, and he claimed his wife was a Muslim, and talked shamelessly of his penchant for whores. He had spoken of Maluk with a degree of fondness, and mentioned something about mining.
But on the map the road through the dark hills still faded south of here, breaking down into a dotted line as it bent around the western haunch of Sumbawa’s crippled form before fading completely into the empty mosquito coast. The last places marked were tiny dots: Maluk and Sekongkang.

The road was not good. It shone yellow in the sunlight, and was fractured at the edges, but there was no other traffic as we lurched over the potholes. The great peak on Lombok looked very close to the right, but it was fading into purple cloud now and the light was paling, flattening. The road deteriorated quickly, and it rose through a bank of damp, thickset hills, then dropped and ran beside an overgrown lake. I could see the clouds of mosquitoes pulsing above the shining gaps in the water hyacinth. There was an air of sickness about the place.

Beyond the lake, Taliwang was scarcely a town; a few lost streets on a spread of level ground with the dark hills rising inland, almost without people. Beyond Taliwang there were no more houses. A few diseased dogs lingered in the bushes and watched the jeep with slow, mournful eyes. The potholes became deeper, and the trees and bushes formed a thick tangle at the verges, sending creepers fingering across the tarmac. The forest was beginning to take the road back, rip it to pieces and consume it.

I remember that we did not speak much as we drove, and wondered perhaps what we would find ahead of us, having only the reports of a drunk Australian and an out-of-date guidebook, and the very clear knowledge that surf-charter boats from Bali came and anchored offshore along this coastline.

There was a final bank of hills before Maluk. The sky had dropped lower and greyer now and we could no longer see Rinjani or the sea and to the left the green-backed ridges were blank and empty and Bali and pizza and beer and pasta and nightclubs and other tourists seemed far more than a day’s drive away.

And then, quite suddenly the forest ended and we passed a great set of gates and a road of black-smooth tarmac blazing away into the hills, and then on the right, great sheds and steel towers and taut, barb-topped fences, and heavy industry on a crook-cupped blue bay and we came to Maluk. On the rattle-trap mainstreet there was a crooked plastic sign pointing to a bank and an ATM, and there were frayed-cloth banners flapping outside Javanese warungs all the length of the street.

It was a town. No slow-yellow place of sick dogs like Taliwang; Maluk had hustled itself very rapidly into existence. They hadn’t even bothered to make sure that the sign for the ATM was straight; they just forced it in and it was there, coughing out money in this cleared space of concrete and tin, a long way from anywhere with the dark, empty hills behind. Except they weren’t that empty: they were full of gold and copper.

We stayed in a plain little room behind a bar on a side street. The bar was run by a drunk Kiwi. The bar had Guinness on tap and a huge television bolted to the ceiling.
Past the bar the track gave way to sand and there was a blinding bay. We wandered along it squinting and sweating and still not really speaking. The surf was very, very small. We went back to the bar. It was dark inside and the light came in from the hot, fly-filled outside in white sheets.
There was a white man in grey shorts sitting on one of the high stools drinking beer and watching MTV. None of this seemed quite real. But he told us that there were around a hundred of them – a hundred foreigners – living here in this half-real place. I complained about the condition of the road from Sumbawa Besar.
“Wouldn’t know mate; we come in by seaplane,” he said. He was a mine engineer. He had flown in from leave on Bali that morning.

We went out and drove a little way beyond the town. There were white buildings behind high concrete walls, and somewhere east of us, where the hills rose again, thick and green and empty, we saw the strip of smooth tarmac we had passed earlier, bending some private course into the forest. A huge metallic-blue pick-up truck roared past us. We glimpsed a shaven-headed white man in sunglasses behind the wheel.

At night the dirty main street was full of people from Java and our room was full of mosquitoes and we still felt a long, long way from Bali.

We went, a little nervously, into the bar, and sat together, feeling like the most lost of lost tourists. On the walls there were photographs of huge white men with guns and sunglasses, and the carcasses of forest pigs they had shot in the hills near here, or on white boats with the blunt-headed reef fish they had caught.
A dozen of these men were drinking noisily beneath the television. They seemed bigger than normal people. At the other end of the bar was an oily knot of dark-eyed whores. They had hard, down-turned mouths.
One of the men lurched over to us and thumped a pair of large hands onto the table.
“You Pommies?”
We nodded, like shy children.
“You surfers?”
We nodded again, feeling a long way from Bali. I wondered what had happened to the village headman who you might have been able to stay with five years earlier.

The next day we drove south, looking for waves. The road was potholed and broken, as it had been the day before. Again, to the east, we caught glimpses of the strip of smooth tarmac, cleared from the forest, running to somewhere locked and hidden. There were more white buildings behind high walls, and in other places shells of broken concrete people had built in moments of intense optimism, then abandoned without completion. Everything about the place felt broken.
We came to a hot white beach with mediocre waves, and stood, squinting and sweating again. On the map this was the end of the line, but we could see than someone had pushed the road on a little further, over one more high headland, so we followed it. At the top of the rise we saw that this truly was where the road ended. From here a bony, empty coastline, scoured by wind-cut waves ran on and on. It was backed by those empty green hills and that sickness-forest. There were no villages, nothing.
But before that, at the bottom of the hill, there was one more building. We drove down to it, and stood beside the jeep, not saying anything, just looking at it. It was framed by green-forested hills and empty coast where there weren’t even any fishermen. It had a lawn of trimmed grass and a miniature golf course. There was a sign above the open veranda. It said “Club Tropical”. There was an open-fronted bar under a pair of huge ceiling fans. A lone white man was sitting at it, drinking. He looked bigger than normal people.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Other Peoples’ Journeys III

2008-03-24T17:30:00.000-07:00

His name was Joseph. He had deep red hair and lines on his cheeks. He moved in that edgy way of all small, thin men who are ready to fight. He was an Iraqi with British citizenship.
The share-taxi sped north out of Amman in a grey-cold morning, out past the last of the off-white blocks of concrete on the strange hills of the city and into a stony, winter desert. The road to Syria was broad and straight and Joseph and I sat side by side on the back seat, hemmed in on either side by petty Jordanian businessmen in polyester shirts and nylon trousers.

Joseph was going to Baghdad. He had flown in from London the night before. The cheapest flights were to Amman. Now he was travelling north to Damascus. He would stop there for a couple of days, then travel east through the dry-dust cold of grey grit and checkpoints to Iraq.
“How is it in Baghdad now?” I asked. It was the beginning of 2005.
“Ah, my friend, things are so good now,” he said.
This was not what he was supposed to say. “Really? When was the last time you went there?”
“I was there last year for three weeks, and again the year before that. That was the first time for ten years. I am happy that I can go back there now.”

Joseph lived in London. “I work for a cleaning company, but I am not a cleaner; that is important. I am in the sales department.”
I asked how long he had been in London.
“I have been there for 12 years, my friend. I am a British citizen.”
“Why did you leave Iraq?”
“Why?” incredulous. “Why do you think? It is impossible to live with Saddam. I want the Americans to kill him very slowly so he feels a lot of pain.”
“If he’s going to be executed don’t you think it would be better if the Iraqi government did it?”
“No. The Iraqis are still scared of him; they will probably let him go. The Americans caught him so it is their right to kill him. I will be very happy on that day my friend.”
We were close to the border now, and Damascus was marked on the road signs.
“After you left you never went back to Iraq until after the war?”
“How can I go back with Saddam there? It is impossible.”
I had only ever heard good about the Iraq war from the kind of people who read the very worst kind of British newspapers. But Joseph, though he was a British citizen, was also an Iraqi.
“But aren’t things worse now? Before the war there was water and electricity and education and healthcare. That’s all gone now. And there are extremists now, al Qaeda.”
“Listen my friend,” said Joseph, “this is all worth it. What good is water and medicine if you cannot live? I cannot live with Saddam. We will have water and electricity again soon and I am not worried about al Qaeda; the Americans will kill them.”
“But what about all the civilians who’ve died?”
“And what about all the civilians Saddam killed? You know, I live in London, and it makes me angry when I see all these people, all these British and American people, people like you – I’m sorry,” he gently touched my arm, “at their protest with their flags and signs saying no to the war. I want to tell them try to live in Iraq with Saddam. You should be proud of your government.”
“I’m not.”
“You should be.”

At the border there were cracked concrete barriers across the road and the smiling, jovial portraits of Jordan’s boy-faced king with his beautiful wife and young children were replaced by sour-faced pictures of Bashar al-Assad. He wore sharp-cut suits, a little too loose for his long frame. He was so lean and long that they seemed to have made the billboards taller to fit his portrait. He looked down coldly at the traffic with his strange, weak-chinned face. His eyes were the colour of the blue shade under the overhangs of arctic ice.
A border guard in green thumbed through my passport.
“You go to Israel?”
“No.”
He stamped me into the country.
Joseph had walked very deliberately to the non-Arab-national counter, with his tight-sprung gait, ready to fight. He was still carrying his British passport as we walked back to the taxi. He had taped a Union Jack flag to the burgundy cover.

We sped on north. The road was straight and good and there were stony fields on either side under a vast, arching winter sky, cut across with running cloud. The Lebanon Ranges, streaked with snow, showed to the west.
“Honestly,” said Joseph, “I know you people don’t like it, but what the British and Americans are doing in Iraq is the best thing. And they should not stop.” Outside another ice-eyed portrait of Assad whipped past. Joseph lowered his voice and flicked his thumb towards it. “They should come here next, and kill him, bomb Damascus, then all the others, Saudi, Egypt, they are all like Saddam. If Bush is strong he will destroy them all.”
I squirmed a little in my seat. We had been in Syria for barely five minutes. “Perhaps you shouldn’t say that here…”
Joseph clicked his tongue. “What can they do? I’m a British citizen.”
He gave me his phone number and told me to call him if I had any problems with the bad people in Syria.
There were dead dogs beside the road all the way to Damascus.

***

Some days later I had another encounter. It was after dark, and together with two Canadians and a pretty American girl I had gone to a bar in the modern part of Damascus. There were expensive places to drink in converted basements off the Street Called Straight at the far end of the Old City, but this was not one of them. It was up a flight of grubby stairs above a kebab shop with half a raw goat carcass hanging in a glass case with a few limp stalks of parsley.
The bar was loud and smoky and lit too brightly and full of sad, drunken Arabs, and categorically no women. The Canadians and I had been there before; the American girl had not. She flared her blue eyes and said “Oh, my gosh…” as we stepped through the door.

The thin, weary-looking waiter brought us Barada beer – which was drinkable, while ash-Sharq beer was not – and salty peanuts. There was a man sitting alone at a table near the window. There were nine empty bottles on his table and he was leaning forward with an expression of bitter hatred on his face. But I doubted that he could see anything and the hatred was targeted only at the air around him.
We drank and chatted, and after a while I heard a voice speak in English behind me. I turned in my chair, smiling now after a couple of beers.
Four men, all of them wearing leather jackets, all of them with that certain shabbiness that is so hard for Arab men to avoid as they move into middle age, were sitting at the next table. A bottle of tea-coloured liquor stood between them, three-quarters empty.
The man with the iron-grey hair and a clipped moustache and heavy, jowly cheeks was smiling at me. “Where are you from?”
I smiled back a little idiotically, “I am from England, they are from Canada, and she is from America.”
He tilted his head back, “A-ha. And where am I from?”
I was in that state of slightly inane happiness on the southern edge of intoxication. “I don’t know,” I said stupidly, grinning, “Syria?”
He smiled. “No.”
“Palestine?” “No.”
“Lebanon? Jordan?”
“No,” he said, “I am from Iraq.”
“Ah,” I said.
“This my uncle, this my cousin, this my friend. We are all from Iraq…” he paused and laughed; it was only when he laughed that you could see that he was drunk. “Actually we all was from Iraq. Now – boom!” he grinned and opened his hands in mock starbursts. “Now no more Iraq, now we have no more country. Now,” he laughed and tapped the table, “this bar is our country!” He translated this to Arabic for the other three men who spoke no English and they all roared with laughter.
They were traders, he said, from Baghdad. He said “Baghdad” in that low, ominous way that the word has when pronounced correctly.
“We are import-export, Baghdad-Damascus.” He drew a finger between two imaginary points on the table, “Baghdad, Damascus, import, export, Damascus, Baghdad. Every week, maybe three, maybe four times, Baghdad, Damascus, import, export. But now? Boom!” Again the starburst hands. “No more business, no more import-export. If we go Baghdad now, we dead!” He translated this too, and they roared with laughter again, and he called something to the weary waiter.
“Now we have no more job.” He raised his glass. “Now our job is drinking, in our new country – this bar!” They all laughed again, and I kept on grinning, inanely.

The waiter came back with four empty glasses, and the Iraqi filled them with the tea-coloured liquor. He said it was whiskey. The colour was right, but the smell was wrong. He passed the glasses to me, and when he leaned forward you could see how drunk he was.
“Yes, yes, for you and you. Yes, and for the American.” He sat back and raised his own glass. “Drink with me, my friend.”

© Tim Hannigan 2008

A Moveable Feast

2008-03-22T08:20:00.000-07:00

Omar said I was the last foreigner in the valley. In summer, when it was all green, and gritty sweat would bead on your brow if you walked uphill and yellow cloudbanks swept up over the high-brown slopes, there were trekking parties with clicking poles and reflective sunglasses and special shoes. But not now. Now it was the end of November and in the morning the sky was so sharp and clear it hurt to look at it, and in the midday sometimes grey rain ran in and fell as wet sleet in the valley and clean snow high up. Next week, or tomorrow, or this afternoon the high road to Azilal might be closed and Ait Bougmez would be locked for days, or weeks, or even for the whole winter if it was a bad one. That’s what Omar said in his soft-spoken, delicate French.

I had arrived in Tabant late in the day when a bitter-dust wind ran in along the dirt road and the sky had gone to pale white behind the ridges. Up from Beni Melal, to Azilal where old Berber women were leaving the Thursday souk with hunks of meat and plastic bags of potatoes, across the high ground in a white minibus. We stopped for prayers on a high-swelling bank of brown land cross-pinned with twisted trees. The land rolled out high and half-level, then the great glass-white peaks around M’Goun rose in its place where it fell to the distance. The men on the bus ranked up in a neat row beneath the vast cold sky and knelt to the east. An old man with a twist of green cloth around his brow led them in their devotions.
Then past cold shepherds’ huts and down into the valley, and I met Omar on the dirt street of shutter-shops and he took me to his home and apologised for the lack of electricity.
I put my bag in the corner of the long narrow guestroom at the front of the flat-roofed, mud-walled building, and peered through the cracked glass of the crooked windows. Outside there were great skeins of snow on the mountain banks beyond Ait Bougmez, and the sky was pale. Then the muezzin called for mahgrib prayers and it was time to eat.

We ate in the little kitchen by the guttering light of a hurricane lamp, sitting on the floor on dirty blankets. There were a few dates, and warm bread, and a soup of white lentils, and sweet milky coffee from an old tin pot. Omar’s two little children watched me with big eyes, and his wife smiled and filled my coffee cup over and over. They had red-raw cheeks from the high mountain air.
“Tu fais le Ramadan?” Omar asked.
“Today, yes,” I said, then felt the need for utter honesty and added, “almost.”
Omar smiled, “Tu est Chrétienne, non? Alors ce n’est pas nécessaire …”
“Yes,” I said, “but on days when I travel I try. I cannot eat or drink while I am on the bus, or in the grande taxi with people who are fasting. Today I left Azrou in the morning; I ate some bread in my room at eight, but nothing since then.”

Each morning I would wake in the white light with the thin breeze of the High Atlas rattling the crooked windows of the guest room. They would brew me tea and bring me bread, though they had eaten long hours before in the pre-dawn darkness. Then I would go out on foot and walk up high onto the mountain slopes among the broken juniper bushes and hard brown rocks. One day I walked as high as the snowline, and another I was besieged for half an hour on a rocky buttress as a huge bear-headed sheepdog snarled and lunged at me before the shepherd scrambled down the slope and threw a rock at it and laughed at me. Another day a sour wind chased rain in along the whole length of Ait Bougmez in minutes and I shivered under a cliff face until it stopped.
Somewhere out in the hills, alone and away from people who were fasting I would eat a little cheese and drink some water. I would come back to the house in the afternoon. In the last of the light I would read and write in the guestroom, and Omar’s children would stalk me, closer and closer, then leap upon me and giggle with delight when I flung them off.

Omar did not pray, but he did not eat until after mahgrib. First there was the bread and soup and olives and coffee, then he and I would go out along the muddy lane, treading gently in the heavy darkness, to the little hall, built of new concrete below the road, with a generator for light, one crooked pool table and a few broken plastic chairs. The men of the valley came there each night to play cards and smoke kif.
Sometime after nine we would go back to the house and sit again in the kitchen on the dirty blankets in the lamplight and eat the tagine from the shared bowel with stale bread. There was never any meat for the tagine.

“You do not fast in Christianity?” Omar asked.
“Not like this.”
He shook his head, “C’est un chose bizarre, le Ramadan, tres bizarre.”
I made a noise of polite protest, but he shook his head again, “Truly my friend, Islam is a bizarre religion.”
They wanted me to stay for the feast, but it was still five days away, and I was worried about the snow on the road out of the valley. I would leave in the morning.
“And tomorrow,” I said, “je vais faire le Ramadan…”

I ate with them in the headache hours long before dawn: white soup with a little oil and dry bread and sweet white coffee. Then we all slept again and once it was light I packed my bag and said goodbye. Omar and I stood shaking hands on the muddy chicken path that ran up to the high brown slopes behind the house. A thin-cold rain was falling and somehow it washed away French as a shared language and Omar drew out a handful of English words from somewhere and I did the same with Arabic (though of course, Tamazight – of which I knew none - was his mother tongue). We stood in tongue-tied sincerity in the chilly drizzle – thank you, thank you very much; shukran, shukran jazilan – then I went down hill into the village where a minibus was waiting to leave for Azilal.

The valley was wet and grey all along its length and I could not see the high peaks through the cloud. Once we had wound up through the switchbacks onto the highlands there was thick, sodden snow on all sides, and the shepherds’ huts were already banked up with high drifts.
There was already an aching hollow of hunger in the pit of my belly. It ought to have been breakfast time. I hugged myself in the cold as we rattled over the rough, snow-streaked road and thought of good breakfasts in other places…

I thought of breakfasts in remote and empty hotels in Pakistan, Anglo-Indian breakfasts, left behind by the British long ago and then warped slightly by the subcontinent but not realising that they had become a parody: porridge in chipped white bowls with coarse sugar to poor on, and tea – milk separate – from tarnished pots, and the waiter with a moth-holed sweater against the cold of the empty dining room with grey mountains beyond the dirty windows. After the porridge a limp-oily omelette, and limp toast, cooked in a dry frying pan. There were chillies in the omelette… They were good breakfasts on which to walk in the hills, but there were better breakfasts elsewhere: murky black coffee with a muddy inch of dregs at the bottom of the glass, and a banana pancake crisped and caramelised at the edges and a plate of diced watermelon and the shadow of the mosquito net on the room behind and the smell of incense from the Balinese offerings down in the courtyard.
Good Kurdish cheese in Van on the street of the shoe-shiners and a little plate of olives and bread in heavy slices and cooked cream with clear mountain honey and bitter-sweet tea from a glass so delicate it felt like it would break in my fingers. And the best breakfast ever in Jaisalmer, from a cart with the rickshaw-wallahs. It was a plate-sized crispbread, bubbled with little air pockets from the frying, and a great ladleful of yellow dhal poured on top, then a fistful of red onion, diced fine enough to taste sweet, and a squeeze of lime juice, and a scrap of newspaper to keep the grease off your palm as you balanced it on your left hand and broke fragments from the edge, eating your way inwards. And a deep-fried sour-dough and a cup of hot milk with skin forming on the surface in Kashgar in the early morning before I walked across the city in the blue-cold haze of the dawn to the great Sunday Market, and crepes and café-cassé and pain-au-chocolat and fresh jus-d’orange in Casablanca on another visit to Morocco, and a bowl of good pho with flakes of beef in the rain in Dalat. And in Athens, after a long, long train ride from Alexandrouplis, through the high mountains, shepherd-green in the early spring, at the end of a long, long road from Cairo, nothing more than a great bowl of yoghurt with honey. The yoghurt was whiter than snow and smoother than fresh linen in a high-windowed room above a narrow bay, and cooler the water in the hill-stream in summer, and the honey was sweet.

It was raining horribly in Azilal. A week earlier on the day of the Thursday Souk it had felt like the grit-wind might sweep the scruffy red town clear off these highlands and away like breeze-cast paper; today it seemed that the stinging-bitter rain might wash it to a red mud in the gutter-gulleys of the hills.
The aching in my belly had turned to a sad, hungry nausea. All the shops and the cafes were closed. A few dirt-yellow grades taxis were idling at the wet roadside. The drivers had broken umbrellas. One man with a coarse jellabiya and a beard shot through with grey was going to Marrakech. There was no one on the wet-windy street but he called out the destination anyway, in the Berber way, with machine-gun Rs and only one vowel in the whole word: “Mrrrrakshhhh! Mrrrrakshhhh!”
The only other passengers were two fat Berber women in drab-coloured robes. The driver asked me to buy the double space of the front seat so that we might depart sooner. I had done so before for comfort, but was reluctant. We waited half an hour in the rain. There were no more passengers. The women paid double fares for the back seats, so I had to do the same for the front. We rolled south along the fringes of the Atlas. There was a wet smell from the driver’s damp jellabiya. The window was thick with condensation and the wipers squeaked at the glass. Outside there was wet country of stones and bushes. The two Berber women took on that sad aspect that fat women on journeys often take, and peered glumly at the rain.
The driver fiddled with the dial of the radio until he happened upon some horrible pop music. He did not speak much French, but he grinned at me, “Tu aimes?”
“No.”
“It’s French music, non?”
“I believe it’s American.”
He fiddled again and came upon something similar. “Tu aimes?”
I did not, and it was not French.
Another twist of the dial. It was Michael Jackson. It was not French. “But I’m not French anyway,” I said.
“A-ha!” He swept across the bands again and for a moment an Egyptian with a soaring voice wailed the high-echoing notes of the Qoran from the dashboard speakers. “Tu aimes?” he asked doubtfully, but decided for me: “Non.” Finally he hit Berber music, a thin, wiry sound, just a slow heart-beat drum and a hard-snapping string and a man with a fractured voice. “Tu aimes?”
I did, very much.
“Tu fais le Ramadan?” he asked, and was delighted when I said yes. I was less delighted. I was lunchtime, and I was thinking about food, good food that comes at unexpected corners.

There was mutton karahi in Chitral in the little chaikhana with green carpet on the floor and cricket on the television and a tall Afghan cook, and the way it sizzled in the wok when the boy brought it to you and a great pile of flour-dust naan to eat it with. And Uiygers with green eyes selling walnut nougat in grey Chinese cities far from the Xinjiang desert and the saw-blade mountains. There was puri sabzi and egg with cumin, and muglai parathas in Bangladesh fried to the colour of copper, and crisp and full of cloud-soft egg, and there was river fish stewed with spinach. There were sardines, brought up from Essaouira on the white coast, up to the mountains and grilled with paprika in week-day souks in other Atlas villages. Falafel with pickle, wrapped in a flatbread for breakfast in Damascus from the stall near the flyover, and sweet-grilled pork on skewers near the railway station in Bangkok, so tender that it fell apart in your mouth and you didn’t have to tug at it like other kebabs. And momos in the bitter cold at the monastery on Spitti, full of garlic and mutton and steaming lemon tea to drink with it, and thukpa soup with thick-flat noodles later in Kaza the day before I took the bus across the pass and saw the ibex. And sweetcorn in the night market in Kota Baru, steamed with milk so the sweet-popping yellow corns were soft, and Indian omelettes cooked on a griddle with the bread bedded into the egg, all full of onion and ginger and chilli. And martabak at night from some dark Indonesian street corner, and how hungry it makes you to watch it slowly crisping in the hot oil, bubbling, browning, and thinking of all the egg and meat inside. Fried bananas wrapped in little strips of pastry, and the way banana tastes when it’s cooked, and crisp-sweet strips of pork fat and basil and peppermint to wrap it with in some highland town in Vietnam the name of which I have forgotten, and fish and chips – yes, fish and chips – at night in Hong Kong, sitting outside on the steps with two Nigerians. And fruit of all kinds: lychees like eating perfume, and rambutan, and the pleasure of peeling the hairy red rind off the glass-egg flesh, and watermelon like eating sweet snow, and the sweet-sharp luxury of marquisas behind their shabby pith, and butter-yellow jackfruit, and the way the best mangos – like the one the Buddhist monk gave me one day in the rain in Vietnam – can make you moan with helpless pleasure.

The rain had stopped and there was yellow winter sunlight when we came to Marrakech. I left the grande taxi station at Bab Doukkala and walked along streets lined with women selling parsley and the remembered-smell of cold meat from the butchers’ stalls.
The Place Jemaa el-Fna had its distant-war sound as always with drums and pipes, and the sunlight made you squint. My throat was aching now, and I felt an ill-considered rage as I passed the café on the corner of Rue Bab Aganou and saw the other tourists, dark glasses against the hard light, eating brochettes et frites with salad, and half chickens and drinking coca cola. Neither I nor the waiter had eaten since four in the morning.
In the guesthouse with the orange tree in the courtyard off the dust-narrow alley south of the square I left my bag on the hard bed in the room of cool tiles and went up to the roof with a bottle of water. The rain had cleared the light and the sun was falling to the west, beyond the dark rank of outer hills outside the city. In the opposite direction the High Atlas was now covered with snow, far down the lower slopes. The whiteness made them look vast, Himalayan, though they were barely half the height of that range. I could still hear the noise from the place and see the square-block minarets of the medina. There was an hour to wait, and I was already laying out the tables for the feast to come, laying out tables of feast from all corners.

There was another fast-breaking in the darkness at the desert edge in Yarkand; a cluster of stalls and great tandoor-baked kebabs covered in tomato and onion bread and afterwards great slices of dripping-red watermelon and all the men in flat caps eating with furious urgency. And in Syria in quiet restaurants with humus and tabouleh and pickles and plates full of other things I could not name and flat bread and cool water, and good basmati rice in Indian hill towns and two paranthas on the side, and a copper-handled bowl of paneer butter masala, red and rich with a twist of cream on the surface and a sprinkling of pistachios and fresh-chopped coriander, and Nasi Padang, anywhere in Indonesia with twenty plates on my table and squid stewed with turmeric and chicken with chilli and beef in heavy read sauce and greens with garlic and grilled fish chunks and eating myself silly on it, and Rawon Setan near the Marriot Hotel in Surabaya, black sauce and cubes of dark beef that go to pieces against your tongue, the smell in Singapore food courts of steam and rice and chilli, and fish, and walking past black-crackling woks in the rain in Kuala Lumpur, and whole, red-roast ducks hanging behind glass and a meal of red-tandoori chicken in Tanah Rata with a salad of sliced onion and lime juice, and Turkish lokantas, simple eating-palaces with thick lentil soup and bread, and yellow-soft rice and bread, and lamb with stewed tomatoes all sharp-sweet and aubergine cooked to creaminess with garlic, and bread, and black tea.

When I watched the progress of Ramadan days at other times that month, times when I had eaten crisp-soft oil-breads with diced onion and paprika in the half-sordid privacy of my own room, or swallowed sweet water alone on a hillside, I had seen the way mornings had a half-normality, then afternoons had a slow lethargy, given back to sleep if possible, and then the last hour had an air of franticness as tables were swept, plates polished, tomatoes diced, bread sliced, cigarette packets fiddled with. I understood it now, for I paced back and forth along the blue-tiled roof, in near hysteria, staring at the bottle of water as the storks flew in and the sun dropped and the noise from the square rose a pitch… and then it was time.

The prayer call went up, and the cannon fired beyond the walls of the medina and I drank a litre and a half without breathing then went out to the square, and straight to the stall at the end of the outdoor kitchens where the served harira soup from a great vat. There were men – all those who could not go back to a home somewhere for a private iftar – jostling around it, eating the thick red soup urgently without sitting down, sucking at the wooden spoons. I ate two full bowls, then went to a stall where they fried tiny sole from the Atlantic coast in good, coarse flour. Their flesh was paper-white and the bones so fine you didn’t notice that you were eating them. Then I had oily beef brochettes with parsley and cumin and a little bowl of tomatoes, then I left the stalls of the square and ate a tagine – with meat this time, lamb, falling off splinters of bone, and potato and tomato and I scraped it all up with bread until I was mopping at the charcoal bottom of the pot. Then I went back across the square and drank three cups of peppery tea from a copper urn and ate two little plates of dark-malt cake with it, and I was no longer hungry.
But I bore very much in mind that the man in the white jacket who poured the tea would do what I had done today again tomorrow, and every day for the rest of the month, and I, quite wisely, would not.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Mahgrib

2008-03-13T12:34:00.000-07:00

There is a mosque in the village of Pero, lost on the empty shore of the Indian Ocean. In the morning little boys sell eggs up and down the broken road that leads to the lagoon. The coastline is empty and yellow, and there are tangles of dry things at the top the sand. Most days ugly waves grunt onto the reef offshore and the long, fading line of the land is smudged with a smear of salt-spray. Pero is a long, long way from anywhere: one of Indonesia’s frayed and forgotten edges. It takes many days of rusted ferries and broken buses to get back to anything that could be called a city. East and west of the village there are people who live in the thatched houses among the tall palms. In those villages they worship their ancestors, but in Pero they are Muslim, and they have a mosque. The dome of the mosque is cracked like a willow-pattern vase in the backroom of a grandmother’s house, and fixed, not with brown superglue, but with rough cement. And when the sun runs in west along the line of the yellow coast, and drops beyond the palms where the ancestor-worshippers live, the muezzin has a voice as cracked and broken as the dome of his mosque.

“Allaaaaaaaah uh akbar, Allah uh akbar…”

South of here there is nothing until the water cools and you meet the pack ice of the Southern Ocean.

But while the thin fishermen in Pero kneel in the broken mosque, their limbs bony in loose sarongs, the sun is running westwards, and in Surabaya, the Arabs of Ampel are taking down the bolts of coloured cloth and bundling up the packs of dates from Tunisia and pistachios from Iraq, and beyond the long rat-run of the Sacred Ampel Street there are small boys in white skull caps hawking plastic bags for the shoes of the faithful. They are washing their feet at the fountain in the courtyard, and up high where the sky is paling there are kites, catching the tail of a Dry Season breeze. Inside the mosque it is already too dark to see. Fat men are sleeping on the marble steps and in the garden thin men are sitting, cross-legged by the grave of the Wali, with their hands cupped, and the hibiscus and frangipani flowers fallen from the broke-back trees all around them. All of them shift when it comes.

“Allaaaaaaah uh akbar, Allah uh akbar…”

And on and on and in the heavy green heat in Singapore there are Indian men in white pyjamas making their ablutions in the level courtyard beneath the yellow-green lines of the Gaffoor Mesjid, and there are Chinese ladies with thick glasses on the street outside.

“Ashahaduan la il aha il Allaaaaaaaaah”

And the sun runs on, faster it seems, outpacing jet-planes bearing for desert states and cold capitals, dragging half a day, and north and north, and over flood-swept fields and the finger-stretched waterways of a broken river state, and in Mongla where the hotels are dirty and the river is full of boats, every muezzin of every mosque is in full voice as the falling sun bleeds a little into the milk-coloured air, and the Bengali men with high cheekbones and moustaches make their prayers.

“Ashahaduan la il aha il Allaaaaaaaaah”

And onwards and the prayercall is louder than ever over the tangle-crickle-dog-leg-chain of alleyways in Mughal Delhi, and to jog up the red steps of the Jama Mesjid breaks a brow-sweat. From the minaret, with the coal-dark stretches of stair you can see all of the old city, and the water tanks in the railway station beyond the Turkman Gate, and there are men peering skywards on every rooftop, and the pigeon flocks are tumbling and swelling and closing in the humming dusk.

“Ashahaduan Mohammad ar-rasul Allaaaaaaaaaah…”

And in the mirror of the Delhi mosque, beyond the border where they have just marched and strutted like chickens to close the gates, in the great courtyard beyond the Sikh Walls, half of Lahore have turned southwest, and before the domes and marble inlay of the Badshahi Mosque they are lined in long ranks, so when the bend and kneel together the sound of forty thousand shalwaar kamises rustle like wind-chased leaves.

“Ashahaduan Mohammad ar-rasul Allaaaaaaaaaah…”

And north and north, turning to beat before the west-stream of the sun, over high ice and scar-cut valleys to meet the desert edge. There is only the thin line of the road with a vast hollow emptiness of cold sand beyond, and a faltering string of towns, and way across dry stone to the south, beyond the silhouettes of two-humped camels there is the long broken blade of the mountains, darkening before the falling sun. And in Yarkand, at the edge of the mud-walled bazaar, close to where the town gives wall to alleys lined with thin poplars, and grey-water ditch-channels, and houses without windows, and donkey carts and pomegranates, a few old men have lined on the frayed green carpets of the mosque. Their beards are white and their eyes turned like almonds at the corners and there is only cold stone and sand for many miles around the town, and there are stars already in the pale sky, and the mesh of roses on the trellises of the mosque courtyard. And here the muezzin may not amplify his voice.

“Haya as-salaaaaaaaaaaaat…”

And south and south, across cold slopes where Marco Polo sheep, heads bowed under the weight of their own horns, are pawing at the snow for frozen grass, back to catch the fizzing wake of the sun, and still in the mountains, in Rumbur, beneath walnut trees, a man is treading red grapes for wine in a broken wooden trough, and across the mud-lane an old man is making the call with hands cupped to his ears and no electricity to fracture his voice.

“Haya as-salaaaaaaaaaaaat…”

And on and on, sweeping to catch a sun that has left the coursing jets behind, and pulled Pero and Surabaya and Singapore and Mongla deep into purple night, across a white courtyard behind the old caravanserai near the Story Tellers’ Bazaar in Peshawar where the Afghans are praying, sweeping on until we catch the hard, crystal light as it flicks red-flame onto the snows of Ararat, rearing high over the cold plain beyond Dogubayazit, then on again over claw-scored mountains to Erzurum, lost on the edge of the cold Anatolian steppe.

“Haya al-falaaaaaaaaaaaah…”

Faster and faster the sun is running on, but we sweep behind it, arching through its fading trails, south again, and into the City along the Street Called Straight, to the steps beside the café with the white cat, and through the gate in the Roman walls, and they have half-filled the courtyard, and the women in black, crying at the tomb of John the Baptist have been shooed away so they can make their lines. We are swinging through the compass now, and they are twisting, edging their shoulder to the fading light.

“Haya al-falaaaaaaaaaaaah…”

North again, north and north and in Konya where the Mevlana whirled and the air is cold and the tiles of the madrasah green. But only a few men are praying here.

“Allaaaaaaaaah uh akbar….”

Down the line of the Levantine coast, sweeping past metalled beaches, under the breath-breeze falling from the Lebanon ranges, into the Delta, along canal-cuts and fellah-villages under sagging palms in the gloaming to the Cairo, and to the minaret of the Ghurriyya and the sound is mixed here, a hundred times from a hundred needling spires, and below, in the velvet gloom of the mosque, they have left their shoes and washed their feet, and now turned their backs full to the sun.

“Allaaaaaaaaah uh akbar….”

And on and on over sand and stone and four borders, light slipping from our grasp, sun trails fraying and coming apart in our fingers, and across the last of the desert and a blade-back of mountains until we are brought up again before the sea in the grubby streets of Rabat, and a mosque with a square tower and winter surf breaking on dirty shorelines below the flaking, white-walled alleys of the medina. The mosque has green tiles laid into yellow stone and rain has run through in the afternoon and left the buildings damp and there is a smell of rust and grilling fish, and offshore the sardine boats are beating against the broken swell under a bleeding sky. It will rain again soon, and the men hurrying into the courtyard have pulled up the hoods of their coarse jellabiyas and the tower of the mosque is black now against the sky and the spray from the broken waves is catching in the wind and spitting onto the patch of dirty paving where boys with cropped hair are playing football, and there is nothing beyond here except ocean, and we have finally lost the sun.

“La il aha il Allaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah…”

The Chauvinist

2008-03-02T01:09:00.000-08:00

He was a lower-middle class Indian of the old-fashioned kind. A Bengali Hindu who owned a stationary shop in Calcutta, his edges were blurred by the diet of mild prosperity, and he had a thick moustache. He spoke fluent Indian English without the modern transatlantic twists of the call-centre workers. He talked in that wonderful 1940s syntax, and laced his sentences with anachronistic words. He used the continuous aspect continuously, and he said “actually” a lot. He was charming.

The bus had stopped on the road back to Dalhousie, and the copper light of the afternoon was cutting through the dark forest and flaming the distant ridge of snow. There were a couple of stalls at the edge of a broad clearing, and the other passengers had wandered off to piss in the pine trees.
“Looks like England, yes?” he nodded to the hills and the pines.
I squinted, “Not really. More like Switzerland I think.”
“Ah yes, Switzerland.”
He told me he was “on tour” with his family, visiting a string of crumbling hill stations before returning to Delhi to take a long distance train back across the full girth of the country to Bengal. His wife, walking a few yards away, smiled at me. She had taken the second of the two routes Indian ladies can take as they approach middle age, and she was thin with blue shadow around her eyes rather that plump and waddling. But she had a kind face behind her glasses. His two children, with pudding basin haircuts and woollen jumpers for the alpine climate of Himachal Pradesh, were scampering over the grass and giggling. He was very kind, and he gave me a carton of sticky mango juice from the plastic bag his wife carried.
“You are coming from which part of England?” he asked.
“Cornwall.”
“Cornwall?” he frowned, “near London?”
“Not really. It’s in the southwest, by the sea.”
“Ah. Actually I am visiting England next year. My Uncle, he is living in Birmingham. We will be touring England, and also Spain. My Uncle is having caravan in ‘Spain’.” He had that odd Indian habit of putting random words into verbal quotation marks, so that “Spain” had unwarranted emphasis, as if it was a cliché, or a dubious theory.
He asked me if I liked India, and I told him that I did, very much.
“But you are having some difficulties with our ‘transportation’ system, no? It is much better in England, I am thinking.”
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “I took the Shatabdi express to Chandigargh last week, we don’t have anything as good as that in Britain.”
This delighted and him. And of course the real reason I liked India was not its rail network, but the warmth and friendliness of people like him. They were everywhere; on every bus, on every train, at every guesthouse. It was a kind country.

The bus was still standing at the roadside, and the driver had pushed a large stone under each wheel, not trusting the brakes to keep it from rolling back down the slope. The children had moved further away, chasing each other in circles, and his wife had followed them. The colour was deepening on the far mountains
“I was reading that you were having some trouble in England recently, in Glasgow,” he said.
“Glasgow?”
“Yes, Glasgow, with the Muslims.”
“Oh,” I nodded, “Bradford you mean?”
“Yes, yes, Bradford.” He shook his head and looked at the ground. “Everywhere, all over the world it is these Muslims who are the problem.”
I made a pained noise, “Well, you know, it wasn’t really that simple in Bradford. The problem really was the BNP. They went there and stirred things up. The Muslims there are very poor… You know the BNP?”
“Yes, yes,” he said abruptly, “British National Party.” But he shook his head and turned slowly back towards the bus, scuffing at the gravel as he walked. “Everywhere, Muslims are number one problem, really, I am telling you. India, Afghanistan, Israel, America, England, all problems are coming from Muslims.” He looked up and frowned at the sunset. “I am telling you, it is in their minds, they are not really human beings.”
I blinked and did not know what to say.
He ran his thumb and forefinger over his moustache. “You are lucky in England, you are not having too many Muslims, but the problem will be coming. Here in India?” He made a noise of disgust, “We are having too many Muslims, too, too many, and always they are taking advantage.”

Suddenly I wasn’t so sure that I liked him. The driver had clambered back into the bus and started the engine with a clattering roar. He sounded the horn, and people began to move back over the grass in the last of the sunlight. We were standing beside the steps.
“Actually,” he said, “sometimes I am thinking this Hitler was having some good ideas.”
“Hitler?”
He frowned at me, wondering perhaps if I was stupid, “Yes, yes, Hitler, Germany, 1945, Nazis.”
I stared at him, this kind man with his smiling children, who had given me a carton of mango juice. “What on earth do you mean?”
“I am telling you, in Germany Hitler was having problem with minority, and he was dealing with problem, he was having Final Solution.” And there was one phrase that certainly deserved verbal quotation marks, but he gave it none. The driver sounded the horn again, and he swung himself onto the battered aluminium steps. I stared up at him from the dust, not wanting to sit too near to him now. He looked back at me over his shoulder. “Actually, what we are needing in this India is Final Solution for the Muslims.”

© Tim Hannigan 2008

The Other Foreigner

2008-02-23T03:58:00.000-08:00

The land poured away in great running ridges, dropping to cupped levels of rice field, then to standing ranks of pale palms and white beaches and empty ocean. South of this lost coastline there was nothing.

I stopped and parked my motorbike where the road skirted a ridge buttress amongst the trees. There was a long breeze moving everything and drying the sweat on my brow. The wind came from the south and might have run all the way from the pack ice of the Southern Ocean.

There was a village here. It was called the Hill of the Camel, but there are no camels on this island, and no one knew why it had that name. There were some twenty houses, ranged around the almond space of packed yellow earth where the graves were, and where the village dogs slept in the easy sunlight. The houses had great soaring, rocketing peaks, sweeping up to the height of the highest palms, hung with shaggy, mildewed thatch like the rotting haystacks that stand amongst rusted harrows and broken tractors on cold hill farms. The roof peak dropped through a sheer angle, then levelled in a narrow skirt almost hiding the bamboo platform and the tiers of flaky-dry buffalo horns that covered the rough-wood walls. The palms between the buildings moved in the wind, and it seemed that the tall roofs were moving gently too. In their swaying oval they made me think for a moment of Mevlevi dervishes, heads titled, eyes closed, palms loose, whirling into trance on the cold Anatolian steppe. But Sumba, teetering on the very brink of Indonesia, was far, far from Konya, and the people at the Hill of the Camel were not Muslims of any kind. Nor were they Christians. For up in the hollow of those rot-thatch roofs, among the smoke stains and cobwebs, above the yellowed pig jawbones that hung from the bamboo rafters, there were sacred heirlooms – old swords and tarnished bronze platters marked with lines and curves. And among the heirlooms dwelt the Ancestor Spirits. They dwelt there, above the cooking space, in the stream of the wood smoke and rice steam so they could watch what the family ate, and could intervene should times be lean.

The village was silent, but for the wind against thatch and palm leaves. Even the dogs could not raise themselves from where they lay on the worn limestone capstones of the village graves. I walked slowly between the buildings. Three small boys in dirty t-shirts and ragged shorts appeared. They stared at me for a moment, then bolted screaming. An old woman with straw-thick grey hair twisted above a shrunken face peered from a black doorway. She was wearing a sarong of heavy, hand-spun black cloth threaded with red and amber, and nothing else. Her chest and shoulders were marked with blood-blue tattoos. She barked something back into the gloom of the house.

Slowly, from her house and from others people emerged. They were women with mouths stained red from betel nut, and old men. Most of the women wore only the dark-weave sarong. Their shoulders slumped under loose skin. The men wore twists of purple cloth at their waists, and had bands of hand-weave tied around their foreheads. Each of them carried a long, tarnished blade at their side. Their cheekbones were high and their eyes glowed a little. They stared at me. The three children had re-emerged now, and were watching me with huge, round eyes, clinging to the legs of the women.

I asked for the house of the village headman.
“He is not here,” they said; he and all of the young men were at the weekly market in some other village.
I had brought sugar and cigarettes to give to them. One of the women took them nervously, then hissed something and someone with trembling hands held out a little box of woven grass towards me. “Sirih-pinang,” she said, and I took the box and helped myself to the raw betel nut and the sour catkin dipped in lime.
As I forced it into my mouth and pushed the numbing, bitter mess into my back teeth the oldest of the old men lurched forward towards me. He was almost as tall as I was and his back was straight, though his face was hollow and his hair was yellow-white, scraped back over his skull.
He waved a long, thin finger at me and said: “You are a foreigner.”
“I am,” I said, a little startled, feeling almost as though that fact had briefly escaped me.
“There is another foreigner,” he said, still waggling the finger. A murmur of affirmation moved through the rest of the crowd.
“I believe there are several of us,” I muttered.
“He lives near here,” the old man said, “in a village. He has lived there for a long time.”
“Where is he from?” I asked.
“From abroad.” The same affirming murmur –“Yes, yes! From abroad!”
“What a coincidence!” I said, “Just like me…”
Now discovering that I could talk, even with a mouth full of blood-red sirih-pinang, the three children had crept further forward, and now stood before the legs of the women, grinning. I spat the excess juice to the floor. That was the correct thing to do. The oval pinang represented the feminine, the phallic sirih, the male. And the white lime powder was obvious in its symbolism: without it there would be no scarlet spittle, no blood of childbirth to be returned to the earth, and the whole business of chewing the stuff would be worthless.
“The other foreigner has been here for 20 years,” the old man said.
“Longer than that,” someone hissed, “maybe…”
“He is married to a Sumba woman,” someone else said. They were growing in confidence now, beginning to babble.
“He has many children – how many? Ten? Maybe - certainly many.”
Another old man, this one shorter, with thin, iron-grey hair standing in tufts above his head-cloth, raised his own scrawny digit. “He wears these clothes,” he patted his own short sarong and headscarf.
“And speaks the local language with fluency…”
“Like a native…”
“And,” said one of the thin-shouldered women, “he is Agama Marapu, he is an ancestor worshipper.”
Questions, murmurs, dissent: Is he? Not a Christian? No! Are you certain? Certain! Is that possible? Possible!”
“He is like an original Sumba man – completely…”
Perhaps, I thought for a delightful moment, it was true; perhaps, I had really, encountered a case of an outsider who had truly gone native…

***

Long ago, in Nepal, I met an Englishwoman who insisted that India was her spiritual home. She told me that she believed that she was really an Indian, born by some fault of the karmic system into a middle class family in the south of England. She used to work in sales.
She had spent two months in an ashram in Rishikesh – like the Beatles – and had found her “balance”. She had a dab of vermillion on her brow to show that she had been to some temple that morning. She was sitting at the table across from me on the rooftop of a restaurant in the Kathmandu tourist ghetto of Thamel. I was eating glorious palak paneer. It was a Punjabi rather than a Nepali dish but they made it well. The lumps of cheese squeaked a little between my teeth as I bit into them; they were cool and creamy and the spinach sauce was a vivid, buttery, silage-green flecked with chilli-red. I was reading a pirated copy of an Ernest Hemingway novel, with wonky pages and an absurdly incongruous photograph of Hrithik Roshan on the cover.
She was reading the Bhagvad Gitta and eating a pizza.
“I just love the spirituality of India,” she said; “it’s definitely where I belong. And Hinduism is just such a peaceful religion, although I consider myself to be more of a Buddhist.”
I talked to her about where she had been on her journey, interested to hear her impressions of the Subcontinent.
She hated India with a passion. The food made her sick; she found the heat unbearable. The people were idiots, every one of them, forever trying to steal from her, con her, scam her. She despised the Indian attitude towards women (a man on the bus to Nepalganj had tried to touch her breast) and couldn’t understand why she had to pay more than the locals for everything. She had arrived in Kathmandu two days earlier and gone straight to the airline office, and although the staff were idiotic and useless she had managed to change her ticket. She was flying back to England the next morning and was very, very happy.

In Dharamsala I saw a bulky, bearded Frenchman dressed in the purple robes of a Tibetan Buddhist; six weeks later I saw him again, in Udaipur, dressed as a Hindu Saddhu. He told me he was going to Pakistan.

Wilfred Thesiger, with a sharp pen and a romantic heart, claimed to despise the modern world. He called himself the last true Bedu, and when, years later, he went back to the Gulf States he was horrified by the skyscrapers now lining the Trucial Coast. He found that the achingly beautiful young boys who wore no shoes and didn’t cut their hair and rode with him through the Empty Quarter forty years earlier, were now fat and bearded and owned pick-up trucks. He grumbled petulantly that they were no longer Beduin; he alone was a true desert nomad.
Then he put his tweed jacket back on and returned to England and died in a nursing home in Surrey.

It is impossible.

***

But perhaps I was wrong.
Even the village dogs had stiffly dropped from the graves and padded across the yellow mud to stare at me with tilted heads and raised ears. The crowd was discussing the other foreigner loudly amongst themselves, debating the exact number of his children, wondering how his Ancestor-worshipping faith worked in practical terms. Had the Sumbanese Ancestors adopted him, or had they taken into their own ranks a long-nosed, white skinned spirit, just as their descendents had done the foreigner?
The old man was still holding his finger erect, waggling it as though he was telling me some cautionary tale. “He is just like us…”
Then I must be wrong, for I found that I believed him with something like revelatory delight. “What is his name,” I said, somewhat wondrously. “This foreigner, what is he called?”
The babbling ceased and the villagers glanced at one another. The old man leaned further forward towards me and pointed at my chest. “His name,” he said, and the rest of the crowd nodded with unanimous conviction; “His name, is Tourist…”

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Bangladesh

2008-02-17T11:49:00.000-08:00

… and the way the light fell heavier and heavier as I moved away from Calcutta towards the border until I reached Bangaon in a brooding evening when there was no sky and the darkness that was there for a month, even in the whitest sunlight, all the way to the wet hills of Meghalaya. And the way everything felt different from India and the split fragments of wood underfoot in the bazaar in Khulna, and the calendar crooked on the peeling blue wall of the Hindu trader’s shop with the picture of Krishna and the tea that tasted fresher and cleaner than in India and everyone staring at me.

And the chai-wallah with almond eyes and the softened cheekbones of another part of the world who wouldn’t let me pay, and the darkness. And the spectre outlines of the Chinese fishing nets sagging over the sodden rice fields, and the smudged chimneys of the brick kilns with a tin star-and-crescent on the top of each one. And boats, and boats, and boats.

And the rotting collapsing hotel in Mongla, and the sound from the mosques there - twenty, fifty, a hundred muezzins howling like a pack of wolves, and the way the air buzzed for a moment as the last “la il aha il allaaaaaaaaaaaaaah” faded, then settled slowly back down like an emptied breath. And the way there was so much less noise on the roads than in India because most of the vehicles were cycle-rickshaws so crossing the street was like walking through the ghosts of traffic. And muglai paranthas, golden on the outside and full of fluffy egg, and yellow biriyani before I caught the ship from Khulna. And the smell of old rope, and diesel and grease, and oil-stained wood, and how good the even beat of a boat’s engine felt through the boards, and the black planking and the white water and the pale sky. And the tall man, rising from his ablutions smiling at my terrible Bangla and squeezing the water from his iron-grey beard and saying in the richest, smoothest English, “It is a surprise to see a foreigner here. My name is Kabir…” and the letter in blue ink in an envelope of rough paper with a Bangladesh postmark that still comes twice a year…

And dinner at Mamun’s house with rice and brains with spinach and little river fish, and his mother and sister giggling, and catching the Rocket before dawn and the bouncing planks across the squat barges and the decks greased with dew and the tall youth with the white turban and the proud face and his white robes falling loose over the line of his body. And the river, swelling with the morning and the fields of water hyacinth and the sky opening to an aching hollow and the canoe, rolling over the bow waves, and the line of women in black walking straight-backed on the green bank, and the clamour at the stops, and the men, stripped to the waist with their lunghis twisted up short, bringing the bundles of coconut husks on board and the light shot through with dust. And the one brief ivory glimpse of a river dolphin curving out of the blank water, and the farmer with the bad teeth paddling alongside and smiling at me and stretching out a wiry arm to pass me a banana that tasted unlike any I had eaten before. And the young woman on the boat with the red and orange dress and the sad eyes who was so beautiful that it made my feet curl up inside my shoes, and the way she spoke to no one and leant against the rusting bulwark with the long light against the smoothness of her face. And the old man who kissed his hand after he had shaken mine, and the sun falling over the pale river and the boats like up-turned pickaxes, and in the morning there being no sky and no river and only the black-oiled fishing boats adrift in the empty blue-whiteness.

And the smell of the chickens they brought on board at Hattia Island, bundled in wicker baskets, and the ship moving out over the yellow sea lost under a white sky, and sounding like a farmyard. And the blood-smell of the rust, and the rumble of the engine and feeling I had slipped out of time somehow, and still feeling the darkness, though I had to squint in the light. And the boy who gave me a torch because he had to give me something, and the man who paid for my ride across the river sitting on the rough sacks.

And the long, level countryside, and the wrecked trucks at the bottom of the embankment on the road to Dhaka, and coming in towards the city, and the darkness, and the darkness, and the black factories and the air like milk, and the sun turning red and sharp-cut long before it reached the skyline so it was a smooth hole punched through the murk and it was the colour of the mark on a Hindu lady’s forehead. And darker and darker and into the growling subsidence of the city and how somehow Dhaka wasn’t hell after all, and the fallen red brick walls in the old city, and the narrow gulley of Hindu Street under a tangle of wires and the man making bangles from white sea shells and the crooked road beside the river buried under straw from the fruit crates and the river full of the black outlines of boats skewed at all angles, and good grilled chicken and salad on Topkhana Road. And the train, tilting on the shining tracks as it slipped out of the city in the rain and the jugghi slums beside the track, close enough to lean through the bars and touch, and the water dripping from the crooked tin sheets.

And north and north into the tea gardens and the grey mist and it being cold at night, and never quite understanding the darkness or the strangeness. The bus rattling out of Sylhet in the wet mist past the smoking chimneys in the empty fields running out to lost yellow, to the border. And crossing out of Bangladesh, walking up into India in the wet gloom, leaving the darkness behind me, leaving the flat, dark, warm-hearted land, fallen a little out of time, under a vast white sky…

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Other Peoples’ Journeys II

2008-02-10T03:53:00.000-08:00

I didn’t ask his name, and I didn’t speak to him. He was lying on the upper bunk in the third class sleeper carriage across the aisle from me.

The Northeast Express to Delhi rolled on into the afternoon, clackety-clack, clackety-clack. We had been late out of New Jalpaiguri the evening before when the sun had been a punchole of blood over the tracks and the train was crowded. A mob of Sikh boy soldiers lounged in their boots among packing cases at the end of the corridor. Heat and cold came in strange moments and the sickly yellow light from the weak bulbs beside the broken fans on the grimy curve of the ceiling had shone all night. It was raining outside.

We passed onwards: Patna, Varanasi, Allahabad. I saw strips of cold water, and sodden slums, and white village platforms where stationmasters stood dripping under broken umbrellas and thin men with grey moustaches squatted under coarse blankets to watch the train pass. There was a fat lady in a green sari on the lower bench. She chewed great clods of paan and pushed her face up wearily against the rain-wriggled window, sighing in long, sad breaths. Opposite her sat a fat student from Guwahati who bought hard boiled eggs with salt and cumin, and channa massala, and puri sabzi and peanuts and bananas and sweet-spiced tea in plastic cups from every vendor that shuffled up the aisle, swinging their loaded bucket or their heavy tray. I talked to him when I grew bored of my books and when he wasn’t eating, and at Allahabad I stepped out onto the rain-slicked platform for a few minutes and shivered at the February chill as I ate stewed potatoes and onions with fenugreek and a little stack of puffed breads from a tiny bowl of dried leaves.
But mostly I lay on the cracked and pick-holed upper bunk, reading Graham Greene with my feet on my backpack.

I didn’t speak to him. He was young, and he lay curled on the bunk with a pile of someone else’s luggage at his feet. He had a weasel-buzz of black hair and a bristle of short moustache on his upper lip. He wore a black t-shirt and a pair of combat trousers and hadn’t taken his boots off. He had the kind of body that people from poor families earn when they join the army and get fed well and worked hard: his arms were wired with muscle but his chest was thin and standing up he would have barely reached my shoulder. I don’t know his name.
Mostly he just lay there, curled up, his eyes swivelling very slowly in his head, his mouth slung half-open. I thought he was mentally deficient. After one station-stop one of the Sikh soldier-boys – tall and thin with a tight turban and only yet a sparse beard – gave him a leaf-plate of vegetables and three limp chapattis; he ate clumsily, spilling sticky droplets of yellow sauce onto the surface of the bunk and struggling to break the bread. The senior officers of the Sikh regiment were sitting on the bunks behind me, and once he raised his head swimmily and called in a slurred voice: “Major-sahib, water!” and the bull-chested major with the coal-black beard gave it to him with weary sympathy. After he drank he curled again, hugging his knees, and when I looked across a little later I saw that his eyes had turned red and filled with tears.

The train was running late and I slept into the afternoon, and woke when I heard the paper-wallah coming along the aisle: “Awwwww paper-paper-newzzzpaper! Hindi-Angreezi-Bengali!” I swung down from the bunk and bought the Times of India and The Hindu, and sat cross-legged beside the lady in the green sari to read them. The fat student was furiously shelling peanuts and he grinned and passed me a handful.
“Actually I am feeling restless now,” he said. “Already more than 24 hours since departing Guwahati. I believe the train is very much delayed.” He grinned again and handed me more peanuts then pointed up to the young soldier, still huddled on his bunk, still watching with the blank gaze of idiocy. “You have seen this man?”
I nodded.
“He is most unfortunate man. Actually I am feeling very sorry for him, but he is lucky these men, these Sikhs, they are caring for him.”
The young soldier came from Delhi; he had been serving with a regiment in Gujarat but was going home on leave to be married. He took the train from Ahmedabad, and along the way, as they rattled over the cactus-lined fields and yellow hills, he took some food offered by a man and woman in the same compartment. The soldier did not wake up at Delhi.
“Maybe he is sleeping more than one day,” said the student. “Can you believe? The man and woman are giving him drugs so they can commit a robbery and he is sleeping until after Patna.”
The Sikhs, going back to barracks in the Punjab after a tour on the Bangladesh border, found him vomiting and insensible on some station platform, with no memory of having travelled half the breadth of India. They bought his ticket and were taking him back to Delhi.
“It is because his brain is disturbed by the drugs he is seeming stupid at the moment, but actually he is normal man – like you, like me. Later he will be improving.”
When he boarded the train in Gujarat the soldier had with him a cheap aluminium case, bolted with a small padlock. Inside it were bundles of rich cloth, worked with sequins and real gold thread, for the wedding. There were thousand-rupee notes – long months of soldier’s salary – in damp bundles and other important things for the family and for his new wife. The case was gone now, and so was the cheap wallet from his pocket.
“This is one very sad story,” said the fat student, “like a tragedy. Please, please, eat more peanuts.” When I looked up the young soldier was crying again.

It was long after midnight when we creaked and lurched into Delhi. The train had been silent for the long, resigned hours that fill the end of a delayed journey, but when we stopped it was all noise and chaos and I went quickly through the dusty halls to the street outside.
A bitter wind was running in from the north, carrying Himalayan ice on its breath. The lights had failed in the jumble of buildings across from the station and the rickshaw drivers were huddled in doorways, sleeping under hairy blankets. I crossed the dirty street and cracked pavements into Paharganj. Main Bazaar was empty and scuffed with scraps of paper and broken wood splinters. I had gone a hundred yards before I remembered the soldier. I didn’t see if there was anyone to meet him at the station.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Ghosts

2008-02-03T10:25:00.000-08:00

Rain had been running in from the South China Sea in great grey-smeared columns for days and the Delta was sinking. Canals were brim-full, lapping at shining roads, waves of mud-water washing over the banks. Blunt-nosed barges, decks below the water line, loaded to the gunnels with sand and gravel, rooted upstream like furrowing pigs. Rain dripped off tin and off the brims of conical straw hats, and the guesthouses smelt of cold rust and mildew and the noodle soup tasted of river-water and the streets smelt of sodden chicken feathers, and sometimes a cold-shivering breeze ran in across grey water.

But the rain of the morning had stopped now, and the people of Cantho were quickly filling the streets, skipping over mud-puddles yapping at each other in the strange sing-song of Vietnamese. The market under the barn-roofs beside the river was roaring in the steaming dampness over broken eggs and rotten onion skins and pools of fish scales and slime. I bought a bundle of lychees from a fat woman in loose, checked pyjamas sitting on an upturned yellow bucket.

The river was broad and white here, and great hoardings advertising paint and beer reared up from the low green line of vegetation on the far bank. A few rusting ferries guttered back and forth, churning cappuccino-white wakes; sharp, narrow boats with long-tail outboards shrieked like hornets along the line of the flow, and against the inside bank a plague of rot-black dinghies jostled, shunted, elbowed back and forth, the boatmen – and women – standing tall in the stern, working the heavy oars.

I was looking for a ghost.

In a little park with dripping borders and corroded coke cans in the long grass I met a pair of tiny old men with black eyes and deep smile lines. They asked if I was French, hoping. They wore cheap nylon trousers and battered leather shoes, polished as best as possible, and shifted and twitched like birds as they spoke. They seemed not to have spoken French for a long time, and were delighted to discover that they still could. After each sentence emerged intact their eyes would flare with surprised delight and they would glance at one another, grinning.
“Nous avons appris le Français à college” – black eyes glittering with childlike pride. But now, malheureusement, they said, les jeunes wanted only to learn English; there would soon be no French-speakers left in old Indochina.

Once, waiting in line under grey-furred fans in a bank in Indonesia, a tiny old woman hobbled up to me. She circled for a moment, squinting up with clouded eyes, then she said something in a language I did not understand. But I recognised it, and caught the meaning.
No, I said, I was not Dutch; and I could not speak the language of the Dutch, but, as madam could hear, I spoke Indonesian very well… She did not reply, but made a clicking noise of disappointment with her tongue and shuffled away, shaking her head sadly. Perhaps I had been her last chance to use a language that had long since died in the islands.

There was nothing sad or disappointed about the sparky, bird-like old men in the little park beside the river in Cantho. We discussed the complications of international borders between countries like Cambodia, where the cars travelled on the right, and Thailand, where they drove on the left. What on earth, they wanted to know, happened in the middle of the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France?

I left them, smiling, and twittering and waving between the wet rose bushes and went back to the concrete path beside the river. The French-speaking old men, like the crooked old Dutch-speaker in Indonesia, were fading echoes, ghosts in their way, but I was looking for a different spectre. I had read some travel-writer’s account of a visit to Cantho two decades earlier when the place had been full of them.

***

From a rattling bus with vomit stains streaked from the open windows, shuddering over the salty yellow coast-plains of Gujarat, I saw a black man walking among the narrow-faced Indians in the fly-buzz bazaar of some tiny dog-town east of Bhavnagar. There was no doubt about it: he had a head of tight-cropped curls and a broad African face. He was taller than the men around him, and he squinted as he walked. Then I saw another, dressed in shabby, dust-marked clothes, leaning in a yellow doorway. I twisted my head almost too sharply as we rolled by, sure that his broad black brow had been marked with a dab of Hindu vermillion.

I saw more of these strange African Gujaratis later, and only learnt about their history later still: they had been slaves, brought across by Arab traders in centuries past, and locked into the strange amber of India’s caste system as an Untouchable sub-set. Looking at the map I could see the way their ancestors had come, run up the hard Yemeni coastline from the Horn of Africa in snap-sailed dhows.

At least there was a clear explanation for the black Gujaratis. When I met a Pakistani boy in Gilgit whose hair was so intensely ginger, and whose face so thickly freckled that he would have drawn stares in Scotland, I had to conjure wild fancies of wayward Victorian British soldiers seeking warmth at some lonely Hindukush posting, or better still some lost bloodline from the armies of Alexander the Great… The same for a child making mischief among the touts and peanut-sellers in the smoking bus station in Chittangong. His eyes were black but his hair was yellow and his skin fair. Ghosts.

***

Everyone knew the nature of the ghosts in Cantho, but while the travel writer in the 1980s had reported them milling around him, tugging at sleeves, begging for coins, I searched among the market traders without success, half-imagining a fairer head, a lighter eye here and there, before reluctantly letting it slide every time.

I turned back along the riverfront, towards the park, hoping the old French-speakers would still be there. The boatmen were rocking back and forth beyond the railings, craft nudging at each other, oarsmen balancing against the wavelets. Some of them called to me in broken English – did mister want a tour, a boat trip? I shook my head, and had almost turned away when I saw him, standing taller and prouder than the rest, high at the stern of his boat like a roman charioteer. His brow was high and his hair curled and burnished by the sun, and though his eyes drew to almond points at the corners, his skin was glossy-dark and his nose broad above a perfect, full-lipped mouth. He grinned a bright grin at me – “Boat trip mister?” He was perhaps thirty years old, and I flicked over the decades on my fingers. I grinned back at him, wondering if his father had made it home to whatever quarter of America he belonged. And if he had, did he know - could he imagine this handsome, half-black, half-Vietnamese charioteer, leaning hard against the oars as a fresh tower of rain began its slow march in across the Delta?

© Tim Hannigan 2008

India

2008-01-27T08:15:00.000-08:00

…coming back the second time, after the petulant hate of the first brief trip had somehow turned to retrospective love, and dust and chaos in Delhi airport – no sanitised airlock here – and knowing categorically I had arrived. And the steaming heat of the morning, and seeing a monkey by the side of the road. And going into the hills a few days later, and the bus winding up and up towards Shimla, and the old man with shaking hands in the photography shop on the mall who took my photo for the inner line permit. Waking in Rekong Peo after coming in on a bad road in the black night and stumbling backwards when I opened my door and saw Kinnaur Kailash looming over the valley for the first time. And the three saddhus with thin arms and narrow eyes, squatting by the road while they were clearing the landslide. The blue of the river and the high, clear light moving north into Spitti, and shivering under a thin blanket at Dhankar Ghompa in the bitter night, then riding into Kaza on the roof of a truck in the long light of the next evening, and the blue of the smooth road and the gold of the bending poplars, and momos for dinner. And the flock of ibex flooding uphill as the bus shuddered over the pass in the stinging cold.

The long-tailed langar monkeys on the roof of the bungalow in Dalhousie, and sweating up through the pines on the ridge behind Brahmour and seeing a deer, standing in a clearing, staring at me, twitching and snorting for a moment before it bolted, and the storm across the valley in long grey smudges.

The taste of masala chai, and a pile of hot paranthas, and the crisp flatbread with yellow dhal and chopped red onion and lime juice on a scrap of old newspaper from the stall where the rickshaw-wallahs had breakfast in Jaisalmir when the sun wasn’t up yet and the walls were black. And having got through the second bottle of rum in Bikaner, brewed specially for the army, and the room moving in a funny way, and Man Singh Rathore swaying in his chair with the bottle in his hand and saying “Mister Tim, is more required? More can be procured…” and Mr Krishna sitting on the floor giggling after he had been so quiet and reserved an hour before.

The flocks of pigeons opening around the three domes of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, clattering and swelling and settling like a dropped handkerchief onto the white flagstones, and the City of Alleyways and wandering for hours trying to find my way back out to the hot noise of Chadni Chowk, and knowing that if I spent a year in the city I would never find these same alleyways again. And the light on the Golden Temple, and the little Shiva shrine, with a tank of clear water and a tangle of red flags, high in the hills, in the tall pines, with no one around. And the way every town sounded like a war for a week before Diwali.

And going south out of Rajasthan over brown fields ringed in with sagging cacti, and the men with long moustaches and red and gold ear-studs and the women with long, gypsy faces and red dresses and white bangles, and the light cutting the shadows of the tilled earth. And Ahmedabad in Ramadan, and the stalls with dates, steaming in the night, and the lamplight, and omelette and bread from a stall near the mosque. And the blind man with the scarred face and the accordion, who came onto the bus, somewhere out in the hot, flat of Gujarat and sang with a voice so pure that I almost cried, and smelling the sea for the first time in months as we crossed the bridge to Dieu, and the light that you only ever find by the sea, and the flaking walls of the white buildings, and the people in black suits and dresses going to Mass on Sunday.

And south and south, and the rickshaw driver with the twisted leg who read Sartre and Cammus, and who shook my hand so warmly when I gave him a copy of The Old Man and the Sea. And the grey swells and the sandy wind running in at Kanyakumari. And the rain in Chennai, on Christmas day, heavier than I imagined possible, thundering down, steaming from the roofs, and standing in the doorway of my grubby room for an hour, watching it.

And shivering in the cold in Calcutta at six in the morning and white mist over the Hoogly, and the dew on the Maidan.

The trains, rolling with a long gait over the country, and the shadows of the still, furred fans circling on the grimy roof, and the glimpses of stretches of white water, and rain-shined platforms and dripping slums. And the vendors coming along the corridor, and hot puri-sabzi on the platform at Allahabad, and the little bow-legged egg-wallah – “aaaaaawwwww-ondhuuuuuuuuu, boil-ondhuuuuuuuuuuuuuu” – squatting and shelling an egg with a spoon, slicing it in four and sprinkling it with salt and cumin, while he balanced on his toes to the roll of the train, and how good it tasted. And the warm-faced village woman on the Bengal country train, going to the Bangladesh border who thought I was Kashmiri and laughed and laughed and laughed when I told her I was British, and gave me an orange and was still laughing when she got down at the next halt.

And the cold in Sikkim in January, and one salmon-pink glimpse of the high peaks in the dawn, and the golden grass on the road to Shillong, and the men butchering a pig in the winter sunlight in a field by the road.

And the worst rooms I have ever stayed in, and the best, and the worst food I have ever eaten, and the best. And the pleasure of buying a stack of newspapers on a day when I was going nowhere, and reading every one of them on the crooked balcony. And looking down from the bitter cold of Mussoorie when I had only two days left in the country, and feeling that beyond the damp, cold slopes, beyond the long, dark stretch of the Doon Valley, looking drowned in the grey-pearl light of the sunset, that I could see all of India, and every road I had taken, and feeling that I had lost something somewhere on the way, but found something rather more.

And Delhi on my last day, and feeling the screaming heat of summer already creeping up, and one last walk in the locked heart of the old Mughal city, and one last journey south by rickshaw, across the great runway of Rajpath and the India Gate honey-coloured in the dusk, and hurrying through the dark tunnelled alleys to the white courtyard of Nizzamuddin’s Dargah. And then back to Paharganj, and going up onto the rough roof and hearing the insects singing in the night and seeing the ghosted lines of the big towerblocks in the darkness to the south, and the smooth outline of the old mosque down the street, and the smell of the cooking, and the fumes, and the coloured outline of Main Bazaar looking like a snake in water below. And with a flight at six in the morning the next day the sudden sense of almost overwhelming panic, and an urge that was hard to resist to thrust everything breathlessly back into my bag, leave the guesthouse, scurry back along the street, past the touts and the backpackers, through the chaos of stalls at the end of the bazaar, across the street through the mayhem of cars and rickshaws and into the echoing caverns of the station, onto the flat dust of a platform, any platform, and into a train, any train, to anywhere…

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Other Peoples' Journeys

2008-01-20T10:12:00.000-08:00

His name was Asis. He had been sitting next to me on the bus since we left Ruteng in a molten dawn, but it was several hours, and long into the hard midmorning sunshine, before he spoke to me.

“Are you from Australia?” he asked, quietly, almost a whisper.

I had come in off the ferry at Labuanbajo in steaming darkness, sometime in the dead hours of the night; onto a shrieking bus, hung about with howling tout-boys with earrings. Up and up through darkness, then out into blue, wet light before sunrise, with green hills smoking into cloud and pigs in the villages and big white churches like farmyard barns at the crooks of the road.

I changed buses at a terminal of piss-stains and cracked concrete and Asis sat next to me as we rolled out of Ruteng. The light blazed at the dirty windows and lapped against the faces of the passengers – longer, darker than other Indonesians. Not far from the little town we began to drop into the thick green forest. For a moment a distant prospect of Gunung Inerie, a great dagger-cone volcano, opened far away across running green hills and deep forest, then it fell away as we swept back and forth through the switchbacks. I had passed this way two years earlier, in the sodden months of the Wet Season when all of Flores dripped like a wet haystack. Then the road had been broken in places and I remember the bus slithering over a stretch of mud churned to creamy brown. A truck that had come the same way before us had gone off the road and slouched side-on against a tree above a wet-grey jungle ravine. But today the road was good and dry, and the forest was empty, and when I saw the Sawu Sea, far ahead and far below, flickering behind the forest, it was childhood-blue.

Asis was a Bajo, one of the great tide-cast tribe who have washed ashore everywhere in thorny clusters of stilt huts around the driftwood lengths of the archipelago like geese-barnacles on sea-stolen logs. On every coast of Indonesia there are Bajo; on shit-mud creeks under hot yellow skies, and against hard goat-grass on islets without water. They are like that other great water people, the Bugis. In an island nation where people hate the sea, the watery ghost that haunts Indonesia’s green and shattered landmass belongs only to the Bajo and the Bugis. The place where the ferry had come in from Sumbawa was called Labuanbajo – the Port of the Bajo.

Asis came from Kupang, a lost, mouldering town on a level bay with bright-painted minibuses and a handful of drunk Australians from the cattle stations and open cast mines of the Northern Territories. Kupang is far closer to Darwin than to anywhere of consequence in Indonesia.

Asis was a fisherman. He was happy that I was not Australian.

“Australia is a bad country,” he said. He knew. He had just been there.

Asis was small, with hard hands and dark skin and hair touched on the top by burnt-auburn from too much time in the sun. He was a crewman on a rust-streaked squid boat running out of Kupang’s grey harbour, out past the long, lontar-flanked streak of Rote Island, out beyond Sawu, out into the blank empty water between the islands and the rotten, crocodile-coast of northern Australia. A yachtsman I once met, slurring over his beer on the Kupang seafront, told me of those waters. There were sudden little shoals that just scraped above the high-water mark out there; tiny nail-clipping sandbanks. He had come through that way one season, en route for two months of sad, slow drunkenness in Timor, and seen a party of Bajo fishermen, camped on a barren spit of sand, two hundred kilometres from any real land.

Asis’ boat had been caught over an unmarked line in the water and impounded by an Australian navy patrol boat, bristling with guns. Asis and his crewmates hadn’t known that they were across the line, though they knew that they must have been close. That’s what he told me. There were good catches of squid out there.

He had wanted to cry when he was marched along smooth-clean grey decks. That’s what he said; perhaps he did cry. They took them to Australia, and Asis and the other Bajo found themselves in a detention centre in Perth.

“The boat was burnt,” he said, “with a bomb, by the Australians.”

I asked how long he had been in the detention centre. “A long time,” he said.

No one came to see them, but they spoke to some slick-polished man with a television-Jakarta accent on the telephone. Asis spoke no English; none of the crew spoke English.

Somewhere, and I wasn’t clear where – perhaps in the detention centre, or perhaps somewhere else where they were held briefly – Asis met “Original Australia people”.

“Original Australia people?”

“Yes, original Australia people – with the black skin.” Asis was utterly bemused by the Aborigines. He mimed a tilted bottle; “Always drunk,” he said, “always drunk. I was scared. They don’t wear shoes,” he tapped his own, horny, splay-toed feet in their rubber sandals. “No shoes.” He shook his head sadly and looked past me, out of the grimy window to the bank of sun-touched forest; “No shoes, and they live in the trees.”

Eventually, after a long time, Asis and the other Bajo were taken from the detention centre to the airport. They were each given a top-zipped, shoulder-strapped black bag with their possessions inside, and checked onto a passenger flight to Bali. They sat among tourists and surfers and were bullied by the Balinese immigration officials at customs in Denpasar. They had been given a few dollars, nothing more.

From Bali they had taken the ferry to Lombok, sleeping across the cracked orange seats on the upper deck while Chinese action films played on a flickering screen and the boat rolled over the swells that run through the deep water in the middle of the channel. In Mataram they had milled in the hot white light, waiting for the cheapest bus across the island to the little fishhook port where the boats run to Sumbawa. Asis was sick.

It took 12 hours to cross Sumbawa and they had to wait a day in the wretched, mud-drowned harbour village of Sape for the ferry. At Labuanbajo a man sold them a ticket to Aimere, but he had cheated them and the bus only ran to Ruteng, and they had barely enough left for the extra fare. From Aimere – a concrete jetty on a gravel shoreline under the palm trees beside the road – they would take a ferry back across the Sawu Sea to Kupang.

“The boat was burned,” he said again; “no more boat, no more job.”

It was almost lunchtime when we got to Aimere. There was nothing there but a couple of dirty shops and a patch of ground where they held a market of dried fish and cheap cloth once a week. There was a weed-grown truck yard, empty of trucks, and a locked waiting hall with broken windows. The sea was flat and blank and empty; the hills were steep and green in the yellow sunlight.

Asis wished me a happy journey.

It was a happy journey. I had come the same way as Asis, at a slower pace, eating good fish and swimming in clear water and sleeping in a clean bedroom in a garden of hibiscus and frangipani the night before I caught the ferry from Bali. On Lombok I swam again in clear water, green over rippled sand, and watched the sky bleed behind Mount Agung, back across the channel. I rented a motorbike and drove through the highland roads and onion fields on the slopes of the Rinjani Volcano, and slept in a bamboo cottage in the ricefields with a gecko in the cobwebs on the ceiling above my mosquito net. I watched buffalo with old Dutch coins stitched into their harnesses racing on flooded rice fields on Sumbawa. And now, up through the switchbacks from Aimere there was the neat little town of Bajawa, just cool enough at night for the pleasure of sleeping under a blanket, and out in the hills, under that great volcano cone I had seen that morning, and beneath the dragon-back ridges lined with crooked Catholic crosses, there were villages of rough wood with rocketing thatch roofs and buffalo horns above the doorways…

I looked back as the bus rolled away. The ferry to Kupang was on Saturday. It was Wednesday. Asis and the other Bajo – a dozen of them - were standing beside the road in the fly-blown heat. Each of them carried the neat black shoulder bag they had been given at the airport. The white flight tags were still attached to the handles. The bags looked very empty.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

The Day Before Yesterday

2008-01-15T10:59:00.000-08:00

Cold, cold country, so big and empty that the immigration check post was almost a full day’s drive from the border.
I shouldered my pack and walked along the road into Tashkurgan in the dusk. The road was wide and smooth and there was pale light dying behind charcoal-black hills ahead of me. It was very cold.

All the way down from the border where the young Chinese guards with their soft faces and their over-sized green uniforms had shivered in a tin hut with new snow piled metres deep against the walls, the land had been big and empty. There were villages of red stone and smoke and dust and twisted lengths of dry wood. The Pakistani traders in the jeep stared out of the rattling, dust-touched, sun-cut windows. They themselves came from the stony, mountain world around Gilgit, but they had never seen anything like this.
“Tough people,” one of them said as we watched a tall, hard-faced woman stride between the little flat-roofed hovels; she had a heavy scarlet dress and an amber headscarf and red-raw hands. “Very tough. What do they eat? Nothing grows here.” There was only thin-cropped grass and scuffed brown earth between the huts, then a cold river, then a great bank of hard, hard mountains and a huge sky.
“Are there places like this in England?” he asked.
I shook my head.
He nodded. “I didn’t think so. It’s all green, right? Even in winter…”

The jeep stopped in the hard-metal cold under the floodlights outside immigration. I filled in the disembarkation card for a man from Skardu who couldn’t write. He didn’t know his date of birth.

The Chinese soldiers were still going through the sacks and bundles of the Pakistanis, riffling packages of dried apricots and semi-precious stones wrapped in old newspaper. I walked away towards the town. It was bitterly cold, and there was no one out on the grid of streets. A thin Chinese girl with oil-straight hair and a short skirt leant from a red doorway and glanced along the pavement for a moment, and there were Uiyger men with flat caps and grey-green overcoats sitting over cheap china cups of tea in glass-fronted cafes. Fat men smoked behind the counters of goods stores with piled boxes and packets of soap and snacks strung from the ceiling, while a blue-grey television screen flickered in the corner. The place felt like it was being crushed by the vast weight of the cold emptiness around it.

The hotel had gloomy yellow corridors and showers that dribbled scalding water. I wandered outside, a scarf around my neck, my hands deep inside my pockets, and I ate stringy, oily kebabs in a restaurant with a plastic fountain and two sad goldfish in a grimy tank. Then I wandered outside again and bought good, warm bread, topped with sesame seeds and onion.

There was nothing I recognised.

A week earlier I had been in Passu, where the light lay broken and copper-coloured over the fractured granite spires and the long breeze ran in the yellow grass and over the grey river water and they had already brought the animals down from the high pastures. I stayed in a cold little guesthouse with tiny rooms with broken beds and icy water in buckets from a single outside tap. At night the electricity always failed, and the only other customers were a mob of Chinese road workers in threadbare blue jackets and caps. They smoked continuously and drank tea and played cards in the corner, squawking raucously at one another. The old man who owned the guesthouse had curly grey hair and a thick moustache. He would serve them tea then join me at my table where I sat reading or writing by lamplight, or eating the stewed potatoes and thick, slabby bread they make in Passu. The old man would glance at the Chinese and shake his head, “They are strange people – and they don’t know one word of English or Urdu, not one word…” (he himself spoke half a dozen languages well). I began to feel nervous about going to China.

In the guesthouse there was a damp and dog-eared collection of old guidebooks, novels and torn, coverless magazines. Among them I found a beautiful volume of photographs, all of rich colour and shade. There were pictures of Wakhi nomads leading trains of two-humped camels along the narrow defiles of their mountain corridor, of wild buzkashi matches (you could smell the dust and the horse-sweat and the cold blood from the carcass). And there were pictures of the bazaar in Tashkurgan. There was dappled light from the souk-roof of rushes, and girls with gold teeth and tattooed chins; one frame showed a bearded man, tall and gaunt with hollow cheeks, a dark robe and a heavy turban. He was standing in the cut light of some packed mud alleyway. Tethered to his wrist was a great fury-eyed hawk. Other pictures of the place showed grey-earth walls and poplar trees and a crumbling fort and a man leading camels over a bridge of ancient wood. Any of the photographs could have been taken a millennium ago – had they had cameras then. The book was published at the end of the 1970s.

In the cold and the dark at the end of 2004 I wandered through Tashkurgan, a new arrival in China at the very limit of its vastness. The streets were straight and wide and lined with grey concrete and plastic signs lit by flickering bulbs and there were fat Chinese shopkeepers and thin Chinese hookers and the Uiygers wore their flat caps and raincoats and drank their tea from cheap porcelain in cafes with goldfish and plastic fountains. I saw nothing I recognised.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

All the Right Places

2008-01-13T05:18:00.000-08:00

They had been coming into town since first light, down the highway that curved along the coast from the direction of Byblos and Tripoli. Lying in bed in the little guesthouse, up the flight of narrow stairs above bolted-down shopfronts still marked with old bullet holes, I could hear the sounding of car horns, and the low, liquid sound of determination moving through a crowd.

By mid-morning the army had closed the road to the north, but people had left their vehicles on the verges beside the Mediterranean and continued into the city on foot. I watched them from the balcony: a thickening flow moving determinedly towards Martyrs’ Square. The previous days had been lit by soft-sharp spring sunlight, but today a blank white sheet had run in across the sky and everything was very, very still. Except for the protesters.

Most of them carried a flag and waved it as they walked. Leaning out, stretching my neck I could see the long, snaking line moving down the coast, all red and white, and for a moment I caught a memory smell of cheap wine and cigars and sweat from the Plaza Del Toros in Pamplona. But this was a different kind of fiesta.

It was late February. A day earlier old men who read the French newspapers had been sunbathing on the smooth rocks beneath the Corniche; tomorrow young women with expensive sunglasses would go skiing on the last of the shrinking snows up on Mount Lebanon. But not today.

I stood for a long time on the balcony watching the moving crowd thickening and thickening, and hearing the roars moving back and forth from the direction of the square. The pastel-coloured tower blocks on the rising ground behind the road were smudged in the soft grey light, and right in front of the balcony, on a billboard looking down over the road was a huge poster of the man whose portrait was plastered to walls and windows and old bullet-scarred doors all over the city: Rafik Hariri. In the poster he was wearing a fine suit - the suit of a prosperous man - and standing with his hands in his pockets glancing upwards and smiling. He had kind eyes and wavy iron-grey hair and a thick moustache. There was a black band across the right-hand corner of the poster, and one white word in Arabic: shaheed – martyr.

***

A fortnight earlier I had been in Amman. It was cold; there had been thick, wet sleet in Petra two days before. Amman was a strange white city, like grimy snow settled over warty hills. There were flocks of pigeons in the yellow sky. I stayed in a guesthouse with dirty corridors, and the streets were crowded with lost Iraqis and Palestinians.

I read about it in the Jordan Times, sitting at a tiny metal table on a narrow, sloping alleyway just off Sha’ban Street, eating hummus and good bread, and drinking thick, grainy coffee that tasted of cardamom. It was on the front page. Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon – the anti-Syrian former prime minister of Lebanon - had died in a huge car bomb blast near the seafront in Beirut. The students from the Lebanese universities blamed Syria. They were already demonstrating.

***

Too many correspondents’ memoirs. Too many books of tender, erudite machismo; too many descriptions of momentous horror from people who chose to be there. James Cameron, James Fenton, and dozens of others, new ones every year; they preface their books with little poppy-red scraps of poetry written by men who died knee deep in mud and shit in the second decade of the 20th Century, just to make it clear that they have nothing new to say. But with the crisp prose of a journalist turned out to the grass of empty pages, it doesn’t matter, because they are all so good to read…

It’s nothing to be proud of: being seduced by the reflections of generations of disingenuous newsmen who invariably tell you just how squalid war is, while making it quite clear that they loved every moment of it. But they write too well, and you can’t help it.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to see a war – there was mayhem east of Jordan and I wouldn’t have gone there for any money – but the idea of crowds and History a little way to the northwest sounded ideal. I had long since realised the very obvious truth that most “dangerous places” are anything but; I had been to places with troubled frontiers without finding any need to discover if I was brave or not. But when I read about the anti-Syrian protests in Lebanon I was determined to go there for one reason: it would finally rid me of the smirking, cheek-stinging embarresment of missing out once before.

***

They’ve laid a road right up to the pass now, and a bus runs across it every day in the warm months after the snow melts, but in the late autumn of 1999 the tarmac ended an hour out of Gilgit, and for three days we bounced in the back of a jeep over broken stones.
The Prophet said: “A journey is a fragment of hell”, but we travel not for trafficking alone, and the light was so sharp and the leaves on the poplars so golden and the deep plunge pools of Ghizr River were such a bright, milky blue that I didn’t feel the bumps. Women in blue-embroidered caps turned away from us in the fields for a moment, then turned back to look, and there was snow on the high red-gold-brown peaks, and there were men threshing wheat with paired cattle, turning the beasts round and around over the cut lengths, dust and chaff lifting in the cold sunlight.

There were trout in the river and no phone or television, and even if I had carried a radio the peaks of the Hindu Raj would have ruined the reception. The mountains were high and we rolled through Gupis and Phandur and on towards Shandur, and 200 miles to the south where the summer heat was still steaming over the Punjab and there were dead horses in the rank grass by the side of the roads Great Events were happening.

A general in an aeroplane, and a fat, balding civilian politician in a white shalwaar kamis and a grey waistcoat, and battalions rolling out of Rawalpindi (their town) and along the road to Islamabad to make it their town too; airports seized, documents shredded and government ministers panicking and bolting. One leapt over his garden wall and disappeared into the slums dressed as a woman. And before sunset on 12th of October, General Pervez Musharraf was the ruler of Pakistan.

Meanwhile, we ate stringy chicken by lamplight in a heavy-walled old inspection bungalow, built by the British. Outside there were great smears of stars above the ridges and we knew nothing of what had happened until we rolled into Chitral two days later and called England on a cracked plastic telephone on the counter of a grocer’s shop in the bazaar and my mother told us…

I read all about it later, and I knew that it would have been just as easy to miss the bloodless coup if I had been in Islamabad, but as I kept reading those correspondents and their memoirs I felt all the more frustrated, and all the more silly. So I went to Lebanon.

***

I saw a small girl give a flower to a soldier. They had been ordered to keep the crowds out of the square, and the people coming down the road from the north – and me, strolling among them from the guesthouse – swung left at the bundled rolls of barbed wire. We could see the red-white hordes on the other side: people who had come in by other roads, and the students who had camped on the sloping grass by the Martyrs’ Monument for days. Sometimes a gang of youths would kicked the wire aside where it lay loose against a wall, and a great surge of people would dash forward with a cheer to join the protest. The soldiers smirked as they pushed the wire back into place, and when the little girl reached up, holding the flower, the man with the gun grinned broadly, and you knew that no one would be shot today. By lunchtime they had disobeyed their orders and taken the wire away and the road was open. The Lebanese soldiers hated the fact that there were Syrian checkposts, and Syrian intelligence officers in their country as much as anyone.

The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon was a little piece of history that could have been made for inquisitive tourists. It all seemed to happen in the course of one day; the result seemed clear – and good; and no one ran for cover under bullets or fell coughing to their knees in bitter-grey tear gas clouds.

I wandered back and forth all day. The square was full. There were students clinging to the top of the statue, waving their red, white and green flags. There were banners and posters in Arabic and English and French, telling the Syrians to go home. There were girls in headscarves and girls in tight sleeveless tops with their pierced belly-buttons showing; and there were old women and men in suits. And one man with curly grey hair, holding his little daughter by the hand, and with a flag over his shoulder called out to me: “Allez, monsieur, come and protest with us, protest with Lebanese!”
There were great walls of white wood close to the memorial, and they were scrawled with messages in three languages, messages of commemoration for Hariri, the Martyr, and messages of condemnation for Syria – go home!
Above it all the great stark giant of the old Holiday Inn loomed in broken grey concrete and hollow windows, and splattered shrapnel marks and the old acne scars of a million bullets from the old war. Not far away there was a barrier across the road, and black scorch marks on the pavement, and rows of cars with shattered windows and smoke-black buildings. Hariri died there. No one was guarding the scene; no one had cleared it up, after two weeks, and no one had properly investigated it.

In the little shop, just off the square with its high walls lined with jars I had to queue for a sandwich. I had eaten there the night before when it was quiet, and drunken half a dozen amstel beers. There were no other customers then, but today the heavyset man behind the counter shook his head breathlessly. “I am so busy today,” he said, “It is the manifestation - revolution makes them hungry.”
They didn’t call it a demo, or a protest; they used the French word – manifestation. I liked that. It was a manifestation - of their anger and hope.

In the afternoon I walked away from the square. The streets around the university were empty, and a soft sunlight had cut through the clouds. I bought an icecream and walked along the Corniche. It was very still, and I could hear the roars from the square, and when I got back it was almost dark, and they had lit little fires near the statue, and there was a big television screen near the old opera house, and in the Lebanese Parliament they were debating a motion of no confidence in the government of Omar Karami and there were still students clinging to the top of the statue, waving their flags.

The crowd was mixed, but it was mostly young, and by evening when the sightseers had taken the children home to bed it was clear that this was a very middle class movement – and in Lebanon the middle class is disproportionately Maronite Christian. I never quite got over the deft, chic confidence of these trilingual young Lebanese, thoroughly Mediterranean in their look and their outlook; you couldn’t help but feel a little shabby and unfashionable around them. But they were furiously positive too. Things would change, they said; they were sure. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but things would change.
They liked Walid Jumblatt, the Druze politician, testing the wind as he always was.
“He’s mad,” said a very beautiful girl with a nose piercing and braided hair, “ I mean really mad, chemically mad, like us.” Her boyfriend had marijuana eyes and the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up. He laughed when she said this. “He is; she’s right.”
I asked when they thought Karami’s government would fall. Not today, they said; maybe next week. They were going skiing tomorrow – did I want to come?

The crowd was going nowhere, but it was getting late, and I began to wonder how the day could end. It was still cold at night, and I envisaged the kind of hung-over, grey-skyed weariness of mornings at music festivals the next morning. Perhaps they wouldn’t chant as hard the next day.

I had wandered away from the square again when the cheer went up. It was a huge roar and a boy with a red neckerchief went dashing past me shouting, and car horns started sounding all the way up the road along the coast, and I turned back quickly towards the square and someone told me the government, the pro-Syrian government – had resigned in the face of the protests. I had nothing invested in what was happening, and I knew only what any diligently interested tourist ought to know about the politics and history of the country, but I understood well enough that this was what the crowd wanted, and I was absurdly happy for them.

They were dancing on the street outside the guesthouse all night, and the car horns were sounding all night, and in the morning it was very cold, and very grey and my visa was about to run out.

There was no traffic, and no one walking on the streets. It was very, very still and silent. There were no buses running from the terminal, but I found a nervous Syrian taxi driver who wanted to get out of Lebanon, and he crowded me and a handful of Arabs into his car, and filled it with boxes of soap and biscuits and drove over the mountains to Damascus.

Syria seemed shabby and subdued in a way it hadn’t done a week earlier. The woman behind the counter in the guesthouse in Souq Sarouja shook her head as I filled in the register.
“They are crazy, the Lebanese. We have always known that they are crazy; they are always doing things like that.”

I smiled. I wasn’t crazy, but I had made up for missing out last time…

© Tim Hannigan 2008

The Place at the End of the World

2008-01-07T06:17:00.001-08:00

India rose up from the sodden, table-flat stubble plains in a wet green wall of hills and they let me down at an anonymous lay-by and the rattling bus rolled away into the cold drizzle.

There was a dirty yard hemmed by dripping trees where a few trucks had tipped loads of coal into great heaps. It was low grade, broken coal, and the rain had turned the dust to black mud. There were no people anywhere.

I walked on a little way and saw tin roofed huts with dripping gutters, and one crooked pole across the road, weighted at one end with a block of rough concrete, and held down with a rag of frayed rope at the other. A thin chicken was mincing back and forth beneath it. Just beyond the barrier pole the road bent left into a solid bank of wet trees and the land rose abruptly. It was another country.

I found the border guards dozing in a tin hut that smelt of rain water and paraffin. They stamped me out of Bangladesh and I slipped around the corner of the pole and walked up the broken rising road into India. There was no one at the immigration post and I had to wait for almost an hour before a thin, shivering man with a green blanket over his shoulder and droplets of rain in his moustache came and filled in my details in a damp ledger and thumped an inky stamp into my passport. And I walked on, uphill.

The road was unsurfaced, and brown-water streams were breaking it apart. There were country trucks, loaded with coal parked along the bending verge beside the dark forest, but their engines were cold and their doors were locked.

It was not long after midday, but the air was so wet and heavy that it seemed like an early nightfall was already slipping out from between the muddy, rotting trees. No one passed me on the road, but I saw a collapsing wooden shack where a couple of men with dripping noses squatted around a guttering stove, their blankets draped from the tops of their heads down across their shoulders. The road bent on, narrow, and rain-cut and steep. Back on the other side of the barrier there were no hills at all.

The village was down below the road in a wet hollow. There were mildewed white walls and red-rusted tin roofs, rattling gently in the rain. The place smelt of woodsmoke and chickens. There was a small bazaar where women with pale, Chinese faces sold live catfish from broken plastic buckets. There was no bus to Shillong until the morning. There was no jeep, and no minibus either. One driver, squatting on a broken concrete step half-heartedly offered to take me, but he was drunk, and he couldn’t even be bothered to think of a price. I ate muddy river fish and cold rice in a damp shack. I had almost no Indian money but a thin Sikh in a gloomy hard-ware shop, warmed by a smoking stove changed the last of my Bangladeshi Takkas, and told me to go to the police station.

The police station had mould on the walls and no glass in the windows and chickens sheltering under the desks. They gave me tea and said I could stay in the inspection bungalow. The bungalow was on the top of a little hillock above the bazaar. The chowkidar trembled as he walked. His eyes were cloudy like water after clothes have been washed in it and his voice was cracked. He fumbled with the keys when he let me into the room. There was a sign on the wall that forbade cooking or consuming alcohol. The rain was coming down heavier now, thundering over the roof and the electricity had failed. It was so dark outside that I couldn’t see to read, even when I sat beside the window, so I went back out and wandered with my hood up, beyond the last of the rotting houses, past a mildewed church with white walls and a red roof. I could see the thick mist smoking over the trees on the steep slopes above the village to the right. To the left there was only an empty grey hollow. Half a mile on, through the wet forest, a bridge crossed a dank gorge. There were Punjabi soldiers sulking over their cold guns in wooden huts at either end. From the empty void to the south strange, satanic noises rose: cracks and clanks and metallic grindings, and flashes of sizzling electric light sparked the mist like far-off thunderstorms. It was Bangladesh, and they were lifting gravel from the banks of the river where it ran onto the unrelenting flatness.

Back in the village it was darker than ever, though it was only two o clock. A little gaggle of men were squatting outside a shop selling beer in brown bottles. They all had the same pale, Chinese faces, and they all had woolly hats, beaded with the thin rain, pulled low down on their brows. They were all drunk. The women were still selling muddy catfish, and quite suddenly, quite bizarrely the afternoon prayer call rung out, very loud and very clear over this wet, lost village where there were no Muslims. It was coming out of Bangladesh, 200 yards away. I hadn’t seen another foreigner for a month, and I felt like the last tourist in the world.

And then, suddenly there was another Englishman standing in the road in front of me. He held out his hand and said, “You must be Timothy.” This wasn’t all that odd: he had crossed the border after me and had seen my name in the damp ledger. He was a professional photographer and he had been working in Bangladesh. For a while we wondered if we could hire a jeep to Shillong together, but the only driver was now even drunker and he laughed idiotically at us.

It was almost completely dark by mid-afternoon. I had read the sign on the wall in the bungalow, but the chowkidar was too senile to care, and we bought beer in brown bottles and clambered back up the slippery steps and sat drinking in the room waiting for the electricity to come back on, while the rain rattled endlessly on the roof.

The photographer was more than a decade older than me, and he laughed at how young I was. He had travelled all over Asia in his twenties, and said he had once been as enthusiastic as me. He told me about being robbed in Thailand and that, once he had stopped shaking, it had felt so good to have absolutely nothing (though they hadn’t found his money and passport, secured inside his clothes). I had never been to Thailand. He told me that the most beautiful women in the world were in Vietnam. I had never been to Vietnam.

He laughed at me for pretentiously refusing to read modern literature, and he warned me not to travel too much, not to see too many places in too short a time. He said that he had made this mistake, and that now, in his thirties, very little impressed him, very little seemed new. Even Bangladesh with all its light-dark strangeness had just been another hot dirty country, and worse yet – it had no beer. I scoffed back at him; maybe that could happen to some people I said, but not to me. I was too sensitive to the world around me to become that cynical.

It turns out that he was quite right about the books. For a while, about the time I landed in Cairo a few years later, I thought he had been right about travel too. But he wasn’t.

Outside it really was dark now, and it was still raining. There was still no electricity and the beer had all gone and the last prayer call was echoing out of another country.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Pakistan

2007-12-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

… 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

Before the Fall

2007-12-12T13:53:00.000-08:00

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

Arrival

2007-12-09T02:10:00.000-08:00

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…

Point of Departure

2007-12-08T14:12:00.000-08:00

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