by Norman Lewis
The days slipped away while I was passed from office to office, handled always with wonderful courtesy, encouraged in my hopes and commiserated with upon my many frustrations. Escape was by the greatest of flukes. Someone told me that a certain powerful general was the only person who could do anything for me. I was admitted to his office to be received by a man overflowing with charm. My face was by this time covered in blisters, but whatever surprise he may have felt at this spectacle, nothing of it showed. The fluke consisted in his occupation at the moment of my arrival with the translation of a recently issued British military manual into Burmese, and the difficulties he had run into, for although he had been at Sandhurst, certain of the terms employed had since then been changed. ‘Happen to know anything about this kind of thing?’ he asked, and amazingly enough I did. One hour later I left his presence with the pass in my pocket that was open-sesame to any part of Burma. ‘Damn interesting trip, I should imagine,’ he said. ‘Won’t find it too comfortable, I think, but have a great time.’
The question was where and how to travel at a time when the Burmese army was at grips with five different brands of insurgents in the provinces, and the small town of Syriam, just across the river from Rangoon, was under attack by dacoits. The disruptions of war had left a gap of a dozen miles in the main line connecting Rangoon with the old capital, Mandalay, and steamers using the Irrawaddy to carry goods and passengers up-country were sometimes cannonaded. Travelling rough could still be undertaken on the lorries of traders generally supposed to have come to an arrangement with insurgent bands, but there was nowhere in the interior to stay, not even a single hotel, and the dak bungalows providing rough accommodation in the past were closed or had been destroyed.
Happily Mandalay could still be reached by plane, and two days later I landed there, to be met by Mr Tok Gale of the British Information Service, who told me that he had arranged for me to sleep in the projection room of the town’s only cinema, and would do his best to find a seat for me on a lorry going north. I was astounded to hear that he lived in what was officially described as the town’s dacoit zone, two miles away. Tok Gale instructed me in the protocol of travel by Burmese lorry. Drivers, he said, did not accept money, but it was in order to present them with small gifts, and he suggested that I should carry such items as key-rings and plastic combs. Postcards of the coronation of George VI were also eagerly collected and he had brought along a selection of these. ‘You will be seated next to the driver,’ he said. ‘Please take trouble to compliment him on his driving skills whenever occasion arises.’ There was a word of warning. ‘Beware in conversation of disparaging dacoits. These persons may be respectably dressed and mingling unobserved with lawful passengers.’
The night of my arrival in Mandalay, while walking in the deserted main street, I was attacked by a pariah dog, which bit me calmly and quietly in the calf before strolling away. Fortunately the only place of business open was a bar, where I bought a bottle of Fire Tank Brand Mandalay Whisky to disinfect the wound. I increased my popularity on the next leg of the trip by sharing the remainder of this with such of my companions who were not subject to a religious fast. From this experience I learned the usefulness of religious fasts when rejecting unappetising food, such as the lizards in black sauce served in the north of Burma in roadside stalls.
The first stretch of the journey was to Myitkyina, where the road came to an end in the north, followed by a route virtually encircling the north-east, through Bhamó, Wanting—almost within sight of China—and Lashio, then weeks later back to Mandalay. At Bhamó, in jade country, you could pick up beautiful pieces of jade for next to nothing, and to my huge delight a circuit house for travelling officials (although there were none) was actually open, run by a butler straight out of the Victorian epoch, who addressed me as ‘honoured sir’, instantly provided tea with eggs lightly boiled, and later a bed with sheets.
A final adventure was protective custody, into which I was taken in the small town of Mu-Sé. Once again I slept contentedly, this time in a police station, and by day was accompanied by a heavily armed policemen, who was as much interested as I in wildlife and natural history, on pleasant country walks.
Thereafter all was plain sailing. Children had long since ceased to be alarmed by my ravaged features, and pariah dogs were no longer perturbed by an alien smell. At Bhamó again, I took the river steamer down the Irrawaddy to Mandalay—‘a pleasure-making excursion’, as the man who sold the tickets described it, and he was absolutely right. For three days we chugged softly through delectable riverine scenes. We were entertained by a professional story-teller, musicians strummed on archaic instruments, and once in a while the girls put on old-fashioned costumes to perform a spirited dance. There was a single moment of drama that was more theatrical than alarming. Insurgents hidden in the dense underbrush at the water’s edge fired a few shots. Those on deck took momentary refuge behind the bales of malodorous fish piled there. No one was hurt and by the time I arrived on the scene from below, our military escort, who had blasted away at nothing in particular, had put down their guns and gone back to their gambling.
Next day Tok Gale welcomed me back in Mandalay.
‘No complications with journey, I am hoping? No bad effects from meeting with dog?’
‘None at all. Everything went off perfectly. Couldn’t have been better.’
‘I am relieved. Well at least something will be done now about all those dogs on our streets.’
‘So, you’re actually getting rid of them then?’
‘For a while, yes. Abbot U Thein San is taking all these animals into his pagoda compound for feeding and smarten-up. They will be released in a better frame of mind. It is belief that they will give no more trouble. In Mandalay we are used to seeing them. We should be regretful to miss their presence.’
‘It’s to be understood,’ I said.
‘So how are you planning return to Rangoon?’ he asked.
‘I’m taking the train.’
Tok Gale seemed doubtful about this. ‘For train travel they are saying that things are worse than they were. Rangoon train never arrives at destination.’
‘I’ve been hearing that, so I took the precaution of having a horoscope done at the stupa of King Pyu Sawhti.’
‘Ah yes. This is famous monarch hatched from egg. And was result satisfactory?’
‘Entirely so. The ponggi told me I was good for another thirty years.’
‘Well, that is splendid omen,’ Tok Gale said. ‘So 6.15 to Rangoon is holding few terrors for you?’
‘How can it after a horoscope like that?’
Tok Gale laughed and shook his head in mock reproach. ‘Now I must tell you something, Mr Lewis. You are falling into our ways.’
1997
Hold Back the Crowds
EVEN BACK IN THE early Fifties it was more interesting and usually more pleasant to travel in areas of Europe off the beaten track. In this respect Spain was outstanding, due largely to damaged communications in the aftermath of the Civil War. Many roads had been left unrepaired for a number of years, with the result that most Spaniards travelled only when obliged to. Foreigners, on the whole, still nervous of the Franco dictatorship and discouraged by rumours of food shortages, were staying away. For my first post-war visit I found the frontier between France and Spain still nominally closed. I had to take a French taxi to the frontier post, walk through the barrier, then hire a Spanish taxi to the first town across the border. Despite all that had happened I found Spain as charmingly unspoilt as it had ever been, and hiring a car I went in search of a seaside village in which to spend the summer.
I chose Farol on the Costa Brava and as it turned out spent three summer seasons there, studying and writing about the life of the people. Protected by an approach down something hardly better than a cart track, followed by steep gradients and hairpin bends, and a final patch of swamp crossed by a swaying bridge, the village was perfect from my point of view. A further slight drawback to th
e visitor was that a spare room in a house had to be found, although in a friendly and hospitable environment this offered no difficulty. Such were these small deterrents that in the first of three incomparable seasons of my stay, there were no other intruders from the outside world and in consequence I was able to enjoy life in surroundings that had hardly changed in the previous century or two.
Apart from the priest, a shopkeeper, and a Civil Guard, the people of Farol lived wholly by fishing, and even a young doctor possessing the legal minimum of qualifications for practising his profession put in an hour or two dickering with the nets with which he caught an occasional fish. There were neither rich nor poor, and even the charming old aristocrat who owned most of the land grew on it no more than a few meagre vegetables, and stole out at night to put down pots from which once in a while he recovered a lobster. Life here, although devoid of modern stress, provided an abundance of small pleasures. The fishermen back from the sea told tall stories and composed poetry in the single bar. On Saturday nights there was dancing to a wind-up phonograph in the tiny square. Fiestas were frequent, as well as outings to accepted beauty spots and local shrines. For financial reasons courtships were protracted and marriages entered into later in life than in the towns. Families with more than two children were rare. Above all, it seemed to me, the villagers lived in harmony. The fisherman’s calling is the least boring of professions, for however meagre the daily return, hope of great catches to come is never extinguished. Fishing where large shoals are frequently involved calls continually for communal planning and action as opposed to individual effort. In Farol, a living constructed from the sea was devoid of any taint of bad blood.
I was late on the scene the next year, and by then the first of the tourists had arrived. They were two French girls who had found a room over the bar, but who soon moved on, although their brief presence left an extraordinary effect. The fishermen’s wives who spent most of their day mending nets spread out on the beach had been much impressed by their clothes, and had copied them carefully. Within a matter of weeks, still busy with torn netting, they were clad in reasonable imitations of French fashions. These, although unsuitable to the background, attracted much admiration both in Farol and in other villages in the vicinity. The accommodation over the bar had been rented at rather above-average prices, thus giving the couple who ran the place the idea of adding to their establishment an annexe with two more rooms. As soon as this was completed it was occupied by more French tourists, and a developer attracted as if by magic to the scene put in plans for a three-storey hotel.
By year three a startling change had come about. All the main highways from the frontier were now resurfaced, the potholes in the local roads filled in, the swamp drained and the bridge put in order. The new hotel, ‘modernistic’ in design, dominated the mild contours of the old village like an army strongpoint and was full of English and French, and the foundations of two new hotels were already in place. Dances were arranged for the foreigners every night, and the young fishermen, having overcome their shyness, joined in. Most significant and even disturbing was the news that two or three had abandoned the sea to work as waiters in the hotel and a cafe that had opened, and in doing so made far more from tips than the most experienced fishermen on the boats.
I was shown the plans for the further development of Farol, which was to include a marina, a sea-front promenade, several restaurants, more hotels and a large car park. By the time all this was completed what had once been a tiny village would have become a town with suburbs. Someone mentioned that there had been emotional disturbances. Two local betrothals had come to nothing following fifteen-day romances with foreign holidaymakers, and one promising young fisherman had gone off, taking nothing but his guitar, and no more had been heard of him. The time had come, I decided, to move on.
In 1984, after an absence of thirty-four years, I returned to Farol on a visit suggested by a London newspaper. I had suspected that I should find it unrecognisable and this proved to be the case. What I drove into after formidable traffic delays was a Costa city stamped out as if by some industrial process. Part of the village’s original charm lay in the straggling irregularities of its narrow streets. Now they had been blasted and bulldozed into a uniform width with buildings of a standard design. A one-way system corkscrewed its way down through a firmament of traffic lights to a point where I knew the sea lay somewhere ahead, but it was invisible behind hoardings. Moments later I was to find that most of the beach had become a car park, with long lines of cars and notices warning of the danger of theft. Back in the streets there were burger restaurants, amusement arcades and advertisements for go-kart racing, and a refulgent sign in English urged Let’s Go Play Cowboy Games. Fishing was at an end, but fishermen who could not bring themselves wholly to abandon the sea had fitted glass bottoms to their boats and took tourists on trips ‘to explore the beauties of the coral gardens’. (Both the coral and the huge shells with which the sea-bed had been littered were of Pacific origin.)
I ran to earth one of the old friends with whom I had gone tunny- and sardine-fishing so many years before. He seemed, strangely enough, to have been saddened by what should have been a tremendous stroke of luck. Shortly after my departure he had inherited a valueless scrap of land in the village’s centre, on which his wife had kept chickens. Twenty years later he had sold this for several million pesetas, putting most of the cash into a scheme to convert a sluggish stream on the town’s outskirts into a canal with gondolas in the Venetian style. The project had come to nothing, for no method had been found to stop the water seeping away.
‘Do the girls still wear those Parisian dresses they used to put on to mend the nets?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘They all work as laundresses or chambermaids these days. It wouldn’t be suitable.’
‘What about the poetry they used to recite in the bar?’
‘If you started reciting poetry now they’d think you’d gone off your head.’
‘Everything changed,’ I said. ‘And you gave it up.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t quite that. It wasn’t a question of us giving poetry up. We were forsaken by poetry.’
The fate of Farol is an outstanding example of what was to destroy the extraordinary charm of the villages and towns of the eastern seaboard of Spain, including those such as Torremolinos and Benidorm, once fishing villages with a population living in enchanting surroundings and great tranquillity. In 1984 the municipality of Farol announced with pride that 200 hotels and campsites had been built in the vicinity and that 100,000 guests could be accommodated in these at the height of the season.
In Spain the damage inflicted by tourism out of control has been largely confined to the Mediterranean coast, whereas in France, according to a report issued by the Ministry of the Environment, it has affected all parts of the country. France, it was announced, possessed 10,000 temporary holiday villages, of which 4,000 were unsatisfactory, either by posing serious safety risks or through damage to their surroundings. The report cited a situation in the Pas de Calais where out of 237 tourist villages, only twenty-one took any safety precautions. It stated that in Corsica 174 such sites were in danger from forest fires, usually started by picnickers, which everywhere in the south of the country were on the increase. There was criticism of the degradation of the environment in the vicinity of such villages. ‘Wherever you look,’ said an informant, ‘there is a terrible mess.’
The wildlife of countries attracting most tourists has been badly affected everywhere in the post-war period. In the past, Spanish flora was the richest in Europe. A botanist writing in the Bulletin of the Alpine Society in 1972 spoke of mountain slopes in Andorra being covered ‘possibly by millions of wild daffodils’. They would have been reached in those days by footpaths, but now there are roads, and retracing the author’s footsteps two years ago I discovered that collectors had left no sign of the flowers. Even the Spanish national press is concerned at such happenings. ‘Mallorca is a
botanical garden on the verge of extinction,’ said a headline in Diario De Mallorca on 1 October 1995. The paper warned that 37 per cent of the species of plants to be found only on the island had already been destroyed by tourists uprooting them. An attempt to protect what was left had been made by enclosing several hundred miles of roads with wire fences, but the fear was that this measure might have come too late.
Animals are equally under threat in Spain, the rarest of them, such as the lynx and the brown bear, although protected by law, having survived only in the remotest areas. Within a year of the opening of the frontier at the end of the Civil War, the international press carried an account of an incident when bears held up traffic on the main highway joining Huesca with Pamplona. Cars formed a queue and after a half-hour or so the bears ambled away into the woods.
With the return of peace and prosperity things had changed. I made the acquaintance of a road-construction engineer who had just put up an ugly house in the village. ‘If it’s wildlife that interests you,’ he said, ‘you should go to the Cantrabrians. We’ve just built 200 kilometres of new roads up there. The wolves come into the villages to clear up the rubbish at night. I read in Vanguardia that they still have bears in the caves at Somiedo and foreign sportsmen pay up to 300,000 pesetas for the chance to kill one.’
Remembering this conversation several years later I went to Somiedo and, finding the caves empty, was directed to Abbeyales, believed locally to be the most isolated and inaccessible village in Spain. People here still lived in the circular stone houses of pre-history, with their animals sheltered in byres under the living rooms (‘We need them in winter to keep warm’). Don Juan Fernandez Serra, the priest, was also unofficial mayor and an honorary policeman. From the wildlife point of view, he said, the news was poor. Only the wolves were doing fairly well, but with huntsmen now paying up to the equivalent of £3,000 even for a bear cub, and £1,000 for a lynx, these species were locally approaching extinction.
