The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  The old part of Hoi An had a distinctive Chinese flavour, although from time to time it had been garrisoned by Portuguese, Dutch, French and English. Only three colours were used to daub the stucco façades: yellow ochre, prussian blue, and turquoise applied in soft Provençal dilution. The old imperial capital carried its heritage well with wide streets lined with tamarind and mulberry and solid prosperous villas, with double mansard roofs, green shutters and a short curved driveway off the street, as though the original owners were simply replacing what they had left behind in the banlieu of Marseilles. The serenity of these streets was disturbed by music that blared out from cafés all day long. Morning coffee was drunk to a Nashville ‘I’ve Got a Black Magic Woman’ and ‘Mary’s Boy Child Jesus Christ’ in Vietnamese.

  The railway station at Hue mixed coloured twinkling lights around the bar and a three tiered crystal chandelier with the same lack of inhibition and taste that was so apparent elsewhere in the country. A notice in the waiting room read ‘No spitting or explosives. If you break anything you will pay for it. All these regulations must be carried out seriously, sufficiently’. Graham Greene knew about tropical rain when he wrote that ‘it descends like a burden’ and here it hunched the passengers as they waited with their heads cast down under a heavyweight onslaught. The dreary sky spat in anger, smearing whatever it hit and fouling the oily track. The Reunification Express arrived at nine o’clock and I scrambled aboard to find the ‘Soft Sleeping Carriage’. ‘Soft’ was one layer of plywood on each of four berths while ‘Hard Seating’ was a two layers of plywood and a slatted back. It was hot and steamy, far from clean and the loo, a hole in the floor through to the tracks, buzzed with mosquitoes. I drank most of the half bottle of whisky I had bought at the station for £1.50 – Royal Whisky, ‘A blend of Scottish malts’. This ensured a reasonable night’s sleep in spite of station announcements piped through at high volume and great frequency. Rust stained and sticky with grease this monster shook from its clanking pistons and vibrated from rattling over 1,000 bridges. Adjacent to my carriage was the engine; opening the end door one could step straight on to the footplate. To the rear stretched 11 coaches of progressively deteriorating condition and reducing fares but conversely, progressively full of life and interest. It was as though the street had taken to wheels. Chattering families huddled together, chopsticks snapped and clicked, cards were shuffled and piglets squealed. Packages, sacks, parcels and wicker baskets were piled in abandon. Hammocks were slung between seat backs, smoke from coarse cigarettes hung like acrid smog at luggage rack level and tea and noodles were awash on the floor. An unavoidable factor of rail travel is the proximity of strangers, their stinks and unfamiliar smells, eating their food and enduring their habits but here, in the luckless end of the train, the appearance of a foreigner was ignored in the serious business of surviving. Here there was anonymity as too many were gathered to enable any interest in an individual. Even a large westerner wandering through this crush of busy humanity did not engender a glance and no one moved to ease my route. All tickets included breakfast and this was served by a troupe of laughing girls in grey dresses with white pinnies. Red and blue plastic containers of noodles, beans and pork were served up with a ladle from an insulated bucket; it was delicious.

  Hanoi was reached at noon. The rain had stopped but it was chilly and the people were in several sweaters and fur hats. Things seemed more disciplined and orderly than in the south, although the electric and telephone wires were still strung in wild abandon and the pavements were as cracked. There seemed a rather serious, studied approach to living and a drabness of dress but there were flowers at every street corner and gladioli and chrysanthemums were sold from rusty cans whose water was replenished from underground cisterns beneath the pavement. Conical hats had given way to olive toupees (I had thought they were only for the tourists).

  A sleek, slim, soft-life liner was tied up in the port of Haiphong discharging bewildered tourists. The ship stood out like Linda Evangelista in a back alley, as she shared a quay side berth with coal barges and the rusting tramps that hustled their way around the South China Sea. From an adjacent quay, I embarked for Cat Ba Island on the local ferry – as crippled and decrepit a tub as you would never wish to travel on. It was ‘Hard Seating’ over again but with added chickens, groaning, creaking machinery and black diesel smoke. It was also extremely cold. I was unprepared for this and had to unpack on deck for a T-shirt, two further shirts and a sweater but I still shivered during the three hour crossing. At my single storey hotel I had three beds in my room – each with a little pink satin pillow decorated with lace hearts. I went to bed in my four shirts and under the blankets of all the beds with the alcoholic salvation of a bottle of Apricot Liquor, being the only name I recognised in the neon lit bar.

  In the morning, a dozen motor cyclists had assembled with their Russian bikes, all offering a trip to the forest. After much negotiation, I found myself hugging a youth with one earring, a few gold teeth and a leering smile as I perched precariously behind him on a terrifying ride through the steep and jagged hills, each bend pot-holed and sprinkled with loose gravel. We climbed through thick bamboo forest and spectacular scenery, he laughing and myself silent with fear. As I gripped him with my thighs at each bend and hugged him as protection from the cold, he interpreted these involuntary gropings as signs of enthusiasm and urged his machine to greater speed.

  The phantasmagorical limestone outcrops that form the 3,000 islands of inspiring beauty of Halong Bay would have been stunning had it not been for the persistent cold that kept me huddled in the lee of the wheelhouse of the pseudo junk as it made its daily cruise round the most popular of these. I returned to seek warmth under my blankets and the comfort of the remaining half of the bottle of Apricot Liquor. They were using dynamite to blast rock for a new road nearby and huge explosions shook my glass. These competed in decibels with the karaoke bar next door. ‘I’ve Got a Black Magic Woman’ had turned up again as the current favourite.

  The town serving the festival of Quang Am at Chua Huong Tich, the Perfumed Pagoda, attracted traders from every back lane. For two months it had milked visitors from all over Vietnam but it was on the river, the only route to the pagodas and the central shrine, that the cream was skimmed. Many hundreds of small boats, rowed almost universally by women, sought passengers for the hour long trip. Larger boats took several families at a time – children, grannies, forgotten cousins, firm friends and all the paraphernalia of a day’s outing. On these, there was a rower at each end standing on the boat’s edge and leaning their bantam weight against long slim oars, with a coolie hat fastened by a bright cloth strap that added to the gaiety. Flags fluttered and umbrellas were raised against the sun as this flotilla glided over limpid water towards dramatic little steep hills that receded to a horizon of darkening shades of grey; it was as though those islands from Halong Bay had been dumped inland. The passengers were tipped out into a mini town of bamboo snack bars, souvenir stalls and hustlers, each one awash with red banners and glitter. The stone path that led up to the cave had been oiled with the mud spread by 10,000 feet and children did brisk business selling three foot long bamboo canes for the precarious climb. Being cut for the Vietnamese, mine was a foot too short, so I hobbled along like a 90 year old with a broken back. The jungle steamed as the sun melted the mist but no one had warned me of the length of the climb. For two hours I sweated, hung about with the discarded sweater and two shirts that I had put on in chilly Hanoi. But there was jollity and expectation amongst the crowd and as we climbed further the price of water, fresh pressed sugarcane juice and walking sticks got steeper too. I had no real idea of what lay at the end of this trail and considered giving up on a couple of occasions, so arduous was the route.

  Round a bend masked by giant bamboo, the path suddenly dipped to reveal the mouth of a gigantic cavern, its roof dripping with huge stalactites and its floor covered in a multitudinous sea of pilgrims. The view was obscured by the smoke of a t
housand cooking braziers and a hundred thousand joss sticks. It was acrid, pungent and exotic. Huge paper lanterns, once white, hung from the roof like discarded cocoons. Blackened by decades of incense smoke, their red calligraphy had bled into the tattered paper: words turned to wounds. Hundreds of trays were held head-high piled with offerings of fruit, rice, chickens and brightly wrapped parcels as worshippers jostled their way to the inner sanctuary in the depth of the cave and the glittering statue of a female Buddha. For many, this had been the destination of many days’ travel and for some the culmination of a lifetime’s ambition. As on the river, there was a palette of bright colour in costume and flags. Some of the banners at the entrance of the cave were of huge proportions and were highlighted by the sharply defined rays of sunlight that sparkled on gold decorations and polished brass. The coolness of the cavern contrasted with the heat, the tropical vegetation, the religious passion and the holiday cheer fulness. Worship here was mixed with a good slug of festive spirit and refreshing drafts of jollity.

  The two mile (three km) journey back down the hill was treacherous with 100,000 pilgrims packed ten abreast, half struggling up and half slithering down. As I was rowed back, the soft light of the setting sun slipped behind the serene grey hills and more boats, brimming with jolly and expectant worshippers, were being paddled towards the final destination of that magical cave.

  Postcard Home

  The Quiet American has long left Saigon

  But still there lingers on the silhouette of Phong.

  Within this city of the South, now Ho Chi Minh,

  Five million mopeds move with discipline.

  The girls who ride, straight backed with model figures,

  Belie their years of hardships and life’s rigours.

  I’ve been by plane, boat, rickshaw, horse, cart, train,

  And junk in drizzle, humid heat and rain,

  On mountain, sea and river – so now to Laos

  To rest, recuperate, to dream and drowse.

  Peru

  July 1996

  ‘I have just been round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it’

  – Sir Thomas Beecham

  I wrote this by the flame of a candle around which, and tragically occasionally through which, there darted and fluttered many moths and other winged insects that live beside a river flowing fast and noisily over great boulders, deep in the cloud forest and high on the eastern side of the Peruvian Andes. With me were 19 travellers, two naturalist guides, a Peruvian driver, a general factotum and his cook wife. Eight of the party were German for whom solid seemed to be an appropriate description whether applied to girth, conversation or mutual togetherness. They balanced on benches whose native manufacturer did not expect to have to accommodate bottoms so broad, and the legs of the benches were set too far towards the centre so that the bum at the end relied on several others further up to maintain its place at the table. The single narrow plank was bending to a degree that caused them alarm and myself eager anticipation. The others in the party, at 11 numerically greater but in aggregate lighter, were an English engineer, his wife and three female Danes in their 20s who were writing theses for a botanical masters degree in the genus passiflora. They were under the tutelage of an elderly man who seemed to be a sort of professorial chaperone. There were also an Austrian, a Swiss and two Americans hung around with techno devices of many kinds.

  My journey had been long and tiring and with an interim disaster at Lima. Like anybody who has ever watched those bags ponderously make their way around the conveyor belt of airport luggage anxious for the first sight of one’s own bag, that anxiety for the first time became dreadful reality with the absence of my luggage. Manu Tours rode to the rescue as best they could. One of the guides, John Arvin – tall, craggy, grey-bearded and with a silver earring – came to the hotel to size me up and generously lent me a thick shirt and two sweaters. A couple of hours around town secured a pair of bikini pants, socks, toothpaste and a razor and after much searching, a pair of trousers. Peruvians average 5’ 4” (1.6m) and are giants at 5’ 9” (1.75m) and I was squeezed into some black jeans that made my voice suitable for a descant and which ended well above my ankles. My new wardrobe was packed into a bag of striped campesino cotton (I paid over the odds for one I was assured was antique) and I was already beginning to think that I needed nothing else. Unusually, the altitude made me thick-headed and dizzy and I wandered around town under clear skies and in crisp air seeking salvation for my predicament. For a short time it was found in a charming small church where evening mass was accompanied by two wizened violinists, a pianist and a tenor, strongly singing Gounod’s Ave Maria. I was moved to tears but this moment of emotional succour was stopped short by violent explosions in the small, flower-filled square outside. None of the devout blinked but I ran to the door, alarmed with thoughts of Sendero Luminoso and then, seeing the small boys who had let off fireworks, had to return sheepishly and caught the eye of the pianist who smiled kindly.

  In the gloaming of 4 am, just bright enough to reflect off the damp cobbled street, I joined my fellow travellers and slumped into the one remaining seat. As dawn broke we were lurching down through the grasslands of the eastern side of the Andes on a rough track that eventually made its way through dense vegetation and forest. Breakfast was coffee and buns beside a pre-Inca burial ground (somehow it seemed appropriate as I still nursed a sick head and worse, a queasy stomach) and dawn revealed my companions. I was not too dismayed as they looked as dishevelled as I – but their trousers were longer. The Germans were already active, advancing like a Panzer brigade on an unfortunate mountain finch. Gradually the forest thickened around us but not before a pit stop at 13,000 ft (3,960m) in thick cloud, where I temporarily lost my bearings and might still be herding alpaca if the bus had not hooted long and loud. I was feeling better and my Austrian neighbour turned out to be companionable and intelligent.

  The road to this first camp was full of wonder. Imagine a track as narrow and deep as a Devon lane, snaking along the contours of a near vertical hillside; smother it, stack it high, spread it thick with lavish abundance and lushness so dense you could swear you saw it grow and breathe, meld in the delicacy of ferns and bamboo with the loutish bully boys of gunnera, ficus and philodendron; splash colour, not too liberally but occasionally upset the paint pot on an 80 ft (24m) scarlet flowering anthryna and then continue this lane bouldered, pot holed, rough and makeshift for 200 miles (320kms), dropping from a freezing 11,000 ft (3,350m) to the humidity of 300 ft (90m), wriggling through trees so encrusted with lichen that the trunks seem constructed of sponge and past leaves the size of cartwheels. Torrents of water fall into and across the lane sometimes sweeping it away. Regulate the traffic to two trucks a day, scatter birds in all directions (but curiously almost no bugs or butterflies) and then, give or take a forest giant or a honking toucan, you have the main highway from Cusco in the Andes to Maldonado in Amazonia.

  The staccato of rain on the roof of a raised platform where the tents are nailed into the plank floor woke me at 5.30 am and dawn came quickly after. The night had been cold and I had twice searched my secondhand duffle-bag for a hat – a large woolly affair more suitable for the Alps than for the forest and which I had scoffed at when first offered. Delicious large, airy pancakes, miraculously inflated and tossed over a kerosene flame, made a wonderful breakfast. Liberally garnished with juice from a lemon, with an insulated skin so thick you needed a bayonet to open it up, and dribbled with wild honey, it seemed a kind of jungle nectar. Eliana, our Peruvian guide, appeared with a fluffy scarlet-chested chick sitting contentedly on her palm looking around as though it too was expecting breakfast. It had fallen out of a tree and seemed quite unaffected by its sudden change of habitat.

  After bumping further down the overgrown track the crowded forest gave way to a different vegetation, higher temperature and brighter skies. A settlement or two was passed and a small village, started by the road builders in the 1930s/40s. There were
typical shacks, with roofs of woven palm or rusting corrugated iron, dirty, ragged, waving, cheerful children, a pig or two and a clutch of chickens pecking for grubs in the dust. Then lunch by a broad river with bright water cleansed by the grit of the bed and a shoreline bordered with boulders, a further drive to a riverside settlement, a long boat – leaking a little (it turned out they all do), a short walk, a longer ride in a Landrover so battered it would have been long abandoned by even the most pecuniary Scottish hill farmer, and then Amazonia Lodge appeared like a sanctuary. It was surprisingly solid with cut lawns, a flowering shrub or two and noisy, yellow tailed dusky green oropendulas constantly building their weaver nests in the palm trees, chattering like wives on a Grimsby dockside. The birds had a delightful call, like water plopping into a bowl followed by a little giggle. The male builds the nest while the female looks on and if she is not satisfied with its design or construction she scolds her mate and tears the nest apart. I shared a shower with a very large spider that looked angrily at me from a corner as I listened to the cicadas starting their evening trilling. The walls are constructed of planks with wide gaps between them, so as you sit on the pan (a proper flusher but no seat) you look onto the green, wet, tangled world and hope that not too many pairs of eyes are looking in – so undignified sitting on a loo with no seat.