The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  We looked in on a couple of villages and at one, Maca, a small earthquake a year before toppled the church tower. This had the principle church of the valley and behind it was a convent run by two truly remarkable women – Mother Antonia and Mother Sarah. I had asked to call on them having heard of their good work and caught them at lunch, weak soup and biscuits, but they were instantly welcoming. Madre Antonia was in her eighties, a New Yorker who spent several years in the Bronx, then in the slums of Lima and for the last thirty years in the Colcha having learnt quecha. She was doctor, friend, counsellor and universal aunt to the whole valley. Disarmingly dressed in an outsized sweater, baggy trousers and local sandals that show her cracked feet, she exuded warmth and goodness. Madre Sarah was Indian, a little younger and wears jeans, an anorak that said Bronco Braves on the back and a fluffy sweater. They organised a communal lunch each day for 1,000 – yes, 1,000 – cooked within the convent. I saw the huge pans. So many men had left the valley for the towns that there were many poor and old women who struggled to eat. We had our photograph taken by Mestor – I on my knees so as to equal their height. I could not speak for a while afterwards as I would have choked on my words.

  At lunch in Chivay, the main town in the valley, the restaurant owner had rescued a vicuna when its mother had been illegally shot and at three months old and standing four feet (1.2m) high it wandered around the restaurant begging scraps. The local market was full of women squatting by sacks of maize and potatoes – many different kinds of each – and I bought a kilo of maize for roasting; it had been delicious scattered in the tomato soup at lunch. And then we left this lost valley with its smiling people, its fruit, its alpacas, its scattered emeralds of alfalfa and its diamond river for the climb again into the lifeless high Andes and through the churning dust to Arequipa where the setting sun coloured the volcanoes with splashes of carmine and crimson.

  In sombre mood I went to the Monesterio del Santa Catalina, a glorious building and a place of great peace and tranquillity; I had it to myself. A convent from 1580 to 1970, there were a dozen or so nuns still in residence. It was almost a small town with little internal streets and squares all painted in peeling and fading ochre, purple, turquoise and prussian blue. Scarlet geraniums abounded in old pots. I was given a map the size of a biscuit to find my way around but discarded it as useless within a few minutes. Life for the nuns was clearly hard but nevertheless each had a little apartment – a room to sleep and pray, a kitchen and in what was no more than a cupboard, space for a servant.

  In the evening, I called in at a travel agent to book a later plane to Lima. There are three airlines, all of which seem to fly half full on identical schedules – Aero Continente, Faucett, and Americana. Flying in on Continente, the stewardess had crossed herself on take-off and landing; and on the presumption that she knew more about the maintenance of the plane than I, it did not seem wise to trust them with my life again. Faucett had engine trouble and so Americana it was. Taking off on a runway so short that passengers gripped their armrests until their knuckles were stretched white, it rattled a bit and a piece of the ceiling fell down during take-off; a pity since it rather spoilt the new interior paint job where white gloss had been liberally coated over everything except the seats – and some on them too.

  Writing this under grey skies in the depressing surroundings of a drab hotel at JFK Airport, the parrots, the peasants, Amazonia and the Altoplano were already a continent away. But hurrah! I was on my way home.

  Singapore to Bangkok

  November 1997

  ‘The only way of catching a train I ever discovered is to miss the train before’

  – G.K. Chesterton

  Almost all the ghosts of the colonials had crept away and my own memories had vanished too. Changi, Neesoon and Kranji had fallen victim to high rise suburbia although the Tangyi Club still held up its head in defiant exclusivity and token buildings such as Stanhope Road, the National Museum and Raffles, of course, remained. This ‘90s city was sweaty, tropical and vertical but with none of the frenzy of Hong Kong nor the individualism of Manhattan; it was a kind of eastern Miami swept of vice and rollerblades. Spitting, long hair and fire crackers were an offence and possession of just 200gms of marijuana brought mandatory death. Clinically clean and accountancy dull, its people were cardboard cut outs of respectability. Taxi windows were so covered in regulatory notices on insurance, tyre pressures and inspections that it was hard to see out. Chewing gum was prohibited, few smoked, Playboy magazine was banned and, in a society that has little privacy since the xenophobic state continually controls and regulates, foreigners were regarded with disdain and seen as being disorderly and a decadent influence. In a humid 90°F (32°C) only the snowmen and Father Christmases were not melting. Feline women with skinny arms and fragile bones were stockinged and dapper men in Armani suits spoke earnestly into their mobiles. No one was fat, no one was poor and no one was badly dressed. Like hothouse flowers, the inhabitants bloomed in ordered seasons, the overprotected products of a manipulative government. Street underpasses were air conditioned and served by Schindler escalators, M & S (the largest in Asia), Gucci (three of these) and all the world’s top fashion names had bullied away the street vendors and limos had stolen the road from rickshaws. The great harbour remains but even so, the wharfs, godowns and fleets of packet boats have yielded to huge container ships continuously pecked by huge cranes. But there was redemption too: the giants of marble and stainless steel stood guard over little pearls of Christian churches – Armenian, Catholic and Protestant – that were scattered around, painted white and standing on emerald napkins of grass. Prolific planting of trees and shrubs succeeded in greening the streets and although they were continuously shedding leaves, these hardly touched the granite pavement before they were scooped up in the name of order.

  A modest £5 for ‘eat all you can’ around the pool was as attractive as the dishes on offer. It was only when a gas cylinder was connected up to a cast iron plate on my table that I realised that £5 did not include the chef. Oil – sesame, peanut or palm – was spread on the griddle and then it was DIY. Since the choice was raw chicken or pork, the gas kept going out in the breeze and the poor light made it difficult to judge the degree of singeing and further, as the food passed to the mouth via chilli sauce whose scale of searing started at agony, it would not be until the next day that I would discover whether it was salmonella or myself who had survived.

  Ah! The triumph of an old Asia hand, I was alive! Overnight rain had cleaned the streets and cleared the skies and I walked to the station to board Express ER2 for Butterworth departing at 7 am. Once the busy terminus for all traffic to the north, the station was now forlorn with a single train per day. Nevertheless all the carriages were full; full too of blaring music which I hoped was not going to spoil the ride. A clerk used a bicycle to deliver forms to the guard at the end of the long train. Parked on a long curve, one end was invisible to the other and a series of flag wavers passed the all clear round the bend.

  Crossing the island was like slicing through Metropolis. Not a kampong, chicken or buffalo to be seen; no rows of papaya, no grubby, smiling children and not a sarong in sight. Blocks of flats built or being built were divided only by concrete roads. The northern side of the island seemed to be scrap yards but even here the wrecks were neatly stacked. It will not be long before the island sinks. But cross the Causeway, pull away from Johore Baru and hurrah! for rusty roofed shacks, bananas, old bikes and brown backs hacking into red earth. Here there was life.

  On board, drinks arrived brought by a young Malaysian woman who balanced cups and glasses with circus skill as the train swayed and jogged. The radio had been replaced by Tom Hanks on a video in a corner. Individual rubbish bags were distributed and a small fellow with cracked teeth and a bent back came through from time to time to sweep the carpet with an old Ewbank. Here, the view was of palm oil acres and smaller plantations of rubber trees which were fringed with rows of avocado, mango, coconut,
papaya or banana. Occasionally there was durian and jackfruit. Sunbirds and pied kingfishers perched on the telephone lines, there were white egrets looking for frogs in the storm ditches and small stations had platforms filled with potted plants. At each station the guard went through the same routine in three languages. “Mind the step, don’t leave anything behind and thank you so for the pleasure of travelling.” He had a strange singsong voice with a refined accent which made him seem like an effete dilettante – perhaps he was.

  Kuala Lumpur went by in a flash – a pity, as its domed and crenellated Moorish exterior make it the best looking city in Asia. Just a glimpse of the Petronias Towers (the highest in the world) and a host of cranes that were completing the competition. No longer was K.L. ‘Kuala L’Impure’.

  I had forgotten the hills that surround Ipoh, some with dramatic sheer cliffs, others great limestone lumps standing isolated. Strange that such significant and dramatic features could have slipped my memory, even after 35 years. But from the train, the town seemed familiar; the single storey buildings with painted corrugated roofs and the taller buildings down the main street with tiled roofs, all stained by neglect and the rigours of the tropics. Then, as a lieutenant in a cavalry regiment that was limited in its activities by the need to keep its Saladin armoured cars and Ferret scout cars on the roads, there was time to explore. Dinners in the mess were up to the standards of the UK, with the regimental silver shining with a polish that came from hours spent at camp rather than in the field. Tropical mess kit of starched white cotton jacket and skin tight blue serge trousers was accompanied by the accoutrements of patent leather boots, silver spurs, chain mail epaulettes and medals. We felt and looked smart and proud but there was no contact with any educated Malays to discover their opinions; perhaps just as well. In any case, two years later in August 1963, Malaya received its independence and we were gone.

  Fourteen hours later, under a sky whose lightning competed with the neon of George Town that shimmered across the Straits of Malacca, we pulled in and I hurried to catch the ferry. It was hard to simultaneously carry a suitcase, shoulder a heavy bag and hold an umbrella and so I had had my bath by the time I arrived at the hotel. At dinner, the revolving restaurant made me giddy, and moving away from the glazed perimeter I found myself closer to a band whose only solution to the unfamiliar notes of western pop was to pump up the decibels.

  Mr Teh was dapper, two days older than me and drove a stretched limo. Had I known about the car I would not have booked the hotel room. A family could have lived in it; in fact, judging by its condition they might have only just left. It was a Proton, one of three in the country and when I asked how old it was, Mr Teh dodged the question. The string around the boot rather let it down, but who needed a boot when you could fit a cabin trunk inside? At first, we drove through plantations of oil palm but in Thailand these changed to rubber trees planted in precision rows for mile after mile, each tree with its little cup collecting a few tears from its scarred trunk. Sometimes, a tapper’s hut had a few sheets of dried latex hung out on a line to dry like a row of pillow cases after a weekend house party. In the towns, stinking lumps of latex from the bottom of the curing vats were laid out on the road. Looking like pumice rocks they were bought to stuff chair seats. Along the roadsides young teak trees had been planted – hundreds of miles of them. Whether this was a gesture towards replacing the robbed forest or a cash crop for the future, I did not know.

  Mr Teh was keen on retaining British names for roads, strict parent control, English as the primary language and the death penalty.

  “The only way to do business don’t you think, Mr Chilton?”

  He was very formal and used my name in every sentence. We got along well. When he talked he slowed down and since talking was what he liked doing best, we took longer than planned to reach Pattani – or perhaps he was just nursing the limo.

  The town was predominantly Muslim, mostly of Malay origin; the men wore little skull caps and the women covered their heads. The remainder were Hokkien Chinese. It was a beach resort with an old and attractive fishing port – very photogenic and very smelly but away from the sea it had gone in for high rise (that meant four storeys in this part of the world) and my hotel was an early model. Many of the houses and shops had delicate bamboo bird cages hanging in the shade. Most contained singing doves, mournful little grey birds that were expected to sing their hearts out in a competition held all over southern Thailand each October. I whistled a bar or two of La Paloma to a few but their pink, beady eyes never blinked nor their throats opened; in November they had probably had all they could take of encouraging whistles.

  I shared the dining room with a pair of lovers and seven waitresses. The menu was written in unintelligible Thai, so I asked for chicken as the safe option but a scrawny leg and a slice of cucumber were not what I had in mind. Extravagant Billy Bunter gestures produced a whole farmyard of boiled beasts and asking for a little more rice, the whole prodigality was repeated. Had Werner von Braun discovered the chilli sauce, he would have cancelled his experiments. Dinner was accompanied by a series of chanteuses (eight before I left) clad in mock tiger or shimmering chiffon who sang sad songs that seemed to be about lost loves. I could not make out whether they were in a competition all singing the same weary tune or whether the fact that the lovers had drowned or jumped off a cliff made for sickening similarity. In any case, I was busy chewing through the farm yard. At breakfast, my request for an omelette and bacon arrived as fried eggs and chicken sausage and each request for a cup of coffee came accompanied by a cup of green tea.

  Mr Teh tightened the string on the boot and we set off to Narithawat 40 miles to the south. He was reluctant to stray off the main road but I had the map and the money so he was persuaded to make one or two detours. On one we came across a fish drying factory housed in a shack beside the muddy shore. Piles of fresh fish, mostly small sharks, were filleted, put into great clay pots of brine for a week and then laid out on huge bamboo trays to dry in the sun. The smell was terrible. On one side two men cracked open oysters and patient cats sat by for the rejects.

  Narithawat was not quite the ‘small pretty fishing village’ the guide book had promised but it was rural and pleasant all the same. A scruffy, elderly man with a deferential manner and ill-matched shoes shuffled up and in good English told me he had obtained a degree at Cairo University, gone to London to teach but had ‘lost his mind’ and returned. He had certainly lost his teeth and most of his hair but otherwise he seemed pretty sane. Beside a wooden quay, a small girl was making a boat from folded palm leaves and, filling it with frangipani blossom, she gently launched it as her offering to a river god. Other palm boats had been caught in the detritus that accumulated in eddies; I hoped the prayers they carried were received before they got parked in this aquatic rubbish bin.

  At noon in Yala, Mr Teh announced that he had to drop me at 2 pm. Since my train left at 5 pm, I was angry and made it plain that if he could not find me a good hotel to spend three hours in, he would have to keep driving around. Much to his surprise and mine there appeared like an apparition, at the end of the dirty and dismal main street, a brand new, air conditioned, ten-storey palace of comfort and coolness. Most of his tip was saved and he set off on the eight hour drive back to Penang. Being lunchtime and wary of the small portions served, I tried to order a double amount of nasi goring with the result that two places were laid and two plates served. So courteous were the staff, they showed no surprise when I followed my own meal with that of my absent friend.

  Joining another train for the final leg of my journey, my compartment was fitted out in grey formica and polished aluminium; it was efficient, clean and as soulless as a home to a dead sardine. But the air conditioning worked well, I could turn off the music and I had it to myself; my plan to travel on a Sunday seemed to have paid off. As we left, the door of the carriage opened and a charming boy handed me a fresh orange juice and a menu that ran to four pages – heaven knows where they cook
ed it, perhaps they telephoned ahead. When my choices arrived, the tom yum soup was spiced with coriander, ginger, chilli and lemon grass and burdened with shrimp, crab and octopus. It was in a special metal bowl under which a saucer of oil was burning. Had the train suddenly stopped, I should have got a gallon of boiling soup over my chest and the carriage might have caught fire.