The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  Suddenly our soporific progress stopped dead in the water. It was lunchtime and plates of food tipped into laps, the kettle toppled, fuel drums were dislodged and there were cries of alarm; we had run on to a sandbank. Le Capitaine looked distraught, no doubt from the dual concerns that his seamanship might be questioned or that his tip might be jeopardised. He and the two boys jumped into the water, as did I and help was summoned from fishermen whose poles were employed as levers amid much conflicting advice. Eventually we floated free, lunch and leisure were resumed and I for one looked forward to the next desastre.

  Approaching Mopti, a large town at the confluence of the Niger and the Bani rivers, we passed through Lake Donde where the grey of the sky melded into the grey of the water with bare distinction. I have never seen ten square miles (25 square kms) of water so universally calm. The whole lake held its breath not daring to ripple less it expend unnecessary energy. Cormorants occasionally crossed our bows flying east to west just above the syrupy water and here at last was a lushness of reeds and plant life. Perched upon the tallest stems were groups of carmine bee eaters, Abyssinian rollers and paradise wydahs.

  Going on to Djenne we reached what was once the country’s most prosperous city with far reaching traders bartering Saharan iron, copper and stone but now trade was listless – just like the rest of the country. We had come to look at the mud buildings of which the much photographed mosque, with its turreted corners and crenulated walls, is the biggest in the world. I should have been impressed but it seemed like a larger version of those that are annually patted into place on Weymouth beach. Here they were also patted but by teams of boys who scrambled up the precarious scaffolding with buckets of red mud from the banks of the River Bani in a continuous programme of repair. The buildings may be centuries old but the open sewers were too and I was anxious to leave this mud pie of a town for the warm, clean winds of the desert.

  ‘Is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo

  A dream as frail as those of ancient time?’

  In a word, Mr Tennyson, yes. The rumours may well have once had substance but in Timbuktu now all there seemed to be were thin goats, ragged children and an air of dusty despondency that swept around every corner: there was much dust and there were many corners. We had flown there in a Russian aircraft of Air Mali, known locally as Air Maybe, and at the airport, Tuareg men, wrapped like mummies in blue indigo cloth so that only dark, bloodshot eyes were vulnerable to swirling sand, gave a hint of authenticity. The golden years were in the 16th century when the city was the hub of the trans-Saharan trade routes travelled by merchants from the south dealing in gold, ivory, ostrich feathers and slaves and from the North, salt, copper, cloth and horses. Out of this prosperity grew the greatest centre of learning and religious thought in the western Sudan. The tales of fabulous wealth attracted Mungo Park, who never reached the town, Gordon Laing who did but was slaughtered by Tuaregs as he left and Rene Caillie, who got there in 1827 only to write home describing ‘a mass of ill-looking houses built of earth’; and so it was.

  Late one evening I found Sinclair robed in his tartan dressing gown on the roof top veranda of the Hotel Colombe. He was having his hair cut by a prim and pencil moustached barber who had the words ‘Maurice René – Paris and Timbuktu’ embroidered on his white tunic. Waugh and Durrell would have rejoiced that such scenes could still be real. The shower had dribbled and the bed was harder than the tiled floor but after a dinner of rice and river fish on the hotel roof, I looked up from reading the tales of Beau Geste to the sparkling canopy of stars in their infinite number and for a moment thought I could hear the welcoming shouts of a camel train as it approached from the great dunes of Sudan and caught a hint of frankincense on the warm wind.

  “I’ve just been to Mali.”

  “Oh really? Dogons, Timbuktu, the Niger and all that; it must have been wonderful.”

  “It was... interesting.”

  Postcard Home

  I’m an ingenue in Timbuktu.

  It’s so damned hot I think I’ll rot!

  My group loves a bird to a point that absurd;

  “Hoopoo at 4 o’clock” one of them cries

  And six pairs of binos are raised to the skies.

  (I’ve seen the odd mammal but each one’s a camel)

  But when all’s said and done, I’m having quite fun.

  Sabah

  August 2003

  ‘One of the pleasantest things in life is to go for a long journey’ – William Hazlitt

  Singapore was 73°F (23°C) and drenched with rain. En route to Sabah, Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, was even wetter. A large party of jolly young Malaysian men were there to play golf. They wore co-respondent spiked shoes, many were dressed in tartan trousers and most were chattering into a mobile phone. These rang constantly, each playing a different jingle; a dozen or so might be calling at the same time. A tin marked ‘Horlicks’ and slices of Swiss roll by the tea urn and something grey labelled ‘Beef Pie’ revealed that the past still lingered. It could have been Perth airport for the Gleneagles fortnight.

  Kota Kinabalu, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sabah, was a smaller version of Kuching but still about seven times larger than I had imagined or had wished. There were high rise buildings, an urban sprawl in all directions and scars of red earth where new industrial estates and more houses were planned. Evidence of older houses only appeared on the fringes where coloured tin roofs clustered together in kampongs. The town was largely destroyed by the British in World War II in an attempt to deny it to the approaching Japanese and it was then comprehensively flattened three years later as they were being driven out. Rebuilt in the ’60s and renamed from its previous name of Jessleton, it was long on function and short on charm, had little appeal and I longed to leave. By now it was 10 pm and with a two hour mountain drive ahead, fast food was called for and there it was, glowing in red neon – Double Cheeseburger and Chips.

  My prayer for departure was clearly garbled in transmission as a tropical storm of great intensity broke out. As we wound laboriously up the mountain, often axle deep in floodwaters, I pondered the omens. After a 25 hour journey from a parched Oxfordshire landscape, I had arrived to a waterfall of rain to eat at McDonalds with a male Chinese guide oddly called Jessie and who had spent his teenage years in Borehamwood and a driver with one ear (as I noticed in the almost continuous forked lightning) and unaccountably known as Captain Julius. I judged the omens good, if only on the basis of improbability.

  Mount Kinabalu pokes its granite nose out of the rainforest on the northern tip of Borneo and for many is the sole reason for visiting Sabah. The summit at 13,400 ft (4,095m) is the highest in South-East Asia, with tropical vegetation up to 1,000 ft (3,200m). It lies at the centre of the Kinabalu National Park which has World Heritage status and one of the most remarkable of all nature’s paradises with reputedly the richest diversity of flora in the world. With 6,000 vascular plant species, 1,000 different orchids and 780 ferns, it seemed a likely claim. It also has an annual drenching of 15 ft (4.5m) of rain and most of it seemed to fall on the morning of my climb.

  Rigorous procedures at the park headquarters ensured that I had a coded yellow plastic label to hang round my neck. This was principally to check that I returned but more likely so that my corpse could be identified if I strayed off the path. I felt like a heifer with a tag in its ear. Guides, or more truthfully helping hands, were compulsory. The system allowed these guides – stocky, wiry, mountain men with bulging calves and cracked skin – to barter for their clients, so as the tagged heifers milled around, they made their bids. Single, fit young men were the cheapest; plump Japanese pricey and families sky-high (the children might need carrying).

  The route was steep, sometimes vertical and the steps high (there were 2,800 to the summit). The rock was slippery, washed by mountain streams, and the mud sticky. But there were no bugs, good shelters every half mile (.8kms) and there was the camaraderie engendered by those who know that they are engage
d in a challenge. For me, the challenge started at the gate and continued in increasing stages of difficulty for the next four and a half hours. I saw one other of bus-pass age but so intent was I in following one secure foothold with another that I might have missed a few. I made it to the tree line – an uphill two and a half mile route. My knees were jelly, my legs wobbled and my heart pounded; only bravado and the spirit of empire builders kept me moving. I celebrated the point of no return with my packed lunch of cold chicken sausage, fried bread and an ‘energy bar’ that looked and tasted like Old Bruno Ready Rubbed pipe tobacco. From 9,800 ft (2,980m) there was perpetual cloud whose drizzle made a scotch mist seem like a puff of aerosol and this suddenly gave way to a tropical storm – another one! Climbers slithering up or sliding down stopped at our corrugated roofed shelter and soon a polyglot, multi-lingual, international, dripping but cheerful group were crowded together, confined behind the heavy bars of rain. National characteristics were displayed in their wet weather gear. The Japanese were fully equipped for Cape Horn, the Dutch and Italians were in proper waterproofs and sturdy rucksacks, there was a Spaniard in an anorak and guides in tattered trousers, flip flops and charity t-shirts. There was also an Englishman in split boots, shorts, a muddy shirt, carrying a Peruvian shoulder bag and sweating under a cheap plastic poncho.

  The downward journey was heavier on the knees but lighter on the heart and there was some enthusiasm for handing back my tag and a great deal more enthusiasm for my bed. The whole trip to the top would have been ten hours, with a cold and wet night in a hut on the way and then six hours down the next morning. Limping back to my bungalow, I passed a sign that listed the time of the winner of the last annual Climbathon Race to the summit and back: two hours, 41 minutes. Some men are not human.

  Sandakan, Sabah’s second town, lies on the east coast. The flight across the state showed the rainforest sprawled across the heavily corrugated landscape with the highest trees and the widest canopies in the valleys. At 7 am mist and low cloud had settled in these warmer valleys but would burn off soon. Occasionally a patch of red earth showed through where there had been logging but in this part at least, the damage looked minor. However, where the land flattened towards the sea, over 250,000 acres (one million hectares) had been cleared and oil palm in blocks of neat rows had been planted over the last 30 years. Rivers writhed through the flat land carrying silt whose colour matched the terracotta of the roads – the latter only distinguishable by their straight path.

  On the aeroplane I was reading A Parrot in a Pepper Tree by Christopher Stewart and my suppressed laughter made tears pour down my cheeks. I was interrupted by the woman beside me wearing a baju kurung, a white Muslim headscarf. She might have been a nun but at any rate, she was clearly a kindly and caring soul and she put a hand on my knee and gave me a tender and compassionate smile. On a later leg and similarly convulsed, my companion, this time short and hairy (and big in cement he told me) seemed to assume from the book’s title that I was reading an agricultural text book; he must have thought me either deranged or was using the cover to mask something lascivious.

  Sandakan was clean and conforming and its urban vulgarity spread along the shoreline to where the stilted houses of the fishermen and sea gypsies took over in a tangled town of timber boarded, tin roofed shacks linked by planked walkways and all hung about with the domestic decoration of washing, potted plants and plastic utensils. The rows of white villas in cul-de-sacs and squares of urban propriety were soulless and abandoned but in these offshore communities children giggled, women chatted and life throbbed. The products of the fishermen’s labours were spread out through a huge fish market. Slippery under foot with guts and scales, the night’s catches were piled in heaps for wholesalers and housewives. There were huge rays three feet (1m) across, snapper, parrotfish, grouper, eels, crabs, conch, flatfish, tube fish, yellow finned tuna, mountains of little jacks, white-fleshed shark and red fleshed tuna. Great slabs of ice covered in hessian arrived in pick-ups and were slid over the market floor, lifted by toothed prongs and then pushed on to the boats down narrow wooden channels where they were crushed with sledgehammers for the next night’s fishing.

  A mile offshore but in shallow water, bungalow-sized bamboo fish traps with great square nets were anchored in the sand to catch the fish swept in by the tide and these were serviced by smaller boats that continually chugged out almost obscured by their diesel smoke. We looked at these nets on the way to Turtle Island, an hour away in a high speed boat. There, a conservation project attempted to protect Green and Hawksbill turtles that find their way back from the ocean to lay their clutches of between 80 and 200 eggs in the sand. The jetty had been rammed by a misguided military boat the day before (there was a small contingent of Malaysian police on the island to patrol the seas against Filipino illegal immigrants, the border with the Philippines being only ten miles to the north) and so we ran aground on sand as dazzling as snow and in azure water waist deep. We had not been warned of this type of arrival and for a little while there was confusion. Two of our party, Val and Ian Hales, a middle aged Australian couple, he a pumpkin she a stick, unpacked their bags and attempted to change into swimming clothes. Not an easy matter in an open boat rocking in the surf while maintaining modesty in front of crew and strangers. I shunned decency and stripped to underpants and the other traveller Bas van Steegeen, a 6’6” (2m) tall pigtailed Dutchman, whose whole wardrobe was contained in a rucksack so small it might have been sold as a female fashion accessory, jumped in with shorts and singlet. My suitcase, heavy with cameras, books, boots and ‘things to do if it rains’, got laboriously passed from shoulder to shoulder as we stood in the warm water. It would probably have floated but I had an anxious few minutes.

  The whole purpose of this lengthy side trip to these pleasant islands in the Sulu Sea was something of a disappointment. A mother turtle – in this case a Green (the Hawksbills having come ashore earlier in the year) – having reached sexual maturity after ten or sometimes 30 years at sea and its pea-sized brain having being guided by ocean currents, moon phases and magnetic fields, hauls itself up with great effort onto the same beach that gave it birth. Highly susceptible to heat, she does this at night. Under pain of island expulsion no camera flash was allowed, so loaded with the fastest film available and a torch, I sought to capture this intimate occasion. In the event my torch was banned and by the dismal glow of a guide’s torch and standing four deep like students in a labour ward, we just made out the plopping of one hundred and eight rubbery eggs. After laying, the clutch was immediately gathered up by the rangers for reburial in an area safe from rats, monitor lizards and raptors and mother turtle skilfully but pathetically covered over a now empty hole with her back flippers. The highlight of the evening – by now it was midnight – was the release of 100 or so hatchlings (three would fit in one’s palm) back to the sea. They were tipped out from a plastic bucket at high tide level so that their lungs could be exercised before their swim and they scurried over the sand, their little flippers whirring like a wind-up toy. The laggards were urged on by the crowd and when the last one was safely afloat, a cheer went up and there were some sobs too. Within three hours of birth, in the darkness, alone, uncared for, unguided, unfed, vulnerable and lonely, these hatchlings were embraced by the warm water of an immense ocean.

  The Kinabatangan River is Sabah’s largest and rises in the hilly interior and empties itself on the east coast in a muddy soup that extends far out to sea. At this eastern end and hemmed in by vast oil palm plantations (Sabah produces ten percent of the world’s cooking oil and chippies in Bolton could not do without it) are wetlands that support a high concentration of birds and mammals. The forest dwellers include Asian elephants, Sumatran rhinos and various cats, rats, squirrels and many monkeys – gibbons, macaques, langurs and the bizarre proboscis. One of nature’s jokes, a male proboscis monkey sports a belly that might have been fed on beer and has a great floppy, extended and inebriated nose. Its tight, biscuit-colou
red fur improbably has a band of white around its bottom to give the impression of an elderly drunk clad only in his underpants. Bas, the pigtailed Dutch man, had appeared again and as we shared the backseat of a longboat, he roared with laughter whenever a group of these drunkards appeared. Oriental darters and many kingfishers – pied, blue-eared, black-backed, rufous-backed, stork-billed and banded and imperial green pigeons, egrets and many raptors, including the white billed fish eagle and the magnificent crested serpent eagle, inhabited the riverine margin. Pairs of hornbills continually crossed the river calling raucously like old fashioned football rattles. The rhinoceros hornbill is another freak, with a great extended casque welded on to the top of an already impossibly unwieldy beak. Like the Brabazon, aerodynamically it should not be flying.

  The rains have so swollen the river that it covered the base of the tree trunks on either side and it seemed as if the forest is draining into it. The current was swift and carried a great assortment of logs, branches, floating islands of hyacinth, an oil drum or two, bamboo poles, planks and the plastic detritus of humans further upstream. On one such pile of flotsam there was a monitor lizard three feet long that fixed me with a dinosaurian eye before swimming away and overhead, a brahminy kite flew so low I heard the rush of air through its primaries. It then circled overhead, its pale brown flecked belly white in the sun and mewing a shrill call before it soared away. Occasionally egrets sat perched on a log and they seemed to enjoy the ride as they swirled into whirlpools. The water, beige coloured with the silt that was washed from the riverbanks and hillsides stripped naked by logging activities, mixed with darker earth in the eddies so that the whole river resembled a huge helping of Caramel Delight. The egrets, when not riding the river rollercoaster, stood sentinel and silent to catch a fish or a frog. But no self-respecting mammal enjoys the rain, and the monkeys vanished to the shelter of broad leafed trees.