The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  The rain followed me to the Danum Valley where a fashionable eco-lodge had been built at the end of a three hour drive on a switchback rubble road through a logging concession of one million acres (404,000 hectares). Taking a ‘get wet and be damned’ attitude and protecting my camera in a lodge laundry bag, I strode out down a forest trail in shorts and a tee-shirt. I should have known about the leeches. Some unpleasant weeks at a Jungle Warfare School 40 years before, lugging a bren gun through drenched undergrowth and splashing through jungle streams, should have reminded me of the guile of these silent and stealthy parasites. Painlessly, they clasp on to warm-blooded mammals as they flounder by and hang on till they gorge themselves. They can take onboard six times their weight in blood and live off it for months. Enthusiastic for the lushness of the jungle, I walked the trails for an hour or so and returning damp and muddy stripped in the shower to find half a dozen of these blood suckers. A lighted cigarette dispatched them but three had climbed to the tenderest and warmest part of my male anatomy. These clever and insidious creatures inject an anti-coagulant which ensures that blood runs for several hours. The dinner gong had sounded and I had only a pair of cream trousers to wear. The manufacturers of sticking plaster do not seem to have properly researched the adhesive properties required in this particular area of the male body and as the blood flowed, I contemplated the alternatives. An embarrassing stain getting steadily larger, the use of a plastic bag (I only had one and that crackled), missing dinner (I was hungry) or tightly tied handkerchiefs. I chose the latter and walking as though in a wet nappy, I timidly headed for the dining room sporting a bulge like a family bunch of bananas.

  Botanically, the jungle here is Lowland Dipterocarp Forest. Commercially it is a loggers’ dream with hardwood trees two or three hundred years old, up to 260 ft (80m) high and with a girth of 1.5 ft (4m). For the forest inhabitants it is disastrous and the orang-utan population was down 50 percent in the previous 15 years. Like all primary forests it was benign, with few thorns or bugs, but full of sound; monkeys crashed through the canopy, birds called, cicadas screeched and deer barked. Palim, my naturalist guide, was born in the forest and started out as a hunter relying on the forest for food but now he spoke Malay, English, Japanese and Chinese and he led our band along damp and shady forest trails. One glance at the dark green wall of forest took in a millipede in the floor litter, a medicinal plant or a flying squirrel 160 ft (50m) up. Droppings were minutely poked about and identified and after three days I found I knew more than I might have wished about the digestive systems of civets and what a langur had for lunch.

  After a day in such a place, one acquires a misplaced possessiveness that claims exclusive rights. Those joining a small group are treated with some indifference and even resentment. I was the interloper who dared join an established team of two Nipps, two Swedes and two Brits. This stew, made up of rather bland and respectful national ingredients, seemed to work well. The addition of a couple of Yanks might have added body, but a Wop or two would have been far too spicy and to have thrown in a handful of Micks would have had the pot boiling over. After the pleasantries of mutual Good Mornings, each kept to their own until some occasion provided an opportunity to offer a better viewing position or a steadying hand over a rocky river bed. The flavours slowly intermingled and simmered. And so it was for two days and a night – Koshi and Hourima, Petra and Sven, Tom and Annabelle plus James; a pretty successful recipe.

  On my last evening I sat on a boulder by the river for an hour or two and was visited by a family of wild pigs rootling in the riverbank and a timid sambar deer coming to the edge to drink. A black hornbill called from the far bank with low growls that gathered speed and ended in swift cackles as though he was delighted in his own joke. A troop of maroon langurs crashed around before returning to the forest for the night. Gibbons sang their sunset songs and a pair vocalised to each other over a three octave range. The bugs of dusk came out too; Keats remembered them (although beside a Scottish loch).

  ‘Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

  Among the river sallows, borne aloft

  Or sinking as the light wind lives and dies.’

  In the dusk, I made my way back to find I was the only guest. I sat in the great first floor dining hall with six waiters, two barmen, a kitchen full of chefs and with maids and flunkies eager to please but lacking commands. By some freak of booking mismanagement, this 20-bedroomed lodge with its stockpile of rattan furniture and sitting in a million acres of jungle was all mine. Simultaneously I was all powerful, somewhat disconcerted and rather forlorn. Some might have relished this opportunity to act the pasha in his palace but this armchair Tarzan, lordly but lonely and missing his Jane, called for another beer, paused on the veranda to catch the sounds of croaking frogs, the squeaks and whirls of myriad insects, the trill of a flycatcher, the ripple of the river, wondered at the stars, the trails of fireflies and the lightning of a distant storm silhouetting the forest canopy and headed for dreams.

  Lahad Datu was the face of modern Sabah that I had sought to avoid. This provincial town on the extreme border of Malaysia showed up the prosperity of the country as a whole. Car scrap-yards, depots of mechanical diggers and logging lorries grinding their way to the port with oil palm tankers in their wake. Along the road were new army barracks, a huge new hospital (although short of doctors I was told), new power lines from a hydroelectric scheme and a university campus for 1,000 students. Japanese 4x4s, mobile phones, TVs and techno gadgets were in every shop and showroom. Identical residential boxes with no gardens but plants in all types of containers sat in sullen rows and scattered across this urban landscape were an assortment of evangelical churches and extravagant domed mosques. And all this was inhabited, driven, worked and regulated by a mix of Malay, Chinese and Indians, all speaking their own languages (with a universal fall-back of English) and worshipping their own gods in a harmony that prejudiced parts of the world should envy.

  I stopped over in Singapore for a change of planes and a gulp of nostalgia. Every arriving passenger was thermodynamically screened for high body temperature as an indicator of the SARS epidemic allegedly raving at the time. Singapore takes everything seriously and all school children took their temperature daily. The female taxi driver had two mobiles and an electronic screen, all of which bleeped or spoke. She thought I was under 50, which somewhat compensated for a boatman in Sabah who had thought I was 72. Torrents of rain filled the storm culverts and dimmed the view; was there a message somewhere in these buckets of water that were upturned wherever I arrived? When the rain cleared it revealed a city unknown to me; refreshingly green and remarkably clean and with every car seemingly driven out of a showroom that day; even the school buses were polished.

  I took a taxi with a driver of low intelligence but high spirits and an incessant gabble that might have been English if only night school could have honed his pronunciation into something intelligible. Unfortunately, he did not think much of my pronunciation either and in a lay-by we studied a map of my objectives. Neesoon, where I was happily stationed for a year in 1962, was a vast housing estate, the Goodwood Hotel and Raffles recognisable only externally and the Tanglin Club, once the haunt of arrogant young cavalry officers, had a long waiting list for would-be members of the business noblesse. The Singapore Tourist Office would, no doubt, have wanted to tell me about the old fashioned charms of Geyland Serai, Arab Street or Little India but to me they were sanitised history. Memory lane had been turned into dual carriageways, although road names were unchanged and familiar. My last memory of Orchard Road was one of driving down it in my yellow, two-seater TR3 with six brother officers in the back. We were going home then and it was time for me to go home now. Besides, it had started to rain again.

  Shangri La

  June 2004

  ‘The world is getting such a dangerous place, a man is lucky to get out of it alive’

  - WC Fields

  It seems a pity to start with a complaint but I n
eed to clear away an irritation that arises from the dawn arrival of each of the last four flights I have taken. Why, oh why is breakfast served so early? Sleep is scarce enough and each wink is precious. Prior to a 6 am arrival, to be woken for a foam rubber omelette and a leather sausage at 4 am and to have this cleared away only for the lights to be turned off again is a special kind of long haul torture. I said as much to the senior hostess: “Royal Thai Orchid Class should treat its customers better; after all they are the ones that make you money.” She smiled a charm school smile, dipped her knees just sufficiently to put a tiny crease in the back of her silk skirt and said that she would note my comments and hoped that I had had a pleasant flight. I had thought that she was human, she was certainly pretty and it was a shame that she turned out to be simply an automaton. However, a signal had gone out, as later the purser arrived. He pursed his lips, went down on one knee and listened intently. He then thought for a while and said he would note my comments and hoped that I had had a pleasant flight.

  The flight of Southern China Airlines from Kunming was far noisier, considerably more crowded and a lot more fun. I thought I was going to miss it as 43 Taiwanese golfers queued in front of me on their way to The Sunshine Golf Tournament. When I realised that they were queuing for my own flight, my anxiety was reduced to wondering whether there would be enough room left for me.

  To a westerner the Chinese are small and so are their airline seats. A six foot New Zealander had his knees around his ears but I was fortunate being by the emergency exit; the captain came to say, “Pleeth no touch.” My smile of acknowledgement was confident but should the moment have come when I should have been required to touch, 43 golfers, a tall New Zealander and 159 assorted Chinese would have been kicking my bum to be the first to escape. I asked my Taiwanese neighbour if it was difficult to enter China. “Oh no!” he laughed. “We are the ones who lend the money.” He chuckled about this absurd question until we landed an hour later.

  The old town of Dali oozes charm from its tree-lined, stone-paved streets busy with local shoppers and groups of Chinese tourists gathered up by flag waving girl guides. Here, the Bai are the majority tribe, the women wearing a single coloured vest over a blouse with an apron falling over black trousers. Confusing in name but not in dress are the Dai who filter through the market adding bright splashes of colour with their striped sarongs and fitted jackets – resembling their tribal cousins in Burma’s Shan states. Lahu also come down from the hills to shop, distinctive in their black turbans with a long back flap. They are Christians and in a small chapel, a picture shows Christ floating ethereally above the Great Wall. The Bai, on the other hand, are Muslim but all seem tolerant of each other’s religions and customs. This tribal cocktail gets the occasional addition of Wa women puffing away on home grown tobacco stuffed into long silver pipes. Having paid the obligatory visit to the ninth century Three Pagodas (they looked 19th century to me), spent two nights in a vast hotel of ghastly gaudiness and fished with trained cormorants in the rain, I moved on.

  Like a ribbon thrown against the mountainside, the road to Lake Lugu winds around the steep sides of valleys several thousand feet deep that a millennium of snow and flood, rock falls and crashing streams has vertically scarred. The road is partly metalled, partly cobbled and in between are sections of rutted dirt. The echoes of the tramping feet of Kublai Khan’s armies resonate all the way. Like ants toiling over a ploughed field, his weary troops climbed 100 mountain ranges and crossed the Yangtze and Mekong rivers before eventually garrisoning the Lijiang district in around 1250. As we dropped 4,000 ft (1,200m) in two hours, the scrub pine gave way to alder and birch and then, at the base of deep valleys where the sun is trapped and the wind filtered through 1,000 subsidiary glens, bananas, lemons, pomegranates and oranges grow in terraced rows. Small areas of pasture had been cleared to graze a few brown and black cows, and grape vines growing in ordered rows and originally introduced by French Catholic missionaries for sacramental wine.

  As we climbed again, the flash of sun on moving water far below gave a first glimpse of the River Yangtze. These glimpses came more frequently as the road descended the next valley via 100 hairpins and then brown water, swiftly moving amongst the sandbanks, rocks and cascades, was squeezed between concrete buildings that intrude like a proletariat wart on the natural grandeur. Crossing the river by the bridge that is anchored by these buildings (the only bridge for 90 miles (144kms) north and 80 miles (128kms) south), the opposite side of the gorge had another random ribbon of road along which overloaded lorries slowly inched their way, belching enough black exhaust fumes to darken the sky. These were not the brightly coloured glittery vehicles of the southern Himalayas and the Karakorum but in the nature of the Han Chinese, plain and conforming. We made long detours to the ends of side valleys, past little settlements where the wooden houses are built alpine-like with interlocking trunks from the pine that cover the hillsides. The almost vertical slopes were sometimes cleared of stone boulders and planted with potatoes or maize, both introduced by missionaries in the early 19th century and now staples of the local diet. Why these crops were not washed away by the rain is a mystery; perhaps they are, but an occasional loss is presumably preferable to the labour of terracing such steep slopes. Down once more, the switchback road was then surfaced with a zillion small pieces of granite individually jig-sawed into compacted clay that left my bones rattling like a laboratory skeleton. The bus often had to manoeuvre over and around landslides, each time coming heart-stoppingly close to the edge. There were lacy patterns of goat trails over the hillsides and far below rice paddies, in varied stages of growth, made a patchwork of viridian, emerald and jade.

  Up again, this time into the territory of the Mosu people and on the fringe of the Yi. Married Yi women working in the fields were wearing two foot (60cms) wide canopies of black velvet on their heads – a more impractical and awkward headgear it would be hard to devise but in case this was not handicap enough, this was coupled with eight inch long earrings of semi-precious stones, a heavily embroidered, brilliantly coloured coat and weighty silver jewellery. The Mosu, like the Naxi whom we would meet later, follow a flexible form of co-habitation before marriage known as ashu – literally ‘good friends’. We have heard that one before! Sexual activity often begins between teenagers and needless to say the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases is frightful. In 1957 Peter Goullart, a Russian-born Frenchman who wrote extensively of this part of China, recalls an encounter with a Tibetan trader returning from the Mosu region. Asked to treat the man, Goullart quickly recognized the symptoms of gonorrhoea and proceeded to suggest a suitable course of treatment. But the man protested that he only had a cold. “How did you get the cold?” asked Goullart. “From riding a horse,” replied the man. “Well,” said Goullart, “it was the wrong kind of horse.”

  Descending again for the fortieth time, I regretted the breakfast of bracken shoots and crunchy chicken feet. Here was another change of architecture where the wooden houses had stone bases up to the first floor and were grouped around a courtyard. Black faced sheep appeared together with Mosu women this time wearing turbans of black knitted wool covered in silver and gold beads, embroidered tunics and long, white, pleated skirts.

  My first impression of Lijiang appalled since I had fond and vivid memories of an outstanding TV documentary of the late ’80s, called ‘Beyond the Clouds’. I had longed to see this wonderful town – the genuine, untouched, medieval, cobbled, cool, stone-bridged, clear-streamed, willow-hung, single-storied and timbered-fronted and dotted with charming squares full of magnolias and camellias of venerable age. Unfortunately, the Chinese Office of State Tourism seemed to have been watching television too and had other plans. After the devastating earthquake of 1996 that destroyed many of the Naxi homes, the state poured in money to clear, gentrify, sanitise and reconstruct. UNESCO then added a World Heritage Site stamp of approval. Ancient, sleepy little alleyways became busy with souvenir shops and internet cafés, cobbled
lanes were transformed by the brash and the tacky and all were filled with crowds bussed in and flown in to experience the ‘Real China’. Many shops sold old domestic items of dubious authenticity and age. Like their counterparts worldwide, their sign might well have read ‘Bric-a-brac bought, antiques sold’. However, strolling the lanes and back alleys in the angled sunlight of early morning (even Chinese tourists don’t get out before 9 am), there was still a quiet magic to be found. There were vendors at street corners with fresh, newly peeled, water sprinkled vegetables and dumplings steaming, dogs stretching, children yawning, neighbours chatting, thresholds being swept, cobbles being watered and wooden shutters being opened; all the indications of a prosperous market town starting the day. But post 9 am, these townsfolk, some descended from the garrisoning armies of Kublai Khan, were engulfed by some of the three million tourists a year (99% Chinese) that stay for two nights in the 75 hotels or rent one of the 3,200 self-catering apartments that have been built in the last five years.

  Wandering around the town, I came upon the Cultural Museum; the sign at the entrance read: ‘The Tired and Over-Sixty are Free’. I walked in, doubly eligible. The museum seemed to be staffed exclusively by women reflecting the matriarchal society of the Naxi. The women own the house, the lease of the land (all land in China being state-owned) and have custody of the children. As strong as Greek donkeys, they work the fields and run the businesses. The husbands look after the house, the potted plants and the children, write poetry, play musical instruments and gossip.