The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  The instructions for the mandrill tracking expedition were clear:

  Be ready at 0730 – please be prompt.

  Wear dark clothing.

  Wear boots or wellingtons.

  My team of Vincent and Salvador appeared around 0900 dressed for a Caribbean carnival and wearing flip-flops. I signed a form absolving the National Park authorities from any responsibility as to my safety and in particular, expressly waived my rights under Sec 1542 of the Civil Code of California and we set off for the forest. After a number of triangulation hits of a radio collar fitted to a matriarch mandrill, a spot by a stream was chosen as being on the likely path of the troop. Camouflage netting was thrown over the base of a tree and two of us squatted for over an hour in a space the size of a tea chest, encumbered by roots and accompanied by large ants, small spiders and a host of tiny black, biting flies. Suddenly, there was a roar from a male mandrill and a troop of some 200 rushed past in the deep shadow of the far side of the stream. They were gone in 20 seconds and I caught a glimpse of a disappearing blue bottom. I had paid extra for this.

  I cannot blame the galloping mandrills on my guides; wild animals do not perform to order but I tired of Lope and longed for the food and efficiency of Operation Loango. Devoid of energy and enterprise, any organisation eventually collapses and action does not form part of the average African day; it is simply a way of passing time. In every village, non-committal women with folded arms leant against doorposts and listless children tumbled with their dogs and chickens in the dust. I ceased to take note of them and joined the local ways: smile, resign yourself, things will work out. In any case it’s too hot, too wet and whatever you might think of doing, it’s too hard. African scenery is spectacular, its wildlife sensational but its people drive me mad.

  The twice weekly Train l’Equateur from Libreville trundled in an hour late but for those waiting it was an opportunity to chat to friends. The station, clean, tidy and well maintained, adjoined a huge marshalling yard for the logging industry and a train half a mile (400m) long was being loaded for its trip to the coast. Trees five feet (1.5m) across were stacked six high; 600 year old giants sought out for their sovereignty were now felled, scarred and chained and awaiting banishment to a foreign land. There was a trainload every two weeks and in addition, a constant flow of timber lorries and large rafts on the rivers. From time to time the station master appeared from his office, donned a waistcoat emblazoned on its back with SETAG – Societe Transportation de Gabon – and wrote the expected arrival time on a blackboard; taking off his waistcoat he then disappeared again into his den. Alterations were made several times each hour but I never saw anyone read them. The porter never did as he was fast asleep on a pile of mattresses; his legs twitched now and again and his shoes did not match. Instead of a trolley he had a wheelbarrow which was now filled with bananas and a microwave oven. The barrow was new – perhaps it was part of the luggage.

  The deep interior of an equatorial rain forest is a quiet, benign and shadowy environment. Life lurks in these shadows and stares from the canopy but it seldom threatens and is seldom seen. In the rainy season, it would be unpleasantly abuzz with insects but it was now dry and I accepted an invitation to visit Mikongo, a small camp run as a scientific station and staffed by five women researchers all of different nationalities (but none Gabonese or even African). We rattled for a few hours due east down the main road to the Congo over the ruts and corrugations caused by 40-ton, 18-wheeled logging lorries driven fast and carelessly to the railhead at Lope by drivers paid by the trip and high on marijuana. Passing one meant driving blind in an impenetrable cloud of fine and choking dust; a dozen times my life was in the hands of chance or the Angel Gabriel. After a further two hours along a narrow track cut through the forest and which snaked around great trees and plunged down steep banks to cross over streams, we reached a little clearing with six wooden huts spread around the perimeter in a circle. My Gabonese guides had the unlikely names of Janvier and Jeremy and we set off along barely discernable paths a foot wide, slithering down slimy slopes and crossing streams on fallen tree trunks. I simultaneously tried to find life in the canopy 200 ft (60m) above and avoid the hazards of the track two feet below. After 30 minutes, I was already dripping with sweat and every muscle ached and there was another five hours to go. The wildlife had clearly heard I was coming and scurried away but what remained was spotted by Janvier with the fine-tuned ear and far-seeing eye of a forest hunter; Jeremy sat down at every opportunity. Along a wide stream bed of damp sand there were the tracks of leopard, mandrill, bush pig and antelope, the paths we followed were cut or brashed by forest elephants and I heard, but seldom saw, hornbills, turacos, parrots, manabe and vervet monkeys. Perhaps I was unlucky, perhaps the time of year was wrong, the weather too damp and dull or perhaps I did not offer up the right incantations to the right gods but the wildlife had conspired to stay hidden.

  Leaving Lope, Vincent (the ham-handed animal spotter) looked at me as he mangled my fingers in a goodbye crunch.

  “Vat have you done viz your hair?” he asked.

  I had no idea and the mirror in the gloomy gents showed nothing amiss. But later, back in the tasteless pile of the Meridian Hotel and a brightly lit bathroom, I discovered my hair was satsuma orange. I looked like a Belisha beacon. The culprit was clearly a new and novel anti-sunburn liquid that I had been liberally applying to my thinning pate. At a supermarket I miraculously obtained a pack of Garnier ‘ColorGo’ whose contents (two powders and a liquid) came with instructions in French. The only part of these I could understand was ‘It is important to apply the contents in the correct order’. Having no idea of the correct order and with a plane to catch I risked powder, powder, liquid, avoided the stares of curious passengers and sank low into my aircraft seat. It took a month for orange to turn to grey.

  Gabon will be spared a return visit.

  Postcard Home

  Deep in the forest the shadows are parted

  By a leathery hand the size of a plate.

  It’s a female gorilla as big as a shed

  But she’s still just a tiddler compared to her mate.

  Here in Gabon on the plains and the foothills

  Are hundred-strong gatherings of blue nosed mandrills.

  As I swing in my hammock the drums from the Congo

  Are beating a greeting to President Bongo.

  Tibet

  September 2007

  ‘I should like to spend the whole of my life travelling abroad, if I could borrow another life to spend afterwards at home’ – William Hazlitt

  The Shankar Hotel in Kathmandu was once a palace but surplus to royal requirements in the ’50s it had been converted from its ground plus two floors, into ground plus three. Our bedroom on the new mezzanine third was the top slice of the previous ballroom and had a three foot (1m) deep cornice and the top pane of the ballroom window so that to look out required lying on the floor. Two weeks before we arrived, there had been a more radical distribution of royal residences and all 16 of the countrywide palaces had been confiscated, the king stripped of all executive powers and the kingdom declared a republican state. These dramatic political changes seemed to have no visible effect on the street jams of worn out lorries, Suzuki taxis or Honda motor bikes, nor had three hour queues for just two litres of petrol dampened the Nepali enthusiasm for motorised wheels. However, three bombs (two killed and 19 injured) allegedly planted by Maoist terrorists on the evening we arrived closed off Durbar Square, adding to the press of traffic elsewhere.

  The Kathmandu Post naturally described these atrocities the next morning but the more disturbing front page news was a report that the chief engineer of Nepali Airlines, baffled by a persistent mechanical problem, had sacrificed a goat to encourage a divine solution. Since we were about to fly with Nepali over the highest and most inhospitable mountains on earth, I wished that at least he could have run to a buffalo.

  In Lhasa, the Chinese had rolled out a great carpet of comme
rcial concrete over the fertile valley so that there was a grid of dual carriageways and rows of identikit tenement blocks together with four army barracks and several open spaces for mass rallies. To those nurtured on the sentiments of a mystical city inhabited by a living god, a tough and resolute people under the protection of high mountains, this garish, insensitive and overbearing example of Chinese dominance was initially shocking. However, the Han Chinese have outnumbered the Tibetans in Lhasa for almost 40 years and Tibet with a quarter of China’s land mass (equal to France, Germany and Belgium combined) has only six percent of its population. The dreadful destruction of the Cultural Revolution had been halted for some of the buildings most precious to the Tibetan heritage, and the inner sanctum around the Jokhang temple was respectful of traditional styles and materials. The Potala Palace too had been left largely unscathed as an important draw for tourists. Part fortress, part prison, part shrine and part home, its dominating vertical plane and its monolithic structure of immense grandeur glowed white, pale pink, red and gold. The hill on which it rests and its own slanting walls (a structural necessity in the absence of mortar) combined to give it a powerful sense of stability.

  Elsewhere, architectural devices from Ming to modern were deployed with hideous abandon. In Tsedang was embodied what is present in all Chinese cities: a stupefying architectural sameness based on an inanimate set of models. Streets of standard cuboid shops are followed by streets of standard cuboid shops. There is no basic variation in the design of flats, government offices, barracks, parks or bookstores. Only the street lamps differed although there, the model was art nouveau meets Venetian. The Chinese ideal of harmonising with nature is absent in the stodgy, conformist architecture of its cities. At our hotel, a personal message from the manager welcomed us:

  ‘Enjoy the enchanting sunshine and extensive field of view’ ending, ‘We are always your sincere friends; here is your sweet home from home.’

  I looked for a bucket to be sick into. The smarmy tone of the letter was somewhat alleviated by a warning against ‘...depositing hotchpotch in the garden.’

  Escaping the bling of the town and the supercilious manager, we set off for the Samye monastery following the course of the fledgling Brahmaputra River, whose flood waters had wrapped the stands of willow and poplar in a swirl of Brown Windsor soup. Along the way ceratostigma, pink and white cosmos, and a pungent low growing shrub – an artemesia perhaps – were all flowering and the mountainsides were covered by a thorny bush cautiously grazed by herds of sullen sheep and arrogant but perky goats. Rape was being harvested to be crushed for cooking oil and quinke, the hardy highland barley, harvested for bread and beer. The farm houses were solid, stone built and square, each with an elaborate doorway and prayer flags at the four corners of their flat roofs. We crossed axle deep an eager and intemperate river of clear water as it rushed to join the soup of the Brahmaputra and climbed to a pass where the whole of the valley could be seen through a tangle of prayer flags, torn and tattered by the bitter wind. The monastery stood alone in a desolate landscape and was the object of pilgrimage by many thousands of Tibetans, the majority of whom made the difficult journey in the winter when the land no longer required their attention. Many had travelled over these mountains for days, some for weeks enduring the harshest weather and the most rigorous conditions. At their goal, they prostrated themselves many times before their chosen Buddha or lama, caressed the door frame of a shrine’s entrance already engrained with the sweat and dirt of 10,000 imploring hands, and kissed the pedestal of their god. Behind the temples were ruins of wood and clay, reminders of the fury of an extreme cultural intolerance. They are left to the nettles, an occasional hoopoe, mangy dogs and diseased peach trees. In the monastery’s ill-kempt grounds were hollyhocks and delphiniums in profusion and a bed of pink roses which we set about dead-heading.

  In contrast to the Potala Palace where backpacks were scanned and photographs forbidden, the monks here were welcoming and unconcerned as we poked about their temple and their home. Taking advantage of a sign crudely painted with the universal letters WC on a piece of cardboard torn from a box of tinned milk, I found a row of four unpartitioned squatters and a windowless opening to the outside. On a wall was a poster of David Beckham.

  A quilt had been laid over the wide plain of the Yalumba River, its patches of unripened barley showing green, and those ready for harvesting glowing like crème caramel and matching the early autumnal hues of poplars along the river banks. Other patches, where barley had already been cut and stooked, showed like polka dots in the wide landscape and in between there was an occasional square of potatoes and a smear of rape or a flash of mustard. Harvesters took a break for yak butter tea, sitting with legs outstretched as though the bend at their waist was locked in place whether reaping or resting. My three Tibetan phrases drew more quizzical expressions than smiling acknowledgements but I stopped short of the local custom of sticking out one’s tongue in greeting.

  Each day there was another monastery – or so it seemed, each with its scattering of young monks sprouting the first hairs of manhood and with shy but sincere smiles. They looked implausibly healthy and cheerful on an unchanging diet of steamed vegetables and suffocating veneration. I could never have become accustomed to the stygian gloom of monastic shrines, the cramped interiors, the impossibly complex characters of Tibetan Buddhism, the pungency of rancid yak butter and the almost insufferable compression of spiritualism that they contained. On the other hand, the buildings’ construction and decoration was admirable with their massive structural timbers, lacquered and bound with studded bands of steel and copper. Their exquisite wall decorations, minutely illustrated religious texts whether painted on leather or fabric and their effigies were beautifully fashioned from clay and gold; Buddha’s past, present and future, Guanyins and Sakamunis all with a different posture or gesture. At each of these monasteries, pilgrims, the devout or the simply curious were chanting, praying, shoving and spinning prayer wheels which engendered a pitch of religious enthusiasm I found both exhilarating and disturbing. Everywhere there were silk brocades, banners and smoke; lamas in maroon or saffron robes sat in alcoves intoning scriptures; a novice scrubbed the floor and in a corner there were brooms and thermoses. A thousand small Buddhas looked down from niches and there were macabre tankas of Kali. Through all this solemnity, cut the deep jangle of the bell whose frayed rope was pulled as pilgrims pressed past, the endless chant of ‘Om mani padme hum’ and the brilliant clang and muffled thud of a great cymbal-drum echoed through the resonating halls.

  The pilgrims and Chinese tourists with their squawking leaders pushed slowly through the corridors, halls and shrines of these labyrinths. Implanting coins in wax around the doorways, they dragged rosaries along the vermilion doors of closed rooms. Monks attended to lamps with strainers, tongs and trimmers. Dogs barked at rival dogs. Children carried younger children on their backs, adult sons carried their mothers. A woman prostrated herself full length before an image of a Buddha top-knotted, long-lobed and with an indescribable sense of peace on his unlined features. Before him there were offerings: a china cup, peacock feathers, teapots, incense sticks, plastic gladioli, toffees, hair slides, oranges, four yellow roses, coins brimming over in a copper bowl, a portrait of the Dalai Lama and barley grain. The golden statue itself was swathed in sashes of white, saffron and yellow, fastened to its robes with safety pins. A fire extinguisher and a huge aluminium kettle stood by the door. The smell of incense permeated the dark rooms. I longed to escape, to breathe the crisp, clear high altitude air, search the great sweep of the valleys and gaze on the mountains.

  On the way to Shigatse we wound up a gorge along whose base flowed a river so awash with white water that it resembled cappuccino froth. The northern wall had twisted contortions of rock while on the southern side, the strata was turned vertically into slivers of grey stone. This was worked by groups of cheerless men who levered it out, chiselled it into long thin strips and heaved it down to th
e valley to be stacked beside the road and to await prospective purchasers. Small patches of ripe barley stood in tiny terraced plots and caught the sun like scattered gold coins. The rock ridges were tinged pink and slate and cinnamon with dark cloud shadows marching over them. On the tops of north facing peaks there was fresh snow and then came a feast of geological transformations. Isolated nude dunes of seductive contours; black hills, oily and stony and, like a tricolour of an imagined republic, a distant blue lake, a strip of flowering pink mustard and in front, a line of emerald grass. A sole mountain glowed gold in the late light. The grass was thin but goats and sheep nibbled a meagre meal. Plants, stunted and well-spaced, strived to maintain a foothold in the loose textured surface and rock falls were a constant hazard. Later, the slopes were riven with deep runnels as though scarred with the tears of the weeping mountains. At the Gyat-so-La pass (17,100 ft, 5,220m) the scenery opened out on to a high plateau and yak herds were frequent. If grazing by the roadside, they looked up with a benevolent and bewildered expression as if we were the first vehicle through in a month and then bolted in alarm. A nomadic herder plodded wearily along, the poles of his tent dragged by one of his beasts and some way behind a calf struggled to keep up. A glacier had slid this way many millennia ago and the ground was strewn with boulders. Astonishingly, at 9,800 ft (3,000m) above the tree line, wild clematis and buddleja were growing and the inhabitants of isolated villages were harvesting barley and beans. The sky was immense and the mountain ranges, set one beyond the other in infinitely fading shades, were barren but magnificent. Tingri, the last settlement before Everest, was like a small town in a Western movie: brown, broad and dusty with a few stores strung out along its single street. A horse with richly patterned woven saddle cloths stood patiently beside the modern cowboy’s steed: a motorbike of extravagant chrome and its own decorated saddle cloth. Packs of savage looking dogs roamed around.