The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  Besides Mr Charles, there was Miss Maureen (an Australian whose little riverside establishment served coffee at a price only slightly less than the Palm Court of The Ritz), Mr. Book and Mr. Food. The latter, a Chinaman, had a double row of largely gold teeth and displayed this investment often and willingly to potential customers. In his restaurant, a cook naked to the waist displayed tattooed dragons that writhed up his arms before they ended open-jawed across his chest. A clinging snippet of intestine was flicked off a finger to be caught mid-air by an expectant cat. A discouraging collection of cellular, membranous or sinewy objects lay in a chipped enamel bowl, some black from lengthy displays, others startlingly red or blue. Over the double wok hung a lantern that spread an unsympathetic light over this tapestry of viscera. In spite of a large contingent of military in celebratory mood, our food arrived within minutes of ordering; a dish heaped with scrawny chicken limbs, jaundiced with curry and blanched with rice and ton yam soup brimming with river prawns, watercress, baby turnips, lemongrass and carrying a raft of coriander.

  Back in the west at Homalin, the foreign contingent of 40 who disembarked from the military plane were as diverse a bunch of travellers as ever ventured into the mountainous jungles of North West Burma. It was the variety of their hair that initially surprised. Pigtailed, shaven, permed or lank; as black and glossy as a guardsman’s boot or so blonde and flowing it caught the sun and the eye of local lads. There were those slim in body and light on luggage, those corpulent and overburdened, those gone native in local homespun and those in tailored jackets. Enthused by adventure, they huddled in great discomfort on metal seats narrow even for a slight Burmese, first on a Chindwin river boat (four seats wide and 20 long) and then bounced on dusty tracks perched on racks welded onto the backs of requisitioned pickups, shrieking in agony or excitement. Four hours in each unforgiving vehicle separated the hardened adventurer from the soft and curious. One of the traveller’s worst enemies is the pernicious optimism of informants. “Will we arrive before dark?” “Oh, for sure.” “Does the hotel have bathrooms?” “But of course.” And so it was for the journey. The information was that it would be short, the seats comfortable and the scenery spectacular. But we were off to see the Naga and apart from an extortionate premium of £600, a sore bum, rattled bones and a late night arrival, a package of misinformation was an acceptable part of the price.

  On the switchback track which cut like a whiplash through primary forest, the truck in front ground its way uphill, grossly overloaded in the usual manner with cargo both human and vegetable. Suddenly, it gave off a startling crack and simultaneously, like a beast shot through the heart, collapsed to the ground. In the dark, the panicked human cargo leapt off, the panniered vegetable cargo rolled off and there was much yelling and confusion. Our pickup seemed vulnerable to the truck sliding backwards and we too scrambled to safety but it was soon clear that with the shackles of its rear springs snapped and its axle broken, it would be there for a long while. It was so immobile, in fact, that a large section of the high bank to one side had to be excavated by mattocks under the pale light of faltering torches before the convoy of eight vehicles lurched past, pushed, pulled, wheels spinning, engines screaming and all of us cheering. Another drama on this darkened jungle track was played out on the return trip but this time it was more tragic. The lead truck travelling too fast, too loaded, or too near a ditch turned on its side, pitching its passengers off. There were urgent calls for blankets, a doctor and torches. Several bodies lay groaning in the undergrowth and the truck’s front wheels were splayed out with twisted and torn tyres. But assistance arrived by way of the dawn and a visiting general and his entourage of nine vehicles including a doctor. There was nothing we could do and we went on our way like unfulfilled Samaritans, alert at every perilous corner.

  The Insight Guide describes the Naga Hills ‘as isolated and remote as anywhere, completely off limits and inaccessible’. Well, not quite. Two helicopter pads and an excavated hillside for our bamboo sleeping accommodation scarred the forested hills that surrounded the little town of Leshio perched at 10,000 ft (3,000m) on the border with Assam. The people here are the stuff of legend and fulfil every preconception of tribal ferocity. Glorious in hornbill plumage and parangs thrust upwards to the sky, they are beset with boars’ tusks, bears’ claws and tigers’ teeth. Tarzan might have cried, “Run while you can!” Their language and customs are so diverse they have difficulty in conversing from one village to another (they certainly don’t speak Burmese). And they like to kill each other. At least they did, until the Burmese government introduced a sophisticated policy of engagement which included a New Year Festival. The headmen are seduced by TV sets, sheets of corrugated iron and bags of rice and the young by tee-shirts, ballpoint pens and fizzy drinks. The Nagas are a proud people, tough and even brutal but they also have charm and humour and abound in the courtesies effected by remote peoples to passing strangers. But for me the festival was a monstrous sham, hijacked by the army and sponsored by a Rangoon travel agency, with the local people dragooned into providing huts and entertainment for foreigners. The £600 per person was apparently a loss leader but to a government intent on providing an acceptable face of peace and harmony, the publicity was vital.

  The antidote to the jungle clad hills lay 800 miles (425kms) south on the Bay of Bengal. Here at Ngwe San, where a perfect cyan sky met the azure water on a line drawn spirit level true, a small blemish appeared as though a speck of dust had landed on this page of paradise. Moving slowly, a silhouette of a fishing boat could be made out. A lobster lunch was coming ashore and the previous day’s 19-hour journey was already forgotten. Each hotel strung along the coast had progressively pretentious names so that in order of construction, there was Sunny Beach, Palm Beach, Treasure Cove, Aurium, Paradise, Emerald Paradise and Glorious Paradise. We were settled in Hotel Bay of Bengal which seemed to trump the lot by encompassing the whole 200 miles (320kms) of Burma’s western coastline. On the beach fronting one of the more extravagant of these establishments, men were digging out building sand and filling sacks that required two of them to lift. These were then placed on the head of a young woman to carry to a waiting truck: the slim, fragile body of a female Burmese disguises a physique of steel hawsers. At first light, long low fishing boats with a dozen or so men aboard rowed out to sea a little way and then spread a net perhaps 300 ft (100m) long. Returning to shore, the net was pulled in from each end with great effort and after an hour or so a modest basket of little silver fish was gathered in, each adorned with an emerald stripe. They sparkled in the sun like misplaced cloisonné. In the afternoon, four squawking Japanese arrived and splashed around in the pool and then two more foreigners, gasping at the view. The 200-bed hotel in which the four of us had been the only guests was becoming crowded, the gates of paradise were opening too wide and it was time to move on.

  On a previous trip, I had taken the public ferry from Mandalay to Bagan enjoying the village shore life from a deckchair on the upper deck. I was looking forward to a repeat voyage, some hours of enforced meditation, a lassitude in the cool evening air and a period of reflection aboard a battered old relic of a boat of susceptible safety but reliable machinery, making its way mid-stream at a pace commensurate with that of Burmese life. The sight of the hordes of waiting passengers on the dockside at Pathien immediately destroyed such an indulgence in dreams.

  The ferry terminal had some resemblance to Waterloo Station on the last working day before Christmas: unwittingly, I had hit upon the end of term at Pathien University. Booking clerks were shouting, porters were yelling, vendors were clamouring and the ferry was hooting. To add further confusion, the down ferry was late in and disembarking passengers clashed with the forces intent on home and holiday – 400 students carrying 400 bicycles and as many sacks, chests, trunks and cases. Once on board, this paraphernalia was stacked six feet (2m) high around the perimeter of each deck. In the event of an accident, a total loss of life would have been assured. There w
ere four cabins and I had paid double (£18) to secure one all to myself. The guidebook had spoken of ‘spacious cabins each with private facilities and air conditioning’. These facilities were confined to two wooden beds, each with a grubby mattress and a sheet that may once have been washed and a hole in the window’s fly screen; neither the light nor the fan was in working order. As far as I could tell there were only two WCs on board but by drinking my remaining whisky, as an anaesthetic rather than a pleasure, I then had a useful empty bottle. Burmese students are little different from any others; however, since few could afford alcohol, they were for the most part good natured, laughing and playing guitars most of the night, while those who had scaled to the roof (and the ceiling of my cabin) seemed to prefer dancing. Having opted for a policy of self-imprisonment as soon as the sun had set, a group of girls then made a little more space for themselves by leaning against the outside of my door and like a sophomore choir, crooned into the early hours. At 1 am we berthed near Hinthada and the pandemonium of boarding was reversed. In the morning there was not a student left and litter was the only evidence of their passage. The lower decks, which I had come to photograph and on which I had hoped to mingle with its passengers, were locked off and I contented myself with the flat agricultural plains of both banks, fishermen attending their nocturnal nets and stupas gilded by the early morning sun.

  The Shwedagon Pagoda, ‘where the prodigious glamour of the ancient orient endures’, remains the heart and soul of Rangoon, a great and glorious monument of the Buddhist faith. The 320 steps of the southern entrance were lined with flower stalls, religious souvenirs in the most garish and vulgar taste and votive offerings. Apart from a handful of Tibetans whose tenacious piety is never daunted and groups of tourists awestruck by the gilded splendour, it is now only the Burmese who kneel penitent or beseeching before their chosen shrine. The remaining Buddhist world which regards a once in a lifetime pilgrimage to the Schwedagon as an obligation to be undertaken in the same manner as those that make the journey to Mecca, Santiago de Compestela or the Khum Mela, has been discouraged by the recent unrest. The heavy dictatorial yoke that so tragically burdens the Burmese people is becoming weightier, but the nation stands on foundations of extraordinary solidarity. Wonderfully fertile, materially abundant in coal, gas, oil and timber, its people have a resilience that has pulled them safely through a millennia of historic crises of the gravest kind. The current isolation and retrenchment could be the gravest yet. May the gentle, industrious and hospitable people of this beautiful country have faith enough to again pull them through to safety.

  On the evening of my return I found myself in a packed Oxfordshire village hall where a judge conducted an auction for a ton of manure and a basket of chutneys, a professor of genetics was in a flap about the readiness of her sausages and a plump and merry hairdresser was on her feet, just, swaying to entertainment from the local postman’s Elvis impersonations. Here were tribal rituals of a different kind and of such is life richly spiced.

  Italy

  July 2008

  ‘As a member of an escorted group you don’t even have to know that the Matterhorn isn’t a tuba’ – Fielding’s Guide to Europe, 1963

  The presence of the Florence football team, ACF Florentina, at our Kastelruth hotel was unexpected and unwanted. To a man – and there were 50 of them including managers, physiotherapists, trainers, publicists, security bouncers and a team and a half of reserves – they were handsome, tanned, with black or blackened gelled hair and universally clad in purple tracksuits (courtesy of Toyota). These were worn from breakfast onwards – they may well have been worn in bed. Several passionate young women were overcome, small boys clamoured for autographs and a crowd gathered outside the hotel door chanting in adoration. For us, six friends who had banded together to tackle the higher slopes of the Dolomites, the team and their admirers were an irritation that distracted staff from our alcohol order.

  Our alpinist, Charles, authentically clad in breeches, checked shirt and a hat that bore the sweat of a thousand ascents, was intent upon the most direct route to the high plateau. Our walking notes for this option were headed boldly: ‘Do not undertake this route unless you are exceptionally fit and experienced’. We were all well past 60, had seldom ventured off a well-worn Cotswold path and carried between us the handicaps of a broken toe, a damaged knee, acute cystitis, attacks of vertigo and legs whose ligaments needed stretching at regular intervals and this was our first day. The option was universally accepted. The warning on the notes was wholly accurate; the route was alternately slippery with mud, strewn with boulders, laced with roots and so vertical that ropes had been secured into the rock to assist survival. A waterfall opened its net of whispers, rinsing the air and mingling with our sweat. Boosted by mutual encouragement, an instinctive will to live and fearful of the stigma of failure, miraculously we achieved our goal. Along the way, nature’s dazzlers in the form of aconites, orchids, arnica and martagon lilies nodded their heads in admiration.

  The little hamlet of Compatsch wallowed comfortably in a fold of the plateau. The storm that had threatened the day finally opened its dark clouds in the late evening, encrusting the ground with marble-sized hail that rolled into gutters and hollows glinting there in glassy piles under the street lights. But the storm left behind skies bright and clear so that at dawn the jagged teeth of El Massiccio del Catinaccio could be seen in all their ferocity: it was clearly a day to climb Mount Pez. The farmers were cutting their wild flower meadows and the hay would have been of such sweetness that the cows must have anticipated the pleasure of winter. But if ever the absurdities of the Common Agricultural Policy needed visual proof, here it was. Each field, some barely a couple of acres, was being cut by a machine that was either new or so little utilised as to look new. At one point, five of these were operating within a few hundred feet of each other. And not just a machine for cutting, there was another for turning and drying and a third for picking up and transporting. All these, when a single machine for each task, co-operatively owned or contracted, could have done all the work in a week. No doubt there was a second crop to take later but each machine was employed for two days of the year: extravagance beyond reason.

  At a scenic point there was a choice; to the east the Salterhutte with a cappuccino and maybe a cognac while to the west was a two hour vertical hike to the summit of Mount Pez – 8,408ft (2,563m). I had nothing better to do and as I was to receive a new knee on the operating table of Mr Dodd in a couple of weeks’ time it seemed sensible to get the full mileage from the current one and so I steered to the west where the solid red line on the map and accompanying text confirmed a mule track. It was not a mule track, although a mule that was severely thrashed and had the certain knowledge of an unlimited supply of the sweetest carrots might have once ventured up it. On the path there were few who matched my age but a number who could have been my grandchildren. Two of these had frolicked past me and I found them later sitting on a wayside rock. The girl was in a skirt and wore plimsolls and her brother, if that was who he was, had on a tee-shirt emblazoned with the motif of The Waking Dead. I first thought it said The Walking Dead in which case I might have asked to be buried in it there and then. As I passed, the girl held out a dozen sugar lumps wrapped in newspaper and on gratefully accepting one, her brother squeezed on fresh lemon juice. Whether they thought I was a grandfather in need or whether this was the natural generosity of alpine trails, I do not know but I skipped the next few steps with gratitude in my heart and the way distorted by tears.

  M (who had needed to visit the clinic earlier) had spent the day reclining with an entertaining book and a team of good looking waiters who from time to time brought her herbal tisanes and slices of fresh fruit. Returning in the late afternoon I recounted my adventures; the vertiginous ascent, the crumbling track, the torrents of cascading storm water shredded white by boulders and the hazardous bridges. I described in detail the pinched path chiselled from the granite rock face, the sections th
at were accessible only by the iron ladders of a via ferrata and the bus sized boulders. The only thing that impressed her was the sense in staying where she was.

  The wildflowers often drew me down to my knees to marvel at their ability to survive let alone bloom from a crack in a rock or the dark shadows of a pine forest. They did not group themselves by hazard but in colonies of common need. A limestone scree was the home of toadflax (linaria alpina), Snow in Summer (cerastium latifolium), viola and alpine buttercup (ranunculus glacialis). Around heavily dunged farm buildings, large areas were covered with lady’s mantle (alchemilla alpina), docks (rumex alpinus), the spires of monkshood (aconitum napellus) and red campion (silene dioica) while a shaded wood hosted martagon lilies, alpine sea holly, soldanellas and violets. On the pastureland, machines and scythes cut in a single sweep a dozen or more different varieties.

  The Sudtirol carried its burden of tourism kindly and with custodianship. Some hotels had succumbed to external modernity but for the most part little seemed to have changed since the pictures in my parents’ photograph books. There were well-ordered arrangements of flower meadows in prodigious variety, fretted balconies supporting cascades of geraniums, well-fed horses harnessed to open carriages piled with warm rugs and a coachman in a silly hat and puffing an oversized briar. Here were hearty, healthy hikers, hearty healthy helpings, huge woolly dogs, sweet gentle cows enduring the clang of their bell, black predatory ravens and all around fearsome, grey, saw-toothed crags.