“Please die at the lodge,” came the reply, “the ground is softer for a grave.” My blood boiled, my camera (weighing in at 6lbs (3kgs)), came close to abandonment and after four hours we were still climbing. “I am fat and old,” I whimpered. “You are like a deer,” came back down the mountain side. I skipped for two paces. At least I was unaffected by mosquitoes which are clearly unequipped for wet landings on sweaty skin. Labouring on through little plantations of maize, peanuts and dry rice and through villages crowded with small brown children and smaller black pigs, we eventually made our goal of the Harati Waterfalls. As I lay down on a boulder that seemed as soft as a pillow, two Indonesian sightseers appeared – one was wearing a fleece anorak for goodness sake! They insisted on taking my photograph; no doubt in some kampong a group are gathered round a mobile phone, giggling at the picture of a fat old Englishman, puce in the face, dripping with sweat and eating a pot noodle. We rafted back – blissfully cool, with my feet awash in the frothy, tepid water. The locals are on to a good thing here. They need to sell their bamboo downriver so they bind 20 or more together and then charge a panting tourist for sitting on top of them, legs astride a stool.
I have never encountered so many mosques as there were in Banjamasin. A network covers the town in astonishing profusion so that a larger mosque, topped with four or more tiled domes and perhaps a slender, balconied minaret, spawns a group of smaller ones. Some are painted, others are plainly planked but all have a distinguishing polished metal dome. Their loudspeakers squawk raucously, five times a day, and woken by the first of these squawks, we set off in the tranquillity of first light for a floating market that operated on the edge of the Barito River, the widest in all Kalimantan. It is in an area that receives timber floated down the river from logging operations, legal and illegal. Towering over the huddle of little boats full of fruit, vegetables, coconuts, chickens and rice, was a massive barge laden to the water line with huge tree trunks – 200 year old veterans, slain in the forest, trussed as a raft and then piled end to end in a sawmill morgue of sacrificial and profitable anonymity.
After a plane journey north, I rode the River Mahakam in lordly but lonely splendour. The top deck of the Budi Serati was mine and below were the captain, two deckhands, two cooks (they were sisters) and Shyadhian, still as my guide. Setting off from Loa Janan at dusk, the banks sparkled in a ribbon of light from riverside settlements and timber factories processing plywood, spewed acrid smoke. We chugged along all night, the whole boat throbbing from the diesel engine. I moved my mattress out on to my veranda to distance myself from the exhaust and lay there restless and sleepless, watching the weak searchlight on the bows sweep the river as the helmsman sought a safe route and warned other craft of our presence. We tied up at dawn beside a rotting jetty and behind a sleek river taxi taking an elderly couple on a hadj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. They were both dressed in the obligatory white, symbolising purity and equality and a party of friends, a group of schoolgirls and a few of the simply curious were gathered to see them off. It was a solemn farewell, since the pilgrims would be away for six weeks or more and many do not return, having succumbed to the difficulties of the journey followed by the rigours of the inescapable impositions of the hadj precepts.
Transferring to a smaller craft, I zoomed down a tributary of a darker tone of brown water, first calling at a fishing village that had been created by people from the north of the province, escaping the Japanese in 1940. Shyahdian disdainfully referred to them as immigrants. The village was a ramshackle conglomeration of planked houses perched above the water on a spillikin confusion of feeble supports, its roofs as patched as the clothes of the inhabitants. All manner of fish traps lined the river edges. There were huge affairs on booms that needed winching up, lines of bamboos that led the fish into an internal prison and woven tubular wicker traps with a bulging end. Another type of netted enclosure had somehow been infiltrated by a stork billed kingfisher and it flapped about in a vain attempt at escape. I hoped the fisherman would be merciful to such a spectacular bird. Lines of whiskered terns sat on the trap structures in long lines like targets at a funfair shooting booth and there were grey and little herons, egrets in variety and mournful looking adjutant storks which slowly paced the banks as though intent upon solving a philosophical puzzle. Later on at Waja, a plump youth with a Suzuki motorbike (both unusual in these parts) was employed as a taxi and we skidded along a dusty road to a famous dayak longhouse. It lived up to its name being a good 260 ft (80m) long and richly ornamented with lattice openwork and fronted by a long line of grotesquely carved totem poles. Two days before there had been a ‘second burial’ of a dayak chief at which two buffalo were sacrificed. An old man with a sagging body and lacklustre eyes offered to take me to the killing ground. Despair hung about him like a squalid and stained garment and he brushed off the accompanying band of bright and cheerful children as though irritated by troublesome flies. At the sad sacrificial spot, blood stained the earth in front of a huge pile of dung.
Night falls fast on the equator and by 6 pm the lights on board attracted a host of flying bugs. My guide book had advised, ‘What you need on the Mahakam River is a good long book’ and I read Blood River, Tim Butcher’s account of his heroic but insane journey following Winston Stanley’s route down the Congo. As I sat expectant of dinner from the sisterly duo, it did not seem too fanciful to think of Stanley as he made his way, as I was, on a river of viscous brown soup, bordered by jungle and bombarded by bugs. Tropical rivers are all much the same but what was different and a surprise about this one were the coal barges that lumbered ponderously down to the sea pulled by tugs. We passed several conveyor belts that leant over the river to fill these floating giants with 2,000 tons (2million kgs) of coal apiece that had been ripped from beneath the jungle carpet. In a single morning I counted 11 of these behemoths.
At Balikpapan airport on a Saturday morning there was chaos and confusion as passengers and their cardboard boxes spilled out into the car park and groups of schoolchildren shouted at each other and their mobiles. Shyadian spun in a whirlwind of fluttering handshakes and contortionist hugs, grinned and was gone. I swept on to the ordered and manipulated calm of Singapore. The city was locked down for an APEC summit attended by the presidents or prime ministers of America, China, Japan and 24 others and was aglow with Christmas decorations. I escaped by the first plane out.
Postcard Home
Here in an outpost of Asian jungle
There’s rain, lushness and a wild ensemble
Of bears, birds, monkeys, Dyaks and Iban
And that ‘man of the forest’, the orang-utan.
Up a Borneo creek in a dugout canoe
I’ve thrown up on yam and snake ragout.
My boat smells of diesel, fish and carbolic,
Banished at night by draughts alcoholic.
Colombia
February 2010
‘The traveller is active; he goes strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes ‘sight-seeing’.’
– Daniel J Boorstin
Manaus scattered itself peripatetically along the Rio Negro. Only the Teatro Amazonica seemed in good order and very fine it was. Elsewhere the crumbling façades of 19th century elegance stood, or were more often propped, to await salvation. This may come with the 2014 World Cup which has matches to play in the city stadium. This woeful disregard of architectural heritage is all the more unfortunate considering that Manaus in its boom days of rubber and gold from 1864 to 1928 was one of the wealthiest cities in the world with a population of 100,000 ; now it is one million. Other cities on a traveller’s schedule and in a parlous financial state have done things better. Kathmandu, Havana and La Paz have adapted; Rangoon has sold off the best to hotel chains and Lijiang has turned itself into a historical pastiche. Here nothing has been done. Once, after journeying to Alexandria to find the world of Justine et al, I was disappoin
ted to find nothing remained. It was the same here: where had the past gone? Where was the legacy of the French and Spanish architects, the extravagance on an epic scale – marble and craftsmen from Italy, laundry sent to Paris, horses rubbed down with champagne, Les Halles reproduced by Eiffel? Here the fault lines of age have had no cosmetic assistance, the gentle charm of the elderly has been simply ignored or covered in a shroud of hoardings, weeds and opportunist market stalls. In the evening I went with Carlo my guide (at six, the Brazilian junior bridge champion) to look at the celebrated opera house. It was a strange affair with its rectilinear form, mock classical façade and topped by a dome which mixed Moorish geometric mosaic with Picasso’s invention. Inside was opulence to match any European equivalent with painted ceilings, intricate parquet, gilt on every protuberance and chandeliers of Versailles proportions. Strolling around its piazza, a covey of fireworks sprang into the sky and little plops left balls of smoke hanging in the air. Rockets are as numerous in Brazil as exclamation marks in a debutante’s correspondence. The birth of a saint, the death of a patriot, the birthday of a relative and the outbreak or conclusion of a revolution will all be sparkled with fireworks.
I have been impressed and a little confused by the courtesies afforded me. In an airport bus, a young man of sickly appearance and a weight of silver in his right ear, gave me his seat; in Manaus, a featherweight chambermaid insisted on carrying my luggage and for the flight to Tabatinga, I was singled out (along with nursing mothers and cripples) for prior boarding. Was I really that old or that foreign? It seems that balding, greying and white skinned is not on the Brazilian indigenous menu in spite of the genetic stew with its original ingredients of Spanish soldiers, African slaves and Aztecs and a later seasoning of immigrants from just about everywhere.
Down by the river bank, my boat seemed loaded for an expedition of several months. Moored by a pontoon to which were tethered another dozen longboats and on which sat an assortment of mothers, children, Indians of varying authenticity and piles of cardboard boxes, sacks and paraphernalia of all kinds, my boat was stowed gunwale to gunwale. Here there were drums of diesel, smaller drums of petrol for the outboard, boxes of fruit, sacks of flour, cold boxes, coils of rope, stacks of eggs and a block of ice the size of an armchair. There was also a lump of carne seca the size of a suitcase that lay unwrapped in a torn sack and so charred it could have been roasted in a volcano. Within minutes of leaving our mooring, I was soaked through with the warm spray of the river. But what the hell, we were off up the Amazon.
But first, out on the Rio Negro, grey river dolphins showed their dorsal fins and a pair of pink dolphins – as pink as calamine – surfaced for an exclusive but elusive moment. River traffic was plentiful but such was the scale of the river, running silently and slowly but with immense strength, that fishermen and water taxis seemed like gnats on a Scottish loch. Only ill-maintained and foul-looking river ferries (four days to Manaus from the delta – I had flown in three hours) streaked with the rigours of age and the ardours of Amazonia, were noticeable by their bulk. The day before, I had been rowed out to the Meeting of the Waerts. Here, the Rio Negro, cold, acidic, and grey meets its watery master, the Amazon – warm, calcalareous and brown. Both embrace to finish their combined journey to the Atlantic.
Four hours later, wet through, deafened by the outboard but exhilarated just to be there, we turned off the main river, up a lesser one, then a smaller one, across a lake and after wriggling through the tops of a forest of shrubs in this flooded environment, we came upon Heliconia Lodge. In the gathering darkness, monkeys crashed around as they trooped off to their treetop dormitory, the whistles of the orependulas slowly subsided and silence crept in. The Javari River, our nearest waterway, marked the boundary between Brazil and Peru where clocks were set one hour later. For the time conscious, this was a confusing part of the world but time was seldom on the mind of those who lived here and in any case, Brazilians seemed immune to any notion of punctuality. Delay is indigenous and procrastination an element of every decision; in Brazil, a man in a hurry is a man of misery. The local Indians (a few of whom worked at the lodge) had little concept of numbers. “How many fish do you have?” Answer, “Enough.” “What time is dinner?” “When it is ready.” “How far is the village?” “Not far/very far/too far.”
An armadillo had made its home under my cabana – under the loo in fact. It shuffled about after dark looking for termites and worms but in the silence of the night it might have been a pig. I had not seen it but Santiago, the Indian guide, had identified its burrow. The loo, whose raised floor so conveniently protected the armadillo’s home from the rain, was spacious and occupied a three sided corner of the cabana. The fourth side did not exist and so one sat, enthroned, looking out into the forest. It was oddly liberating and disturbing at the same time. There were ants the size of battleships that scurried about the planked floor; it was not a place to linger. As there was no electricity, little jam jars of paraffin with a cotton wick were placed around including one outside the shower, similarly open to the forest. If you were engaged in ablutions at 6.30 pm when the lamplighter came round, he simply wished you a courteous boa neite. Outside my room, a branch heavy with blossom was bent towards and into a window as if to eavesdrop on any conversation within.
One afternoon, a group of the indigenous Indians came to visit the lodge. There were five men wearing an assortment of western cast-offs and two women in grubby skirts and blouses with four small children. They all had fingers as stubby as their toes and none had shoes. The women had long, black, tousled and shiny hair while the men’s were as neat as if they had just stepped out from a barber. They were all short and sturdy with muscular legs and wide feet with splayed toes. They arrived in a boat about 30 ft (nine metres) long, its whole length covered by a hooped roof of woven palm and this was their temporary home in which they all slept, cooked and travelled. They had started their journey eight days before. Apparently they made this journey twice a year, visiting lodges and selling finely woven baskets and hunting weapons. These weapons were magnificent; a long bow, taller than any of them and made of black polished wood and arrows, six feet (two metres) long which were beautifully feathered and with their sharp ends protected by a woven sheath. All these were decorated with intricate braiding of coloured twine. They were a cheerful lot, no doubt happy that they had sold all their goods to the lodge for its collection. We waved them goodbye but they did not wave back as they started on their long return journey to their home in the deep forest. Unknown birds sent out stealthy, isolated calls across the still water, a dog barked in a far off settlement and fish broke the surface with a surreptitious splash. Against a lambent western sky and the embers of sunset, the jungle was sharply defined. To the east it was indeterminate in the little mist that writhed along the smooth dark water. A morpho butterfly, loitering and aimless, flopped by in resplendent slivers of electric blue. Unable to rest, it spread its gorgeous cloak over the water as though its vanity required that there be a mirror image. It was all a little improbable but in accordance with the best traditions of exploration.
At Tabatinga, the town straddles the border with Brazil and this is marked by a plastic barrier of the kind commonly seen protecting an excavated hole in the road. On the other side of this and the other side of the street is Leticia in Colombia. There are no formalities. This town of adjoining nations is spruce and soulless on the Brazilian side and unkempt and lively on the Colombian side. Each half boasts its own international airport although ‘international’ must be taken with a degree of circumspection around here: Peru is round the corner, Venezuela is over the hill and Bolivia is down the road. Leticia’s cracked pavements, its muddy riverbanks and its lively cafés were sprinkled with all those characters that move through the movies of South America from Saludos Amigos to Romancing the Stone. At a street corner a Jordanite was haranguing a few apathetic loafers and a suspicious policeman. He wore a long white robe and a white turban; a drowsy small boy sat
in the dust beside him was holding a large and scuffed bible. Their name is derived not from the river but from a Mr Jordan from Jamaica. Seeing myself as the only white man, he became a little flustered and cracking the boy on the head, demanded the bible from which he then chose a text to preach on. Here were local girls, generous with their lipstick and mean with their skirts, Indian families bewildered in urban surroundings, old men with faces furrowed by time and climate, nodding in conversation or sleep and tall, lean and bony backpacking men, trousers threadbare, hair awry and eyes too bright. A nun or two added solemnity and an elegant senor with a pencil moustache, polished shoes – crocodile he would like you to think – and dark darting eyes that searched for a break in the queue and the short cuts of life; the kind that had a ready smile for authority and a sneer for the humble. Elsewhere, you might have imagined this cast but here they were real.
Victoria, the receptionist at El Marques, one of a new breed of boutique hotels in restored old merchants’ houses in the old town of Cartagena, had only a smattering of English. So we had a computerised conversation. “May I delay my check out?” “How do you get to the church of St Pedro?” “Did you know you are the prettiest receptionist in Cartagena?” All instantly translated into Spanish or blushes. The old town had much the same characteristics – pretty façades that hid modern technology; the new town housed a million in urban high rise and a few chic villas.
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