On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  After Pang had rustled up one of his amazingly quick and delicious meals, out of nothing but locally-gathered leaves and bits of chicken, we bedded down on our rush mats on the bare boards and prepared to go to sleep. I was woken again about eleven in the evening when a group of young men arrived and sat down beside us on the hut floor. They carried AK47 rifles and had just been into Burma to attack the Burmese army. We chatted with them for some while, they telling us of their problems with the Burmese generals who were oppressing the people and especially the Karen tribes. The exhaustion from the day’s walk and boat ride overtook me and I fell asleep.

  In the morning we went down to the river and washed in the shallows, the white water swooshing round us. Then we had breakfast and were shown two female elephants. Annette and I had to ride one of them, Tracy and Tony the other. Managing these two giants were two small boys of about ten and twelve. The twelve-year-old seemed to know what he was doing and he was our guy. The journey lasted all morning and at lunch time we said goodbye to the lady pachyderms. The rest of the day we were force marched up a steep hillside, until we saw a village in the distance, the smoke curling up out of the bush.

  This was the Akka village where we would spend the rest of that day and the night. On the way we passed a woman selling bottles of water from a lean-to. Pang told us she had been banished from the village for giving birth to twins. Both babies had been killed because one of them was ‘evil’ and no one knew which one that might be.

  The village itself appeared to be chaotic. Every adult was smoking a drug, either pot or opium. Women and men had long curved pipes permanently in their mouths, puffing away. Many were walking around witha glazed look in their eyes. What was even more worrying was the fact that the men were all carrying long hunting rifles, slung casually over their shoulders or hooked under an arm. I didn’t think the mix was a good idea, drugs and guns, and had a job to get to sleep that night even though it was a fairly comfortable bed made of springy bamboo rods.

  We were relieved to get out of that particular village and on to the next one, which belonged to the Lahu tribe. Though not as colourfully dressed as the Akka, whose women wore headdresses decorated with silver coins, the Lahu did not appear to smoke anything dubious and merely took us to their grain store and proudly showed us the results of their harvest. They let us each have a go on the grinder, which was like a see-saw that went slightly sideways, as well as up and down.

  After four days of trekking through the hills of northern Thailand we came down to civilisation again. We scrubbed ourselves in a beautiful waterfall and found a tea stall that sold real tea. A Land Rover then arrived to take us back to Chang Mai. I thoroughly enjoyed the trek, which I have on video. The most telling scene is of Annette struggling valiantly up a burnt-brush hill in the sweltering heat, pausing with the sweat dripping from her brow, then shouting above the sawmill noise of the cicadas, ‘Garry, you go on, love, and just leave me to die . . .’

  ~

  The Philippines was a short visit with Trinny and Lorraine, who came to stay for a while. We passed rubbish dumps in Manila which had children camping on them, living under tents made out of plastic sheeting. They were there to be first at the rubbish when it arrived each morning. It was a sight I did not forget and the result was a children’s novel The Electric Kid which won the Lancashire Children’s Book Award, a prize that’s judged by schoolchildren alone. I’m mighty proud to have won it. At more or less the same time the BBC televised one of my children’s books, Billy Pink’s Private Detective Agency, which they did with a single actor performing all the parts. It was a not bad production set in the creeks of the Dengies, the Essex marshes.

  ~

  We went to Japan at a time when we would see the plum trees in bloom. Corny, I know, but there you are. We took the bullet train to Kyoto and stayed in one of those inns made of rice paper and bamboo. You can almost see through the walls and you have to be incredibly quiet if you make love, stuffing the corner of a pillow in your mouth. It’s difficult to avoid making love in such a setting, after you’ve been walking under plum and cherry trees in bloom and have visited the hot tub.

  We visited Nijo Castle, which had high stone ramparts but the rest of it was also made out of ricepaper and bamboo. We saw the emperor’s bedroom which had a ‘nightingale floor’ that ‘sang’ when you walked on it to give the emperor warning of any midnight assassins. We took bitter tasting green tea at the beautiful Kujomizu and Kodaiji Temples, the latter attached to a high cliff by wooden struts. Another, the Todaiji Temple, houses a fifty-three-foot high bronze statue of Buddha and is the world’s largest wooden structure. At the Imperial Palace there were of course fabulous gardens, ponds and lawns. We were told that stone represents ‘bone’, trees and bushes ‘flesh’and water ‘blood’.

  Japan was horrendously expensive. We ate mostly noodle soup at the railway station buffet tent, but also bought obento box meals. The box was made of pine and the layout of the pieces of sushi worthy of a great artist. Eating it was a spiritual experience. On the last day we were due to meet with Claire, Shaney’s best friend at school. Claire had married a Japanese radio broadcaster (not without fierce opposition from the man’s relations, who were appalled that Akifumi Uchida wanted to marry a Westerner) and she had told us she would bring her new husband along. However, when she arrived there was no Akifumi.

  ‘He says he has stomach ache,’ Claire said, laughing, ‘but the truth is he’s too shy to meet you.’

  Claire’s parents had never been to see her in Japan, so she told us we were to be her surrogate parents.

  ‘We’ll go home and surprise him.’

  So, we all went back to their incredibly small flat and a shocked and surprised Akifumi opened the door to us. He was indeed very shy and fussed around in the kitchen for a while, but once he saw that we were not monsters he came out and we had a great time. Akifumi is a small, quiet and charming man, and he and Claire now have two lovely children. The family have suffered a lot of prejudice from certain quarters, the children being bullied at school, even by teachers. I have no doubt there are many Japanese who are not bigots – we have a good friend in a singer, Yumi Maeda, who we met on that trip in Tokyo who is certainly not chauvinistic – but there are still some who have a medieval mindset and the Uchidas have born the brunt of this narrow thinking.

  We left Japan in a sombre and thoughtful mood after visiting the Peace Park at Hiroshima.

  ~

  We flew to Sarawak one Easter and found this Borneo member of the Malaysian Federation one of the most fascinating countries we had been to thus far.

  The capital of Sarawak is Kuching, which means ‘Pussycat’ in the Dyak language.

  This obviously requires an explanation.

  In late 1838 an English soldier touring the sea off Sarawak in his private yacht was summoned to the shore by a boat party of Malays, Dyaks and Chinese, the three races that inhabit the country. Their rajah was dying and he had asked to see the captain of the yacht. The Englishman’s name was Brooke and he’d recently recovered from a near fatal wound sustained during a battle in India. Brooke went with the vizier who was head of the delegation to the bedside of the dying rajah.

  The rajah asked Brooke to take over the kingdom for him once he was dead. This astonishing request was followed by the explanation that, if the rajah left it to a Malay, the Dyaks and Chinese would soon depose him through revolution. Similarly with the other two. Jealousies among the three races were rife. It needed someone from another race to rule without favouring any one of the three. He asked only that Brooke impress his courtiers by clearing the sea around Sarawak of pirates, which the Englishman did, his large yacht having a cannon mounted on the bows with which to blow the Dyak pirate canoes out of the water.

  It was a massive gamble on the part of the sick rajah. He had no idea what sort of man Brooke might be. He could turn out to be a tyrant. In fact James Brooke was a young man with a sound integrity, ethical character and a strong s
ense of justice. He ruled wisely and impartially, taking for his palace a modest three-bedroom bungalow and not exploiting the country for its wealth. Part way through his reign he offered the country to Queen Victoria, the Empress of India, but she had heard how well he was ruling Sarawak and said he should continue to do so. The Brookes, or White Rajahs as they were known, ruled Sarawak until 1946, when Sarawak became part of the Malaysian Federation. Each successive Brooke was as upright and honest as the last, all of them insisting that the Malays, Chinese and Dyaks were the equal of any Englishman and to be treated with the utmost respect, a view that was probably not universal among white men in the 1800s.

  So, after this potted history, it remains to explain why Kuching translates as ‘pussycat’. When the grand vizier was leading Brooke to the bedside of the rajah they had to enter Kuching. Brooke pointed towards the city and asked, ‘What is it’s name?’ The vizier, no doubt distracted by the state of his master’s health, thought Brooke was pointing to a young cat lying asleep in a doorway. ‘Kuching,’ he said. Later, when Rajah Brooke began referring to the capital as ‘Pussycat’ his subjects did not like to correct him and so the nickname became the name.

  I based a nice fat novel on the life of Rajah Brooke, entitled Shadow-Hawk, which is one of my best.

  Sarawak has very few roads. Transport is mostly by river. Annette and I went down the river system by the usual method, high-speed enclosed launches continuously showing Kung-fu movies at full volume. One is mighty glad when the trip is over. We then went further into the interior, up a fast-flowing river by narrow canoe. There was a man on the bows of the canoe to watch for logs and other dangerous flotsam, of which there was a huge amount. The Dyak tribal long house was deep in the rainforest. There were human skulls hanging from the smoky rafters. Dyaks were once head hunters. Rajah Brooke tried to stamp the practice out, but his orders were rescinded during the Second World War when the Dyaks were told they could take Japanese heads. Some of those skulls I saw were probably on Japanese shoulders at one time.

  We were on our own and as usual Annette was given a baby to hold. This is to show that the people have trust in the visitors. On this occasion the infant had on a nappy of sorts, but Annette had learned by now not to wear white trousers when visiting locals. I was taken out and shown how to blow a dart through a blowpipe and how to chuck a spear at a fish. Jolly good fun. We stayed with the long house people for the night, watching the dancing and taking part in the feasting, which was not for us but we just happened to hit on a festival day. Lucky.

  The next morning we left for Bako National Park: 2,727 hectares on the tip of the Muaru Tebas peninsula, where huge bearded hogs roamed the campsite and monkeys stole all our biscuits. There was only rice and greens to be had in the park, which was quite wild, and so those monkeys ate better than we did. I really liked Sarawak a lot. Years later we visited friends who were teaching in Brunei and crossed the border into the middle country between Sarawak and Brunei, a country called Saba.

  In Saba we had another taste of that beautiful rainforest when we tried to climb Mount Kinabalu. Unfortunately it was a time of torrential rain and we got no further than the base camp. Getting there was bad enough, since the vehicle taking us up had to negotiate a track thick with ooze and mud, and kept slipping sideways towards sheer drops of several hundred feet. Saba, and indeed Sarawak, is a land of wide deep caves and still unexplored jungle. Off the side of Mount Kinabalu, halfway up, is a deep largely unexplored valley known as Lows Gully.

  In the 1990s a party of soldiers, Chinese and British, went from Hong Kong and descended into Lows Gully. Unfortunately they had only one experienced climber with them, an army corporal, and found they were unable to turn back and ascend the high cliffs down which they had abseiled. Two of the party went off into the rainforest to seek a way out of the steep-sided valley. They were lost for many days, barely survived the ordeal, but finally found a village where they got help.

  Saba is also memorable to me for a game of golf. We stayed at a bed-and-breakfast on a beach there. There was a young man in the house who came in carrying a set of golf clubs. I asked him if he would care to take me for a game while I was there. ‘I’m very busy,’ said the young man, a Malay I believe, ‘but my dad would be glad to have a game.’ So his dad duly arrived in a jeep and took me to the golf course. He explained that we needed to have caddies because it gave local people jobs in a country where there was a lot of unemployment. So, accompanied by our caddies, who just happened to be young women – very progressive I thought – we went out on the course. Everyone we met greeted us with exceptional manners and bowed their heads politely. I thought this a wonderful custom and said so to my companion, who was a thick-set man of about fifty with a hell of a golf swing and drive.

  ‘Oh, they’re not usually this polite to everyone,’ he said, smiling at my naivety. ‘It’s only because I’m Chief of Police.’

  In Saba we visited the orang utan sanctuary, where rescued youngsters are taken in until they’re fully grown, then released back into the rainforest. No one is very sure whether it works or not, but these gangly red-haired fellows seem to be maintaining their numbers. There are still poachers around, just like with the silverback gorillas in Africa, but control seems tighter in Borneo. One of the ‘inmates’ was an orang utan called Bullet, because he had a rifle round still lodged in his head. This poor chap had to be caged, albeit in a very large space, being subject to fits and bouts of violence due to the condition of his brain.

  ~

  We went several times into China, once the dust of Tiananmen Square had settled. Once was with the History Society and we visited the area on the Pearl River where the 19th Century British had had a ship battle with the Chinese navy. Apparently half-way through the battle, big guns blazing, boarding parties hacking off arms and legs with cutlasses, the Chinese admiral requested a temporary halt to the fighting. He had lost the red button that crowned his velvet cap. The button that proclaimed him to be the Lord High Admiral of the Chinese fleet. The British, bless their cotton socks, agreed to a brief pause. The admiral duly found his button, replaced it, and the battle was allowed to commence again. The Brits won the fight and the admiral was no doubt taken to task by the Chinese emperor, who didn’t like the British selling his subjects the opium they grew in India.

  That wasn’t what the fight was about though. The Brits were upset because the emperor had decided not to sell any more rhubarb to the British. I kid you not. Rhubarb, not then grown in UK, was highly prized for its supposed medicinal qualities and those in Britain were devastated to hear the Chinese wouldn’t sell it to them until they stopped supplying opium to their people. Sounds like a very sensible reason for a major war between two great powers, doesn’t it?

  Another visit was with Christchurch Kowloon Tong. Our vicar Norman Jones arranged a meeting with the Chinese vicar of an Anglican church in Canton. We had a great time, being shown over the city by the congregation of Christchurch Canton. The vicar, Peter Fan, was a remarkable man who had been imprisoned by the Mao’s Red Guard for seventeen years, his church confiscated and used as a wood store during his incarceration. Immediately he was freed from prison and while we were resident in Hong Kong, he demanded rent from the state for misappropriating his church. I thought that showed immense courage.

  Finally, when Pete and Peggy Good were staying with us, we all took a flight to Guilin. Apart from the fact that the plane was very basic and my seat was wet with urine, that the baggage room was reached through a hole that had been knocked in a brickwork wall, and that Peggy freaked out when told the meal she was eating was jellyfish, we had a terrific few days in that beautiful area which is depicted in many Chinese paintings. Usually its a fir tree clinging to a cliff edge. Guilin is limestone country and over millions of years water has turned a large plateau into wonderful blue-tinged mountains. Coming out of the hotel in the morning and looking towards these hills, they seemed to fold into one another, smooth hill upon hill, stretchin
g out into forever. Annette, who had been taking classes in Chinese painting during her time in Hong Kong, drew inspiration from Guilin, the source of a million works of art.

  ~

  By far our best visit was to Malaysia, where Annette and I had been several times before. This particular trek was with Sarah and Rob. They had come to stay with us in Hong Kong for several weeks. Sarah wanted to go into China but Tiananmen Square was still raw and we had been advised by the Foreign Office not to venture over the border. Sarah was disappointed so we suggested backpacking through Malaysia.

  The four of us flew to Kuala Lumpur and took a rickety bus across the forested centre to the east coast. Before our journey was halfway over there was one of those huge tropical downpours, of flood proportions, which washed away a bridge over a gully. The driver of the bus acquired a set of planks from a nearby hut which he laid across the chasm. Below was a fast river which would have swallowed anyone who fell. It was getting dark by the time the planks were ready.

  Indeed, we all managed the precarious walk across the planks, the young people assisting the elderly, without losing a single soul. Then came the turn of the bus itself. The driver revved the engine while another man guided his wheels onto the start of the two planks. Finally, white-faced, the driver released his brake and shot out over the ravine. We watched in horror as the planks bowed downwards in the middle, thinking that at any moment they would break or fly from under the wheels. Fortunately the planks held and the bus got to our side of the ravine. The driver jumped out, absolutely ecstatic and insisted on shaking hands with every passenger travelling on his vehicle.

  That night we took lodgings at a hostel on the coast and asked Rob and Sarah where they would like to go next.

  ‘Tioman Island,’ they said.

  There was a small aircraft that could take us to Tioman in thirty minutes or a slow fishing boat that would take four or five hours. They chose the fishing boat and Annette and I spent the whole time hanging over the gunwales throwing up. When we arrived at the island the rain was coming down like a waterfall. Sarah told me off because I had suggested leaving her anorak behind, knowing she would have been too hot in it. There was a precarious climb up to a make-shift jetty and we then went to find our accommodation – A-frame huts.