The Road to Zagora Read online

  There you are, I have explained a little why a man who sometimes cannot butter a slice of toast can climb a mountain. And why a man who cannot work can, with some help, have adventures in faraway places. That is what the disease has done for me; it has taken me to India and Nepal, Peru and Ecuador, Turkey, Morocco, and the Middle East. When we knew that I faced a future of severe disability Flic and I panicked. And in a spirit of now or never, we travelled. We saw a volcano erupting in Ecuador, were guests of honour at a Hindu ceremony in India, came across fresh snow leopard tracks in the Himalayas, snorkelled in the Red Sea, and much, much more.

  We did it for the experience of being in beautiful and strange places not knowing that it would enrich our lives and change our understanding of the world in the long term. That’s a bonus. It makes me want to write about our travels and about the things we have learned. And there’s a temptation to look at the longer journey that I have made, that we all make, you know the one I mean. You’ll have to excuse me if I find myself wondering, just for a moment or two, about some of the deeper meanings behind such an adventure.

  B is for Bethlehem (Wales)

  It was quite early on in that longer journey to which I have referred, and I was maybe twenty-two years old, when I visited Bethlehem, in south Wales. I was working on a small organic dairy farm close by.

  I had read a lot of Thomas Hardy as a teenager and loved the rural settings and country life of the stories as much as anything else. I was brought up in leafy suburbia and had romantic notions of the countryside. I loved the beauty of the natural world and wanted to be immersed in it by working out of doors. It might not match up to my dreams but I thought I would give it a try. I had an opportunity through an organisation called WWOOF, Working Weekends on Organic Farms, to volunteer on a small dairy farm near Fairfach. I loved it.

  The new owner of the farm, a woman with a PhD in soil science keen to put into practice her organic theories and ideals, had brought her cows with her down from Scotland. They were Ayrshires, brown and white and very handsome. I was soon able to tell them apart by their markings and got to know the individual characters of some.

  There was Ticky, a sleek intelligent animal who always tried to sneak her way into the hay barn on the way to the milking parlour and once managed to break off a car wing mirror in the process. There were Celandine and Buttercup, similar looking cows who had markings the colour of a new conker when it is first squished out of its case and who were great friends and grazed side by side. And there was a big daft cow called Meg who was way down on their butting order, the cow’s hierarchy, and was bullied by most of the others. When she had a calf which she would get to see at milking time she got so excited that she pushed her way through the herd, bravely fending off her persecutors. If I thought about it for a while I could probably remember some of the others.

  There is, as you know, another Bethlehem in another part of the world, the Middle East. Towards the end of our travels we visited Israel, Palestine and neighbouring countries. We spent some time in the city of Jerusalem and visited nearby Bethlehem. I have enjoyed the interest and beauty of many places on five continents and I’m going to enjoy sharing some of that with you in the following pages. But it was in the Middle East that we were most engaged with political issues and it was there that we had our preconceptions most thoroughly challenged. I don’t know why we went to those countries but it feels right that we made that journey after the others, as if we were building up to it. And so you too will have to wait a while before we pass through Israeli checkpoints and visit the town made famous by Jesus and Banksy. You’ll have to make do with Bethlehem in Wales and a herd of Ayrshire cows.

  3

  The Limp, the Alien and the Aurora

  I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the summer of 2006. I had been walking with a limp, cycling with a limp and even driving with a limp (my right foot refused to lift up when I changed gear and I revved up like a boy racer – brrrrrrrrrum!). Sometimes my right arm hung loosely by my side when I walked. When it got worse I had to spend two weeks in Morriston hospital, Swansea, waiting for a brain scan. They found nothing that shouldn’t be there (no blood clots, no cancer) and decided that it must be Parkinson’s. I returned home and found my symptoms getting worse. My body refused to work when asked, did things I didn’t require of it, and seemed to be occupied by an alien. When I closed my eyes at night great waves of coloured light drifted up behind my eyelids. I had always wanted to see the aurora borealis but not like this. I felt too ill to do anything and spent whole days lounging around lying on the sofa.

  Then one bright sunny morning in January 2007 Flic decided to walk up the hill behind our village in west Wales. I was too ill to go with her but it was too lovely a morning to miss so I tried anyway. We got to the old spoil heap and a view of the Dyfi estuary and the sea and the Lleyn Peninsula in the distance. Wonderful. I waited while Flic went on to the top of the hill. She came back soon, told me how beautiful it was up there and insisted that I come up too. When I got to the top my Parkinson’s symptoms pretty much went away. The exercise, the beauty of the morning, the relief at being out in the world again, maybe all these things together worked a cure. We walked for an hour or so and I came home a happy man. That walk was the start of something big for us.

  A few weeks later we walked up Cadair Idris. I felt I could get as far as the lake half way up. It was easy and we continued to the summit. We saw the seaside town of Barmouth in the distance and decided to walk there, some eight miles away, arriving after dark. I cannot express how special a day that was for me.

  Flic and I love the outdoors and we continued walking in the hills. We spent six days in the Swiss Alps in the summer. In November we arrived in Kathmandu, ready to walk the Annapurna circuit. It was to be a one off, an unrepeatable trip of a lifetime. We had travelled together many years ago, before we had children. Now Kit had left home and was at art college. Peter, at seventeen years old and with friends in the village, could manage without us for a month. We were ready for a long walk.

  A few years ago I was walking along a stretch of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, with Flic and her sister, Anna. I had been limping for a while but not so badly as to spoil my day. It was a different way of walking not, as it can sometimes be, a difficult struggle. Anna said something like: It’s strange that you like walking so much when you find it difficult. The truth was, and is, that most other things are more difficult for me; walking is one of the few things I can do. More than that, the repetitive motion often makes my body function better while more complicated tasks cause me to become more dysfunctional. And I’ve always liked walking.

  Flic and I have covered a lot of ground on foot in the years since my illness became apparent and our shared pleasure in the outdoors has brought us closer together. And so it causes me great sadness to realise that it’s becoming much more difficult for me and that increasingly I choose to stay at home rather than attempt and fail to enjoy a long walk. But I shouldn’t make myself too miserable yet. There are three things I can think about to come to terms with this.

  The first is to remember the time when I injured my foot by treading on broken glass when I was wandering around Greece as a young man. I limped along painfully and slowly, there was no possibility of hurrying, and I began to take note of much more in my surroundings. The slower you go, the more you see I thought and I still think it now. Secondly there’s this: I can still walk quite well, quite often, if only for short distances. Finally I have to celebrate what has been possible for me. Flic and I had a wonderful time walking a hundred and fifty miles around Annapurna. We can’t do it now but we did it when we could and it was marvellous, as were the travels that followed. And here’s the strange thing: if Mr Parkinson hadn’t come knocking on my door we quite probably would have stayed at home.

  C is for Copacabana (Bolivia)

  The shores of Lake Titicaca are wild and unspoilt and beautiful, for the most part. But not at Copacabana in Bolivia. It’s
a rundown tourist resort with untreated sewage spilling into the lake, street dogs hungry for titbits and affection, and more pedalo boats per head of population than anywhere else in the world.

  Our Lady of Copacabana is the patron saint of boy racers, who come to the town in large numbers on her feast day to have their cars blessed. Then they get drunk and drive around for a while. Gringos are advised to stay away until the festivities are over. But when we were there we did watch a street marriage celebration with music and dancing. I thought something was wrong with the beer – people kept pouring some of it onto the ground. I later discovered it was in honour of Pachamama, the Inca Earth goddess who is in the fertility business. The Spanish imposed Catholicism all over South America but Pachamama is still alive and well and living in Copacabana.

  4

  Around Annapurna

  Of course an essence of Nepal. Ever present at the end of the slightest alley that reminds Nepal a loyally paradise of gallant shade the ‘Nature’.

  From the website of Hotel Nature.

  From our hotel window I can see banana trees, lemon trees, ducks, vines, pot plants, crows, washing, solar panels, brick walls, and flags. The roofs have a tower on them for water tanks – with a spiral staircase you can climb. Hear – dogs, cars beeping, voices, motorbikes, brakes squealing.

  From Flic’s journal, November 2007.

  I don’t know the hour but it is early morning, sometime between first light and sunrise. I am up on the flat rooftop of Hotel Nature, looking out across the city through a haze of pollution and humidity. Kathmandu stretches, in some directions, as far the eye can see; only to the west I can make out hills touched with the green of something like woodland or farmland, and to the north, between drifting clouds, glimpses of snow covered mountains.

  Low-rise square buildings of brick and concrete surround me, all of them with black plastic water tanks on their roofs, some with pot plants and even small trees, some with washing hanging out, a few with early rising people. A man nearby clears his throat and cleans his teeth. A woman below me is preparing vegetables. Further away a small boy waits until his mother has gone, jumps up onto the parapet and balances along high above the street. There is the sound of a small handheld bell and I look down and across at a man chanting a prayer. There is the smoke of burning juniper leaves and then the bell again.

  I can see no old buildings, just these newly decrepit, multi-occupied blocks, a few vacant lots awaiting development and some half-built concrete shells of buildings-to-be. Further away are few scattered little tree-covered hillocks, like tiny islands above the streets. And a bigger hill with trees and what might be a temple, I can make out two white towers and a golden dome.

  I don’t know it yet but this is to be only the first of a great number of early morning rooftop views, in a dozen countries on four continents, that I will experience during the next few years. Views over cities and mountains and farmland and desert and the sea. I wake up early in a new place, excited by life, looking out and around, maybe wondering what’s ahead. It’s the best time of the day.

  Walking the Annapurna Circuit is, for the most part, easier than walking in Wales. The old trade routes that are now popular with trekkers run through settled countryside and there are villages every few miles along the way. In every one of them you can buy food and drink and find a cheap place to stay the night. There are no way markers but friendly locals will put you back on the path if you get lost. The only problem is the altitude. The route takes you up the valley of the Marsyangdi River and down the valley of the Khali Kandaki. You just have to cross from one to the other by way of the Thorong La, a 17,000 ft pass, where cold and altitude sickness will kill you if you are unlucky enough to get benighted. I really didn’t know what effect altitude would have on my illness so we employed both a guide and a porter. On the Thorong La I was pleased we had.

  Our guide was called Ram Rai, an easy going but reserved man who spoke some English. Our porter was a sweet young guy called Take. We met them in Kathmandu and set off by bus for the beginning of the trail at Besi Shah. Ram sat across the aisle, a little separate from us but there if needed. That was to be his way over the next three weeks, polite, unobtrusive but with an uncanny habit of being around at the right time. The bus passed field after field of a handsome green cereal crop that I hadn’t seen before and didn’t recognise. I asked Ram what it was and he showed no surprise at my ignorance. It is rice, he said with a smile.

  Ram always smiled, always seemed at ease. He had the broad face and narrow eyes of the Rai people (hence his surname, Ram Rai, in the Nepali manner) and that contributed to his seeming contentment. Nepalis are lovely people, kind and friendly to foreigners. On the trail they greet you with a smile and the word namaste, which translates as I salute the God within you. I never, ever heard a Nepali say namaste to another Nepali. I guess it’s archaic and sounds something like good morrow kind sir. No wonder that they keep on smiling.

  We set off from Besi Shah early in the morning and walked down a flat, grassy trail along which jeeps or buses would sometimes pass. The buses had very high clearance and could travel over rough ground. After a short distance the path became too rough and narrow for them and we were in a world completely free of wheeled vehicles. Everything had to be carried on the back of a Nepali porter or a donkey. We passed by fields of millet and rice, terraced into the hillside. Lentils were growing on the banks of the terraces. Sweetcorn had been harvested and was stored on the cob hanging in special racks on under the eaves of houses. There were sheep, goats, chickens and water buffalo along the way. Any questions I had about the agriculture there would be answered by Ram who was from a farming background. And when we passed a patch of semi-tropical woodland he showed us the movement in the trees where there were monkeys.

  This is what I remember. But Flic carried her sketchbook journal and now I have it in front of me. She wrote and sketched as we went along, not often reflecting on our experiences, just recording the day to day details. It makes for a vivid account, a very special record of a very special journey. Here are some of her observations:

  There are cattle trees which are holy and have stones around them to rest on. Giant mango trees with strange noises coming from them – frogs? crickets? Burbling from birds. It’s quite humid and cloudy. We stop for tea after a couple of hours and watch passersby – porters carrying huge loads with a strap around their foreheads. There are mule trains carrying stuff up to Manang and returning empty apart from rubbish. All the while the Marsyangdi roars along beside us.

  We stopped for lunch at a simple guesthouse close to the bank of the Marsyangdi River in a place called Ngadi. Ram asked if we should stay the night there and we agreed. We pottered about among the boulders on the river bank and then Flic walked up to the village with some local children. That was our first day. I would like to impress you with our courage and fortitude on the hard trail, challenges met, unforeseeable problems overcome. It wasn’t like that. At the beginning it was, as we said at the time, a walk in the park.

  In the evening some villagers organised a dance for the trekkers. They persuaded us to join in and laughed at us good naturedly and got some money out of us to help with the building of a new school. A girl in her early teens talked to the trekkers in reasonable English. As Flic recorded she was pretty and very aware of it. She sold me a woven good luck charm which has been attached to my rucksack ever since. She seemed worried that she was charging too much at something like 35 pence in our money. As the light faded the locals walked back up to the village. We watched fireflies glowing in the bushes around us and, looking up and along the valley, got our first view of a snow-capped mountain reflecting the sunset

  It now occurs to me that we met and talked to women in Nepal as you would at home, no surprises there; but it was in great contrast to our later experiences in India, where ordinary women don’t generally talk to foreigners or indeed to any men outside the family. We noticed that men and women share heavy physical work i
n Nepal and we often saw men looking after young children too. It looked like there was a fair amount of gender equality – who knows?

  Our second day’s walking was a little harder, not much, and we began to have the animal encounters that are so much a part of rural life in poorer countries. We saw water buffaloes crossing the river. One was swept off its feet and carried downstream a little. When it managed to get out of the water it found itself on the wrong side and had to go back in and struggle across to catch up with the rest of the herd. When we stopped for lunch two kids (the four legged kind) jumped up onto the table and had to be shooed away. Flic noted: It is a festival time and today is the dog’s festival so the dogs, a few, have been decorated with garlands and tinsel and one has red paint on its head.

  Both the Marsyangdi and the Kali Kandaki valleys have been important trade routes for a long time and, as the paths are not too steep and the altitude not too great, there are many mule trains, as we came to call them although they are made up of donkeys. The foremost animals wear quite grand woven head-dresses. We were warned to stand on the uphill side of the path as they passed because you can get knocked off. We met a woman who had been pushed off the path by a well-laden donkey and fallen a few metres – enough to make her nervous when they came by.