The Road to Zagora Read online

  Altitude is the big thing in Nepal. It is possible to travel continuously downhill by bus for many hours – something you can’t imagine here in Wales where the landscape is so flat that you need hardly raise your head to see the top of the highest ‘mountain’. We travelled, yes, that’s right, continuously downhill for two hours, maybe more, until we came to a town we recognised close to the Indian border. Then we got off and waited, in the rain, for a bus going the other way. We were at a road junction and there were shops around about with signs written in English. My guess is that this gave them some sort of status. Nobody in the shops or outside of them could speak a word of English and besides that a substantial proportion of the population is illiterate there. But the signs look foreign and that suggests quality.

  A digression here in the form of a Peruvian joke. The English tell jokes about the Irish, the Russians about Poles, Swedes about Norwegians (or is it the other way around?) and so forth. Peruvians tell jokes about themselves:

  Father to son: what do you want to be when you grow up my boy?

  Son: A foreigner.

  Maybe the Nepalis have that same excessive modesty and admiration for foreign cultures; I don’t know. And I can’t remember now how it was that we were convinced to get on a more than full bus going back towards the hills and, we hoped, Pokhara. But we did. The nice young men in charge of the bus squeezed us on with promises that they would get us seats and we would get to our destination. Both these things turned out to be true.

  I remember that with all the luggage and people on the bus I could only find floorspace for one foot. I stood, one legged, for many miles, perfectly safe, wedged in tight by the other passengers and with no chance of falling over. And when some people got off we were given seats straight away. Perhaps it had something to do with the 500 rupees each that we had been charged for the journey. The ticket vendor liked to show the other passengers these 500 rupee notes, smile and nod in our direction enthusiastically. I guess we had been charged at the top end of that sliding scale used in some countries in place of the rather dull system we have at home in which goods or services have a fixed price.

  The journey took seven hours. A nightmare on wheels that we somehow came to enjoy. The rain stopped and the sun came out and shone on the extraordinary landscapes that we passed through. The hills were very steep and were sometimes covered in forest. Or they were moderately steep, terraced and farmed for crops like rice and millet. There were pale blue snow-melt rivers in the bottoms of the valleys and as the day went on we began to get glimpses of the Annapurna range of mountains, reaching very high up into that part of the sky normally occupied only by clouds.

  As well as the driver there were the two handsome young men running the bus, one to sell tickets and the other to hassle people and their luggage on and off. It worked like this: we would overtake the bus of another company, a competitor, and then arrive ahead of it at some town or village. The young guys would be hanging out of the door or on the metal ladders that led up to the roof shouting Pokhara, Pokhara, Pokhara. We would just about stop and any new passengers would be grabbed and pulled onto the bus as we accelerated away before we could be overtaken by another bus.

  The guys were having a great time shouting out encouragement and abuse to other road users and climbing up and down the outside of the bus. They both wore bandanas, like pirates. And the nautical feeling was enhanced by the swaying of the bus as it went round endless hairpin bends. Quite few people (not us) were throwing up into plastic bags which they threw out of the window. We got a puncture and the guys changed the wheel at the side of the road. And so it went on. The mountains grew closer and looked increasingly fantastical as the sun went down. We reached Pokhara in the early evening having spent maybe nine hours on busses. Perhaps it sounds like a nightmare. It felt like an adventure.

  In India we once travelled on a luxury express bus with numbered seats. The bus left the terminal with each seat occupied by just one person and the aisles free of passengers. It felt comfortable and spacious. A few hundred yards later we stopped to let some village people on. They stood in the aisle or perched on the edge of seats. Half a mile up the road we stopped for some more. We carried on like this for seven hours, very few people getting off, more and more getting on. A woman sitting on the edge of my seat was soon sitting on the edge of my lap. A man was wedged so close against me that I thought we might as well go the whole way and get married. When we arrived (at Jodhpur was it?) the bus took an age to empty of its passengers. Were people getting on again through a back door and passing us two or three times? We wondered how a day spent sitting down could leave us so exhausted.

  A cow falls from the sky and kills a young woman on a boat. A glacier advances on New York at 200 miles per hour. A plane turns into a robot and lands on a pyramid. An ant pours a magic potion into the ear of a small boy. A bus travels along the edge of the desert for ten hours. Richard and Flic try not to watch fifth rate Hollywood movies dubbed in Spanish. They arrive in Pacasmayo, en route to Ecuador.

  On our later journeys I wrote a blog and this was my blog post after a bus journey in Peru where the buses show endless videos to keep passengers entertained. The videos are often violent and always loud. If you have seen a film called Precious, about family life in a poor part of Harlem, New York, and heard the amount of swearing in it, you might understand why, at the end of a day passing through the quiet wild beauty of upland Peru, a passenger was heard to say let’s getting our mother-fucking asses off the mother-fucking bus. That passenger was me.

  Another day, another bus, another blog post, this one from Jordan:

  Taxi into Amman and hardly any traffic, shops shut and shuttered. Of course, it’s Friday, the day off, the day when people get religion. We get on the bus to Petra and instead of music from the speakers there’s wall-to-wall chanting – verses from the Koran, I think, going on for an hour. But nobody seems to listen; people chat, young guys are listening to music on their mobile phones. And in front of me a heavily headscarfed and long coated woman gets her laptop out and checks out her hotmail, facebook and youtube. The chanting stops but is soon replaced by what sounds like a sermon, rather joyless and hectoring in tone to our ears. We hope the guy is preaching the Islamic code of generosity towards all foreigners. Then the bus stops by a mosque and a few of the more pious travellers get out for a while. The laptop woman turns to us and explains in English – ‘they are praying, it is a good thing.’ We arrive at Petra after 3 hours and find ourselves waiting outside a cheap hotel for the man to come to the door and let us in. We can see what he's doing through the window. He comes out and welcomes us when he’s finished saying his prayers.

  I could write a piece about the place of livestock on public transport in the developing world. I would probably call it The Bus that Crowed. I could write about bicycle rickshaws, about the world record for number of people riding in a tuk tuk, about rides in milk-trucks and pick-ups. I could speak of the boda-boda, a bicycle taxi in Africa that takes a passenger on the back rack. And more. But I think the point has been made. Public transport is one of the best ways for a traveller to get close to the life of another people in another country. As close as you could ever want to be.

  Here, in Wales, my favourite bus used to be called the X32. We have taken it many times in recent years for a day out on our nearest mountain, Cadair Idris. Once or twice when we were on a bus in Peru and the on-board entertainment was too much to cope with I longed for home and the X32 bound quietly northwards for Dolgellau. And there’s something else. You would be travelling home on, let’s say, a wet Monday evening in November. You are passing through Machynlleth or Aberystwyth in the rain and dark. Just for a moment you catch sight of the bus number, brightly lit and reflected in the window of a shop or office. You weren’t thinking about it before but you are now; X32 in reverse spells SEX. That’s why some people referred to it by its local nick-name, the sex bus.

  E is for Entebbe (Uganda)

  I arrived
at Entebbe airport in Uganda and was met by Joseph Sekiku and his old friend Macarius. I was on the way to Joseph’s village in NW Tanzania as a representative of a link between his community and ours in Wales. I had been on a night flight, it was now early in the morning and Macarius took us to his home for breakfast. He was a long-serving police officer and as such he was given accommodation with the job. It turned out to be a two room metal hut in a compound of other huts with children and goats running around.

  Breakfast consisted of sweetened sliced white bread, perhaps a special treat they had bought for me – I don’t know. Macarius’ partner, Sharon, had the difficult job of serving the menfolk their food (our food, I should say) while keeping her head below our eye-level. As far as I could make out that was the appropriate etiquette. She also kept a sort of glazed expression on her face that I saw Joseph’s wife adopt later; maybe it was a type of politeness used in formal situations. It all looked wrong to me and I felt uncomfortable. Then she and the other women in the room stood around while we ate. They took no interest in the conversation and I assumed they spoke no English.

  When I returned three weeks later Sharon greeted me as a friend, in good African English. She asked me why I hadn’t got a suntan. It’s a different culture there. It would take quite a while to understand it.

  6

  Ballsy

  It was in the spring of 2008, a few months after our once in a lifetime trip to Nepal, that Flic and I met Bill’s friend Glynis. I saw her running from her car carrying a pair of crutches and then walking slowly and awkwardly with them as she approached the hostel we were staying in. I understood straight away; that must be the woman who has Parkinson’s disease, I thought. It was good to meet her, someone a few years down the road from me, experiencing the illness as it progressed further. Or was it?

  She wanted to be my friend, to talk to me about her struggle with the disease. She got out her laptop and showed me photographs and poems. She described waking in the night with her hand formed into a rigid claw shape that she couldn’t release. She talked of being stuck in the park and a friend coming to get her with a wheelchair. I must say I felt a great warmth and sympathy towards her. Then in the evening she began her dyskinesias, involuntary writhing movements of her whole body, something brought on by the drugs she was taking. She didn’t have much to eat at supper time because she couldn’t get the food to her mouth. She struggled to keep her face turned towards us to maintain eye contact as she spoke. Both Flic and I found this disturbing. It was my future.

  Glynis wanted to keep in touch but I never replied to her emails. I just couldn’t. It was selfish and cowardly of me but I had to cope with Parkinson’s the best way I could: by denial, by not looking ahead. But Flic and I had a renewed sense of urgency now. We should make the most of the time we had while my health remained.

  On the last day of that first trip we visited a Hindu temple complex in Kathmandu. It was the strangest and most exotic experience of our lives, of a culture so different from our own. So when we decided to go back to the Himalayas and walk this time in the Everest Region we thought we would go on to India. We would be away for three and a half months.

  We flew to Delhi in October 2008 and made our way overland to Kathmandu. My younger son, Peter, is in India as I write this. His first email home started with text-speak: OMG IDFBI. Oh my God, I don’t fucking believe it. Yes, that’s how India hits you. It’s mad, it’s strange, it’s ugly and sometimes beautiful. It’s an assault on the senses. In India you are intensely alive. Just being there, looking around you, is an experience.

  We had just twenty-four hours in Delhi before catching an overnight train that would take us to Gorakhpur near to the Nepalese border. Our plan was to stay at least a month in Nepal before returning to India and spending time in Rajasthan (in the north) and then Kerala (in the south). I look at Flic’s journal now and read:

  This morning in Delhi. I want to go to the Modern Art Gallery near India Gate. We eat breakfast then walk out and a cycle rickshaw man stops and we jump in. He takes us not far to his friend who has a taxi who takes us to India Gate a huge archway to commemorate the people who died in the first world war we think. There are rows of red flowers and strips of water and grass, fascinating birds, people of all sorts. Some men bathing in the canals, some Muslims, snake charmers, grass cutters, soldiers, families. It is New Delhi designed by Lutyens in the 1920s. Thank goodness that he did and the roads are really wide. You risk injury or death crossing them they are so full of traffic but if they were narrower it would be much worse. Animals mingle with the motorised vehicles – horses, bullocks, donkeys, dogs. Although it’s 95 degrees it isn’t too hot. The museum has some good paintings and sculptures in the garden. We got a tuk tuk to a famous garden and saw a Gandhi memorial and watched everyone take off their shoes to show respect. The Indians we have talked to are very polite and thoughtful though the price of rides varies a lot.

  Proximity. That’s the word that springs to mind when I think of India and Indians. There are little three wheeler taxis (tuk tuks, or auto-rickshaws) which have a seat for the driver in the front and a seat for three passengers behind him. There are times in India when a tuk tuk pulls up with a family of four or five sitting in the back and the driver invites you to get in because there is plenty of room. There is no room. So the two of you, with rucksacks, get in somehow. There are lots of arms and lots of legs in the tuk tuk. You know that some of them belong to you. There are torsos and there are hands and feet and luggage and some of it belongs to you too but you lose track for a while. It’s only when you need to get out that you decide which body parts and which items of luggage are yours and need to be untangled and removed.

  The infrastructure of New Delhi, the streets and buildings, were put in place by the British and are appropriately grand and spacious. But even here the road traffic operates in a way that goes beyond proximity; it challenges the physical laws of the universe as we know it. There is a stream of traffic, perhaps three or four lanes of cars, buses, lorries, taxis and so forth, tightly packed, moving fast, approaching a roundabout carrying the same density of vehicles. There are no spaces between the vehicles on the roundabout into which any of the approaching traffic might fit. It comes on in a constant unremitting stream and, without slowing down, merges with the roundabout traffic. Two into one don’t go. But this is India and two into one do go and they do it (note the tone of incredulity indicated by italics) without slowing down. But I think I can explain.

  All over the sub-continent lorries have the words horn please painted on the back. This is to remind you to sound your horn when overtaking because they may suddenly change lanes without looking in their mirror. Why don’t they look in their mirror? Because in India you look ahead all the time; you can’t take your eyes off the road in front of you because a child or an old lady with a herd of goats, or a cow with painted horns, or a small motorbike carrying a family of four, or a lorry with a hand-painted portrait of the god Shiva (to make it accident proof) on each side or... or any number of improbable vehicles, people or animals are about to pull out in front of you (without looking). You do not look behind and your reactions are very, very fast.

  The other thing is proximity; did I mention proximity? I finally understood when in south India I saw a man standing up on a boat about to go under a bridge. He ducked at the very last available moment, his head inches from the concrete. And I understood that we non-Indians carry around with us an envelope of extra space into which we cannot imagine other people or objects intruding. The Indian universe is envelope-free and you can bump right up against anyone or anything. And people take up less space. In a country with a population of more than one billion this might be considered a good thing.

  We stayed one night in Delhi, pottered about a little, paid a lucky young cycle-rickshaw driver about a month’s wages for an hour’s pedalling, and in the afternoon got ourselves to the station. I am always appropriately nervous before long journeys; I have a preoccupatio
n with issues such as getting on the right train, not losing my luggage and so forth. Flic is relaxed and carefree. The more carefree she gets the more nervous I get. I was uncomfortable, it has to be said, when she got out her sketchbook and started drawing the people on what may or may not have been the right platform for our train. And when it arrived it was the longest train I have ever seen. We were the only foreigners among a multitude of Indians. Somehow we found our carriage and settled in.

  We are on the 2nd class AC sleeper. While the light lasts it is like watching a silent film, factories, fields, brick kilns and other trains and people some dusty some bright, some cutting rice and some sleeping.

  Now it is dark outside. In our carriage there are lights and curtains but further down it is dark and the carriages are more crowded and there are Sadhus sitting on the floor. I feel too big and white to go in there. It’s fine where we are.

  In the morning I wake at 5 expecting the train to be at Gorakhpur at 6 but it is 3 hours late. The morning is still lovely a mist covers the fields but it slowly gets hotter. At last we get to Gorakhpur straight away we get a taxi to the border. The driver drives very fast nearly hitting cows dogs busses cyclists rickshaws but being very careful where there are any potholes. Another 3 hours and we get to the border.