In June 2012, Arno Kopecky and his friend, photographer Ilja Herb, set out in a 41-foot sailboat named Foxy to chart a course along the coast of British Columbia, sailing from Sidney to Kitimat, the proposed terminus of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline. The following was excerpted from Kopecky’s award-winning book, The Oil Man and the Sea: Navigating the Northern Gateway, published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2013.
Since then, a court challenge has been brought before the Federal Court of Appeal by a coalition of First Nations, environmental groups and Canada’s largest private-sector union. The case had its final day of hearings on October 8. A decision could take one to several months. In the meantime, Enbridge Northern Gateway has postponed construction indefinitely. Three of the four parties running in this month’s federal election have said they will cancel the project if they form government. BC premier Christy Clark maintains that her conditions have not been met for the province’s approval of Northern Gateway. However, trophy hunting of grizzly bears — opposed by a far greater majority of British Columbians than those who oppose Northern Gateway — does have her full support.
Of the sixty or so grizzlies who dine on the Koeye River’s salmon each fall, Ilja shot six. He shot them all in the space of three hours, two days after the Joint Review Panel left Heiltsuk territory.
We pulled out of Bella Bella the morning after they did, motoring south down Lama Passage, into the lake of Fitz Hugh Channel, through the current-laden junction with Burke Channel, on past the ghost town of Namu and its ten-thousand-year-old middens. Calvert Island came into sight off our starboard bow. Between Calvert’s northern tip and the island chain above it there was a narrow gap through which you could see Hecate Strait. That gap was Hakai Pass, and it was the chink in the armour of outer islands through which an oil tanker’s spill could easily flow if the tide was rising and the current flooding in. Directly in the current’s path, open as a warm embrace, was the Koeye rivermouth.
In the northwest corner of the bay, an overgrowth of cedars and spruce that predated the Renaissance obscured the river’s passage. We anchored in the oval bay the river emptied in to. A mild swell pulsed through Hakai Pass, across Fitz Hugh Channel and underneath Foxy before breaking into foam against the shore’s yellow sand. This was as close as Foxy could get to the river.
In the morning, we loaded Ilja’s Linhof Master Technika into the dinghy, along with his Nikon D3, his Nikon D7000, his 500mm “mega-zoom”, and nine smaller lenses with varying parameters of focus and range, until our beloved and thus far under-utilized inflatable was piled so high with grey camera cases that I had to climb over them and perch my ass on the dinghy’s rubber nose while Ilja folded his long legs into the back and nestled in beside the 15-horse Tohatsu. And off we sped.
A group of camp kids was swimming and snorkelling in a deep eddy around the river’s first bend, splashing and laughing in their bathing suits as though this were the Mexican Riviera and not a ten-degree river in bear country. They waved, we waved back. We slowed as we approached two submerged boulders that Marge had warned us about, underwater shadows that you couldn’t see until you were right on top of them; next came the old quarry pilings that emerged from the water like giant, shredded toothpicks. After that the river deepened, the obstacles disappeared, Ilja opened up the throttle, and we flew through the middle of an ancient forest.
The flight of the Nikons lasted two kilometres, after which the river became too shallow to motor up safely; our propellor was tinging off the gravel bottom. The forest fell back here and gave way to an estuary of chest-high grass through which narrow moats of river water carved brown channels. We were still in the intertidal zone, for orange seaweed covered the pebble islands that rose into the middle of the river. We stepped out of the dinghy and pulled it farther upstream, wading against a sluggish thigh-high current, until it became knee-high, then ankle high and the dinghy’s bottom scraped the rocks and ground to a halt.
We were floating back downstream with the motor off when we saw the first one swim across the river.
It paddled a hundred metres downstream from us, brown head bobbing above the surface. I’d never seen a grizzly bear before. I whispered, “Bear.” Ilja scrambled amongst his gear, opening one case after another, struggling to get his 500mm lens mounted onto the right camera body without making a sound, all whilst trading places with me so that I was at the tiller and Ilja sat at the front, our absurdly small and overloaded rubber raft tottering beneath us. By the time we’d readjusted, the bear had made it across. It emerged from the water and paused to shake itself dry just as the current brought us alongside, and before it disappeared into the grass Ilja fired off his first few shots. They were his first wildlife shots of the trip.
“Thank Jesus,” he sighed when the bear was out of sight.
We drifted a few hundred metres more and pulled out onto a gravel section of riverbank. Yesterday, when we stopped to replace the alternator wire, we’d also caught our first coho, and now we ate the leftovers—in hindsight, perhaps not the wisest menu selection in bear country. But Ilja washed the tinfoil in river water before putting it back in his pack, and then he grabbed his camera and we went for a walk. We followed the river bank where it curved into the grass field, hugging a thin strip of rock against the forest’s edge. The sea of green spread out across from the moat of water beside us, the grasses flattened by crisscrossing bear trails that ran between the canals. We reached a promontory two and a half metres above the channel just as a mother grizzly burst from the grass a hundred metres away with two cubs at her feet; they plunged into the channel and sauntered slowly out the other side, and Ilja shot them too.
They shook dry together, the cubs looking like raccoons with their sharply thin pale faces and dark eyes. Their mother was lean, her flesh hanging off her frame in long folds, for the fall’s salmon feast hadn’t yet begun and all they’d been eating was berries and grass. Too shortsighted to see us, she nevertheless caught a whiff of something strange in the wind and let out a few precautionary whuffs. Then she started walking. Her path brought her and her cubs closer to us. The only thing I knew about bears was never to get between a mother and her cubs. They kept coming closer. We backed away, and the mother reared onto her hind legs, sniffing hard. We kept backing off, Ilja shooting all the while, and they stayed put. Then we turned a sharp corner along the bank and ran back to the boat and that was that.
Ilja was elated now, and so was I. I took my clothes off to jump in the river, dunked my head underwater, and when I looked up, there was another bear swimming across the river towards us. More shooting. Ilja said, quietly, “If anything happens, don’t run. We’ll calmly get into the boat, and if he gets closer we’ll pick up our paddles and wave them above our heads so that we look bigger than he is.” The thing not to do was panic. Our paddles were pathetic little plastic things that came with the inflatable kayaks, because we’d misplaced our wooden paddles in Bella Bella. Maybe the Heiltsuk used them to paddle their canoes to Denny Island. I hadn’t minded until now. I felt naked, because I was naked, but also because we didn’t have bear mace or guns or any reliable means of self-defense other than not panicking, and the bear kept swimming closer.
But he came ashore fifty metres from us, slow and lumbering and almost-blind, non-aggressive and in no hurry, and disappeared into the grass. There was no reason to be afraid, after all.
Still, it seemed wise to get back in the boat. I put on my clothes and we packed the boat up and eased it back into the river. The current was so slow we hardly moved. A few moments later, another lean grizzly emerged from the trees directly behind where we’d been standing. It ambled snout down to our picnic site and licked the rocks where Ilja had washed the tin foil after our picnic.
We spent the next half hour floating beside him, twenty metres away as he strolled down the shore, pausing to chew the grass or glare dimly at us, then walk on. Eventually he reached a side channel that stretched back towards a mountain, and we let him disappear into the distant forest. By then, the mama had returned to the main branch of the Koeye and paddled halfway out with her two cubs, then turned back and sauntered upstream and out of sight.
Arno Kopecky’sThe Oil Man and the Sea was short-listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Banff Mountain Book Award, and won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. Kopecky is a Vancouver-based journalist and travel writer whose work has appeared in The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, Reader’s Digest and Foreign Policy. His previous work includes The Devil’s Curve: A Journey into Power and Profit at the Amazon’s Edge (D&M, 2012). He is currently at work on his first novel.
“Bring night to your imaginings. Bring the darkest passage of your holy book.”
— Carolyn Forché, Prayer
The legend of Dervla Murphy generally begins in December 1941, her tenth birthday, when she received a bicycle and an atlas. She fell in love with both and, looking out from a hill near her home in Lismore, Ireland, she decided to cycle to India. Twenty-one years later, she set out for Delhi—cycling through France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan and Pakistan—alone but for her bike and a pistol. The notes she took during this journey were turned into Full Tilt, a wonderful book that won her well-deserved recognition as one of the best travel writers of her generation. Many more books followed. About Tibet, Nepal, and trekking through Ethiopia with a mule. Then, after her daughter Rachel was old enough (5 years old, to be exact), she continued her work with a couple books about their travels in India.
But I would argue that the true legend of Dervla Murphy began in 1978, with the publication of A Place Apart, about cycling through Northern Ireland during the height of The Troubles. Using travel writing as a template, Murphy—whose father had been sentenced to three years in jail for hiding weapons and ammunition in his back garden before she was born—explored what at the time seemed to be an intractable conflict by simply speaking to people on both sides, hearing their stories, drinking with them, bearing witness.
There is a line of thought that discourages any link between art and politics—especially in the case of travel writing, which, more than most genres, is often read as escapism. But Murphy instinctively saw how suitable the form could be for putting a human face on vague ideas, and personalizing problems so large that they’re difficult to comprehend. She also saw that a disengagement with politics was a refusal to engage with a country or its people—something that would be anathema to her ideal of immersive travel.
In 1996, in an essay titled The Poetry of Witness, Carloyn Forché argued for the removal of the distinction between personal and political, calling for a more socially-minded poetics, where justice, rather than party politics, was the main concern. Twenty years earlier, Dervla Murphy had already discovered a way to make her particular form of poetry—travel writing—bear witness. At home, she wrote about the nuclear threat, and the racism that lead to the Handsworth riots in the UK. In East Africa, she journeyed through the areas hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic. She visited Rwanda shortly after the genocide, South Africa after apartheid, and the Balkans after the Yugoslav Wars. In her two most recent books, A Month By the Sea and Between River and Sea, she’s travelled to Israel, to witness the Isreal/Palestine problem first hand.
Ms. Murphy is now 84, and was still an avid cyclist up until about a year ago, when emphysema forced her to continue on foot. She still calls Lismore home, and that’s where we reached her by way of Skype and phone. She’s as charming and funny as you’d expect of any Irish granny. And as tough, intelligent and interesting as you’d expect of one of the greatest travel writers alive today.
– Chris Oke
Disclaimer: The following has been culled from a much longer interview. Some editing has been done for clarity, other edits have been made in a vain attempt to make the interviewer sound halfway as articulate as Ms. Murphy.
ERRANT: The first thing I wanted to ask you was about your previous book, A Month by the Sea, which was about your month in Gaza in 2011. Between River and Sea was based on your visits between 2008 and 2010. So is this, in a way, a prequel?
DERVLA MURPHY: I’ll tell you exactly what happened: When I went to Gaza, I was three-quarters of the way through [Between River and Sea], the long one, and I reckoned that based on my month in Gaza I would probably do two long chapters, which would come at the end of the book. But when I got home there was so much material to do with Gaza that the two chapters became nine, at which point my publisher said, “That’s much too long to add to the other book, I think we better bring this out now, bring it out first, just on its own.”
ERRANT: So would you say that they’re meant to be read together, as companion pieces?
MURPHY: Well, I suppose ideally yes because in [Between River and Sea] I give far more of the general historical background of the whole Palestinian/Israeli problem, than I do in [A Month by the Sea], which is specifically about the Gaza Strip. So ideally yes, I think one would read the long one first and then the one on Gaza. They’ve just been republished, the paperback editions are just coming out now, together, but I hadn’t thought about that, it would’ve been useful to put in a little note to tell people to read the long one first.
ERRANT: I’m sure that reading them in either order will be fine. Would you say that you were passionately concerned about the Palestinina/Israeli conflict before your trip, or was it the trip itself that made you aware?
MURPHY: Oh, it was the trip itself. I mean, obviously I was concerned and interested and puzzled by why the Palestinians were having such a hard time. But no, I wasn’t as passionately involved as I have since become.
ERRANT: Was there any single event that really brought the situation home to you, something that made you feel as though this was a topic that you had to pursue, devote so much time to and write about?
MURPHY: Not really, because it’s the overall impact of the Palestinians’ suffering really. It’s incident after incident, event after event, an accumulation rather than one outstanding deed or event.
ERRANT: Near the beginning of Between River and Sea, you talk about displaying your Irish passport so that they don’t mistake you for a compatriot of Tony Blair.
MURPHY: Ah, yes. He still is a major disaster in that area. He’s had to step down of course from his position of head of this phoney thing, The Quartet [on the Middle East]. It was always meaningless. But he’s remained involved, for his own profit, in the whole Middle Eastern area. He’s still very much on the scene.
ERRANT: Aside from that though, I’m wondering whether you feel that your identity as an Irish woman—with family members who were once associated with the IRA—gives you a unique perspective on the conflict?
MURPHY: Not at all unique, no. Just a different, Irish perspective. And I suppose helpful in a way to the extent that you can see things from both sides—in a way that very often the British or French or Americans can’t because they have the perspective of former imperialist powers or, as in the case of the United States, present imperial powers. Whereas I suppose Irish people as a whole have more of an underdog point of view.
ERRANT: Could you speak a bit more about comparisons between The Troubles and The Palestinian/Isreali conflict? In A Place Apart, you employed a similar technique, travelling around Northern Ireland in the 1970s and speaking to people on the ground about the issues they were facing. Would you say that that experience shaped the way you wrote about this issue?
MURPHY: Well there’s simply no comparison. Can you imagine the British Air Force, the RAF, flying to Derry, and deliberately bombing the homes of anybody suspected of IRA activism? And doing that repeatedly? It’s unimaginable, that the British would behave like that.
At the end of my South African journey—when would that have been? ’94, I suppose. One of my books, had just been published—I can’t remember which one exactly—I have so many children, I can’t remember when they were all born—but a book had just been published and my publishers had arranged for me to attend some event at a bookshop in Belfast to celebrate the publication. So as it happened, I flew straight back from Johannesburg to Belfast and of course, I’d been, all-together, about 18 months in South Africa, and I can remember the feeling of… really, extreme impatience. I mean, I know that people had a hard time in the North of Ireland during those prolonged troubles, but there just wasn’t any comparison with what the people had suffered in South Africa. I found myself thinking that all sides really should get a grip on this and realize how lucky they are. They’re not starving. Their health is looked after. They have roofs over their heads.
So that will give you an idea of what I feel about comparing the Irish to Palestinians. And the Palestinians, in many ways, are actually even worse off than the blacks under Apartheid. As indeed, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has remarked on having visited the West Bank a few times.
ERRANT: Yes, I noticed that you often refer to “the apartheid wall.”
MURPHY: Well, I mean that’s what it is. And the awful apartheid roads where Palestinians can’t drive or walk. Although it’s obviously very, very different from South African apartheid.
My first month or so on the West Bank, I sensed that there was something inaccurate, it wasn’t right to talk about apartheid in Palestine, because the original version of it imposed on South Africa was all so clear and fresh in my mind, but the longer I was there, the more I realized that yes, this is apartheid. Another, different version. But not improved.
What I’m really working towards now is helping the campaign for the one-state solution. There’s absolutely no possibility now of the Palestinians having their own state, and increasingly they’re realizing that themselves. Like the boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS Movement] campaign [which was inspired by anti-Apartheid campaigns], which I support. The whole thing, by the way, was completely started by Palestinians. It’s not any outsider’s idea. It’s the Palestinians’ idea, which is how any solution has to be begun.
What they’re asking for is simple: one person/one vote, and equality before the law. There’s nothing complicated about the demand. But, you know, I won’t live to see it. Maybe my daughter won’t. I would hope my granddaughters will live to see that solution.
ERRANT: If it’s so simple, why do you think that implementing this solution has taken—and will likely take—so long?
MURPHY: Can you imagine? Something very dramatic has to happen to change the Zionist viewpoint and their determination to have an exclusively Jewish state. And of course, when and if the one state solution comes about, everybody loses. The Zionists lose their entirely Jewish state. And the Palestinians lose their own independent state. That might help to balance things out. I mean, there won’t be a victory for anybody.
“Among the survivors of the German camps were people who would not have been alive were they not what they were—hard, mean and selfish—and what they have been through erased every remaining good quality from them.” — David Ben-Gurion, Isreal’s first Prime Minister, addressing an assembly of Labour Zionists in 1949
ERRANT: Your book goes a long way to point out how Zionists have misled people about the history of the land and their movement to take possession of it. The most shocking thing to me was their callousness toward Holocaust survivors. It’s unbelievable.
MURPHY: Absolutely. And at the same time, the Zionist regime uses the Holocaust globally so effectively. So many people believe that Israel was created as a state because of the Holocaust—you know, the Jews needed somewhere safe to live and all the rest of it. Completely overlooking the fact that half a century before the Holocaust, the take-over of the Palestinians’ land was being planned by the Zionists, beginning in the 1890s, and going on from there. I mean, everybody knows about the Sykes-Picot Agreement and then the Balfour Declaration, but the present Zionist regime in Jerusalem, they are just so skillful at using the Holocaust and the guilt that—quite rightly—effects European and Americans, because of our refusal to help, even though we knew—and when I say we, I mean the leaders of America and Western Europe, who knew quite well what was happening. They didn’t have to wait until the concentration camps were opened up after the war. These retched people were going around begging to be allowed into various countries and being turned away. That led to a huge build-up of guilt on our part, and, as I say, quite rightly too. Which of course makes it much easier for the Zionists to play the Holocaust card the way they do.
ERRANT: It’s fascinating history though. Like, for example, how secular the Zionist movement was originally. And that they were seriously considering Uganda as a place to build the Jewish state. It’s fascinating to think of all the “what ifs”. What would it have been like if they’d ended up in Uganda? It would’ve been incredible.
MURPHY: Well, not from the point of view of Ugandans.
ERRANT: True. But I don’t know if it would’ve been any worse than Idi Amin.
MURPHY: Yes, quite. Yes.
“When the irreligious [Theodor] Herzl first visited Jerusalem in 1898, he deplored ‘the craven attitudes of worshippers clinging to stones and the superstitious custom of thrusting written prayers between those stones.’”
– Between River and Sea
ERRANT: One of the things that struck me most about your book is the incredibly personal conversations that you have with people who you just seem to have met. There’s that old saying about polite company, that you’re not supposed to talk about religion, politics or money. You seem to discuss nothing but.
MURPHY: Exactly! And that’s what I’ve always done in every country—the first chance I get, whenever anybody speaks English, you talk about religion, politics or money. Because that’s where their problems usually are.
ERRANT: In both books, your point of view on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict really shows through, whereas many journalists try to appear unbiased—often to the detriment of the story. Was this a conscious decision? Or was this just the only way that you could have written the book?
MURPHY: Well, it was the only way I could have written it. It was really interesting though, within a few days of my getting there, before I’d been to the West Bank, I was talking to an Englishman who had spent at least half of his adult life in Jerusalem, and he said to me—because he had read a few of my books and he knew that reviewers had given me a reputation for being unbiased—he said, “remember: you can’t be both honest and neutral.”
ERRANT: You first travelled to Israel in 2008, so it’s been about seven years now. Is it normal for you to remain this involved? Usually you visit a country or region, write about it, and then head off to the next, no?
MURPHY: Yes. Absolutely. This is an involvement on a different level. And at my age, I consider that this could be a life-long involvement.
ERRANT: Are you planning any other journeys in the future, or perhaps to write more about Israel/Palestine?
MURPHY: Well, there will be more writing about it, but not quite yet. What I would like to do is focus on something we tend to overlook: the fact that the majority of Palestinians actually now live in their diaspora—in these huge refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan and, until recently of course, in Syria. I would very much like to visit those. Because they should never be forgotten. It’s appalling to think that they’re into the fourth generation now, the babies in all of those camps are the fourth generation to be born into these… refugee dumps, you might say. It’s awful.
ERRANT: Often, whenever anyone is critical of Israel, there are accusations of anti-Semitism. Have you received any blow-back as a result of the two books?
MURPHY: Apparently I have, but most of it passes me by because I don’t get involved on the computer with the—what do they call it?—social media. My publisher’s assistant said the Zionists are coming at me from all angles. But I see absolutely no point in bothering myself with what anybody says about me, good or bad, especially on social media.
ERRANT: You haven’t had any bad experiences at readings? No one’s popped up to get angry with you?
MURPHY: Oh yes, there have been problems there with the local Zionists popping up and asserting themselves. In fact, in Cork the police had to intervene and remove a couple of them. And in London too, in Haringey there was a very nasty incident for the chap who was organizing that particular event. There were several speakers, like myself, who had all recently written books about some aspect of the situation. And the chap who organized it was in fact an American Jew who’s worked for years at the British Library. He was attacked so severely that he spent 24 hours in the hospital with a concussion. They really went for him.
ERRANT: Do you think that being a granny in your 80s has protected you from the worst of these sorts of attacks.
MURPHY: Oh, not from that lot. No. They’d skin their own granny.
ERRANT: Did being an older woman help you at all when you were on the ground doing your research, did it make people more receptive to your questions?
MURPHY: Oh, absolutely. And particularly amongst traditional people like the Palestinians. They have great respect for older people. White hair is a great advantage. Whereas in Europe now, and I suppose in America, people have very little time for you once you get to that sort of doddery stage, when you’ve lost half your teeth, white hair, can’t see anything without your specs… they just sort of elbow you aside. It’s the reverse with Palestinians. It’s the same in Africa and India. There’s a real respect for the older generation.
ERRANT: What sort of advice do you give to young travel writers.
MURPHY: The sad thing, and I think of this particularly in relation to my granddaughters, is that it will be very difficult now to travel as I did, because I most enjoyed my journeys on foot, in Ethiopia and the Peruvian Andes, and so on. In those days, when I was travelling, there were no motor roads and everything that goes with motor roads. That’s all changed completely. And the pace of change is quicker all the time.
What I do say to youngsters is for God’s sake don’t travel around in a pack with a Lonely Planet guide, with everybody going to stay at the same guest house and eating at the same restaurants and meeting only each other—the other backpackers. It really shocks me, half the time these kids don’t know which country they’re in. And they’ve actually told me they collect stamps in their passports, you know? That’s their idea of travelling. You need to think not in terms of seeing 15 or 20 countries, but choosing a particular country, and if it’s too big, a particular corner of a country, and really getting to know it and getting to know the people in it.
I also really encourage young people, and not so young people nowadays, to go and have their holidays on the West Bank. They can’t go to Gaza, but they can visit the West Bank. Because it means so much to the Palestinians. And that’s why it was so easy to collect material for those books, they really do value the opportunity to talk with outsiders to explain their viewpoint and what’s happening to them. That’s really one of the few ways, unfortunately, that we can help them. Just by going there and being with them.
ERRANT: Do you think you’ll have trouble getting back into Israel now that the books have come out?
A version of this essay was originally published in Renegade, an alternative travel magazine based in the UK. Launched in January 2014, Renegade published two truly excellent issues, and then went out of production. However, its editors assure us that the magazine is still very much alive, with ambitions to continue. We’re really looking forward to it. For updates on Renegade, follow them on Twitter @renegadetravel.
I don’t just read all the new travel books I can get hold of, I collect whole library editions as well. Aside from their texts, they summon up a once devoted and attentive readership: Those lovely cloth-and-gilt-titled Everyman hardbacks are scented with craftsmanship and muscular Christian decency. The bashed-up magenta paperbacks produced by Penguin just before the war were part of a mission that made democratic socialism possible, while I imagine the blue-cloth hardbacks of Jonathan Cape’s traveller’s library, being read by the more thoughtful members of a colonial clubhouse in the 20s. From my own youth the massed volumes of the rival Picador, Penguin Travel Library and Century lists sit prolific on my shelves.
I acquire them to aid my work (which is to dig out lost classics of travel literature and add them to the Eland list) but there is also something more obsessive going on. The libraries allow me to watch how the ‘immortality’ of authorship ebbs away, how tastes evolve and how that which was so ‘needed and now’ to one generation, becomes so much recyclable garbage to the next. But like inspiring pin-pricks in the night sky, there are still travel books that keep shining, and have kept generation after generation of readers enthralled.
And, like it or lump it, we seem to be passing through a crunch point in travel writing at the moment, the long-term effects of which we do not understand. The revival of travel writing so brilliantly led by Bruce Chatwin in the 1980s, and aided and abetted by Redmond O’Hanlon, Colin Thubron, Bill Bryson, Eric Newby, Norman Lewis and Dervla Murphy, is coming to a close. The role of the professional travel writer will soon be at an end. You only have to look at how some of the most promising contemporary travel writers have adapted, to feel which way the wind blows. William Dalrymple, three books into a career as the darling of his generation, switched very successfully to history, just as the three very talented travel-writing Jasons of my acquaintance (J. Webster on Spain, J. Goodwin on Byzantium, and J. Elliot on Afghanistan/Iran) have all headed for fictional waters, as most recently, has Tim Mackintosh-Smith. There are still some stalwarts – Sarah Wheeler, Ian Thomson, Tim Parks, Philip Marsden, Hugh Thomson, Antony Sattin and Jeremy Seal – at the top of their game, delivering works that combine energy with a lifetime of experience. But in private conversation there is an acknowledgement that the advances from publishers are slipping away. It is a common joke that their agents dont reveal to them their sales figures because it would only discourage them from writing the next book. And as a corollary of this, as a basic rule of thumb, in the last decade the publishing advances have slipped from something near £50,000 for a top writer (an admirable sounding sum until you divide it by three years of travel and work) to a period when ‘fifteen is the new fifty’, which has now seeped down towards six. But travel writers are by nature adaptable, and are used to bolstering income by acting as tour guides, lecturers and jobbing journalists. Certainly the slow collapse in sales has not yet had any effect on the quality or the range of travel writing, though it is intriguing to reflect that the joint winners (Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie) of last year’s annual travel-writing prize, the Stanford-Dolman, are both fulltime academics, supported by a university salary.
Where have the readers gone? The easy answer is that they have gone travelling to see for themselves. There’s also been a gradual increase in translated fiction (a process entirely on the side of the angels) which has diminished the travel writers former role as cultural interpreter. And if they were alive today, it is not difficult to see that such prolific travel-writers of the past as Sacheverell Sitwell would surely be on television, conducting Michael-Pallin-style whirl-wind tours or architectural investigations à la Dan Cruikshank.
And there are other concerns. Over the last fifteen years, almost exactly mirroring the advance in the use of the internet, there has been an incremental collapse in the guide-book market by ten per cent, year on year. In their heyday, the big publishing outfits like Rough Guides, Dorling Kindersley, the AA and Lonely Planet (supplemented by smaller fry like Cadogan, Blue Guides, Hedonist, Footprint and Bradt) launched dozens of new books a year and a fleet of updated texts and foreign translations. Collectively they acted as a forcing house for talent, employing, training and feeding new writers, editors and travellers and producing a rich spin-off of travel magazines, maps, dictionaries, pocket histories, guides to world music, food and travel writing. Now this industry is virtually silent, like some old cotton mill in Bradford.
This experience is also reflected in the coverage of the broadsheet papers — The Sunday Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent — who even ten years ago were commissioning independent writers and photographers on a weekly basis, not to mention the half a dozen intelligent glossy magazines. Now their travel pages are dominated by churnalism (the re-writing of press releases), celebrity interviews, list-making and readers advice and ‘trip-advisor’ experience columns. The lyrical, investigative literary travel piece is not being published. On my last trip with Britain’s great post-war photographer, Don McCullin, we found ourselves stuck in southern Algeria. There I was able to have a long series of interviews with him which revealed just how important these papers had been to the careers of Bruce Chatwin, Eric Newby and Norman Lewis. He had worked with them all and watched their ideas incubate on the road.
So it looks like very slim pickings in the years ahead. But is this necessarily a bad thing? There has always been something determinedly quirky, if not down-right awkward, about a great travel writer. If I was given a vast lottery foundation by the Ministry of Books to fill this gap, could I be sure of nurturing a new generation of talent with the careful distribution of travel bursaries, salaries and decent advances? Go figure, or ask the Churchill Foundation how many of their grant-receivers have come good. I have also recently begun to notice how many of the travel writers were self-taught, if not actual autodidacts. Bruce Chatwin left university before they sacked him, Paddy Leigh Fermor learned most of his history in the bedroom and in the arms of his various lovers, Colin Thubron side-stepped university in order to try to make films. Dervla Murphy’s youth was locked in a caring relationship with her dependent, bedridden mother whilst Norman Lewis avoided college and spent his youth repairing crashed racing cars (picking them up cheap from grieving wealthy parents) and setting up a Leica-camera dealership.
I also like to tease myself about what sort of typescripts I would not like to be sent to read by an aspiring writer. I certainly wouldn’t be interested in reading a story about a couple of middle-aged men having a career break (so there goes Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush), nor about a middle-aged woman’s first bycyling trip abroad (there goes Dervla Murphy’s Full Tilt) and I most certainly wouldn’t look forward to reading about two bored young Swiss youths escaping their bourgeois parents by setting off on a road trip (there goes Nicolas Bouvier’s The Way of the World).
So what’s the trick? There is no formula, though you need a lot of skills. You have to get people talking and remember the flow of words. You have to be able to live for the moment and yet remember the scent and the touch of it on paper. You have to wish to learn through travelling and through the truth of chance encounters rather than through interview appointments, library-life and web searches. You also have to possess that sliver of ice near the heart of any writer, that ruthless search for story coupled with brutal honesty and the ability to ditch the dull from your pages. You have to be good company yet also inspiring on the page. You have to ‘catch the moment on the wing.’
Barnaby Rogerson has written a Biography of the Prophet Muhammad; a History of North Africa; an account of the early Caliphate, The Heirs of the Prophet; and the story of the battle for the Mediterranean from 1415-1580, The Last Crusaders. He has most recently edited a collection of sacred numerological traditions of the world, Rogerson’s Book of Numbers; co-edited a collection of the contemporary travel writing Ox-Tales for the charity Oxfam; edited a collection of the travel literature of Marrakech the Red City; a collection of contemporary travel encounters with Islam, Meetings with Remarkable Muslims; a collection of English Orientalist verse, Desert Air; and a collection of the poetry of place of London. Previous to this, he had written half-a-dozen guidebooks to the historical monuments of the Maghreb and the Mediterranean, including Morocco, Tunisia, Istanbul and Cyprus and created the text for Don McCullins photographic study of Roman North Africa, Southern Frontiers. Barnaby is on the advisory board of Critical Muslim, the editorial board of Middle East in London and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Geographical Society. He has been elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and an honorary member of The Travellers Club. He is also a book reviewer and journalist. Visit him at BarnabyRogerson.com.
His day job is running Eland, a publishing house that specializes in keeping classic travel books in print. To find out more about the over 100 classics in their catalogue, please visit www.travelbooks.co.uk.
Pink light fuzzed through the drawn curtains of the Midnight Sun Hotel, washing across the mountainous bar-humped regulars and giving their silhouettes an ominous red glow.
It was a dust-fogged afternoon in late August. The guy at the next table was a seasonal worker, up from Vancouver, with clomping steel-toes, frayed Carhartts wet-looking with grime and an unbuttoned uniform that read Solomon Development Ltd. — Creating Sustainable Futures. He was sitting amidst a sea of heavy leather recliners that hadn’t been arranged so much as chaotically crammed into any available space. He was eating French fries with dirty fingers.
“You get that on Koh Phangan?” he asked me, nodding at my Chang Beer T-shirt. “Full Moon Party? I was there about six months ago. Between contracts.”
“Phuket, actually. I was there in 2012.”
He yanked out a chair for me, this guy, and we reminisced about our travel experiences over a pair of Yukon Jacks. He asked me whether I got to the killing fields in Cambodia or if I’d river-tubed down the Nam Song in Vang Vien. I mentioned the hill tribes outside Chiang Mai, up in the north, and within moments we discovered we had an acquaintance in common—a slender, sickly looking Thai teenager everybody called The Doctor. Years apart, each of us had been introduced to The Doctor during a multi-day jungle trek in which white tourists were marched from one tribe to the next, stopping to admire waterfalls, take pictures and purchase illicit drugs. The Doctor was the resident opium expert at one of the most remote cliffside villages, and for an entirely reasonable price he would accompany you to a small hut to smoke opium out of a lightbulb-shaped glass pipe.
Both of us had taken him up on the offer.
“I can’t believe it,” the guy said. “I mean, what are the chances, right? We smoked opium with the same dude.”
I forget his name—my memories from that time are often fragmented—but we spent a good six or seven hours talking that day. He was due back at the gold mine north of town the following morning. I would later learn he was driving a diesel truck with a makeshift living space in the back, stuffed with quintessential Klondike detritus: sleeping bags, empties, soiled mining clothes and a variety of mud-speckled work tools with functions I couldn’t guess at. He had the casual machismo of a man raised by men, a skill set that could only have been picked up from attentive fathers, uncles, brothers. I envied him the irritated-looking purple scabs on his knuckles, the casual heft of his engorged biceps, the weather-cracked complexion of his sunburnt forehead. It wasn’t that I was jealous of his lifestyle, or that I felt capable of living that sort of life—I just knew he would experience things I wouldn’t, he would visit places I couldn’t, and without too much effort he would construct the sort of life people call successful. Stability was an option for him.
He drove me out to a gold dredge, just a few clicks out of town, that was rotting Ozymandias-style on a stake mined decades earlier. I had trouble believing it was real at first, six storeys high but beginning to sag and collapse after decades of neglect. It had a rusted metal snout that protruded a couple hundred feet in the air, crane-like and avian. Rusted cables hung from its underbelly, and in its wake a series of stones were piled in systematic ridges. According to the guy’s headlight-illuminated monologue the operators had sifted through the churned up earth for anything of value and then excreted the sluiced mess out the back. I imagined the machine cleaving through the earth like a giant, nightmarish slug. He sat on his tailgate and blew cigarette smoke in its direction.
“You ever spent any time out there?” he asked me. “Like really out there?”
“This is about as remote as it gets for me.”
“You’re not careful, it’ll drive you bonkers. The solitude, man. I’ve never read so many books in my fucking life. Sitting in my tent with a headlamp just to keep my brain distracted. They do piss tests, but still half the guys up there are junkies.”
There was something dark in his voice. I didn’t know what to say. He explained that, at one point, it had been his job when they were preparing to vacate a work site to burn all the remaining garbage and ensure they were—he hate-rolled his eyes and air-quoted with his fingers—“leaving no trace”. It was a bitch job, but he was new on the crew so the task fell to him and the other fresh recruit. “We’ve got these two jerry cans of gasoline, right? And this is back in fucking March, so it’s snow everywhere and we’ve got everything piled up to burn—tree branches, bags of garbage, a ruined tent, whatever. And here I am standing in the middle of this mess, just shaking out the last few drops of gasoline on this pile of wood, when I look over and the guy’s already got his Zippo out and he’s waving it around like a fucking idiot, lighting this big dry branch he ripped off a nearby tree. I start screaming, you know? Like ‘put that shit down, you’re going to kill us’ but this fucker’s just waving around this burning branch and all of a sudden this whole place, I’m talking all around me, everything was on fire. Everything.”
“Holy shit.”
“Got flames coming up my legs, no shit. I’m sprinting for the woods, right, with my fucking eyebrows gone and this fucker is laughing.”
“No.”
“Laughing the whole time.” He sucked on his cheeks. “Nobody wants a guy like that on their crew, you know? Messes with the balance.”
He stumbled over to piss on some fireweed, then retrieved two more beers from the back of his truck. I felt bad accepting charity drinks but I’d seen his wallet, thick-stuffed with fifties, and hated myself for the instinctual money-lust it triggered.
“Two weeks later, dude took a drill bill to the face,” the guy said, finger-stabbing his own cheekbone. “They had to fly him down for reconstructive surgery.”
Later he dropped me in front of the Midnight Sun staff residences. His engine shuddered and grumbled as I clambered into the street, shoulder-lugging my bag. When I turned back he was staring drunkenly at his steering wheel with naked dread. The dash light gave his face an amber glow. I felt like if there was a moment to say something profound, this was it. Instead I jutted out my chin, thanked him for the beers and watched as his truck crashed through the potholes in the direction of the river. As he turned the corner he dropped his arm out the window and gave me a quick wave. Then he was gone.
I walked up to the front door.
“Is Laura here?” I asked the guy who answered the door. “Or Paisley?” He stood shirtless, eyes pink, with short blond dreads firing out of his skull like accusatory fingers.
“It’s like 2 a.m. man, you can’t just come around whenever you feel like it. People are sleeping, you know? I’ve gotta work.”
“If I could just talk to them for one second.”
“We’ve got a curfew, you know? Hours ago, man. Like hours.”
“Please, one second?”
“This is reserved for staff. You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I’ll sleep on the floor. What do you want me to do?”
He didn’t slam the door in my face; instead he swung it shut, carefully, then turned the deadbolt with an authoritative click. The orange pane above the door went black, and I was alone again. For a moment I imagined torching the whole place—dreadlock-douche shriek-screaming in the conflagration. Instead, I headed down to the river to find a picnic table. It wouldn’t be the first time I slept on one.
The sky was purple-streaked and fading, the horizon line blurred with an ember-like glow. The darkest part of the night was already over, and pretty soon the sun would resurrect itself over the scarred face of the domed mountain that overlooked town. I walked along First Avenue, passing the line of dainty tourist restaurants, and sat down at the ferry terminal to smoke a half-joint I had stashed in my coat. My mind flirted with oblivion, reality blurring. A few hundred meters away was a slanted, yellow-painted former bank that had been boarded up and abandoned long ago. I watched as three hippy-kids, stupid-stumbling, hoisted each other through a second-floor window. They laughed, their efforts fumbling, with tragic joy. I could almost visualize their multi-week hitchhiking trip north, the panicked discussions on the side of a rainy highway, the selfies taken en route. Their pristine bedrooms, left behind.
Three people, these kids liberated from high school and suburban mediocrity, had set out together to capture some of that primal wildness, that Kerouacian madness. These kids, these little explorers, they had no real identity yet. Their only commonality was a sort of faux-rebellion, an aligning of their short-lived defiant phases, a happy coincidence that allowed them to be present for each other’s nomadic inner awakening.
But do you think they’ll even know each other in ten years?
Before long there was a small parade of drunk kids at the ferry terminal, milling bee-like around a line of vehicles and attempting to keep the night’s revelry alive with an impromptu pavement party. One girl in jean shorts came crawling out of a Jeep, barefoot, and asked for a swig of the beer in my hand. I looked down and discovered it there, amazed. She downed the rest and asked me whether I wanted to dance. Gypsy folk jangled from a nearby car radio.
“I saw this giant gold-digging machine,” I told her.
“Is that a joke?”
Her chin rested on my collarbone. I palmed the base of her back, her shirt damp.
“My friends work at the Midnight Sun,” I said.
“You don’t need to think about them anymore.”
She touched my hair with the tips of her fingers, blinking prettily. She was short, years too young for me, and clearly wasted.
We kissed.
“Are you at the hostel?” I asked. “You got a place you’re staying?”
She had huge, beautiful eyelashes.
“My boyfriend and his buddies are all back there already.”
“Boyfriend?”
She shrugged.
“We could find something, somewhere, maybe?”
“What, like get a room? That what you wanna do?”
She kissed me again.
Maybe the other people were paying more attention to us than I realized, their own antics winding down, but we felt gloriously alone. I lifted this small girl by the waist and she straddle-grabbed me with her legs, laughing. We spun around for no reason at all.
“I’ve gotta do something about this,” I told her, panting from exertion. “This has to mean something.”
She laughed. “We’re heading up the Dempster tomorrow. We’ve got another space in the car if you want to tag along.”
“With your boyfriend, you mean?”
“It doesn’t matter. There’s a whole crowd of us, you know?”
“I want to get you alone.”
She slid her fingertips past my boxer elastic. “Yeah?”
“Fuck your friends, I’m going to kidnap you.”
She laughed again.
“You’re a nice man,” she said. “I think I like you.”
I kissed her earlobe, held her open throat in my palm. My thumb traced her jaw as our mouths opened. Tongues surged. I tasted her breath, carried all the way from wherever she called home, and drank heaving lungfuls of it. Mere breath, it died with each exhale. But together we gobbled those dying moments as everyone waited for the ferry to make its slow, diagonal approach.
Will Johnson is a writer, teacher, photographer and journalist from Nelson, BC. His fiction has appeared in the The Fiddlehead, Little Fiction, Prairie Fire, This Side of West, Burner Mag, OCW Magazine and Island Writer. His work can also be found in the anthology Somebody’s Child from Brindle & Glass, Coming Attractions 14 from Oberon Press, and, shortly, in a print anthology released by Little Fiction. He has his BFA in Creative Writing from UVic and his MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. For the last five years, he’s been mentoring writers of all ages through his Literary Goon mentorship service, as well as teaching workshops for high school students and writers with disabilities. He is currently completing an Ecclesiastes-themed book of short fiction called This is how you talk to strangers and a novel called Whatever you’re on, I want some.
Ian Stewart is a freelance photographer based in Canada.
As a gift to himself on his 60th birthday, Brian Brett bought a ticket to Cambodia. Amid bouts of dysentery, and a possible case of gangrene, he managed to visit some over-touristed temples and write a few poems. This was one of them. Lady-Boy is part of Brett’s forthcoming collection of poetry, To Your Scattered Bodies Go. It is also a track on the new album Talking Songs, from his band Scattered Bodies. To have a listen, click here.
LADY-BOY AT THE SIEM REAP BRIDGE
Beauty smiled at me
on the Siem Reap bridge –
guarded by the seven-headed Naga.
All her charms on display;
the platinum-blonde shimmering hair;
her high, full Khmer breasts.
The classic willow-woman waist.
Forty years ago I would have
said yes … yes … yes …
just for the experience
and the joy of discovery.
But I am sadder now
and I could only smile
and pass her some money,
before I walked away from beauty.
Brian Brett is a poet, memoir writer, fictionist, journalist and the former chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada. He is the author of twelve books including Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life (Greystone), which won numerous prizes, including the Writers’ Trust award for non-fiction. His new poems To Your Scattered Bodies Go won the CBC poetry prize in 2011. A collection of poems and prose poems about the endangered Peel Watershed, The Wind River Variations (Oolichan) has just been released. And he is currently completing the third of a trilogy of memoirs. For more about Brett, visit his website.
Brett is joined in Scattered Bodies by singer/composer Susheela Dawne and art-punk producer Andy Meyers. Talking Songs is available from Dream Tower Records.
Though born in Norway, Erling Friis-Baastad was raised in the U.S. and has spent most of his adult life in the Yukon Territory, Canada. His poems have appeared in a number of chapbooks and collections, as well as many literary journals and anthologies. His most recent collection is Wood Spoken: New and Selected Poems (Harbour, 2005). The Andalusia poems were written while in residence at Fundación Valparaíso in Mojácar, Spain. The suite will be part of a new collection of poetry entitled Fossil Light.
The steady clicking of the overhead fan brought to mind an old film projector. But instead of a seedy movie house, the five of us were jammed into a small, poorly-ventilated office. Instead of a big screen, we were huddled around a tiny monitor. Instead of some classic film, I was watching myself, lurching down a hallway, movements jerky and off-kilter in the low-quality security footage. I disappear from the screen, and into my hotel room.
“That’s when I realized I’d been robbed,” I say, to no one in particular.
On screen, I burst out of the room and begin knocking on doors, gathering my friends to tell them what had happened. The security technician fiddles with the remote control and the screen switches to a grid of nine boxes. I watch my group parade from one box to the next, all the way down to the reception desk to report the crime.
The hotel manager took out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his neck and sat down with a look of disinterest. It was the afternoon following the robbery. The head of security watched the manager nervously. Another man, the night manager, looked almost as exhausted as I was and equally uncomfortable. I locked eyes with the security technician. He nodded, pressed a button, and the images began to run in reverse.
The road in front of the Urafiki Police Station is under permanent construction, making it necessary to negotiate heavily congested traffic and a narrow back road to reach the offices. The station occupies the ground floor of a three-story apartment building, and the residents above have strung out their laundry to dry in the dust-filled wind. It’s an open concept police station, spilling out into the yard. Suspects with their hands tied sit on benches out front. The lucky ones sit in the shade of a nearby tree. The one small jail at the station looks like something out of the Count of Monte Cristo, with half-naked prisoners sticking their arms out through the rusted bars. One of these prisoners greeted me with a “mambo mzungu” as I hopped out of the auto-rickshaw. “What’s up white man?”
I went to Urafiki first thing in the morning after the robbery. I’d asked to review the security footage first, but was told we had to wait for the technician to arrive, which wouldn’t be until later on that afternoon. I decided to head to the Police station to give my statement first. But I wasn’t the only mzungu there. A frail-looking blond woman was standing at the entrance to one of the interrogation rooms. She gave me a look hungry for support and solidarity.
“What happened to you?” she asked in accented English. Danish, maybe.
“I had my hotel room broken into. You?”
She and her friend were planning to go to Arusha that day, she told me, making their way north toward Ethiopia. They left their hotel at six in the morning, found a taxi and asked the driver to take them to the bus station. Instead, he stopped to pick up a couple friends who proceeded to rob them of everything they had. They even forced the women to give their PIN codes and took extra money out of an ATM.
“I think we lost around 3,000 euros each,” she said. “But that’s fine. I’m just glad that nothing worse happened, you know? I mean, they were three big guys and we… I’m just glad to be safe.”
It can always be worse.
Crime rates are skyrocketing in Tanzania, and it’s not just the foreigners who are baring the brunt of it. According to a recent survey conducted by Afrobarometer, Tanzania has overtaken South Africa for percentage of citizens who have experienced theft and violent crime (33 nations took part in the survey with certain countries like the Congo, Somalia and Libya notably absent). The study found that only 44 per cent of victims of crime reported them to the police. This could be a result of the fact that there are very few police stations in the country. But the low reporting is more likely caused by police apathy and corruption. Reportedly, some officers refuse to listen to those who want to report a crime. Other officers demand bribes in exchange for help.
The detective in charge of my case, Paul, was of the apathetic variety. He led me into one of the rooms. Two women in headscarves sat chatting in one corner. In the other, there was a young boy who looked as if he’d recently been in a fight or beaten. The boy was sitting on the ground, his arm handcuffed to a chair. Paul sighed as he sat down at the long table that took up most of the room and motioned for me to sit down as well. He began slowly riffling through a folder of what appeared to be scrap paper. He eventually found the form he was looking for and set it on the table between us, diligently smoothing out every wrinkle. No hurry. No rush. We seemed about to start. But then someone outside the barred window had to be told something—an order or a joke, it was hard to tell. An old CB radio chattered away on the ledge in front of a barred window, the officers on the other end obviously saying something funny, based on the periodic laughter of those in the room, the handcuffed boy included.
Finally, we got started. I began by answering the ubiquitous list of questions that Tanzanians use to differentiate themselves. Family and given name, date and place of birth, current address, tribe, religion, nationality. Paul hovered over the space next to “tribe” for a while, before asking me what part of Canada I was from. I was marked down as being from the tribe of Ontario. More difficult was the section on religion. I don’t have one.
“No religion?” he said, looking confused. I repeated my answer. “Not Christian? Not Muslim? Nothing?” Nothing, I said. He sat back in his chair, shaking his head. He began fiddling with his pencil, like a student unsure of the answer on an important test. He had to put something in the empty space. I wasn’t being very helpful.
It was the truth. I’m an atheist. But I was raised Christian and that would’ve been an easy enough answer to give. I’m not sure why I was so stubborn. It may have been a reaction to the theft. A response to the violation that comes with having someone enter your personal space and take things that belong to you. In a sense, the thief took part of me, part of my personality, my outlook on the world. I’m generally a pretty optimistic, trusting, upbeat person. I’d woken that morning feeling paranoid, resentful and a little depressed. As outwardly positive as I tried to remain about the situation, I was feeling terrible and oddly hollow. I found myself clinging defiantly to what I had left of my old identity. I clung to my atheism.
(A week later, when I was on the other end of things, filling out one of these statements as a suspect being charged, rather than a victim, I compliantly answered Christian. But that’s another story.)
Paul yelled at another officer passing by the window and the two conferred for a while in Swahili. Finally, with great reluctance, he drew a line through the space next to religion, and we moved on to the statement:
I was in my hotel room until around 8 o’clock that evening. (I wrote something along these lines on a scrap piece of paper, which Paul then diligently copied into the proper form). That was the last time I’d used my computer. I then left it on the desk next to my bed to charge and went downstairs to have dinner. Afterwards, I returned to my room to grab some chairs and glasses, and my friends and I hung out on the balcony outside of my room for a few hours, playing card games and drinking Konyagi, a cheap Tanzanian gin. Around 11 or 12, we left to go to a local club. Both times, before leaving for dinner and before leaving for the club, I left my room key with the receptionist. We’d been instructed to do this all week, and it had become habit. I was back in my room by 3 am. That was when I discovered my computer was gone. Other things were missing as well. I gathered my friends, and reported the theft to the front desk. There was no sign of forced entry. The door was closed and locked when I left and when I returned. The windows were also closed.
Detective Paul then asked me to list everything that had been stolen, with the monetary value, in US dollars, listed alongside. He endeared himself to me somewhat by gasping each time I added a new item, and sighing as I estimated its value. Shaking his head and muttering, “Pole sana. Pole sana.” I’m so sorry for you.
Apple MacBook Pro, 15 inch — $2,000 USD
LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt Hard Drive — $250 USD
Apple iPhone 4S 60 Gig — $600 USD
200,000 Tanzanian Shillings Cash — $125 USD
$300 USD Cash
Electric Razor — $150 USD
Herschel Backpack — $80 USD
The amount of crime in Tanzania, and lack of trust in police and the justice system, leads to the brutal and often deadly phenomenon of mob justice. According to the Legal and Human Rights Centre, the country’s foremost defender of human rights, 597 people were killed by mobs since the beginning of the year. That’s about 100 people a month. At least half of these murders were connected to superstition, with people killing those suspected of being witches, some being buried alive. The majority of the remaining 300 murders were in in response to more tangible crimes. Suspected murderers are stoned to death by whole villages, suspected rapists are beaten. But some are killed for misdemeanors. One of the first news stories I remember reading upon arriving in Tanzania was of a pair of young men who were detained by police, accused of stealing in a market. A crowd formed and the police were quickly put in the awkward position of having to protect the suspected thieves from the citizens, rather than the other way around. In the end, the police were overpowered (although I doubt they put up much of a fight) and the two young men were lynched.
In a country where “justice” is meted out with such violent finality, one has to think twice before accusing anyone of a crime. This was what was going through my mind as I finished giving my statement to Detective Paul. Outside the door, I recognized two of the hotel maids, as well as the night receptionist—the one who I’d given my key to that night. Something told me that it had to have been an inside job. But I didn’t want to accuse any of those women. I wasn’t concerned about a vindictive mob, fatally avenging me and my lost possessions. But I was concerned about them losing their jobs and what that might mean for them. From what I had seen, all three women worked very hard in exchange for very little pay. How many mouths were they feeding with that paycheck? How much, if any, had they managed to save? How easy would it be to find another job? How long would they be able to last without one? Accusing any one of them of being involved with the theft wasn’t exactly a death sentence, but it had the potential to destroy their lives. I’d lost a little money and some old electronics that could be easily replaced. They would lose their livelihood. If the miserable look on the night receptionist’s face was any indication, she was losing her job regardless of whether I accused her or not. I felt conflicted. I’d been robbed and yet I also felt guilty. Look at all the misery I’ve caused.
I appeared again on the screen, moving in reverse, moonwalking down the hallway and back into my room. We’d rewound through the entire time that I’d been out at the club and found nothing. A few hotel guests had passed through the hallway on the way to their own rooms, but that was all. So how had the robbery taken place? Had they come through the window? Scaled the wall up to the second floor, and back down, without anyone noticing in the busy restaurant below? The hotel manager seemed notably less inquisitive. He shrugged his shoulders, apologized, and stood up to leave.
“Keep going,” I told the security technician. The last time I used my computer was before going out for dinner, at 8 o’clock. I hadn’t used it at all when I returned. The manager sat back down, while the tape began to rewind again.
I leaned in, hopeful, expectant—only vaguely aware of how much I was enjoying the process of playing detective. The excitement of living out a movie scene almost enough to make me forget how much I’d lost. Around 8:30, the night receptionist walked to the end of the hall, and then quickly left again. The security footage only caught the edge of my door, so it was impossible to tell whether she was visiting my room or the patio at the end of the hall. “Interesting,” I murmured. The security technician scribbled in his notepad. The manager yawned and sopped up more sweat with his handkerchief. We rewound a little more. At 8:17, we spotted the culprit.
At 8:13, a well-dressed young man entered the hallway, talking on a cell phone (presumably to a partner outside, watching me eat). He disappeared from the screen. Less than 4 minutes later, he appeared again, this time with my backpack slung cavalierly over one shoulder. “We’ve got him!” I yelled, slapping the technician on the back and looking back joyfully at everyone in the room. The others weren’t quite as excited, but deigned to get up from their chairs to inspect the footage. We went back to the beginning and watched it all again. He was too quick. Had to have a key. Had to have known what he was looking for. The technician paused the footage at the point when the suspect was closest to the camera. The lighting was bad. The footage grainy. The man was looking downwards as he spoke into his phone. “Who is it?” I asked the manager. He shrugged his shoulders, giving me a look that said it could be anyone.
“So what now?” I asked.
The technician said that he would show the footage to the police. “But…” he said, motioning toward the abstract image on the screen. Another shoulder shrug. He wasn’t optimistic.
The insidious hope that I’d allowed to build in me crumbled all at once, leaving me feeling worse than before. Nothing to do but leave, make my way back to the couch where I was crashing until an apartment became available. I left the office to a chorus of “pole sana”s and made my way out to the busy street. Night was falling the way it does in Dar es Salaam, all at once, plunging the world into a sticky darkness. The auto-rickshaw driver I’d ridden with earlier that day recognized me and waved me over. He was friendly and talkative, joking around in his idiosyncratic English. We negotiated the price and I hopped in.
“Jina lako nani?” I said, using the little Swahili that I knew. “What’s your name?”
“Goodluck,” he replied. A common name, but one that struck me as potentially meaningful as we raced our way dangerously through traffic. Was it serendipity or irony?
It was, of course, the latter.
Nothing came of the police investigation, if there ever was one. And the hotel didn’t so much refuse to compensate me as wear me out with various distractions, excuses and promises of tomorrow. The theft wasn’t even the worst thing to happen to me during that first eventful month in Tanzania. But Goodluck and I made it home that night, after all the usual close calls that come with negotiating the hectic streets of Dar. So I suppose my luck hadn’t completely left me.
Things can always be worse.
Chris Oke is a poet and journalist. One of the founders of Errant, he lives and works in Dar es Salaam Tanzania.
Nick Ashdown is an international journalist and photographer, currently based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. For more of his photography click here. To read his writing click here.
It was why I was reluctant when Hilde asked, in her heavily accented English, “We smoke marijuana tonight, yes?”
“Uh, not sure.”
“Oh yes. It is our last night. The time is good. And this place? Is good also, yes?
I looked where she did. A camp on a riverbank. A thatch-roofed platform facing the water. Huge trees bound with fig vines pressed in on us; frog calls rose above the sounds of the camp boys hammering together the rafts that, next day, we would pole out of the jungle to our rendezvous with the truck that would return us to Chiang Mai. After four days trekking through the Golden Triangle, where Thailand butts up to Burma and Laos, the first beer would taste sweet. There were twelve days left till the end of the 80’s; I had been in Thailand a week and had three months in South East Asia still to go.
I reconsidered her request. Time and place were indeed good. My companion, perfectly nice. No desire there. The very tall, very blonde Hilde from Hamburg simply not my type. Nor I hers, no doubt. She was fleeing the sudden dumping by her fiancé of seven years. My marriage had lasted exactly half that time and had ended, to mutual relief, on Christmas Day fifty one weeks before.
Hilde and I had formed an Anglo-German alliance against the Swiss. The two other members of our group, Hans and Dieter, trekked in matching pink and black jumpsuits and paused only for photo opportunities. While Hilde and I gasped at vistas, explored villages and swam in mountain pools, they clicked and marched. The night before they’d each placed their head on the pillow and the opium pipe to their lips, to have their picture snapped. Back in Zurich, they’d be able to plead what would later be known as ‘the Clinton defence’. They hadn’t inhaled.
I had. A lot. It had not gone well. Hence my reluctance. But Hilde’s pleading persuaded me. We were allies, after all.
“I’ll ask Buddy,” I said.
Buddy. Not his real name. But his real name wasn’t his real name either. Our guide was Shan, a hill tribe continually at war with the Burmese government. He’d been a fighter, though mainly a mule, humping sacks of opium around some of the same forests he now guided tourists through. At night, stoned before a fire, he’d break into fist-pumping chants of ‘Shan People’s Army’. His favourite song was, ‘Buffalo Soldier’. I liked him. All he wanted was for his clients to have a good time.
“Grass. For my friends, OK!” He put a hand on my shoulder. “But you OK?”
“Fine,” I lied.
Here’s what had happened with the opium. I blame it on De Quincey’s ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater’. I blame it on Coleridge. I’d sought transcendence, Xanadu, my very own sunless sea. Before the trek, I’d figured I’d only do it once so I might as well do it right. But two pipes the first night of the trek had just made me sleepy and irritable.
So the previous night I’d done twelve.
I’d transcended alright. Buddy had only seen the outward manifestation in which I’d leaped from my mattress, ran to the entrance of the platform hut, jiggered there for nearly a minute like some crazed disco dancer before projectilevomiting into the compound below. Dogs came and ate my vomit. They were real – unlike the donkey who rushed at me with big yellow teeth as soon as I lay down again. He’d been a hallucination, my solitary one. Buddy had given me cold tea to drink, and had sat by me for an hour while I shook.
“Really, I’m fine,” I said now to the doubt in his eyes.
He squeezed, let me go. “Mai Pen Rai,” he said.
He’d explained the phrase that first night. It translated loosely into something akin to Kurt Vonnegut’s, ‘So it goes’. An acceptance of life however it unfolds. It was exactly the kind of thing I’d come to Thailand to absorb, and I tried to say it with just Buddy’s casual shrug.
“Mai Pen Rai,” I agreed.
After dinner, the sudden night fallen, the Swiss already tucked up in their sleeping bags, Buddy came to where Hilde and I sat on the edge of the platform before a campfire, cocooned in its flickering light. Beyond it, we could hear the river’s rush and hundreds of frogs seeking mates.
Buddy lit the bong, a simple cylinder of bamboo. He took a huge hit, passed it to me. I took a smaller one, over his protests. Hilde matched me. Another head-engulfing hit from our host, an even smaller one for me. Yet as I gave it to Hilde for her second toke, I felt my neck muscles, tight since the phantom donkey, ease. Interesting, I thought.
“More!” Buddy encouraged.
“I’m good,” I said.
“Me also,” said Hilde.
And we were. Better than. Actually, for ten minutes we were bloody marvelous. Frogs still called from the riverbank but now in Monty Python voices: “Ooh, that Chris, isn’t he a clever lad?” Don’t know what they said in German but they made Hilde roar. Bamboo exploded in the fire when each sealed chamber of a log was breached. We shrieked at the whooshing sparks. We giggled continuously. This, I remember thinking, is going to be great.
And then she said, “This is very strong, yes?”
“Very. Very Very Very.”
“I think… I think maybe it is … too strong.”
There’s that moment when you look at someone who’s about to fall off a cliff and you think, if only I can reach out and catch them. So I said, as I reached for her, “You’re fine. Everything’s fine. Don’t fall.”
But she wasn’t, and it wasn’t, and she did.
It was Timothy Leary who defined ‘The Rule’ of Set and Setting. He was speaking about LSD but it applies to any strong drug: (Mind) Set – be in a good head space, no major life hassles hanging over you. Setting – be somewhere familiar, calm, with people you know well and trust.
We’d both been in Thailand less than a week, fleeing the car crash of long term relationships. We were strangers in the middle of the Golden Triangle, six hours hike from anything close to civilization, with a Buffalo Soldier and two Switzers in pink and black jumpsuits.
Reader, we were fucked.
There was a choice to be made – either both dissolve completely and throw ourselves on the mercy of Shan and Swiss. Or one of us had to take over.
Hilde was ten years younger, had rarely strayed from home, and her fiancé had just dumped her. I, like a racehorse in England, had ‘form’. I’d done this before, seen people through. Taking a deep breath, I leapt into Rescue Mode.
I’d been a professional actor for twelve years. Grass tended to exaggerate my performer. So I led her away from the fire and the frogs and began to juggle – literally, three mangosteens. I told jokes. I put on funny voices. Not every choice was a good one but for a while I thought I was getting through.
Until she spoke to me in German.
Eons before, I had briefly studied it at school. I thought that I didn’t remember much. Yet inebriation, I’ve discovered, improves language skills. I was certainly able to understand Hilde when she told me that a) she was going mad, b) Buddy had laced the grass with opium, and, c) the Buffalo Soldier had done that for his own dark reason.
I couldn’t understand exactly what that was – were we to be sold into white slavery? – because I was as stoned as I’d ever been in my life, with a certainty that I was somewhere near the base of that particular mountain and there was still a long, long way to its summit. All I did know was that she was in even worse trouble than me. She kept replaying her fiancé’s dumping speech. She wanted to go – now, right now – to an airport and fly home, beg him to take her back. I tried to dissuade her, tried to get her to focus on the beauty of the stars, kept up my act – only to watch a new idea come onto a face that, if I looked at it too long, morphed into various former girlfriend’s, up to and including my ex-wife’s. And what became clear was that it wasn’t Buddy who was the villain now. It was the Englishman.
Actually I believe the exact phrase was: ‘Der Scheisse Englander.’
I put down the mangosteens. It was time for help. It was time for a little sanity. It was time for the men from the land of cuckoo clocks, Nazi gold and chocolate.
Hans and Dieter emerged from their sleeping bags. They’d both done military training that included first aid. They talked to her calmly in her own tongue, made her sip water. I crept away to sit before the fire.
And that’s when my hallucinations began.
I remember being a little miffed. I didn’t have a problem with hallucinations. Bring ‘em on, was my usual cry. But three hours in? While Monty Python frogs gossiped about my every failing and a girl wailed in perfectly comprehensible German about the shitty Englishman who had drugged her in order to seduce her?
De Quincey wrote, of the hallucinatory state, ‘If your life is cattle, you will dream of cattle.’ What was my life, then? I’d just completely failed my first major adult test. I’d screwed up a marriage. I had, no matter how I tried to divvy up the blame. And why had I come to Thailand? Not really to take drugs, the accustomed and easy shortcut to transcendence. I wanted a philosophy. I wanted a new way of being. Damn it, I wanted to become a Buddhist!
But that wasn’t the faith I’d been raised in. And was it Leary who also said, ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’?
There I was. 33, divorced, lost every which way, three thousand miles from home while the giant tree before me, covered in creepers and fig vines, transformed into a vast Michelangelo sculpture of Jesus being handed down from the cross. I would have liked to admire it, the way I’d admired his Pieta in St Peter’s, his David in Florence. But I couldn’t, because it was moving. I couldn’t, because Jesus was being uncrucified, and was about to be laid out on the ground between me and the fire. I knew he would rise then, speak to me, place his hand on my shoulder, like Buddy had. Earlier in the day, we’d stopped to help a village boy with a broken arm. I felt pain now in my own arm. Was I meant to heal? Was that what I’d come to Thailand to learn? Lord?
I jumped up. Even defamatory Germans were better than a Damascene encounter with the Saviour. I needed Hilde now and, fortunately for me, she’d had another change of mind. The Swiss were too straight to understand what she was going through. She needed me too.
It was time for the return of Der Scheisse Englander.
For a while, I lay beside her, outside her sleeping bag, talking her down. I had to not look at her because, she said, my face turned into Jack Nicholson’s ‘The Joker’ from ‘Batman’, and this was not helping. Meantime, Buddy – who said that nothing like this had happened to him in seven years of guiding – was very upset, as I was for him. He brought a sweet solution, a cup of sugar mixed into a very little water. Like a poison taster at a medieval court I had to taste it for Hilde before she would drink it. Bizarrely, it worked and she sank, muttering, into a deep sleep.
I returned to the fire. Four hours had passed since I’d first sat there. The Frogs were again largely speaking frog and if there was still a hint of Michelangelo about the tree, at least Jesus was no longer going to descend from it and join me.
Buddy did. We sat in silence for a while, staring into the flames.
“Mai Pen Rai,” he said, at last.
“Maybe not,” I replied.
C. C. Humphreys is an actor, playwright and the author of twelve books of both historical and young adult fiction. Since 1989 he has largely sought transcendence through Bowmore Mariner. This is his second piece for Errant.
In the fading light, the entrance of a goldmine gapes like an empty eye socket. A motorcycle is parked inside. Black wires leading into the mine power a couple of naked bulbs, illuminating the passageway gouged out of the rock. A large orange hose leads out of the mine, meandering 30 feet down the bank to belch its contents into the Huaranilla River. Nearby, several generators stand beneath a protective lean-to. A few foam mattresses are strewn about on the ground. Just beyond this are an open pit latrine and a refuse dump filled with whiskey bottles. Compared to other makeshift mines I’ve seen in the Yungas region of the Bolivian Andes, this one seems relatively well-funded and tidy.
I assume I’m trespassing, but curiosity has gotten the better of me. I’d spotted the mine—which hadn’t been here a few years ago—from across the river on the incoming drive, and I’m hoping to talk to the miners to learn more about the small operation, given it exists within the boundaries of Cotapata National Park. But the place appears abandoned. A hut constructed of chain-sawed boards seems unoccupied, but as I approach I hear the faint sound of snoring. It’s Sunday. Very likely it’s the caretaker who has already had his daily quota of whiskey and crashed for the night. The other miners are probably out spending time with family or getting sloshed in a bar across the river.
As night is falling and I have no flashlight, I begin the hike back up to the jungle hotel. A local madwoman once haunted these environs; if you ran into her she would mutter insults through gummy chops and sometimes throw dirt clods as you hurried by.
I pick up the pace. A shadow peels from the thick vegetation in front of me. It’s an agouti, a larger relative to the guinea pig. It stops to nibble at something, but as I approach it scurries back into the undergrowth. I find a half-eaten avocado on the ground, probably discarded by one of the miners.
A little farther along a small waterfall spills down a moss-slick cliff. It’s a humid July evening, so I pull off my camera and daypack and soak my head and shirt in the water. As I step back, I see the silhouettes of three men blocking the way. The cliff to my right denies any escape, so I grab my belongings, straighten my shoulders and march towards them, hoping that a confident guise will somehow protect me. My second thought is to pick up a rock. The silhouettes turn toward me.
“Jonatán, is that you?” says a familiar voice in Spanish.
“Fernando?” I say.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s the owner of the jungle lodge where I’m staying, Fernando Querejazu, accompanied by two hotel employees. Although over fifty, Fernando’s well-muscled body makes him look ten years younger—he reminds me of the formidable Colonel Quaritch from the movie Avatar—only shorter and with a pony tail. He says he’s come down to inspect the riverfront.
“What are you doing here?” he says.
“Snooping around. I wanted to check out the mine back there. Do you have anything to do with it?”
“No, nothing.”
“Doesn’t this path run through your property?”
“Yes.”
“Did they negotiate a formal easement with you?”
“No. They already had the necessary government permissions.”
“How?
“To be honest, I don’t know,” Fernando says, rubbing a bicep. “But I have my suspicions. And what pisses me off, is that they have set up an illegal logging operation just above here.” He nods towards the waterfall.
The hauling in of mining equipment has chewed up the area and Fernando wants to restore and protect what he can. Behind a long government-installed retaining wall of caged river rock guarding the mine from the river a row of saplings has been planted. I ask him about the wall and all the other walls I’ve seen up and down the Huaranilla Valley.
“At first the retaining walls made sense, especially on the sharp river bends,” he says. “The water gets really high during the rainy season. But then it seemed like every curve was being fortified, and sometimes even the banks along the straightaways. Overkill, if you ask me.” His employees nod in agreement. “I suspect the river is being prepped for increased mining activity, like you see here, and future hydro projects.”
Back at the hotel, the power is out. Over Peruvian beers, Fernando explains that rolling power outages have become the norm.
“La Paz and El Alto are growing faster than its infrastructure can keep up,” he says. “When they run out of power, the Yungas all the way past Caranavi and into the lowlands tend to get the the short end of the stick.” The power goes out at least twice a week.
With the growing cities of La Paz and El Alto overtaxing existing hydro-electricity sources like the nearby Zongo Valley, the government has started eyeballing other catchments close to La Paz. Places like the Huaranilla Valley.
However, the valley and cloud forests of Cotapata National Park carry far greater importance as a source of fresh water, a commodity becoming increasingly rare in the highlands as a result of the rapid recession of Andean ice-pack. Glaciers I had once traversed in the eighties had now given way to bare rock. It’s no secret that Andean glaciers are disappearing faster than almost anywhere else on the globe. In the seventies and eighties, Bolivia boasted the world’s highest ski run on Chacaltaya Glacier. Now all that’s left is a shale slope and an abandoned lodge.
With over 80% of the world’s tropical glaciers, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia have begun implementing an Adaptation to the Impact of Rapid Glacier Retreat in the Tropical Andes project funded by the World Bank and Japanese government. Besides studying the effects of climate change on Andean glaciers, the project undertakes small-scale risk assessments to demonstrate the benefits of water-saving techniques in farming, like line-drip irrigation. These efforts are coupled with training and a program to improve clean water distribution. But it’s already a life-or-death situation in cities like Bolivia’s El Alto, where up to 1000 households might share a single water outlet.
I’ve known Fernando for almost twenty years. In 1993, when the area was declared a national park, a ‘resource management’ provision allowed him and a handful of communities to continue to own private land within its boundaries. I witnessed how he took a small corner of jungle in the North Yungas, and turned it into a sizeable resort, a Flintstones meets Club Med affair, capable of accommodating over 600 people. Success comes with headaches, however, including what to do with the copious waste produced by hundreds of eating, purging guests, something for which the hotel has received criticism from environmentalists.
Fernando sheds light on the complex relationship between private landholders and the wildlife and resource management area of Cotapata National Park. The park encompasses an area of about 148,000 acres in a region as diverse as any in the world, ranging from Andean alpine to Amazon jungle. It comprises the southwestern portion of what is known as the Vilcabamba-Amboró Corridor, a crucial Andean watershed region straddling the Peru-Bolivia border. It also includes several areas of development: La Paz and El Alto 50 kilometres to the southwest and expanding coca-farming areas to the east (there is more coca growing in Bolivia now than before U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs began in the eighties). And since President Evo Morales’s inauguration in 2007, numerous new mining concessions have sprung up along the river valleys.
In the days that follow, my family and I visit the animal refuge of La Senda Verde and town of Coroico, taking us up and down the Huaranilla and Yolosa river valleys. I count at least half a dozen small mining operations.
I hate the site of these places. In the eighties, I’d experienced first hand how the onslaught of boom-bust gold mining poisoned streams and rivers. In 1982, I spent a month working with open-pit gold miners in the jungles near San Ramón in Bolivia’s eastern Amazon lowlands, where mercury amalgamation and leaching were widely practiced. Those were the days before the big companies moved into the area, when wildcat miners ruled, staking out claims or striking deals with existing claimants, Bolivia’s version of the Yukon Gold Rush.
I was sixteen at the time. My family moved to Bolivia in 1981 because my father had landed a job selling mining equipment out of La Paz. In those days, I wanted to be a field biologist like the great George B. Schaller, a man alone in the wild, free to observe the behaviour of animals from which to draw profound analogies for the benefit of Mankind. I suppose my father thought that casting me into a South American Heart of Darkness would bring me face-to-face with the grim realities of nature while building much-needed character. I guess it did. But it also nearly killed me. One day the main pit from which we extracted the ‘gold mud’—a 15’x15’ hole heading due south—collapsed, burying alive an unfortunate miner. After twenty minutes of frantic digging, we hauled his limp body from the pit, smeared in muddy vernix, mouth full of dirt. I wondered at how easily the land swallowed these gold-hungry earthworms.
During the day we’d pan the heavy gold mud extracted from the pit, sometimes separating out the gold with mercury, and then burning the mercury off in a crude smelter. I didn’t know it at the time, but the vapor created through this process was by far the most environmentally harmful byproduct of small pit gold mining; several of my fellow miners suffered from dreadful coughs, fevers and other pulmonary-related issues. At sundown, we’d head back to camp along the rutted road (which is now part of the Santa Cruz – Trinidad Highway).
Camp consisted of a couple open-air thatched huts. There had been heavy rains that month, and the roads were in terrible shape. As a result, supplies of rice, meat and tinned goods had not come through from Santa Cruz, so we resorted to living off of what we could fish from the mercury-laced streams—and what we could kill with a .22 caliber rifle. This included a hawk, a rare scarlet ibis, a Cuvier’s toucan, a beautiful Amazon squirrel and two six-banded armadillos. We had some charquay (jerky), draped over one of the hut supports, so infested with maggots that my fellow miners laughed about how a person had to literally cook it to death before eating it.
I befriended one of the younger miners, Juan, a Brazilian, who sported a Ché Guevara beard and a pistol strapped to one hip. During the down time after dark, in the light of a kerosene lamp we played poker with a Playboy Bunny adorned deck while exchanging sips from a bottle of Singani, Bolivian moonshine; or on weekends he’d drive me 27 treacherous kilometres into the nearest town on his 50cc motorbike for a treat of fried yucca and arroz con queso (rice and melted farmer’s cheese) and to meet the local girls. One clear Sunday morning, toco toucans croaking high in the treetops, instead of heading to town, Juan and I buzzed northward for several kilometres and pulled up in front of a questionable looking hut, where a cow with bulging udders tied to a small corral stood in a dismal state. Juan called out, shortly after which a woman with a loose-fitting top appeared, and between gaps in her teeth asked us what we wanted. I didn’t understand much Spanish in those days, but I knew enough to realize that Juan aimed to make a man out me. My head suddenly rife with graphic images of death-by-STD, I hastily declined the offer. Juan found my rejection terribly funny, as did the lady of the house. Juan asked, if I didn’t want to get laid, would I like some grenadine instead? Sure, I said. Anything would be better than a romp with that woman. He then proceeded to squirt milk straight from the tethered cow’s swollen teats into a glass the woman handed him, to which he added a bit of red liquid from a dirty plastic bottle, stirred it with a stick and handed it to me. It looked like strawberry phlegm. I drank it down in a couple of gulps. The woman winked at me and said I didn’t know what I was missing.
During one foray into the backcountry we met a grizzled man sporting a silver-plated pistol in a leather holster riding a white stallion. Patting the gun, the man had confessed, “I’m eighty years old and I recently killed a man.” Conversations in gold-mining country often started this way. A man’s reputation and gun were his best companions. “Over sixty years of mining I’ve collected two large Coke bottles full of gold,” he told us. “Several weeks ago, some imbécil broke into my house with the aim of stealing my Coke bottles. But I shot him dead, instead. To think that he actually thought I’d keep my gold in the house! What an idiot.”
Aside from a poor diet, life in the mining camp came with the incessant onslaught of insects, hot nights and the dreadful discovery of newly hatched worms called niguas feasting on my feet. When the food caught up to me I spent plenty of time in the bushes around camp emptying my bowels and picking up numerous ticks, one of which gorged itself on my scrotum. I thought I was going to die when I found the grape-sized critter. A resident mutt and her litter of puppies kept us entertained, while the fleas they carried infested our bedding. Vampire bats were frequent visitors at night. By the time my father arrived to pick me up at the end of my character-building month, I was a complete mess. I had an infected foot, I was bitten from head to toe, with heat rashes burning the inside of my arms and legs. My stomach was in disarray and something akin to the pox had mottled the skin on my face and transformed my lips into a flaking, cracked and bloody nightmare. I thought I might have chagas disease. My father took one look at me and said, “We’ve got to get you out of here.” The reward for my labours? Less than a gram of gold pressed into a dried clump of clay.
I did not become a biologist.
Exactly 31 years later, I have returned to Bolivia, family in tow, eager for them to experience the wonders of the Yungas. Fernando tells me that some new circuit trails have been developed for the benefit of more adventuresome guests. The next day, we find the trailhead a few hundred feet from the hotel cutting steeply up through the forest. As we climb, our boots squishing in the soft earth, the sweet smell of curry rises as the sun tries to break through the morning mists. Here and there we see a candy wrapper, or a pile of human excrement. Eventually we round the ridge and then the trail drops down into a small adjacent valley, at the bottom of which tumbles a sizeable stream.
Leaving my wife and daughter sunning themselves on some boulders, my son, Kai, and I wade up through the cool waters. After several curves all signs of human existence disappear and we are left with the symphony of forest and water sounds. The release is edifying, especially in the knowledge that there is no human habitation between here and the mountain summit at about 2700 metres—this water is about as clean as it gets, ironic, since it flows into the Huaranilla, a river in decline.
The release of mercury during gold extraction poses a serious threat to the environment and health of those living along the river. While it affects people living and working in gold-mining areas, these threats jeopardize life more significantly downstream in the Amazon Basin. In the late nineties, the mercury concentrations found in carnivorous fish in the Upper Beni River—into which the Huaranilla flows—exceeded four times the World Health Organization’s recommended safety levels; elevated mercury levels in six of eight human hair samples taken in the same area warned of the hazards of eating these tainted fish. More recent investigations suggest even higher levels today.
Our presence in this pristine part of the watershed feels like a sacrilege.
A little later, Kai and I descend the stream along the steep opposite bank. Before long, we pick up a freshly cut trail that eventually leads us into a clearing where several tree trunks lie in a heap. A few chain-sawed boards stacked to one side betray this as the miners’ illegal logging operation of which Fernando had spoken.
“It must take a long time to saw those boards with a chainsaw,” my son says. He’s thirteen. I muse over the thought of sending him to a logging camp in the Amazon for a month.
I do a bit of filming and then we meet up again with the girls to carry on back to the hotel.
Given what I’ve witnessed of the growing mining industry in the Huaranilla Valley, the designation of an integrated resource management area inside a Bolivian national park strikes me as oxymoronic, conservation with a front door thrown open to exploitation. But, as is often the case in developing countries, part of the soul of a place must sometimes be sacrificed if the heart of it is to be preserved. I’d seen this very scenario unfold in Bolivia’s Madidi, Noel Kempf Mercado, Isiboro-Securé and Carrasco-Amboró national parks, all important watershed regions.
Cotapata National Park is no exception. If anything, as a crucial watershed it faces a disproportionate amount of pressure from hyrdro-electricity developers, coca growers, tourists and miners. While each of these pressures have environmental implications, mining alone presents a categorically life-threatening scenario for the people downstream.
Before we depart for La Paz, I find myself back on the banks of the Huaranilla River, not far from the mine I’d visited a few days previously. I observe a lone heron perched on a boulder midstream. The thought that the fish that sustain it might be slowly killing it troubles me. Do toxins show up in feathers like they do in human hair?
Experts in mercury pollution of Andean rivers endorse a practical plan of action for Cotapata National Park. In order to cut down on mercury emissions, even small mines can install inexpensive, safe-to-operate mercury retorts, which effectively trap mercury during blow-torching of amalgam, thus preventing toxic substances from becoming airborne. Not only does the process reduce the risk of exposure to deadly vapours, but allows the miner to trap mercury for reuse. In other parts of the Bolivian Yungas, the use of such apparatuses has led to a significant drop in mercury emissions.
Two years ago a group of about 80 families formed the Cotapata Gold Mining Cooperative, now the first small-scale miners´ organization in the area certified to the Fairtrade and Fairmined standard for responsibly mined gold. Best practices require them to use mercury retorts in all gold extraction, a promising start.
The mine behind me might be part of this cooperative and I want to see one of the retorts in action. But I’m on holiday with my family and I have neither the time nor the spousal clearance to do my usual sleuthing. It will have to wait.
I turn to leave. Startled by my movement, in one swift and awkward thrust the heron takes flight and pounds it’s way upstream to disappear behind a clump of bamboo.
All the way back to the hotel, where my family waits, I feel like I’m racing the shadows edging up the steep, jungle-clad sides of the valley.
Jon Derksen spent his formative years in Malaysia, Japan, Canada and Bolivia. He has contributed to editions of Backpacking and Trekking in Peru and Bolivia (Bradt Publications) and he compiled Hiking in the Garhwal Himalayas: A Guide (Woodstock Publications). His writing and photography have appeared in South American Explorer Magazine, Geographical, GORP, The Bolivian Times and elsewhere. Work with National Geographic and Discovery Channel has taken him from the Andean highlands to the remote Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. His passions include being a husband and father, teaching and leading student expeditions, and protecting watershed and coastal areas. Jon is currently working on Loggerheads, a young adult adventure novel about Belize’s barrier reef.
