Category: Travel

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The wave

 

 

For the last decade I’ve lived in southern and southeastern Asia.  During that time, the shadow cast by the tsunami that struck 14 countries on December 26th, 2004, has never seemed far away.  Triggered by an earthquake off the coast of Aceh in Sumatra, northern Indonesia, the tsunami claimed approximately 228,000 lives.  The worst devastation occurred in Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka, all three countries recording the tsunami as the worst-ever natural disaster in their histories.  Today, December 26th, 2024, is the 20th anniversary of the tragedy.

 

My partner and I lived in Sri Lanka from 2014 to 2022.  We weren’t there long before we began to notice memorials to, see lingering traces of and hear people talk about the tsunami, which slammed into the island’s eastern and southern coasts, claimed over 30,000 lives and displaced over 1,500,000 people from their homes.

 

For instance, in 2020, we stayed briefly in the southern town of Tangalle, where we hired a local tuk-tuk driver, going by the nickname of Dash, to take us to the tourist attractions in the neighbourhood.  Dash told us his house had been destroyed by the tsunami and now, 16 years later, he was still trying to build a replacement house further inland. Its ground floor was complete but something had delayed the construction of the first floor.

 

Also, my work required me to stay a few times in the same hotel in the northeastern town of Trincomalee.  There, I got to know the barman, who was a southerner.  His tsunami story was that he got trapped by rising waters whilst on a bus east of Galle, southern Sri Lanka’s biggest town.  Despite the water, the bus passengers decided it’d be safer to stay on board the vehicle.  He disagreed with them, climbed out through a window, started swimming and made it to safety.  From what he heard later, he believed the other passengers had died.  The disaster disabled the local mobile-phone network and he recalled afterwards having to beg coins off someone, then having to stand in a long, long queue at an old payphone so he could contact his family to let them know he’d survived.

 

However, what really brought the horror of the tsunami home to us happened while we were having a weekend break in the seaside town of Hikkaduwa in southeastern Sri Lanka.  We heard about the village of Peraliya, a few miles up the coast.  The statistics of the tsunami’s carnage were so tragically overwhelming that they hid a more particular fact – that because of it, at Peraliya, Sri Lanka also experienced the world’s worst rail disaster.

 

I’ll let Wikipedia relate the details: “The 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami rail disaster is the largest single rail disaster in world history by death toll…  Train #50 was a regular train operating between the cities of Colombo and Matara…  On Sunday, 26 December 2004, during the Buddhist full moon holiday and the Christmas holiday weekend, it left Colombo’s Fort Station shortly after 6.50 AM with over 1,500 paid passengers and an unknown number of unpaid passengers with travel passes (called Seasons) and government travel passes…

 

“At 9.30 AM, in the village of Peraliya, near Telwatta, the beach saw the first of the gigantic waves thrown up by the earthquake.  The train came to a halt as water surged around it.  Hundreds of locals, believing the train to be secure on the rails, climbed on top of the cars to avoid being swept away.  Others stood behind the train, hoping it would shield them from the force of the water…

 

“Ten minutes later, a huge wave picked the train up and smashed it against the trees and houses which lined the track, crushing those seeking shelter behind it.  The eight carriages were so packed with people that the doors could not be opened while they filled with water, drowning almost everyone inside as the water washed over the wreckage several more times.  The passengers on top of the train were thrown clear of the uprooted carriages, and most drowned or were crushed by debris…

 

“…the Sri Lankan authorities had no idea where the train was for several hours, until it was spotted by an army helicopter around 4.00 PM.  The local emergency services were destroyed, and it was a long time before help arrived…  Some families descended on the area determined to find their relatives themselves.  According to the Sri Lankan authorities, only about 150 people on the train survived.  The estimated death toll was at least 1,700 people, and probably over 2,000, although only approximately 900 bodies were recovered, as many were swept out to sea or taken away by relatives.  The town of Peraliya was also destroyed, losing hundreds of citizens and all but ten buildings to the waves.  More than 200 of the bodies retrieved were not identified or claimed, and were buried three days later in a Buddhist ceremony near the torn railway line.”

 

 

Today, when you enter Peraliya along the coastal road from the south, you’ll see a monument to the victims called Tsunami Honganji Viharaya  on the right-hand, inland side.  It consists of an 18.5-metre-high Buddha statue rising from an islet in a rectangular pond, built on the spot where the tragedy occurred.  Although the statue was erected with donations from Japan, it’s actually a reproduction of one of the Bhamian statues in Afghanistan that were dynamited and destroyed by those ignorant bigots in the Taliban in 2001.

 

When we visited the monument, there was – and perhaps still is – a small building by the entrance with the words TEMPLE OFFICE painted on its side.  Inside, we found a gallery of photographs taken in the tsunami’s immediate aftermath.  Some of them recorded such carnage they were difficult to look at.  Among the less graphic photographs, one showed the local rail-tracks after they’d been twisted into steel squiggles by the strength of the water.

 

 

A little further, on the road’s left-hand, seaward side, there’s a non-religious memorial to the victims, consisting of a plaque, a column and a scene carved onto a wall of grey and rust-orange stone representing the destruction immediately after train and village had been hit.  It shows piles of bodies, masonry and smashed palm trees, sections of wrenched-up and misshapen rail track, and upended train carriages, some with corpses hanging from their windows.  It’s startlingly candid – indeed, it probably shocks some Westerners, accustomed to such memorials in their own cultures avoiding explicit details and being discretely abstract, so as not to upset traumatised survivors and grieving relatives.

 

The 2004 tragedy at Peraliya has two poignant footnotes.  The locomotive that’d been pulling the carriages, and two of the carriages themselves, were eventually retrieved from the disaster scene, rebuilt and repaired and now, every year on December 26th, they return to Peraliya to take part in a religious ceremony held in remembrance of those who lost their lives.  Secondly, one of the small number of survivors was a train guard called W. Karunatilaka.  His sense of duty was such that following the disaster he continued to work on the Colombo-to-Galle train service.  He was still serving on that coastal route in the mid-2010s.

 

A much more personal record of what the tsunami did in Sri Lanka that day is provided by Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir Wave (2013).  This records how she lost her husband, two sons and parents when the tsunami swept into Yala National Park on the south coast and how she dealt with – often couldn’t deal with – the emotional and psychological devastation that followed.  Indeed, the ‘wave’ of the book’s title may refer to the massive grief she felt during the ensuing years as much as to the tsunami itself.  I found the book a tough read indeed.  However, it’s worth noting William Dalrymple’s appraisal of Wave when he reviewed it for the Guardian.  It was “…possibly the most moving book I have ever read about grief, but it is also a very, very fine book about love.  For grief is the black hole that is left in our lives when we lose someone irreplaceable…”

 

I only realised a few days ago that the 20th anniversary of the tsunami was coming up.  By a coincidence, my partner and I spent a pre-Christmas holiday in Khao Lak, the part of Thailand that suffered most in 2004.  The area’s death toll was officially 4000, though unofficial estimates put the figure higher.  We learned that a tsunami museum had opened in 2022 in the nearby village of Ban Nam Khem and decided to visit it.

 

 

Ban Nam Khem Tsunami Museum manages to be informative about 2004’s events, and convey their dreadful emotional impact, without wallowing in the death and horror.  For instance, there’s a display of photographs from the disaster’s aftermath, showing scenes of mangled, waterlogged chaos – boats, vehicles, trees, parts of wrecked buildings dumped on top of each other – but the more upsetting images have been pixellated out.  One terrifying photo shows the tsunami about to strike a bay, the sea swollen but still weirdly blue, clear and serene-looking, whereas the palm trees on shore are silhouetted against a crashing white wall of foam.  On the premises outside the museum-building, the sense of the tsunami’s gargantuan power is reinforced by the presence of two salvaged trawlers.  One was smashed a kilometre inland and deposited in the village’s centre, the other ended up with its prow stuck in the roof of a house.

 

The museum also has an auditorium where visitors can view a film about a Western tsunami survivor, now an adult, but a kid when he holidayed there with his family in 2004, returning to Ban Nam Khem to search for the fisherman who saved him from the post-tsunami floods.  It’s obviously highly fictionalised, but at least it tries to show how something positive can develop out of the very worst of situations.  The film also serves an educational purpose, warning local children not to be complacent and to take the area’s regular, tsunami-emergency drills seriously.

 

 

For me, the museum’s biggest impact comes from its displays of objects salvaged after the tsunami.  Again, there are a few big things giving a sense of the huge, brutal force unleashed that day, such as the shattered prow of a boat or a pulverised car that looks like it’s been in a hydraulic compactor.  But the small, everyday artefacts have the greatest poignancy: domestic ones (toys, handbags, purses, crockery, chairs, parasols, footballs, shoes), nautical (snorkelling flippers, broken fishing floats, pieces of netting, crab and lobster traps) and cultural (a spirit house, a Buddha’s head, urns, a Christmas tree).  The fact that, 20 years on, some items – a portable CD-playing stereo, a manual typewriter, a box radio, a box camera, an adding machine from a shop – have an antiquated look gives the displays the feel of a time capsule.  Yet this time capsule is from the moments before disaster struck and countless lives were ended or turned upside-down.

 

 

It’s a reminder that, though our brains are hardwired not to think such about things, our safety and security depend upon the whims of nature.  And if we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, we can be suddenly engulfed in tragedy and chaos on a colossal scale – as happened to hundreds of thousands of unfortunate people in this region of the world two decades ago today.

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Christmas in Khao Lak

 

It’s been years since I last spent Christmas in a place where, around December 25th, it’s actually cold.  For most of the past decade, I’ve experienced the festive season in a country close to the equator, such as Sri Lanka or Singapore, where the temperature outside has been over 30 degrees.

 

For that reason, on Christmas Day, I customarily post a few photos whereby Christmas trees and decorations, bearing wintry images of snow, ice and reindeer, appear against a backdrop of tropical beaches and palm trees.  And I write a few lines where I marvel, “Isn’t this weird?”

 

Well, my partner and I have just spent two weeks in southern Thailand, in the town of Khao Lak, and here yet again is a picture of something Christmassy juxtaposed with something far removed from the snowy north of the world.  This time the photo is of a Khao Lak restaurant that had a Christmas tree standing beside two Thai spirit houses – San Phra Phum, as they’re known locally.  These are the miniature buildings you see outside nearly every Thai home and business, held aloft on wooden pillars like bird-tables, often fragranced by smouldering incense sticks and garlanded with flowers.  Their purpose is to provide accommodation for the spirits residing on the premises and to keep those spirits contented, so that they don’t move into the human building and cause ghostly high-jinks there.

 

 

Inside the spirit house, you get things such as a representation of the angel-like Hindu deity Phra Chai Mongkol, who bears a sword and a bag of money, presumably to ensure protection and good fortune for the house’s ethereal inhabitants; human figures to keep the spirits company; dolls’-house-style pieces of furniture for the spirits’ comfort; and possibly models of horses and elephants, to help them get around.  I’ve even seen spirit houses cluttered with model cars and toy figures, presumably to give the spirits something to play with; and ones bedecked with strings of coloured lights, presumably to allow the spirits illumination after nightfall.

 

While in Khao Lak, I looked for spirit houses that had miniature Christmas trees and decorations put inside them so that the spirits could experience the festive season too.  But I didn’t see any.  Just as well.  I don’t think the spirits would appreciate the gesture.  Imposing Christmas on them would be a step too far in terms of Westernisation.

 

 

Meanwhile, the hotel we were staying at put on a lavish Christmas display in its front yard.  I particularly liked the display’s Christmas tree, which had been assembled out of beer bottles.  Alcohol is the only thing that makes the festive season bearable for many people, so a Christmas tree celebrating beer seems very fitting.

 

 

On the other hand, I have to say the display’s Santa Claus was the most hideous and evil-looking representation of the old fellow I’ve ever seen.  Not only was he wildly cross-eyed, but his face – what could be seen of it above the beard – was a patch of putrid, decomposing brown mush.  I really hope this thing didn’t climb down anyone’s chimney last night.

 

 

Anyway – a Merry Christmas to you all.

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Bali bits and pieces

 

 

My partner and I have just been in Thailand.  But before I put anything on my blog about that, I suppose I’d better post this last instalment about our experiences in Bali…

 

Taman Ayun Temple

This was our first stop on a tour we did with a spritely, 60-something Balinese guide who spoke English with an Australian accent – the result of years ferrying Australian tourists around the island’s attractions.  Also, his raspy tones made him sound like an Australian Keith Richards.  Appropriately, he complained about how life had been in Indonesia during the brutal military regime of General Suharto, who among his many sins had banned Western rock music.  Our guide recalled the joy of being able to listen to the likes of Led Zeppelin and AC/DC after Suharto’s departure in 1998.

 

Unlike the Balinese mountain and coastal temples we visited, Taman Ayun Temple was sedate in its topography.  Its buildings, compounds, stone-tiled paths, lawns, gardens, trees and green-painted, Victorian-style lampposts were arranged over a flat strip of ground contained within a long, narrow, U-shaped waterway.  But I liked it because we arrived early, before other tourists, and had the premises to ourselves.  I especially liked wandering the sides of the complex and looking across the water – tall, thin, poplar trees spearing it with their reflections.  And at the temple’s far end were paths leading into some woodland with immensely fibrous and creepered banyan trees.  That part was the closest I got to exploring Bali’s nature during our holiday.

 

 

Typically for Balinese temples, there were tapering, tiered pagodas shaped like stacks of ceramic bushings you’d find in an electrical substation.  And at the end of the circuit we made around Taman Ayun, we encountered a display-area that was half-gallery, half-museum.  In addition to many traditional and modern paintings, it had on show a trio of shaggy Balinese demon costumes.  These included one of Rangda, whom Wikipedia describes as “the demon queen of the Leyaks in Bali…  Terrifying to behold, the child-eating Rangda leads an army of evil witches against… the forces of good.”

 

 

Coffee Plantation

We’d known a coffee plantation was included on our tour itinerary.  Unfortunately beforehand, we hadn’t given it much thought – or done any research.

 

We were shown around the plantation and ended up in a treehouse-café that resembled Tarzan’s jungle home in one of the old movies featuring Johnny Weissmuller.  It looked particularly Tarzan-esque because of a catwalk that snaked from it, through the treetops, to a platform where you could take photos of the adjacent mountains, round, blue and caressed by tufts of passing cloud.  In the café we were presented with 17 little tasting glasses containing 17 differently flavoured and coloured coffees, teas and other plantation-produced drinks.

 

 

What soured our experience there was the sudden appearance of a luwak, a type of civet used extensively in the production of ‘luwak coffee’.  The process, to quote a somewhat ungrammatical information sign at the plantation, goes like this: “Luwak eats coffee beans that are still intact… Through the luwak digestive system, undergoes natural chemical treatment, fermenting in the stomach and come out with excrement… The taste very unique!  Fermentation in the luwak stomach make low caffeine.  It has rich flavour like almond chocolate taste and very smooth.”  In other words, luwak coffee is made from beans eaten, digested and shat out by luwaks, which supposedly have less caffeine but a richer, smoother, more chocolatey taste.

 

A plantation staff-member brought a luwak around the café’s tables so the visitors could look at it.  The poor beast seemed befuddled.  Worse, when it was brought to us, the luwak panicked, sprang out of the staff-member’s hands onto my left arm, clambered across my shoulders and descended my right arm before being captured again.  Upset by this, my partner consulted her smartphone.  She discovered that luwaks should be fed on a varied diet of fruit, seeds and insects, not the monotonous, nutritiously-deficient diet of coffee beans they get at the plantations.  They’re also confined to small cages and, as shy, nocturnal animals, being displayed to tourists during the daytime traumatises them.

 

I know – in all cultures, animals used in the production of food are usually treated cruelly.  I’m well aware of that, being from a farming background.  But the poor old luwaks could at least be spared the indignity of being dragged from their cages, during daytime, for tourists to gawk at.  If we’re in Bali again, we’ll make sure coffee plantations aren’t on the itineraries of any tours we do.

 

Ulun Danu Beratan Temple

This temple complex was beautifully sited on the shore of Lake Beratan in central Bali.  The view you got from it across the water was, basically, a rhapsody in blue: the shimmering, rippling, glassy blue of the lake, the solider green-blue of the Bedugul Mountains rising above the lake’s far rim, the crystal-clear blue of the sky.  Also, horticulturalists would love the place even if they didn’t walk as far as the temple-buildings.  The approach was gorgeously landscaped with lawns, flowerbeds, flowery borders and neatly groomed trees.

 

 

After our experiences a few days earlier at the tourist-infested Lempuyang Temple, it was a relief to be in a Balinese temple that was busy mainly with local people.  Crowds of them, both adults and children, had assembled wearing white sarongs and red senteng (shawls bound around the waist) and white or red udeng (traditional Balinese male headdress).  Not all the locals had gathered for religious purposes – for, at the lakeshore, a squad of boys were using fishing rods, their lines out in the water among the water-lilies and between the moored wooden boats.  However, there were still a few foreigners around.  One hideous spectacle that stuck in my mind took place at a stage where folk were invited to don historical Balinese costumes and pose for photographs – a Western lady, no doubt an influencer, had tricked herself out as a Balinese princess and was posing for picture after picture with a nauseating, full-of-herself smile on her visage.

 

A little disconcertingly, along the shore from the temple buildings, the complex became more family-friendly, with the statues of traditional Balinese deities and mythological creatures giving way to Disney-esque ones of animals: fish, peacocks, parrots.  There were also bird-headed paddleboats and even a little compound where youngsters could hang out with and cuddle large fluffy rabbits.  Oh well.  I suppose parents visiting the temple appreciated it having attractions to keep the kids occupied too.

 

 

Jatiluwih Rice Terraces

We stopped for lunch at an eatery that was in the middle of this UN World Heritage Site.  It’s prized for the traditional rice fields that occupy the multiple terraces scaling its hillsides.  When we stopped at a booth to buy our entry tickets for the area, I noticed a sign on the booth listing possible activities on the terraces and the prices that doers of those activities needed to pay.  The list of activities ran up to the shooting of movies in the area, by foreign directors, which cost vast amounts of Indonesian rupiah.  (The rupiah was currently worth 0.000088 Singaporean dollars, so a lot of zeroes were involved.)  Shooting a movie there with a local director was slightly less expensive.  As far as I know, the famous shots of Julia Roberts pedalling her bicycle through the rice-fields in Eat, Pray, Love (2010) – or, as I prefer to think of it, Watch, Gag, Puke – were not filmed here.

 

After we’d eaten, we ventured along a footpath leading in amid the expanses of rice.  The rice-fields occupied a slightly-undulating plain of green and yellow, occasionally carved up by lines of trees, which stretched off towards distant, broad mountains.  The path was bordered by a channel, full of water, and the edge of the adjacent rice-field collapsed over it, the plants dipping their golden heads in the water as if drinking it.

 

 

This tour took place on Tumpek Landep Day in Bali, which according to balispirit.com is “a ceremonial day at which offerings are made for objects that are made of metal,” which nowadays include “cars and motorbikes…  Most Balinese people truly believe that these ceremonies and blessings will bring them luck and keep them safe in traffic.”  Thus, as we drove around, we saw multiple vehicles – stationary and in motion – with charms and rosettes fixed on their bodywork, dangling long, dried strands of coconut-palm leaves.

 

 

However, these vehicular decorations didn’t sway the police in the city of Ubud, where we were staying.  When Balinese / Australian Keith Richards returned us there at the tour’s end, we noticed some 4x4s that were naughtily parked in ‘no parking’ areas along the sides of the main street.  To chastise them, the local cops were letting all the air out of their tyres.

 

Nyang Nyang Beach

We visited this beach three days later, after we’d relocated from Ubud to Uluwata.  Its main attraction was the claim it was very cut-off and secluded.  A taxi dropped us above the beach.  From there we had to descend a long, very steep road that dropped down through a deep cleft cut out of the shoreline’s rock. The sun blazed from the strip of sky visible above. The road looked like it’d be an ordeal to walk up again, but our plan was to follow the beach to its far end, from which, supposedly, a flight of steps climbed back to civilisation.  At the bottom of the road we found a parking lot and a ramshackle bar. From there, we stepped down onto the beach itself.

 

It was busier than we’d expected, both with bronzed teenaged and 20-something bodies lying on the sand sunbathing – or in a few instances, sitting straight-backed, meditating – and with a pod of surfers out on the water, each awaiting his or her turn to ride in on each big wave that passed by.  A little way down the beach, we found another ramshackle bar – just a shed with a two solid walls and two open sides, a couple of fridges, an icebox, some clunky old wooden tables and chairs, and battered metal signs advertising rum, mojitos and something called ‘Friendship Coffee Vodka’.  We stopped there for a rest.  Nearby, a Balinese guy was operating a film camera, pointed in the direction of the surfers.  They ‘d hired him to film their surfing antics, clips of which would later be uploaded to their social media accounts.

 

 

Then we walked further.  The other holidaymakers disappeared behind us and we definitely felt the vibe of solitude and isolation that’d drawn us here.  Disappointingly, though, Nyang Nyang Beach still had some gunk washed up on its sands: plastic bottles, bottle-tops, cartons, cups and cutlery, and flip-flops and shoe-soles.

 

At the beach’s far end we found a little old man with an icebox who was selling water, Coca Cola and beer.  He showed us the flight of steps, which he proudly told us he went up and down several times a day.  Actually, the ‘steps’ were a chaotic track of rocks, earth and rubble, an assault course rather than a staircase, which wound its way up through the vegetation covering the cliff-face.  Hurriedly changing our plans, we thanked the old man and made our back along the beach to the bottom of the super-steep road.  Luckily, another old guy there with a motorbike offered a ‘taxi’ service – for a fee of 25,000 rupiah, he’d shuttle you up to the top of the road on the back of his bike.  My partner rode up with him first.

 

While waiting for the motorbike to return, I had a quick beer in the bar beside the parking lot.  A slogan had been graffiti-ed on a timber column there: ‘F**K EVERYTHING AND BECOME A PIRATE’.  Pirates, I thought sourly.  That’s what all you wee influencer / Instagramming surf-boys out there are.  Modern-day pirates.

 

Aye, right.

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Two temples by the sea

 

 

Pura Tanah Lot is a Hindu sea-temple founded in the 16th century and located on Bali’s southern coast.  It sits on top of a pedestal of rock that, when the tide is in, becomes an island and is inaccessible from the shore.  When the tide is out, a rugged, rocky shelf forms a causeway connecting the temple and its pedestal to the mainland.

 

My partner and I arrived there one afternoon while the tide was out beyond the temple.  The shelf between it and the shore was a messy palette of seaweed-greens and damp-looking greys and browns.  Here and there, pools of trapped seawater glinted in the sun like shards of blue glass.

 

 

The rock supporting the temple has a froth of vegetation, including trees, growing along its landward side while the temple-buildings are clustered on its seaward side.  Flights of stone steps coil up the rock but, when we visited, most sightseers had to be content with wandering about the drained shelf around it.  Only a few folk, serious worshippers, were allowed to ascend the steps to the temple itself.

 

 

We made our way to the temple’s southern side, mainly to get out of the heat and glare of the afternoon sun, which was so fierce it created a glowing white band across the sea.  There, we scrambled up onto a higher level of the shelf, where parts of it were carpeted in mushy brown growths, like pulped kelp.  Viewed from this position, the temple and its pedestal had the shape of a sagging haystack.  But we couldn’t go the whole way around the temple because we came to a fracture in the shelf, which extended to the bottom of the temple-rock from the ocean.  The fracture had created a gorge, with seawater racing tumultuously along its bottom.

 

 

Predictably, vendors and pedlars were selling their wares among the throng of sightseers between the temple and the shore. One was hawking kites and had one up in the air, shaped like a galleon with fancy, multicoloured sails.  Meanwhile, along the shoreline, at the bottom of the miniature cliffs there, were some cavities that looked like cave entrances.  One had a queue of people waiting to go inside and a sign above saying ‘ULAR SUCI – HOLY SNAKE’.  This was explained by the temple’s website: “The cave is inhabited by some holy sea snakes, which are believed as (sic) incarnations of shawls of Dang Hyang Nirartha (founder of Tanah Lot Temple).”  In other words, Dang Hyang Nirartha is said to have created the sea snakes from his shawl, or sash, to protect the temple against evil spirits.

 

 

The ground overlooking Pura Tanah Lot is home to an attractive temple complex.  It has well-maintained green spaces and handsome statues that, unlike the discoloured and lichened ones I’ve seen in other Balinese temples, are clad brightly in gold-coloured robes and armour.

 

 

Pura Luhur Uluwatu is another of Bali’s famous sea-temples.  It’s further south, is located on the western tip of the Bukit Peninsula and was officially established in the 11th century, though a small place of worship may have existed there site earlier.

 

After the entrance and ticket desk, the approach to the temple was through a pleasantly leafy, wooded area.  However, a stark red sign warned us of potential dangers ahead: “BE CAREFUL IN BRINGING ITEMS SUCH AS SUNGLASSES, HATS, HANDPHONES, ETC., BECAUSE THERE ARE MANY MONKEYS IN THIS AREA.  IF YOUR STUFF IS TAKEN BY A MONKEY, REACH FOR (sic) OUR OFFICER.  DO NOT ATTEMPT TO GET THE STUFF BACK WITHOUT ASSISTANCE FROM OUR OFFICER.  The information about the monkeys swiping phones particularly alarmed us.  Currently resident in Singapore, our smartphones are laden with important Singaporean ID, banking and  transport apps and we’d be screwed if we lost them.  So, we agreed that, during our visit, one of us would take photos with their camera-phone while the other kept a lookout for marauding monkeys.

 

Further on, in the temple complex, we found a sign giving more details about the local monkey population.  There are 11 hectares of woodland surrounding the temple, known as Uluwatu Forest, and in it live some 400 grey long-tailed macaques.  These are divided into six groups – named riting, tapak, melem, celagi, amplung and gading – whose members range from 50 to 150.  The fact they were organised in gangs made them seem more criminal then ever.

 

The woodland extended right to the temple, so that its grounds were bathed in green-tinted light and rippling shadows.  But because the place is perched on a cliff, 97 metres up, this eventually gave way to dramatic views of the Indian Ocean.

 

 

Having looked at the temple, we set off down some flights of stone steps and along a path that followed the clifftop to the north.  Below, the glassy blue of the sea changed to a mottled blue, white and teal near the shore, and became a turbulent white froth along the rocks at the cliff’s base.  The cliffs themselves were largely bearded in green vegetation, with a sprinkling of scarlet flowers at the top.  We came to a viewpoint at the path’s end, took some pictures – still guarding against monkeys – and headed back.

 

While approaching the temple again, we heard ahead of us a chorus of shrieks – female ones.  The monkeys had raided a party of Chinese lady tourists.  And a few minutes later, back at the temple, we saw one monkey crouching on a wall besides some steps, playing with somebody’s floppy white hat.

 

Another path ran along the clifftop to the south. It was scenic too but the landscape there was less spectacularly contoured than it was along the northern path.

 

 

This temple also contained some interesting statues.  There was a crouching, snarling, winged creature, its maw crammed with short tusks, like a canine variant on the Hindu / Buddhist / Jain half-bird, half-human deity Garuda.  There was a statue of Ganesha, left arm raised and crooked at the elbow as if scratching his head.  I have to say this was the most monstrous representation I’ve seen of this usually genial, elephant-headed deity.  The effect was because of his big, blank, boiled-egg-like eyes and his tusks, which were more like fangs, short and thrusting up from his lower jaw.

 

Finally, there was a statue of the monkey-god Hanuman, in an Action Man pose, wearing battle armour and screaming with exertion.  However, lots of little monkeys were swarming around him, climbing up his legs and arms.  I know he’s supposed to command a monkey army, but in this depiction it looked more like his minions were attacking him.

 

 

Either that, or they were trying to pinch his phone.

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Nostalgic wallows 2: youth hotels

 

From pixabay.com / © Hans

 

I’ve been meaning to write about youth hostels since last July.  That was when the journalist John Harris penned an article for the Guardian that was both a tribute to and a lamentation about them.  Harris reported: “The Youth Hostel Association of England and Wales (YHA) has announced the sell-off of 20 of its 150 hostels, and identified a further 30 for possible uploading over the next three years – which, in total, would mean the loss of a third of its properties.  Its spokespeople blame ‘pandemic shutdowns, the cost-of-living crisis and steep inflation.’”  He also observed: “Insiders… talk about how Brexit has hugely reduced the number of school trips to the UK from Europe, thereby hitting a crucial part of the YHA’s revenue.”

 

For a long time, I was a member of the Scottish Youth Hostels Association (SYHA), or Hostelling Scotland as it is now, and I assume the situation north of the border is bleak too.  The youth hostel in Melrose, the one closest to my home address in the Scottish Borders, ceased trading some years ago.  Indeed, as far as I know, the Borders region has only one SYHA hostel these days, in Kirk Yetholm.  It’s insane when you consider how the Borders is choc-a-bloc with beautiful countryside and offers great opportunities for walking, hiking and cycling.  It should have half-a-dozen such hostels offering holiday accommodation for outdoor enthusiasts who are on a budget.

 

The first youth hotel association I was a member of, though, was the Northern Irish one.  I joined it during the summer of 1982, when I was 16 and temporarily employed on an uncle’s farm in County Tyrone.  I was making plans to go to the French-speaking part of Switzerland that October and work as a grape-picker, and then travel around Europe, and as I didn’t have much money to finance this it made sense to get a youth-hostel membership card that’d allow me to use any cheap European hostel I came across.  The autumn arrived, I headed abroad and I ended up staying in a slew of hostels.  These included ones in Lausanne, Fribourg, Grindelwald, Lucerne and Zurich in Switzerland, in Vaduz in Liechtenstein, in Munich, Ulm, Freiburg and Bonn in Germany, in Brussels in Belgium and in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

 

To my young, innocent mind, it seemed marvellous that every city and decent-sized town in Switzerland, Liechtenstein – well, Vaduz was the only town in Liechtenstein – Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands should have an establishment where you could get basic but adequate accommodation for a price that was as cheap as the proverbial chips.

 

From those 1982 wanderings, the Grindelwald youth hostel remains most vivid in my memory.  I arrived in the Alpine town one evening when everything was shrouded in fog as well as in darkness and I had no idea what my surroundings looked like.  The next morning, I woke in a hostel dormitory, put on some clothes and emerged onto a balcony.  The hostel was sited high on one side of a valley and across from it, confronting me, was the vast craggy awesomeness of the Eiger.  Wow!

 

From pixabay.com / © Goodlynx

 

There were downsides, of course.  At the time, many of those hostels were strictly run – especially the Swiss ones. They had ten o’clock curfews and the wardens showed their guests as much humanity as Victorian schoolmasters showed their pupils in Charles Dickens’ novels.  In one hostel, I noticed some graffiti scrawled on the inside of a toilet door.  “The warden,” it said bluntly, “is a fascist.”

 

I also met a wide range of humanity in those places.  In the common rooms, dining rooms, kitchens and dormitories, I had conversations with philosophers, poets, communists, anarchists, rabid Irish nationalists, belligerent English football hooligans, drunkards, thieves – a sweater was swiped from my rucksack in Brussels – and more.  I met an old Australian guy who talked about the months he’d spent roaming the Sahara Desert and hanging out with the Tuareg.  I met an American woman who couldn’t understand a single word I uttered – I ’d say something in my hybrid Northern Irish / Scottish accent and, panic-stricken, she’d look to her travelling companion for a translation.  In Rotterdam, on my way from the station to the youth hostel, a guy pulled a knife on me and tried to rob me, and then at the hostel I was consoled by a devout Dutch Christian.  After telling him about my misadventure, he exclaimed, “Thank God for saving your life!”

 

The following summer, I worked in Switzerland again, this time on a farm, and I did a little more hostelling – in the Swiss cities of Zug and Berne and in the French coastal town of Boulogne, from which I caught a ferry back to the UK.  And soon afterwards, I spent a couple of weeks tramping around England’s Lake District and stayed in several youth hostels there: Ambleside, Keswick, Grasmere, Windermere, Borrowdale.

 

It wasn’t until 1988, when I was in my early twenties, that I was reacquainted with the youth hostelling world. This was shortly after I’d graduated from college in Aberdeen. Needing employment for the summer, I was taken on as a seasonal warden at Aberdeen Youth Hostel on Queen’s Road.  I worked under the supervision of the hostel’s head warden, the relaxed and affable Bill Dick, and alongside fellow wardens Andrew Gordon and Paul Hunter.  It was a pleasant summer on a personal level – even my memories of wrestling a lawnmower over the building’s extensive and unruly back garden seem idyllic now.  That said, it was a traumatic one for Aberdeen generally because, on the night of July 6th-7th, the Piper Alpha oil platform exploded in the sea 120 miles north-east of the city, resulting in 167 deaths.  In fact, some of the guys staying in the hostel were looking for employment in the local oil industry.  Before they did anything else, they had to complete a Helicopter Underwater Escape Training (HUET) course at the city’s Robert Gordon Institute of Technology (now Robert Gordon University) and they’d tell me about how they were strapped inside a mock-up of a helicopter fuselage and then dunked in a giant tank of water.

 

Bill Dick was a laidback boss but one thing seriously worried him.  That was the thought of a fire.  The premises contained cheap plastic furniture that might give off toxic fumes if it burned and, also, the external fire escapes were showing signs of wear and tear.  He’d raised these issues with the SYHA but so far nothing had been done about them, presumably due to a lack of funds.  Thus, Andrew, Paul and I had the procedures to follow in the event of a fire, and the locations of the fire extinguishers and fire alarms, drummed into our heads.

 

From wikimedia.org / © AlasdairW

 

One evening, just after eleven, I was completing a shift at the front desk.  The hostellers all seemed to be in bed and Bill and the other staff had gone out for a drink, save for Nicky, the night-porter, who was upstairs, and Mary, the cook, who was finishing up in the kitchen.  I was wrestling with the usual end-of-day headache of counting up the till – not an easy job because youth hostels in those days (and maybe still now) used elaborate systems of discounts and vouchers that meant guests were often paying less than the official prices.  Then an agonisingly loud, shrill noise pierced through the building – the fire alarm.

 

I grabbed the phone and dialled 999.  Yelling above the noise, I gave the emergency-services operator our address.  By this time, guests were shambling down the stairs, into the front lobby, wearing pyjamas, dressing gowns and other nighttime attire.  “Get outside,” I ordered, even pushing a couple of them towards the door, “get outside!”  Mary appeared from the kitchen – Nicky, it transpired later, was detained because he’d been in the middle of using the loo when the alarm went off – and we headed into the building’s interior in search of the fire.  We didn’t find it.  We did, however, find a fire alarm with its protective glass broken.  Some wanker, who’d probably been in the pub all evening, had smashed it and pressed the activation button inside for a laugh.  Meanwhile, the windows at the front of the hostel brimmed with dazzling white light, as if the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) had just landed in the front yard.  It was actually the headlights of a couple of engines arriving from Aberdeen Fire Station.

 

Later, after I’d filled in forms confirming the fire had been a false alarm and a number of disgruntled Aberdonian firefighters had returned to their vehicles, Mary remarked, “My hands are still shaking.”  I realised mine were too.  I felt pretty stupid about summoning all those firemen for nothing, but when Bill returned and heard what’d happened, he assured me I’d done the right thing.

 

I’m sure that later, as health-and-safety regulations became more stringent, the SYHA sorted out the hostel’s furniture and fire escapes.  However, that’s academic now, as the the building was put up for sale in 2022 and I assume Aberdeen, like so many other places, is now youth-hostel-less.

 

During the 1990s I lived in Japan and in 1995 I got a temporary job as a researcher for the Fodor’s Guidebook company.  My assignment was to update and rewrite two chapters in the previous edition of their Japanese guide, about Hokkaido and Tohoku, for a new edition.  As Hokkaido and Tohoku constitute the northern third of the Japanese landmass, this involved a lot of travelling around.  To cut costs, I stayed in several youth hostels – in the cities of Hakodate, Aomori, Hirosaki and Akita, and by Lake Tazawa, which is up in the mountains to the east of Akita City and is Japan’s deepest lake.  The hostels were pretty basic but, crucially, they were warm – I was carrying out this job in March, when northern Japan was still in the grip of winter and buried in snowdrifts.

 

From pixabay.com / © hydroxyquinol

 

My visit to the Lake Tazawa youth hostel was a spooky experience.  I’d phoned earlier in the day from Akita and booked a bed there – a friendly-sounding lady had answered and confirmed the booking – but it was dark when I arrived on the train.  To get to the hostel, I had to walk along a silent, lonely road that had snow banked high along its sides.  Indeed, the wind had sculpted the tops of those snowbanks into weird, twisted shapes that in the glow from the sporadic streetlights, and the attendant shadows, looked like props from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).  Finally, I reached the hostel, entered it… and found it totally deserted.  Its lights were on, but however much I wandered around its interior, and however loudly I shouted, I couldn’t locate another soul.

 

Yet I had spoken to a real human being on the phone… hadn’t I?  By this time, with the wind moaning outside and flinging shards of snow against the hostel’s walls and roof, I’d stopped thinking about Alien and started thinking about the traditional Japanese ghost stories famously transcribed by Lafcadio Hearn.  Maybe I was a character in one of those ghost stories now.  Maybe one also involving the yuki–onna…

 

But after staying there for a bewildering half-hour, I ventured outside again – and discovered a second building close by, one I hadn’t noticed earlier.  Inside it, I found the youth hostel staff, including the woman I’d spoken to earlier.  What I’d entered first of all had been an annex building of the hostel.  I hadn’t been ensnared in a wintry Japanese ghost story after all.

 

After Japan, I lived in East Anglia – one of the loveliest parts of England – on three occasions.  These were for a couple of months in Norwich in 1998, while I was doing a course to get a teaching diploma; for half-a-year working in County Suffolk in 2002; and in Norwich again from 2008 to 2009 while I was doing a Master’s Degree at the University of East Anglia.

 

When I first turned up in Norwich in 1998, I checked into the town’s youth hostel assuming I would then find normal accommodation in a flat or bedsit for the duration of my diploma course.  However, I soon decided that, because it was off-season, I might as well just stay in the hostel, attend the course and do its homework assignments in the usually-quiet common room.  Elsewhere in East Anglia, I have fond memories of staying at the youth hostel in the Suffolk village of Snape and, from there, exploring the tidal estuary of the River Alde; and using the hostel in the north Norfolk town of Wells-next-the-Sea as my base while I went walking in the local salt marshes.  Sadly, all three of those hostels, Norwich, Snape and Wells-next-the-Sea, appear to be defunct in 2024.

 

Also, from 2002 to 2005, I worked in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  My family didn’t live that far away from Newcastle, being on the other side of the English / Scottish border, and by that time I’d become an ardent cyclist.  Thus, several times, I cycled north from Newcastle to visit my folks.  The journey took the most of two days by bike and I’d break the journey by staying in youth hostels along the way – either in the midge-infested village of Byrness just south of the border in England, or in Kirk Yetholm just north of it in Scotland.  The Byrness Hostel – yes, you guessed it – has given up the ghost since then too.

 

© YHA Alston

 

I also cycled westwards from Newcastle, visited the Lake District again and stayed in some of the youth hostels I’d been in two decades earlier.  While returning to Newcastle I had another eerie hostel-related experience.  Again, I planned to break the journey, this time spending a night in the hostel in Alston, which is said to be the highest market town in England.  To get there, I cycled through Penrith and, afterwards, had a gruelling time getting my bicycle up the mercilessly steep A686 road to Hartside Pass.  It was evening-time when I finally reached the pass and by then I felt about 200 years old.  But, unexpectedly, the road descended gently for the next few miles. I coasted along it, barely pedalling, gradually getting my strength back.  The ride was also discombobulating, though, because the light was fading and everything around me was shrouded in mist.  Finally, I scooted into Alston.  The town had a dream-like quality – almost phantasmagorical as it materialised out of the dusk and mist in what felt like the middle of nowhere.

 

Incidentally, I’ve just looked up the Alston Youth Hostel and – hurrah! – it’s still on the go.

 

After that, I stayed in youth hostels only a few times more, in Edinburgh and London when I had a plane or train to catch early the next morning and didn’t feel like splashing out on a hotel-room.  In the last decade I haven’t youth-hostelled at all.  Nowadays, I’m able to afford less spartan accommodation and, as I’m old, cranky and ‘high maintenance’, I doubt if a youth-hostel bunkbed would meet my expectations for comfort.  Still, though they were called ‘youth’ hostels, I was frequenting them into my forties, long after my youth had ended.  I certainly got plenty of mileage out of them.

 

Now, as John Harris observes, they appear to be heading for extinction, in Britain at least.  Yes, I know, modern phenomena like Airbnb have vastly widened people’s options when they search for and choose accommodation.  But that’s only if people have money.  If you’re to believe the figures, some 12 million people in Britain – 18% of the population – are living in absolute poverty, including 3.6 million children.  I assume the majority of them live in the cities.  I doubt if the existence of Airbnb and the like enables them to travel far from home and see much of the countryside.  Now more than ever, young folk need the humble youth hostel as somewhere to provide a warm berth and a roof over their heads while they wander, and explore, and broaden their horizons – cheaply.

 

And yet, though they’re so needed, youth hostels are being allowed to die out.  That’s another indictment of Britain in 2024, a country where the powers-that-be know the cost of everything but the value of absolutely nothing.

 

From pixabay.com / © Sabrinayrafa

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A water garden, plus ghouls

 

 

Another holiday dispatch from Bali…

 

After the atmospheric, scenic but heavily tourist-orientated experience of Bali’s Lempuyang Temple, it was a relief to visit Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden (or Water Palace, depending on which travel book or website you read) in the same area.  You weren’t shepherded around, you didn’t have to queue, the be-all and end-all of the place wasn’t to have some cute pictures of yourself taken that you could slather over your social media pages.  Although, inevitably, there were some folk at the Water Garden obsessed with taking cute pictures of themselves.

 

Rather, this was a place where you could wander freely and immerse yourself in the gorgeous surroundings – whilst keeping a sensible distance from the selfie-fanatics.  Also, for a morbid creature like myself, there were some unexpectedly dark things lurking in a back corner of the site, which I found fascinating.  More on those later.

 

The antiquity of the garden’s appearance hides the fact that it’s a relatively recent construction.  It was designed and built by the King of Karangsem in the late 1940s.  (So enthusiastic was the King about the project that he literally built it, for he was one of the labourers digging out its pools and ponds.)  However, despite its modernity, it already has a history of being razed and ruined.  In 1963, the nearby volcano Mount Agung, the scenic backdrop for the countless photographs being taken at Lempuyang Temple, erupted and destroyed it, and it had to be rebuilt.

 

 

After passing through the entrance, which contained a tall, narrow candi–bentar-style gateway with different-coloured, florally-patterned ceramic plates embedded in its brickwork like lines of giant buttons, we descended into the garden.  Across to the left was South Pond, a large, rectangular body of water with a long, thin island stretched across its middle, almost dividing it in two.  The island had the dramatic name of Demon Island, although rather than demons the only things on it were a row of fountains.  The bridges attaching Demon Island to the ‘mainland’ at either end were decorated with dragon-cum-sea-serpent creatures with scaly, rippling bodies.

 

 

The garden’s main attraction, however, was to the right of the entrance steps and paths.  This was the smaller but more ornate Mahabharata Pond, whose attractions were threefold.  First, its waters were full of grey and pink carp, some of them truly big and torpedo-like.  People were buying bread and throwing chunks of it at the carp, causing much tumultuous splashing as they surged up to feed.  Secondly, the pond’s surface was dotted with statues, maybe four or five-feet tall, depicting sitting or crouching figures in elaborate Balinese headgear.  They were slightly dilapidated, in a picturesque way.  Their white surfaces were partly discoloured and scabbed with flaking grey or brown lichen.  Little fern-like plants sprouted from their bases just above the waterline.  Their faces occasionally had so many blotches they resembled Harlequin masks.

 

 

And thirdly, running along the pond’s surface and threading between the statues were lines of stepping stones.  Really, these were the tops of octagonal stone pillars standing on the pond’s bed, which poked a couple of inches above the water.  Needless to say, the stepping stones were a big draw for the photo-obsessed visitors and lots of people were posing for pictures on them.  Sometimes couples tried to pose together on the same stone and looked in serious danger of tipping over into the pond.  I assumed the carp weren’t carnivorous.

 

 

The garden’s other features included a handful of further ponds and pools, an amphitheatre and an auditorium.  But the most impressive item was Nawa Sanga Fountain, which stood at the far end of Mahabharata Pond and resembled a tall, slim, eight-tiered pagoda.  Seen from a distance, the water weeping past the edges of its tiers enclosed it in a shimmering halo.  Green, mouldy growths had gathered on the eternally-wet segments between the tiers, but somehow the mould didn’t diminish its elegance.

 

 

Oddly, the accounts of Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden I’ve read online have all failed to mention something I discovered at the far right-hand corner of the premises.  This was a compound that had at its centre a ring of seven statues, presumably representing Balinese and / or Hindu deities.  Four of the seven, endowed with physical attributes typical of deities in this part of the world, such as having four  arms, or having three faces, or having unfeasibly big hands, looked fairly innocuous.  Their faces were serene, their heads topped with Balinese crowns or tiaras.  But the other three statues were, frankly, monstrous.

 

In the notes I made at the time, I described one as having ‘…splayed, scalpel-ended fingers… a skirt of long, dangling things, like headless snakes… a mouth gaping horribly, a tongue pouring out of it… goggling eyes, long, matted hair’ and looking ‘…like a marauding zombie.’  Another, I wrote, was ‘…less monstrous…’ but ‘…still alarming… like a particularly rabid vampire…’ with ‘…a gaping mouth, snaking tongue…’ and ‘…long, scratchy fingers.’  Its hands were like ‘…clusters of carrots, Nosferatu-style.’

 

 

The third statue was ‘…a truly ghastly thing…’ with ‘…fingers so long and sharp its hands resembled tree-roots.’  It was ‘…seemingly neckless and shoulder-less, its head a mound of horribleness piled on top of its torso.’  The head had ‘…a mane of long, worm-like things…’ that I wasn’t sure were supposed to be ‘…weird, sprouting growths or just tresses of (very manky) hair.’  Its mouth contained ‘…a big row of upper teeth…’ and a ‘…protruding tongue bifurcating and bifurcating again until it resembled a cluster of starfish.’  This shambling creature would have given H.P. Lovecraft sleepless nights.

 

 

On the site’s map, I think the compound was described as a ‘meditation centre’.  I would have found it difficult to meditate there in the presence of three of its residents.

 

And that was my unexpectedly-creepy last port of call in the grounds of the otherwise beguiling and decorous Tirta Gangga Garden Royal Water Garden.

 

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Instagrammers at the gates of dawn

 

 

One nice thing about 2023 was that my partner and I managed to have a couple of international holidays for the first time since the start of the pandemic.  Here’s a dispatch about Bali, which we visited in June.  In it, your grumpy blogger makes a few uncomfortable discoveries about the nature of 21st century vacationing. 

 

Not having done much research about Bali beforehand, I knew little about Lempuyang Temple other than that it provided a spectacular view, especially at sunrise, and was on every visitor’s must-see list.  Two days after arriving in Bali, we embarked on our first tour and Lempuyang was the first thing on the schedule. The tour began at a fiendishly early hour. Our tour-guide collected us at four o’clock in the morning and we spent the next two hours in his vehicle, speeding along dark, mostly-empty roads to make sure we got to the temple early.

 

Just before six, we arrived at Lempuyang’s car-park, changed to a miniature, open-sided shuttle-bus, and were transported up to the temple’s reception area. We were given sarongs to wear, to comply with the place’s etiquette. Then we had to ascend a steep slope on foot to the temple proper. It wasn’t that long ago, we were told, that there was no shuttle-bus and visitors had to walk the whole way from the car-park, which would have been a slog.

 

 

We emerged onto a flat area that had at its back three stone staircases climbing to three doors.  Presumably, the stairs and doors led to the temple’s inner sanctum, which was out of bounds to visitors. They were extremely ornate.  The doors at the top, bathed in shimmering white light, were set in stone frames that resembled gothic pagodas.  But the most striking features were the stone dragon-heads flanking the staircases at the bottom.  Each had a lantern glowing within its jaws, so that crimson light seeped out through its fangs – though the straggles of stone in their maws looked less like fangs and more like the baleen of plankton-feeding whales.  In the pre-dawn darkness, the lanterns’ glow made the heads blurry and ephemeral. It was as if they weren’t made of stone, but of still-malleable lava.

 

At the other end of the area was a classical Balinese temple candi bentar (split) gate.  Its outer sides were steep and tiered, with decorous, upward-curling prongs, while its inner surfaces were vertical and blank. As the sky beyond changed colour from black to an ashy blue-grey, then to indigo, and then to a paler but smoky shade of blue, the sacred Balinese volcano Mount Agung became visible in the distance. The two sections of the gateway framed its rounded summit with perfect symmetry.  Alas, the view rapidly clouded over and the mountain vanished again.

 

 

On the area’s other two sides were lengths of roofing, held up by wooden columns, white lights shining along their edges. Sitting under these roofs were a growing number of tourists, half of them Westerners, half of them Asians, nearly everyone accompanied by Balinese guides.  We’d all come for a supposedly crucial part of the Balinese tourist experience – getting your photo taken in Lampuyang’s split gateway or, as it’s called, ‘the Gates of Heaven’.

 

Once the sun had risen, a crew of local guys started taking photos of each tourist, or couple, or group, while they posed between the Gates of Heaven.  Ideally, this would have been with Mount Agung as a backdrop, though by this point it was no longer visible.  I’d read complaints online from people who’d had to wait for hours until their turn to get photographed.  This explained the roofing.  Later in the day, with long queues, people would need shelter from the blazing Bali sun while they waited.

 

Our guide had whisked us there so early that we were number 12 in the queue.  We should only have to wait a few minutes, get a quick picture snapped of us, and then be on our way to the next place on our itinerary.  Right?  Wrong.  It wasn’t that straightforward. The subjects of the photos were allowed to strike a number of poses within the gates.  And many of them milked that.  They posed endlessly.  I suppose this was our first encounter with the culture of the Instagrammers and social-media ‘influencers’ who infest Bali these days and clog up the Internet with images, clips and accounts of their marvellously exotic, interesting and well-travelled lives.

 

Some cringy poses were struck.  I was particularly irked by one where the poser (in all senses of the term) would turn, show their back to the camera and point meaningfully towards Mount Agung in the distance – not that you could see it today, buried in the murk – as if they were an explorer who’d just discovered it.  Also annoying was a pose popular among couples.  He’d lean against one side of the gateway, she’d lean against the other, and both would look quizzically towards the camera.  As if to say: Ain’t we a kooky couple?  (Well, no…)  Or one where the person or people simply jumped.  They’d spring up and be pictured in mid-air with arms and legs splayed, looking like characters in a 1940s Warner Brothers cartoon being zapped by a powerful electrical shock.

 

To get your photographs, you handed your phone to the team of locals and they snapped you with its camera.  It was rather a cheat, incidentally, that the photographer took the pictures with the phone positioned above a horizontal mirror.  This created the impression that you and the gateway were standing at the edge of a pool of crystal-clear water, with a perfect reflection plunging beneath you.

 

Finally, our turn came.  As all the previous subjects had done the jumping thing, and the photographer was in the habit of shouting “Jump!” in the middle of each photo-shoot, I gave him a stony stare when I handed over my phone and intoned, “No jumping.”  So he took a few pictures and we struck a few affectionate poses within the gates – holding hands, embracing, nothing fancy. But he kept taking photos and kept telling us to strike new poses. We quickly ran out of ideas, and had to improvise, and ended up looking dorky.  What an ordeal.  This exhibitionism was not our cup of tea.  Of course, all the social-media butterflies who’d come had probably spent days beforehand planning, deciding on and rehearsing the many poses they were going to make.

 

 

That was the main business out of the way, thankfully.  Afterwards, we and our guide took a wander through the lower levels of the temple.  I thought the Gates of Heaven actually looked better from below.  They stood imposingly at the top of a grand flight of stone steps and above stone terraces adorned with clumps of ferns and clusters of white and red flowers.  More dragon-heads loomed here too.  A couple of chickens were making their way up the steps at the time, and I hoped some Instagrammer / influencer, narcissistically posing for photos in the gateway, would have their shots disrupted by the poultry sticking their heads over the threshold behind them.

 

As we descended the steep slope, to be picked up again by the shuttle-bus, the cloud obscuring Mount Agung furled itself into a long, white strand and revealed the volcano’s slopes and summit in their immense, pale-blue glory.

 

 

A treat awaited us.  Our next stop was a more rewarding tourist attraction: Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden.

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A dark Swiss secret

 

From unsplash.com / © Nadine Marfurt

 

I seem to have spent a lot of time recently living in the past, which is no doubt due to the lack of anything happening in the present.  And that, of course, is because of the ongoing and seemingly never-ending Covid-19 pandemic.  Since August 20th, Sri Lanka, the country I’m currently resident in, has been in its third period of lockdown.  When it was announced, my partner and I had just ended a state of self-imposed lockdown, for one of our friends was diagnosed with Covid-19 at the start of August and we’d had to self-isolate.  So, basically, we’ve seen little apart from the inside of our flat for the past two months.

 

Anyway, the following entry is a little stroll down memory lane that I originally posted on this blog in 2015.  While it looks back (fairly) fondly on an adventure I had in 1983, what revived my memories of the adventure was a disturbing article about Switzerland that I’d just discovered on the BBC news website.

 

For two months in the late spring and early summer of 1983 I worked on a farm in the Swiss municipality of Niederweningen, which is a 35-minute train ride out of Zurich.  I can safely say that in terms of sheer, hard, physical work, I’ve done no job like this before or since.

 

At the time, I was in the middle of taking a year out between the end of high school and the start of college.  As far as I remember, nobody else in my school-year did this.  Those who intended to go to college did so in the autumn of 1982, a few months after they’d left school.  Everybody around me, including my parents, seemed to think I was insane for delaying my entry to college by 16 months and spending the intervening period doing loopy things like working on a farm in rural Switzerland.  Nowadays of course, nearly four decades later, you’re considered insane, and lacking in initiative and employability, if you enter college and you haven’t taken a year out, or a gap-year as it’s known in modern parlance.  (At least, that’s how it was before the Covid-19 pandemic and presumably how it’ll be again after the pandemic.)

 

In 1982 I’d discovered an agency called Vacation Work International, which for a small fee arranged paid working holidays in Switzerland.  Switzerland wasn’t top of my list of places to visit but Vacation Work accepted people from the age of 17 upwards.  I was 17 at the time and other foreign-job agencies I’d tried had turned me down because, due to visa regulations, they could only take on people who were 18 or older.  In October 1982, Vacation Work fitted me up with a month-long job as a grape-picker in a vineyard near Lausanne in French-speaking western Switzerland.  This was a tough (and wet – those Swiss wine-producers had a very rainy grape harvest to deal with in 1982) but tolerable job.  So, after spending some time travelling in central Europe and working with the Community Service Volunteers in the English Midlands, I thought I’d contact Vacation Work again and give something else on their Swiss brochure a go.  This time I plumped for a two-month package where I’d work as a farmhand.

 

One thing this job did immediately was rid me of the assumption that everyone in Switzerland wore a smart suit and earned pots of money working in a bank.  The farming family whom Vacation Work attached me to were not wealthy; certainly not by the standards of any farmer I knew back in the UK (and my Dad is one).

 

Their house was plain but serviceable, but certain things I’d assumed would be a feature of any household in Western Europe, however rich or poor, such as a television set, were absent.  One basic commodity that seemed to be lacking was a decent strip of flypaper because, although the house was reasonably clean, its dining table was always plagued by swarms of big, impudent flies.

 

Their farmstead possessed a tractor, a trailer and one or two other bits of machinery, but nothing like what even a modest British farm would be equipped with.  When the farmer, Hugo, wanted to bale some hay, he had to arrange for the use of a baler that seemed to be shared among a number of farms in the valley.  And there were no machines for spraying or weeding crops.  Those chores had to be done by someone with a heavy tank of weed-killer strapped onto their back or by someone wielding a hoe, monotonously, all day long, up and down the furrows of a field.  Similarly, such devices as front-end or back-end loaders were considered an unaffordable luxury.  For shifting things like dung or loose hay, the shovel and the pitchfork were the order of the day.  During my two months there, such basic tools were rarely out of my hands.

 

My abiding memory from those two months is of the daily schedule.  Hugo would usually come knocking at my door at 5.30 in the morning and after a hurried breakfast both of us would be outside, ready for action, at 6.00.  We’d have an hour’s break at lunchtime.  We’d spend the first half that lunch-hour eating and then Hugo would give me a pitying look and suggest, “Jan…”  – neither Hugo nor his family could ever get their tongues around the correct /ǝın/ pronunciation of my name – “…eine halbe Stunde.”  During this free half-hour, I’d usually doze off in my room and wake up 20 or 25 minutes later with a headache and a rotten taste in my mouth that suggested I’d just been chewing a dead frog.

 

At some point in the early evening there’d be another meal, but the work usually continued until 8.00 or 9.00 PM.  During a busy period, like when we were hay-making, we didn’t clock off until after 10.00.  This was the routine six days a week.  Only Sundays were free.  I calculated I must be doing 70 to 80 hours of physical labour each week.  I’d grown up on a farm, and indeed the previous year I’d spent a busy summer working on my uncle’s farm in Ireland.  But I hadn’t done anything on the scale of this.

 

© schweizerdeutsch-lernen.ch

 

That said, I did quite enjoy myself.  I got on well with Hugo and his family were civil to me, although because I was equipped only with the basic German I’d learnt at school and as they spoke the robust – some would say impenetrable – dialect of German known as Schweizerdeutsch, communication was often difficult.  At the end of 1983, I received a nice Christmas card and letter from Hugo and his family, which had been written in English by one of their children who was learning the language as school.  It wasn’t very comprehensible and I wondered if I’d sounded as strange to them when I’d spoken German.

 

The family were also kind enough at the end of my two-month service to present me with a going-away gift: a bottle of illicitly-homemade kirsche.  This bottle of kirsche lasted for the next two years, into 1985.  It was so strong that it could be supped only in minute quantities.  A couple of times I sneakily gave glasses of it to college acquaintances who liked to boast about their drinking prowess and, soon after, enjoyed the spectacle of them falling unconscious.

 

Pleasant too was the scenery at Niederweningen.  It wasn’t mountainous but, half-farmed, half forested, it was gorgeous in a sedate, pastoral way.  And I formed a friendship with another Vacation Work person who’d been assigned to a neighbouring farm, Rebecca Macnaughton.  Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, we’ve kept in touch to this very day.  Actually, no matter how long and how hard I worked, it never seemed to stop me from accompanying my Vacation Work colleague down the road to the local pub for a beer after I’d finally finished for the day.

 

One evening, we tried exploring a different road and happened across a small restaurant that was run, somewhat unexpected, by a well-travelled and very interesting Sri Lankan guy.  In fact, he was the first Sri Lankan I’d ever met and I never imagined that, later in my life, I’d spend seven years living in his home country.  Anyway, he described how, previously, he’d worked in Zurich with some young Swiss heroin addicts.  And suddenly another of my assumptions about Switzerland, about how it was a bastion of order, decency and law-abidingness, had been turned on its head.

 

One other positive thing about the experience was how physically fit I felt afterwards.  Nowadays, with my body wracked by arthritic aches and pains and my waistline fighting a losing battle against a beer-belly, I look at photographs taken of me after I’d arrived home and can hardly believe how athletic I looked then.  Indeed, one of the things I did after that was to spend a fortnight tramping around the Lake District and I seem to remember bounding about those Cumbrian fells like a mountain gazelle.

 

For my Swiss farm-work I was paid a modest wage, but I was never sure if that wage came out of Hugo’s pocket or if it was provided under some Swiss farming subsidy scheme.  From what I could gather, the people provided by Vacation Work International were just one input in a system that saw lots of foreign people working cheaply on those modest-sized, modest-resourced farms.  Hugo told me how one farmhand who’d worked for him previously was an African bloke.  He’d also employed someone, at some point, from the Faroes Islands.  Hugo and the Faroese guy had got along so well that the latter still phoned him for a chat from time to time, from his home in the North Atlantic.

 

Mind you, the annual presence of foreign farmhands didn’t seem to improve Hugo or his neighbours’ knowledge of the outside world.  I recall one lunchtime having an argument with him and one of his neighbours about where Albania was.  I was the only one who maintained that it was in Europe.  Eventually, one of Hugo’s kids’ school atlases was dug out and consulted and, yes, it transpired that I was correct.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Roland zh

 

I’ve written nostalgically about my days on a Swiss farm, but I have to admit that what rekindled my memories of them and inspired me to write this blog-entry was something altogether darker.  Whilst browsing through the online back-pages of the BBC News website magazine, I happened across an article about a phenomenon that the Swiss authorities had until recently kept quiet about.  The article is called SWITZERLAND’S SHAME – THE CHILDREN USED AS CHEAP FARM LABOUR and is written by Kavita Puri.

 

This describes the old Swiss practice of taking orphaned children, or the children of unmarried parents, or children from poor backgrounds, and using them as ‘contract children’; as ultra-cheap labour, often on farms, where they were vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.  Part of the reason for this was simple economics.  Prior to World War II Switzerland wasn’t a wealthy country and a low-costing workforce for its agricultural sector had to be found somewhere.  However, it was driven too by an unforgiving attitude towards poverty.  As one historian explains: “It was like a kind of punishment.  Being poor was not recognised as a social problem, it was individual failure.”

 

The phenomenon of contract children – which over the decades is believed to have involved hundreds of thousands of Swiss youngsters – began in the 1850s and continued for the next century.  It didn’t peter out until the 1960s and 1970s, when “farming became mechanised” and “the need for child labour vanished.”  Also, “(w)omen got the vote in 1971 and attitudes towards the poor and single mothers moved on.”  Even so, Puri’s article mentions one case of agricultural child labour that occurred as late as 1979, just four years before I arrived there for my 70-to-80 hours of weekly hard labour.  What a sobering thought.

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The end of the road

 

© John Murray

 

And to conclude my short series of posts and reposts about the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, here’s something I wrote in 2017 after reading his posthumously published book The Broken Road (2013).

 

A while ago I wrote about A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.  These were the first two instalments in a trilogy of books describing a walking journey made across Europe during 1933 and 1934 by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

 

Fermor was only in his late teens at the time.  Later, he’d make a name for himself as a soldier, decorated war hero, author and scholar though nowadays, several years after his death, I suspect he’s best known for being a possible inspiration for the character of James Bond, who was created by his friend Ian Fleming.  A man always meticulous about his research, Fleming can’t have been too pleased when, following the publication of the 1963 Bond novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Fermor mischievously pointed out an error to him.  At one point in the book 007 orders a ‘half-bottle’ of Pol Roger champagne.  But, observed Fermor, Pol Roger is never sold in half-bottles.

 

A Time of Gifts chronicled Fermor’s progress from Rotterdam to the Czechoslovakian / Hungarian border, while Between the Woods and the Water continued his journey through Hungary and Romania.  He published these two books decades afterwards, the first volume appearing in 1977 and the second in 1986.  The Broken Road, an account of the final part of his epic hike, across Bulgaria to his ultimate destination Constantinople, was published posthumously in 2013.  Fermor didn’t live to complete the third book.  The finished item was based on a draft he’d written and was edited by the travel writer Colin Thubron and Fermor’s biographer Artemis Cooper.  They used information from one of his old diaries to fill in any gaps in the text and, presumably, gave it a final polish too.

 

I read The Broken Road recently.  How does it compare with the previous two books?  And does the fact that it was still a work-in-progress in 2011, when the great man passed away, lessen its impact?

 

The simple and welcome answer is: hardly at all.  There’s one moment where Fermor’s demise leaves things noticeably unfinished, which I’ll come to later.  Otherwise, this is pleasingly on par with the tone and quality of A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.  You may feel at times that a further edit would have tightened Fermor’s prose by trimming some of its floridity – but then you probably felt that way with the earlier books too.  A verbose chap, Fermor didn’t subscribe to the Ernest Hemmingway less-is-more approach to writing.  Indeed, his garrulousness is part of the three books’ charm.

 

One way in which The Broken Road differs from predecessors is its darker tone.  Now in the late stages of his journey, Fermor refers to fatigue and jadedness.  He’s also in a place, Bulgaria, where he feels more alien and out-of-his-depth.  Occasionally, he becomes gloomy: “…the falling depression had been hammered home by the unbroken downpour, lashed into a spiteful anti-human fury by the unrelenting north-east wind that felt as though it was blowing without let or hindrance, as it probably was, direct from Siberia…”

 

He’s more aware now of encountering duplicity and hostility and things that as an outsider make him feel uncomfortable.  During inclement weather, cart-drivers refuse to give him lifts unless he pays money that he can’t spare.  One evening at a restaurant-bar he’s disturbed when the patrons explode into frenzied celebration at the news that King Alexander I of Yugoslavia has just been assassinated in Marseilles.  (“They’ve killed the Serbian king!  Today, in France!  And it was a Bulgar that did him in!”)  And there’s a perplexing moment when, for no apparent reason, a Bulgarian youth called Gatcho whom he’s befriended turns on him, screams abuse and threatens him with a knife.

 

Afterwards, a chastened Fermor wonders about “…how much of a nuisance I might have proved to countless people during the last year: had I been a perfect pest all across Central Europe?  A deep subsidiary gloom set in…”

 

Though it can’t have been fun at the time, I actually like seeing Fermor out of his comfort zone here.  This is because in the previous books there are times when I felt he had it too easy, thanks to his privileged background, his wealthy contacts and the easy manner with which he ingratiates himself with those contacts.  As I wrote previously: “Gradually… Fermor falls in with a succession of aristocrats and moneyed folk.  Each of these gets in touch with relatives or friends further along his walking route and arranges for them to put him up.  So Fermor makes increasingly-frequent stops at big houses, where he dawdles among drawing rooms, libraries, servants, vintage motor cars, lavish family picnics and sumptuous evening balls…  Between the Woods and the Water, in particular, contains so many aristos that they start to blur into one another.”

 

In The Broken Road, Fermor even has to endure a common hazard for solitary, long-distance budget travellers: the loony who attaches himself to you.  (As someone who’s done a fair amount of travelling, I’ve had many loonies attach themselves to me.)  Here, it’s a misfit called Ivancho, “threadbare and urban and with a face like a hare’s,” who talks “at such a speed that I could scarcely understand a word – at the same time eager, confidential and ear-splitting, and without the faintest trace of punctuation, accompanied by many gestures and with a fixed smile and those hare’s eyes projecting and rolling, as though loose in their sockets.  It continued for mile after mile until my head began to swim and ache.”

 

The book isn’t all misery, of course.  Its pages are frequently lighted by moments of rhapsody, moments when the ever-curious Fermor is genuinely delighted by his discoveries.  For example, the whirlwinds of thistledown, sticks and rubbish that appear on the Dobruja steppe: “The plain was still alive with mirages; these four pillars careered across a sunset that the hanging mantle of dust refracted into a vast and tragic drama of orange and amber and blood red and violet…  There are tales of whole wagons being gathered up by these twisting demons, with sheep and buffaloes…”

 

Or the dream-like experience he has in the final chapter when he spends the night in a firelit cave by the Black Sea that “arched high overhead but did not go very deep into the cliff side” amid a mixed band of Greek fisherman and Bulgar shepherds.  They entertain themselves swigging from bottles of raki, playing music on goatskin bagpipes, gourd drums and Eastern European lutes, and dancing – first a slapstick all-male Turkish belly-dancing number and then some intriguing variations on Greek rebetiko.  The chapter is a tour de force of descriptive writing and provides the book, and the trilogy itself, with a fitting climax.

 

The cave sequence is the climax by default because a few pages later what you’d expect to be the real climax, Fermor’s long-awaited arrival in Constantinople, doesn’t materialise.  Rather, the text terminates in mid-sentence (“…and yet, in another sense, although”) and Fermor’s editors provide an apologetic note explaining that he never recorded the arrival in his draft or in his diary.  They speculate: “Perhaps the end of his journey was weighing on him with the traveller’s bewilderment of at last reaching his goal, and the uneasy question of his future.”

 

From ouranoupoli.com

 

There’s compensation, however.  We get an 80-page epilogue wherein, post-Constantinople and early in 1935, Fermor describes a three-and-a-half-week sojourn on the Greek peninsular of Mount Athos, the ‘Autonomous Monastic State of the Holy Mountain’ that’s home to twenty Eastern Orthodox monasteries and that’s off-limits to women.  Indeed, Fermor observes, the peninsula’s off-limits to most things female: “for centuries, no mares, sheep, she-goats, sheep, cats, etc., have lived there, and all the flocks that I saw cropping what grass they could among the rocks, watched by a shepherd boy with a flute, were of rams and billy-goats.”  (Things have now been relaxed, apparently.  According to Wikipedia, “female cats, female insects and female songbirds” are allowed entry to modern-day Mount Athos.)

 

So after A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road, I’ve spent about 800 pages in the company of the young Patrick Leigh Fermor during his trek across 1930s Europe.  Like with any travelling companion on a long and often arduous trip, there’ve been moments when I’ve become irritated at him, at his poshness, his puppy-dog enthusiasm, his occasionally infuriating know-it-all-ness.  But at the same time, I feel I’ve formed a bond with the fellow.  And now that the journey has reached its end, you know what?  I’m going to miss him.

 

© The National Library of Scotland

Posted on

The woods, the water, the gifts and the gab

 

© John Murray

 

Following my blogpost about the biography of the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, I thought it would be timely to repost what I’d written in 2015 about Fermor’s books A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986).

 

It’s hard to know where to start with A Time of Gifts and its sequel Between the Woods and the Water, which chronicle the first part of a journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor made across Europe, on foot, in the mid-1930s.

 

To simply describe them as travel books would do them a disservice.  Fermor, who was a lad of 18 when he started this epic walk, and who’d later become known as a soldier, decorated war hero, author, scholar and polyglot, has a voracious eye for detail that refuses to confine itself to mere geography.  You also get pages of observation and speculation about the history, mythology, art, architecture, languages, costumes and music of the locales that he visits.  At times, it seems like his teenaged brain is the mental equivalent of a blue whale, cruising along, sucking in and trapping every iota of information that comes its way, just as the baleen plates in a whale’s maw sift up tons of krill.

 

Depending on your interests, and patience, this can make the books a fascinating and delightfully anecdotal read; or a distractingly long-winded and rambling one.  I have to say there were moments when I found them fascinating, delightful, long-winded and rambling all at the same time.

 

And they’re verbose.  Regarding writing, Fermor certainly doesn’t believe in the Ernest Hemingway ‘less is more’ approach.

 

A Time of Gifts details Fermor’s progress, in 1933 and 1934, from Rotterdam and through the Low Countries; into Germany, where he passes through Cologne, Stuttgart and Munich; into Austria and to Vienna; by way of a detour, up into Czechoslovakia and to Prague and back; and to the western borders of Hungary.  Between the Woods and the Water continues the story from there and by the end of the second book he’s travelled across Hungary and Romania. A third book, The Broken Road, was published after Fermor’s death in 2011.  I haven’t read it yet but I assume it completes the journey and sees him arrive at his ultimate destination, Constantinople, in 1935.

 

Perusing these books in 2015, you’re aware of what would happen to Europe a few years after he’d walked through it.  You sense that many of the communities, cultures and places described would soon be transformed – disfigured at best, erased at worst.  Viewing the books from this sombre perspective, you can’t begrudge Fermor his obsession with detail.  You want him to get everything recorded, before it’s too late.

 

Events in 1930s Germany send subtle but menacing ripples through the books.  In one Rhineland town in A Time of Gifts, he accepts a youth’s offer of a night’s sleep in an attic.  He discovers the attic to be “a shrine of Hitleriana.  The walls were covered with flags, photographs, posters, slogans and emblems.”  The youth tells him: “You should have seen it last year!  You would have laughed. Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World, Unite…!  Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies.  I realised Adolf was the man for me.  All of a sudden!”

 

Later, in Between the Woods and the Water, Fermor encounters a group of orthodox Jews in the Carpathian Mountains and, while he chats to them, the issue of Nazi Germany crops up: “They came into the conversation and – it seems utterly incredible now – we talked of Hitler and the Nazis as though they merely represented a dire phase of history, a sort of transitory aberration or a nightmare that might suddenly vanish, like a cloud evaporating or a bad dream.”

 

Meanwhile, it’s worth considering these books from another perspective.  Although Fermor did the travelling in the 1930s, he didn’t do the writing until decades later.  He finally got A Time of Gifts published in 1977 and Between the Woods and the Water in 1986.  Thus, while the books’ narrator views the world through the eyes of a teenager, a second pair of eyes are at work here, those of a man in his 60s and 70s with immeasurably greater knowledge and experience.  While Fermor waxes loquaciously about the forces shaping German art, or the Kingdom of Bohemia’s connection with Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, or the elephant that Harun al-Rashid gave to Emperor Charlemagne, or the remnants of Turkish culture found on Ada Kaleh Island, you’re not, as you may initially think, hearing the thoughts of a super-intelligent boy genius.  Many of those thoughts belong to the old Fermor, but they’re expressed in the excitable voice of the youth.

 

© John Murray

 

There’s another point, one that might trouble readers who open a book about a real-life journey made by a real-life traveller expecting the events in it to be, well, real.  Fermor subsequently lost many of the notes he’d written during the trip and in the 1970s and 1980s had to reconstruct a lot using his memory, which admittedly was a formidable one.  And as a report in the BBC news magazine in 2012 suggested, certain episodes may have been embroidered.  One bone of contention was Fermor’s account in Between the Woods and the Water of how he crossed the Great Hungarian Plain.  The book says he did it on horseback.  Some 27 pages are spent in the company of a horse called Malek, “a fine chestnut with a flowing mane and tail, one white sock, a blaze and more than a touch of Arab to his brow”.  This aroused the suspicions of Fermor’s editor and biographer Artemis Cooper because, in an earlier draft of the book she’d seen, the beast hadn’t existed.  Fermor admitted to her, “Ah yes, well, I thought everyone would get tired of me trudging along, so I put myself on a horse for a bit – you won’t let on, will you?”

 

Actually, what bothers me more than these embellishments is Fermor’s reliance on well-to-do contacts for accommodation and sustenance, which increases the further he travels.  His original manifesto was to “set out across Europe like a tramp…  like a pilgrim or a palmer, an errant scholar, a broken knight…  I would travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps.”  When he does this, the results are engrossing.  He dallies with Rhineland bargemen, Hungarian gypsies and Transylvanian shepherds.  He encounters a Franciscan monk called Brother Peter, with whom he communicates in Latin and passes the time playing games of skittles; and a down-at-heels eccentric called Konrad who, in Vienna, encourages him to make money by going around the city’s wealthier homes and offering to draw sketches of the inhabitants.  Sketching, apparently, was yet another of Fermor’s talents.

 

Gradually, though, Fermor falls in with a succession of aristocrats and moneyed folk.  Each of these gets in touch with relatives or friends further along his walking route and arranges for them to put him up.  So Fermor makes increasingly-frequent stops at big houses, where he dawdles among drawing rooms, libraries, servants, vintage motor cars, lavish family picnics and sumptuous evening balls.  He hangs out with people with names like Baron Rheinhard von Liphart-Ratshoff, Count Graf Joseph, Baron Pips, Captain Tibor of the Horse-Gunners, Countess Ilona Meran, Count Lajos, Count Józsi and Count Jenӧ.  There’s a fellow called Tibor living in a house with a “Palladian façade” and another called Istvàn living in “a mixture of manor house, monastery and farmstead”.  Between the Woods and the Water, especially, contains so many aristos that they start to blur into one another.

 

At this point I should declare an interest.  When I was 17, I made my own trip across mainland Europe.  I started off near Lausanne in Switzerland, where I’d earned money from a grape-picking job, and travelled to Bern, Interlaken, Lucerne and Zurich; then into Liechtenstein and through the western end of Austria; into Germany, to Munich, Stuttgart, Heidelberg and Bonn; and finally into the Low Countries and to Brussels and Rotterdam.  I didn’t walk, but hitchhiked, for back then hitchhiking was still a relatively safe and acceptable form of transport.  This meant that while Fermor got to see some of the greatest natural and historical sights of Europe, I got to see a lot of entry-ramps leading down into Autobahns.  For much of the way, my travelling companion was a guy from Stevenage who claimed to be both a football hooligan and a drummer in a punk-rock band, so our conversations were slightly less highbrow than those of Fermor and his new-found chums in aristocratic central Europe.  While I never slept in a barn or a cave-entrance like Fermor did occasionally, I didn’t enjoy the hospitality of the continent’s landed gentry either.  My evenings were spent in a succession of Swiss and German youth hostels, which in those days were run with Teutonic strictness.

 

Indeed, I suspect that if I’d set foot on the estates belonging to Baron Rheinhard von Liphart-Ratshoff, Count Graf Joseph, etc., they’d have taken one look at me, grabbed a gun and sprayed me with buckshot.  Not that I’d have wanted their hospitality.  I’d been raised by typical Northern-Irish Protestant parents who’d instilled in me a devotion to the principles of independence and self-reliance.  The worst thing a Northern Irish Prod could do was accept charity or favours from somebody else.  Hitching a lift with someone for a few miles along the road was bad enough.  Turning up on a stranger’s doorstep and expecting to be housed and fed was diabolical.  But this wasn’t an issue for Fermor who, as a member of Britain’s ruling class, seemed to have both self-confidence and shamelessness in his genes.

 

Still, I’m aware of how this old Hungarian-Romanian aristocracy was shortly to be obliterated, courtesy of Hitler and Stalin.  I can understand why Fermor, writing these books decades later, wanted to commemorate these people and the hospitality they showed him.

 

Anyway, although the books induced some occasional crankiness in me, I generally liked them a lot. Despite Fermor’s rich-and-powerful friends and his many brainy digressions, there’s much in the character of their 18-year-old narrator that I can identify with – through my memories of what I was like at a similar age – and there are passages that are wonderfully evocative in a youthful, wide-eyed, open-to-everything way.  For example, Fermor’s description of an Easter Sunday parade shortly after he’s entered Hungary: “Woken by the bells and the music, the storks in the town were floating and crossing overhead and looking down on our little string of lights as it turned uphill into the basilica again.  The intensity of the moment, the singing and candle flames and incense, the feeling of spring, the circling birds, the smell of fields, the bells, the chorus from the rushes, thin shadows and the unreality of the moon over the woods and the silver flood – all these things hallowed the night with a spell of great beneficence and power.”

 

Or a description of a glade he encounters while wandering in the forested uplands of the Carpathians: “there lay… a space like an enormous room: a long, enclosed clearing where beech trees sprang up like gigantic pillars flinging out vaults of tangled and interlocking boughs.  Grey in shadow, their smooth trunks were flecked with silver where the sunbeams spilt their way through an infinity of leaves and scattered blurred discs of light over the bark and the muscular spread of the roots; they shed a sparser and still more grudging confetti on the unencumbered floor.”

 

Yes, there are moments when Fermor, writing this in his 60s and 70s, seems in danger of succumbing to purple prose, to poetic overkill, to whimsy.  But with those sentences ringing out in the voice of his exuberant 18 or 19-year-old self, he gets away with it – rather magically.

 

© The Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive