peter harris, tapestryweaver

Fascinating to hear of all the interest in seeking asylum or retirement to Ecuador lately.  Following on my last posting, a recommendation of some of my favourite travel books, there is one concerning Ecuador that springs to mind: “The Farm on the River of Emeralds” by Moritz Thomsen (Vintage Departures / Random House edition, New York, 1989).  It paints an up-close-and-personal picture of the author’s determination to build a rural homestead in the coastal jungle province of Esmeraldas, northern Ecuador.  Thomsen (1915 – 1991), an American Peace Corps veteran, wrote with sensitivity, insight, and engagement, about his ambitions and disappointments in trying to make a life for his 53-year-old self, and share the realities of the rural-poor folk around him.  The writer Wallace Stegner called it “…a heart-breaking book about good intentions and idealism crashing against poverty and cultural differences…bound to be read with fascination, amusement, and something close to horror.”  Dating from his experiences in the 1970’s, it’s not that bad by today’s standards – no looming disasters, invasive development, or shifting battle-lines, just the average rural challenges of the ever-encroaching jungle and the traps of poverty, in a hot-house environment.
I haven’t read his earlier memoir, “Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle”, also set in Ecuador, but I came across a wonderful metaphor he constructed that could be the book’s epigraph: “Living poor,” he wrote, “is like being sentenced to exist in a stormy sea in a battered canoe, requiring all your strength simply to keep afloat; there is never any question of reaching a destination. True poverty is a state of perpetual crisis, and one wave just a little bigger or coming from an unexpected direction can and usually does wreck things.”  Then there is a sequel to his experiences in Ecuador, “The Saddest Pleasure” (from “travel is the saddest of the pleasures”, a line by Paul Theroux), even more intensely self-reflective.
In 1976, I travelled for two and a half months in the Andean countries of South America, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.  I was still pretty naive, but by this time I had already taken a year-long sojourn to Europe and overland to India, in 1972-73.  Come to think of it, I am still pretty naive, travel has done little to change that, and the sense I make of “the saddest pleasure” is that it is entirely pleasurable except that all those pleasures are eventually left behind.  We are all travellers, threading our ways through the tapestry of this world.  Anyway.
Overland along the backbone of South America meant following the route of the Pan-American Highway with few alternatives, so very often it meant falling in step with other travellers, stopping or moving-on by consensus, partnerships forming and re-forming due to coincidences, pick-up relationships, information-sharing.  The cultural environment was a lot more familiar, but more raw and dangerous than west or south Asia – to me it approximated the “Wild West” of open landscapes and the rough imposition of modernizing habits and developments on defensive indigenous peoples.  On an earlier visit, a Colombian friend had pointed to the juxtaposition in a village square of a church facade and a billboard advertising a soda-pop brand, calling them the twin oppressors of his culture.  Maybe I am just naive about my own role in all this, not one of the shock troops of western development, but a camp-follower.  Maybe there is no such thing as “asylum”, retirement, or pleasure without reflection.

Posted in travel

For a long time, I have been a fan of the genre known as “travel literature”, escapist yes, not into fantasy or science fiction, but to real places and often backwards in time.  More recently, I’ve thought of posting a review of some of my favourite travel books, adventures to make the reader feel more content and grateful to sink into an overstuffed armchair on a long winter evening, pulled up close to a crackling campfire somewhere on the Tibetan plateau.  Who knew that Ian Fleming, originator of the James Bond franchise, had an older brother Peter who made an “undeservedly successful” venture across western China from “Peiping” to Srinagar in the 1930’s, and wrote about it vividly and easily, because it was not the product of imagination or research, but experience?
Then I realised that several of the books I would turn to first, are connected by more than just genre, acquisition, and enjoyment.  As a student of the shawlweaving tradition of Kashmir, I’ve had quoted to me from every book on that subject the observations of William Moorcroft, an early 19th-century British colonialist who made his way into Central Asia, supposedly in search of breeding stock to improve the quality of cavalry horses in subtropical, lowland India.  At the time when the East India Company, based in Calcutta, was extending its control over the sub-continent, Moorcroft paused in Srinagar to study the extensive and already famous shawl industry, in the middle of an epic six-year journey from which he never returned.
So: I was browsing in a bookshop for a then-recently-reviewed book about Afghanistan by Karl Meyer, and came up with an earlier work (“Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Asia” by Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac, Abacus/Little, Brown and Company (UK), 2001), a colourful and fast-paced history, of rather the “great man” variety, that opens with… William Moorcroft, and closes 600 pages later in mid-20th-century with another chap I keep bumping into, Nicholas Roerich.
I wanted to know all I could by and about Moorcroft, not only in the hope of discovering some overlooked detail of his reports on shawlweaving that might only be useful to a specialist, but also because he was one of the earliest European documentarians treading an unspoiled path, and it’s a moot question whether he was officially a British spy.  I finally found a reprint of his two-volume “Travels” (“Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab, from 1819 to 1825” by William Moorcroft and George Trebeck, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1979), originally edited from his papers by H. H. Wilson in 1841.  This was in a chaotic little bookshop in Faletti’s Hotel, Lahore, where my initial inquiry was met with a negative, but the elderly proprietor cleared a space and sat me down to his self-prepared tea.  As my eyes wandered, I discovered the books in a stack practically at my elbow – a test of my kismet.
In the early going Moorcroft’s account, always filled with acute observation and lived experience,  seems pedestrian in more ways than one.  Following traditional trails through hitherto unmapped territory he is at pains to record such things as distance travelled, on which bank of the river, and how many tributaries crossed.  But deep in the second volume there are satisfyingly dramatic days as Moorcroft escapes imminent robbery and murder by seeking refuge in the home of a religious elder and appealing for the traditional protection of pashtunwali.  In the end it was a fever that claimed him.
Alberto Manguel once said that anyone who hasn’t already read Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” (many editions) is in for a treat – true for no one more than me.  An adventure novel first published in 1901, its old-fashioned romanticism and over-the-top local colour is easily as much fun as the first, young Harry Potter film (which I first saw on late-night TV one February, huddled under my blanket in a drafty, down-market Paharganj hotel room).  But the connection here is that Kipling must have been familiar with Moorcroft’s “Travels”, if only for the intelligencer’s covert trick of counting paces along the trail to map his route.
The last word on Moorcroft is an in-depth biography (“Beyond Bokhara: The Life of William Moorcroft, Asian Explorer and Pioneer Veterinary Surgeon” by Garry Alder, Century Publishing, London, 1985), long out-of-print.  Moorcroft’s early years were as accomplishful as his later travels: born in 1767, he studied medicine, then trained in France (at the time of the revolution) in veterinary medicine.  Specializing in the treatment of horses, he set up a thriving practice catering to the carriage trade in London in 1792, but eventually accepted a post with the East India Company to manage their horse-breeding program in Bengal in 1808.  Restless and independent-minded, he was an evident patriot but unpopular with his Company superiors, so whether he was on the payroll as a spy, or contributed his intelligence-gathering as a loyal subject, seems a fine point.  During his travels, his medical skills usually made him a welcome guest.  Garry Alder for his part must have been a true admirer, retracing Moorcroft’s explorations, and reconstructing his own manuscript lost along the way.  In my own small but persistent way, I eventually located a copy of “Beyond Bokhara” at the Toronto Reference Library.  As I paged through it to make a complete photocopy, I had the distinct sense that, acquired when it was new 20 years earlier, it had, sadly, never been opened.
At the other end of “Tournament of Shadows”, I’m prompted to recommend Nicholas Roerich not because his book is as rivetting, but because he was as willful and eccentric in his accomplishments and travels.  Russian-born of Scandanavian ancestry, he is best-remembered as a painter and stage-designer, recognized early for collaborating with Diaghilev on ballet productions by Borodin and Stravinsky.  A political moderate and dedicated cultural preservationist, he emigrated from Russia after the revolution, moving to London and New York in the early 1920’s, touring, exhibiting, working on various causes and projects, enjoying celebrity and friendships with notables of the time, nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize.  A Theosophist, he embarked between 1925 – 1928 on a trek through Central Asia and western China in search of Shambala, enduring great hardship barred at the frontier from entry into Tibet, and subject to suspicion as a possible spy.  He recorded his experiences in “Altai-Himalaya, A Travel Diary” (Adventures Unlimited Press; Kempton, Illinois, 2001).  His final years were spent at Naggar in the Kulu Valley, northern India, where he died in 1947.  In 1985, my late partner Ellen and I spent several rainy days at a former royal hunting lodge converted to a government tourist guest-house, perched on the side of the valley overlooking Naggar and Roerich’s home, now preserved as a museum.  Some 165 years earlier, William Moorcroft passed by up the valley and noted the hunting lodge, early on the journey to his destiny.

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Recently I was reading the “Babur Nama” (in a translated and abridged Penguin Classics edition), the vivid and highly personal autobiographical journal of Babur, the conqueror and founder of the Mughal Empire dynasty in early 16th-century India.  A descendant of both Emir Timur and Chingiz Khan, his early territorial wins and losses took him back and forth across central Asia from Andijan to Samarkand and Kabul, and I went to the back issues of National Geographic (I have the CD set) looking for images of the landscapes he was traversing.  National Geographic seems to have a fascination for Afghanistan – the former king M. Zahir Shah was a noted subscriber – and several teams of authors have reported on their treks along the Wakhan Corridor, a narrow strip of rugged terrain separating what was then the Soviet Union and Pakistan, leading up to the western tip of China.

In an earlier account published in the November 1950 issue, the authors Franc and Jean Shor describe how, having reached the limit of the effective protection of their Afghan military escort, they put themselves in the hands of a local Kirghiz clan leader Rahman Qul in order to complete the furthest stage of their trek.  In an eerie epilogue to their tale of surviving the rigours of the trail, they hear more about their guardian:
“Two years before, the mayor began, Rahman Qul and his tribe had crossed the Russian Pamirs.  There they had robbed a caravan and murdered every man in it.  Pursued by the Russians, they had fled into Chinese Turkistan and taken up residence near the border post of Mintaka.
“Rahman Qul had become a close friend of the commander of the little Chinese border garrison.  Less than a month before we met him he had invited the commander and his garrison of eight men to a lunch on a Mohammedan festival day.  While the Chinese were eating, Qul’s tribesmen had stolen into the tent behind them and murdered every man in cold blood, the mayor reported.  They had looted the garrison of guns, ammunition, horses, and supplies, and fled across the Afghan border to resume residence on the Pamir Plateau.”
Twenty years later in an April 1972 article, a different pair of authors Roland and Sabrina Michaud setting out on the same trek from Kabul described the help they received from their “friend” the tribal chieftain Rahman Qul, and showed him the photograph of himself in the earlier article.  Thinking that Rahman Qul had not only survived but perhaps also risen above his earlier reputation as a “highwayman”, I searched the web and found an article by M. Nazif Shahrani from the Spring 1984 issue of the journal Cultural Survival Quarterly, that added much to his story not only since but also before his encounters with these foreign adventurers.
His group of nomadic pastoralist Kirghiz fled their traditional homeland in one of the remotest corners of the USSR in the face of mid-1920’s efforts to enforce the Soviet policy of resettlement on collective farms.  They settled in the Wakhan Corridor, but after Soviet military cross-border raids in 1946 they shifted to Chinese territory in the Pamirs, only to return 3 years later after the Chinese Communist revolution in 1949.  This much of the story ties in with the less-sympathetic version told in the 1950 article.  Until the late 1970’s this Afghan Kirghiz community of fewer than 2000 enjoyed stability, recognition from the Afghan government, and increasing prosperity, under Rahman Qul’s strong leadership.  But after the Communist military coup and subsequent Soviet invasion in 1978-79, the Kirghiz, led by now Haji Rahman Qul, sought refuge in the northern areas of Pakistan.  There they languished for four years in the relatively hot, lowland climate, with no land base to practise their pastoral lifestyle.  Haji Rahman Qul tried to rally his scattered community and seek a more promising homeland, first in Alaska but the US was unresponsive, and finally in Turkey.  In 1981, along with a number of other ethnic-Turkic Afghan refugees, Turkey accepted the Kirghiz group, who were resettled in a village built for them in the eastern province of Van.
“The critical role of the Kirghiz khan, Haji Rahman Qul, now referred to in the modern Turkish vernacular as Agha (chief), cannot be overestimated in the continual struggle of his community for survival. Through the strong will of this remarkable traditional tribal leader, the Kirghiz have been able to preserve the integrity of their community, although in the process a way of life has vanished forever.” (M. Nazif Shahrani)
Haji Rahman Qul, as Babur would have said, went to God’s mercy, in 1990.
The history and current status of his Kirghiz community in Turkey is the subject of a good-natured documentary film “37 Uses for a Dead Sheep” (2006) by Ben Hopkins.

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Like a four-leaf clover, I found this without looking in the grounds of the Aleppo citadel overlooking the city. I’m told it’s not particularly old or rare, so I don’t think I was raiding Syria’s cultural patrimony. For me it’s a talisman, a connection…and if it were still lying there now, what?

I remember once, there were two of us waiting to catch a train from Aleppo to Baghdad – this was in 1973, ancient history.  It was winter, so it was freezing cold, and in the evening, and the train was going to be delayed for hours.  We were knocking around the deserted streets looking for somewhere we could get another hot meal before two days on the train.  About all we could find was tea and backgammon, but we met this young guy who offered to open a can of beans or something, you know what I mean, nothing fancy, back at his place, so we did that.   Traditional ethic of hospitality meets one-world, back-street travellers, right?  You could tell that we were stretching his resources but it wasn’t serious.  We were just sitting around – he was a Palestinian, a university student – it was interesting talking for a while.  Then it was getting late and my friend kind of suddenly mentioned he was thinking of heading back to the train station, and I could stay there longer if I wanted.  The only thing that went through my mind was, it was the middle of the night, I think I know how to get back to the station, when is the train going to be ready to go, what would happen to my checked knapsack if it went without me?  No, I was ready to go, and we left.  Later he said to me, that the student was trying to pick me up, and he thought I might have wanted him to go by himself.  All this was news to me, that’s how naïve I was.  Probably I wouldn’t have done anything different, and playing stupid was the best move all round; for actually not seeing it happening, I get no points.
Anyway, back at the train station, there wasn’t going to be a train anytime soon, and we wound up sitting in the stationmaster’s office because it was the only enclosed space and there was one of those little kerosene stoves where you could watch it drip, drip, drip into the burner.  We were always so grateful to be around one of those in that part of the trip, so we sat and drank little glasses of tea, smoked (everybody did), didn’t get much more to eat, and just talked and talked, about that, and a million-and-one things, all night long.  It was special, and I’ve always remembered it, although the whole trip was full of things like that, not because I almost got seduced, but because I didn’t, and went on from there to have a bottomless kind of intimacy, just talking, that doesn’t happen nearly so often.  Any two people can do that, they just have to be ready and open to it, and it’s nobody else’s business if they do.  It’s such a gift, and it shows how boxed-in we are in society that it’s so rare.

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Tooti Chowk, Paharganj, Delhi

For me the biggest advantage of transitioning (whether I wanted to or not) to a digital camera, is being able to see immediately if the photo I just took is successful, or how to make the next one better.  This is especially true in low-light situations – shots I would have thought in the past were hopeless.  I just have to remember to hold the camera steady.

Photos from the car window of wild elephants browsing at the roadside in the Wayanad Hills of south India, were still marginal at best.  I wasn’t using flash, to avoid startling the elephant, and so once the headlight beams had gone past the elephant, I was on my own.  It’s more vivid in my memory.

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