OxTravels Read online

  Thanks

  OxTravels was developed by Mark Ellingham of Profile Books (www.profilebooks.com), Barnaby Rogerson of Eland Books (www.travelbooks.co.uk) and Peter Florence of Hay Festival (www.hayfestival.com), together with Tom Childs of Oxfam.

  Thanks from each of us to the authors who generously donated their stories – and time – to the book, and to the photographers who allowed us to use their work, in support of Oxfam. Thanks also to their publishers and agents for their support of the project.

  At Profile, special thanks to Peter Dyer for the inspired cover design. At Oxfam, thanks to Brian Harley, Sara Griffiths, Rose Marsh, Matt Kurton and David McCullough.

  OxTravels © 2011 Profile Books.

  All individual stories © the authors (see ‘Permissions’, following)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

  Set in Sabon, Bradon and LLRubberGrotesque

  Page design by Henry Iles

  First published in 2011 by

  Profile Books

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street, Exmouth Market

  London EC1R OJH

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon CR0 4TD, on Forest Stewardship Council (mixed sources) certified paper

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-184668 496 8

  eISBN 978-184765 745 9

  OxTravels

  MEETINGS OF REMARKABLE TRAVEL WRITERS

  INTRODUCED BY

  MICHAEL PALIN

  EDITED BY

  MARK ELLINGHAM, PETER FLORENCE

  AND BARNABY ROGERSON

  PERMISSIONS

  All the stories in OxTravels are copyright of the authors and have been licensed to this collection for one-off rights. Except otherwise detailed below, all pieces are published here for the first time and thus © 2011.

  Introduction © Michael Palin; Return of the Native © Nicholas Shakespeare; Madam Say Go © Sonia Faleiro; The Monk’s Luggage © Paul Theroux (adapted from Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Hamish Hamilton, 2008); Blood Diamonds © Peter Godwin (adapted from The Fear, Picador, 2010); Arifin © Ruth Padel (adapted from Tigers in Red Weather, Little Brown, 2005); The Nun’s Tale © William Dalrymple (adapted from Nine Lives, Bloomsbury, 2009); The Last Man Alive © Oliver Bullough; The Penguin and the Tree © Lloyd Jones; Manoli © Victoria Hislop; Costa © John Julius Norwich; The Other World © John Gimlette; Three Tibetans in Ireland © Dervla Murphy; Rafaelillo © Jason Webster; A Piece of String © Shehan Karunatilaka; The End of the Bolster © Sara Wheeler; Encounter in the Amazon © Hugh Thomson; Love in a Hot Climate © Rory MacLean; A Confederacy of Ghosts © Jasper Winn; The Beggar King © Aminatta Forna; The Fall and Rise of a Rome Patient © Ian Thomson; Cures for Serpents © Chris Stewart; On the Way to Timbuktu © Michael Jacobs; Big Yellow Taxi © Tiffany Murray; The Orchid Lady © Robin Hanbury-Tenison; With Eyes Wide Open © Raja Shehadeh; Decide To Be Bold © Janine di Giovanni; The Man Who Laughed in a Tomb © Anthony Sattin; A Villain © Horatio Clare; The Zoo from the Outside © Tom Bullough; Meetings with Remarkable Poets © Sarah Maguire; Letting Greene Go © Tim Butcher; Heat of Darkness © David Shukman (adapted from An Iceberg As Big As Manhattan, Profile Books, 2011); The Fourth World © Jan Morris; The Wrestler © Rory Stewart; In Mandalay © Colin Thubron; A Cave on the Black Sea © Patrick Leigh Fermor (from Words of Mercury, John Murray, 2003); Afterword © Barbara Stocking/Oxfam.

  ABOUT OxTravels

  OxTravels is a very simple idea. We asked the best travel writers based in Britain – and a few further afield – for a story loosely based around a meeting. There were no rules except that the story should be true – and the meeting real. The book follows on from Ox-Tales, our collection of stories from fiction writers, published in 2009, and again its purpose is primarily to raise funds for Oxfam’s work. All of the authors have again donated their royalties to Oxfam.

  The original concept was for a book of about 250 pages, with contributions from twenty writers. We had imagined only about half the travel writers that we approached would find time to contribute. They tend to be away travelling, after all. But the response was almost unanimous, both from the established authors and from those we identified as an emerging new wave of travel writers. Almost all have contributed original material, though a handful of authors, for whom that was impossible due to immediate commitments, have adapted previously published pieces.

  So here they are: thirty-six compelling stories, together with an introduction from Michael Palin and an afterword by Oxfam’s own chief traveller, Barbara Stocking.

  Mark Ellingham, Peter florence and Barnaby Rogerson Editors, OxTravels

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Michael Palin

  Return of the Native

  Nicholas Shakespeare

  Madam Say Go

  Sonia Faleiro

  The Monk’s Luggage

  Paul Theroux

  Blood Diamonds

  Peter Godwin

  Arifin

  Ruth Padel

  The Nun’s Tale

  William Dalrymple

  The Last Man Alive

  Oliver Bullough

  The Penguin and the Tree

  Lloyd Jones

  Manoli

  Victoria Hislop

  Costa

  John Julius Norwich

  The Other World

  John Gimlette

  Three Tibetans in Ireland

  Dervla Murphy

  Rafaelillo

  Jason Webster

  The Piece of String

  Shehan Karunatilaka

  The End of the Bolster

  Sara Wheeler

  Encounter in the Amazon

  Hugh Thomson

  Love in a Hot Climate

  Rory MacLean

  A Confederacy of Ghosts

  Jasper Winn

  The Beggar King

  Aminatta Forna

  The Fall and Rise of a Rome Patient

  Ian Thomson

  Cures for Serpents

  Chris Stewart

  On the Way to Timbuktu

  Michael Jacobs

  Big Yellow Taxi

  Tiffany Murray

  The Orchid Lady

  Robin Hanbury-Tenison

  With Eyes Wide Open

  Raja Shehadeh

  Decide To Be Bold

  Janine di Giovanni

  The Man Who Laughed in a Tomb

  Anthony Sattin

  A Villain

  Horatio Clare

  The Zoo from the Outside

  Tom Bullough

  Meetings with Remarkable Poets

  Sarah Maguire

  Letting Greene Go

  Tim Butcher

  Heat of Darkness

  David Shukman

  The Fourth World

  Jan Morris

  The Wrestler

  Rory Stewart

  In Mandalay

  Colin Thubron

  A Cave on the Black Sea

  Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Afterword

  Barbara Stocking

  MICHAEL PALIN (born Broomhill, Sheffield, 1943) established his reputation with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Ripping Yarns. His work also includes several Python films, The Missionary, A Private Function and A Fish Called Wanda. He has written books to accompany his seven travel series – Around the World in Eighty Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway Adventure, Sahara, Himalaya and New Europe – as well as a novel, Hemingway’s Chair. He is currently President of the Royal Geographical Society.

  Introduction

  MICHAEL PALIN

 
Gathered here, for the benefit of Oxfam and its work, are a series of vivid accounts of people and places which not only show the wonder of the world but also the wealth of fine travel writers working today. The theme behind each contribution is, quite loosely, meetings, or to put it more poetically, encounters.

  When I set out on my BBC series Around the World in Eighty Days in 1988 I was nervous. Not so much of the world outside, but of what I would make of it. Ahead of me were the giants of broadcast travel – the James Camerons, Charles Wheelers and the Alan Whickers. Masters of the concise and the memorable. I had also been commissioned to write a book of my experiences on the journey, and all I could think of was the daunting legacy of great descriptive writers like Bruce Chatwin and Jan Morris, and my personal favourite, Norman Lewis, who used bone-dry humour to lure his readers into all sorts of weird and dangerous places. As if this literary legacy wasn’t intimidating enough, there was also Jules Verne, who’d written Around the World in Eighty Days already.

  As my journey went on and I struggled to find a single fresh word to apply to sunsets, Venice or another morning on the Mediterranean, it struck me that perhaps I’d been born just too late and that everything that could be said had already been said. Then, in the third week of the journey, everything changed. We found ourselves far from well-trodden Europe, confined for seven days and nights on a dhow on the Persian Gulf. It had no radar or radio and of the crew of fifteen Gujaratis, only one had a smattering of English. It was wonderful. I couldn’t fill the pages of my notebook fast enough. The unfolding relationship between our BBC crew, high-tech and largely helpless, and the dhow crew, low-tech and indispensable, was one of the most extraordinary and unusual encounters of the Eighty Days journey, and indeed of my six subsequent television journeys. It was the story of two groups of people from almost diametrically opposed backgrounds finding common ground through a common endeavour. In the absence of a shared language, shared food and physical tasks became our currency. Expressions, gestures and laughter became invaluable points of contact. Thanks to the connections I was able to make with the crew of the Al Sharma, I knew that I had a story to tell, both on and off camera, that was recognisably my own. Sunsets and sunrises would always be there but what made them special was who you were watching them with at the time.

  From then on I’ve relied on human encounters to bring to life the places I’ve visited. As far as possible I’ve tried to avoid formal interviews or rehearsed interactions in favour of the accidental and the unexpected. It doesn’t always work. Whilst filming my Pole to Pole journey, I remember being instructed to make friends with a morose lighthouse keeper on the Hurtigruten boat service up the Norwegian coast. He was returning to the most northerly lighthouse in Europe. My magic moment of contact rather fell apart when I asked him, with great concern, how he survived six months of Arctic ice and darkness. ‘Oh,’ he said, brightening up considerably, ‘we watch your programmes on the television’.

  The Tibetan plateau can be an intimidating stretch of the globe, and I would remember it as an abstract and impersonal space had it not been for an encounter with Sonam, a yak herder, who I met at a horse fair near Yushu. Sonam and I ended up in his tent, beside a yak-dung fire, talking about family life in two quite incompatible languages but with as much laughter and understanding as if I were back in my kitchen at home.

  Over a roast goat supper in the heart of the Sahara, I and a group of Touareg cameleers were reduced to hysterics whilst trying to teach each other words from our separate languages. My greatest achievement was to get one of the Touareg to say ‘Bottoms Up’ in an accent that would not have disgraced David Niven. That one evening of human intercourse in the middle of a hostile wilderness gave me a special and particular memory of the biggest desert on earth.

  It is those chance relationships we make along the way that unites this collection of thirty-five travellers’ tales. These stories carry us right across the globe, from Brazil to Burma and Antarctica to Orissa. Lloyd Jones shares Scott’s Hut with a legendary snorer. A raki-fuelled Patrick Leigh Fermor watches a Greek fisherman doing a Turkish bellydance in a Bulgarian cave. Victoria Hislop is moved and inspired by her friendship with a former resident of the leper colony of Spinalonga. Colin Thubron is pedalled about by a rickshaw driver called Tun, who has a powerful and sobering story to tell. Ian Thomson revisits Rome to meet Professor Milza (or, as he helpfully translates for us, Professor Spleen), the surgeon who saved his life twenty-five years earlier. John Gimlette, visiting the forests of Orissa in India to investigate the story of tribesmen who wanted to eat their teacher, encounters the small but fearsome men of the Bonda tribe who would kill anyone who tried to take a photo of them. Russell Crowe and Naomi Campbell are clearly not the only ones.

  From Sarah Wheeler and Rory MacLean come stories of travel experiences enhanced by love and lust. Robin Hanbury-Tenison sets out on a river journey from one end of South America to another with a companion who has to be regularly injected in the bottom. Janine di Giovanni describes how her meeting with a Jewish lawyer in Jerusalem changed her life.

  The great strength of these encounters is that the personal illuminates the general, so through Dervla Murphy’s fondly described encounters with three Tibetans, one of them a dog she adopted, we gain a powerful insight into the history and predicament of the Tibetans in exile. Similarly, the chance that sat Sonia Faleiro next to an Indian maid returning from the Gulf, on the wrong plane as it turns out, gives us a brief but poignant glimpse of what millions of poor Indians will put up with to earn money from rich employers abroad. Through William Dalrymple’s meeting with a Jainist nun I learn more than I ever knew about the extreme asceticism of one of the world’s oldest living religions.

  And there are many more stories that make up this fascinating and irresistible assortment. I’ll not spoil the treats ahead of you by giving away any more. Suffice to say, OxTravels is a uniquely readable and entertaining travel anthology. It ranges right across the world and will hopefully restore your faith in the human race.

  Just like Oxfam, in fact.

  Michael Palin, London, 2011

  Return of the Native

  NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE (born Worcester, 1957) grew up in the Far East and South America. After a stint as a BBC journalist, he joined The Times and then became literary editor for The Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. His novels have been translated into twenty languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Booker-longlisted Snowleg, and The Dancer Upstairs, which was made into a film by John Malkovich. He is also the author of an acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin, and a travel memoir, In Tasmania. He lives in Oxford.

  Return of the Native

  NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

  My sister and I grew up in Brazil during the 1960s. Thirty years later, my sister went back to work with street children in the Pelhourinho district of Bahia, where she fell in love with a former street boy, a carefree Rastafarian called Rasbutta da Silva.

  In 1994, research for a book took me to Bahia and I stayed with them. While my sister occupied herself feeding and teaching the children, Rasbutta showed me around the cobbled streets of the Pelhourinho, where, I could tell, he enjoyed some status. He strummed the mandolin and guitar, composed ballads and sang in a band, the Lions of Jehovah. (His drummer, he told me with a hint of pride, had played with the Lemonheads).

  Rasbutta had been born into an impoverished black family who lived in a favela overlooking the bay. Built on layers of moist garbage, this was no second Troy: what the imagination reconstructed from the stinking mounds were generations of malnourishment and poverty. The shit dripped down stilts that were held together by rags. Water leaked from a single spout and the children who rinsed their hair in the dribble risked hepatitis or cholera.

  Pinched between ocean and highway, Rasbutta’s community survived on fishing for vermelho and enguia. Unable to afford outboard engines, the fishermen paddled huge distances to find the shoals. In the
dawn, they crouched exhausted on the dirty sand, slicing eels that they had stunned with dynamite.

  Shoeless, in overlarge shorts, the children of the favela were forced like Rasbutta in the opposite direction, onto a maniacal highway called the Contorno. They stood in small, excited groups, reaching out their hands to the traffic whirling past. But it was a perilous business, begging on the Contorno, and sometimes a car knocked one of them down.

  Rasbutta had made it across the Contorno to become a musician. His songs divided into two: laments for the children of the favela who grew up to be drug addicts and child prostitutes (that is to say, those whom my sister attempted to care for), and homesick, repetitive melodies about ‘Mama Africa’ and ‘Africa Diaspora’. Rasbutta had little idea what these phrases meant. The way he talked, the words had been leeched of their original sad power, like a national anthem which is sung but not felt.

  ‘I don’t know where my family comes from, what my origins are. Why does Bahia have so many blacks?’

  Nor could Rasbutta’s community enlighten him. His family lacked an oral tradition. One of very few scraps his mother had passed on was how white Portuguese from Brazil went with guns to Africa and carried off the blacks. But nothing more. Africa, for Rasbutta, was simply the source of his blackness, part of a hazy nostalgia. It was not something he questioned or discussed. It was something he sang about.

  He didn’t even believe in voodoo. Once, I stood with Rasbutta inside the shrine belonging to his austere elder brother, a priest of candomblé. The shrine – a stifling shed in a garden – contained a red plastic doll with a lascivious smile, a bar of black soap and an empty champagne bottle. Outside, a tortoise clambered over the roots of a loko tree. The roots, suggested Rasbutta’s brother, stretched under the Pacific to the land of Rasbutta’s ancestors: to Itu-Auyé, to Africa, home of the gods.

  Hocus pocus, said Rasbutta out of earshot. ‘If voodoo’s so powerful, why were we slaves for 400 years?’