Camel Train to the Sahara

January 14, 2016March 12, 2020 / Richard Senior / 4 Comments

“How are you, my friend?”

“I’m very good, thank you. And you?”

“Very good. Insh’Allah. First time on camel?”

“Yeah. I’ve ridden elephants, though.

“Camel is different.”

“Of course. No trunk, right?”

There is an art to getting on a camel. No one told me what it was. I got on like a drunk trying to scale a fence. The Bedouin, then, told the camel to get up and, in three distinct movements, it thrust its head forward, extended its back legs – tipping me forward as if in a roller-coaster going over the top – then brought its front legs up to meet them.

There was a group of us – British, French, Dutch, Austrian, Canadian, Korean and Japanese – gathered from hotels, hostels and riads around Marrakesh and driven 350 miles across country to the edge of the Sahara where the road stopped abruptly and the towns thinned out to villages, then hamlets and finally to nothing but an isolated hostel and sand. The camel train would take us the rest of the way.

The camels were roped together in two groups of four with a Bedouin leading each group. I had the camel at the front of the train behind a Bedouin in an ankle-length thobe and turban, and jeans and Asics trainers. He hummed to himself as he ambled through the dunes, until his smartphone rang. He was a digital nomad.

The winds had stacked, shaped, sculpted, smoothed and polished the sand into hills and valleys, peaks and troughs, soaring anything up to five hundred feet, then plunging back to the desert floor, gently undulating, and soaring up again; the ridges were sharply creased, the slopes pristine.

It was all the same to the camels, who plodded along with deliberate steps, never slowing, never slipping, up sinuous inclines, along knife-edge trails across the dunes, and down slopes steep enough to worry me about going over the handlebars. They have a reputation for being foul-tempered things which spit and burp and growl, but then so do some of us. These camels had a relaxed air and beatific smiles. They seemed barely to notice, let alone to care about, the strangers on their backs.

The sand glowed orange in the dying sun of the late afternoon; the shadows were long and dark. We stopped at the top of a dune and looked west and watched the sun slip below the horizon, then set off again in the twilight.

It was a lot more comfortable on the camel than I imagined it would be, but my thighs eventually began to protest at constantly stretching around the saddle bags and I was glad when we got to the camp.

The camels sank to their knees and I got off as clumsily as I had got on. The Bedouins unloaded the saddle bags and we dumped our stuff in the tents. They were a roughly rectangular shape, flat-roofed, waist-high, with a wooden frame covered with stitched woollen blankets.

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There was a big communal tent, too, with flickering lanterns, low tables, Berber rugs and a family of tabby cats. The Bedouins poured out mint tea, lit a crackling camp fire and cooked a simple but perfectly good tagine. The cats noisily begged us to share it and, as always, it worked with me: they got the chicken and I had the bread and potatoes.

I had packed an overnight bag and shorts and a t-shirt to sleep in, but I am not sure where I thought I was going to find water, nor whether I really envisaged stripping off and getting ready for bed in the dark and the cold of the desert. As it was, I just laid down fully-clothed and pulled a couple of Berber rugs over me.

The cats crept into the tent in the middle of the night, or at least I assume it was them: something around that size bolted out when I got up to go to the toilet, and I didn’t want to think about what else it might be.

A wind had picked up by then and howled with a quiet determination. The sky was crammed with stars. The camels were sleeping with their necks stretched out across the sand in front of them. The last embers of the fire glowed weakly.

I was perhaps an hour, as the camel plods, from the nearest hamlet but it was easy to imagine that I was hundreds of miles in any direction from human habitation, further from the modern world and all its annoyances: far from endless TV shows about forgotten celebrities and amateur property developers, interspersed with excitable adverts for products which nobody needs, from constant finger-wagging and pettifogging rules, from unsmiling one-upmanship where fun ought to be, from lives too busy for living. It was just an illusion, though.

We were back on the camels in the bitter cold dawn, hooded and gloved, to welcome the sun back up.

© Richard Senior 2016

The Uros and the Uru-Sceptics

January 12, 2016March 12, 2020 / Richard Senior / 2 Comments

The island was made from layers of totora reeds and looked like a giant hay bale. It was one of forty-four floating islands between the reed beds on Lake Titicaca. As I stepped ashore, it sank underfoot, forcing up a puddle of water. It flexed and wobbled like a plywood sheet laid over uneven ground. Yet a few families called it home.

The Uru people have lived life their own way for hundreds of years. They fled to the lake and built the floating islands when the Aymara arrived in Southern Peru; they anchored the islands to the bed of the lake and stood ready, if attacked, to weigh anchor and row them to safety.

The islands rotted from the bottom up but the Uros maintained them by adding more layers of reeds. They used the same reeds to build huts and watchtowers and the white lower part as a foodstuff: they say that it works as a painkiller and hangover cure and inures them to the cold. They fished with tethered cormorants, kept ibis for eggs and hunted birds with flintlock rifles.

They took bundles of totora reeds to the mainland to barter and sell and, by now, you will have guessed what they made their boats from.

There are solar panels, nowadays, on some of the huts; the Uros have TVs and smartphones, and their own radio station. They have motorboats to get to the mainland, although they still build rowing boats from totora reeds – I was rowed round the islands in one. They earn money, now, by selling textiles and handicrafts to the tourists who visit the islands.

Otherwise, though, their lives seem largely unchanged in the half a millennium or so within which the Aymara where subjugated by the Incas, the Incas crushed by the Spanish, the Spanish driven out by Bolivarian rebels and independent Peru fought wars, in turn, with Colombia, Spain, Chile, Colombia again and Ecuador and went through military juntas, Maoist insurgencies and strong-armed economic reforms.

Sceptics maintain that it is all a façade. They accuse the Uros of embellishing their history – if not making it up – to entertain the tourists. But wherever there are people living an alternative lifestyle, there are mainstream figures doing their best to discredit them.

With no written records until the Spanish arrived, neither the Uros nor the Uru-sceptics can prove their case; but researchers have at least established that the Uros are genetically different from other indigenous groups.

Their lifestyle, though, has been under threat since the 1980s, when the government restricted hunting and fishing on Lake Titicaca and started confiscating their eggs and birds. Then climate change caused the surface of the lake to rise dramatically and inundate the islands, and brought droughts which ravaged the tortora reeds.

The Uros rebuilt their islands closer to the shore of the lake and many drifted off to live a regular life on the mainland; others have followed since. The sceptics – who obviously have too little going on in their own lives – claim that no one really lives on the floating islands anymore and that the Uros return to homes in Puno after the last tourist boat leaves.

It seems unlikely to me that they pack up their children, their birds and their cats every night and leave their televisions, solar panels and radio equipment unattended. But, whether fixed or transitory, the population of the islands has undoubtedly fallen and each generation seems a little less interested than the last in maintaining the traditional lifestyle. Tourism is now a major part of the lives of the Uros who remain on the islands, and may soon be their only reason for staying.

© Richard Senior 2016

Gyeongju: Two Days in the Museum without Walls

November 25, 2015March 14, 2020 / Richard Senior / Leave a comment

There are two or three blocks of forgettable shops south of the station, then a sudden lake of yellow rapeseed.

Narrow paths have been cut into the rape field and happy young couples stroll through the flowers, stopping to smile and make peace signs for cameras at the ends of poles they hold at arm’s length. The field is floodlit at night and more couples stream in and flashtubes pop across the field like a diorama of a battle.

Beyond the rape field, behind trees, older couples march along paths through the forest to a stream with their ski poles and sunhats and leisure wear as vivid as the yellow of the rapeseed and the blue of the sky. There are hazy mountains in the middle distance and the keenest start early and hike to them.

Gyeongju was the capital of the ancient Silla kingdom which ruled Korea for a thousand years from the first century BCE. The walking trails criss-cross the site of Banwolseong Fortress and there are fragments of the old walls in the undergrowth. The hourglass-shaped Cheomseongdae Observatory is still intact after fourteen centuries and sits, surreally, in the middle of a park.

The kings and their treasures are buried in two dozen grassy hillocks, like a much-simplified form of the Egyptian pyramids. One has been opened up so that visitors can look inside and the whole complex has been modelled into a park with quiet paths between trees and azalea bushes and traditional music piped in through hidden speakers, which gives it a dreamlike quality.

The same music plays, to the same effect, in the grounds of the royal palace. The pavilions and ornamental lake have been rebuilt and the gardens restored and you could stroll there happily for hours, at least if you were not being followed around by a school party repeatedly saying “hello” and “how are you?” because they wanted to practice their English and those seemed to be the only words they knew. It is wonderfully ethereal at night, when the pavilions are lit up and reflect in the lake.

Gyeongju is known, with justification, as ‘the museum without walls’. I filled a day looking at temples and tombs, pagodas and wooden hanok houses and walking along trails through the forest. I planned to hike Mount Namsan, as well, but it turned out to be a lot further away than it looked and I gave up on the idea before I got there.

I set out early next morning on a bike which I borrowed from the guest house. It was a cheap, Chinese-made thing with brakes to trap fingers, sharp edges to scratch and protruding parts to bruise. It was a vicious cycle.

The shifter for the back hub refused to shift. The other had four positions for three gears. The first just made it click annoyingly, the second took me back to where I started, the third made the crank spin like a propeller, and the fourth made the chain come off.

What I had taken, from the map, to be a quiet country road was actually a busy highway; it ran alongside the railway and sloped forever uphill. But there were cherry blossoms, white herons and mountains as well as the concrete, cars and trains.

I guessed that it would take around half an hour, an hour at the most, to ride to Bulguksa Temple, but it apparently takes longer than that in the car. The incline seemed slight but never let up until the turn off for Bulguksa, when it became a long, steep hill. Each sign implied that Bulguksa was round the next corner, or the one after that, and it began to feel like chasing a rainbow.

I got there in the end, though, and it is a splendid temple with pagodas, bridges, statues and intricately carved, gloriously painted roofs set in a forest you could lose yourself in for a day; but it was Saturday and brimming with day-trippers – of course, I was one of them – and instead of the serenity you expect at a Buddhist temple, there was the stress of a big city at rush hour.

It would have been too easy to freewheel down the hill and follow my tyre tracks back to Gyeongju, and instead I took the long way round, up yet another hill, and hoped that it would lead into town. Eventually it did.

© Richard Senior 2015

An Onsen Town

October 27, 2015March 16, 2020 / Richard Senior / 2 Comments

“The Japanese have the same attitude to bathing as Frenchmen reserve for eating: they do it with a mixture of connoisseurship and physical abandon. A bath can be enjoyed alone, but it is more often taken with many others, keeping up with the latest gossip while scrubbing one’s neighbour’s back” – Ian Buruma, A Japanese Mirror

Yamanaka Onsen was deep in the mountains. It had rained and the road was damp and the mist clung to the peaks of the mountains. In the bottom of the gorge, a river followed the road in a series of undisciplined curves. It was a striking, mineral-rich green and flowed rapidly after the rain. A truss bridge stretched high across the river, triangular in section, violet in colour, describing a lazy S-shape. It led to a path through a park filled with cherry blossoms, and alongside the river, past a waterfall to a shrine and a 2,300 year-old cedar. Ryokans were clustered around the river on the edge of town.

It was the middle of the morning and the main street was all but deserted. There were no customers in the old wooden stores. It was early, yet, for the sake brewery, the tea-house and the soba noodle shop; and there were no tourists, but me, to browse the shops which sold the lacquerware for which the region is famous.

The town was built around hot springs and the two public bath houses, one for men and one for women, are centrepieces of the plaza. The waters, at a temperature of 48.3 degrees Celsius and rich in calcium and sodium sulphate, are said to relieve “muscular pain, joint pain, shoulder pain, bruises, chronic digestive diseases, haemorrhoids, over-sensitivity to cold, fatigue, arteriosclerosis, cuts, burns, chronic skin diseases and motor paralysis”.

I slipped my trainers off and went in, only to be stopped at the door and made to understand through urgent, embarrassed gestures that the smaller building across the plaza was the men’s bath house.

I had come unprepared, as ever, and had to hire a towel and buy a sachet of shower gel. There were lockers in the foyer for shoes and valuables and, with those locked away, I went through to the wood-panelled changing room and folded my clothes into a basket and slotted it onto the shelf. It is illegal to be untidy in Japan.

It was a bright, spacious bath house with a pitched wooden ceiling and high windows running the length of the room. The walls and the floor were tiled in muted colours; there was a tiled pillar in the centre of the bath with a plinth you could sit on and lean your back against it. Around the edge, there were shower heads and mirrors set low. I took a plastic stool from the stack, sat down and showered, then padded across the room to the bath and slid into the hot water. The idea is to soak for a while, get out, shower off and soak again. I have no idea whether it does anything for the conditions it is said to relieve, but it is without doubt relaxing.

There were a couple of locals bathing, perhaps connoisseurs but thankfully not acting with the physical abandon which Ian Burumu mentioned in the extract above. They politely ignored me and I politely ignored them. We had no language in common to gossip, in any case; and I was not going to scrub anyone’s back.

In San Francisco with Kerouac

December 5, 2014May 1, 2020 / Richard Senior / Leave a comment

[S]tretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time. – Jack Kerouac, On the Road

North Beach is an old Italian neighbourhood. There are tricoleri painted around the lamp posts and cafes named for operas, and delis filled with salami and prosciutto legs. Everywhere the smell of good coffee and soffritto gently frying, the clunk-shush of espresso machines, bouna seras and ci vediamos.

I stayed on Mason at the San Remo Hotel, a pretty, Italianate Victorian with marble sinks, iron bedsteads and old wooden bureaux in the rooms. There were no televisions, duvets or phones, little of the modern world beyond a Wi-Fi connection. It was as if nothing had changed since it opened in 1906, since the two World Wars, since Kerouac slouched round the neighbourhood, seabag on shoulder, bottle in hand, looking for a bed, a sofa, a floor for the night.

I had just started reading his novel, Big Sur, which opens with ‘Dulouz’ (Keroauc) stumbling drunk into City Lights bookstore to see the owner, his friend ‘Monsanto’ (Lawrence Ferlinghetti), and as I walked down Columbus and glanced in the window of a cheery old bookshop, I was startled to see the words “City Lights” in shaded gold letters on the glass. I had no idea it was still open.

It has the shabby, shambolic air of all the best bookshops, a relief from the corporate monotony of the chain stores which dominate the market and have all the character of a bank. The icons whose names appear on the spines of the books in the Beat literature section which fills one wall, whose photographs decorate another wall, Kerouac and Cassady, Ginsberg and Corso, Snyder and Ferlinghetti, were drawn to San Francisco in the forties and fifties, when writers could afford to live in North Beach. They called themselves the Beat Generation.

Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx in On the Road) and Gregory Corso each lived in apartments down the street on Montgomery. Corso broke into City Lights one drunken early morning and robbed the till. “We just didn’t pay his royalties for a couple of years,” shrugged Ferlinghetti. Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) lived – between wanderings and mistresses – with his second wife in nearby Russian Hill.

Kerouac never really lived in his “favourite exciting city of San Francisco,” but frequently ended up there, hitching rides and hopping freights from the East Coast. He spent nights in friends’ spare rooms, or on their sofas, and stayed for a time in the attic of the Cassadys’ “two-storey crooked, rickety wooden cottage in the middle of tenements” which is still standing at 29 Russell Street. Otherwise he booked into Skid Row hotels around Third and Mission and Fourth and Howard South of Market, now developed out of recognition, and the Tenderloin, which is still the sorriest part of town.

I passed through a few times, but always hurriedly and never at night. It makes you despair to see the ruined lives, the lack of hope, the long, desperate queues for soup kitchens, the derelicts in the doorways, the guys selling scraps of pitiful junk reclaimed from bins spread across blankets on the pavement – another, different, beat generation.

“I ain’t no panhandler,” a man said to me, much as Brits say “I’m not being funny” whenever they are about to be funny. “No!” said his girlfriend, shaking her head in support, as he started to explain that he was from out of town, and his car had been towed, and he had no cash, and his card had been declined, and he was sorry to ask, but he needed to raise $18. I believed none of it, of course, but gave him a couple of dollars for effort.

A few blocks north, through the Dragon Gate, is one of the oldest and biggest of the world’s Chinatowns, a teeming, bustling quarter crammed with restaurants, temples, meeting houses, mahjong players, incense, and maneki-neko cats, waving limply as the crowds throng past. The ghosts of the Beat Generation are everywhere. Kerouac wrote in The Dharma Bums of a night at Nam Yuen restaurant at 740 Washington Street, a favourite of Gary Snyder’s:

We all got together…and drove in several cars to Chinatown for a big fabulous dinner off the Chinese menu, with chopsticks, yelling conversation in the middle of the night in one of those free-swinging great Chinese restaurants of San Francisco.

The building is still there with the sign out front, but it is closed, boarded up and graffitied now. Its neighbour, the “marvellous old restaurant” Sun Hung Heung (called Sam Heung in Desolation Angels) is now simply Chinatown Restaurant. Ginsberg preferred the narrow red-brick, green-shuttered Sam Wo along the street at 813, with San Francisco’s most truculent waiter. It closed for good in 2012.

Round the corner, up Chinatown’s steep main street is a dive bar which looks much the same as it did when Kerouac, Snyder and Ginsberg drank there in the fifties: like a cave with a Buddha and red leatherette stools. It is named Li Po, after an eighth century poet with a lifestyle like one of the Beats: a compulsive wanderer, a tough guy who killed men in sword fights, and a committed drinker, who wrote frankly about it in poems like “Waking from drunkenness on a spring day”.

A little further up Grant, midway from Pacific to Broadway, is an alley named in Kerouac’s honour. It leads back onto Columbus, between City Lights and the wonderfully bohemian Vesuvio Café (“the bar on Columbus Street” of Big Sur), which Carolyn Cassady (Camille Moriarty), Neal’s wife and Kerouac’s lover, recalled as:

an arty bar…with colourful cartoon-like paintings….a quiet laid-back little bar where men played chess and guitar, and you could have a drink and conversion without having to yell over loud so-called music.

It has barely changed – if it has changed at all – in sixty-five years. I expected Neal Cassady to explode through the door, back from the dead, telling three different stories at once. As I read the yellowing newspaper clippings pinned to the wall, a man of late middle age in a silk top hat and a leopard-print jacket rose from his seat and stared, as if I were the one oddly dressed. Perhaps to him I was.

Caffè Trieste, up the hill on Vallejo, with its dark wood and brass, its old-fashioned juke box and smoke-yellowed ceiling claims to have been the first espresso bar on the West Coast. The Beats were regulars when it opened in 1956 (Ferlinghetti apparently still is) and what you see as you sit and sip your espresso is much as they would have seen it. Francis Ford Coppola is among the star cast of patrons whose black and white photos hang from the wall. He owns the verdigrised Sentinel Building which dominates the corner of Columbus and Kearny and appears in all the brochures. His American Zoetrope studio, based there – in a building which ‘Sal’ and ‘Dean’ and ‘Carlo Marx’ knew well – adapted On the Road for the screen.

The Beat Generation was really just Kerouac, Ginsberg, William Burroughs and their friends. But after the Six Gallery poetry reading of 1955, which Ginsberg and Snyder closed out and Kerouac chronicled in The Dharma Bums, after Ginsberg’s Howl was published the following year and On the Road the year after that, North Beach started to flood with wannabes in sunglasses, berets and turtlenecks, with goatee beards, bongos and half-arsed Buddhist ideas. The media called them “beatniks”.

The next generation’s bohemians were priced out of North Beach and settled instead across town in the streets around the junction of Haight and Ashbury, where the media discovered them again and re-branded them “hippies”. The neighbourhood is stuck in the middle-sixties, like some ageing hippie, still high on the acid of half a century ago. Its stores and houses are a hallucination of orange and turquoise, magenta and blue, of peace signs and rainbows and trippy cartoons.

Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the Haight-Ashbury generation’s On the Road. It follows another hedonistic journey from coast to coast, fifteen years after ‘Sal’ and ‘Dean’s’, when the Beat Generation was middle-aged, and LSD was the favoured drug instead of Benzedrine and booze, and the soundtrack was acid rock, not jazz. But Neal Cassady was still doing the driving; he partied with the hippies as he had with the Beats, bounded from one generation to the next. Ginsberg, too, found a place for himself in the sixties. He became friends with Dylan and Timothy Leary and protested the Vietnam War. But Kerouac slid into a bitter, reactionary middle age; no longer travelling, hardly ever sober. From the joie de vivre of On the Road to the despair of Big Sur, and worse. He died, at 47, just twelve years after his best-known book was published.

But Cassady had been dead 18 months by then, living fast to the very end. A trip to Mexico, a party, a few drinks, a fistful of Seconal tablets, a late-night walk along the railway line. He was found in the morning in a coma from which he never recovered. He was 41.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

(c) Richard Senior 2014

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