Faded Huế

January 14, 2015May 2, 2020 / Richard Senior / 4 Comments

The arches of the Trường Tiền Bridge soar and dip over the Perfume River, where barges which look two centuries old chug back and forth throughout the day, towards and away from the watercolour mountains far off to the west, and where, of an evening, traders spread their goods on blankets laid out on the bank, and street food vendors light their grills and the flames dance and the smoke coils up and the shrimps sizzle and scent the air, and big neon signs flash adverts from the opposite bank, and lights along the span of the bridge sweep from white to purple to yellow to blue to red to green and white again.

Huế was the capital for the Nguyển dynasty which ruled Vietnam from the start of the nineteenth century. A matryoshka of citadels, one inside the other, led through to the Forbidden Purple City, where the emperor lived with his concubines. There were moats and bastions and multi-tiered gateways; and palaces and temples, and gilded columns and carvings and fretwork, and cylindrical tiles surmounted by dragons. It was a place of exquisite beauty.

But the city was bombed and shelled and shot at by three different armies in the French and American wars and much lay in ruins when the bell clanged on the final round of the Battle of Huế, which the US Marines won on points. “Did we have to destroy the town in order to save it?” asked a Marine captain, echoing what another officer had said about Bến Tre further down south a month before.

There is not a lot left of the Forbidden Purple City beyond the stumps of shattered brick which poke from the grass where palaces used to stand, and a portentous flight of steps bookended with dragons which carries you up to an anti-climactic flower bed laid out in the broken foundations.

Elsewhere in the complex, the buildings have been carefully restored and rebuilt. The work is ongoing and, while I was there, men were tearing tin sheets from the roof of a ravaged temple. Enough has been done to evoke the majesty of the Imperial City that was; but there are still dozens of buildings blackened by napalm, pierced with shells, pitted by bullets, untouched and left to decay since 1968, when the battle staggered to its wearied close.

I spent a good two days wandering the site and – away from the parts which have been freshly restored – I was often alone and there was at least a moat and a two-metre thick wall between me and the bustle of the modern town outside the citadel and the only sounds I could hear were the chirping of birds, the chatter of cicadas and leaves gently falling from the trees.

I strayed into courtyards which time had grassed over and poked inside buildings which looked long forgotten with roofs sagging inwards and rotten doors hanging off hinges. I was not at all sure I was supposed to be there, but there was nothing to keep me out. In one quiet corner, I happened upon an elephant, chained up like a guard dog and left unattended. It huffed and stamped its foot in warning.

In the late afternoon, I left the citadel and made my way across the bridge and back to the hotel with the closing scene of Full Metal Jacket screening in my head:

“We hump down to the Perfume River to set in for the night… I’m so happy that I am alive….”

© Richard Senior 2015

Journey through Zimbabwe, Part 1

January 8, 2015May 2, 2020 / Richard Senior / 4 Comments

The Zambezi sparkles in the sun as it drives a broad wedge between Zambia and Zimbabwe on its way from Angola, past Namibia, past Botswana, and on until it topples over Victoria Falls and continues through Mozambique and spills out into the Indian Ocean.

A troop of baboons was free-running the border post, vaulting up onto the back of a trailer and running along, dropping off, scooting across the yard, up the side of the building, grasping a window ledge, springing up, leaping and grabbing for the roof, sliding down the satellite dish, back into the car park, over the fence in a couple of bounds, then stopping to rest and eat a pilfered sandwich.

Passport control is well into Zimbabwe, but one desk is officially Zambia and I officially left at some notional point as I walked the few metres across the floor to buy a Zimbabwe visa. Much of the world pays US$30, but Brits pay 50 because of Cecil Rhodes, and Canadians 75 – I am told – because their PM was recently rude about Uncle Bob.

Unity, Freedom, Work is Zimbabwe’s motto, but the unity is fragile, there is little freedom and barely any work. Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF has reportedly murdered, tortured, beaten and flattened the villages of people it believed to support the opposition. The economy was once one of the strongest in the region: now it is one of the weakest in the world. Unemployment has hovered around 90% for years. The regime blames sanctions. Others blame the regime.

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But Zimbabwe was – for different reasons – a pariah state before Mugabe and ZANU-PF, before it was Zimbabwe; and its unhappy modern history dates at least to the 1880’s, to the Scramble for Africa and Cecil Rhodes’ dream of the British Empire stretching from the Cape to Cairo.

For miles and miles after the border, there was nothing but waist-high yellow grass flecked with red, except for a few generations of car wreck: a Humber from the forties, a Chevrolet from the sixties and others too screwed up and stripped of parts to be recognised.

We stopped for diesel at a flyblown filling station with big chunks of the canopy missing. Ragged men sat listlessly on the grass around it. A Rottweiler stood up and glared from a crumpled pick-up truck. The Lion’s Den Butchery around the back had dust-encrusted grilles on the door and hardly looked inviting; but inside there was a chiller cabinet filled with biltong and more of it drying on racks on the walls and I bought a few dollars’ worth and pigged it all as we headed south to the capital.

© Richard Senior 2015

Countryside image: Shutterstock

A Bus to Puno

January 6, 2015May 2, 2020 / Richard Senior / 6 Comments

The bus station was teeming with Quechua families with suitcases-worth of belongings in rainbow papooses which they squeezed through the doors of the buses. There were a few gringo backpackers, too, with the look of the road about them. Touts shouted destinations, barely pausing to breathe. “Arequipa-Arequipa-Arequipa-Arequipa-Aquipa-Aquipa-Aquip-Aquip….” But no one was buying tickets to Arequipa.

I wanted to go to Puno and knew from the guidebook that it would be a full day’s drive.

“Will it be a coach?” I asked.

“…Almost,” the guy said.

I imagined a scrapper with four bald tyres and seats like park benches and filthy windows taped shut; and it was easy to picture, because most of the buses in Lima had been like that. I expected to arrive in the sort of discomfort you feel when you commute on British trains.

It was not so bad, though. The bus cannot have been more than thirty years old – not much more, at any rate – and although it pumped out black smoke and wallowed over bumps, it looked capable of getting to Puno. The buses in Lima never looked as if they would make the next traffic lights.

The single track road stretched for hours ahead on its serpentine way through an endless landscape of plains reaching out to distant mountains in front of mountains in front of still more mountains, chaperoned by a river and flocks of sheep and herds of llamas which grazed beside and blundered right onto the road, forcing the driver to stop.

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Sometimes, in the middle of miles of nothing, there was an adobe hut with a collapsing thatched roof which looked like a relic from decades ago, but nearby there was a Quechua herdsman who could surely have lived nowhere else. There were the ruins of an ancient stone village, with a new adobe village abutting it; there were charming little towns, a long way from the Gringo Trail; and then there was Juliaca.

All the gringos stared out the window as we passed through, much as they might at a car smash. It is the scariest city I have ever seen, despite growing up in West Yorkshire. The roads were just mud and boating lake puddles in the bit that I saw: no surface, no pavements at all. Dangerous-looking young men lounged in doorways, scowling from under hoods. My guidebook warned that daytime muggings were common enough, and at night were too frequent to mention.

But Puno is better, in parts. It has a nice Baroque cathedral, photogenic decay and indigenous markets selling colourful fabrics and sandals made from car tyres. It is worth a day of your time.

I arrived, by chance, the day before the festival of La Virgen de la Candelaria and the party erupted all over town next morning. There were street food vendors on every corner and I bought an anticucho (marinated beef heart skewer) outside my hotel and tried to eat it while I threaded my way through the crowds. Scuse me! Scuse… err… ¡Permesso! There were brass bands and flautists and men with big drums they call wankaras. Aymara dancers trooped down the street whirling batons. I wanted to cross but there was never a gap, so I joined the parade and slipped out further down the road. Wankara, someone said.

A very drunk man leaned against a wall in a lane, with his head lolling a few centimetres from speeding mototaxis. Another happily pissed in the middle of the road and people pretended not to notice.

It was like a Saturday night back home.

© Richard Senior 2015

Landscape image: Shutterstock

Travelling by Tube in New Zealand

January 4, 2015May 2, 2020 / Richard Senior / 7 Comments

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There were six of us in the minibus on the way to the Waitomo Caves, all looking ridiculous in wetsuits, ankle-length wellingtons and miners’ helmets, each clutching an inflated inner tube out of a tractor tyre.

We squeezed through a gash in the side of the mountain and climbed down into a chamber, stooping and huddling together to fit. I was nearest to the crevice which led further in, so the guide sent me on ahead and told me to stop when I heard a roaring sound. I inched along between the walls, splashing through water, seeing what little the lamp on my helmet cared to light up, and listened for a roaring sound. I realised what it was when I heard it.

All I had to do, the guide said when the others caught up, was to approach the waterfall backwards, stand on the edge, hold the inner tube up to my bum as if suffering with haemorrhoids and leap backwards into the water.

The sensible part of my brain warned me sternly against it, as if I were five and it were my father grabbing hold of my arm to stop me running into the road. Fair enough, as I never got round to learning to swim. But if I listened to the sensible part of my brain, I would still be at my desk in London, alternately stressed and bored. I would be on the Tube, instead of on a tube.

I backed up to the edge and jumped, ducked under and swallowed a mouthful of nasty water, then bobbed back up on my tube with the endorphin rush you always get when your brain says no and you go ahead anyway and come out of it okay.

We reclined on our tubes and floated along the underground river which led through a passage with stalactites bearing down on us, until we got to another waterfall, twice the height of the first. I stood back and let the others go first – “no, no, after you,” I said with the pantomime politeness of the British, and nothing to do with being scared – then jumped and sank deeper and ingested more water and came up choking and spitting, but felt fantastic as soon as I could breathe again.

We switched off our lamps as we came out in a cavern and stared up at a roof which was speckled with glow worms and looked like a diorama of space. There were thousands, no tens of thousands, an uncountable number of blue-white dots of effulgence stretching as far as I could see.

We slid silently through the darkness and the LED’s on the backs of the helmets advanced in a line and wound round the corners and the glow worms winked above us until the river burst out above ground through a fissure in the rock and we came out squinting into the afternoon sunlight.

© Richard Senior 2015

Image: Shutterstock

New Year’s East

December 31, 2014May 1, 2020 / Richard Senior / 2 Comments

I had been bouncing around the Andaman Islands and landed up in Krabi.

A party crowd washed down to the coast for the long weekend, bought fireworks by the armful and let them off on the beach.

Street food stalls appeared all the way down the road through Nopparat Thara. Chicken skewers and air-dried squid were piled up on trestle tables; gallons of chilli sauce, hundreds of quartered limes. Smoke from the grills drifted towards Ao Nang. A vendor made som tam in an earthenware mortar, bashing the garlic and chilli, the shredded papaya, the snake beans and tomatoes.

I expected a party on New Year’s Eve on the ponderous curve of peachy sand. But the only poster I saw was for a buffet and live band at a hotel in Ao Nang, and that was hardly worth staying up for.

But, with half a day left to run of the year, I spotted a flyer for Luna Bar (presumably the model for Moon Bar in Richard Arthur’s I of the Sun) which promised deep house and EDM, fireworks and whisky buckets. More fun than a live band and buffet, for sure.

Luna was ominously quiet at 10pm, when I wandered in and scooped up a bucket of the sort which I took to the beach as a child. It came with a quarter of Sang Som whisky, a bottle of Coke and an energy drink and I tipped them in and walked through to the beach, where the holiday crowd was still exploding ordnance. (The firework sellers did well that night.)

The bar began to fill up as the year faded out and the crowd spilled onto the beach. They crammed together in raggedy rows, like rush hour commuters, holding up paper lanterns half their own size, lighting them and letting them go. The flickering lights stretched the length of the beach. There were forty, or fifty, or more in the air at a time. A few, swayed by gusts, caught fire and dropped to the water: the rest floated out over spectral karsts, way out into the Andaman Sea.

Then, at midnight, the music stopped and giant Roman candles sputtered into flame on posts along the waterfront. Explosions reverberated like howitzer shells and the glorious colours spilled across the sky. Lines of racing yellow tadpoles mutated into pin cushions of pink, blue and green, distorted, collapsed and came back to earth as a glittering, sparkling downpour.

All the stresses and disappointments I had run away from back home seemed a lifetime ago right then.

Happy New Year!

© Richard Senior 2014

Santa in Sunnies: Christmas Day on the Beach

December 24, 2014May 1, 2020 / Richard Senior / 4 Comments

It was the middle of the morning on Christmas Day and the sun was hot enough to burn.

The beach was crowded but the only Thais were the boat taxi men, calling out “boat-boat” from under their awning when anyone went near. The rest were Western backpackers in boardies, bikinis and Santa hats. They sprawled on the sand and frolicked in the waves and lined up the empty Singha beer bottles. One prattled about finding a turkey to roast, saying much the same thing a few dozen times, as if polishing a phrase for a piece he was writing. “Hey mate,” another shouted to every guy on the beach, “What’s your best ladyboy story?” As if everybody had several, and would happily share.

I grew tired of them and crossed the isthmus to the quieter, second best beach and sat on the sand near an empty bar where Errol Dunkley sang Ok Fred and Bob Marley was jamming. Longtail boats, moored in a line, nodded at the edge of the beach. A small yacht dropped its sails and slid into the harbour. The owner of a sports cruiser started its engines and revved them a few times, filling the air with a sound like a supercar underwater.

I found a restaurant by chance when I cut through an alley where an old lady sat mending socks in a doorway and a skeletal man pumped air into the tyre of a rusty bike. The walls were jerry-built from reclaimed wood and the tables and chairs were cheap plastic things intended for a garden. But the eyes of the fish on ice in the doorway were inky black and their gills were cardinal red. There were none of the tacky Christmas songs I had heard from the restaurants I had passed in the middle of the village. It was, after all, just a regular Tuesday in Thailand.

A little silver tabby sat down beside me and let out a spare any change meow. I gave her a piece of grilled snapper, and then heard a different meow. It was a poor old red Persian with a sneeze and battle scars and one ear folded down. We agreed to share the fish three ways. They let me eat all the rice.

Merry Christmas all.

(c) Richard Senior 2014

A Perspective on Lima

December 22, 2014May 1, 2020 / Richard Senior / 9 Comments

“Lima is a pretty city,” reckoned Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries. “Lima is an atrocity,” insisted Matthew Parris in Inca Kola.

Parris’s impression is the one generally held, especially by those who have never been. Lima has a shocking reputation. It is ugly, they say; it is dangerous. There is nothing much to look at while you are being mugged at gunpoint. Parris noticed concrete and tin, dead dogs and cars without windscreens.

The city is smothered in fog for much of the year, which cannot help to endear it. “The white veil,” Melville called it in Moby Dick. But I was there in late January, when the sky was blue more often than not, and the sun was hot enough to redden my neck. The fogs came, all right; but ephemerally, like dry ice from a smoke machine.

I think Lima must, in any case, have smartened itself up in the twenty-four years since Parris was there. I never saw a dead dog – although strays were everywhere – and saw only one car that was missing a windscreen. Most were in a lot better fettle than the minibuses, which roared along with blowing exhausts, great gashes down their sides and several important bits missing.

Hotel development in the Miraflores district has been about as unsympathetic as it could be (Guevara would have been spared that in 1952); but next door Barranco is full of character with its shabby-gentile colonial buildings in jaunty, contrasting colours like forest green and lilac, anorak blue and orange, and dogshit brown and dayglo pink. It would be a stretch, though, to call it pretty.

The Centro Historico is genuinely pretty with its plazas, its fountains, its grand public buildings and a cathedral to which Guevara devoted a long and exuberant paragraph. You might, for a moment, imagine yourself in an important city in Spain; but the illusion cannot last for long. A shanty town spreads round and up the surrounding mountains, painfully visible from all over town; and just a few blocks from the grandest plaza are workaday districts with litter in the doorways and broken chairs slung onto roofs.

In short, it is not as irredeemably ugly as popularly believed, but it is hardly Cuzco either. The danger is apparently real, but even at night it feels a lot less edgy than somewhere like La Paz.

My guidebook – never knowingly underwhelmed – reckoned Lima “the gastronomic capital of the continent”. That sounds like windy exaggeration, but two of its restaurants are listed among the World’s 50 Best: equal with London, one fewer than Paris. It is the place to go to eat ceviche, Peru’s most famous dish: a buzzword, now, on fine-dining menus in the English-speaking world.

The chef squirts lime juice over sliced raw fish, and then flavours it with garlic, chilli, coriander and red onion and leaves it to marinate so that the acid in the juice “cooks” the fish. “Better than it sounds,” said Parris, who seems to have the classical Englishman’s approach to food and usually only mentioned it when it upset somebody’s stomach.

The version I had at a smart restaurant overlooking the sea in Miraflores used chunks of sea bass, crab claws and scallops, and came with the Peruvian staples, sweet potato and corn. “Una experencia incomparable,” the menu declared with a good pinch of hyperbole, but it was very good.

(c) Richard Senior 2014

Are You a Tourist or a Traveller… And Who Cares?

December 18, 2014May 1, 2020 / Richard Senior / 15 Comments

The narrator of Alex Garland’s The Beach fancies himself as a serious traveller. He is a voyeur of riots and extreme poverty and sneers at the ‘touristy’ Lower Gulf Islands. It is satire, of course, and readers will notice that he sees nothing of Thailand beyond the backpacker ghetto of Khao San Road and what amounts to a private island for young middle class Westerners.

Garland said, of the sort of travellers his book was lampooning, “These people say they aren’t tourists but travellers and think they are special, more sensitive. It’s stupid. They’re not”. The Beach set out to explode their pretensions. But, as with Wall Street and La Dolce Vita, the point is often spectacularly missed.

There are numberless features exploring the supposed difference between tourists and travellers. It clearly matters a lot to some. There are graphs, there are charts, there are tables and pictograms to help you understand. There are lofty quotations from people like Chesterton: “The traveller sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see”. But almost everyone agrees with Evelyn Waugh that “the tourist is the other fellow”.

If you like being patronised, there are quizzes you can take to see which side of the line you fall; and if –heaven forbid – it turns out that you are only a tourist, WikiHow has a 9-step guide, complete with pictures, to teach you how to become a traveller.

As far as the dictionary is concerned, all of us are travellers (people who travel) and most of us are tourists (people who travel for pleasure) and I generally use the words interchangeably. But I did the quizzes out of curiosity and found that I am 80% traveller according to one, but only narrowly so according to another, and merely a tourist according to a third. None of them was interested in how much I had actually travelled or what I had learned on the way. This is a sample question:

Which do you prefer?

[ ] Having a map

[ ] Having no map

If you prefer to have a map, it suggests you are a tourist.

If you prefer not to have a map, it suggests you are bonkers.

Travellers, says one source, like WiFi connections, while tourists dislike bugs. They cancel each other out in my case. In everyone else’s too, I should think.

Travellers apparently blend in to their surroundings. They do this by wearing Chang Beer singlets in Thailand, chullo hats in South America, Masaai wraps in East Africa and hiking boots with zip-off trousers everywhere else.

Travellers, we are told, immerse themselves in the local culture, so if you approach a backpacker on Khao San Road with the routine Thai greeting gin khao reu yung (have you eaten yet), he or she will respond with gin khao leauw (I have eaten already), then tell you how to make yum woon sen and start a debate about Thaksin Shinawatra.

It seems to be widely agreed that travellers are not interested in sights, and that this makes them better people. One source scoffs at “buildings of note,” while another has a go at art galleries. It must follow that the tourists who head straight for Macy’s are closer to being travellers than those who go look at Brooklyn Bridge and the Met.

But there are sights and there are sights. The sort of traveller who would laugh in your face if you told him you had spent a morning at St Peter’s Basilica would insist that you need at least a week for the temples of Angkor, if not a month, a year, or several lifetimes.

Some good points are buried within all the snobbery. There is more to the world than the twenty dollar sights, and a ragtag market can be more rewarding than a world-famous cathedral. But to refuse on principle to see the big sights is surely as myopic as refusing to see anything else. If you want to learn something of the local culture – and it is not work, so no one should say that you have to – you need, for sure, to see how ordinary people live; but you need to know something of the history, the politics and religion as well, and that will take you back to the sights which appear in the guidebooks. Better just to go and see the things which interest you and skip the ones which don’t. Never mind whether the guidebooks gush or someone in a bandana scoffs.

Respecting local customs is just good manners, and recognising that things which are different from home may not be worse is about being open-minded. There is no need for an artificial distinction between tourists and travellers.

(c) Richard Senior 2014

The Kindness of Strangers

December 14, 2014May 1, 2020 / Richard Senior / 13 Comments

I jumped out of the back of the songthaew (shared taxi) and wandered off to find a guest house. By the time I was a hundred yards down the road, and the songthaew was the other side of the island, it hit me that my daybag was still under the seat. In it were my camera, laptop, emergency funds, spare credit card and enough documents to clone me.

I flagged down another songthaew and got him to take me to the depot, where they asked me a few questions and I was out at the end of the first round:

“What was the number of the songthaew?”

“Pass.”

“Was it an Izuzu or a Hyundai?”

“Pass.”

“What was the driver’s name?”

“Pass.”

I looked in the back of the parked songthaews, the controller phoned round the drivers, and I wrote out my contact details, but none of us expected my bag to turn up.

I felt numb as I headed back to Chaweng, checked into a guest house and dropped off what was left of my stuff. But my spirits rose a bit when I went to the beach and felt the powdery white sand underfoot, and a bit more when I sat with a Singha beer and watched the jetskiers carving up the sea and listened to the waves collapsing on the shore. Gradually, as the sun slipped down, everything twisted into focus. It’s only stuff isn’t it? I told myself.

I had an email in the morning from a girl in Moscow, who told me that her mother was on holiday on Samui and had found my bag and in it a print-out with my email address at the top. The lady spoke no English so had asked her daughter back home, who did, to get in touch with me. I went in a taxi to a smart hotel up in the hills and retrieved my bag with everything still in it.

I had got back what I had given up as lost for good; but – more than that – I had seen human nature at its best. People might get themselves wrapped up with greed and envy, prejudice and spite; but they are capable, too, of spontaneous acts of kindness towards a perfect stranger.

(c) Richard Senior 2014

Riding History in San Francisco

December 10, 2014May 1, 2020 / Richard Senior / 2 Comments

The cable cars would never have survived in Britain. The unsmiling grey people who make the important decisions would have killed them off long ago. Inefficient, an accountant would have sniffed: they need two people to operate them instead of one. Dangerous too, a health and safety officer would have added: someone could jump or fall off the platform and go under the wheels and get squashed and sue us. They would have gone to the scrappers with London’s Routemaster buses.

It almost happened in San Francisco in the late 1940’s, when the cable cars were coming up to 75 years old; but a citizen’s committee forced a referendum and won it. The cars are a National Historic Landmark now and, much as it might be a tourist cliché, few visitors leave without riding one.

You have to wait in line for an age at the terminus up near Fisherman’s Wharf, but a car will eventually trundle down the hill and onto the wooden turntable set into the road. The stocky gripman and skinny conductor will jump out, lean against it and shove it round to face the other way. It is delightfully archaic.

You stand on the platform and hang on to the pole in the open doorway. The conductor dings the bell and the gripman tugs on hefty levers and the car jerks forward and climbs through North Beach to the summit of Columbus Avenue and begins its descent downtown. Tourists whoop and scream as the car tips into the dizzying hills, as if they really believe you could fall off the edge of the world in the heart of an American city. But the gripman has the lever hard back so the car never gathers much speed, except on one or two corners when he lets it go so it can build up the momentum to get round.

Then down, down, down, stopping at each block, as the gripman calls out the street name and some passengers jump off and some climb on; then clanking past Chinatown, glimpsing the other suspension bridge, the one no one cares about because it is not funky orange; tourists genuflect in the street to get action shots as the car rolls towards them, the gripman rings the bell to get them to move; and then on and down to the turnaround at Market Street in a quiet corner of the Tenderloin.

It would, in truth, have been quicker to walk, much quicker to take the bus. But it would not have been half as much fun.