Oxygen

I

Three thousand, three thousand two hundred and beyond… In the Humahuaca Valley in northwest Argentina the altitude sets in and the human body’s resilience is tested. Just how much oxygen does a body need, anyway?

Normally there’s a mild headache that stretches on from several yesterdays. Normally there’s shortness of breath and lethargy. On a first occasion though, during a first clash with the heights, it must be usual to wonder through the night if the symptoms remain within that normal range. As there’s no past experience, nothing to compare an individual reaction to, there’s no exact measurement to be had.

Is this how initial acclimatisation should feel? Is it static? Is it getting worse?

What’s known: not all human bodies are the same. Elevations affect people differently and while three thousand plus metres is not nearly as high as we can go, at some point there comes for everyone that stage where the body is deteriorating faster than it can adjust – when, oxygen-starved, a body slowly dies. It’s not clear just at what elevation a body will succumb to altitude sickness. The only way to know about the nature of one’s own body is to try.

It’s supposed to take about a month to fully adjust. The body produces more red blood cells to better grab oxygen at lower air pressure. Usually after a few days the headache will go, and the breathlessness will gradually dissipate over the coming weeks. Usually the lethargy does not last.

But is this how acclimatisation should feel?

II

The country was a galaxy in grandeur, the bus turned into a toy with its passengers as pinheads, ants. In a landscape like that, of soft yellows, reds and browns, vast and empty, the human is easily understood to be not more than an unimpressive bag of chemicals, affected by changing conditions and prone to reactions. We’re no stronger than the wind and the air.

The country had been creative, with cacti decorated desert hillsides and twisted, multicoloured cliffs that earned their poetic names like the ‘Artist’s Palette,’ and looked as a great wealth of minerals. There were windblown rock formations and it was worth the breathing strain to see it.

Yet from the reaction to the lower pressure it should’ve been some alpine expedition. It should have been on foot with a walking stick, possibly ropes. There shouldn’t have been a bus service at all, nor a highway, nor beyond that open country, buildings.

That the human species has colonised almost every terrestrial environment would account for the two small towns on either side of the bridge. It would explain La Quiaca and Villazon.

It was time to get out and try to stretch one’s legs, because the future was up ahead, across the little bridge, where those bags of cement were, at great speed, going.

III

They were running across the bridge, hundreds of people, without any formalities. What drove their urgency was at first unclear; that they could run at all was a wonder. Where was the oxygen? Well, they say the locals are born with larger lungs.

It was a colourful procession, short indigenous men and wrinkle-faced women with swinging plaits and carefully balanced bowler hats. They lugged bags of building supplies, grain and cases of fruit, more, unknown boxes and baskets carried in multicoloured aguayo blankets slung over their shoulders and across their backs.

Among the bowler hats were several distinct varieties: black, brown or dark green, full-sized, nicely fit on the head or child-sized and looking a bit precarious, balanced at a fashionable side angle.

To the left, another line was coming southwards: people of the same crowd with the same tanned skin and distinctive cheek bones.  They were then carrying nothing but just as quickly. What was all the rush for?

The world has many borders. There’s a winding train line border from Belarus into Vilnius, a muddy channel with reeds between Iran and Iraq, there’s a long line of Tata trucks parked along the road to Haridaspore. And I remember how as another bus had once crossed from Bulgaria to Macedonia the passengers had hid cartons of cigarettes on the bus roof through the skylight as it drove slowly enough not to knock them off, through the checkpoint.

Still, of all borders it’s that one, La Quiaca in Argentina to Villazon in Bolivia, which is one of the strangest of all.

Why were they running? A tourist said they were contrabandistas, desperately smuggling as many loads of Argentina back into Bolivia as they could while Argentine customs officers stopped for lunch and siesta. It was a street market on the run; it seemed as if half of Argentina would be removed and resold before the customs post reopened.

Argentina has a Titanic-sized human border leak that’s impossible to fix; only a few people stood in the official queue.

And although it was but a small bridge it was a border that seemed natural, due to contrast, not least in the human faces to the north and to the south.

To the south was a largely immigrant country with a strong Italian influence that altered the pronunciation of the Spanish language. To the north there was an indigenous majority country still waiting, as at 2005, for its first indigenous president, an achievement which was surprisingly just one year away. His name was Evo Morales and people would speak of the end of Andean Apartheid after his election.

I wondered what it would be like to have an indigenous Bolivian friend, Quechua or Aymara. Would such a friendship have a distinctive Andean shape to it and how would it fit into the rest-of-life jigsaw, so entirely different as to be left waiting to one side, unable to place? What would life be like in La Paz, after I took up my new Bolivian job?

I remembered my mother, who’d warned me to watch out for the multitude sickness. I can only imagine that’s a rare type of affliction which strikes in elevated locations that are also crowded, places just like the La Quiaca – Villazon border.

And there, incidentally, running is certainly not as obvious an activity as stopping to catch breath.

IV

The Bolivian official reminded me, ‘thirty days’ as he stamped my passport. I thought he was fishing for an insistence on ninety for a small unofficial fee, but I might be wrong about that. In any case it was already planned to pursue a work visa, a process into which a week of my life would disappear, later, in the Bolivian capital.

My first Bolivian steps were in the town of Villazon, which, apart from that Andean dust you can’t do anything about, was clean and fastidiously swept. Somehow I’d imagined a more chaotic Bolivia.

They had an organised ticket system at the railway station and with my newly acquired Bolivianos I bought a ticket for Tupiza, the nearest town.

A robust train conductor in a hard cylindrical cap with a tin sign across it, labelling him in Spanish, greeted passengers at the carriage door; and he religiously swept the carriage every half hour or so.

I sat dusty-comfortable, watching the on-train video of traditionally costumed Bolivians dancing around a train, to the eclectic rhythms of Andean cumbias, and the out-the-window movie of banded dry hills, small gullies, distant mountains and a sunset over cactus flats.

There were a few adobe hut villages with washing drying on thorny bushes by a stream. The occasional goods truck chewed up dust and bowler hatted, long plaited goat herders walked from somewhere over the horizon to somewhere else over the horizon. Finally, there was night.

More Argentina...

More Bolivia...

More Mountains, or... 

Getting About by Rickshaw... which is nothing to do with it, really...

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Oxygen

Desert Grapes

Jojo had everything going for her. With a teaching career back home and a mortgage down on a house in “Freo”, what Westralians call Fremantle, the funky port town appendage to Perth, what could hold her back?

“There’s something wrong with my throat,” she said, clutching at her neck, her voice raspy.

Jojo and her backpack rocked in from somewhere south of Santiago while I’d grabbed a bus down from up north. Chile is an endless Pacific sliver of a land: it can only increase the chances of a north-going, south-going running-into-each-other. There’s hardly room to step to the side in a country as thin as Chile. A step to the west, shoes will be ocean wet; a stride to the east, footprints will be Argentine.

Besides, it was only natural I should stop somewhere en-route from Iquique to Santiago, to avoid being entombed in a metallic express coach mega-journey for what would’ve felt like days. Jojo wanted to see La Serena. I wanted a bit of non-AC oxygen on the way.

It was the taxi driver in from the bus station who dropped me at the guest house door: he said he knew a place and I didn’t argue. It was a handful of rooms along an enclosed courtyard in an old grey house, colonial and quaint, run by an old grey woman, short and jolly. She dropped by my room, in turn, to tempt me with a tour for the following day. She had a brochure of the Elqui Valley, a winding sliver of green running off into the mountainous hinterland towards Argentina. It came with a price list and coffee presented as a cup of hot water with small packets of Nescafe, sweetener and powdered milk lined up on the saucer. With all the on-selling going on, Chileans had no deficit of entrepreneurial skill.

In the wealthiest country in South America, where the poor could be seen living in flimsy shanties along the vast stretches of otherwise empty rocky-sandy coastline, for the tourist all was ready.

Jojo wasn’t only a teacher. She’d had the experience of running a school in a remote aboriginal community in Western Australia, far enough into the desert that non-aboriginals needed a formal invitation from the tribal elders to drop by. She used to pack up the kids and take them into the bush in the school’s government supplied four-wheel drive for classes, as she could. They were at home in the outdoors. They learnt better there.

But Jojo didn’t get in until after dinner. I’d wandered, found La Serena historical, colonial, quiet and clean. The food was good, the servings judiciously small, as it is in Chile. Nick, the guy at the next table, struck up a conversation on the basis that because I put my chips in the bread and ate it like a sandwich I must be, as he was, British.

But like Jojo and the Chileans I was of colonial stock and not a European. It didn’t mean I couldn’t eat chips on bread.

It was Nick’s first time outside Europe but as a tour guide he’d visited all the countries of Europe apart from Russia, except for three. He asked me to guess. I chose at first Armenia and Georgia, which are technically Europe, but Nick didn’t consider them so. “Okay, it’d be Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus.” He was shocked. I was right. “People always choose Albania,” he said, “but I’ve been to Albania.”

Nick enjoyed being a guide, especially for the Americans who were so nervous and naïve while on the wrong side of the Atlantic. He wanted to demonstrate they didn’t need to be fearful of France.

Jojo turned up as words, after that, from an old grey woman’s mouth. “There’s another tourist,” she said elatedly, “who is interested in the tour. You could split the cost?” Her on-selling had found new merit.

Jojo dropped by my room and we chatted. I heard how she was returning to Chile after a decade, that she’d once spent a year there as an exchange student. She kept touching her throat.

“What are Chileans really like?”

In her slightly rattly voice she narrated how she felt. “Maybe I didn’t notice before,” she said. She’d been shocked by how many Chileans seemed to blame poverty on the poor and how proud they’d been in her Chilean town of the wondrous new mega mall, of the sort that had multiplied across the country.

It seemed a shame if it were true, a country trading its soul for a mega mall.

Jojo said there were exceptions: not everyone was such.

“Did you catch a cold?” She looked nervous, stressed.

“I’m sure I have throat cancer,” she said, her words making her more worried.

“How do you know?”

“I feel it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s tonsillitis at worst!”

I agreed to the tour. At worst, it would be agreeable to spend a day with Jojo.

It might be that a tour guide should look intellectual, maybe with glasses. But there’s no exact model and when Jose arrived with his minivan, he certainly wasn’t it. He was muscular, moustached and about seven feet tall. His voice was so deep I wouldn’t want to take him up a mountain for fear its rumble might set off an avalanche. He could have been a member of the Chilean military’s elite whatever special something forces.

As we got into the minivan, one old grey woman waving us off, Jojo was busy fondling her throat.

“Stop it! It’s not cancer!”

The landscape of the Elqui Valley was unique. Some might marvel at the engineering in the irrigation that let the grape vines grow; for me it was enough to enjoy the contrast of the vineyard green with the dusty, barren hills.

But the Elqui was a distraction, like a suave French film going on in the background of a dinner party. It was the conversation with Jojo at valley centre: it filled the several Elqui hours, interrupted by the occasional rumbling fact supplied by Jose, delivered at the very lowest end of the human hearing scale.

The aboriginal kids saw a flock of birds, Jojo said. It was a particular type of bird that shot up from the sandy ground. It meant nothing to her, but the kids in unison excitedly shouted the word in their language for “water”. Those birds meant water: what the elders taught them, and in the desert water-finding is more important that mathematics.

Meanwhile there was Jose explaining about the pisco, the vodka-like drink allegedly invented in the Elqui Valley, although Peruvians claim it too. We dropped by a distillery and tried a sample.

The aboriginal kids used to tell Jojo where she’d been on the previous evening, the exact houses she’d visited and when. Expertly they read her tracks in the sand.

“The community was like one family. Things go wrong when the kids get older and have to move to Perth for opportunity. The city is a society they don’t understand.”

Jose took us to Vicuña for lunch: the main Elqui town.

Another non-aboriginal worker in the desert once captured a baby camel, Jojo said. He named it after the then Indonesian President, Megawati Sukarnoputri. He liked that name. And Megawati the camel lived in his backyard, everybody knew.

By evening we were back at the old grey house in La Serena. Luckily Jose’s voice had caused no avalanche.

Jojo decided to head down to Santiago with me. I think she liked my non-medical medical opinion concerning her sore throat. As it turned out, after a few days the throat cancer cleared up. 

I should mention: the rest of the world calls her Jo. It’s in my mind that it’s always been doubled: two letters never seemed enough of a name for Jojo.

Grapes...

             wheat

     rice

                               horticulture

               bamboo

          coffee








This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Desert Grapes

You know Harry?

You know Harry, Sagar and the others?  Of course his actual name might not be Harry but it’s what they call him.  I did too.  Anyway, they were the ones I knew before I knew that I knew them.  It was only after we met, actually, that they were able to explain and I was able to understand that we’d known each other already for a couple of years.

I don’t know, maybe such circumstances are common in Rajasthan, and it’s not a bad thing to discover at a first meeting.  It’s kind of an unexpected head start.  Anyway, it happened in the small desert town of Phalodi where tourists rarely tread.

If I think of the beginning it’s likely a bit tragic, you see, because it is so too often for me that at the beginning comes tea.  Well, I exaggerate.  The tea came in the middle of the start, and the start of the start was more the hired white Ambassador stopping.  It was not due to mechanical fault but rather an idea that brought the vehicle to a halt: the desire to stop somewhere random, away from the tourist towns, to see if we couldn’t find the real, unadulterated Rajasthan.  Phalodi was a fair choice.

Now, I know there’s more to the town than that singular dusty road leading up from the highway, with the usual assortment of desert homes, small shops and light bustle.   But I didn’t know it then so it seemed the only way to proceed.  And not too far along that road, on the left side, was a primary school gate.  It was as we were passing, and my Australian friend Lachlan was there then, that the school kids started calling out to us, making a bit of a fuss.  They were excited to see foreigners and I don’t remember what words they used, but it likely included ‘One pen, one pen?’, the phrase that seemed ubiquitous in Rajasthan.

Of course one of the teachers, Madan, came to the gate to see what the students were getting excited about and I can say now that his curiosity was likely not less than theirs, though he didn’t show it.  He did however ask where we were from and told us to wait, at the gate, while he consulted with the headmaster.  He wished to invite us into the staff room cum headmaster’s office for tea.

Approval came forthwith and we sat in the staff room cum headmaster’s office with the headmaster behind his desk and several teachers finding places to stand or sit about the room.  Well I don’t recall exactly but the conversation must’ve mentioned cricket and there may have been a song or two, while we waited for tea.  Madan struggled with his English but through simple words and understanding communication found its way.

It’s a simple thing, tea, and although it took a while to arrive it came in cups with saucers in much the usual way.  It was only when the drinking commenced that the trouble started.

Well, we couldn’t have anticipated the slurping.  The first one or two loud, unashamed slurps might’ve been overlooked as unfortunate: in Australia slurping tea is not the thing to do.  But when it progressed into a kind of random chorus of slurps from all corners of the room a smile started to work its way onto my face.  I wondered if those slurps could be heard back at the white Ambassador down the street.

I sat there looking down, thinking of Lachlan.  ‘Please don’t slurp, please don’t slurp!’ I was thinking, knowing that if he did I would no longer be able to contain my laughter at the strangeness of things.  Besides, I wanted to compose myself enough to take a loud, unashamed slurp of my own that would set him off instead.

‘Don’t look at him! Don’t look at him!’ I told myself; but sure enough, when I felt composed and strong I made the mistake of giving him a small glance and he was ahead of me, as it were, just then taking the boldest, most unrepentant slurp of his tea.  It sent me into fits of uncontrollable laughter, and it spread to Lachlan too.  And there was nothing to say, you know, when the slurping for them was a way of complimenting the tea, when they asked why we were laughing.  I think we made something up about the white Ambassador but it was embarrassing.

Well Madan, as it were, didn’t quite write us off as mad.  Instead, he introduced us to his class and I saw they used slates to write on, with chalk.  And he took us to his home, a little further up the street, where he showed some nice pictures of traditional Rajasthani puppets and introduced us to his family.  And that was that: we were soon on our way towards Jodhpur as planned.

He’d walked with us back to the highway though, and we’d stopped for a second, farewell tea at a stall there.  Strangely that tea too was remarkable.  It had various spices in it and stood out as the finest cup of tea we found in the whole three months of that Indian adventure.

Months later I wrote to him and I couldn’t help but mention the tastiest tea in India.  Indeed I asked for the recipe; I was missing chai by then.

About a month later I came home to a letter, from Phalodi.  The envelope was large and oddly fattened at the bottom.  Inside was a plastic bag with a greyish, brownish powder in it.  Madan didn’t only send the recipe, but a sample of the spices used in the tastiest tea in India!

To be honest I felt slightly uneasy about getting a strange powdery substance through the post.  I can only be grateful that the sniffer dogs at Sydney Airport would not appear to be trained to detect Rajasthani tea spices in the midst of mail bags.  Anyway, there was nothing to do but boil the milk and try it out.  And I read the letter, thinking his written English was surprisingly good.

It was two years before I reached India again, and in that time Madan and I had exchanged several letters.  From that small first encounter it had become essential to revisit Phalodi.  With a train and bus from Delhi I arrived once more in the small desert town.  Madan didn’t know what day I’d come exactly, because neither did I.  So I wandered up the street wondering if I could recognise his house again.  It was just as well to ask: Phalodi is a small enough town for that.

Whoever it was led me through new alleyways until I was sure I was hopelessly lost and would never find Madan, when eventually we stopped at a small telephone shop.  It was Madan’s family’s business and he was there.

It was just a few days, the second visit; but of course he introduced me to Harry and Sagar and the others.  We rode motorbikes through the surrounding desert countryside visiting various picturesque village temples of older and newer construction.  There were parties, a staged drama featuring the school students, Harry climbed a tree and Sagar was apologising for only being able to take part of the time I was there as leave from his job.  I wondered why he’d think to do that for a complete stranger.

Madan had started losing his hair by then; but the more interesting development was in his spoken English.  It was dramatically improved and I was able to explain about the cultural difference in the tea slurping.  ‘How did you do that?’  I asked, about his English.

‘If you really wish to learn something,’ he said, ‘the best way is to teach it.’ 

He’d become the school’s English teacher.  And he took me back there one day, where I gave the very first English class of my own, only it was cheating since the lesson I taught, his class had learnt the day before.  They knew all the answers to the foreigner’s questions and they gained confidence from that.

It was strange, meanwhile, how much Harry, Sagar and the others seemed to know about me.  Madan must have said a lot, I thought.  It wasn’t long before I left that it made sense, when they thought to explain, a little sheepishly, that every time I’d sent a letter they’d all sat together to read it, discuss it, definitely in Hindi, and gradually draft the English reply!   

‘That’s why Madan’s written script was so good,’ I thought.  Each Phalodi letter might’ve been signed with his name but it was a team effort.  I’d been writing to all of them and through those letters, it wasn’t only Madan I’d come to know, but the entirety of one little social circle in a small desert town.  It was really rather good that the white Ambassador had stopped there, at the start.

India elsewhere? 

              Bangladesh?

                               Iran?







This article also published in Star Magazine, here: You Know Harry?

There Shall Have Been Jaisalmer

There could even be future predictions in those books.  Who’s to say there isn’t?  Who’s to say what wisdom is there, in the rare manuscripts and ancient tomes of the libraries of Jaisalmer, where the dry desert air is favourable to conservation?  Yet here, I embark upon a far humbler task: of predicting the past.

As once there came tribesmen into the arid territories of the Thar, as once there came herdsmen driving cattle and flocks of goats to forage among the thorny, scrubby bushes and desert grasses of that marginal country; as once there came wayfarers and traders from east and west, with textile, gemstone and treasure chest; so it shall come to pass that western backpackers, two, shall arrive in a white Ambassador that shall have been hired from Something-or-Other Tours & Travels in Delhi.

Over the centuries, in places where wells and tanks have been dug and there is water to drink, settlements shall have emerged and, gradually, a small but dignified desert kingdom shall have been established.  There shall be palaces and forts built for the Bhati Rajput royalty and the capital shall have taken the name of its founder, Maharawal Jaisal Singh.  At a time long after the camel caravans from Central Asia, Africa and Egypt have ceased to come; long after the several neighbouring kingdoms have been combined into Rajasthan, the land of the kings; and many years after the Pakistani border has been etched across the map, the backpackers shall have reached Jaisalmer to see all that has gone before them.

And they shall have with them a driver, who in his previous life was a bear.  That very driver shall have steered the Ambassador in safety across the nearer Rajasthani plains, dodging camel cart and swerving around cattle herd; and he shall have stopped to undertake urgent on-road mechanical tinkering as they navigated the ribbons of tar of the Thar.  In Jaisalmer, so shall it have been that they took rest.

Let it be said that they shall have stayed in a hotel near the large tank to the city’s south, the tank that’s embellished with minor temples around its edges.  They shall have heard the rumour that the main gate to the tank was presented to the Maharawal by a well-to-do lady-of-the-night, and when he disagreed to its construction due to considerations of propriety, she did it anyway, while he was away, incorporating a Krishna Temple in its uppermost storey so that he could not object to passing beneath it.

Let it be written here that they shall have enjoyed one sunset at the tank and have found the following sunrise while eating breakfast on the hotel rooftop, with views to the fort and the old city within its walls.  Let it be known how they visited that city of laneways, with its Jain temples and its haveli mansions in filigree design, of delicate craftsmanship, that shall have been constructed long before by the once wealthy families of trade.  By the time of the Ambassador’s arrival, the city in all its history shall be there, perched upon its hilltop in the Thar, Jaisalmer: the golden city.

So too shall they have visited the shops of souvenirs and desert jewellery in turquoise gemstone, silver and lapis lazuli.  They shall have known the carpet stores where dozens of carpets are to be unfurled upon arrival, as potential customers sip tea.  They shall have met the Singaporean ladies, three, down from Kashmir; and they shall have heard the Singaporean critique that westerners usually prefer carpets in bold, contrasting colours.  And it shall have amused them as the Singaporeans chose their own carpets in not less predictable pastel shades of aqua and rose.  To each group shall be their own traditions.  But it shall not have mattered in any substantial way, because the carpet stores are stocked for all comers, from the east and from the west.

Verily I say that on the third day they shall have organised a tour, by jeep and by camel, to the sand dunes of Sam.  As His Royal Highness the Maharawal could tell you, winter nights in the desert are cool and the locality of Sam follows that pattern.  But kindling for the campfire shall have been brought from afar, due to the lack of trees, and the locals shall have donned military type jackets and factory knitted shawls.  The foreigners, meanwhile, shall have unrolled their technologically designed sleeping bags that come with guarantees of withstanding a specified number of minus degrees, the sleeping bags which their mothers shall have made them bring.  They shall have slept in the open, with Australian pillows, under the Indian stars. 

And those foreigners shall know nothing, not how to survive in the desert nor even how to speak the Rajasthani tongue; but they shall have eaten well, the dinner prescribed by the tour agreement.  Meanwhile the locals shall have busied themselves in poaching: cooking and eating a small desert deer.  The locals shall have imbibed from desert wells while the foreigners had bottled water from a distant alpine spring.

On the following day there shall have been camels, two, for the ride back into town, a ride of several hours, and I tell you they are tall beasts such that when the camel one is sat upon is elderly, with arthritic knees causing it to sometimes stumble on rocky ground, when there is the sound of leg bones creaking as it walks, it’s not an altogether calming experience.  ‘Does he ever actually fall over?’ shall have been asked in sign language, as best it could be done.  ‘Sometimes,’ the camel driver shall have made him to understand by way of reply.

And the he-camel shall have passed beside she-camels and there shall have been bellowing, camel lips inverted with bubbling froth welling up from a camel mouth.  Camels live for about twenty years, they shall have heard, with a working life from two to sixteen.

So let it be recorded as it shall have been done.  It is my past prediction.  They shall have seen Jaisalmer.

 

But being a patriot, I suppose 6th century art critic Xie He might have preferred the mountains of his China.  Fruit adorers might like instead the mango tree gardens of Malda Town, or after the desert wanderings of Jaisalmer, it might be time to get lost in the rain.

It's up to you. Nobody's telling you what to do. It's your choice.




This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: They Shall Have Seen Jaisalmer








India Will Decide: Article Index for articles about India