Bear, Julian or Gordon: What’s in a name?

Cora chooses a name for her newborn son and, on that choice, three possible futures open out. As it happens, all three are grim, though in different ways. The futures of the son, his elder sister, and their mother hinge on that simple choice.

The premise is original, and the writing in general is good, but the book is too short to hold everything that needs to be said. We visit the three main characters every seven years and I found it increasingly difficult to remember who was doing what. Their different character arcs were too divergent, and it ended up, for me, being a book about nine characters, not three.

As to the father, described in the blurb as “cruel”, he is a cypher. We only ever see him from outside, never here his inner monologue, and never hear how an intelligent man can be so nasty.

I was left unsatisfied by reading. Not for me.

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There is nothing like launching a book to take it out of you. I had high hopes for Price’s Price, but it was a commercial flop. Almost no one outside Hong Kong, and few in it, were very interested in the book.

But there is more to it than that. I launched Price’s Price at the height of Covid (remember that?). The book was a homage to Hong Kong, the town in which I’d spent my adult life and in which, if you’d asked me a few years ago, I had intended to spend the rest of my life.

But Covid and the government’s response to the 2019 protests took the soul out of the place.

So we moved to London. It was a move to, as much as from, and London is wonderful: it has a rich cultural life, great theatre and performances, a thriving arts scene, and the business I’m involved in seems to have benefited from my presence here, in the same physical place as the people I work with.

Which has left me busy. So too has facing metastatised prostate cancer. Not so good, but the NHS has been brilliant and, although there is no cure, there is the possibility of managing the disease.

All of which has kept me away from my blog.

But I’m back.

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What an excellent movie! A simple thesis, well-executed, convincingly acted, and with a nice twist at the end.

The couple in the poster photo above meet through a dating app, and the movie tracks their journey as they fall in love, only to find that one of them makes increasingly insensitive and unachievable demands on the other. Both are on the rebound from former relationships, mostly kept off-stage, and both have children, also off-stage, which adds to the conflicts. Happy times can change all too quickly to sad; arguments can erupt over nothing: will the relationship triumph?

Carefully observed, the movie was shot over the time period it portrays: essentially 13 scenes over as many months. Often very intense, that is tempered by the occasional humour and also the joy when things are going well. Best of all, the script stays on focus, not asking more from the material than it has to give. A must-see!

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The idea was to pick up my online existence again in 2025. However, we moved to London where I was diagnosed with metastatised prostate cancer. The NHS were brilliant, and have managed to rein in the disease (no cure is available).

So, another year slipped by, and it’s now the Year of the Gold Horse. And time to pick up my online presence.

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What a great book! Characters that leap off the page, and lots of things I never knew: how Cuneiform was decyphered, the Yazidi people, and lots of stuff about water.

I’ll be rereading it soon

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The Buru Quartet, of which This Earth of Mankind is the first novel, like the Cairo Trilogy, is about much more than one person’s journey. While the main character of the first three books, Minke, is engaging in a good way and that of the last, Pangemanann, is equally engaging in a very bad way, the quartet is about the much larger picture of Indonesia’s political awakening in the opening decades of the twentieth century. And, like the Cairo Trilogy, I bought the Buru Quartet in an airport bookshop having never heard of it or its author before. Two great finds.

The first two books of the quartet were not written but recited by Pramoedya while in prison and those tales smuggled out by fellow inmates to be transcribed (see the wikipedia entry on this first book for more). That provenance shows: this book, and the quartet as a whole, are not always very consistent. But the inconsistency, while it distracts from the broader achievement, doesn’t diminish it much.

This Earth of Mankind book starts in the late 1890s with Minke, the main character, going on a visit with a school friend, Robert Suurhof. Robert takes Minke along as a chaperone, only to have Minke inadvertently fall for the very same young lady, Annelies, that Robert wishes to court. She is the daughter of the concubine of a dissolute Dutchman, and Minke is the son of a noble and a star student of the prestigious HBS school: a social gulf which is problematic for everyone but the couple.

Their romance forms the foreground of an exploration of Javanese society, social mores and casual colonial injustice. Minke’s Dutch classmates enjoy privileges that he cannot and, for the most part, are quite unaware of that fact. Annelies’ mother, Nyai (the title for a concubine) Ontosoroh, is an extraordinary woman: despite the contempt in which society holds her as a concubine – and the concubine of a Dutchman at that – she runs a successful business and farm, treats her workers a great deal better than the rich Dutch colonists treat theirs, is well-read and is politically aware. That political awareness starts to rub off on Minke, especially when Ontosoroh’s master dies, leaving her exposed to his grasping relatives.

There is much that makes this a powerful book: the evocative descriptions of the countryside and the city of Surabaya; the range of characters from the veteran, Jean, who lost a leg during the Dutch campaign to pacify Aceh and now has a daughter and paints; the de la Croix family who take Minke under their wing; a teacher who does likewise; a Chinese on the run from the dying Ching Dynasty and the scheming Mellema family into which Ontosoroh was sold. There is also Minke at the start of his career as a writer, with the joy and despair, the acceptance and the rejections, that writers know so well.

A great read in its own right, and a piercing insight into the workings of colonial justice, This Earth of Mankind is a book the likes of which I wish I could write.

Child of All Nations by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The second novel of the Buru Quartet, this novel picks up shortly after This Earth of Mankind and sees Minke’s political awakening.

Java at the end of the 19th century very parochial (geographically remote and largely self-sufficient, Indonesia, of which Java is the most populous island, remains that way today), and Minke’s horizons were thus constrained. Although his classmates were Dutch or mixed-blood, the world beyond Surabaya was abstract to him. Himself from the nobility, attending an elite school and largely thinking in and speaking Dutch rather than Javanese, he is also cut off from the reality of Javanese life.

That begins to change as Minke discovers the daily indignities and injustices to which many Javanese were subjected. Java at that time was the world’s main producer of sugar, and the sugar plantations were Dutch-owned and founded on colonial violence. Families who had been on the land for generations were turfed off it on specious and often brazenly illegal grounds, becoming indentured and little better than slaves; the women widely abused (though the abuse was inimical to Javanese society).

This is interwoven with another theme, which is the degeneracy of Javanese culture itself: a very rigid caste system in which those of a lower rank have to kind of wriggle across the floor when approaching those of a higher caste, and to keep their heads bowed and their eyes away from the superior. This is shown through Minke’s own dealings with his aristocratic parents: while his mother is somewhat forgiving, his father expects absolute obedience. I found the language – translated as it is – also interesting: how people refer to themselves and those they address in the third person: Minke refers to himself as “your son…” and his mother as “your mother….” (A feature of several South-East and East Asian languages.)

Minke’s mother-in-law, Ontosoroh, who self-taught, clever and tough. As Minke develops his skills as a journalist, and guided by her, he becomes aware of the efforts by planation workers to resist their oppressors. He visits one plantation and starts to discover the harsh reality of that life. He also has his eyes opened to the struggles of the Philippines in throwing off the Spanish yoke only to don the American one; and of the broader struggles in South Africa – also, at the time, a Dutch colony.

This becomes much more immediate and urgent when his wife’s father and Ontosoroh’s owner (she is a concubine, so owned under law), is murdered. His scheming family, seeing Ontosoroh’s successful business, step in and two battles ensue. The first is the legal battle, not only for the business, but also for Minke’s wife who is regarded as property. The second is the battle for public opinion.

These two battles come to a head, and the author neatly joins the various strands. I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s a cracker.

Footsteps by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The third and probably the most important of the quartet, Footsteps charts the awakening of a political consciousness the protagonist, Minke, and in the Dutch East Indies (as it then was) in the opening years of the twentieth century.

Minke’s first marriage has ended, but he is admitted to medical school in what is now Jakarta. Although he does well academically, he is torn between a course of study that will groom him to be a glorified civil servant, and the rising sense of injustice of colonial rule. He continues to write and his audience broadens; he is even summoned to meet the governor of the Dutch East Indies, with whom he strikes up a certain accord. The director of Minke’s medical school “was among the proudest of my admirers. He had famous student.”

In a previous volume, Minke had encountered a Chinese student, come to Java both to escape from the crumbling Ching empire in China, and to drum up support for the coming Chinese republic. He is murdered by the local Chinese for his politics, but his girlfriend Mei inspires Minke with her dedication to the cause, and by a vision broader than his. He also encounters friendly Dutchmen who make him more critically aware of the degeneration of Javanese culture: how the aristocracy have been bought off by the Dutch, the placidity of the peasantry, the abject subjection of the civil servants.

He starts a newspaper which not only reports on specific cases of injustice, but which gains the help of a sympathetic Dutch lawyer who advises how to seek redress. This paper starts to become commercially successful, and it is at this point that Minke’s studies more or less fall by the wayside. As the paper increases in circulation, he realises that, to resist colonial rule, Indoensian society needs to get organised. Yet contemporaneous Indonesia society is fragmented, bound by a rigid caste system, and riven by vested interests. It turns out that he himself is very good politically, with the political skills needed to forge compromise between the various factions without losing focus.

Inspiring women again play a large role. He marries Mei, and they are happy together, but she dies. A princess, whose parents have been exiled, further inspires him and he falls in love with her. She not only supports but encourages him as the movements he forms take on a life of their own.

At this point, the colonial authorities begin to regard the movements as a danger. The storm clouds gather. Minke’s old schoolmate and adversary Robert Suurhof makes an appearance, now unambiguously a bad person, though a somewhat paper-thin character. A rather odd person, Pangemanann, forces himself on Minke, and is ominously present when an assassination attempt is made. The various organisations Minke forms come under pressure from conservative forces and those of the government, and Minke realises that he will have to go into exile by travelling the world – and thus the climax arrives.

The first two books in the quartet were recited and reconstructed outside prison walls; this one was written. Oddly, the same inconsistencies that plague the first two books remain in this one: threads that get dropped, characters who don’t quite seem the same or who are referred to with different names or titles. However, the big change is the introduction of politics. The first two books had a few overt political passages, and those passages were short. The political passages in this book are long, and I felt at times they could have done with some benevolent trimming. I also felt that the Glossary could have been usefully expanded to map the place names in the book to those in modern Java – I ended up having to look them up: peripheral to the plot, but it did interrupt the flow.

Yet this is a political book and almost a political history. Many of the organisations referred to are real; some exist to this day. As such, the story Pramoedya weaves is masterful: historical fiction at its very best. But the most remarkable achievement of the quartet is yet to come.

House of Glass by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The concluding novel of the Buru Quartet is astonishing. Leaving behind the old protagonist, Minke, the author turns Pangemanann (with two final ns, to ensure that the final n is pronounced by French people) a peripheral character from Footsteps into the central character of this novel.

This is a novel about the corruption of selling out. Pangemanann was educated in La Sourbonne, has a French wife, and starts the novel as the most senior Indonesian policeman in Java (and therefore the Dutch East Indies). Extraordinarily intelligent, he is also no ordinary cop: his brief is to keep an eye on the political situation and brief his superiors on how best to respond. He always operates in the shadows and is not afraid to use extra-judicial means to achieve his masters’ ends. By the same token, as the sole senior Indonesian in government, he is keenly aware of how tenuous his situation is, and of the need to protect himself.

What follows is a fascinating study of human failing. He privately admires many of those he undermines and destroys, yet acts in the full consciousness of his feelings. These deep contradictions take their toll: he descends not into madness, but into depravity. Yet this is no ordinary depravity, but a mirror of the depravity of colonial rule, a triumph of personal greed over conscience. Just as the Dutch as a nation, while all the time trumpeting the virtues of European civilisation, know that their hold in the East Indies is slipping and become ever harsher as it slips from their grasp, so too is Pangemanann destroyed by the contradictions within. It with a ghoulish fascination that we read of his machinations to destroy women and men that he knows to be better than him, that we see him destroy the people who love him, that we see him destroy himself.

The final volume of the Buru Quartet is the one that makes a masterpiece of the whole. Read them.

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This book sat on my (literal) shelf for several years, neglected and unread because the opening was of a brutal murder and I’m not into true crime as a genre.

True crime features in the book, but this is not a book about crime. Rather, it uses the Mormon religion as a window to explore religiosity in general, and the fundamentalist end of the religion spectrum in particular. The murder with which the book begins was horrendous, and the journey of the murderers from being ordinarily religious folk to the kind of people who slaughtered a mother and her fifteen-month-old infant in cold blood is used to frame an exploration of Mormonism, and fundamentalist Mormonism to frame violent faith. Much the same lessons could be applied to, say, the perpetrators of 9-11 or the excesses of Buddhist monks against the Rohingya people or Burma (Myanmar).

Mormonism is used because it is barely two centuries old, and its early days are thus more accessible than, for example, Buddhism or Judiasm. Older religions happened (or were revealed) so long ago that all we have to go on are religious texts that, although they are authoritative to true believers, are somewhere between myth and fairy tales to unbelievers. With Mormonism, historical records are available that tell the early history from unbelievers’ points of view. Those records have all the weaknesses of historical records everywhere in terms of completeness, and of the biases and prejudices of those who wrote them, but they tell a tale of Mormonism that is quite far from the smiling faces of its missionaries.

As such, I read the book not as being critical of Mormonism, but rather of the peculiar violence to which fundamentalist belief of any kind can lead. On this reading, I think the book meets its objectives well. It is well-written, thought-provoking, and very disturbing. It is, as the author states in his concluding remarks, about his own exploration of religion and how he can’t make the leap of faith that religion – and especially fundamentalism – requires.

The book was published 20 years ago, and what I find most frightening is that the transformation from frustration to anger to fundamentalist violence documented in Under the Banner is one that, to an outsider such as me, seems to be spreading across America and the world: the Trumpian sense of victimhood writ societally large. There is much in the press at the moment about Trump’s plans for a dictatorship. No dictator comes to power purely by the power of the sword, but rather by violence that rides on the back of anger that, once stoked, has no other means to vent. The moral of this book is that, while one does not have to be a fundamentalist to be angry, the belief that you’re acting on God’s command makes violence much more likely. As the curse goes, we live in interesting times.

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We arrived on the seventh day of the Nepali festival of Dashain, which meant that Kathmandu was shuttered as everyone was at home. We wandered around for the morning, stumbled across a guidebook on Langtang, which turned out to be very useful indeed.

Our car and driver turned up, along with our guide, Nom, and our porter, Rajan. We had a relaxed and painless drive to the starting point. The chant of the drive became China – not because of the country, but because every time we stopped to look for a tea (chai) shop, it was not (na) open.

We arrived at the Red Panda Hotel, had a decent meal and a comfortable night’s sleep, then set off. We aimed to be at Kyanjin Gonpa on the third night; we arrived before lunch on the third day. Kyanjin Gonpa is a little after Langtang, the town that gives the valley and national park their names. Here are some photos:

The hoops like a python’s curves in the centre of the photo are bee’s hives

Chilies drying on the toilet roof

The stupa at the entrance to Kyanjin Gonpa

The Sunrise View Hotel in Kyanjin Gonpa

The only encounter of note was on the second day with Wilfred, a former forensic police officer with the Munich police, who has visited Langtang every year for the past decade or so. Local practice is to boil potatoes with the skin on, so he was peeling a load of boiled potatoes by hand prior to having them fried for lunch. He quizzed us on Hong Kong, has been to Japan and Singapore and loves travelling in general, but to Nepal in particular because it is cheap.

Our hotel in Kyanjin Gonpa, The Sunrise Hotel, was friendly and we had an en-suite, which is a luxury in Nepal. After 3000m ascent in three days, the first thing to attend to was washing. We then went in search of a glacial lake that was said to be nearby. I deferred to Dean on the directions, we overshot and got stuck in flurries of snow. There was a ridge to our right and, when we made that, the lake was before us. It was small, and between two natural ridges of moraine. It also powered the micro-hydro that in turn powered the village, supplemented by water and electric solar panels on almost every roof.

The next day we ventured further. I was a little slow, but Dean went leaping ahead and we ended up above the lake, admiring the glaciers of the surrounding massif. My camera was either on on the blink or back in the hotel, so no pictures, but it was beautiful in a rather stark and barren way. That afternoon, we went up Kyanjin-ri, a hill behind the town. I idiotically wore my day-hiking rather than my proper trekking boots. With precipitous drops to one side on a path made slippery by dust from soil erosion, I paid the price. A couple of slips left me rather terrified but unhurt.

At Dorje’s tea house later that afternoon, we got talking to Geet, like Wilfred a regular visitor. Geet is a restaurateur living in Kathmandu, who had carried up his own sourdough and brie (though he didn’t offer us any). “Wow,” he said, when we told him about Yala. He’d gone over the Kyanjin-la pass at 5,300m a few years ago and that was as high as he wanted to go. A thousand meters of scree followed by a night in a very cold tent and a scramble through the snow. No thanks but good luck.

Dean and I looked at each other. The Kyanjin-la was next after Yala.

Back at the hotel, we were the only foreign guests. The others were all Nepalis, who, unable to travel during covid, discovered their own country. Some were inquisitive, some ignored us. The communal dining room was on the top floor of the hotel, and many popped out on to the roof for a smoke – which was only rarely tobacco. Our guide, Nom, turned up, reeking of rakshi, the local hooch. We gave him a smell of Scottish rakshi – the Glen Grant variety – and he wandered off, suitably humbled.

The next day, we set off to Yala Base Camp. This was a long traverse up a hillside:

We arrived at about lunch time, and Dean almost immediately assumed attack position:

Yala is the mountain behind the man, the rightmost of the ridge.

Dean was doing the right thing. It’s not a criticism but a physiological fact that (perhaps as he’s never been a smoker) he is not used to low-oxygen atmospheres, so adjusts less readily than I. Rest is the best way to get the red blood cell count up, and that is what he was doing.

I wandered around, found out that two other parties were targeting Yala: a large group of Italians and Spaniards who had come up with us, and a lone Frenchman who had already been in the camp for a day to acclimatise. All were heading up in the early hours of the coming morning.

It got cooler, the porters and cook lit a fire from yak dung, I admired the colours of lichen and moss on the rocks, and sunset came and went:

Very quiet, very tranquil, and very beautiful.

It was soon also to become very, very cold. And that was where it all went wrong. I had changed into my long johns and thermal vest, but I did so in our tiny tent and, as a result, a two-minute job took fifteen minutes. I was already cold after that, and my feet refused to warm up. Even poking them in the direction of a yak dung fire did little to help. Dinner, soup, was adequate and I submerged into my sleeping bag. That was okay until the first pee stop, which not only was cold but also saw me pee away a lot of warmth (I’d read about this in an Andy McNab thriller).

The night wore on, my feet got colder and colder and I felt the strength and warmth start to ebb away from my core. I tried vigorous movements and wiggling my toes and fingers, but to no avail. The pressure on my bladder, thanks to the soup, became unbearable. Another venture out into the now frigid night and more warmth pee’d away. Back to the sleeping bag, but something very bad was happening. My entire torso was wracked with micro-shivers. My feet were heading towards numbness. I rearranged myself. No change. Worse. Dean was asleep; I didn’t want to compromise his sleep as he needed to acclimatise. My eyes wanted to shut, but I remembered Shackleton. He’d reached South Georgia from Antarctica and had to march over the island. His men had wanted to rest. “I let them sleep for five minutes and told them it was half an hour,” he said in his book, “because that is a sleep from which no man awakes.” Was I being a drama queen? I staggered out of the tent and to the guide’s and porter’s tent, fifty paces away. By the time I got there I was convulsing uncontrollably with shivers. I hesitated, but there was nothing for it. I yanked open the zip.

Nom surfaced and very quickly realised something was wrong. Five cups of hot water (they had thermos flasks) laced with sugar and I was beginning to feel better. We changed my sleeping bag for one of their thicker ones. I snuggled inside. Within a few minutes my feet were warm, my torso was warm. I fell into an exhausted sleep – only to awake with a bursting bladder. Nothing for it. Outside once more. By the time I got back, although I was not as cold as I had been, I was chilled. I wiggled my feet; they refused to warm up. I wriggled me; I refused to warm up. I was not going to give in. I mentally recited every set piece I know (apart from “To be or not to be,” which would be asking for trouble), every poem I’ve memorised, every song I can sing. Some early hour of the morning came and the Frenchman emerged from his tent, had a cup of something and re-entered it. No sign of the Italians or Spaniards. No sign of the sun, though the moon made the landscape bright. More recitals, dredging my memory. No sun. No warmth in my toes, little in my torso. Another set piece. Was that the first rays of dawn? At last.

Kumar, a porter, woke me up shortly afterwards with a cup of sweet tea. I glugged it, fell asleep for another hour and half and woke up, alive.

It later transpired that that night had seen a sudden drop from a few degrees above freezing to fifteen below. None of the other parties had set off at 3:30 a.m. as planned; the Frenchman was still there, and less than half of the Italians and Spaniards had decided to make the attempt.

(I later found out that although cold feet were the start of it, the peeing had done a lot of damage. The way to deal with this natural urge in extreme cold is to pee into a bottle and take the bottle into your sleeping bag as a hot water bottle. I should have read Andy McNab, ex SAS, in more detail.)

Dean – probably not helped by me writhing besides him – had also had an awful night’s sleep, too. We decided to try a lower mountain, Tsugo-ri, an hour’s walk from our base camp, that morning. That turned out to be a fairly easy stroll and, although neither of us was 100%, worthwhile:

Tsugo-ri Peak on the way up

From Tsugo-ri looking back towards Kyanjin Gonpa

Dean even managed to look somewhat as though he wanted to be there.

Yala, however, was beyond us. Although only another 600m up from base camp, that consisted of 500m of high-altitude scree, followed by a hundred meters of vertical ice and rock. Dean was not properly acclimatised (and, though I didn’t say it at the time, his footwear was not up it) and I was not only exhausted from the cold, but had had my confidence dented in a major way. On top of that, the next couple of days would, according to Geet, see us descend to the valley floor at 4,000m, ascend a thousand meters of scree on the other side of the valley to 5,000m in a north-facing (i.e. no sunlight) bowl, where we would overnight before scrambling up over the Kyanjin-la pass at 5,300m.

And Dean had had enough of desolate places. Beautiful as the base camp was, it was not very different from Ama Damblan, our first exploit a few years ago. And we were surely both too old to be in thin-walled tents at 5,000m and -15°C (which is a lot colder at that height than at ground level).

So we chose to survive. We went a lot of the way back to the road head, turned off and up towards Gosaikund.

This, according to Hindu legend, is where the god Shiva cured a very nasty case of indigestion by stabbing his trident into the earth to bring forth a lake to cool his boiling stomach. The result is a series of glacial lakes. It took another four days to get there:

Spot the mountain goats

Approaching Langtang

Monks selfie too!

A stupa in the forest

A yak that will go nowhere

A forest stupa

A holy hole

An abandoned gonpa

Those pictures are from our walk on the way down and on the way up again, including a group of monks who, to judge from their language and accents, were from Isaan in northern Thailand; some rather fine stupas; a stuffed yak on The Hotel Yak Nak; and a very sinister but holy hole in the ground on the way to an abandoned and ruined gonpa. We spent a night at The Shittiest Tea House in Nepal where we met a trekker who had gone up the Kyanjin-la pass only to be forced to stop 85m from the top by an avalanche chute of solid black ice. The pass was already closed. We also stayed at the delightful Peace Hotel, where I was taught how to play a dramnyen by the host’s 80-year-old father.

We were now on the part of the route that Nepalis use to go to Gosaikund on weekend dashes, one day up and one day down.Sadly, it shows:

Litter marked the path. We arrived at our next tea house:

The second taken from an afternoon walk. My night in the cold had left me vulnerable and I was battling a throat infection that the previous day’s over-exertion in finding the abandoned gonpa had done little to help, so I gave up on the afternoon walk and let Dean go on ahead. While I awaited his return, two Nepalis arrived, skinned up a joint (at 4,100m), and offered me a toke. I declined, but not without wondering if they weren’t right, that weed is good for the altitude.

After the walk, the dining room of our hotel contained two Nepalis who were stoned to the point of being very obnoxious, asking questions at the top of their voices, assuming everyone else was in on the joke, playing their own music very loud and smoking inside. We went next door for a beer, by which time they’d been thrown out by the manageress.

There was clattering and banging all night, alarms going off, people coming and going, so I had a dreadful day’s hiking the next day. On arrival at Gosaikund, I collapsed into bed. A couple of hour’s rest left me much better, but it was now snowing outside. Several quick-march tourists, covered in snow, came into the dining room and left. That included a Tibetan who had lost all feeling in his fingers and toes, and who looked very frightened. I had been, too.

By sunset, the snow had stopped:

Frigid but stunning. I returned back inside to the communal dining room. A Belgian couple sat next to the stove trying not to shiver, and a group of Czechs came and went.

I was worried that the next day’s hike would be awful, but I cheered up as we went and soon was revelling in Shiva’s destructive creation:

Contemplating taking the waters

Gosaikund, the main lake

Another lake. There are said to be 108.

Annapurna and Manaslu behind me…

… and unobstructed by me.

Nom, not taking the waters. Sensible chap.

I think the peak behind this one is Surya, which means sun.

At the top of the pass @ 4,700ish meters

Looking back.

Pass, prayer flags and sky.

The last few are at the Gosaikund pass, which is the way in from the other side. After that it was, inevitably, all downhill. It took another few days to reach Kathmandu, a lot of that spent in forests and getting used to not being cold. We caught up with or were passed by various of the people we’d met: the Belgians had enjoyed their adventure, though the woman had at one point needed to warm her hands on the belly of a passing sherpa; an Italian and his wife who proudly asked us his age only to respond “seventy-four!”, and a French couple who knew their limits. We had met four doughty Englishmen, including a photographer who disdained equipment and wind farmer. The latter one our first meeting asked Dean about Hong Kong. Perhaps he was expecting an enthused monologue about the hundreds of miles of great hiking, the great beaches and vibrant sporting scene; or perhaps the brilliant operas, plays and performances; or the museums, history and culture, or even just the world-class dining and shopping. What he got was a lecture on the joys of living in a town with no tax and heavy subsidies for old people. We passed the site of a 1992 Thai Airways crash that held particular fascination for Dean (he had to travel a lot for work and flew I think 3 million miles), and we had lunch at a town where a bus full of people arrived from Kathmandu and hit the beer without delay at midday.

Here are a couple more snapshots:

The above two are on the way to Mangin Goth (a goth being a place where herders graze their charges). The next morning we slipped out early in the morning to a deep hoar frost:

Those hardy flowers seemed to survive being frozen solid. More resilient than me.

Our last night was in Chisopani, at the northern side of Shivapuri National Park, and the site of some devastation from the 2015 earthquake:

(And, yes, that building with the window and door frames stripped out, but still with a cell tower on top, is leaning over by 15 degrees. We were in the red and blue-painted hotel behind it. As I was on the balcony writing my journal, voices came from another ruin. I never saw who. Spooky.) We met a whole bunch of interesting people. Most were on small hikes from Kathmandu, but one was a lady who had summited Yala a few years before: “a bit technical towards the top” was the best she could say. A fitting end, somehow.

And here, for the record at Yala Base Camp, is Rajan, our porter…

The sign that never was.

…and Nom, our guide, taking a break half way up a hill. And, yes, that is a beer and a fag in his hands:

Nom.

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For those who have never heard of Flores, click here for a rather dry wikipedia entry.

Our tour started in Ende, which lives up to its name at the end of the world haha.There we met Marino, who was to be our guide for the tour. He had dreadlocks down to his hips, but insisted that although he liked reggae music, he is not Rastafarian. Like most people from Flores (Floratians?), he is Catholic. As the trip went on, however, I began to suspect that the Catholicism was a thin veneer on a deep base of Animism.

Ende is an administrative centre whose main claim to fame is that Soekarno, the father of Indonesian independence during the colonial era and the country’s first president, stayed there for a few years in Indonesia’s run-up to independence. Indonesia’s motto translates to “Strength through Diversity”, and Soekarno, a Muslim, resided with a Dutch pastor. After independence, Soekarno asked the Dutchman if there was anything he’d like, and the Dutchman asked for and was granted Indonesian citizenship.

We departed Ende and turned up a gorge. I came to like Marino’s driving style. He rarely made it past third gear and the more he spoke, the slower we went. As I was happy with slow, this resulted in a running commentary that was both informative and funny. The road we were travelling along was the inter-Flores highway. Flores is about 350km from one end to the other, but the highway, constructed by the Dutch in 1925, is 720km long as it is “a spaghetti road” (jalan spageti). The cows tethered on the verge were there as a result of a central government project: Indonesia imports huge amounts of beef cattle every Ramadan and, as Floratians consume almost no beef, the idea was that the Floratians would husband the cattle and export them to Java. At one point we went past a shack with an enormous speaker stack on the porch: Floratians, when they celebrate, do so with loud music and lots of palm todi. We also went past a lot of discarded plastic bags and detritus, the curse of developing-nation roads. Education, lamented Marino.

Our first port of call was Kelimutu, a somewhat active volcano which has three crater lakes, each a different colour. The wiki article linked to has better photos than I could take. The local people believe that the spirits of the dead go to these craters, the young to one, the old to another and the evil to a third.

I wonder which of the latter two I’ll go to.

Despite a fair lashing of tourists, I enjoyed our quick walk up the summit, and a diversion through a forest trail on the way down. And the sunrise was nice, though my phone camera was too crappy to catch it. So here, as a consolation prize, is the view from our room on our return:

Rice paddies and hills, and very, very quiet.

In Flores, terraced rice paddies are an exception. The larger ethnic group in Flores seems to be the Bajo people, who never got the hang of terraced rice paddies. As Flores is very hilly, the Bajo people rely on potatoes, carrots, tubers, and any number of game animals for their diet – along with Flores chilies, which are not just spicy hot, but very tasty.

A consistent theme of this trip became that Floratians refused to believe that a foreigner (me!) would eat food at the same spice level they do. I can’t blame them. Although Flores is very far off the beaten path, I’ve noticed that distance from paths that are beaten doesn’t affect tourists’ diets. One time in Ladakh in India, a group of a dozen tourists sat at a table next to us. Rather than follow the Indian custom of ordering a variety of dishes and sharing, each ordered the same biryani, no one shared, and they left half the food uneaten. Click, got the photo of spectacular landscape, curious humanoids, but we’re not changing our diet or cultural eating patterns one little bit, seems to be the attitude. Their loss – but I suppose that’s what Floratians are used to. Hence a constant backwards-and-forwards regarding the spice in my food.

The next day was a medley. We started out with a walk through the jungle, with a very well-informed guide who pointed out all sorts of jungle plants. At one point, we (my wife and I) recognised the smell of mint. Our guide had never heard of it, but when we pointed out the plants, he told us that variety of mint was highly poisonous. We saw a cashew-nut tree and found out that the nuts grow on a fruit which is very tasty, and very, very sour. Refreshing to eat after a long walk, but not something most people would have in the dining room fruit bowl. The locals let the fruit rot but harvest the cashews. Our guide also pointed out cocoa nuts, which are suffering from a blight, and the Tiger Balm plant. South-East Asians place great reliance on Tiger Balm as a cure for everything from a sniffle to a broken leg to tertiary syphilis. Useless to me: I can’t abide the smell. He also pointed out how the local palm toddy is made – cut the branch from a certain type of palm, collect the sap in a bamboo tube, ferment and get shit-faced.

One of Flores’s major exports is coffee. I’d never seen a coffee tree before:

Here’s me learning about coffee from a young man just returned from university in Manchester, England. That particular plantation is second-generation, the current owner being an Indonesian who naturalised in Holland. She has great but rather vague plans for her plantation. I hope they come to fruition, whatever they are.

Just down the road we came to a village.

The boh-tree is a kind of marker for the villagers, who can become quite dispersed so need a reference point. As boh-trees live forever and are huge, so visible from a distance, they serve the purpose. The gentleman between my wife and me was the headman of the tribe. He was a former schoolteacher who spoke excellent English. He related this tale:

Once, an immigrant from Java had turned up and, without making any overtures of friendship to his village, built a house on their land. The village was very unhappy about this. As head, it fell upon him to do something about it. In prosecution of this, he sacrificed a dog, drank its blood, ate its liver and led the villagers to the offending house – which they torched. “That was five or six years ago,” he concluded. “The police have still never come.”

Moral: if you come to this part of the world and wish to reside, make friends with the villagers first.

The next day, after a spice-free meal at our beautiful but soulless tourist hotel in the rice padis, we set off west to Bajawa. The route there has two volcanoes which, according to the local people, are dad and mum:

Dad, on the photo on the left, is a chain smoker of many years standing. Mum, was demure, so spent most of our visit modestly shrouded in the clothes of cloud, but she made a very brief appearance for the photo on the right. Dad and Mum were divorced by administrative fiat when the regency that contained both of them split. Thus do the affairs of bureaucrats afflict local custom.

The village in the foreground of the right-hand photo is of a different tribe to our dog-sacrificing warrior above, but the same overall Bajo people. The tribe in the Bajawa area is matriarchal. The only practical difference that makes seems to be when a woman of from one of the matriarchal clans falls in love with a man from one of the patriarchal ones and vice versa. What that seemed to boil down to was ostracism and very large numbers of water-buffalo as the dowry. Though Marino, our be-dreadlocked guide, didn’t use the word dowry.

Our next port of call was a waterfall. I’m not normally much of a waterfall sort of person, but this one involved descending an enormous number of steps to arrive at a natural stone bridge across the water:

The photo on the left is the local guide showing it can be crossed. Marino took one look at this gratuitous display of foolhardiness and shook his head. As did I.

There were more waterfalls the next day. These had the distinction of running both hot and cold at the same time: they were at the confluence of two streams, one from a nearby hot springs which was hot and the other from distant cold rainwater, which was cold.

Marino explained that the person who lives nearby the waterfall had no idea that it could be a tourist attraction until Marino suggested it. The resident took his advice and now offers food (with chilies for a change!), along with the local firewater. That was a very good meal.

To the extent that Indonesia is ever in the news, it is normally about its appalling treatment of its own environment: the burning of forests in Sumatra, dangerous and cruel extraction of minerals, and the like. Don’t get me wrong: I think Indonesia would be a much happier and wealthier country if it were to preserve the magnificent rain forest and natural bounty to which the country is heir, treat its workers decently, and that Indonesia should be called out for the environmental vandalism and horrid working conditions.

But what tends to get overlooked in the international press is that a lot of Indonesians feel the same way. The rest of the world may be clueless as to where Indonesia is, but Indonesians are very well aware of what’s going on in the rest of the world, and many younger ones are keen to break ties with the extract-and-burn old guard. So the final delight of this trip was a bamboo university.

This is a small campus, built almost entirely from bamboo. There we learnt that there are three different types of bamboo, each with its own name in the local language, but which I will crudely translate as big, small and medium. The big ones are six inches or more in diameter and can bear structural loads, so are used for the columns and beams of the two-storey building at the centre of the campus. The medium ones are useful for household objects: they make excellent cups and the like. The small ones are used in a myriad of ways, including food (the pith, not the outside), matting, roofing and webbing.

The university is a private foundation. Indonesia is home to tens of thousands of foundations – its been my privilege to have engaged with a couple – and this reflects the country’s great and thriving civic society. (One that has largely come into being after Soekarno’s authoritarian successor, Suharto, was deposed in 1998.) Bajawa’s bamboo university was founded to teach local people how to cultivate bamboo as a cash crop, and to help them treat and find a market for the finished products.

And there we are, at the end of our tour:

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Annapurna by Maurice Herzog
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you don’t like books about mountaineering – though if you’ve got this far, you probably already do – stop reading this review. If you do like them, this is one of the greatest climbing books, and one of the greatest adventure books ever written. It grips from the opening sentences to the final words, with the pace of a thriller and a consistent insight into human nature at the limits of what we can achieve.

The French expedition arrived in Nepal in 1950 with an idea to ascend either Annapurna or Dhaulagiri. The core team consisted of eight European mountaineers, one Nepali representing the royal family (which, then, was the state) and three Sherpas, along with many others in support. Although all of the Europeans were experienced in the European Alps, none were experienced in the Himalaya, and the Himalaya turned out to be a very different kettle of fish.

The first part of the expedition was spent exploring the area around the two peaks. It turned out that nearly all of the maps they had were wrong, and some of them very dangerously wrong. Their explorations did map the area and, in the end, they concluded that Dhaulagiri was unclimbable (it was to be ten years before they were proved wrong).

With time before the monsoon running out and supplies dwindling, they turned their attention to Annapurna. After a frenzy of recces, they ruled out one route but found another, and, on the 3rd June 1950, Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal became the first people to summit an 8,000 meter peak.

What makes the book great are not the bare facts of the climb, though those are spectacular enough, but the author’s insight into the characters of his fellow climbers: the different attitudes to risk, the their determination, the willingness of some to forego the summit in order that the expedition as a whole would succeed.

He also brilliantly conveys not only the sheer hardship of what it is to climb at high alititude, but also what it’s like to climb with severe oxygen narcosis – it is quite clear from the scenes as he approaches the summit that he is not thinking straight, that his ability to evaluate risk has been lost, and that he is high (as in stoned).

No mountaineering book is complete without the descent. This contains some harrowing scenes. Maurice and Louis were severely frost-bitten, and, with the monsoon rains coming in, the expedition had to get off the mountain and fast. Bounced and jolted down on improvised stretchers, I found myself wincing and grimacing at every unfortunate bump.

Even though the author was one of the worst-affected, he recounts the experience without looking for pity, but with a grim humour: their train pulls up at a station in India and the locals’ (presumed) first experience of Europeans is an amputated toe being thrown from a carriage full of blood and pus.

If the mountaineering section of your library consists of only one book, this should be it.

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The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was lent this book, the first of a trilogy that I think ended up becoming a triptych of trilogies, over the summer.

It’s been a while since I’ve read an original fantasy, and this makes the grade. It is gritty, violent and has a very black humour. The pages turn quickly enough. The characters are all nasty in interestingly different ways, and the author deserves credit for including a main character who is a complete moron, yet whose depiction is at once both engaging and funny.

For all that, I can’t quite put this up with Game of Thrones (I wonder if that series ever got finished?). The problem is that this world is neither as complete nor as fully formed; if anything, it is too close for comfort to our world. One of the great constructs in Game of Thrones is a vast ice wall; there is no similar geographical impossibility here. Although nearly all the main characters are physically out of the ordinary, there don’t seem to be any friends or enemies that are non-human in the way of Tolkein or the ice creatures in Game of Thrones. The only exception are the Shanka, but we’re never given a description, so it’s not clear whether they’re Orcs or just a particularly vicious tribe of nasties.

But the bigger missing thing is that, having read this first very thick volume, I still have no idea what’s at stake. There is the survival of a kingdom that is decaying, but its decay appears well-deserved. What’s missing is the clear evil represented by Tolkein’s ring, or the advance of the very non-human zombies in Game of Thrones.

I’ll read (if I can borrow it) the next volume, but only because this one didn’t so much conclude as stop. As an acquaintance once remarked of sex on speed: great fun, but not idea where it’s going.

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The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

To fans of Bill Bryson – and I am one – this is the usual Bill Bryson fare. On the twentieth anniversary of this American’s “Notes from a Small Island”, he sets off on another circuit of his adopted home, the United Kingdom.

This tour starts in Bognor Regis and ends in Cape Wrath at the other end of the Bryson Line (you’ll have to read the book to find out what that is). In between we are treated to the author’s acerbic wit, so funny that there were points when I was laughing so hard that I had to stop reading, and a series of vignettes in various far- and not-so-far-flung parts of the British Isles.

Bryson’s charm is that he is as funny as he is well-informed. Never shy of a rant, his diatribes range from a delightful defenestration of those who profess to write English but are completely ignorant of its grammar, through his own schizophrenic attitude to the National Trust, which excites both admiration and frustration, to his experience with large corporations “… there are people in [British Telecom] who hated you before you were born.”

Two things let this book down. The first is that, quite simply, it wasn’t about the British Isles. It was about the part of England south of the Midlands. Everything north and west of that is an afterthought, a kind of bow to necessity. The second is that it is less than the sum of its parts: this is a book with an acute case of sequelitus, written not because the author wanted to write it, but because he, his publisher or his agent saw a few bucks.

I hope he succeeds in making a few bucks. But I also hope his next book will be written because he wants to write it, not because someone else wants him to write it.

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The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked this mystery with a twist. What I liked most is how deeply rooted it is in the tradition of black and white murder mysteries, mostly Hitchcock, and how it blends those with a gripping tale of a woman, Anna Fox, who lives in complete isolation and whom we never quite trust as a narrator.

That distrust is very skillfully played out and central to the plot. I would have liked to use the analogy of a Matryoshka doll, but that’s weak because the dolls are the same in every layer, just smaller, whereas in this book, each layer reveals a different shape and appearance of Anna. This is a woman with serious issues and each revelation makes us realise how damaged she is.

Yet there was a section about a third of the way through when that distrust played against the book, when I was ready to give up on both Anna and the book; when I stopped trusting the author. The problem was that the trauma central to Anna is simply not credible. She would not have survived.

So, a great and intricate plot, skillfully woven, and clever. But not one I’d read again.

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