Uncategorized

It’s Hotel Life, Jim, But Not As We Know It.

#adventure, Uncategorized

Who Needs Breakfast at Tiffany’s?

Who needs Breakfast at Tiffany’s when you can have evangelical Nigerian generals for breakfast? A fair question, you might ask, but one that stands out as a trifle bizarre.

I’m holed up in the Al-Rayyan Doha Hilton for three months. We’re currently three weeks into a long, luxurious stay, with two months of room service to run. Outside it might be 43 celsius, but the hotel is an air-conned hotbed of the weird and the wonderful. They dump their bags from all over the world before disappearing behind fancy room numbers in this six-storey prism of marble and bronze leaf. The atrium is magnificent, it must be acknowledged. Tiered on two sides with hotel rooms tastefully set back from balustrades. On the third side, resplendent as you enter the vast lobby, is a kind of architectural fixture – I know not the technical term for it – a 100ft-high banner of bronze, cross-hatched glass panels, and abstractions of light and three-dimensional relief, perhaps. Whatever it is, it’s a showstopper. There’s so much marble in this one establishment that the mountain it was quarried from lies now in ransacked ruin. Trump was here in Qatar last week. He quipped something about loving all that marble. Trust me, he wasn’t kidding.

Back to the breakfast anecdote. It was Friday, first day of the weekend, and I was sitting there digesting yet another unnecessarily generous buffet breakfast, minding my own business, when in walks a black man, middle-aged, definitely West African. I had a feeling he might be Nigerian, as a large delegation had encamped there on official business as few days before. In fact, i was chatting with one of them at dinner the previous evening.

The chap turned to me and asked, “Are you South African?”

I answered i wasn’t but that the question had been asked of me in the past.

“Is there something about me that has that Afrikaner ring to it?”

“Well, yes”, he said. “Your face. And you are tall and white, so why not.”

I wanted to reassure him that in various parts of the world, stretching from Dunedin to Dundee, Manitoba to Moscow, there are a lot of white fellas over 6′ tall, and who could pass for a Springbok.

Soon, we fell into talking. Not afraid of physical proximity, as West Africans have to be, he shifted across the padded bench until inches away and proceeded to tell me that he was none other than a general in the Nigerian army.

“Funny, that,” I countered. ‘Until last week, I can’t recall ever meeting a senior military officer. But since then I’ve rubbed up against British Lt Colonels and Qatari Brigadiers.”

Life is either predictably predictable or else bloody bizarre. You wait an age on one red double decker and then three turn up in rapid succession.

Our conversation went from surface to deep sea within minutes. Our first scheduled stop on the pelagic dive was about the conspicuous wealth in the Gulf. Another hundred metres into the inky leviathan and we were on the subject of the corruption of money and greed in public life. Deeper still, it was the ecological crisis, rampant deforestation and Africa’s – and the planet’s – dwindling biota of all creatures great and small. But it was our next scheduled rest on the deep dive into the profound that he strong-armed me with a term i had never heard of before: prebendalism. What the? Can you repeat that, Emmanuel? P-r-e-b-e-n-d-a-l-i-s-m. The politics of cronyism and corruption and the curse of a democratic Nigeria. It refers to a closed culture in which state offices and civil service privileges result in a shared feeling of entitlement among elected officials to basically cannibalise the state’s resources for their own ends when that commonwealth should instead be fairly redistributed to those most in need. And among Nigeria’s 200 million there are many. It was, alleged my newfound general friend, Emmanuel, the reason for Nigeria’s impending doom. Reason further still to suspend democracy and restore military rule. He had a point, to be fair. He claimed, plausibly, that when civilian governments rule, they cannot help but slide in a culture of prebendalism. Popular vote by virtue of self-interest groups close to government demand booty in exchange for ballot loyalty. Those entitlements can be as innocent as a bag of rice or as sinister as cash bundles. A military government, on the other hand, seeks no such alliances of convenience and is therefore more adept at tackling strategic problems, like bringing immediate aid to whole regional populations who have, say, had their crops fail due to extreme weather, or civil unrest.

Emmanuel propounded a theory massively unpopular in the condescending West. But a theory nonetheless that made me sit back and think from the perspective of one of the heads of the Army who frames his country’s current plight in near-calamitous terms requiring martial law, redefining martial rule as a corrective instrument for a nation gone badly off the rails. Though in spite of the prebendalism hollowing out Nigeria’s (and i suspect much of Africa’s) civil governance, it was something else that led me to turn a quirky but original experience into this written record: namely, Emmanuel’s confession that he would rather be saving souls than saving lives. There is a deep evangelical streak running through the heart of all human life in developing nations with runaway population pressure. I saw it in Brazil. In him I saw it as casting a divine shadow over realities we in the west cannot imagine: where someone like Emmanuel’s father loses his own father to preventable disease aged six, before wandering alone across brutally hot savannah for weeks before being rescued by European missionaries – Anglicans, actually. From that trauma to the balm of Christ, in a West Africa preceded for millennia by animistic shamanism, the superimposition of Western scriptural doctrine onto little lost sheep has this intoxicating effect. Not only was the son fervently Christian in both beliefs and deeds in a way we in the secular West could no longer be, Emmanuel had the shaman in him too, for he believed that God spoke through him, anointing him with divine powers to change others’ fate. He was convinced, for instance, that he was able to grant his father a stay of death until the time was right to lose him. Like the missionaries who plucked his father from sad obscurity aged six, beyond the temporal to the spiritual Emmanuel considered being a general a drop in the ocean compared to being a servant of the people prosecuting God’s work.

Pitying my inbuilt scepticism, and mocking my quasi-Darwinian metaphor of the chimpanzee and the human hand being one in the same, he was not going to let me go without taking my hand in his, and praying for an end to my lifetime of doubt. Clasping a white hand in two warm, black hands he squeezed with all the conviction of a man who knew nothing but. He sealed his eyes and screwed up his face, beseeching God to give Scott a long life. And when it was over, gave me his number and invited me to stay with his family the next time i was in Nigeria.

Who needs Breakfast at Tiffany’s when you can have breakfast in Babylon?

What Goes Down Must Come Up: Why You Should See the Colca Canyon

#adventure, adventure, Andes, backpacking, Landscapes, Latin America, Perú, Perú, Travel, Uncategorized

Olympian Among Canyons

Allow me to set the scene, if you will. The Colca Canyon is situated in Southern Peru, about a 3-hour drive northwest of the White City, Arequipa. By all measures, the Colca is the world’s third deepest canyon (some say fourth) after the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in Tibet, followed by the jaw-dropping Kali Gandaki Gorge in the Annapurna region of Nepal.

The Colca Canyon cuts such a swathe through the Andean plateau that it bottoms out at about 11,000ft (3,400m). To offer up some idea of scale that clicks with most of us, that’s about twice the depth of the world’s most celebrated geological knife wound, Arizona’s Grand Canyon. So, one Grand Canyon nested on top of another, and the Colca will just about accommodate them both.

Where Humans Dare To Tread and Till

Farmed by Inca peoples since time immemorial, its steep slopes show abundant signs of continuous human occupation. At about 50 miles in length that’s one deep cut for Man; one deeper cut for the magisterial condor that has made a miraculous comeback there after decades of persecution from local livestock farmers. Its confidence soaring, the condor is one of the main attractions of the hordes of tour buses that stop at the various lookouts along the canyon rim.

For the adventurous few though, what awaits them is a gruelling descent to the canyon floor, where if lucky, they’ll see the condor soar not below them, but at eye level. It’s all downhill from here. And surprise, surprise, the prospects never looked so good.

I got teamed up with a nice bunch of continental Europeans half my age and double my knee flexibility. Among them a smattering of French and German. The Franco-Prussian alliance had sunk to new heights. Our guide was a native of Arequipa, a man who had led so many 3-day expeditions in and out of the canyon that, as can be expected, he was rather unfazed by the whole affair.

El Condor Pasa

One moment we were setting off along the canyon rim and the next a slow motion plunge down a zigzagging hoof trail that swallowed us whole. The view was stupendous, the scale was suddenly gargantuan, and the sky a blue bonanza between weeks of monsoon rain that would render it all but impassable before and after. With the heat rising and the sunlight penetrating the deepest, darkest rincones of this abyss, we fell into a hypnotic rhythm. Our guide pointed out geological features, and delved into a history of human geography. But in keeping with great journeys, what you rank as the best bits keep getting superseded by better bits. Half way down royalty dropped in. Condors swooping over us so near and so balletic on the hot air updrafts that by the time i reached for my oversized SLR camera, they had glided away into the shaded recesses under the canyon walls.

It’s All Downhill From Here

Serendipity had accompanied us that day. Our guide marvelled at how rare it was to come so close to the feathered emblem of the Andes. Then again, perhaps he said that to all his small tour groups. Down and down we traipsed until, looking up, the canyon walls closed in on us like great doors in some medieval banquet hall.

Having spent the better part of the day tiptoeing down about 3,000ft we found ourselves at the nadir. By no means the lowest point in our experience, crossing the iron suspension bridge over the Colca’s mazy river did signal the lowest point geographically-speaking. The sun was beyond its zenith, casting its brilliance on the east face of the canyon, making shadow creep gracefully up the west face.

Scraping the Barrel to Find an Oasis

We had been descending all this time. Now we were walking along the canyon floor adjacent to the watercourse. Festooning the margins of the clear crystal water were orchards of figs and other succulent fruits. Vegetation was abundant. Light and warmth caressing in a very special place where the wind and the winds of change were banished.

We walked and talked for the next couple of days along that canyon floor. We passed churches and villages, kids coming home from school, and guinea pigs flayed and hung out to dry. We stopped in a guesthouse with the most amazing swimming pool, fed to pure by an oasis. A classic desert oasis in the truest sense it was, fringed by date palms whose seedlings had come from half a world away.

It’s All Uphill From Here

On the third morning since taking the plunge into the world’s third deepest canyon, we gathered around our guide at 4am to face the trek back up and out. We obviously knew all along that what goes down must come up. But comfortable in our deep oasis on the previous evening, tipsy on rum and oxygen, I was contemplating a helicopter medevac out of there. The climb looked daunting, and was. 3,000ft straight up in the grip of incipient subtropical heat. Hence the reason we left before daybreak. As if to foreshadow what would be a gruelling hike out, my guide took one look at the packs I was carrying back and front, and shook his head in pity. “I told you to travel lightly, didn’t I?”

Half-light kissed the rim tops around an hour or two into the climb. Then, quick as ink blotting on paper, the dawn light seeped down until we rose to meet it a quarter of the way up. By then the pain of being a human packhorse had slowed my stride to a lumbering, teetering mess. My t-shirt was soaked with the sweat of my own labours. My bandana had to be wrung out every 100 metres or so. My eyes were weeping salty tears of pure perspiration. The line between myself and the other group members was attenuating fast, as they strode ahead. Overcome with guilt, eventually my guide offered, with a degree of reluctance visible in his grimace, to take one of my packs. But not before hailing a passing muleteer who refused.

Ghosts From the Past

Onward we clambered, inch by inch until at about 10am – a full 6 hours after setting off from the now microscopic guesthouse on the canyon floor – he and I emerged on the lip. Shattered, reddened to bursting, and vowing never to descend that far again with any baggage whatsoever, I collapsed in a heap. Beside me, by the grace of an ironic God, were a couple of Estonians I had climbed with a couple of weeks earlier. On that occasion, the altitude was so dizzying that it was they who struggled with hypoxia to the point of almost fainting, and me who offered a helping hand. Now there they were all smiles, relaxing after practically jogging up the Colca carrying nothing but a 7-litre daypack. And me, a sorry sight, temples pounding, eyes throbbing and near spent. Valió la pena? Was it worth the pain? Absolutamente!