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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?

Socorro Answers a Cry for Help.

#Brazil, Brazil, Säo Paulo, Socorro, South America, Travel, travelogue

Made ancient by granitic bedrock jutting through in megalithic outcrops, while at the same time made new by the accelerated growth rate of vegetation rampaging over every sod of this Capricorn earth, the topography takes a sideways glance at normality. It’s a split personality of rural France and equatorial South America: piebald cows grazing upland pastures that border dense strips of Atlantic rainforest. Nobbled hilltops, a punk mohican of Atlantic rainforest on one flank, scalped green on the other. If ever Gondwana had an affair with Occitanie, the hills around Socorro is where the child was raised.

There’s nothing quite like a great view to soothe frayed nerves. We left the madhouse of Säo Paulo later than expected on Friday. Wanting to escape the quantum chaos of Friday rush hour traffic, instead the invisible threads that bind millions to the city’s ailing physiology – with its high cholesterol and hypertension – took us into its sickly hold. A passing thunderstorm brought rain not in drops but in globules. Five minutes of deluge had the streets funnelling a torrent of water. As the afternoon wore on, I feared being held hostage to fortune in what would be a million-man race out of the city before dark. And so it went. Swerving hither and thither, we dodged four-wheel bullet after four-wheel bullet in our haste to pull off a spectacular jailbreak. And we almost made it the 25-odd miles to the city limits without incident. That is, until some inconsiderate arsehole (cuzaö in Portuguese – my new favourite, adopted insult) decided to cut us up by swerving violently off the middle lane to reach the exit (saída) and clipping the flank of our car which was motoring along on the inside lane.

Bang! Time stopped momentarily while fate decided whether to flip the car onto its roof and under the 18 wheels of a trundling road train, or to spare us with a mere metallic slap. Fate chose the latter. Stopped in the central reservation of a 6-lane highway from hell, cars flew past us as we remonstrated with the intransigent old fool, who blamed us for being in the slow lane, and therefore causing considerable inconvenience to his plans to make a sudden and spectacularly boneheaded exit off the expressway. ‘Sua culpa’ I said, which maddened him all the more. Meanwhile, I could see the red mist come down on my girlfriend. The offending driver refused to exchange insurance details, stating he didn’t bother buying any for his €15,000 car. Having given up trying to make him see reason, he fled. Karine snapped at the injustice, and an emotional catharsis ensued. Despairing, she insisted on going home. I said no way, so took the wheel and tried to make a dignified escape into the thickly-forested mountains at the natural delimitation of this red giant of a town.

Catharses often end in a profound sense of inner peace. And so it was with Karine. I placed a reassuring hand on hers, and reminded her that we were uninjured and the car, while pranged, was driving well enough. And best of all, we had escaped Säo Paulo’s potent clutches and were now under a tranquil blanket of night in rural Brazil.

We made Socorro by 9pm. The surrounding hills were just about discernible as an inky staircase climbing into the unsullied night. The town, now just a cluster of lamplight in the saddle of a distant valley, looked inviting in a way that only a boy from the provinces could understand. Our little love shack was waiting for us along the Rio de Peixe (Fish River) tourist valley, off the asphalt and down a red oxide dirt track. Old derelict outhouses that once served the Fazenda Fartura loomed in the shadow. Other than weak porch light from the few farm dwellings dotted around the meadows and beside lone arboreal survivors from a disappearing world of giants, we arrived to nought but bliss, and the sound of Earth spinning soundlessly through the void.

Toes in the Water

Uncategorized

What’s a blog, anyway? A blended word for a blocked bog? Is this how we flush away the undigested waste of our thoughts during coffee breaks and weekend shakedowns?

Ships’ captains use to keep logs. Cook wrote reams of them on the creaking bark, the one the Admiralty named Endeavour, for that’s what it took to write a ship’s log in excruciating detail when the thing was listing and rocking and rolling into history. Looking back on it, I’ll wager that the indigenous peoples of the Indo-Pacific had wished that the poster boy of the Royal Navy had been illiterate. Had he never kept a B (ark Endeavour) Log, detailing his quest to see Venus transit, he scarce would have made a first-footing with such a join-the-dot regularity on so many of these remote islands. No Cook no Empire, no Empire no cats and rats and vitamin-deficient mariners invading from the West. No invasive species, no world in its present guise. No world in its present guise, no tapping idle thoughts on this computer, blogging idle dreams of global conquest.

Yes, i can see it now: 1769, cracked lips, throbbing groin, hanging off the rigging whooping for joy as my ship sails into a Tahitian harbour to be greeted by scantily-clad beauties paddling canoes, bearing gifts that need no recording even in the ship’s log.