Category Archives: Travel

Levison Wood: Walking The Himalayas

24th January 2016 Oikofuge 4 Comments

“You come all this way to see the views and get out of breath? What a strange people you are.”

This is the successor volume to Levison Wood‘s Walking The Nile, which recorded his journey on foot from the source of the Nile to the Mediterranean. It’s a companion to his TV series of the same name on Channel 4.

Walking the Himalayas was always going to be a more nebulous undertaking than walking the Nile. There’s no definite start and end point to the Himalayan range, and no unique line of travel. Wood’s route takes him well south of the mountaineering traverse carried out by Graeme Dingle & Peter Hillary in 1981 (detailed in their book First Across The Roof Of The World, which I’ve reviewed here). Dingle & Hillary’s route linked Kanchenjunga in Sikkim to K2 in Pakistan. Wood covers more of the range, from the Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan to Gankhar Puensum in Bhutan, but by travelling at a lower level he avoids much weaving to-and-fro, so he actually covers less distance than Dingle and Hillary—a “mere” 1,700 miles compared to their 3,200 miles.

The book makes a fine companion to the television series. It records much that didn’t make it past the editing process for television, as well as providing space for Wood to give us a little history of the region, as well as some personal reminiscences. If I have a grumble, it’s the way the narrative blithely edits out the intermittent presence of a film crew, and indeed proceeds as if there’s no TV documentary involved at all. For instance, it’s difficult to believe that the “spontaneous” decision to hire a helicopter and fly off to look at Mount Everest didn’t have something to do with the involvement of a film director and producer lurking in the background. But Wood isn’t alone in this sort of thing—Gus Casely-Hayford managed to get right through his book, The Lost Kingdoms Of Africa, without ever mentioning the documentary film crew who were travelling with him.

Wood’s book, in contrast to Dingle and Hillary’s, isn’t really about the mountains at all. Apart from a high col at the start of the journey, and a nameless ridge at the end, he doesn’t do much deliberate mountain climbing; he walks on roads a lot of the time. Instead, he’s much more interested in the people he meets and the cultures he encounters along the way.

The book gives us all the major incidents that turned up on television—crossing wonky bridges and eroded paths, dealing with tense border guards, wading through crocodile-infested rivers, losing the route on rough ground at nightfall, trekking through the monsoon, evacuating a rapidly flooding camp at dead of night, and of course the near-fatal car crash that interrupted (and very nearly ended) the journey. But we also get to read about Wood’s anxious stay in Kabul before the journey started, holed up in a fortified safe-house under the care of a security consultant. Then there’s his audience with the Dalai Lama, in which the wily old sage quickly identified Wood’s journey as potentially good publicity for the Tibetan cause; and his meeting with the Hindu holy man Swami Chidanand Saraswatiji, whose PA reminded Wood, “Don’t forget to like us on Facebook.” We also get to hear a great deal more about Wood’s longstanding friendship with his Nepali walking companion and guide, Binod Pariyar.

Through it all, Wood comes across as the same cheerful, calm, reasonable person that he seems to be on television. There’s a suggestion in the book that he might have had enough of long-distance walking—but then, there was a suggestion at the start of the book that he’d had enough of long-distance walking. So watch this space, I think.

(Added March 2017: And so it turned out. I’ve now reviewed Wood’s next book, Walking the Americas. Here’s a link to the relevant post.)

Note: For interest, I’ve prepared the map below comparing the route taken by Wood with the earlier traverse by Dingle & Hillary. (Both routes were interrupted by problems with direct border crossings, necessitating detours to official crossing points, but Dingle & Hillary incurred a much bigger gap at the Kashmiri Line of Control.)

Comparison of Himalayan traverses by Wood (2015) and Dingle & Hillary (1981)
Click to enlarge
(Original base map)

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Reading, Travel, Walking

Graeme Dingle & Peter Hillary: First Across The Roof Of The World

7th January 2016 Oikofuge Leave a comment

We’ve been watching Levison Wood‘s Channel 4 series Walking the Himalayas. (And I’ve now reviewed his book of the series here.) The Boon Companion and I had to fight down a wave of nostalgia during the second episode, having spent a happy couple of weeks in Kashmir back in the early 80s, albeit followed by a brief admission to an Infectious Diseases hospital for The Oikofuge.

Anyway, Wood’s Himalayan traverse has prompted me to reread an account of the first such expedition. In 1981, mountaineers Graeme Dingle and Peter Hillary followed a rather free-style 5000-kilometre route from Kanchenjunga to K2. They did this “Alpine style”—travelling light and fast, after the fashion of Alpine mountaineers, rather than using the major-expedition style of classic Himalayan mountaineering. It was extremely Alpine-style: they carried only a tent fly-sheet for shelter, bought their food along the way, and generally walked in Adidas trainers (including during many of their glacier ascents and high col crossings). They only dug out the mountaineering kit when they had to venture over 17,000 feet in eastern Nepal. They walked usually with just one companion, and only occasionally hired porters if they were setting off with a large load of newly purchased food. At widely spaced intervals, where there was road access to the route, friends would bring in additional supplies.

Sometimes they ran out of food. Occasionally their trainers fell apart at inconvenient moments. They didn’t have very good maps, and the directions they got from locals were sometimes of poor quality. They tried to stick as close as possible to the spine of the Himalayas without climbing any peaks, so the journey was an endless up-and-down trek across the southern spurs of the big summits, crossing cols between 16,000 and 20,000 feet high. In 300 days of walking, they racked up a jaw-dropping 1.5 million feet of ascent. Their journey was not quite continuous—they couldn’t make legal border crossings in the high mountains between Sikkim and Nepal, or cross the Line of Control in Kashmir, and so were obliged to make detours by bus to official crossing points, and then take up the journey again as close as possible to the other side of the border. (Levison Wood had the same problem.)

It’s pretty clear that they hated each other for most of the journey, often walking separately for long periods, which must have been immense fun for their single travelling companion, a Nepalese-Tibetan mountaineer called Chewang Tashi. They wrote alternate chapters of this book, each apparently making some effort to spare the other’s feelings, so it’s difficult to know quite why there was so much animosity from so early in the journey. At one point Dingle describes some sort of near-mutiny, in which the support team members demand that Hillary step down as overall leader in favour of Dingle, but Hillary makes no reference to this.

Neither is a great stylist, it has to be said—they both overuse the word “mighty” (mighty peaks, mighty rivers, mighty cliffs); some of the “amusing” anecdotes are simply impenetrable; and neither of them can make up his mind whether they are traversing “the Himalaya” or “the Himalayas”. Only one phrase stood out for me in the whole book, and that was Dingle describing the disappointment of being drunk when everyone else is sober: “Unfortunately, the whisky I drank did little to cheer up those that didn’t drink it”. Even more unfortunately, this led him to try cheering everyone up by pretending to be a blind man falling over a cliff. At which point he … um … actually fell over a cliff. The resulting dislocated shoulder and fractured collar-bone put a bit of crimp in his style for the next few weeks.

But it’s a steady narrative that gets you from A to B. There’s unfortunately only so much that can be said about yet another col, another valley, another river—so the story mainly comes alive during encounters with other people; some friendly, some hostile, some local, some foreign.

Hodder & Stoughton produced a lovely hardback for them—it’s well laid out, with plenty of photographs nicely reproduced. For me, Colin Maclaren’s sketch maps should have been printed a bit larger, by turning them sideways on the page, but that’s probably a side-effect of my worsening presbyopia and the low winter sun at this reading. I don’t remember having the slightest problem with the maps when I first read this book in 1982!

So my only real complaint is the alleged typeface on the cover. I know the 70s and 80s weren’t great decades for typography on book covers, but this one really takes the biscuit:

Typeface from First Across The Roof Of The World — A crime against typography

Doesn’t that look more like a ransom note than an effort to produce a “set of glyphs that share common design features”?

Note: For interest, I’ve prepared the map below comparing the route taken by Dingle & Hillary with the later traverse by Wood. (Both routes were interrupted by problems with direct border crossings, necessitating detours to official crossing points, but Dingle & Hillary incurred a much bigger gap at the Kashmiri Line of Control.)

Comparison of Himalayan traverses by Wood and Dingle & Hillary — Comparison of Himalayan traverses by Wood (2015) and Dingle & Hillary (1981)
Click to enlarge
(Original base map)

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Travel

Venice

25th November 2015 Oikofuge Leave a comment

It is a quality of Venice that everybody who sets foot there is impelled to share their experience either by writing about or making pictures of the city.

J.G. Links, Venice For Pleasure

To Venice, in November. Nice time of year for it—the streets are pretty quiet, and that strange pearlescent Venetian light is very noticeable. The poor Venetians were so cold they had been forced to wear outdoor scarves on top of their indoor scarves, to the great detriment of eleganza, but by Scottish standards the weather was somewhere between cool and crisp.

San Giorgio Maggiore
© 2015 The Boon Companion

However, the Boon Companion and I were both nursing stuffy colds and hacking coughs, so we crept around the misty canals as if re-enacting a scene from Death in Venice (but without the runny hair dye and the strangely beautiful boy, obviously).

I’m pleased to report that Venice retains its status as World Capital of People Who Aren’t Looking Where They’re Bloody Going; and, from personal observation, its bid to become Selfie-Stick City of the Year for 2016 looks secure. A determined person equipped with bolt-cutters could do a great deal of good in the area around St Mark’s Square. To paraphrase the well-known Klingon proverb: Four thousand selfie sticks may be cut in a single night, by a man who runs. *

Santa Maria della Salute
© 2015 The Boon Companion

Our visit coincided with the Festa della Madonna della Salute on 21 November, so we had the chance to stroll across the temporary pontoon bridge that crosses the south end of the Grand Canal for just four days a year, allowing the procession from St Mark’s Basilica to the Salute to take a short-cut. The proprietors of the Gritti Palace hotel are presumably a little disgruntled about all the people who can peer down into their otherwise secluded canal-side terrace.

Culturally, we almost managed a painting-free visit. We emerged untainted by Tintoretto, unblemished by Bellini, uncontaminated by Canaletto and … um … unassailed by arsy alliteration. Only a pair of tickets for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection prevented us making a clean getaway.

Now, I’m not averse to a bit of Magritte or Giacometti, and there was a rather lovely black granite sculpture by Anish Kapoor, polished to form a couple of concave mirrors:

Anish Kapoor: Untitled, 2007
© 2015 The Boon Companion

But am I the only person who wonders if Mark Rothko wasn’t just having a laugh?

Mark Rothko "Red" 1968 — Mark Rothko: “Red”, 1968.
Transcendence of the individual, or having a laugh?

Our other cultural event was a trip to Musica a Palazzo, a three-handed performance of La Traviata taking place in three rooms in the decaying splendour (well, more like decaying decay) of the Palazzo Barbarigo Minotto. After an unpromising start—we walked down a dark alley and were hailed from a lighted courtyard by a young man who hissed “Psst! Signore? Opera?”—this turned out to be immensely good fun. It’s not often you get to be right amongst the performers at an opera.

But mainly we just wandered around. There’s no place like Venice for just wandering around. It’s impossible to be lost for long, given that it’s a small place surrounded by seawater and split by a stonking great canal, and by its very (expensive) nature, there aren’t really any rough neighbourhoods to wander into. Every twist in the street seems to produce a new improbable vista, a decent place to eat, and a building of historical significance.

Finally, a puzzle. What is strange about this view of St Mark’s Square?

* I need hardly add that the original Klingon is qaStaHvIS wa’ ram loSSaD Hugh SIjlaH qetbogh loD (“Four thousand throats may be cut in a single night, by a man who runs”). There is no Klingon word for “selfie stick”, for obvious reasons.

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Reading, Travel

J.G. Links: Venice for Pleasure

23rd November 2015 Oikofuge Leave a comment

Not only the best guide-book to that city ever written, but the best guide-book to any city ever written.

Bernard Levin in The Times

Joseph Gluckstein Links (1904-1997) wrote Venice for Pleasure in 1966, and it is now in its ninth edition. Venice being the city it is, and Links’s interests being what they are, the book doesn’t need much revision from edition to edition, though (as with other Venice guide-books) you’re well advised to ignore any information about vaporetto routes, which change on a yearly, if not seasonal, basis.

Links was an interesting man: a self-taught expert on the artist Canaletto and the history of Venice, he was also the Queen’s Furrier (who knew there was such a job?), a Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a regular competitor on the Cresta Run, and once collaborated with Dennis Wheatley in the writing of a popular set of “crime dossier” murder mysteries.

What makes Venice for Pleasure such a rare joy is how lightly Links wears his erudition. Reading the book is like wandering slowly around Venice in the company of a knowledgeable, droll, elderly raconteur. At one moment some piece of art history is being wittily imparted; at the next, we’re being urged to take a seat and have a cup of coffee. For, as Links says, “Generally the first thing to do in Venice is to sit down and have some coffee.”

The book starts with an introductory chapter, dealing with the history of Venice and chatting amiably about the part of the city centred on St Mark’s Square. Then Links takes us through four walking routes which, when combined, cover the major landmarks and art galleries. He is keen that we don’t take his walking routes too seriously, though. He encourages us to dip in and out, deviate if we want to, and under no circumstances to read and walk at the same time. The correct place to read his book, he declares, is while seated at leisure in a trattoria with a decent view:

Comments will therefore be reserved for when we are sitting down and, so far as possible, only the minimum of directions for when we need to get from one place to another. They may even be too minimal and we may get lost. No matter.

That gives you a feel for his narrative style. A fine example of his dead-pan delivery turns up in the Campo S. Margherita:

High up on the house next to the campanile is a statue of S. Margherita herself; the dragon beneath her is the devil in disguise and it is a relief to know that he devoured her but then burst asunder and vanished, leaving Margherita unhurt. It must have been a nasty moment, though.

Finally, I want to give you a longer quote from the book, a story about the painter Veronese, and how he came to paint his Feast at the House of Levi:

It was painted as a Last Supper and Veronese was hauled before the Inquisition, which was sitting for the purpose in a chapel in St. Mark’s. The buffoons, dogs, drunkards and dwarfs in the picture had affronted them but above all it was the Germans they could not stomach. ‘Were you commissioned to paint Germans in this picture?’ they asked. No, answered Veronese, but the picture was very large and there had to be a lot of figures in it. ‘Was it fitting that he should paint Germans at our Lord’s last supper?’ they pressed, and the artist could but answer, ‘No, my lord.’ […] He was given three months in which to correct the picture but he found a less arduous way of satisfying honour all round. He just retitled it Feast at the House of Levi instead of The Last Supper and left in the dogs, drunkards, dwarfs – yes, and even the Germans.

It would have been a pretty riotous Last Supper:

Veronese, "Feast in the House of Levi" 1573. — The offending painting (click to enlarge)

The Germans are in the lower right corner. They’re identifiable as such because they’re soldiers, in uniform. And their presence was particularly offensive to the Inquisition because, after the Reformation in Germany, they were probably Protestant soldiers. But Links doesn’t let such explanatory detail get in the way of a good story, well told.

And now for something completely different …

The whole Veronese/Inquisition dialogue was beautifully lampooned in a sketch written by John Cleese for the 1976 Amnesty International charity concert, A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick), which later turned up on video as Pleasure At Her Majesty’s. Here’s a later version of the same sketch:

A discursive blog on various topics of minor interest