Greenland is a part of the kingdom of Denmark – a massive,
almost uninhabited ice-cap over fifty times the size of its mother country.
Not that Odd is unusual in Tromso, in fact its one of the
most common surnames. Should you ever wish to stay unnoticed in a Tromso hotel,
check in as Mr and Mrs Odd.
…..a truly surreal piece of Same culture – a joiking
ceremony. A joik (pronounced yoik) is an improvised chant, delivered in a
semi-yodelling waver. It has no beginning, middle or end. It is musical but not
actually a song. It contains the essence of a feeling or a character or an
emotion that is wholly personal and cannot be transferred except possibly
within a family……It all feels very Irish, or perhaps Indian, and later I find
out that joiking is very much part of an international folk tradition….
We cross the Norway-Finland border at a sleepy hamlet called
Karigasniemi. The Japanese couple, who have been clutching documents for the
last half-hour, cannot believe that no one wants to see their passports.
……our hotel in Ivalo also sported a full-blooded disco which
set to work around midnight and was conveniently located beneath the bedrooms.
There are only five million people in Finland, and they
enjoy the second highest standard of living in Europe. They also share a long
border with a country that is cracking up, and one of their great fears is that
Gorbachev’s reforms will one day lead to a flood of Russian immigrants.
….Neil says that in the north of Finland the girls are very
direct. At a dance or disco they will always make the first move. ‘Even the old
and ugly ones,’ adds Lassie.
The Finns, it seems, are egalitarian, eschewing formality
and anything that smacks of class. They have a sense of humour, but not much
sense of irony. Humour is introspective and personal; there’s no tradition of
getting together in a theatre to laugh communally.
It’s hard to overestimate the contempt which Finns seem to
have for all things Russian.
….[Leningrad] …a
visit to two contrasting food sources. One is the private market, to which
people can bring their home-grown produce to sell. It looks much like any big
covered market, thought the standard of hygiene is low….According to ….our
interpreter, the average Russian would not be able to afford to shop here. Even
her parents, who are quite well off, could only come here maybe two or three
times a month, for a treat….the alternative is the State food shop…..It is
clean, well lit, hygienic and almost entirely devoid of food….there is no wine
on the shelves as Gorbachev’s anti-drinking reforms have resulted in enormous
cuts in production. Apparently sixty per cent of the Georgian wine crop was
deliberately destroyed.
…..Edward…he’s Jewish, one of the ‘nationalities’ for whom
travel is difficult. He is about to go abroad for the first time…..but his
passport will still make specific mention of the fact that he is Jewish…..He
laughs a lot. He says the Russians all do. They couldn’t survive without
laughter.
[Novgorod] …..If
only I had been able to spend more time with the Mayor….I could have asked him
why, in a city of 250,000 people, there are only five restaurants.
….we pull into Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, third-largest
city of the Soviet Union. The station is packed solid. I’ve seen nothing like
it since India.
Soviet restaurants exist for one purpose, and that is to
keep the customer out, and if by chance he or she should get in to make life so
uncomfortable that they wish they hadn’t. ….Its very depressing and is, I
suppose, just the Soviet system in microcosm – unwieldy, paranoid and impersonal.
During the time the Nazis occupied Kiev – from October 1941
to October 1943 – 400,000 people were killed, either in the city or in
extermination camps, 300,000 were deported to forced labour camps in Germany,
and eighty per cent of all residential houses were destroyed. ….If the
prevailing wind had not been blowing from the south on 26 April 1986 – the day
the reactor blew up at Chernobyl – Kiev, only fifty-five miles away, would have
been a dead city…..The Ukrainians claim that 8000 died as a result of the
accident. The official figure is thirty-two.
Romanians occupied Odessa in the war – Hitler had promised
their leader Antonescu large stretches of the Black Sea coastline. They burnt
20,000 locals in an arsenal and hanged 5000 from trees around the city to
frighten the populace. Today the major problem is severe industrial pollution.
The Sea of Azov, a huge area east of the Crimea, is so badly affected that its
beaches have been totally evacuated.
We have seen the petrol queues and the empty shops, the
shabbiness of the surroundings and the hard face of privilege, but we’ve also
seen spontaneous delight in the countryside…..happily packed beaches…..All you
can say is the Soviet Union is never quite what it seems. We have eaten old,
tasteless bread in hotels, but found, here in Odessa, a shop around the corner
selling fresh baguettes. We have seen one bag of fruit costing over twenty per
cent of a weekly wage and country gardens groaning with produce. We have looked
into stony faces but never been hugged as hard.
Istanbul is a very noisy city, much of the noise from a huge
construction programme.
As a result of climate, history and geographical position,
Istanbul is the quintessential trading city. Russia and the Mediterranean and
Europe and Asia meet here….There are Azerbaijanis, Iranians, Poles, Romanians,
Ukrainians and Afghans….
[Rhodes] ….In his
opinion it had a better sewage system 400 years before Christ than it does now.
It also had a population of 300,000, now shrunk to 80,000.
…..Egypt, where confusion seems an essential part of
everyday life. There is no feeling here that life is a series of problems to be
solved, rather that there is a human state, which is chaos, and that peace,
calm and order is a heavenly state to which, Inshallah, we wretched mortals may
one day aspire.
Egypt offers no gradual assimilation into Africa, no
comfortable cultural transition. The strangeness of everything begins at the
coast and doesn’t let up.
The Egyptian theory of driving is simple – everyone else on the
road is in your way.
A statue of Rameses II, ninety-seven feet high and made from
a single piece of granite, weighs 1000 tons. Cranes nowadays can only lift 200
tons, yet this massive statues was brought to Luxor from Aswan overland, 3000
years ago.
The temple of Abu Simbel, further south, was, he tells me,
aligned by the ancient Egyptians so that the sun shone onto the face of Rameses
twice a year – once on his birthday and once on his coronation day. When Abu
Simbel was re-sited in a forty-million-dollar operation to save it from the
rising waters of Lake Nasser, all the calculations of the world’s experts could
not enable the sun to shine on Rameses’ face more than once a year.
…..the dam at Aswan is 650 feet higher than Cairo and
Alexandria, and if it were to burst Egypt would be virtually wiped out…… Some
people question the wisdom of building the dam at all, pointing out that the
yearly flooding of the Nile provided vital fertility, which now has to be
provided artificially; this is expensive and destructive. The Nubians question
why they had to lose seventy-five villages and have thousands of their people
resettled to make way for the lake. But Eltahez is adamant. The Aswan Dam saved
Egypt in the nine years of drought between 1979 and 1988. ….the only project in
modern Egypt to rival the works of the Pharaohs.
Sudan, the largest country in Africa…Foreign visitors are
not encouraged.
….the rule that the more forms you have to fill in the less
efficient the country is likely to be….and any country that has a Ministry of
Information must have something to hide.
…..the diversity of these big African countries – there are
270 languages in the Sudan alone.
[Sudan] ……the
Muslims of the north (comprising about seventy per cent of the country) and the
Christians and non-Muslims of the south….Its one of the puzzles of history that
such hardship and poverty can exist in a land which over 2000 years ago was
renowned for an iron industry and a rich agriculture.
As happens in Africa, there are people walking in the middle
of nowhere….
….Gondar…..this sizeable town, 7000 feet above sea-level and
for 200 years the capital of Ethiopia….
…..Ethiopia’s curious history. It is unique in Africa in
having been ruled by a direct line through forty-five generations….
…..the Blue Nile Falls, or the Tissisat (‘Smoking Water’)
Falls …….look down on one of the greatest natural spectacles I have ever seen….
Graham says that there are few wild animals left in Ethiopia
now. They have been hunted to extinction.
…..Addis Ababa, at 8000 feet, is one of the highest capitals
in the world. ….Addis Ababa was chosen by Emperor Menelik II to be his capital
in 1887. The name means ‘New Flower’ in Amharic, the official language of
Ethiopia, which is a Semitic language, closer to Arabic and Hebrew than
anything African. It is a nondescript city set handsomely in a bowl of
mountains but reflecting no great sense of civic pride.
There are twenty-five million Christians in Ethiopia out of
a total population of forty-five million…..
Most Ethiopians are farmers anyway – ninety-two per cent of
the population, in fact. Of these, eighty-nine per cent are subsistence
farmers, growing only what they need for themselves.
…..the legendary Ethiopian butchers’ shops in which you can
order a slice of raw flesh off the carcass and eat it then and there.
…..the soaring bulk of the Mount Kenya massif. The highest
of its ragged peaks, Batian, rises to 17,000 feet. It is the second highest
point in Africa, after Kilimanjaro……Even from the hot plain beyond Isiolo one
can make out the glaciers and ice-fields at its summit, which ensure that there
is always snow at the Equator.
….Ngorongoro Crater, the second largest in the world…..the
rim of the ….Crater, almost 6600 feet above sea-level….twelve-mile-wide crater
with trees around a small soda lake at the bottom….
Twenty-five per cent of Tanzania is apparently turned over
to conservation, a higher proportion than anywhere else in Africa.
Lake Tanganyika, the second-deepest lake in the world (after
Lake Baikal), set in the centre of the African continent……
Tanzanians don’t intrude, they aren’t curious or reproving
or obsessive starers.
I remember Japhet on the boat telling me that whichever side
won the election there would be ‘no violence ….Zambians are not like that’.
Paul sees this as negative quality. There are eight million Zambians, anything
can grow here he maintains, but the economy is in ruins because the people are
too easygoing and acquiescent.
[Zambia]….David….who
farms in the south of the country and is as level-headed as you would expect
from a graduate of agricultural college, respects witch doctors and has used
them. He saw with his own eyes, a witch doctor make his way down a line of farm
workers, one of whom was thought to be guilty of stealing. He touched each man
on the shoulder with his stick but as he applied it to one man the stick burned
into his flesh and stuck fast. The man confessed.
[Zimbabwe]….This
country has a most un-African obsession with tidiness.
…..South Africa ….One third of the country’s export earnings
comes from gold, and the proceeds from coal, platinum, uranium and other
minerals found in these rich seams raise this to almost two thirds…..mining is
a tight, white-run operation.
Western Deep Mine is in The Guiness Book of Records for the
deepest penetration of man into the earth’s crust – 3773 metres, that’s nearly
two and a half miles. Within the next year that will be surpassed by a new
shaft which will be sunk beyond the 4000-metre mark. …..I have seen no black
faces yet, apart from the gardeners. I presume they’re all underground.
…..the barman Matt ….comes up with the surprising
information that the noisiest tourists he deals with are the Swiss.
‘Swiss people are noisy?’
He relents a little. ‘Well, not noisy, but they’re happy
drinkers.’
…..Table Mountain, a sheer cliff rising 3500 feet above the
city of Cape Town.
…..at 10,000 feet …..It had never occurred to me that
besides being bleak and inhospitable and pitch dark half the year, the South
Pole was as high as an Alpine peak. …..Mount Vinson – at 16,000 feet, the
highest point on the continent of Antartica….
The main dangers in Antartica, she warns us, are the cold
and the wind and the snow. Exposed areas will get quickly frostbitten, and
snow-blindness is painful and easily acquired. A snowstorm can come down at any
time so ‘always move in a party of people’.
I’m surprised…..to find how few people have ever been to the
South Pole. Higher, colder, less accessible than the North, it remained
unvisited for forty-four years after Scott left in January 1912. The US Navy
landed there in 1956 and scientists have worked at the Pole ever since, but few
outsiders have visited. Anne estimates that in six years of operation Adventure
Network have taken no more than twenty-five or twenty-six people all the way to
the Pole.
Unlike the Arctic – a moving ocean covered with ice several
feet thick – Antarctica is a landmass, covered with an ice-sheet 12,000 feet
thick in places. It is larger in area than the USA and yet there are probably
fewer than 4000 people on the entire continent.
The dangers of Antarctic life begin as soon as you set foot
on the ground. It is an extremely slippery continent …..
Away from the coast,
there is no life, and therefore no bacteria; no disease, no pests, no beasts of
prey, no human interference. It is a clinical environment ….It can only be
compared with life under the ocean or in space.
I read this description of Antarctica, from Roland
Huntford’s book The Last Place on Earth…..
No waste of any kind is allowed to be left in Antarctica.
Any effluent, human or otherwise, will make an epic journey, not via some dark
drain and sewer, but by Bruce’s Douglas DC-6, 1700 miles back to South America
to be finally disposed of……Men are allowed to pee on the ice but only at a
certain spot, marked by a red flag, which gives vital wind direction
information as well. Anyone who thinks they can get away with a quick one
outside the tent is in for a shock, as urine turns the snow bright orange.
……There are no polar bears in the Antarctic…..
From this spot all directions point north. At this spot I
can walk around the world in eight seconds. I am on the same longitude as
Tokyo, Cairo, New York and Sheffield. I am standing at the South Pole
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