Category: Take the trip …

Leigh has travelled the world with his job and written travel for many daily newspapers and magazines

SEAHORSES AND THAT BIRD ON A WIRE

SEAHORSES AND THAT BIRD ON A WIRE

I was trawling through my archives the other day and came across this … I had been working as a travel writer for a morning newspaper and was invited to visit Hydra, the Greek island Leonard Cohen had called home.

Leonard moved there in 1960, at the age of 26. His grandmother had left him a little bit of money and he used just over £1,000 of it to buy an ancient run-down ruin of a sailor’s cottage. It had neither electricity or plumbing. Leonard often said it was the best decision he ever made. When there he wrote mainly on the terrace in the blistering sun.

He described the house as being about 200 years old and pledged to do ‘a little work on it every year’ until it becomes a mansion.

It only had five rooms so I doubt it ever became the mansion in Leonard’s mind. But what it did become is beautiful. Here are my jottings about my visit… I understood exactly why Leonard wanted to be here.

I’d gone to Hydra for the day. Ended up staying three. My hydrofoil had been cancelled, which, I suppose had a certain piquancy. The official reason was that the captain refused to sail because the Aegean Sea was awash with white sea horses.

Well, that’s the beauty of the modern mythology in these Greek islands … the sea horses are the white caps of the waves and no self-respecting sailor wants to ride on the backs of them.

Hydra makes me smile. Go there and be entranced. Then be charmed, lied to and cheated. But don’t let it get you down, it’s simply a way of life. You see, nothing is ever what it seems here.

There are sea horses that don’t exist, roads that have never known the bite of a car tyre, booze that looks and tastes like water but blows the back of your head off. And price lists that have no bearing on reality.

That’s the Greek way. And remember Hydra’s history is one dipped in piracy and warfare at sea. All over the Sporades and even the Argo-Saronics you are warned not to leave airline tickets, passports or money in your rooms. Take it with you wherever you go – or somebody else will take it with them.

And no self-respecting ‘karnarki’ – young studs with swarthy good looks and sultry and garlicky chat-up lines who haunt the port and the more photogenic quarters of the town – will let your woman pass-by un-commented-upon.

All this said, Hydra is a place to visit despite the fact that when you arrive the first impression is of an up-market Marbella with a height-of-season that’s just too hot to handle.

And then of course there are the cats.

The place is over-run with cats, tourists, Essex girls and barrow-boys dun good. Donkey trains, gold emporiums, marble streets …and Amigdalota, an exotically toothsome Turkish delight. People eat it everywhere.

Another thing you will notice immediately is the distinct lack of cars … the only ways to get around are by water taxi, foot or donkey.

Actually I suspect that there are cars on hydra – they’re just hidden from view, underground maybe, like in Thunderbirds. At a given signal they burst from the hills, red Porches, XJSs, Cleos in fact anything that an Essex-type girl would drop dead to be seen in. In fact they could rename the place Tracy’s island.

Hidden away there is reputed to be one rubbish truck and an old van. But you’ll never get to see them. What you will get to see are the donkey trains transporting goods around the town and to a lesser extent the rest of this small island.

The other thing you will notice are the bells. The bells!

You see, the Hydroits are religious to a man – except in June, July and August when they are too busy over-charging tourists and day-trippers. Well, the bells may never make them deaf but they don’t do an awful lot of good for visitors with their chiming throughout the day. And Sunday is like a bell –ringing contest.

But it does mean there are plenty of religious buildings to visit . Try the Monastry of the Panaghia with its giant proboscis-like clock and bell tower. The site on the Esplanade was reputedly chosen by a visiting nun in 1776 and building blocks from the ancient temple on Poros island were used to build p[art of it. Or there is the Monastry Profitis Elias – no it’s not about making money under a false name, it means the Prophet Elijah. It takes a little over two hours to walk there – but there is a particularly interesting cemetery on the way!

Or you can take a thirty minute walk to Mandraki Beach along the road that hugs the coast. It is worth it, believe me, and the walk is one of the few things on this island that doesn’t cost you a fortune. But remember there’s no shade and once you get there – pick your own boulder to lie on. The beach is almost volcanic and like everywhere else on Hydra dramatically overcrowded. Mandraki is owned by the Mirimar Hotel and is walled in … the beach is free but you do have to by your drinks from the hotel and that can cost you more than a raging hangover.

It’s about the same distance to Kamini which boasts a beach but in fact offers only a snack bar and some concrete bathing platforms. There are other beaches but if you don’t like the march of pylons and the constant buzz of flies give them a miss.

leonard

There is a beauty to hydra which was first spotted in the heady opiated days of the 1960s when itinerant artists began to float over to the island and make it their home. Some are still there, many in living in splendid isolated failure.

Leonard Cohen was probably one of its most famous inhabitants and he is reputed to still have a small home there … he wrote Like a Bird on the Wire on one of his visits. There could be a good business for somebody showing visitors which wire it was.

#leonardcohen #birdonawire #hydra #greek #travel #memories

THE HAUNTING OF MONKEY PALACE

THE HAUNTING OF MONKEY PALACE

THERE is a place in India where water buffalo are turned to stone by the desert sands, its a place where  pigs become so distracted by the ants living inside their snouts that they savage their young. This place is called The Darkness, a place where pieces of flesh dance in the sewage to make it glisten like stars.

The Macaque monkeys fled The Darkness long before history can recall, but man, woman and child remained, pieces of flesh believing that one day the 330 million faces of god would lead them into The Light …

It took 580 years and a French entrepreneur to lift the hem of The Darkness near Jaipur in Northern India  where Andrea and I were now  taking ‘tiffin’ on the fortified terrace of Neemrana palace. Below us we could see the  desert meeting the   jungle and hear the laughter of the Macaques in the trees. Our china tea cups had a bony tinkle.

Some of the men of The Darkness were there too, servants in their linen jodhpurs and pink shirts. Their servitude had given them decadent paunches but  they stood straight like stalks proud to     send their salaries home to their mothers back in the malaria-ridden hovels they’d escaped from.

Servants from The Darkness can always hear the Macaques laughing.

***

But I’m getting ahead of myself: Come  back down with us from the battlements of this hillside palace into the decaying village below. It’s a collection of derelict houses and  hovels on a road made of rubble, stone, bricks and rubbish. It has been called Way To Neemrana for as long as memory has existed …

The smell of sacred cows, camels, pigs, dung and sewage was horrendous as we followed our footsteps back to the market place. The smell changed in the market, sickly and sweet now, milk boiling on fires made out of plastic bottles and rotten timber, coconut fragrance of  sweating betel leaves, paanwallas spitting pungent pools of red juice, scavenging dogs lapping it up.

Way To Neemrana has always been an important place spiritually, it was the home to Lord Krishna in the 14th century. Today, however, it has a different importance, for it is here that all the property deals as far as the eye can see are sealed by post office workers in the noon-day sun, men in dusty shirts and ties under a makeshift awning. They create title-deeds and contracts on old Remington typewriters, the keys rattle like termites.

It was here that we met Usef, the Typer of Deeds and Contracts. He looked as old as the palace on the hill itself, his teeth discoloured and his gums long dead from paan. His lips were swollen and stained too. Usef was a cultured man though and two days after we met him, he explained why he’d looked so strangely at me as we stepped in to his  post office.  Usef it turned out was a writer and chronicler of the history of this ancient place and he believed he had an sketch of me, done decades ago.

monkey

48 Hours Earlier

So, now lets return to that fortified terrace at the palace and our steaming cups of black char. They serve it sickly sweet at the edge of The Darkness, it sticks your tongue to the roof of your mouth.

The late afternoon sun was so hot it made me want sleep, even the punkawallahs couldn’t cool me. The sun was beating.

And I saw it for the first time, out of the corner of my eye – you know, how you were taught at school to glimpse the tail of a comet?  With your peripheral vision. Yes I could see it, big and bold and brassy, knuckles dusting the ground, slow and laconic, climbing the stairs up to the battlements. The sun made me squint but I swear it stopped and looked me squarely in the eye.   It bared his razor teeth. . .

***

When it is night in The Light there can be a real darkness. In ours though there was a flickering hole, the  kerosene candle  on the bedside table created it.  Andrea was at peace but I couldn’t sleep for many reasons, it was partly the humidity, partly the smell of kerosene and the thwack thwack of the ceiling fan.  But  I also knew that something was outside the thin mosquito net of a door, it was snuffling, scratching. And whatever it was it was angry, like my father used to be when he was drunk outside my bedroom in the early hours.

neemrama

3a.m. 

There was a crash like a bomb, as if somebody had smashed one of the big terracotta pots in the ivy-ridden quadrangle –  then a whoop and an insane string of calls. It sounded like laughter again – and, yes, I could see it, face up against the mosquito net of the door …  big sullen head, vicious teeth, intelligent  cold dead eyes. I knew they were the eyes of a deadly enemy.

***

Breakfast was served by a small army of dignified servants in the shadows of  the mezzanine beneath the battlements, the ‘spider’ men and women were already busy beneath the tables brushing up dust and discarded food as we ate. The remnants of a terracotta pot were piled up waiting for the ‘donkey’ men to clear it away.  Three eagles were spinning overhead.

Neemrana is truly one of the most beautiful places I have ever stopped off at in my long life of travelling. It reached its lowest ebb in  1947 as Partition changed the whole face of India with murder and politics,   12 million people were made homeless and more than a million lay dead in the streets. The palace was in awful disrepair and it was that year that Raja Rajinder Singh  abandoned it and moved to a modest house on the outskirts of Way To Neemrana. His  once palatial 100 room home was crumbling and overrun by Macaques.  His heart was heavy.

To add to his woes his beautiful daughter Imelda became betrothed. It was against his wishes but what could he do?  It was November and Rajistan’s Goddesses of Love had been awakened by the  fireworks of Devali, day and night the air was filled with music. Raja Rajinder felt the darkness inside himself begin to grow.

Then good fortune arrived on the doorstep of his newly-acquired hovel in the shape of the Frenchman, an hotels entrepreneur on the look-out for imposing and cheap properties amid the tragedy of India’s partitioning.

A deal was struck, Neemrana’s crumbling palace was sold for enough rupees to pay for Imelda’s wedding. And so she was married and the music pierced  the sky for two whole days, drums, flutes, strings and cymbals. Two months later Raja Rajinder decided he could look Krishna  squarely in the eye and finally departed his world of darkness and light.

***

Even by the end of breakfast the sun was too hot for us to leave the shadows, so we stuck to the stairways and labyrinths, the  endless stone corridors, steps, dead ends, terraces, sentry points, misleading alleys, empty corners … at one moment we were a thousand feet above Way To Neemrana and the next we were in the  west wall gardens.

And there they were playing mischievously. The Macaques. Andrea adored them immediately,  green coats glistening, their wild and funny gambolling, their fighting and chattering. They tumbled from tree to tabletop, leapt from tabletop to branch  ….   then they saw me. And stopped. Everything stopped, for a second it was as if the world was no longer turning.

A little fellow who had been dancing in the ivy of a small coliseum fell to the floor and lay there on his back  baring his teeth at me in a silent  grimace.   Andrea laughed. Then she screamed. I spun on my heels – the animal took its chance and crashed into the bushes – a split second later there was another scream, this time from the rooftop, and a tile hurtled through the air and smashed at my feet. Andrea looked at me. A bark came down from the sky.

The air filled with angry screeches growls  and screams and the cracking of undergrowth.

***

The next day we walked down to Way to Neemrana in the blistering sun. But nothing felt  right. My attention was constantly drawn  to the rooftops of the hovels that housed silversmiths and haberdashers and a teashop with exotic wind chimes.

There was  music in the air but all I could hear was the scrop of nails like talons on tiles, the thick padding of feet and the crunch of knuckles, short sharp growls, rasps, grunts. I knew my unknown  enemy was stalking the rooftops.

We were stopped   in our tracks  by a rattling bell and the rusty screech of worn bicycle brakes. Usef’s old face appeared from inside the dust and he dismounted his sit-up-and-beg. He beckoned  to us urgently as he wheeled his old machine into a stinking cattle shed.

As we joined him Usef bobbed his head in acknowledgement but there wasn’t a trace of a polite smile.

He whispered: “Sir, it is a ghost that follows you … and I fear it is trying to do you harm. It is long dead but so is the man it thinks you are …   sadly, you are both trapped by an abomination of time …”

Andrea looked at me. There was a scuffling on the roof. Dust spilled  from the eaves as the rafters creaked.  Usef looked up, then he pulled the old sketch from behind the arsenal of pens in the breast pocket of his starched shirt: “I keep a history box of Neemrana and today I remembered this  inside…” he pressed the picture into my hand. There was a snarl above our heads.

It could have been a picture of me … the hair, the build … the eyes. To all intents and purposes I had  my boot placed triumphantly on a dead monkey and I was holding a vicious-looking langur in the crook of my right arm. Andrea and I were mystified.

“The problem is sir, the monkeys are protected by  the great god Hanuman. This animal sir has had the wrath of  god inside him since the day he was slaughtered by the man in this picture…”  Funnels of dust and rubble came down, Usef looked up and whispered: “We must leave, now. It is not safe here.”

We followed him down stinking alleys and rubbish-strewn passageways, the wheels of his old bicycle skittering on the stones as he wrestled with it, he kept his head down and we all pretended to ignore the howls and whoops coming from the rooftops.

Usef’s house was only one room with a corrugated roof. There was a mattress and a threadbare blanket on the floor, a small primus stove in the corner and an old leather armchair pushed up against a battered antique desk where his treasured Remington stood. There were old photographs of Way to Neemrana and its inhabitants, tattered newspaper cuttings and typed notes on rotting paper  pinned to wall above it. His home was sweet with spices and the smell of strong tea.

His dusty old wife served it to us in small chrome cups and then retired back into the shadows.

Usef said we should wait here while he cycled to the palace to arrange for our chauffeur to pack our bags and come to pick us up. But first he invited us to sit cross-legged on the floor with him while he told us this story:

In  the 1950s  circus trainer Barnabas Riesling was cast adrift near Jaipur by the Russian state circus. He’d been  caught starving young ponies of milk to stunt  their growth so he could exhibit them as miniature horses.

The Russians dumped him in The Darkness.  He was surrounded by Macaques which harassed and harangued him for days as he traipsed into town.

But within months this tall skinny and raggedy gypsy with his long shock of grey hair was a bad man rising again, this time with a pair of killer long-tailed, black-faced langurs by his side. They lived in a cage in the back of the old battered Ambassador he’d bought for a few hundred rupees from a drunken taxi driver in Jaipur.

He used his langurs to chase the Macaques from the rich estates and farms between Jaipur and Delhi. The langur tore the Macaques limb from limb while the landowners turned their backs on the   gaze of Hanuman.

One day, a typed letter arrived at the front desk of his cheap hotel. It had been sent from the post office at Way To Neemrana. The new French owner of the  palace was requesting his services. Reisling set off with a full tank of diesel, a bottle of local Morning Miracles gin  and his langurs. He loosed them on his arrival at the gates of the palace and within hours the Macaques had fled blooded and beaten into the jungle.

All except for one. The  big one. It  remained defiant on the ramparts, howling and shaking  its fists in the red dying sun.

Riesling again loosed the  langurs  and they dashed up the vines like wildfire.  But this wasn’t the simple game of cat and mouse that Riesling expected, instead the big one  launched itself into the air, hit the wall and went down it like a lizard until it faced the langurs head on. The three monkeys stopped dead and eyed each other. Stock-still. Silent.

Then the shot rang out. Two monkey fled up the vines in terror as the big one plunged lifelessly to the  courtyard below.

***

Hanuman, the mighty ape god, is so powerful, it is said that with one sweep of his mighty tail he set fire to the island of Lanka where Sita, the wife of Lord Rama’s was being held captive. Today Hanuman is worshipped across India, especially in the villages, because he is capable of destroying  evil.

It was Usef’s belief that the monkey which had stalked me was a dead thing tethered to this earth by the blinding light of its own rage as it waited to wreak revenge against the evil that had destroyed it without dignity. And it had found that evil inside me.

As our chauffeur drove us at a strangely funereal pace away from one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited an all pervading sense of  The Darkness settled over me.