The Front of Beyond

By Martin Edge

‘The Front of Beyond’ is a collection of travellers’ tales from East Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

In the late 1980s and the 1990s I was working as a lecturer. The only perk of this eighty hour a week job was ten weeks holiday a year. So two or three times a year I would leave the office and take a bus to the airport. Usually travelling with hand luggage only I would hop on a plane to somewhere interesting, cheap and a long, long way from the nearest student of quantity surveying.

I wandered around China, trying to nip across international borders in militarised zones. I stuck my nose into parts of rural Burma where the authorities didn’t really want foreigners to go. I delved into parts of Kurdistan. I had a look at parts of the Sahara, apparently being chased by the army. I hitched and bussed across borders in East Africa.

I would sit on a painfully slow, rickety bus in the baking tropical sun for weeks at a time. I spent the time sweating profusely, wondering where I would sleep that night and not thinking at all about lectures, paperwork and meetings. Oh, the interminable bloody meetings.

In the middle of the decade I upped sticks and buggered off, without pay, to sit on a slow bus for a year. But for most of the nineties, I spent a month at a time, hitch-hiking to the front of beyond. I always aspired to get to the back of beyond, of course. But there’s only so much you can do in a month. I really didn’t have the constitution for facing down hitherto undiscovered tribes of angry Amazonians, wielding blowpipes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Martin Edge
• Release date: Mar 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301311071

Martin Edge

"Travels with my Rant" Most of my writing is about my travels. Mostly very slow travels. For some years now I've been plodding round the seas of northern Europe aboard a small sailing boat. To date I've published three accounts of these trips. For years I poked around in some of the more obscure parts of some developing countries, hitch-hiking and travelling by boat, train and bus. Some of the buses were slower than my boat. The record was 12 hours to go 11 miles in the Shan State in northern Burma. I'll soon be publishing two volumes entitled "Travels with my Rant" and "The Front of Beyond". These will include tales about hopping across dodgy borders in places like East Timor and Nicaragua. Whilst travel may broaden some minds and narrow others, travelling slowly and alone changes your perspective on the world around you. I like to think it hones the senses and heightens the critical faculties. Others have agreed that yes, it does make me rant on and on about everything. My travel writings are not gripping tales of derring-do and one man's survival in a savage wilderness against all the odds. I am, in fact, something of a wimp. Neither do they consciously seek to maintain the mythology and exoticism of travel to far flung parts. The fact is that more or less everywhere on earth people wear jeans and ride scooters. The documentary makers must have a hell of a job editing the world so that it's full of tribal head-dresses and loin cloths. Culture shock isn't all it's cracked up to be and nowhere on the planet is as alien as it appears to be from a distance. Except Manchester of course. I've tried to give a flavour of the places I've visited and to discuss those aspects of their landscape, environment, people, culture, economy and politics which make them interesting. In 2014 I published a sort of pilot book entitled "105 Rocks and Other Stuff to Tie your Boat to in Eastern Sweden and Finland". It's full of photos, maps, descriptions and waypoints for, as the name suggests, 105 Scandinavian rocks and other harbours. It's available FREE of charge at my website (www.edge.me.uk) as a web file and as a pdf. There's yet more stuff on my web page at http://www.edge.me.uk/index.htm. This includes a pile of more academic papers written while I was Head of Research of the Architecture School in Aberdeen.

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The Front of Beyond

Martin Edge

Copyright Martin Edge 2013

Published at Smashwords

First Edition

Published in Great Britain

Martin Edge asserts the right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright holder except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd. This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

http://www.edge.me.uk

The Front of Beyond

A Traveller’s Tales from East Asia, East and North Africa and Kurdistan

Martin Edge

‘Culture shock’ is an over-emphasised phenomenon. For intelligent people with imaginations it scarcely exists. You shouldn’t be intimidated by places just because they are a long way away and nowhere on earth is as alien as it appears from a distance. Except Manchester, of course.

Table of Continents

Preface: The International Plastic Fork Threat

Part 1: Sahara

Rat on a Stick

Blofeld’s Lair

The Rat Cellar

Bus Stop

Part 2: China

Lily the Pink

Mickey Mao’s Café

Mr Whippy

Part 3: Burma

FEC

Dad’s Resistance

The Alphabet Monster

Part 4: East Africa

Democracy or Beer

Flak Jackets

Part 5: Kurdistan

Strange Fruit

Postscript: Bullshit

Preface: The International Plastic Fork Threat

Do you remember the days when you could go to an airport, check in, get on a plane and fly, in reasonable comfort, to pretty well anywhere in the world? If so then you probably travelled in the 1990s. I spent that decade working for a little known university in Scotland. It wasn’t one you’ll ever have heard of. This was a factory for inculcating sufficient facts into semi-literate youth to make them more or less employable. It involved working between seventy and eighty hours a week, all year. Its only positive feature was ten weeks holiday a year.

So two or three times a year I would leave the office and take a bus to the airport. Usually travelling with hand luggage only, I would hop on a plane to somewhere interesting, cheap and a long, long way from the nearest student of quantity surveying. There I would sit on a painfully slow, rickety bus in the baking tropical sun for weeks at a time. I would spend the time sweating profusely, wondering where I would sleep that night and not thinking at all about lectures, paperwork and meetings. Oh, the interminable bloody meetings.

In the middle of the decade I upped sticks and buggered off, without pay, to sit on a slow bus for a year. But for most of the nineties I spent a month at a time, hitch-hiking to the front of beyond. I always aspired to get to the back of beyond, of course. But there’s only so much you can do in a month. I really didn’t have the constitution for facing down hitherto undiscovered tribes of angry Amazonians wielding blowpipes.

Instead I wandered around China, trying to nip across international borders in militarised zones. I stuck my nose into parts of rural Burma where the authorities didn’t really want foreigners to go. I had a look at parts of the Sahara, apparently being chased by the army. I hitched and bussed across borders in East Africa. I poked around in the corners of parts of Kurdistan.

Have you seen the newsreel footage of travel in the nineteen thirties? You know the kind of thing. The whole of a Lancashire mill town has shut up shop for one week in July and everyone is going to Blackpool. The station platform is mobbed by incalculable numbers of families with tattered suitcases and children in tow, each carrying buckets and spades. Groups of beery, grinning lads and gaggles of cackling girls wave at the cameraman as the train pulls out of the station. Every window has several heads sticking out of it, eager to claim their three square feet of rain-spattered beach. For me it’s the iconic image of travel in the nineteen thirties. You know that’s how people used to behave, but it seems like an unthinkably unpleasant experience now, with the benefit of eighty years of hindsight.

Here’s the equivalent iconic image of travel in the early twenty first century. A concertinaed row of two hundred people stand in a snaking queue between barriers. Every couple of minutes they shuffle forward a foot or so. They are a row of be-suited business people catching an express shuttle to London for a meeting. Unaccountably, they are disrobing in public. They open their swish leather briefcases and take out their keys, phones, aftershave, laptops, shampoo, Blackberries, toothpaste, money and anything else liquid or electrical or metallic. They juggle awkwardly with all their possessions, scattering a few of them on the ground as they take off their coats. They hop around on one foot at a time as they take off their shiny, black leather shoes.

After half an hour or so of snaking back and forwards, having moved about three yards as the crow flies, they near the head of the snake. They dump all their possessions into a series of rectangular, plastic, horticultural seed trays, place them on a stationary conveyor belt and hope to god that they aren’t singled out for a full search.

Meanwhile the queue has drawn to what would seem to be a permanent halt. Some irresponsible idiot at the front has a small bottle of water in his bag and, worse still, a bendy plastic fork from an airport fast food kiosk in his pocket. The security guards naturally assume that he intends to hijack the plane with them and kill everyone on board.

Everybody there agrees that, though the security measures seem draconian, it’s for their own good. How reassuring it is to see that the airport police now have semi-automatic weapons. With a sinking feeling the semi-naked businessmen notice that the bloke in front of them in the queue is an Asian Muslim. It’s going to be a long wait.

In another eighty years people will look back at images of this insane snake of acquiescent, barefooted humanity and have a good laugh about it. Did people really put up with all that in those days? For the moment this remains the dominant image of air travel in the increasingly fragmented, inaccessible, hate-filled world of the twenty first century. Compared to this, the decade of the nineteen nineties was the golden age of travel. Here’s some travellers tales from it.

This is the second of two volumes describing some of my meanderings. The first, for reasons which will become immediately obvious should you ever read it, is called ‘Travels with my Rant’.

Part 1: Sahara

Rat on a Stick

We will find food on the way, out there in the desert said the old bloke with the camels. He screwed up his eyes against the sun, stared at the featureless horizon and gestured towards it with a sweep of his arm. I looked where he was pointing. The sand which stretched as far as the eye could see was punctuated only by the odd low rock. He was pointing right into the middle of the Sahara desert. I knew that in that direction there was about fifteen hundred miles of sod all. I couldn’t see anything growing and couldn’t imagine where we were supposed to find food out there.

But this old Tunisian bloke had lived with his camels in this desert all his life. He clearly knew how to survive out there, in the sun baked, arid wilderness. Somehow he knew how to find provender in the Sahara. For countless generations people here had lived like this, off nature’s bounty. With difficulty I mounted my camel and we lumbered off, south west, into the desert. Soon the camel herder’s compound and the small village, at the end of the road, disappeared in the heat haze, then over the horizon.

When I quote from the old camel herder I should make it clear that his speeches was made mostly in broken French, which was largely translated for me by my companion. The latter was called Hamish. From this you can deduce that he was either an octogenarian highlander or a posh public school lad from the south east of England. There is no middle ground when it comes to Hamishes. He was, in fact, the latter. A personable Research Student from Cambridge University, he had the public school lad’s way of getting exactly what he wanted, by simply demanding it with confidence.

At the moment what he wanted was to spend some nights under the Saharan stars with a load of camel herders. He was also – and this is relevant to my story – a vegan. A posh vegan. A tofu-nosed vegan, if you will.

I had met Hamish in Tataouine – the small town in southern Tunisia, not Luke Skywalker’s home planet. We had then travelled by various buses to the end of the line, a small village at the end of the road with a handful of houses. Various places in Tunisia offered your bog standard camel rides, for the touros. These involved half an hour of posing for photos in a car park. But Hamish was looking for a proper trip into the desert and I was all for going along with it, leaving him to do what posh people are best at, demanding stuff and organising other people.

There were clearly no tourist operations in this last village before the desert. There was some puzzlement as to what we wanted amongst the people we spoke to. But eventually we were pointed in the direction of the last house in the village. This was a large, low, scruffy, mud brick compound with a couple of doors but no windows to the outside. After a long wait our knocking was answered by an old woman and we were ushered in. Inside were a small number of buildings and a larger number of goats and chickens.

With some difficulty we explained what we wanted to the owner. He was leaving in a couple of hours for the desert, with supplies for the rest of the local camel herders. They were away following the herds, half a day’s camel ride into the Sahara. He agreed to take us with him for a couple of days, for a consideration which we negotiated. We waited for a couple of hours until he’d finished loading up four camels. We clambered inexpertly onto the two with the least luggage and the whole caravan lumbered off into the desert.

By the early afternoon we had lost sight of the village and were well on our way. For several hours I didn’t see a single growing thing. Only trackless virgin sand punctuated by rocks, through which we picked our way. A lot of the desert in this part of the Sahara looks like proper, Carry On desert. That is, it’s rolling hills of pure, white, corrugated sand. It’s the sort of desert that film makers look for and which, when you see it on the big screen, you suspect was actually filmed on the dunes behind the beach at Southport.

The effect of this type of desert is difficult to capture in pictures. A view of rolling hills of sand can look striking. But you can’t easily convey the fact that it stretches off in every direction, that you have been travelling for hours and hours without observing any change and that you could keep going for a fortnight without reaching the end.

I hadn’t particularly expected to enjoy the desert. The idea of all that aridity, sterility and lack of life had never particularly appealed. But on that camel I began to find it beguiling. There was something timeless about it that was in stark contrast to the teeming, consuming life of the more transitory, damp tropics.

As I practiced rolling my first fag on camel back, I thought of it like this. I could have taken my packet of Rizla papers and buried them in the soil of a tropical rainforest. If I had marked the spot carefully, then gone back to dig them up the next day, there would be absolutely nothing left of them. The teeming, damp life of the soil would have rotted them, torn them up, eaten and digested them in a matter of a couple of hours. But if I were to get off my camel and place my packet of Rizlas under a small rock here, in the Sahara, it would be very different. An archaeologist lifting the rock three thousand years in the future would find my packet of Rizlas exactly the same as I had left them. Preserved in the desert. There was something timeless about the place.

The other appeal of the desert is like that of banging your head on a brick wall – It’s a relief when it stops. That sounds negative and I don’t mean it to. But in all that dry, dusty, apparently lifeless land, what is really striking is when you do come across a slice of green. Even a very few dusty, windblown date palms manage to shine like green beacons in the desert.

There is a strong parallel with crossing the sea. Sailing across the Atlantic on a fairly small boat I got used to the rhythm of the days and the ever changing – but still monotonous similarity – of the landscape. Just wave after wave following wave for, in our case, over three weeks. So the senses are heightened by the approach to land. It seems strangely exotic and colourful, not to mention smelly. In the desert, when the waves of sand suddenly give way to an oasis of a few trees where ground water lurks just beneath the surface, it’s quite a similar sensation.

Eventually, away in the distance, I thought I saw something shimmering. Oasis or mirage? Was I just seeing a heat haze? Was it a particularly shiny, white stretch of sand, or were we actually approaching open water? It seemed unlikely. Our old camel herder, at the head of our small caravan, stopped and shaded his eyes. Food he said and pointed in the direction of my mirage. I seemed to have my answer. It must be an oasis. I was intrigued to see how he would hunt down our dinner in this lifeless wilderness.

As we drew closer, the shimmering grew larger and brighter, but I still couldn’t make any sense of it. It seemed to be a large, broadly rectangular area of several acres, shiny and reflective, entirely surrounded by desert. We finally approached it. It was a series of massive greenhouses, each about an acre in extent. Through the plastic walls we could see dense fields of tall, dripping, green crops. There was no road to the greenhouses and no discernible tracks of any sort. This, evidently, was a modern oasis. There was obviously a source of underground water nearby and somebody was taking full advantage.

Our guide forced his way through a gap near one of the main doors and five minutes later reappeared, bearing bundles of tomatoes, peppers, courgettes and beans. Food he said, unnecessarily and got back on his camel with his stolen spoils. We had been initiated into the finest survival traditions of the camel herders of Tunisian Sahara.

He did live up to our stereotypical, Lawrence of Arabia expectations in one respect. His water carrier was a hollowed out goat. That is, it was a goat skin with plugs tied into the leg holes.