WWOOFing to Nepalese Bean Time

Every turn in Nepal has the promise of delight

When I first read about WWOOFing - Willing Workers On Organic Farms, I thought it sounded like a fun way to volunteer

When I read that the program was operating in Nepal, I was hooked.  Dale, my daughter, was joining me on my travels and she loved getting her hands into the earth and I'd peel a few vegetables... or so I thought. The farm we chose was near Lion's Choke, not far from Chitwan National Park.

Our host farmer, Barun, greeted us at the bus stop. Before he started using WWOOFers his children had to skip school to help him plant and harvest.

I could see he was disconcerted

He sized us up. Dale, young and lithe, passed at first muster, but he wasn’t at all sure about me. I wondered if I should snort, stamp my foot or maybe show my teeth?

Eventually he said it, “You are very old. I have never had anyone as old as you.”

Dale and I in Nepal

Barun walked us out through the village. We talked on the way and he confided that the farm was organic simply because he couldn’t afford pesticides - Barun was knee-deep in debt.

The pressure was etched on his face as he spoke, but when we turned into a grove of bamboo, Barun’s daughters burst through the greenery, dancing with excitement and he broke into a wide grin. In the small clearing was their mud house.  A lean-to where we would sleep had a bed of wooden slats resting on an earth floor.  

I find a friend

Barun’s wife greeted us.  Mama was sturdy and cheerful, the perfect foil for Barun, the thinker and worrier. But for me, the warmest welcome came unexpectedly.

I could see that Grandma was surprised when she saw me. Her eyes lit up.  She was tiny; all superfluous flesh had vanished leaving sinew and features, big eyes, big nose and mouth and one solitary big tooth.  She wore gold earrings, but had lost her gold nose-ring working in the fields. She kept the hole open with a splinter of bamboo in the hope that one day she’d find it.

An early start

It was chilly and just light enough to see how thick the mist was when we turned out the next morning. Through the gloom loomed Barun’s oxen trailing a wooden plough. Barun halted the great beasts to drill us in bean-planting 101. With a sack under one arm, we were to scoop handfuls of slippery beans and drop them one-by-one into the fresh furrows.  Too close and we would run out of beans, too far and we’d have beans left over. Each bean was precious and the bloody things bounced.

By lunchtime, Dale and I were beat and we passed out briefly in our stifling lean-to before Barun roused us to get back to work.

Who me?  You are seriously suggesting you want me to plant another ten thousand beans... 

Dale was infuriatingly proficient and I was not

The afternoon shift was worse; the heat made me dizzy and I wanted to throttle Barun who tailed me, muttering as he remedied my irregular spacing, hunting my errant bouncing beans.

Planting needed a lop-sided sway which made my body ache; even my ankles balked from walking barefoot on uneven ground. Dale fared much better; up ahead she sashayed, a gilded nymph sowing to the beat of an ancient rhythm, her beans perfectly spaced.

When school finished, Barun’s daughters joined us, giggling with infectious good-humour, joining Dale in making the job look effortless. At last, every bean was bedded. 

Dale was definitely an immediate hit with the family.

Relief at the day's end followed by magic...

We left Barun to finish painstaking watering row-by-row and joined the village women walking a humpy narrow path between the fields.  An ancient stone cistern, fed by a gurgling stream, was a place to bathe. The soft water soothed our tired muscles in the day’s warm afterglow.

As we strolled back, Dale stopped and grabbed my arm, “Look Mum,” and I turned to see in the distance the snow-capped massif of the Annapurnas tinged with molten gold. “It was all worth today just for this moment,” she whispered.

It got easier

Over the next week, we spread smelly chicken shit on the fields, cleared old crops and planted out vegetable seedlings. The work got easier as we fell into a rhythm with the family.

At the end of each day, we'd eat curry and rice for supper, sometimes followed by honeyed pancakes and a jug of warm buffalo milk brought straight in from the byre. We sat together on the earthen floor and ate from a communal bowl with our fingers.

Afterwards, we’d pull chairs into the little clearing in front of the house and relax. Everyone had daily tasks, but once done, each one stopped. So while it bothered me when one of them was still working and the others relaxing, I realised that while their lives were hard labour, yet down-time was well demarcated too.

Laughter rang out easily, transcending the lack of material possessions and Barun’s anxiety.

Time out ...

And then there was Grandma...

The first time I went to fetch water from the outside stand-pipe the handle was so stiff I could scarcely move it.  I put the bucket down and tried two hands and my body weight - then to my chagrin, out flew grandma who whacked it with one hand, water flooding out in a torrent along with her laughter.   

Grandma talked to me non-stop. It mattered not that I didn’t understand a word. She showed me her herb patch, her room and her shrine. She tried to teach me how to separate husks from beans; tilting and pitching her round wicker tray with the skill of a juggler, the speckled ovals gathering together at her command.

Grandma with her grandson - I did say she was tiny - but hey, what a dynamo!

We learned so much and admired so much

Barun had excellent English and he explained the beans were first harvested with their stalks and sun-dried before being spread on the ground so his buffalo could trample them bursting open the thick, hard pods. Any pods that had not opened were collected by Grandma and she opened them by hand.  Once separated, the husks were kept for kindling - nothing was wasted.

The family was almost self-sufficient; only flour and sugar were missing. They couldn’t grow wheat because it attracted rampaging rhino from the National Park. Near the house they planted mustard-seed, turmeric, ginger, chili and basil for seasoning, marigolds for festivals and neem to make insect repellent.  In the monsoon they grew enough rice for themselves. 

At the end of the week...

Barun said if Dale and I finished everything, we’d have a day off at the end of our week. He kept his word. Dale rode his son’s bike and I perched on the pannier rack of Barun’s, bouncing over the ruts, through grassland and thick bamboo.

When Dale shouted for joy, Barun joined in and I hung on for dear life.

He showed us his bee-hives - he was the first in the district to sell honey - and we walked through woods alive with butterflies.

But when we reached the river, Barun was suddenly sombre and pointed to an island. Some years before, his sister had gone across to cut bales of long grass for fodder, but wading back she’d stumbled under the heavy load and been swept away. “Drownings happen every year like that,” he said.

Dale took these pictures when we were making our way up river to Lion's Choke - so we knew immediately how Barun's sister had died.

We watched the sunset over the river that turned all to gold before we cycled home in the dark.

And too soon...  it was time to go

We had a grand send-off the next evening: Grandma wrapped us in saris, Mama marked our foreheads with red tikkas and the girls garlanded us with lais of marigold. Barun performed a traditional Nepalese stick dance, leaping high while twirling stout bamboo poles.

Dale said it was collective amazement when I took the poles from Barun, crossed them on the ground, and did a Scottish sword dance – once my father’s forte.

I don’t know if I still hold the record for being Barun’s oldest WWOOFer, but I do know Grandma was sad to see me go. She was ten years my senior yet had eclipsed me in every task – except perhaps, the Highland Fling!

OK, so it's not that flattering, but I think I was channeling some kind of warrior spirit.

And Barun?  “Goodbye big sister. Goodbye daughter Dale. Safe journey home to Australia. I want you both to come again.”

A hundred years on from Hong Kong’s most calamitous typhoon ever

A hundred years ago...

One hundred years ago on the 18th September, 1906, Hong Kong was hit by a typhoon: “…the most appallingly destructive visitation of the kind that the Colony has ever experienced.”

The 1906

By the time I arrived in Hong Kong in 1968, that typhoon was almost forgotten.  I would never have heard about it except for a lie.  My boss lied about her age.  The idea that she was born on board a ship mid-typhoon, appealed to her compulsion for melodrama.  And any old typhoon was not good enough – she told me she was born in The 1906 - the most calamitous typhoon ever.  

When I came to write my memoir about Hong Kong, I found she had been born in 1904, a year not notable for any severe tropical storms.  I laughed - the 1906 suited her much better.

Typhoon warning systems were well established

By 1906 Hong Kong had a good early warning system for typhoons. During the season, several would pass the Colony.  A signal was hoisted in the harbour when one was in the five hundred mile range.  Often it was lowered as the storm blew itself out over the China Sea.  But if the typhoon did close in, a second signal went up indicating that it had moved to within three hundred miles.  Then everyone prepared for the worst.  The final signal was the typhoon gun which was sounded when the storm was about to hit.   

At the signals, the Colony swung into action.  Steam launches towed chains of big flat-bottomed lighters into shelters, while smaller sampans scudded off to find safe havens.  Sails and awnings were reefed and everything was battened down.  Ships at anchor prepared to get up steam and either made for the open sea or paid out more cable to safely ride out the storm in the harbour. 

What made the 1906 so deadly was not just its intensity, it was its speed.  There was only half-an-hour between the first signal and the final gun.  Nothing like it had ever happened before.  Usually there were several hours between each signal.

Never before had one hit with such speed

Captains who’d spent the night ashore were astonished to be woken by the sound of the typhoon gun.  They tried desperately to get back aboard their ships, paying motor-launch skippers enormous amounts to take them out on the harbour.  Even then it was too rough to go alongside and crewmen had to throw lifelines into the water and drag their officers aboard. 

Noise exploded around the Colony.  The wind blew at a hundred-and-fifty miles an hour howling along the shore, shrieking through the streets and roaring up mountainsides.  The roofs of godowns – huge storage sheds – flew off and their walls collapsed. Everywhere signs were falling, shutters banging, glass shattering, rickshaws overturned and sedan chairs were thrown about “like feathers”. 

The harbour was obliterated in a terrible fog of driving rain fused with scud and spindrift whipped from the wave tops.  All along the seawall, sampans and lighters were dashed to pieces. Piers and wharfs started to collapse one after another… “like a house of cards.” 

Eyewitness Account

An extraordinary eyewitness account was written by Captain Outerbridge of the China Navigation Company’s steamer Taming, which came safely through the ordeal.  He crouched behind steel plates in the bow of his ship with two other officers.  They peered through blinding rifts of mist, desperate to gauge if their mooring was holding. 

“Every now and then a ship dragging her anchors as if they were of wood, slid past us, fortunately clear.  Until they were right upon us we had no warning and they passed in a flash…

But the worst feature of all was seeing the small boats go flying past bound for what we knew was destruction.  There was nothing we could do.  Our own fate was in the balance that trembled with every squall that came down heavier than the one before...  In the sampans, where entire families of Chinese live their whole lives, women would hold out their children to us begging in mad appeals that we could not even hear, only guess at from the expression of their faces, as they were whirled along the side of our ship, in much the same way that a piece of sea weed is hurled by the crest of the sea.  We could only look at them and pity them, and there we crouched for more than an hour and most of the time the tears were streaming down the faces of the three of us as we looked at the poor creatures going to death and could not lift a hand to save them.”

And then it was gone

The typhoon left almost as quickly as it had come.  Within three hours it was over.

It was calculated that half of all the Chinese craft in the waters of the colony were lost.

Ships entering the harbour over the next days brought in survivors plucked off floating pieces of wreckage but mainly it was the dead that the sea gave back.

The number of people who perished was never established, but it was in the thousands and may have been as many as ten thousand.

Tales of gallantry, extraordinary rescue and random luck were rife afterwards, but most never had the chance
to tell the tale.   

The full account – The calamitous typhoon at Hongkong 18th September, 1906, published by the Hong Kong Daily Press, 1906:  http://ebook.lib.hku.hk/HKG/B36228084.pdf

A Merry Laugh in a Tangier Hideaway

International Tangier

Between the 1920s and 1950s, Tangier was a tax-free international zone isolated from the rest of Morocco and controlled by France, Spain and Britain, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Portugal, the United States and finally the Soviet Union!  

It quickly gained a reputation for everything naughty, wacky and exotic.

I felt like a glass of wine...

Even now, it’s zany chords remain.  Early one summer evening I decided to go for a drink at the Bar Pilo. The Guide said, unlike most bars, it wasn’t a brothel.   I could have gone back to Caid’s Piano Bar at the Hotel El Minzah, but swank hotels are so passé.

The Bar’s frontage was low-key and there was a minder on duty.  I had a flashback to a revolving vinyl 78 RPM my brother played when I was a kid.  I loved the line:  Just knock three times and whisper low, that you and I were sent by Joe…

The door opened a smidgeon and in I slid, holding my breath
and there I was:

I know a dark secluded place,
        It was shady, with a long marble bar.

A place where no one knows your face,
        Well that was definitely the case.

A glass of wine a fast embrace,
        Wine, yes – but the only other patrons were a very tall handsome woman, heavily made up in a long dress with lots     of lace and I mean lots, and a feather boa; a short, middle-of-the-road man, well oiled, who I took to be deaf and dumb as he was miming madly at the bartender; and occupying the end seat, an inflatable lifesize Santa.

It’s called Hernando’s Hideaway ole!

Some places need time to absorb

My eyes rolled along the bar again, skirting the plastic flowers.  Behind a wall of mirrors, glass shelves were stacked with every conceivable liquor.  Wine came by the bottle,  accompanied by a bowl of warm chick peas with some…  tiny feet.  Hooves actually.  The barman, a small wizened man in a waistcoat and bow tie was quite jolly… “Baaaaa Baaaaa.”

“Lamb’s feet?  Really?  How tiny were the lambs?”  Let’s not go there Gill, I answered to myself.  Besides there were olives marinated in oil and lemon, more olives in harissa, crudities and crispy grilled fish.  A feast without the feet.

The large lady in lace was standing with one foot on the bar rail.  She moved closer and sat down.  I fancied the round red-topped bar stools some counters in a game, but didn’t make my move – we smiled and established a rapport in minor key.   She moved four stools back.

I looked around. The walls were deep, dark pink and the whole place was decked with Christmas decorations.  Fairy lights,  chains in coloured foil, tinsel, hanging stars guiding shepherds, a plastic Christmas tree, and best of all, the rest of the set of blow-up Santas each one smaller than the other.  On a mirror, etched with outlines of a mosque, a painted Santa paused - seemingly impaled on a minaret.

After my third glass, the sinuous Arabic music wove the bizarre seamlessly into ardor and ecstasy.  Forget the fast embrace, this would be a long drawn out affair.  There was a TV tuned to a news channel with no audio and as I drank, I could have sworn the singing voice started emerging from the perfect agile mouth of the presenter who was swaying to the melody.  Even the slightly soft Santa at the bar started to look interesting, well, really he was the only option. 

It was time for me to go – just as the night was about to start.    

Home to my hostel

I wound my way back to the Medina singing softly,
“Just knock three times and you will know, that you’ve arrived at Bar Pilo.”

PS:

Hernando’s Hideaway is a tango tune from The Pajama Game 1954.  I love it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLuwyTzAQH8

As Time Goes By

Real Life Romance

It was 1971 when I met Mike in Zambia and fell head-over-heels in love. 

But when he said, “… Here’s looking at you, kid,” I had no idea why. 

I don’t think anyone of our generation escaped seeing Casablanca (1942, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman), but not all of us memorised the whole damn script.

Remember Snuggling-Up at the Drive-In? 

A month or so later I thought I was on track when I took Mike to Gone With the Wind (1939, Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh).  It was showing at the Lusaka Drive-In.  But he went to sleep until the interval when he sat upright, fired up his beat-up Ford Falcon and said, “OK. Let's go!”

It took a lot of persuasion to make him stay for the second half.  He didn’t believe that any film could be that long and or that turgid.  It was almost the end of a beautiful relationship!

Penance

Over the years, I made amends.  I sat through Casablanca at least three times, maybe five….  Not only that but our four daughters have indulged Mike too.

Yet as Time Goes By

I can come clean now;  I never did, and still don’t, get it.  

Ilsa tells Rick she can't think straight and he’ll have to do the thinking for both of them and Rick knows what’s good for her and packs her off without an explanation.  Sexist?  You bet!  What is the appeal?

But still...

A wave of nostalgia did hit me though when travelling solo in Morocco for I learned that the original gin joint in Casablanca was modelled on Caid’s Piano Bar in Hotel El Minzah, Tangier.

Hotel's picture of Caid's Piano Bar

I was travelling out of a back-pack and covered in a rash, but did my best to smarten-up and sauntered into the El Minzah, a sophisticated old-world hotel overlooking the Bay of Tangier. 

Think palms, orange trees and Moorish archways; courtyards and teak lattice.  The hotel was the brain-child of an English aristocrat and first opened in 1930.  It has welcomed many celebrities over the years and appropriately enough, those old Hollywood stars of the 1940s; Rita Hayworth and Rock Hudson.

It was mid-morning and the hotel was deserted but I found a waiter, ordered a glass of wine and sat in the main courtyard and enjoyed a 'life is absolutely bloody marvellous moment.' 

My picture of the table where I unashamedly took a delicious white wine mid-morning... all to myself alone.

Then I tiptoed to the door of Caid’s Bar, pushed it open, and heard Mike’s voice so clearly: “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine…”

Which is why my picture of the Piano Bar is a bit shaky...

My picture of the Piano Bar

A Century Ago Tangier Attracted Artists from All Over the World

Moroccan loggia, 1912 by Hilda Rix Nicholas and Quarazazte Morocco by James McBey

Journeys into Art in Tangier

It’s the journeys within journeys that I love.  My own personal discoveries of history and politics, of art and authors and of music.  Each new destination, a place to pick up strays; arty people either home grown or blown-in, who I have never heard of and may well be long forgotten in the rolling coast of life.

SELFIES: Mrs George Mason Nicholas (Hilda Rix Nicholas) 1917 and James McBey

Two of my Favourites

Many European artists worked in Tangier in the first decade of the twentieth century.  New to me in Morocco was James McBay.    He was a Scot and his work reminded me of that of Hilda Rix Nicholas, one of my favourite Australian artists.  They were born only a year apart, and I could not but wonder if they had ever met.  They were both in Morocco around the same time, shortly before the outbreak of World War I.   

Both captured the colour and light of Tangier through intimate portraits, street scenes and the market place.  Both gave us unforgettable images of the First World War.  Both had endured great personal tragedy. 

Camouflage by Hilda Rix Nicholas 1914 and Arab Man with a Child by James McBey

A Pause for Remembrance in Tangier

A Tear in Tangier

I’m not a sentimental soul so get surprised when something maudlin, corny or schmaltzy triggers a sniff.  Let’s try that again: when something nostalgic, tender or passionate brings tears to my eyes.

These occasions are not rational or even legitimate, but they signal an aliveness within us, part of our emotional heritage but part primordial I think.  We surrender to them or suppress them at our peril.

 
St Andrew's Church

St Andrew's Church, Tangier

Ambling around Tangier, I came upon the charming St Andrew’s Church built in 1905.  With admirable grace its design engages with the local culture.  It has a Moorish interior, ornamented with the Lord’s Prayer engraved in Arabic together with quotes from the Koran.  

Buried in Morocco

The graveyard is almost English, lush green and shady; in it there are are buried a dozen or so downed RAF airmen.  I was caught short by five of them, an entire aircrew, their headstones lined up, side by side.  The youngest was nineteen and the oldest twenty-one. They crashed on 31 January 1945. At least sixty million people, some say eighty million, died in World War II.  So why did these graves, well-cared for in a sunny spot, make me cry?
 
Because they were so young, the end of the war only months away - they were probably already talking about what they would do after the war - and they were on a routine patrol; engine failure or weather perhaps.  

We don’t know how to mourn millions and millions, so we mourn the few and that’s all we can do, and do our bit for peace - keep trying to hold Government to account that keep wanting to make war.  That’s all we can do. 

Lts W M Allison & J H Buxman both South African Air Force, Sgts A J Boyles, H J Hutchinson & F E Turner all RAFVR. They were lost when the 22 Sqn SAAF Ventura serial number 6455 (ex RAF FP683) crashed during a routine patrol on 31 January 1945.

Finding Cafe Hafa in Tangier

Cafe Hafa, founded in 1921, a Tangier icon that has avoided the dreaded developer!

The Hafa Hunt

One of my first stops in Tangier was Café Hafa.  It’s wasn’t a long walk from the Kasbah, but far enough to get lost.  I felt foolish because a generational succession of writers, musicians and rock bands had found it without difficulty and I was stone-cold sober.  

Help at Hand

I realised I was being stalked by a women wearing a hijab on a electric mobility scooter followed by a posse in wheelchairs.  She was winning.  Why I found the combination of hijab and buggy incongruous says more about me than her, but there was a sense of deja vu. 

My husband also uses a mobility scooter and if you get to meet him, give him a wide birth. 
It’s red and he is exceedingly good-looking, even with the beard he insists on sporting
these days.  I think he's had his scooter souped up.

In Prague he mowed down a whole covey of Japanese tourists, in Sydney, he pinned a Chinese business man to the wall and he has caused grievous bodily harm to almost every family member.  I hasten to add he is neither xenophobic or guilty of domestic violence, just slow on the brakes. 

So when the good woman hailed me, I kept a safe distance hoping to outpace her. 

I need not have worried - without me saying a word, she knew exactly what I wanted.  She pointed me in the direction of Café Hafa.  

Sheer Delight with Mint Tea

The café was founded in 1921 and is a Tangier icon.  But the really special thing is it hasn’t just stood the test of time,
it’s just stayed there unmoved by time and fame. 

Well truthfully given a few rows of terraces painted blue and white cascading down a steep hillside spotted with gnarly wind-blown trees in a stunning position overlooking the Bay of Tangier, what is there to change?

My delight was that locals still hung out there, the chairs were cheap plastic, the terraces swept peremptorily, the service problematic.  No one had resortified it!  No plaques, nothing on the menu, no Hey Jude Orange Juice or Brown Sugar Mint Tea.

House of Joy

Entrance to House of Joy - a Cheshire Home in Tangier

On the way back, I went looking for my friend.  She’d gone but I and found a few wheelchairs clustered round the entrance to the gates of a beautiful house - a Cheshire Home.  I walked in and gasped at the beauty of it - the sea blue beyond a profusion of flowers.  It was called House of Joy.  I went to Reception and left a small donation but the young lady said, not unnaturally, that I could not go further.  As I left I spoke to a lovely lass who was wheelchair-bound and had lived there for thirty-three years.

Leonard Cheshire was an RAF Group Captain who started the charity in 1948 and has left a marvellous legacy. 

All Over Tangier in a Rash

Watching the world go by in Tangier

Normally...

Normally I read travel advice on health and am sensible because I’m reluctant to miss out on anything, waylaid by some avoidable affliction. 

Had I read it, I’d have known that sand-flies and ticks and fleas run riot in Morocco.

A Mighty Rash

When I left the Atlas Mountains, the rash that started after I was accosted by tiny black mites in a filthy eco-gite in the Mid-Atlas, became ferocious.  It ran, not just across my cheeks and forehead, but over my eye-lids, across the bridge of my nose making it difficult to wear my glasses, around the edge of my ears and all over my hands, especially along the sides of my fingers.

Sand-Fly Central

I changed my travel plans because I seriously doubted if immigration in Spain, my next destination, would let me in.  Instead I got the night bus from Marrakesh and, in the early morning, arrived just outside the Medina in Tangier.   I avoided the Petite Socco, once notorious for pimps and hash, but now a tourist hub, and walked further into the Medina until I found a simple and clean guesthouse.

I spent the first couple of days sitting on my laptop increasingly terrified by the list of diseases I might have picked up: Leishmaniasis, Tick Bite Fever, Sand Fly Fever, Mediterranean Spotted Fever, West Nile virus, Filariasis, Typhus and Scabies.

A rash of signs in Tangier!

The Ancient Landlubber...

I presented at every pharmacy I could find.  They all asked me if I had had a fever, did I feel dizzy, and when I said no temperature, only supreme anxiety, they sold me creams and seemed remarkably unmoved by my plight - although keeping their distance I noted.

No matter what I applied, the rash persisted.  I was embarrassed to speak to anyone,  swathed my head in a scarf, keeping out of the sun which exacerbated the itch and mooched around shoulders hunched, so even the hawkers avoided me.

Some days I'd blink back tears, imagining I’d slope around Tangier evermore, never to return to the bosom of my family, some kind of Ancient Landlubber, accosting Aussie tourists with my tale.  They’d shrink back in horror and I’d beg them to take messages to the other side. 
 

Tangier; a City Not To Be Missed

My early morning cafe outside the gate to the Medina in Tangier

I have a fairy godmother, celestial patroness or maybe my muse is some male diviner.  Whoever.  Lady Luck is on my side when I pack my bags and invoke the traveller in me to come to the fore.

For without that damned rash I’d never have visited Tangier, now on my short list as one of the most delightful cities in the world.  In the end I didn’t want to leave. 

Within days I had my favourite early morning cafe just outside the Medina.  It was frequented exclusively by men, the elders.  I might not have sat there had the owner not smiled and welcomed me.  Each morning he'd see me coming across the square and my coffee would be ready at my table.  I'd take my book but seldom opened it.  It was a rare spot for me; a place where I just sat and, with a sense of supreme contentment, watched the world go by.

No Early Start From a Moroccan Gite

Just outside my gite...

A Very Nice Gite

After my epic journey to the Atlas Mountains with Kissy Kissy, I stayed at a gite run entirely by five young men.  I was just a bit weary and so my heart sank; I could have done with some female company.  I need not have had any reservations; they were courteous and charming and I had a relaxed, happy stay.  I'm not so sure though what impression I made...

A Very Early Start

I paid my bill the night before I left and told them I was leaving very early, but when I got up at 4 am to catch my bus, I found the establishment locked like a fort.  I couldn’t get out.  I tried getting through the kitchens to the back.  Everything was locked.  I ruffled through keys behind the reception desk, but with no luck.  So I took off my backpack and decided on a window escape.  Nope.  This was locks and padlock country and not draw-bolts and mortises.

Moroccan doors serve their purpose!  Aren't they gorgeous - I collected them on my journey and have a whole folder of Moroccan doors.  Just don't try getting in or OUT!

A Very Scary Moment

I headed for the roof where I thought the young men slept.  I did not want to raise the whole house so crept up the wooden ladder and pushed the trapdoor above my head.  He’d been lying with one ear up and padded quietly to the hatch, no doubt with his head on one side. 

As I arose through the opening into the moonlight, I heard the chink of a chain behind me and swung my head.  We met eyeball to eyeball.  Breath to breath.  The Hound of the Baskervilles on a Moroccan roof.  I dropped the door as it lunged at my head.   The resounding bang restarted my heart which was going like a hammermill by the time I slid down the rungs like liquid and hit the ground. 

A guard dog on the roof had never occurred to me. 

I stood shaking, waiting, listening to the barking, the scratching and the clinking chain.  Well, no-one could sleep through that commotion I thought.  Someone did wake.  They shouted at the dog, but it kept on barking.  Suddenly there was a thud and a yelp and it stopped with a whimper.  That was it.  Nothing more. 

My bus came in a few minutes.  I flew down the stairway remembering I’d seen an old man shuffle through door at the back of the reception area.  I knocked gently, then harder and called out that I needed him.  A man groaned and grumbled.  I hammered some more, my voice rising.  He shouted.   "Bugger-off,” -  unmistakable in any language.  Had there been a question in his voice, I could have persisted.  Bugger off it was.  No way was he getting up for me.   

I’d missed the bus but was too agitated to go back to bed, so sat down on my pack, lent against the front door and read my book until my jailers sleepily emerged. 

They were of course terribly apologetic and flagged down every car outside until hours later they found someone they knew and trusted to give me a lift.  They also made me the most beautiful breakfast and refused to take any money for it. 

A Very Avid Woman... The Story Goes

It was only later when I heard that mature English women travelling solo were infamous for their single-minded pursuit of Moroccan men that I wondered what stories would be told in the gite after my departure...

This was a house near my gite - I just loved the veranda - but not for too wild a party.

Keeping Solo in the High Atlas

One of my most memorable trips travelling solo
in Morocco was into the High Atlas Mountains
by Grand Taxi

On the lower mountain slopes, exuberant swaths of green and pink oleander bushes traced the paths of numerous streams and rivers; lustrous against a backdrop of biscuit-coloured mountains. 

Higher up the bare-rock cliffsides swirled, tilting and tumbling.  Gigantic scribblings that diarised colossal upheavals.  A work that echoed still with latent power.

Tabant to Zaouit Ahansal

My destination was Tabant, a small town with a school for mountain guides, that served hill-walkers and climbers. 
In the town I hired a guide with a car as I wanted to visit a woman’s cooperative in the village of Zaouiat Ahansal
some distance away.  

Tabant and the local petrol station...

It was one of those rare journeys where I truly shifted to a spectator’s seat; the backdrop so endowed, it took on a cinematic quality.

The first part of the journey took us along the Ait Bougomez Valley, past many Berber villages and the towers of ruined kasbahs that looked as if they had hatched out of the mud. 

Irrigation schemes instituted half-a-century before had transformed the valley floor and it was gorgeously banded with orchards and fields of bright green and gold.  On the hillsides above, ancient mud-brick terraces were abandoned - built with so much effort, sweat and tears, they were gradually returning to the earth.

Ait Bougomez Valley

The car made heavy work of the climb and we had to stop frequently to let the engine cool

My troubles didn’t start until we were far above the villages, when Mohammad pulled off the road to take a last look over his valley before we swung over the Tizi’Tirghist Pass. 

“Let us look at the view,” he said, but Mohammad had something else in mind for our stop.   “Kissy kissy now?” 

I looked at him in amazement, primly adjusted my headscarf,  and stared him down.  “No.  No kissy, kissy."

He was an agile little spiv, his verdant mustache fanning with his enormous grin.  He was agitated and hopped
from foot to foot.

“Just little kissy kissy,” he repeated, reaching to take my hand.

I snatched it away and took a few steps back.  

“Absolutely not,” I said in my best English accent.  I was taller than him and I hoped, rather imposing.  A sort of Maggie Smith moment.

But I didn’t feel that confident.  I was, after all, standing on a precipice, we had seen one other car in the last two hours and in any case we were off-road.
 
I gave Mohammad a withering glare and walked resolutely back to the car.  

I was surprised and unnerved, but it didn't take much thought to know it was too ridiculous to be menacing.  I was at least twenty years his senior, a grandmother, short-sighted, seriously deaf and rather grubby - I had been backpacking for weeks - and I had a horrible rash from mites I had encountered earlier at an so-called eco-gite.  I was hardly hot stuff. 

I thought about imperiously demanding a return to Tabant, but whatever I had got myself into, I was halfway there.  Past the point of no return.

Back in the car, I talked of my husband, daughters and grandchildren.  He remained determinedly unconvinced.  The stops on the deserted road for sight-seeing were frequent and he repeated his offer at each one.  Back in the car, he’d reverse with his arm along the back of my seat, touching my shoulders.  As he drove, he constantly adjusted the car windows, pinning me back as he reached across to mine. Even tilting his rear-view mirror he managed to brush my forehead. I squirmed to keep out of his reach and pulled my headscarf tighter, my sleeves lower.

“Kissy, kissy?”  

“No kissy, kissy!”

“Kissy, kissy?”

I grew more confident too, until I just rolled my eyes and tossed my head like a recalcitrant old grey mare. 

Little did he know, I thought, focusing my glare on his mustache, how I loathed facial hair.

The Tizi'Tirghist Pass

The Pass, the highest in Northern Africa at 2,629 metres, was well defined.  The rough road was originally built by the French in the 1930s and it there that the last wild Barbary Lion, Africa’s largest cat, was sighted and sadly shot in 1942. 

Once through the Pass, mountains stretched forever, turbulent, earthy, wild and harsh.  Patches of snow were still about, shrinking in the spring thaw.  There were a few stunted trees scattered over the taupe landscape, but mostly the vegetation was ‘hedgehog’ clusters - greenery that had adapted and grew stunted, bunched together in pincushions clinging to the steep rough terrain.  Many were in flower and made a puffy patchwork of mauve, yellow and white tussocks while some remained shades of green with a velvet sheen.    

Taupe landscape that rolls on for ever and ever...

Nomad Tents Made of Camel-Hair

At first I gazed unseeing at the spectacular and grim mountain slopes until Mohammad pointed out black camel-hair tents of nomad camps and in some places, stone built kraals and low huts. Gradually I too was able to pick out a flash of washing or a group of camels, but it was the black tents that really thrilled me.

Eggs never tasted better

We reached a mud house that had turned one room into a cafe where a smiling Berber girl boiled us eggs in a kettle.  She deftly sliced them, sprinkling salt and spices, before dousing the dish with oil.  Served with hot mint tea and flat bread, it was absolutely delicious. 

Making it Plain in a Pretty Gite

From there it wasn’t far to Zaouiat Ahansal, a village clustered around a river-crossing in a gorge.  I had specifically asked Mohammad to drop me at a gite that was run entirely by women.  He said yes, but took me elsewhere to his friend’s gite.  It was charming and clean overlooking a rushing river tributary with pink hollyhocks in the garden. 

A girl showed me to a room with four mattresses on the floor and I choose one and dropped my backpack beside it.  Within moments Mohammad was there too dropping his bag by the mattress next to mine.  

“No way Mohammad, you are not sleeping in this room.”

He feigned surprise, shrugged and said it was the only room.

“Well, you can sleep in the car.”  I picked up his bag and slung it unceremoniously out the door.

I got on well with the family although I felt the father, the proprietor, took a dim view of me.   After dinner the three of us sat in the little lounge,   With solemn disapproval on one side and crazy man approval on the other, I excused myself and took a walk up the road.

I was soon joined by my ardent friend.
 
“Kissy, kissy?’

“Fuck off!”  I growled.   I was out of patience. 

He licked his lips nervously and I wondered if I might have made a mistake.  Maybe he liked rough talk.  I strode back to the village.

That night I stuck a chair against the door of my room, it’s back under the handle.  From my mattress, I watched the handle move up and down in the candlelight but my improvised door lock held and had it not, I was ready to do a fair impersonation of a banshee that would have summoned the entire village. 

I didn’t want to drive back with Mohammad but when I spoke to the proprietor there was clearly little alternative.

Weaving centre and a hollyhock outside my bedroom window at the gite.

Delightful Zaouiat Ahansal

In the morning Mustafa, the son of the household, took me down to see the small Atelier du Tissages de l’Association du Zaouiat Ahsal - a women's weaving centre.  I would have liked to have bought a rug but they were too heavy.  I watched the girls at work and took mint tea with them.  To my dismay were very enthusiastic about the artificial colours they were starting to use. They didn’t fade, were so bright and cheerful and easy to prepare. 

Mustafa told me about the Association he had set up to control the rubbish in the village because trekkers were discarding plastic bottles and other garbage that the village had no way to deal with it.
 
The highlight of the morning though, was not the women’s weaving that I had travelled so far to see, but Mustafa’s tour of the village’s magnificent ancient kasbah.  He led me through a dark passage, up a staircase so black, I had to feel my way slowly as he scampered ahead.  We emerged onto a precarious roof space and mounted a wooden ladder to access an imposing tower and then he took me down again by a different route, using steps which were no more than axed notches in heavy wooden poles.  Villagers used the lower rooms to stable their donkeys.  The site was being restored with money from Government; a casual process.

The kasbah at Zaouiat Ahansalwhere the local leader lived and where the village would gather when under attack. It is being restored with Government funds and is quite magnificent!

Homeward Bound

The journey back was punctuated by Mohammad’s protestations of infatuation which by now didn’t even get a rise out of me.  I was glad to part from his company but wished him well for after all he had taken me safely on an extraordinary odyssey.

Ahhhhhh....!

A week or so later I met some seasoned Moroccan travellers who asked if I’d had any difficulty travelling alone. 
No, I said, for the Moroccans were genuinely warm and delightful hosts.

“You didn’t you have any trouble with Moroccan men?”

“No, well not really.”

“We wondered because, you see, it’s well established that mature German and English women come to Morocco travelling solo looking for toyboys. They pay good money to have a fling.”

“Not my kind of travel!” I laughed...  but then I thought about poor old Mohammad.

“Ahhhhhh……,” I added, “Well that might explain one particular encounter.”

Footnote:  I have changed the real name of my guide.  He was not called Mohammad!

Going It Alone in Morocco

It was hard to tear myself away from Fez!

Tricks for Travelling Solo

Nature abhors a vacuum.  So without a travel companion, my psyche simply split and I could talk to my other self. 
We didn't always agree but it was nice to have someone in a tight spot.

I was nervous setting off from Fez to back-pack so I bribed myself.  Two nights of sheer indulgence - an eco-gite in the mid Atlas Mountains.  A traditional Moroccan mud-brick farmhouse, lovingly restored, with thick hand-spun Berber carpets and rich in cultural heritage.  A remote utopia where eagles soared above stony slopes crossed only by goat tracks.

Morocco by Grand Taxi

It was a long journey and I would do it all by Morocco’s Grand Taxis - shared cars that plough between regional destinations.  On the second day I was decanted on a deserted road and waited for Aqilah to pick me up.  (It wasn’t that simple, but I’ll cut to the chase.)

Gite d'Etape

When I got to Aqilah’s house,  his lovely wife brought out warm bread, olive oil and peppermint tea.  Aqilah wanted me to book mule rides, a kayak on the lake or a birdwatching expedition for the next day and it took some persuasion just to get him to take me up to the farmhouse. 

It was a stony, uphill track and, at a distance, the gite looked splendid.  

Très Jolie - On Closer Inspection - Très Terrible

Aqilah showed me where I would sleep on the upper floor.  At first glance it was pretty with fresh blue and yellow paint-work; it took a second to see the filth.  The dirty carpets and grubby mattresses; a couple of which were draped with stained sheets.  The droppings; everywhere - rats or mice - gerbils or jerboas - or all of them.  I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing, but strangely docile, I followed Aqilah down to the kitchen. Platters and bowls encrusted with leftover food, days or months old, sat on stockpiles of grimed and greasy plates.  Every surface etched with the grot of ages.

No wonder the website said no chemical cleaners; no cleaners at all

Stunned by the sleaze, I tried to see the bright side.  I waved my hand vaguely at the mud-brick fortifications behind the house, which were mellow and shapely in the afternoon sun. 

“Très jolie!” I said.

My psyche is shouting differently; très filthee…, c’est crasseux.

Aqilah was delighted and took me on a tour.  He beckoned me over to see the underground olive press and opened a chute.  His shining torch revealed a ghastly accumulation of rubbish, plastic bottles and tin cans. 

As we walked round to the house I realised much of the rubbish hadn’t even got that far, the whole place was one big tip.  I felt, by then, quite spooked to be alone on a blasted hillside with this man who thought it très jolie.  I got interrupted.

No Gill, you said très jolie.  And you just paid Euros 40 a night to stay in a squalid ruin.

I know but I'm here and there must be something good about it.

Très jolie - this guy is bonkers - he just took you to show you his rubbish tip.  

Why did I say très jolie?  It is très terrible. 

But Little Bits Were Très Jolie

I sat out on the little veranda and read, trying not to indulge my rising hysteria when up the hill came Aqilah's wife with a tagine, fresh bread and a thermos of tea. 

The warm dusk settled with her arrival, scribbling out the scruffiness, caressing the crumbling mud walls, infusing the painted woodwork. She had a strong, sun-beaten face and she patted my hand, grounding me and I could not help but relax. What else was there to do?  What's a little bit of dirt between friends?

After dinner, with a candle in a glass jar, I wriggled into my silk sleeping bag liner and wrapped the pillow with my scarf. I slept soon enough but was plagued with bad dreams.  I twisted hearing small scuffles in the room and brushed my face imagining things crawling over me.   

Ahhh!

In the morning my dreams were fully realised - tiny black mites were running over my cheeks, behind my ears, through my hair, along my arms, over my hands. 

I jumped up and had stripped naked by the time I hit the shower.  I turned on the tap but there was no water at all.  I grabbed my towel and flew down to use the trickle of cold water from a tap outside the kitchen.  I splashed water everywhere, combed my hair vigorously and rubbed myself with lavender and tea-tree oil.  

“Douche, Madam?  Pas de l’eau,” said Azilah.

Forget the Breakfast

He went to get breakfast but soon reappeared with his finger dripping blood.  I had no plasters, but poured tea-tree oil in the cut.  He yelped and took off down the hill.

I packed and followed suit.  Bugger a bloody breakfast, I wanted out of there.  

He met me on the path.  I told him I was not staying.  He was disappointed.  He said there was no ute so there was no way for me to go. He also wanted me to pay for the next night. We had an impasse. 

I Set Off Down the Road

It started as a pleasant stroll along the lakeside, greeting a boy herding goats, then an uphill haul to the main road which was actually quite a minor one.  That took an hour.   I was hot, tired and hungry.  There was nothing on the road, no house, no shop, filling station -  nothing, and nothing for it but to keep walking and hope for a bus or a taxi. 

I practised Thich Nhat Hanh’s walking meditation.  Then I listed the reasons why the situation was good: Vitamin D, exercise...  The list was so short, I moved onto affirmations. I said out loud, "I am OK, I am strong, I am OK, I can
walk a long way."

Sweat trickled into my eyes, but without shade I just needed to keep walking.     

Affirmations are all very well, but I knew I was talking baloney; the next town was 30 kilometres away, my pack weighed a ton, the sun was hot and I didn't have enough water.

Hitch.

I’ve never hitched.

Hitch.

In Morocco?  Are you mad?

Hitch.

This was part of the road I walked to get away from the gite!

So I Tried Hitching

I heard a car coming so I stopped and patted the air at waist level which seemed to be a slow down, stop, look at me sign and I thought less likely to be misinterpreted than sticking my finger in the air.   The car pulled up.  He was helpful and told me I was on the right road for Azilal.  Another car stopped and another.  They reassured me I was going in the right direction. None of them offered a lift. 

I began to think that I would skip hitching and go straight to holdup. 

The universe likes a joke, the next guy who pulled up was a policeman.  He drove me into town, took me to the Grand Taxi stand and organised the next leg of the journey.  I offered money for petrol, but he would not hear of it.

It was the next day before I started to itch.

Footnote:  On TripAdvisor, subsequently two people shared a similar experience - well not quite; they took one look and didn't stay but just got into and onto their respective vehicles, a car and a motorbike, and got the hell out of there.

Setting Off Travelling Solo in Morocco

Near my Dar in Fez, Morocco after Alice left and I was travelling alone

My space was a little hollow without Alice

When Alice left me in Fez to go back to London I felt bereft. https://gill-shaddick-xg56.squarespace.com/journey/an-accidental-journey-with-alice

I moved to another dar in the Medina, I don’t remember now how I found it, word of mouth I think.  It was more within my budget, owned by a Moroccan family this time,  filled with light, mosaics, fountains, cats galore, soft-footed family,  shy smiles and warm welcomes.  I was the only guest and each morning, I breakfasted alone with the cats, marvelling that orange juice, a croissant and a sprig of mint could look so magnificent on a blue tiled table with a shaft of sunlight filtering through the latticed rooftop.

Travelling Solo At Last

I need to say something here about travelling solo.  I am embarrassed to tell you how challenging I found it to be completely on my own.  I didn’t expect myself to feel the way I did.  After all I had craved it.  A space free of responsibility for someone else being hungry, hot or happy or not so.   

This journey had been part of my big Unilateral Declaration of Ownership.  Owning the situation and owning the solution.  And part of the solution had been to get away - right away.  Imagine that for a cure -  when family and physicians said, “Take your passport, stand not about wringing your hands, but GO!”

Perhaps it was because I hadn’t planned on Morocco.  But that was serendipity, part of the adventure.  How many other people set off for Turkey and land in North Africa?  I had stepped out of my life.  I could go bonkers, eat ice-cream, have serial affairs, write poetry, sleep in all day, party all night and no-one would know. 

Yet I Just Felt Wobbly and Wonky

All I felt like was finding a cafe and reading my book.  Where was the audacity I’d had at twenty-one?  Who was the intrepid traveller of maturity who had, in the last few years, been to Afghanistan, Laos, Tibet, Borneo?  What the hell was my problem?  I was like a child discovering again.  Of course I don’t remember what it is like to be a child discovering, but that’s the only way I can describe it.  Discovering my parameters.  I was scared, so terribly insecure.  Do men feel like this?  Ever?  And added to that, I was disappointed in myself that I felt that way.

Pets Make Good Travelling Companions

I closed my eyes.  Perhaps a four-footed companion. Travels with a Donkey.  Fez had a surfeit of those.  Get behind me RLS.  Those ideas take time and in any case Mike gave me a donkey in the Sudan thirty years earlier,  I could not get it to move in any direction even when I got off and tried to pull it along.

When I opened my eyes, the cats were all regarding me.  I could just stay in Fez.  It was a perfectly legitimate idea.  But the cats looked malevolent, squeezing their pupils as if to dislodge me from their world and my own craved security.  

Escaping Immediate Decision Making

Trying to get my stakes in the ground that first morning on my own, instead of thinking about where I would go in the coming weeks, my mind went back to another perennial problem.  How to be self-sufficient financially on my return to Australia in several months?

Like I was on a desert island and worrying about what I would do after I was rescued rather than addressing the need for water and a coconut.

I didn't have to look far for inspiration.  There I was surrounded by straws.  I pictured a little shop in Sydney; tiles, textiles and tagines.  I’d wear a caftan and Mike could grow the long beard I had always hated, wear a jellabah like he did in the Sudan, and pour out the peppermint tea.  

Clutching at a Project

I was delighted with myself.  A project.  I made enquiries and had no problem finding a manufacturer of Moroccan tiles.  He was delighted to see me.  Many people, he assured me, had made a great deal of money in Australia importing
from him. 

A container, no less, that was the only way to go otherwise it would be too expensive.  There would be no problem filling a container for my new friend had not only tiles and mosaics, but a cousin who made carved wooden doors and screens, an uncle with a good line in fountains.  It so happened his wife’s father owned the very best tagine pottery in Fez.  Over lunch we talked of family and finding out I had four daughters and unmarried at that, he said immediately he could supply husbands, maybe even four brothers.  And I myself, I was travelling alone?  He could squeeze them all in a container, ready-made, I had only to supply required sizes…

"Come back tomorrow," he said, "We'll talk some more."

No trouble filling a container - a new business opportunity awaited me and new opportunities galore

Some Ideas Are Best Left Behind

It was evening by the time I got back to my dar.  The cats eyes shone round in the dark.
“It’s OK,” I said softly, “I’m going in the morning.” 

Somewhere on the road to total contentment in a container, I had also found courage, or at least enough of it to travel in my first Grand Taxi and after that there was no turning back. 

An Accidental Journey with Alice

A London Stopover

I was staying in a tiny flat in North London with my youngest daughter, Alice.  I mean tiny.  A house savagely sliced into pieces leaving rooms appearing taller than they were wide.  She lived there with Chris, her boyfriend. Their bedroom was a thoroughfare, you couldn’t access the loo from anywhere without going through it.

Mum we'll just cuddle up and watch TV

I slept on the sofa-bed and Alice insisted she and I watch the entire series of Downton Abbey - all fifty-two episodes within three nights viewing - well that’s how it felt.  I enjoyed the first few but now have a facial tick that manifests whenever anyone mentions the Abbey.  

We did a lot of fun things in London besides watch Downton Abbey!

I Wanted Some Alice Time

I wanted to take Alice for a holiday and we settled on Southern Turkey.
“So you’ll go to the travel agent tomorrow?”
“No way, I’ll book everything on the internet,” I said.
“Oh, you’re such a switched on Mum,” said Alice and I purred.

As Alice disappeared to the kitchen to cook supper she hissed Chris had a limited Internet plan. Chris was extraordinarily forbearing; deprived of Alice and his TV, subject to my nighttime excursions through his bedroom, he now gave up his final bastion and let me onto his computer.  

Come Fly With Me

It was mighty stressful as I scanned the bucket-shop sites for flights and hostels in Antalya or Alanya, the kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes flying by.  Alice would come in to see how I was going and top up my red wine.  She offered helpful alternative dates which further complicated the breathless combination of flights and hostels which ebbed and flowed before me, seats filling before my eyes, so when I finally got the combo right, I wasn’t going to muck about, booked and went to help Alice with cooking and the red wine.  

So Mum...  aaaaaaaa

“So were do we fly into Mum?” asked Alice.

“Antalya,” I said, but as the words came out my mouth, my whole body did a kind of wiggly cringe. Intuition isn’t called gut feeling for nothing.  It’s also our innate wisdom.  Ha, bloody ha, let me repeat that: johnny come-late wisdom.   

I made some excuse, got Chris to re-fire his computer and checked the confirmation. 

Ryanair were so pleased we were going to Alicante on the Costa Blanca, Spain.

“I really can’t believe you did that,” said Alice, a spatula raised in one hand.  
“I’m sorry, just too many aaaa’s - I can’t believe it either.  Never mind, Alicante‘ll be nice.”
“Mum, I don’t want to go to Spain again!”
I shuffled off back to the computer, simpered to Chris who was checking his emails.

Ryanair would only let me change tickets for another flight on the same day and the only place left was Fez.  
“Mum, where the fes is Fez?”  

Redemption

To make up for it, I booked a guesthouse beyond my normal budget to about the power of five.  An additional incentive being that reviews of my normal nightly outlay left others itchy, wanting for hot water or in some cases, any water at all.  

On arrival at Dar El Hana in Fez Medina, we were welcomed by Josephine.  My intuition had looked after me after all, if not my bank balance.  It was perfect.

On heaven's balcony... with a good book

Josephine's Dar El Hana

Josephine had drifted into Fes some years before on the start of a world adventure, never got further, instead bought a dar, an Arab house in the Medina, and started taking in guests. 

Jammed together, without windows, dar rooms face inward and, from upstairs, have balconies that look down to a central patio.  It may be a garden or just a table and chairs; a gorgeous riot of tiles, carpets, cushions, cedar wood and greenery.  

Some tiling from Fez

Buying a Dar in Fez

When a property is purchased in Fez, everything above the outline of the house at ground level is yours, but the houses have evolved in such an organic way that a winding stair-case or a burrowed cellar may well go beyond your footprint or you may find your neighbour in yours. 

That was what happened to Josephine as she told me when I admired the little coloured tiles on the kitchen floor.

“Most of them are original, I cleaned and sorted them myself.  When we lifted the tiles, the floor gave way and we peered down into the kitchen of our neighbours whom I’d greeted outside only shortly before.  It was a great surprise for both of us!”

So she had to buy and sell pieces of the house to establish her final footprint.

My journeys are always fascinating but often vaguely uncomfortable; an incentive to keep moving. 

In Fez with Alice I could have settled down for months and it was an effort to tear us away to backpack travel. 

Alice acquiesced with a certain stoicism, adopting the dress of an avant-garde Berber tribeswoman with a voluminous scarf round her head and lower jaw and enormous sunglasses to keep the sun off her fair skin. 

Alice - inside without the sungassses

Together we explored the Medina in Meknes, the Kasbah in Rabat and holy marvellous Moulay Idriss.  At Roman Volubilis,  Alice sat in the shade for an hour while I haggled with a dozen taxi drivers in non-existent French and I embarrassed her dreadfully when I eventually hijacked some American tourists for a lift.  

Together we enjoyed a riot of colour and donkeys, camels and cats, great food, naughty boys, friendly Moroccans, and more colour.

Marvellous Moroco

An Ideal Travel Companion... 

Alice has a phenomenal sense of humour and a nose for a bottle of red wine.  She used both when we found ourselves on a windswept Atlantic beach where Lonely Planet’s, “Little visited idyllic seaside fishing village,” wasn’t the description we’d have given and where Alice woke me in the middle of the night to show me the carcass of a bedbug wrapped in a tissue and her lines of bites. 

“Move over Mum -  me and my mates are coming to join you.”   

Alice Knows About the Finer Things in Life

Back in Fez for the last two nights before Alice departed for London, she took control.  She rebooked us into the Dar El Hana, found a modern hammam for the most amazing full-body ex-foliation on hot marble slabs and on our last evening, she followed Josephine’s recommendation and a small boy fetched us and spirited us through the Medina at night to the Tourina Restaurant which was out of this world in ambiance, flavours and delightful service.

Next time...

Next time I go travelling with Alice, I am going to leave all the arrangements up to her.  I’ll just have to save up first.

Undoubtedly the opportunity to touch down in extraordinary Fez and sample the warm-heart of Morocco was the very best of accidents.

Market produce and no gladwrap!

Stirring up a blue day with red paint

Red is gorgeous and dangerous, passionate and painful - what a duet

We all have our blue moments

Life suddenly heavy, the world extraordinarily messy, our children, the success of last resort, briefly feral or blue themselves, poverty imminent, lumbago looming.  Dangerously, the gloom has a sublime quality - a seductive wallow could follow.

How to own the blue days

Dale, my daughter, suggests meditation; my friend Karen, a glass of red; I know a walk is required.  But my cheerlessness is serious when my heart whispers again and again, “Go on an adventure.”

I’m a lifelong runaway.

Decision time

That’s when I need to keep away from Skyscanner and reconnect head, heart and hands; paint furniture or sew creatively.  Which one I choose is immaterial; the initiated steps are a highway to the sky.

Just one foot in front of another and we can climb most mountains.  Only trouble is pictures like these whisper "An adventure..."

This time it's paint.  So I set out for the Porter’s Paint Shop clutching an old tin.  On the lid was written, ‘Aphrodite’. 

Well, the staff said, Aphrodite was long gone, unremembered, the joke on me. 

The flippant conviviality released a sentimental rush of affection for total strangers.  Revived already, I left with a tin of Medieval Red.  But on the way home, I mourned Aphrodite.  Medieval Red conjured clanking armour and testosterone usurping the goddess of love, beauty and procreation.  I spoke firmly to myself.  This is therapy, you have to see it through.

The Fix

I opened the tin and stirred and swirled, rousing a drop-dead gorgeous red that burbled up in slow, globby bubbles. Liberated, its exuberance eyed-me-up, bypassing my brain and rekindled my heart-fire while satisfying some vampire demon that wanted blood. 

Red is the King of Colours

Red is not my favourite, but it is my dear, melodramatic friend, the one I’m drawn to, the crazy-maker, full of theatre and passion.

Love, sunrise and sunset, festivities and hearts and blood-bonds, red-roses, red-carpets and Chinese good luck.  And it’s alter-ego, blood and guts, slaughter, danger, fire and brimstone, is as fundamental as blue days are to calm days, crazy happy days, contented days and fun days.

So I am still here and know if the going gets tougher, and stirring paint doesn’t cut it, I can still take off on the
big red kangaroo.

I didn’t even need to wet my brush, but put the lid back on the tin and underneath Medieval Red, I wrote
Aphrodite Mark II.  

The paint and red things on my desk - maybe red is a closer friend than I think!

A long leaky week that ended in champagne and hugs

Bit of a rattlebag of a week!

I was almost rendered blogless...

Airbnb hosting has outdistanced my writing discipline this week.  Outdistanced, encompassed, overwhelmed, engulfed… 

And you are going to hear all about it...

On Wednesday the pipes blocked in the kitchen sink, the water backwashed into the dishwasher which overflowed, flooding the kitchen floor, which dripped down to the garage knocking out one electric circuit and rapping a mean beat on daughter Dale’s African drum stored below.

Have you noticed that tradies come in matched pairs?

The plumbers arrived in identical tee-shirts.  They looked genuinely concerned at pipe joints leaking into buckets.  I explained how I undid the pipes to fix the problem myself, until one under the house hosed me with revolting smelly water which meant I had to take a long hot shower and put all my clothes onto the bio-wash cycle.  

That, I add, "Is why I called you." 

I do a mean job unblocking toilets and fixing gutters but I’d had to admit defeat. 

They talk gently about needing expertise, pipe diameters, length, inclines, back pressure, expanding joints.  In other words, lady, leave this to us.

They identified the problem - the four googes

“This pipe,” the taller dark-haired one said, tapping it reverently, “Is from the kitchen sink and it is chockablock.” He wrinkles his nose. 

I get it.  That pipe is jam-packed with gunge, goo, grunge and gloop.   

He continues: a high-pressure water blast might clear it but will back up when it hits the end bend and whoosh, all that GGG&G will be atomized over the entire double garage which at the moment is completely taken up with possessions of prodigal daughters.   The two young men politely shake their heads: drop sheets, tarps will not help, everything will be sodden – a double garage Armageddon will ensue once they start.    

To avoid double-garage Armageddon...

An alternative solution, for a mere $2000 they can replace the pipe painlessly. They will exorcise it, seal it off, cut it out and take it to some non-disclosed bio-hazard waste site where the fatty remnants of three decades of domestic drippings will break down over centuries.

Since it's Friday, they can't do anything until Monday, unless I pay an emergency surcharge...

It seemed an astronomical price to agree for a new piece of pipe especially as I am so good at undoing joints.  (It’s just getting them done up again where I need help.)  I decline the emergency surcharge….

Enter left DIYIT

That evening, long-standing guest comes in from work. Let’s call him DIYIT as he is good at DIY and IT.   DIYIT is a dollars and cents man.  He’s a money-saving junkie.

“You know, WE can probably fix it OURSELVES.”  He rubs his chin the way men do when they are thinking. “If WE put a plumber’s snake down there, WE would know exactly what was up.”

I have never heard of a plumber’s snake, but my imagination is running riot.

“Less of the WE, I am leaving at sparrows for Kim’s fortieth in the Blue Mountains.”

“What time does Bunnings Hardware open?”

At 6.30 am,  we creep out to buy a snake and then I bugger off to the Mountains.

On my return...

When I get home that evening, all the guests are smiling.  The sink flows, the dishwasher works.  All for $36.30.

"No evidence of any gunge in the pipe at all," says DIYIT, "Not even any grease on the end of the snake and whatever the problem was, it's gone now."

Thank Goodness and Goodnight all...

I am in bed when a new-first-visit-to-Australia-young-female-guest calls – she had the flights wrong and has arrived twelve hours early.  She knows I have no room so she will sleep at the airport.   I tell her to get on a train while I make up a bed in my office.  I go up to the station at midnight, but she is not on the last train.  So I message her,

“Where are you now?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Gill, your host.”

“Ah I am not the girl.”

Followed by a staccato of messages:”

“I lend her my phone to call u"
“I think she told u this is not her number”
“I think u know so why u ask me where I now”

I start to message back.  I am getting quite worked up.  Messaging strangers, responding to anything remotely controversial on Facebook and road rage are all in the same basket, ultimately self-harm.  I am saved from myself when there is a loud rap on my car window and that frightens the bejesus out of me.

A man wants to know if I am an Uber.  I pack him off to get a taxi on the Highway.  More time passes so I decide to walk around the station to make sure I have not missed new-first-visit-to-Australia-young-female-guest. 

Everything is deserted, even the highway, and there is not a soul around except; a man waiting for a taxi.  He turns round and he is very excited to see me again and starts running towards me, I flee.   

It is now 12.30 am and I am very tired despite the elation that guests can use the sink
and that I have out-run the Uber-doober man;
this is the first time I have lost a new-first-visit-to-Australia-young-female-guest. 
I wonder what I should tell Airbnb since officially she hasn't even arrived.

Salt-of-the-earth saves the day

Fifteen minutes later I get a call from a cleaner for Sydney Trains.  My guest emerged at the wrong station to an empty street facing a huge graveyard.  She had no sim-card, she waited but no traffic passed, no people – her introduction to Sydney just whispering trees and the peaceful dead.  So she found a public phone where a notice said IN AN EMERGENCY…

God Bless her, she dialed Triple Zero.  God Bless Australia, they told her to hold tight, help was on its way. 

Fortunately salt-of-the-earth cleaner, who knows what if feels like to be a foreigner in a strange land, finds her before all three services descend on the station.

White panel van on approach...

The two forlorn figures, staring up the road are clearly disconcerted by the arrival of my clapped-out white panel van.   
I’m used to this, guests expect more up-market transport, so I have a well-practiced leap-out - full of bonhomie and unbridled delight.   If I were practicing abduction, it would be a good tactic, they stand stock still.

We all hug - a triple hug-fest. 

See, it's a nice little white panel van, not creepy at all

The next day is another day...

I get to sleep about 2 am and set the alarm at 6 am to do battle with the redundant plumbers and write my blog and I’d like to say that that day went according to plan…   It didn't but I got lots of hugs from new-first-visit-to-Australia-young-female-guest and at 7 pm, French-departing-guests were popping champagne and celebrating because they were leaving the next day…  and they hoped the next place would have plumbing... I wondered if they would take me too.  

But I know I’d miss it… the life that I have has taken a lifetime to achieve and I have learned so many skills – and one day I might find a tool to help me do up joints on pipes for now I have a plumber’s snake in my repertoire, I’m set - I think DIYIT and I will need to get matching tee shirts and if all else fails, I know I can dial Triple 000, I understand they are tremendously helpful!

   Every girl needs both!

Good news spurred me on to write about Africa and I'm lost for words.

I'm digging up Africa photos - there is Mike - the tall handsome one - my soulmate.  Some photos don't need many words or any translation.  
We were lost and all those damn cotton fields looked exactly alike. 

Good news spurred me on

I started my second manuscript in January when I opened the Africa letters.   I’ve been dragging my hands a bit, but last week, I got a literary agent, Brendan Fredericks, who has taken on my first manuscript - one I wrote about living in Hong Kong.  It takes me a step nearer publishing.  It's an absolute delight to have Brendan on side and it’s having a galvanising effect. I’m writing like crazy, loving it and cursing too.

It's bloody hard work

This writing is no superficial retiree diversion, it’s as challenging as any physical marathon.  Long hours hunched over the keyboard give way to long nights when words play the devil with me.  I sleep with a writing pad at my bedside.  Not so much to catch my midnight inspirations as to empty my head of words. 

By night there are too many, yet by day there are never enough.  

Only a million

There are about a million words in the English language and once you take away the chemical, technical and scientific words...

So less than a million.  I feel I’ve gone through them all and am still left wanting; I might need more…

Monolinqual or Monoglot?

Then I remembered a young Afghan friend who shook his head when talking to me one day.  “It must be awful only to speak one language.”
 
“I’m embarrassed and I wish I’d learned more,” I said truthfully, “But I get by.”  

“I can't imagine it.  Isn't it dull?  I mean there are words in Farsi that express things that you don’t have in English and words in English that Farsi lacks.  Farsi is so poetic.”

It really struck a chord with me.  Surosh was only a teenager at the time we had the conversation. 

I did feel deprived, but it was entirely my own fault.

A Polyglot

Recently I heard about a young American, another teenager.  Tim Doner, a well known polyglot.  He spoke 23 languages (probably he's added another half-dozen by now) and said Farsi was his favourite.

Both young men can quote Hafez, the 14th century Iranian poet - impressive.  Because I know they'd just as easily quote Shakespeare.

Imagine...

Imagine if polyglots had time to write books.  Picture them: chewing their pens, rubbing their temples, contemplating which word from which language best to express the required sentiment.

Mind you, they might need to self-publish…  Or to start an elite club.

So I'll just have make do, after all others have managed...

Oh well I can take some solace in the historical beginnings of English, it’s a bastard language: German, Norse, Danish, Dutch, French Latin. And I’m too busy writing to take up languages, so one million words will have to do. 

I leave you with a line by Hafez

“Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.” 

Now I’m sure a lot gets lost in translation, but I’m glad there was someone there to try.  

When I read poetry, I feel the words lift of the page and spin, suddenly more flexible and closer. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/06/14/american-who-speaks-23-languages-says-persian-is-his-favorite/

http://www.languagemonitor.com/number-of-words/no-of-words/

Vodka, Kasha and the Russian Chapter

Two Babushka Dolls given to me by two Russian doctors almost fifty years apart, one is a peasant, the other a bit of a hussy!

Imagine my delight  

Writing a book was a lot harder than I imagined.  I have a new-found admiration for anyone who gets their work onto the shelves.  My first memoir of two years I spent in Hong Kong got bogged down at the beginning when I wrote about my journey East from England on the Trans-Siberian railway.  I struggled, my words totally inadequate against the Russian front.

Then right in the middle of my epic battle with the Russian chapter, I hosted a Russian, an Associate Professor from Siberia.

I pestered him with questions, he looked disconcerted.  His Siberia was a vibrant spot, he enjoyed living there.

My Farewell Invitation

The months flew and it was time for his farewell.  I sent round the invitations.  We’d send the Professor off in Russian style: drink vodka, eat kasha and sing the Volga Boat Song.

The Professor came to me.  He had printed off my email.  “Vodka?  I prefer Australian white wine.”

“That’s OK,” I said brightly, “I’ll get wine.”  Me and the bottle of Vodka would have our own party, I thought.

“You can cook kasha?” he said doubtfully, “Do you want me to buy the cream?”

Why would I want him to buy the cream?  My kasha was from a The Pauper’s Cookbook by Jocasta Innes, and sure had no cream.  (It upset Mike when I bought that book at a time when we were financially challenged.  He had a Scarlett O’Hara moment, “As God is my witness, we’ll never be poor again … I don’t want to eat like a pauper.”)

I said to the Professor, “No, no, it’s fine, my recipe does not have cream.” 

He looked doubtful.  

Then we had an discussion

His finger moved to the last item, “What is this Vulgar Boat Song?” 

“No, Volga.  You know, ‘Yo heave ho.  Ay-da, da, ay-da.’”

“No, I don’t know this song.”

“Yes you do!”

“No I don’t!”

Thank God for You Tube

So I found the Red Army Choir on YouTube singing the Volga Boat Song.  Since every second and third line is Yo, heave ho, I thought my earlier rendition should have sufficed.

“Oh, this is a very old song.  This is about slaves!”

It was a good party nevertheless

So, the kasha was as the Professor had never tasted it, Australian wine flowed and the Professor led us through some strange song, a romantic lament of cold and snow.  It is always winter in Siberia.

A lesson in Russian history

The professor said how much he had enjoyed staying.  He was a little embarrassed at not being able to answer all my questions about Russia.  He’d attended high-school, just after the collapse of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  The Russian history curriculum was suddenly redundant and it took time to pump out a new one. 

Just as well he was going.  If only I’d known, I’d have rectified that!   What a golden opportunity wasted. 

And the Babushka?

Yes, the Prof gave me a very shiny Babushka doll.  I was truly delighted because in 1968 on the Trans-Siberian Express, another Russian doctor had given me a Babushka doll.  That doctor had liked his Vodka - very much - and I'm sure from memory, we together gave a splendid rendition of the Volga Boat Song.  Yo heave ho.

Ma Wan Then and Now - a Hong Kong memory

The pier where I landed at Ma Wan is deserted today and junks like the one I photographed live on only in replica for the tourists.

Shards of Glass Industry

Reading an article in the South China Morning Post that traced the decline of neon factories in Hong Kong,  made me think of another little glass industry I once visited there which has totally disappeared.

All aboard the Deri-Vica

It was November 1969 when I boarded a swish motor launch at Queen’s Pier for my first jaunt on Hong Kong Harbour. 

We drank Pimm’s as the Deri-Vica, polished wood and gleaming brass, hustled with tankers, lighters and ferries along an ugly industrialised foreshore.  But once we cleared Stonecutters Island, the change was swift; a green and pleasant coastline and a seascape shared with great old wooden junks, still under sail.  These were ‘out of China’ and it was a thrill to glimpse anything from the mainland, then in the grip of the Cultural Revolution.   

Thermos Flasks on Ma Wan Island

Our destination was the little island of Ma Wan where our host, Mickey Mok, Hong Kong’s premier stockbroker, took us to visit the local thermos flask factory which kept the island going together with shrimp fishing, some farming and handicraft.

The blowing of the glass was mechanised, but each one had to be twisted off and finished by hand.  It was a family concern with the children happily engaged in the packaging shed and running errands.  

The inner and outer flasks were separated by small asbestos disks and outside sat a very old lady straddling her workbench; a huge tree stump.  She had a round punch and a hammer and moved a sheet of asbestos around cutting out each disk one by one. 

Shrimp paste, fish, baskets and rice paddies

Mickey Mok walked us on from the factory; there were no cars or even bicycles, just an undercurrent of dogs, cats, chickens and kids. Outside each small house was a rack of fish hanging up to dry. 

Mickey beckoned me to look in one doorway to where a grandmother was making a basket, her hands busy while her feet rested on a flexible bamboo foot pedal that joined a pole suspended between two rafters where a basket hung and rocked her grandson gently as she worked.

On the edge of the village were homes made out of old sampans raised up on stilts, mended and extended with planks from wooden packing crates disporting foreign brand names and logos.

We carried on past rice paddies and vegetable gardens to a sandy beach and then back through the second village on the Island which Mickey claimed was the oldest one left in Hong Kong.  He also said the large TV set mounted in the village square was the Government’s idea of birth control!

And Now?

It's hard to comprehend the change.  The slate is not quite wiped clean, a deserted village by the pier and some old timers attest to that but the thermos factory is long gone. Ma Wan now houses thousands and thousands of families.

The island became a pylon stop in the mid-1990s for the Tsing Ma suspension bridge to the new international airport on Lantau.  It sports a Noah’s Ark theme park and Park Island - a huge gated apartment complex. 

Noah's Ark Theme Park, Ma Wan from the air, the Tsing Ma Bridge by night and by day from the island. Photo credits include Ming Hong and HK Arun

A kindly host

I was only 21; Mickey Mok was a generous host, keen to show visitors around.  It was much more fun on the Deri-Vica than on the boats of foreign Taipans because of his local knowledge.  I admired his immediacy; he engaged villagers and boat dwellers with genuine curiosity, affection and respect - they would have known from the boat that he was a wealthy man, but just how wealthy, I doubt!

Lawrence, Hemingway - each pillaged at Christmas

Samples of their writing, just so you can check - clockwise from bottom left, T E Lawrence, Lawrence in Arabia and Hemingway as a young man

A vintage valise or a battered briefcase?

Even today, every op shop or garage sale, I look out for them.  Battered vintage hand luggage.  It’s been that way since I was a small girl. A persistent image - a dogged fixation.

One day I think, someone might… someone might find a bundle of papers and they might be… Of course the chance now is so remote its laughable, and yet…

 

It started on my mother's knee

It could have been a lesson in perseverance or about being careful, but I don’t think it was either, it was my mother’s admiration for everything Arabian - and for a contemporary hero of hers, T E Lawrence. He'd died in 1935 when my mother was twenty-two. 

It wasn't that she knew him personally, but he was up there with other Arabists she admired, Sir Richard Burton, Gertrude Bell and Wilfred Thesiger.   Lawrence had a mastery of language, a fascination with archaeology and his account of the Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turkish rule in his epic Seven Pillars of Wisdom was full of thrill, pathos and daring.   And he looked pretty damn amazing in his Arab garb!

Mum owned a copy of the first trade edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and I had to handle it carefully.  It was thick and heavy to hold as my small fingers traced its marbled end-papers, smooth to the touch, and the indent of the title and twin scimitars stamped in gold on the cover.

 

Each time the book came out, so did the story

With each outing of the book came the story of Lawrence changing trains and leaving his briefcase with the original manuscript on Reading Railway Station.  It was around Christmas 1919.  He boarded his train and as it pulled out, he realised his loss.  He telephoned as soon has he reached Oxford, not that far, but it was gone, someone had nicked it. 

In the New Year, he sat down and for the next three months rewrote his manuscript from memory.  He no longer had his notes and drafts, he'd destroyed them in his enthusiasm for finishing the manuscript the first time round.

 

Christmas time three years on...

Three years after Lawrence left his briefcase at Reading Train Station, on another winter's day, another case, also full of manuscripts, was stolen at another train station.  This time it was Paris.

Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, excited that he wanted her to join him in Switzerland, gathered up all his papers and packed them in a small case.  I can picture her dashing about their tiny apartment getting ready to set off for the railway station.  With the valise safely under her train seat, she stepped off to get a newspaper and when she came back, it was gone. 

Hemingway tried to put a brave face on it, but he'd never asked her to bring anything. 

The papers on the desk, OK; but why the ones in the drawer and off the shelves?  Surely not everything?

Poor Hemingway.  Poor Hadley. 

Yes everything, everything.

 

Similarities linked the two men

Hemingway and Lawrence were born a decade apart and both lived lives of adventure, made their names writing about war and influenced later generations.  Lawrence was frustrated when Britain contradicted promises of independence made to the Arabs and in the prelude to the next war, Hemingway seethed that the Allies would not help Loyalist Spain in its fight against the fascists.

Hemingway read Lawrence and had him in mind as he set to his famous novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, describing the Spanish landscape in much the same way as Lawrence described Jordan.

 

Misplaced Disappointment!

I wonder what the petty crooks who lifted those cases thought when they opened them?  Irritation?  Disappointment and annoyance?  I expect they barely gave it a thought as they tossed the lot, or did they…  

So now you know why I always look at battered briefcases!  Either would do.

It's also in my mind when I have to start all over again because I've lost a document I'm working on or messed up an art project.  Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a big thick book to write twice.  If he could do it, any of us can.

A Hong Kong character; Horace Kadoorie, looked-up in the Jewish Cemetery

Letters, Shanghai, sign at the Jewish Ghetto in Shanghai, the Jewish Cemetery in Hong Kong where the Kadoorie brothers reside and the best hotel east of Suez.

Before Networking

Once upon a time you were given letters of introduction when you travelled; to someone older or wiser who would smooth the way.  Quality notepaper, a signature in ink, silver salvers, kowtows and honourable obligations. 

Of course that was all bullshit by the time I set off for Hong Kong in the 1960s; instead I was given some names to ‘look-up’.  It was never going to happen.  Without the formality of a letter and before networking was a known mantra, I was in limbo without the confidence or courage to go cold turkey.

It's never too late!

I’ve been thinking about some people I never ‘looked-up’.

For my first night in the Hong Kong, I’d booked myself into The Peninsula Hotel.  It was 1968 and it was the hotel in Hong Kong.  Still is!

I didn’t just have delusions of grandeur, I’d been working at the Grosvenor House in London - it was terribly infra-dig to add the word 'hotel' - if someone needed to be told Grosvenor House was a hotel, they didn’t belong there.  I worked for the manager, Mr Merryweather, and he suggested I stay at The Peninsula and told me to lookup Horace Kadoorie - whose family owed it and a lot more besides. 

 

My new employer vetoed a night of luxury

It was not to be, my new Hong Kong employer, Mrs Church, vetoed it, making it quite plain that on the pittance she was going to pay me, I couldn’t afford it.  She cancelled my hotel booking and telegrammed me that I would stay at her house.

“Why on earth did you book a room at The Peninsula?” she said.

I told her about the connection.

“Oh Horace? I go to him every New Year at The Peninsula, I will ring him on Monday.”

I heard no more about it and by the time Mrs Church marched me to The Peninsula Hotel for eggnog on New Year’s Day, I knew it unlikely that any friend of hers would be a friend of mine, but in any case Horace Kadoorie didn’t join us, just a wave across the room.  In retrospect,  he gave us a wide berth.

It's never too later for an introduction

So it has taken me until now to look-up Horace Kadoorie who died in 1995.  I really missed out more than a free meal and a chat. By all accounts he was a fascinating, compassionate and generous man.

From the grave he took me back to the Spanish Inquisition and on a journey with the Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula to Constantinople and Baghdad, India and Shanghai where the Kadoorie family eventually settled in the 1800s.

Wartime Shanghai and a clever rabbi

The Kadoorie family was well established in Shanghai when an influx of European Jews arrived fleeing the Nazi horror - mostly by Italian ship but some via the Trans-Siberian Railway. 

With twenty thousand Jews in Shanghai, Germany put pressure on Japan to hand them over.  The Japanese Military Governor of the city sent for the Jewish community leaders and asked why the Germans hated them. 

The rabbi was nobody’s fool.  He said it was because the Germans regarded Jews as oriental, short and dark. 

The Jews stayed put and the Kadoorie family were able to help the new arrivals survive the war, albeit in the Shanghai Ghetto, and when refugees were funnelled through Hong Kong for resettlement, Horace and his brother threw open the doors of The Peninsula Hotel and turned the ballroom into dormitories.

And you?

Have you anyone you could have met but didn’t? 

Why didn’t you look them up?  Do you regret not looking them up?

Can you look them up now?  Do the Chinese thing - talk to them in the grave!

Further Reading:

I really enjoyed this article by Hong Kong journalist Sarah Lazarus

http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1661441/role-jews-making-hong-kong