Call of the Bell Bird Read online

  Nonetheless, the blessing of our Meeting was important to us and we asked for and were given a “travelling minute” – a letter from our Meeting to take with us as an introduction, to be endorsed by each Meeting that we visited. To our surprise, before we left we were asked to address a gathering of some thirty Friends about our plans for the journey. The warmth of our send-off was unexpected, and one Friend thrust a fiver into my hand to give to any worthwhile project we might come across. Stephen and I had been so absorbed in the practicalities of our preparations that we hadn’t had time to realise the emotional power of such a leave-taking. It is hard to explain how important the support of our Meeting was throughout our journey; we felt it with us everywhere we went. Each time our minute was endorsed, each time we received an email from a member of our Meeting, we felt the warmth of its embrace.

  Our original idea was simply to go, and let ourselves be guided by the Spirit about when to move on and where. This would have enabled us to involve ourselves fully in a project if it presented itself, without constraint. In the event the only affordable method was to buy a round the world ticket which demanded a route and a (changeable) timetable. In the planning, our newly re-established relationship trembled under the tensions of our differing points of view (I really didn’t want to spend so much time in first-world countries; Stephen didn’t want to go to South America or Mongolia) but compromises were eventually made. We were both concerned that we were not going to be staying anywhere long enough to make a difference, that we would always be “passing through”, but we realised that we would have to consider it as a series of “tasters”; perhaps we would find a place or a project to which we wanted to return.

  Planning the trip was time-consuming. Fortunately, my son Guy works in the travel industry and was able to sort out a route that fitted in with the demands of the ticket: up to 15 stops, 39,000 miles, and one year. Though we did not want to be tied down, it was important for us to contact the people we wanted to see – and this included Quakers on a list of isolated Friends and Meetings in various parts of the world. Despite my Luddite tendencies, I learned how to communicate on email, and contacted dozens of people all over the world. I tried to alternate “easy” and “difficult” countries – I knew some places would be tougher than others, and in many places we had no contacts.

  I was determined to go somewhere for a holiday before launching into the journey proper. Brazil had not been on our original list, but when my son suggested a place on the Brazilian coast I remembered bumping into a publishing friend who had mentioned that she had bought a house there. Feeling very cheeky, I phoned her and she and her partner very kindly allowed us to use it.

  So, the decision was made to go to:

  Brazil, for a holiday;

  Peru – my father was brought up there, and I wanted to see it, as well as the Mayan ruins;

  Bolivia and Costa Rica for the many Quakers there;

  Honduras where Stephen had been for a conference;

  Guatemala, to visit my cousin;

  Then the States and Canada – we decided to drive along the south from Florida to L.A. and then up the west coast into British Columbia;

  Hawaii, where Stephen had lived;

  Tonga. I was very keen to visit a South Sea island, and Stephen wanted to do some sailing, so after a lot of juggling Guy managed to get us to Tonga;

  Then to New Zealand and

  Australia – Friends in both countries encouraged us to extend our planned few days there.

  Thailand, originally mainly because it was a Buddhist country, but increasingly to visit isolated Friends;

  three months in India, with a commitment to volunteer at a number of projects, also to particular ashrams and a wish to see, for instance, the Himalayas.

  Then to Singapore to catch a plane to Beijing, again only for a few days to catch the Trans-Siberian express to

  Mongolia, and on to Russia – Moscow to see Sasha, and St Petersburg, my mother’s birthplace.

  Last stop, Stockholm, not on our list, but beautiful, and the home of my singing teacher!

  It was simply not possible to go to Africa on our ticket. I would have to visit Samuel another time.

  We were invited to stay by relations and Quakers, and we joined Servas, an organisation of international peace and friendship, members of which host travellers for a couple of nights – a magnificent way of meeting local like-minded people.

  The timing of the trip was crucial. Stephen, having come to the end of his computer programming contract a couple of years short of retirement age, was free to leave his freelance work; two of the projects I had been working on had come to fruition, so I too was able to leave. After lifetimes of bringing up children and working we were free. I rejected any notion of “a year out”. For Stephen it was a year of transition to a new life; for me it was the next step in a journey that had started with my leaving the world of publishing. For both of us, the journey was a spiritual one. Quakerism is not a cut and dried religion: it is a way of life and a community of seekers. This trip was an expression of our way of life and a context for our seeking. As a form of outreach, we had printed visiting cards with our names and “Quaker Travellers” on them. If people were interested, they would ask, and it would provide an opening for conversation.

  The practicalities of going away for a year were formidable. financially we were able to go because we each had some savings to pay the fare, and our weekly budget for the year was established by the rent we received for our flats in London – perfectly adequate for living in third world countries; tight in, for instance, the USA. But we wanted to travel simply, on local buses and trains, eating local food and staying in the homes of local people or in backpackers’ hostels. I knew from experience that travellers cheques were no use in some countries, so we decided mainly to rely on ATMs abroad, though I did take some dollar travellers cheques for emergencies, together with some currency for our first stop.

  We bought rucksacks – wonderful new versions that had optional wheels. For wrinklies like us it was essential not always to have to carry our stuff, and in the event we used the wheels most of the time. Water bottles; torches, sheet sleeping bags (Guy had bought me a luxurious plum-coloured silk one to pamper me on the trip), mosquito net, heavy duty insect repellent (deet) for the jungle. We had a battery of jabs, but decided against those for rabies and Japanese encephalitis. We were given conflicting advice about the use of malarial prophylactics: increasingly people feel that it affects indigenous people badly if the drugs used by them as medicine for malaria is also used by visitors as deterrent. But in the end we bowed to our doctor’s advice.

  We were anxious to travel light, and took a minimum of clothes – for hot weather only, as the cold countries came at the end of our trip, and we decided that we could buy padded clothes in Beijing. Nonetheless, we both ended up with an extra bag. My weakness was for books: not only a guide book for each of the first countries, but dictionaries/phrase books and books to read that were relevant to that country: Marquez and The Power and the Glory for Latin America, Faulkner and Steinbeck for the States, the Upanishads and other Hindu scriptures for India and Tolstoy for Russia. I also carried a portable CD player with a dozen or so favourite CDs. Stephen took a short-wave radio and a number of practical items, such as compass, string, pliers, emergency blanket (a piece of foil), blow-up cushion etc. I decided to send some things ahead: to the States and to Australia, where friends kindly agreed to receive them – mainly books, but also modest clothes specifically for India. I had been to Bangladesh a few years earlier and had bought a couple of salwar kameezes at Whitechapel market for the purpose. Practical loose trousers and tunic, with scarf draped to hide any notion of female form, they make life easier, and are a courtesy to local sensibilities.

  A large portion of my extra bag was taken up with dozens of bottles of pills. In January, three months before we were due to depart, I was assailed by violent night sweats, hot flushes and mood swings. Belatedly, the me
nopause was upon me, and my energy was depleted, just as I needed it most. I was adamant about not taking HRT so I went to a Chinese herbalist. It was evident that I could not take a vast volume of herbs with me, or indeed brew them up en route, so the doctor gave me phials of little black pills, a whole phial to be swallowed morning and night. Enough for three months, the little bottles rattled as we went.

  A lot of the work was in planning for our absence rather than for our trip. My daughter kindly agreed to check our mail; I gave my son Power of Attorney to deal with any problems that came up. My mother agreed to store my belongings, and Stephen’s sister stored his. The flat was to be let furnished but we had to remove personal possessions: thousands of books, records, clothes, pictures etc. My children borrowed a number of pictures, books and discs, all of us knowing that they would find it hard to return some of them! I gave post-dated cheques to my accountant for the income tax; I put everything on direct debit, including my credit card. To let the flat, I had to buy a lot of new equipment – the tatty things we were quite happy with would not be appropriate for anyone else. The bed that had been propped up with books for years had to go, as did the oven with a wonky door. Both items that could be mended easily in countries such as Egypt or India, but no one would do it here.

  I had always avoided learning Spanish. I speak French and Italian and didn’t want to confuse myself but, faced with three months in Latin America, I knew that the time had come. Stephen, who does not find languages easy, went to Spanish classes for some time before we left. We had originally planned to leave in early March, so I had left work a month earlier to give me time to get ready. Stephen was unhappy at the idea of missing his last meeting of the Quaker European committee he was on so, in the end, we deferred our trip until mid-April. This meant I had a lot of time to prepare, not only in practical terms, but mentally. Whereas Stephen was working until the last moment, I had been thinking of the year ahead for some time.

  Our flight was to leave at 2200 hours on April 18th, 2001. At two o’clock that morning Stephen turned to me and said “I think we should put this off for a bit; I don’t feel ready to go.” I then spent most of the day accompanying my daughter to court where she was appearing as a witness – our usual lives and responsibilities were still pulling at us, and I found parting from my children unutterably hard.

  But at last, after all those hours, days, years, we were free, ready to go. Armed with passports, spare photos for the visas that would have to be obtained later on in the trip, a book full of airline tickets and a filofax full of addresses, we set off for Heathrow, and a 13-hour trip to our first stop, Rio.

  On the eve of our journey I wrote in my journal:

  People ask “Where are you going?” then one or two ask “What for?” A good question and hard to answer. To gain a new perspective, from seeing how life is in developing countries, away from the spoilt affluence of this insular part of the world; to learn to be less busy, to respond to the Spirit, to be more spontaneous; to be useful, humble, learning and contributing, to try to live in the present and respond to the needs that present themselves. It will change us – who knows how?

  Chapter 2

  Sol y Luna

  You never enjoy the world aright till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the entire world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.

  Traherne, Centuries, 1:27-31

  We began with a holiday.

  Stephen and I started as we continued: at odds. I found our two weeks in Brazil an idyll; Stephen was bitten to bits, made it clear he did not want to be there, and spent most of his time listening to BBC World Service and brushing up his Spanish – we were in a Portuguese-speaking country. He had not had time to prepare mentally, and had not adjusted to the travelling mode. We each thought we might have been better travelling alone.

  The first morning we awoke to the most glorious view I had ever seen from a bedroom window. Dawn over the bay, mist, islands, an amazing variety of bird calls – I wished I knew more about birds. I watched a fisherman near our shore. The banging we had heard in the night obviously came from someone like him banging the side of his boat to frighten the fish into the net. The butterflies were large, numerous and brilliantly coloured: a big primary yellow one hanging from a bush like a sere leaf; a bright orange one flitting through the trees; a mottled green one blending in with the background. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference between them and the tiny birds.

  I spent most of my time on the little beach just over the crest of the hill from Casa Azul where we were staying, past a neighbour’s house. The first morning, tide out, it looked completely idyllic: clean and empty, just the hum of voices to remind me of a little habitation at the back of the beach, and the odd cock crow. I swam very quietly and slowly the length of the shore, gazing at the palms and the rich variety in size and colour of other foliage, with an occasional look out to the islands in the bay. There was a vulture on the tallest jack fruit palm, no sound but the ripples of the sea, a cicada, the occasional bird. As I dozed in the shade, I felt uneasy at a rustling behind the rocks at the back of me. Two guinea fowl and an unidentified bird halfway to a turkey jumped down. A hen appeared ten yards from me; a miniature farmyard on the beach.

  It was the greatest tranquillity I had known for a long while. The air was balmy – autumnal by local standards; it was midday and we were near the equator. As I sat on my sarong, reading, I watched the tide come in, reaching nearer to where I sat, like a welcomed familiar visitor, calm, insistent, very much at my level. Behind me a breeze loosened crackling leaves on to the path. The cockles on the boulder in front of me showed a high water mark of nearly two feet above its present level. In how many places can you lie alone for hours on a beach of such beauty, in glorious unbroken sunshine? Yellow butterfly, red butterfly, the cheep of birds, the hum of a distant boat, and the eternal sound of the sea. Paradise.

  Benedita was a marvel. She was young and fit – we could not believe she was forty – married with children. Unfailingly cheerful, she came over every day to clean the lovely house and cook for us, ferrying herself from the nearby island in a dug-out canoe. I found myself catapulted into unfamiliar Portuguese, discussing meals and shopping. Misunderstandings arose: when Benedita asked if we would like a bola, I, thinking she had said pollo (chicken), started to discuss dinner, then found that she was actually asking if we would like cake for breakfast. My efforts brought back the intense pleasures of language, even at the basic level, and interactions between different tongues. How cerveza can be so different from beer, birra, bier, biere? How can the words for thank you be so varied – gracias and grazie, but then merci, danke and thanks and most of all the Portuguese obrigado which agrees with the gender of the speaker (“obliged”). I remember saying to a friend that if I took up study again it would be of either theology or comparative linguistics. He said that the subjects were not so different: seeking the unity in language was spiritual too.

  The humidity that kicked in every evening was hard to cope with, as were the attendant insects and the lack of electricity. There was a little light powered by solar energy but not enough to read by. Music, conversation or sleep – a seductive choice as we struggled with jet lag – were our only options indoors, whereas the magical night of the outdoors, with fireflies dancing in the trees, satellites coursing across the sky and lights across the water, was fraught with the attack of the insects. In general we ate our fine fish dinners and vast salads outside, plastered in insect repellent.

  We had a glorious day exploring some of the hundreds of islands in the bay, Stephen sunny again, his hand in mine. A pretty little boat with an engine, a blue cover and a charming marinheiro, Paulo. Islands with beautiful beaches, where we luxuriated in the limpid water, islands with shoals of brightly coloured fish that practically leapt into our hands. I had to pinch myself sometime
s to remind myself where I was. flying is such a sudden medium of travel. Such vivid fish gave me a more realistic sense of the exotic place we were in. Words like “exotic”, “tropical”, “jungle”, seemed to have an existence apart from the actuality of being there, and seemed external, larger than life, like the artificial notion of glamour.

  But I was aware that this was time out; that we had not yet started our journey proper. This was luxurious living, quite separate from the life of the local fishing community. We had caught glimpses of the poverty around us – on the beach, I glimpsed a painfully thin old woman flitting through the trees in a straw hat and cotton frock. On a trip over to Benedita’s island, we walked through local hamlets, and felt more in touch with a local reality. Dogs, a noisy school, and snapshots that would be too intrusive to photograph – a gap-toothed old woman squatting by a water hole, washing her pots and pans, a younger woman with children sitting in a canoe inland in the shade, with her husband, back to us, mending nets behind her. And, up on the hill behind our house we saw a poor old white horse, thin and ill, chained up to die. No one could afford the vet’s bills.

  Everywhere, there were vultures. Sinister, ugly, scraggy birds with ancient necks, like turkeys. Stephen said they walked sideways, evilly. Would we think them so ugly if we weren’t aware of their reputation? If, say, they were like turkeys? Why should we think worse of those that eat dead flesh than those who kill to eat?

  This first holiday period contained within it some of the strands that were to persist throughout the year: an uncomfortable sense of a divided world, with its co-existent wealth and poverty, and the first glimpse of how the natural world was to affect me on this journey, how the richness of animal life was to penetrate and deepen my consciousness.