Hippy

I was asked if I was a hippy again yesterday and lately I’ve been proudly answering yes, but I still draw the line at tree-hugger.

The 60’s hippies that drove to India and that danced at Woodstock, were acting on a desire to escape the values and job-for-life destiny of their parent’s generation who, coming out of the austerity of the Second World War, were revelling in a period of prosperity and technology advances that were creating a consumptive society. Sparked by the Beat Generation’s rebellion against the norms of music and poetry, the hippies rejected the norms of lifestyle, and clumsily developed an alternative way, founded on turning to nature and community.

When I started planning this trip, just before the credit crisis, the UK had experienced a 10 year stint of unprecedented prosperity, and developed a credit fuelled appetite for consuming. So I like to think that my escape was an attempt to reject those values, but like the 60’s hippies I have to admit that it was funded by that same economic growth spurt which has given me the savings and freedom to temporarily escape my “career for life” destiny.

Like the hippies of the 60’s I am playing the system, earning my money with a laptop, the internet and corporate clients and spending with a hippy bus journey. It’s a mistake to think that the bus loads that drove to India were anti-capitalist. They were savvy globalising entrepreneurs, long before Thatcher or Reagan made it fashionable or acceptable to be so. Journeys were funded by trading, just like Marco Polo centuries before. Selling auto parts bought in Germany to the Turks, selling spare seats to passengers on the hippy trail, selling Afghan weed to Indian lads, and then stocking up on Indian fabrics and silver jewellery to sell on the beaches of the Adriatic during the return journey.

In some ways I feel that this is where I’m failing my hippy badge. For 12 years I took cars across the Sahara Desert to West Africa loaded with Europe’s junk; broken fridges, auto parts, bicycles, Walkmans, and mobile phones, all to be traded and sold to fund the journeys. This trip hasn’t had that element of trade-as-you-go and I miss it because it’s a sweet insight into what the countries you visit need and what they have to offer. And if you can pull it off it’s a sweet earner too.

The hippy movement made a kind of resurgence in the mid 90’s in the shape of “New Age Travellers”, living in old trucks, squatting on land, and largely migrating with agricultural work cycles; from hop picking in Kent to winkle picking in Scotland, and then down to Spain for the oranges. New Age Travellers sprang from the rave culture but it also grew out of a rejection of the Loadsamoney culture Thatcherism was creating, so along with copious drugs and music, was active protest about social issues, like the Battle for Twyford Down road building, the Poll Tax riots, and pretty much anything else the Tories did.

And both movements arguably left their mark on their societies before their demise. The hippies of the 60’s settled down to merge with their Baby Boomer generation instilling it with a hint of liberalism and social consciousness as their voice blended into society’s voice. The New Age Traveller movement was largely smashed by legislation and then co-opted under Blairism into the mainstream but left an appetite for great music but moreover angry protest in the UK which still keeps the police on its toes.

I’m not sure that the Biotruck will have much of a generational legacy, but the green movement, which like the hippy movement has an interest in bringing society closer to nature and away from consumption, better had. In the meantime I'm reclaiming the term Hippy.

EcoSpeak and the fall of Capitalism

In the new language created by our increased environmental consciousness there are two phrases which are particularly warm and cosy. One is “Beyond Petroleum”. How reassuring that little green sun (or is it a sunflower) emblem is. Sadly, the only significant way in which BP have moved beyond petroleum since rebranding is that they have expanded their interests in Natural Gas, which is a slightly cleaner energy source than crude oil products, but still a fossil fuel, so still involves taking carbon atoms out of the ground after they’ve comfortably rested there for millennia and adding them to our atmosphere and oceans, where they can’t fail to have an impact on our climate. In fairness BP are no worse than the other big oil companies, but they are the only ones with a green logo and windmill on their filling stations which it turns out in some cases are not even hooked up and purely cosmetic!

The other insidious oxymoron designed to generate that warm everything-will-be-ok feeling is “Clean Coal”. A technology which turns coal into a collection of hydrocarbon gasses before burning it. It’s a cleaner, more efficient use of coal, but no measure of efficiency can escape the fact that this is the worst of the fossil fuels, the use of which is one of the best mechanism for taking carbon safely locked away underground and sticking it in the air to warm up in the sun.

Clean coal is often cited along with the phrase Carbon Capture and Storage (CC&S). CC&S involves putting carbon filters on the chimney stacks of coal fired power station, or using bacteria to absorb the carbon. The language makes it sound like the perfect solution; you catch the carbon and then store it. Why didn’t we think of this before? Problem solved. Except capturing CO2 gas into a solid filter is very difficult and makes the powerplants less efficient, so they have to burn more coal. And even then, the capture part is a doddle compared with the storage part. The filters are volumetrically hugely inefficient so the CO2 they do catch takes up lots of space. The bacteria that absorb the carbon quickly die and then decompose releasing their carbon atoms into the atmosphere in the form of methane and CO2, so the storage needs to lock their dead bacteria bodies and filters away forever. The gigatonnes of carbon atoms extracted from the ground in coal, petroleum and natural gas each year would need to be returned to the ground in a way that couldn’t find a route back to the surface. That would take a lot of unfeasibly large holes and a load of energy to dig them. Putting it back in the holes it came from is a lovely idea but not feasible for a host of reasons; you can’t put a solid back down a gas pipe for instance, it takes up more space afterwards than it did before, and you’d have to cover quarries with a concrete cap that would last 1000’s of years without cracking. Can you imagine the builders guarantee on that patio?

“Carbon Credits” is another cuddly positive sounding term. Companies emitting CO2 get taxed on the amount they produce in a bid to discourage them. It creates a “Carbon Market” the theory goes, where pollution can be traded like debt. The market forces (also know in Marxist circles as ‘the law of the jungle’) are left to sort out the problem. But as always the raw natural forces of the market are only as good as the rules which manipulate them. The “Cap and Trade” scheme of carbon credits introduced in the US was so unpopular with industry that it’s been watered down, some say, to the point where it has become a toothless disincentive.

Cap and Trade systems allow you to pay off some poor third world farmers to work harder in a way that emits less CO2 while you continue to churn out your existing levels of pollution. In the meantime the poor farmers will take your money and if they have any sense at all continue to do what they were doing before, because no one is policing these offset schemes, especially in countries rife with corruption.

So how about this term I’ve made up; “Extraction Tax”. Sadly it’s not very lovely and soft, it’s harsh with two x’s and lots of hard t’s that jar as they come out of your mouth. The problem of greenhouse gasses starts when carbon atoms are lifted out of the ground. That’s when they become a liability that someone is going to have to deal with (or ignore and vent along an exhaust pipe). It’s like pointing the blame at the person in the room that farts. In the end we all breathe it in, but it’s the farter who should apologise. I appreciate this is a crap analogy (excuse the equally crap pun) but I can’t seem to write a blog post without some toilet talk and this was the only way I could think to insert it here.

The Oil & Gas and mining companies would carry the burden of paying it based on the number of carbon atoms they pulled out of the ground. No one likes the Oil & Gas or mining companies so it would be hugely popular with the public, and compared with the unaccountability of the capped and traded 3rd world farmer it would be easier to manage because there are only a few oil majors and OPEC countries in the cartel. In practice they’d pass the tax on to energy consumers, you and me, who would pay a more realistic price for the energy we use, reflecting its environmental impact.

But how could you get the world to agree implement such a tax universally? Well of course you can’t. But perhaps you wouldn’t need to. It might be enough if you had just one country that turned to all the oil companies and OPEC and said if you want to sell any of your fossil fuel energy here we are going to tax you for all the carbon you’re pulling out of the ground around the world, even if it’s not mined or used in this country. Like a license to trade with a fee that’s based on the size of the business. Of course it would have to be a country with a massive consumption or the oil majors and OPEC would just boycott it. A global superpower, a world leader, a country headed by someone who cares about the environment, the planet’s policeman. Yes, that’s right, China.

In practice the Chinese (and the US) are desperately looking for energy from wherever they can find it, and the last thing they are about to do is start taxing their own imports of the stuff. But globally, no one could afford for China to shut down its industry if OPEC called their bluff, and ironically so dependent is the rest of the world on China that we would probably have more to lose by China shutting down than the Chinese would, so this threat could be used to leverage other countries to come onboard with the Extraction Tax. Then, Western politicians could finally implement a harsh, costly effective green tax they always dreamed of, and blame it’s unpopular consequences on those bloody Chinese.

I can’t for a minute honestly imagine this would happen, but it’s been a peculiar week on the geopolitical stage; A communist country accurately pointed out to the capitalist ‘Free (Market) World’ that its currency is worth nothing and it doesn’t know how to manage it, which is surely a moment as significant in world events as the fall of the Berlin wall. Up-Perestroika, and raise your Glasnost! Twenty one years later and it turns out Communism won after all. China now owns America, it’s got all their money, and it’s going to be using it to buy all the energy that none of us will be able to afford in the future. It’s also suffering from largely unreported flooding on a massive scale caused by freak weather patterns that have hit all over Asia from Pakistan to Thailand. So I’m going to enjoy that the fantasy for a while that its leaders will put two and two together and play a poker hand that will make us all pay for the true cost of our energy.

And Another Thing II

If you think of the “environment” or let’s take a more specific example, the atmosphere, as a space in which we can store our pollution, the by-products of our consumption, then it’s easy to imagine it as a resource. Like a resource it's finite, keep putting things into the space and one day it will be full.

During this journey from the wealthiest countries in the world (UK, France, Switzerland), to the poorest (Nepal, India), I’ve become more convinced that the way we exploit our environment is just another facet of the global social injustice that has dogged the way this planet is governed since colonial times.

For over a century, richer countries have exploited the earth’s resources, providing a comfortable quality of life for their citizens at a disproportionate cost to the citizens of poorer countries. The exploitation of energy, oil, coal, mineral resources, timber, food crops, cotton, and more, has on the whole benefited the wealthy foreigners exploiting the commodity more than the country whose soil yields it.

So it is with the pollution-storing-environment resource. The beneficiaries who are fully exploiting this resource are the highly consumptive rich nations, who need a lot of rivers, sea, landfills and atmosphere to store the waste their high quality of life produces, and they are getting this globally shared resource for a knock down price. Free.

In the case of space to put the CO2 produced by energy consumption, the US and Europe has had more than 200 years of free rein, burning first their own forests to fuel the industrial revolution, then global coal and now oil reserves. And the situation continues to be exploited unevenly. The quality of each life in the US is using up that storage space over 3 times faster than the quality of each life in India.

And the impact of overusing this CO2 storage will be paid by developing countries. Climate change associated to manmade activities will impact the tropical countries most, where weather patterns are more susceptible to changes, and it will impact agricultural economies that rely on predictable climate to grow crops to feed themselves and earn foreign exchange with which they can give themselves a decent quality of life. Poor developing countries, not by accident, are almost always tropical and agricultural.

“Saving the Environment” is a confusing way of phrasing the problem. Firstly it distances people from the problem. A head teacher in India while congratulating me on this expedition told me “It’s great what you are doing. I love the environment, trees and all that, it would be a shame if we lost it all.” as though the environment is a nice-to-have bonus, something pretty to look at on the drive to work. Secondly it obfuscates the fact that it is humanity that will suffer not the trees. The jet stream will still blow (though no one knows for sure where), clouds will still form at the top of thermal columns of air, wildlife, animals and plants will quietly uncomplainingly adapt, migrate, evolve or die out.

And humans will have to adapt, migrate, evolve or die out too. The ones best suited to adapting and migrating will be the rich ones. The ones without the money or the liberty to move freely around the planet will face the choice between evolving, and where that’s not possible, dying out.

So once again a valuable resource is being disproportionately exploited by people in wealthy nations, leaving a disproportionately high cost for people in poor nations.

I’m becoming more convinced that the mechanism for “Saving the environment” is universally linked to creating global social justice in the world. The two things are mutually dependent. In order to responsibly manage the pollution-storage-space environment there has to be social justice, and managing the environment will prevent social injustice.

Equal education, equal access to healthcare and equal access to global resources. But seeing as we can’t even eradicate poverty in the world I really don’t think we have any chance. Thank god I’m not a poor Indian.

People criticise the environmental credentials of this journey, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. I’m bored of having the same discussions and clarifying confusions about “Biofuels: good or bad?” or “The Environmental Impact of Container Ships”. There’s a bigger point. Living in the UK and especially London, it’s impossible to escape wasteful consumption and being a “valuable member of society” (which actually means working somewhere in the industrialised cycle of turning resources into commodities and delivering them to consumers – and is presumably opposed to being a worthless member of society). By taking to the road and escaping that cycle by living in a truck, I believe, means I am contributing more towards creating a socially just world and therefore helping reduce the CO2 I’m responsible to an even greater degree than the act of running my bus on waste oils. A consumptive lifestyle, complicity with unfair resource exploitation is the root cause of a carbon intensive lifestyle and the fuel I put in my truck is only part of the picture.

In an interview this week I was asked what people can do to help the environment and I said, “I don’t know, they have to figure it out for themselves.” I’m not a role model with easy pithy consumable answers, and if I said they have to quit their jobs, let all their hire-purchase electronics be repossessed, move out of the city and plant tomatoes, most people would understandably think I’m even more of a naive idealist idiot than they already do.

Writing Conspiracy

I have been complicit in a conspiracy.

This week I attended the Ubud Writers and Readers conference. Ubud is Bali’s answer to Glastonbury and Brighton. More yoga centres and organic buddhas that you can shake an Ayurvedic bush at. The writers festival was largely attended by readers, typically Australian women of a certain age, and in many cases a certain size, anxious to rub shoulders with their favourite authors. The atmosphere of divorcees on holiday with their girlfriends, enjoying their new found HRT-stoked freedom to express and be creative, infected the halls with a joyous vigour. Even the glibness of sunglassed authorrs weren't enough to quell the spirit.

I for my part had volunteered to get a free pass, avoiding the $350 ticket price, in exchange for helping out by setting up projectors at some of the presentations. Luckily for me, none of the workshops I had been allocated to, (How to write erotic fiction, How to read erotic fiction, and How to buy erotic fiction) needed to be enhanced with the use of a PowerPoint presentation. So aside from the extra shifts I helped out with, I really had nothing to do but pick the seminars I wanted to attend.

Along with my free pass I was also clutching a secret agenda. The idea of writing a book about my adventure is taking hold and this I figured would be a good place to figure out how to write a book and schmooze with publishers and agents.

I can safely say that the knowledge i need to write the erotic sections of the book I now have safely covered, but as for the rest of it I’m still hugely confused. The process of getting an agent and submitting to a publisher is a little less vague, and the faces and names of potential contacts might be one degree of separation closer now, but I only realised what the big question I wanted answering was at the end of the final session.

Daniel DeCruz, an Australian author who has written a runaway best seller about teenagers screwing and taking drugs in some party town down under (I forget where), was asked if he’d made any money from his book.

“A little bit.” He answered meekly.

So my question surfaced just as the moderator thanked everyone and drew the conference to a close. For a moment the burning urge to halt the ending and shout my question to the stage came close to overwhelming me, but instead I joined the conspiracy of silence that I realised all the other aspiring authors were complicit in from the start.

My question would have been; “So how do you sit at a computer day after day, without earning a penny, for months on end, knowing that you have maybe a 5% chance of getting anything but rejections letters back from publishers, and that if your book does get published and miraculously becomes a runaway success you might make ‘a little bit’ for all your efforts?”

I shared this with Christina who is in the throes of writing her first book, and she too realised this was also the question she’d been wanting answered all along. After the festival, she posed it to her editor on a skype call. The answer of course was obvious.

“Don’t ask that question Christina, ever.”

India, it's a dump

One of the questions I always get asked in interviews by journalists trying to ferret out some drama to my journey is “What was the worst part of the trip?” I have vowed that from now on I will always answer that question with these 4 words. “India, it’s a dump.” And here’s why:

A university professor I shared a platform with at a talk I gave is worried about the next generation of Indians, and told me that any bright Indian student wouldn’t for a minute dream of becoming a teacher. There is no sense in which it’s a valued profession, one your overbearing Indian mother could be proud of, and it’s badly paid. There’s no appreciation that serving India’s future generation is noble and worthy, he said. Being a doctor is respected, not because of the altruism of the profession, helping to heal the sick, but because it’s a good earner.

I’ve met very few Indians interested in community, or making their country better. For instance among the 300 young volunteers that come daily to help at the orphanages and projects of Calcutta, there is rarely a single Indian youth.

So as the clever Indian 20-somethings seek out their MBA programmes and the lucrative corporate jobs in the booming economy that follows graduation, there is no chance their skills will liven the next generation of kids from poorer classes.

Of all the developing countries I’ve been to, the divide between rich and poor here is the most obscene I’ve ever seen - reminiscent of feudal Europe of the middle ages. It isn’t just that large wealth is in the hands of a tiny number of super rich, it’s that there is a whole strata of wealthy middle class, that live unfazed and accepting of the squalor of poverty around them, which I find so troubling. They use the flimsiest excuses to justify their disengagement, waving their responsibility to help because these people are “drug addicts” or “prostitutes”, and that “Begging is the easiest job in the world” and “shouldn’t be encouraged”.

Having tried cleaning windscreens at traffic lights during college, which is only one step up from begging, I can tell you it’s not an easy job, and it should be discouraged by helping people out of poverty so they have alternatives to prostitution and drugs to medicate the nihilism.

Despite the far left spectrum of Indian politics, (Communist, Maoist, Marxist, even a healthy quorum of Leninists!), the door that government provides as a mechanism for creating a fairer society is firmly shut here. When I’ve asked about politicians motivated by ideals, the reaction is laughter. Either the voters are fools for believing the politicians are truly altruistic, or the politicians are fools for thinking they can make a difference. The system is so weighted toward corruption that any good intentions are undermined as you climb the political ladder. Consequently power and moral authority are mutually exclusive.

So who could blame anyone for not wanting to be a low paid school teacher, or joining the Stagno-cratic Civil Service, the IAS (Indian Administration Service), working in the strangled atmosphere where initiation and change is cause for constructive dismissal. Forget about the dismal pay, even a motivated ideologue would have their initiative put down at every opportunity, and soon realise they are serving as the active arm of the politicians self interest and greed, often visibly in conflict with the needs of the population.

But where has the change-activism and idealism of Ghandi’s era gone? I’ve looked for it here and apart from a few very unique individuals, the only sign I found were amongst the activists fighting for Bhopal justice, a cause so scandalously unfair even Indians can’t stand by and watch it evaporate. But things here are so screwed up I’d expect to see young idealistic university students marching against corruption? Where are the political agitators calling for a week-long baksheesh strike? The only idealism of the next generation is BMWism.

Perhaps it would help if the media were more worried about the corruption in the affairs-of-state than in the IPL Cricket League? Where are the journalistic exposés of corrupt governance? They wouldn’t be hard to dig up. Sadly the media is co-opted into the corruption, according to a retired media sales executive I met, who told me how news media is funded not by sales, but almost exclusively by advertisers with an agenda they expect to see reflected in the news' content. Editorial lines are constrained by the business motives of the News Barron owners.

I could tell you about the astounding intellect of engineering under-graduates, and the fox-like savvy of street kids, but to romanticise Indian’s ingenuity is no more helpful that eulogising over “beautiful colours”, vibrancy, and spicy food in the tourist brochures. It doesn’t compensate for the national lack of compassion. Perhaps it's is caused by the host of tragic tales in India that seem to touch everybody’s lives. Whether it's the tailor in Pushkar who lost his job and his home over a clerical error and never got it back, my lawyer who spent 3 years bed ridden with an illness, or my paraglider guru who was locked up for 2 years by the Air Force he served in, to "cool his heels". It’s a country that dishes out cruelty with casual indifference. The result is a population that is tolerant, but psychologically vaccinated against compassion, and ready to dish out more indifference to the next generation. So in an environment immune from sympathy the only sensible option left is to isolate yourself from the hardship and the ugliness of poverty by personal wealth acquisition. A good survival-of-the-fittest strategy which, after all, is what the developed nations have been doing to poor countries since the start of globalisation in the colonial era.

But it’s an ugly strategy, which deserves to be criticised. India has made me squirm on all levels; The piss-stinking streets that assails my nostrils, as much as the blinkered world-view of the allegedly educated Mercedes-Benz yuppies. While national pride is worn so ardently on the uniform of police officers, they conduct traffic yards from naked street kids playing in sewerage. Like the Emperor’s New Clothes, no one dares to say that this country has much more to be ashamed of than it has to be proud of. During 15 years of travelling, to over 50 countries, I’ve never been to a country that has so reviled me that I hope I will never to see it again.

But still I believe in India. It’s ripe for reform. Out of the Greed is Good, Reagan and Thatcher era, the new social enterprise political ideals of Clinton and Blair were born. India is on the cusp of finding its own “third way”. One that will create a fairer future by building better and compulsory education for all, and a wider culture of social mobility that will eventually kill, or at least reduce, the wealth divide.

In both India and the West, business pass money politicians. But there’s a big difference between aligning yourself with a political leader you believe in, compared with buying them off with cash and hookers. What if Indian businesses, lead by Indians with experience of working in the West, start to support change leaders? With open and transparent campaign contributions? In the CEO of a construction firm sponsoring me, and other senior managers I’ve met who have returned from time working in the West, I see an irritation with the system. At their fingertips they have the resources, imagination and maybe the inclination to stage a coup.

What if a young new leader found a voice with their clean funding on a platform or education and reform. Imagine that candidate coming to office. They’d have the energising authority to reform every corner of Indian politics and welfare. It would kick start a rebuilding of faith in the system. Their first action might be to implement ISO9000 in every IAS office followed by a 300% pay rise for every civil servant, easily paid for by sacking 75% of them. Surely being asleep on the job, reading the paper, or taking 4 hour lunch breaks are sackable offences, even in the IAS, so it shouldn’t be too hard finding grounds to reduce the staff to a quarter. If necessary pension them off to avoid a riot. But this breed of politicians could make the IAS, and above all the education system, accountable and attractive alternatives to business for smart young minds. Good pay, good career trajectories, and autonomy for those with talent and clean hands. The frou frou dinner parties of Indian homes would resonate with “Your son is teacher Mrs Singh?! Well we must introduce him to our daughter, she works for the government you know!”

I’ve made many friends here, people that have given me their love and support through possibly the toughest time of my life, and it’s hard to think how they will interpret the contradiction that I’ve found Indians uncompassionate after they have taken me into their hearts, offered me companionship to warm my soul, beds to sleep in and food to burp. To them I say thank you for your friendship, I value it deeply and though I may not show it, I'll keep you close to my heart, always. Please don’t be offended that I don’t like your country, instead come and visit me in England. Now that’s a dump...

An Unquestionably Good Soap Opera

She asks me for a ride on the bicycle, but she’s too short to reach the pedals, so I put her on the handle bars and as I’m circling the car park I can feel the fleas in her hair and dress biting my arms. She’s one of the street sleepers that live under the flyover bridge across from where I’m parked with a dozen other families.

I don’t know her name, but Reema is a beautiful name so lets pretend it's Reema. Reema’s family is probably from the countryside, if they were from the city her family would have a small home in one of the waterless tenement blocks of the city. Instead she sleeps on a blanket laid over the uneven paving stones, next to the gutter, and by a few bushels which are home to a few rats. Maybe she’s eight years old.

I tell her I’m going to give her some soap for her dress to wash out the grime and make the frilly lace collar less of a perfect habitat for lice. But, I warn sternly, I expect to see it clean. She nods dutifully. I pick up a bar of clothes soap and keep it in my pocket until I see her again. She is excited and rushes off. A while later I see her as I’m cycling past, and she runs into the road in her underpants and vest shouting and pointing that her dress is drying. I feel flush. I have done some good. Unquestionable, unchallengeable good. It’s the best kind of good. No downside. Perfect. And consequently I am a good person. Today I have done enough to earn a daily membership to the human race.

And the next day she knocks at the door with the dress on, clean, as clean as the grime stained fabric could ever be gotten, and a proud smile that would melt any heart.

I hatch a plan. Emami, the company that gave me biodiesel also make soaps. It’s the same reaction produces biodiesel as well as soap. A few bars from their factory them would be nothing to them, maybe even some end-of-line stuff? Factory seconds? I remember the boss of the Emami group gave me his card, its nestled in my wallet. And what if I could get him to set up a scheme whereby employees dish it out on a regular basis. The plan can’t fail. I compose the email. Pomp, urgency, flattery. He can’t say no. Send.

The plan fails. He doesn’t say no, or yes. He just doesn’t reply, despite calls and more emails. He’s out of town, and I’ll be gone before he’s back.

Calcutta has hand pumps on almost every street, so water isn’t a problem but for the large community of street sleepers the expense of soap is a luxury they could use some help with. This is too good an idea to fall now.

I hatch plan B. I speak to a friend who runs a high end retail store. But it turns out they don’t sell soaps bars. Plan B is looking shaky. I wish Plan A had worked. My friend is polite about my scheme but he finds a kind way to advise me that a lot of these street sleepers are into prostitution, child prostitution, drugs, and some are “gaylords”. If I give them soap, they’ll just sell it and buy drugs. I really wish Plan A had worked. It’s not the first time I’ve been patronised this week, but this time it matters so I swallow it, smile and reply full of understanding and respectful nods.
“The people that sleep near the bus are families, not mafia, there are no charras pipes burning at night like there are on Sudder Street.” I counter. “And I can’t imagine them getting much drugs for the four rupees [eight US cents] that a bar of soap sells for. So even if they are gaylords and drug addicts, wouldn’t it be better for everyone if they were washed gaylords and drug addicts, less likely to contract and spread Weils diseases from the rat piss?” I could have said urine, but I throw in the final swear in the hope it gives me a gritty street authority.
“Oh the rats here are very clean”, he assures me, but out of politeness agrees to help me out at the weekend. In the meantime Reema keeps asking me for more soap. I’m beginning to suspect that she has me pegged as a soft touch, and that irritates me. “You promised me soap!” she demands. “I’m working on it” but she doesn’t understand the delay.

I could get the soap from the local grocery store, and dish it out, but that would be the beginning and end of it. I’d like to co-opt this friend and get him to see these are vulnerable people for whom a bar of soap is an essential luxury they’d otherwise forgo. My hope is I can persuade him that this is something that should be done on a fortnightly basis. If I could persuade him, he’s the sort of guy that would persuade others.

But in the meantime I buy 20 bars of body soap, and 20 bars of clothes soap. As I walk over to the traffic island the rumour spreads that the tall white guy has finally got some soap. I’m mobbed by pleading hands, sorrowful frowns and whining voices. I just see a mess of little fingers, old fingers, female fingers. The same kids that were dancing and giggling to the solar disco are now acting out the pain of their existence, needing only whatever it is in my bag to heal them. The insincerity of adopting this Dickensian role irks me even more, but it's so ingrained that they can’t it even though we know each other.

Reema is the first pair of hands I sink a couple of bars into. After I give out a few more bars her hands are out again. “No I haven’t had any” she insists. I’m angry she takes me for such a fool, and frustrated by how hard it is to physically distribute and spread around the soap so no one is left out. I give up, and try again at night, but the mobbing is just as bad. I end the night locked in the bus with about 10 of the original 40 bars left and a mute lady making a grunting noise at the door. Despite stripping off and taking a good shower somehow the fleas make it in to my bed.

In Mauritania, a Spanish couple I was travelling with, Maria and Juan, pulled a football from the boot of their car, in a quiet desert village with 3 kids milling about in the central sandy open area. It took about 60 seconds after that first kick for the pitch to fill with over 30 kids, appearing from all directions. And less than a minute more before the pretence of a game totally vanished and the wrestling match to get ownership of the ball had begun in earnest. To their credit Juan and Maria managed to wade in and stop the match after only two or three minutes of all out rioting child carnage. Considering the violence of the scuffle it’s a testament to the hardiness of Mauritanian kids that so few of them were bleeding. Maria and Juan opened up the boot of the car once again and started dispensing plasters and bandages along with a healthy dose of admonishment. Unfortunately the clamour for medicines caused a second even more violent riot which involved a fair few adults too.

Eventually, three hours later and after quelling several more riots, they presented the remains of the punctured football to the smallest kid with the most injuries, who promptly steeled himself for the final riot that would centre on him as soon as we'd driven out of the village.

After a moment to reflect, my anger turns on myself. Why am I surprised that I was mobbed? How can I begrudge them the soap I’ve bought them because they didn’t form an orderly line, with pleases and thank-yous. They didn’t fulfil my fantasy of grateful urchins allowing me to relish my moment of unchallengeable goodness. How arrogant. If I’d been in their bare feet (they don’t have shoes) I’d be snatching the soap bars out of the bag. I allowed my friend’s paranoia that the bars will be sold instead of used, to grip me. How stupid.

But my ego aside, the problem remains; how can I do it so that I spread what I have around, so that the most vulnerable get them and no one gets hurt in the scramble. I toy with buying ink to stain fingernails of recipients, setting up a table, somewhere in the bus is a clipborad, and laugh at the over complication. Better to spend the ink money on more soap and give it to the wrong people.

And that’s it, the best solution I can come up with; buy too much and give it out scattergun knowing that at least some will hit the mark even if some might miss. We’re only talking about cheap soap here. And anyway how can it miss? If it washes someone’s body after they’ve slept on the street then its hit. It’s arguably good, not quite unquestionably good, but still not bad. Perhaps they’ll give me half a day’s membership of humanity for that?

And at least I’ve had a practice run ready to take my friend out tomorrow, but I know Plan B is headed the way of Plan A. I read a great quote “In India, sometimes you have to surrender to before you can win”, but I’d add that sometimes, you just have to surrender.

Fight

I’d never been in a punch up before I came to India, unless you count chinning Paul Morianni’s older brother Karl, when I was 13 at the Pool and Snooker Club. He kept moving the balls just as we were about to play our shots, he was goading us. All 3 of us got kicked out. I don’t know which one of us was more surprised when I landed one right on his jaw. Brawling in a pool hall aged 13 may seem like an auspicious start, but that was the last time for me. I didn’t like the shame of being a cast out, branded a thug, and, moreover, I was always afraid my glasses would get broken when the fists started flying.


But tonight was my fourth punch up since being in India. Something is let lose in me, perhaps because of latent anger over so many things, or maybe just because opticians are so cheap here.


The first one I was really a bystander that tried to protect the truck driver that had just almost killed me and his assailants, but that didn’t stop me taking a few good blows. Now hardened by Indian time, I look back with wonder at my naivety.


Then there was the time I parked by a water spring, on a narrow road and the truck immediately behind me curved round into the oncoming traffic, instead of pausing, and blocked everyone. Within minutes there were 80 cars in gridlock, but the truck driver was working it out. I in the meantime, somewhat arrogantly, decided that it was the truck drivers fault, and even if I moved the bus down the road the problem would just repeat there, further from the spring, so I was already filling my bottles quick as I could. Another motorist realised I was the bus’s driver and after exchanging a few angry words during which I antagonised him with my lethargic I’m-not-raising-my-tone-so-there’s-no-need-to-raise-yours-with-me tone. He grabbed my arm and yanked me towards the bus. In response I splashed him with the open half filled bottle in my hand. He slapped me around the head. I saw it coming, and took it with an acceptance that I’d been an arse and deserved it. But then seeing that I wasn’t going to respond he hit me again. Again I saw it coming but because I thought the first blow would have been an end to it, I wasn’t expecting it I reacted too slowly and got a second sting to my face.

I don’t want to hit this guy, but I want him to stop. How? He swung again and this time, expecting it, I used the ample time for his backswing to palm him off by pushing his face away sending him off balance. His stumpy arms flailed short of my face, while I poked a finger clumsily into one of his eye sockets. That was the end of it. The crowd dragged him off, and I moved the bus even though by then the truck had worked his way round so there was no more need.


Then there was the truck that was trying to overtake on a really dangerous section of night road. I didn’t want to let him past until there was a place that would be safe for him to pass without damaging me. The honking and flashing continued for a few kilometres until he eventually forced his way past me and to teach me a lesson he swerved to ram me off the road. I braked and because my bearing was already seizing, skidded sideways towards the verge, almost losing it into a ditch.


I was livid, but calm. He raced off. I took a moment to compose myself, angry but accepting. No harm done. Then up ahead a train crossing brought the traffic to a halt. He dived up the opposite side of the traffic, something which is infuriatingly common in India, and seeing a moment to set things even, work on some anger release, and give the guy pause for thought next time, I followed. As the driver stepped out of the truck I tapped him hard with the bumper as I pulled up. I then jumped out and calm as an arrow in flight, almost nonchalantly you could say, I punched him in the throat sending him stumbling backwards down the bank. As he came back up it was clear he was blind drunk, making me even more angry that he’d almost totalled my truck, my home and my life. I would have left it at that, but in the moment I re-evaluated what would be appropriate given he was now a drunk driver, rather than just a bad one. Simultaneously the realisation flashed in my eyes that I could get away with more tension relief, free of the risk of any dangerous retaliation. I slammed his head against his truck as he walked around me. And after he got inside the cab closing the door for protection I landed another neat one on his jaw from the road. Around me other drivers looked on with a confused dispassion. The barrier lifted, we all drove on. I let him go first so he wouldn’t have to overtake me again. I felt calm and just. And smug. With hindsight I should have thrown his keys into the dark bushes and let him sober up for an hour while he searched for them.


Tonight I finally got some attention from one of the long haired brown eyed Spanish girls. Clara had asked me from the next table to charge her IPod in my computer a couple of days ago and I’d stuck some more music on it and copied all of hers. Now we sparked up a conversation about bad girl rapper Maria La Mala Rodriguez and ended up flirting, maybe a little too overtly, in a roof top bar. Until a fat stumpy bespectacled Indian man in a shirt and tie took her to be a prostitute flirting for trade. Drunkenly he came over from his table for one, and asked her if she knew Tantra.

He held out a pack of cigarettes, “A present for the lady”, who’d misheard the initial approach, and it’s meaning. He tried to push it past me to her.

“We don’t want it” I grabbed it and sent it sailing over the balcony down to some street sleeper below. But he stood his ground in the face of my competitive client actions, and continued in Hindi, with guttural ludeness in his words listing things, positions or acts that she might perform, or reasons why he’d be a better client. I pushed him away and he circled back to his seat across the terrace.


I sat for a minute processing what he’d said and how inappropriately mildly I’d reacted. It welled up inside me. “Vamonos Clara” I said “No me gusta restar aqi.” I filled up a glass of water, and walked to the door via his table while Clara took the more direct route through the busy tables sensing my mood change or that I was plotting something.


“Hello friend,” he smiled broadly, the sexual fantasies reigniting in his eyes as he sensed my approach brought new opportunities that tingled from his body. Up to then he was just going to get water in his face.


“I’m not your friend,” The glass’s contents doused him and the mobile phone held to his ear, and as he flinched in his chair, my fist followed the water across the table into the bridge of his spectacles, “you cunt.” I didn’t raise my voice especially. The next table wouldn’t have made out more than mumbled drone before I calmly stepped past him towards the door and Clara, who was looking at me with controlled shock, rapidly piecing together what must have triggered my actions. We both walked unhurried out of the restaurant, calculatedly returning the cheery “Goodnight” of the waiter who’d not seen the punch.


It was more than he deserved from me, but he did deserve as much. I kept imagining him explain his cut nose to his concerned wife.


As we stepped into the slow elevator down from the 9th floor Clara went from shock that she could be judged so, to anger around the 8th floor, to a sincere and formal thank you mid way between the 7th and 6th, and then a considered action, she reached up to me and by the time we reached 5 we were kissing, a long wet kiss that lasted all the way to the ground.


Punch the bad guy, walk away cool as a Bollywood Hero, and kiss the girl. My walk-tall lasted through the foyer to the street. “My boyfriend arrives from Spain tomorrow Andy” she broke it to me on the pavement before there was any awkward embarrassment over where we were each spending the night. It was the moment to say ‘Goodnight Clara’ and ‘Goodnight Hero’ but the moment to say ‘Goodnight India’ can’t come soon enough. With it, I hope, will be a goodnight to this unwanted aggression so I can go back to being the specky geek that runs from a fight.

Los Volontarios

This end of Calcutta is full of Volontarios; mainly Spanish, mainly female, mainly in their early 20s. Drawn here by the industry in volunteering that Mother Teresa (God rest her soul) started and still thrives today. At peak periods, some 300 volontarios a day come to help the poor and less fortunate. Ahhh.

Sadly being barely out of school and thrown into the hardest city of a developing country many of these volontarios are hard pushed to look after themselves, let alone anyone else.

It’s the aid-world’s equivalent of chucking a bucket of very thin paint at a wall. Whatever sticks is so faint it’s a hardly worth it. Between their youthful naivety and the heavy dose of Catholic rights and wrongs they have to extol, the volume of volontarios means that the job of managing them must rival the work of providing support for Calcutta’s orphans, disabled, elderly and street sleepers. Hosé, one of Mother Teresa’s co-ordinators, who sometimes has to deal with young volontarios going off the rails, confides that many are sent here by religious parents as a punitive or educational experience.

Salvatore, in his 30’s works with the handicapped full time in Sardinia. He tells me about his first time here when he volunteered through Mama T, “They were fighting each other over who would wash these old handicapped men. Fighting. But after an hour they’d all slopped off because it’s physically hard work. I had to clean 20 people in an a day, alone.“

The one benefit of their presence, so small by comparison to the effort involved to achieve it, is that most of these girls go away with an understanding that the challenges of helping the poor, of delivering aid, is not as practically or ethically simple as it seems. Actually that realisation is no small thing, and most will admit that the experience is more beneficial to them than to vulnerable Indians. It’s a form of extreme-socially-conscious-tourism.

Salvatore has nothing to do with these centres for gap-year-do-gooders anymore. Without much effort he’s able to collect several thousand Euros during the year and has made annual visits since 2008 with the money, spending it locally on tarpaulins, shoes, body soap, clothes soap, anti-lice shampoo and food, which, with the help of a friend Manuela, he bags up and distributes direct to street sleepers. This happens at night to avoid mobbing, and under the direction of the Parvesh, the taxi driver Salvatore has used for 3 years. He’s the arbiter, advising Salvatore on who is needy and who is trying it on when there’s a doubt.

As a project it’s a good one, but as a formula, it’s open to a host of vulnerabilities. Salvatore is completely unaccountable to the anonymous donors, apart from a few pictures and videos on facebook, but he diligently makes sure every penny is spent, and pays for his own flight ticket to India. Parvesh could use his leverage with Salvatore to win favours from friends he directs handouts to, but because the recipients are so poor, and the parcels only of value to street sleepers this doesn’t seem to happen.

Each of the parcels he gives out costs about 100-150ruppees to put together. I ask him if it wouldn’t be better to just give out money, and let people decide what they need, but he’s tried that and he just got mobbed that time too. Later, he confides that secretly he sometimes gives cash out, but doesn’t like the Parvesh to see as it would put him under greater pressure to stay unbiased.

They invite me to join them on their final sortie of the year. Salvatore is a burly, stocky man, with a crew cut and an organised way about him, and at first it feels exciting, paramilitary almost. But the trip through town takes me to new depths of poverty. Young babies covered in grime, children sleeping on spit stained squares of cardboard, inches from ferreting rats, the deep slumber on their faces a reminder to me of their uncompromising innocence. Just a fluke of birth separates me from these children. I see an old man so thin and still that I test his pulse, relieved to feel he’s alive. Another man clutches the apple from his parcel like it’s a radiating heat on a freezing day, fondling it in his grim hands while the world rotates around him. It’s not a fun evening. I don’t feel uplifted at the end. I just want those places not to exist anymore. Salvatore is on a high because his work is over for the year. “This is the last year I’m coming back to India. I’ve seen the same people on the streets for 3 years” His need to quit is part revulsion, part despair.

If the Volontarios are watery white wash, Salvatore’s direct approach is like a skilled graffiti artist, beautifully tagging a small corner of the wall. Thankfully he’s good at what he does but there are others that given his cash would just make the wall look untidy.

Part of the money Salvatore raises he also gives as a large lump sum to Anand Bhavan, Hindi for “The House of Joy”. It’s a home for 30 disadvantaged girls, created so they can have an environment to support them through their education. The staff includes Maria a Spanish psychologist who explains that they also work with the girls’ families and there’s a trickle-out effect from these 30 girls effecting their siblings and parents, instilling a value for education. The hope is that all the girls will go on to vocational training or further education after their time there.

It’s clear to see that being chosen to come here for 5 years makes a radical night-to-day transformation to the girl’s lives and the opportunities they will have. Soon the first quorum will graduate from school and they have dreams for the future; Alisha wants to be a nurse (her mother’s unfulfilled dream), another girl wants to be a teacher, antoher an air hostesses (because they are very beautiful). Ambition in a 12 year old Indian girl from a poor family is a rare thing. Instilling the self-belief that they can dream, is a great achievement which Anand Bhavan should be proud of. For other girls from the same background, destiny is to be passed on to a husband so parents see educating them as a waste. To dream of a job is not in a girl’s frame of reference.

The centre costs €40,000 a year to run. This year Salvatore has donated €3000 to them of the €7000 he’s raised. Over 5 years, to transform the life of each girl costs around €6500. All the money comes from donors in Europe. None from Indians.

I ask Antonio, the programme director, why there is no fundraising from India. He tells me he thinks India is not “solidario”. After seven years living here, he knows how wealthy the country is, but that they don’t have a culture of giving to projects like this. Perhaps Indian generosity goes through the local temple to the local poor, he suggests. Incidentally The House of Joy is multi-faith and the statue of Jesus sits between Ganesh and an extract of the Koran.

Maria looks at the fact that the centre is paid for with foreign money from a social rather than political point of view. She attributes the behaviour more to the fatalism inherent in Hinduism and the psychology that goes with it. People here accept their destiny, and live up to the role of society ascribes to them. I’m poor, that’s what I will be. She’s worked in the slums of Rio before coming here in 2006, so I’m surprised she doesn’t have a broader perspective.

Cash is becoming harder to raise since the Spanish government cut funding to Indian NGOs in favour of South American ones after their financial crisis. In the context of radically changing a life, €6,500 seems like a small price, but perhaps if the project only kept girls for 2 years instead of 5, twice as many girls could have more than half the transformation? That’s a debateable premise. But there might be ways to get more from that money. To torture my wall analogy; here they are pinning up a small but expensive painting. Calcutta has a population of 15million people. An awful lot of those people could benefit from this sort of transformation.

I spend the day with the girls, making bracelets with beads, being silly, giggling, listening to their singing practice, and letting them take pictures with my camera. They laugh hysterically at the sight of their friends on the screen. I’ve been looking at this as a numbers game. But up close it’s not. This project shouldn’t be viewed in the context of saving all the vulnerable of Calcutta, it’s about 30 girls. They are a family. Maria and Antonio are almost their guardians or foster parents. They raise the money needed to make things better for these 30 girls by giving them a chance at education.

Salvatore looks at me helplessly, a gaudy bead bracelet hanging from his muscular wrist, and a softness in the hard man's eyes and says “I guess I’ll be back next year.”

Donations to Salvatore can be made my contacting him direct; salvatore.bandinu@tin.it
Anand Bhavan accepts contributions online at http://www.fundacionananta.org if you can fathom the Spanish.

Push My Button

It’s my own fault. I should have found a gym with weights, or gone swimming. Instead I’m lying on my back listening to Stephanie’s soft French voice telling me to feel “ze hair moove fram yohr nows intoo yohr lahngs” (the air move from your nose into your lungs - for the non French speakers). The problem I have with Stephaine’s yoga/meditaition class is that I want to be sweating, hurting, working off nervous energy, not fighting off sleep while I’m supposed to be “brushing my body with my consciousness”.

After 2 classes I reach breaking point. I’m genuinely worried that in this semi-hypnotised state I may become susceptible to Stephanie’s cosmic pronouncements; Regular Yoga will cure you of any disease. Breathing will make your body regenerate and reverses the aging process. Indian shoe repairers that sit in this pose never get bowel cancer. “They did a study” she confirms, nodding her spindly neck sagely.

My mind is fired by this trigger: What? A study? Who did a study? Who funded it? Was there a double blind control group? Peer reviewed? Surely diet and lifestyle of the Indian shoe repairers is more of a factor, did they take that into account? Should I be palms up or palms down? It’s a big enough population; there must be a few recorded cases of cancer, surely? Was it a long term study? More than 10 years? Is my foot pointing in the right direction? That would be expensive research for such a banal thing as posture’s impact on the bowel. Bet it was funded by some Yoga Ashram. Loads of money. Biased research. What about the shoe polish fumes? That can’t be good for you? Day in, day out. What cancer would they cause? Are these yoga mats made in Nepal or imported from India? And the fumes from the shoe adhesives? Full of atomised benzene rings. Or China? Yeah, must be made in China. Lung Cancer probably. Or Brain Cancer? Shifting my weight makes my hamstring sting more than my calf muscle. Which should sting more? Foam would be too volumetrically expensive to container over the Himalaya, must come from India...

My consciousness has too many questions to process, and is too busy to focus on my left toe, or upper right buttock for long. I’d never even thought of my buttocks as having upper and lower parts. My brain fires again pondering how many ways a buttock could be divided. Meditation is popular with people that want to slow down their over active minds. That’s criminal. I’ve learned to enjoy the ride my trains of thought take me on. I can’t see any value in slowing your thoughts down, and even less in sitting straight-backed for hours mumbling a deep bass mantra. It’s as mentally fruitful as getting stoned, or having a lobotomy.

Rob rides a stubby Enfield, and sports a Chelsea smile from a pub brawl 25 years ago. He spent 5 years in prison for armed robbery after holding up a string of pharmacies with a replica at the height of his drug dependency. While inside he found yoga and 20 years on is totally clean and claims he meditates for 2 hours a day and has been celibate for 9 years. He’s refreshingly aggressive and argumentative, but is a prime example for the fact that meditation is a crutch rather than a cure for whatever psychosis pulls you into it.

Tom, a trained therapist, friend and flying partner agrees that from a psychological point of view, gurus or Gods act as surrogate parents to people searching for reassurance. Gurus will look after you and provide you with the answers you need now that you’ve grown up and mummy and daddy don’t do it anymore. “But,” he says, “meditation is likely to bring a lot of things up, and then provide no outlet for dealing with them.”

After class my yoga-mates agree that Stephanie is a bit far out, and yet while pushing through downward dog we’d somehow all conspired to consume her explanation of the nervous systems’ sub atomic particle being the link between the body and the consciousness. She has answers to some big questions and within the walls of her Yoga classroom they seem agreeably plausible.

However I get particularly irked by the use of misconstrued science to justify ideologies that exist in an incompatible paradigm. I’m a rational extremist, and the western mind is indoctrinated to trust the language and branding of science, to the point where it accepts without fully understanding it. We have faith in science, which is ironically wholly unscientific. Stephanie unwittingly twists this trusted branding within the vagaries of popular misconceptions to validate her Hatha philosophy, at the same time providing solutions to problems where science is lagging behind (cancer cures, eternal youth, a definition of the soul...). This bastardisation of physics and medicine makes my sphincter tighten, back rise and chest inflate, opportunely into the ideal mediation pose which Stephanie congratulates me on.

Stephanie's wackiness is charming, but it’s the evangelists disciples I’ve lost patience with. “Oh Andy, you absolutely must read this book [about Meditation/Yoga]. It really explains everything...” No. I absolutely mustn’t. Clearing out my belly button fluff would be more enlightening than spending time reading books that reaffirm the faith to believers but deliver only unconvincing proofs for cynics. Put it on the shelf there next to the Dharma, Bible and Koran, and have a look at the size of this lint cotton ball! “You really must read the British Hang Gliding and Paragliding Associations’ regulations on Tandem pilot certification. Now THIS really explains everything.” I parry with my booklet, but there is no appetite for cockney sarcasm in the earnest world of the enlightened.

I’m grateful I didn’t come to India when I was 20. I would have swallowed these ideas up wholesale and by now I’d probably be a shoeless Baba or buff yoga master teaching the path to levitation on the beaches of Goa. I’d have been a black-belt in Yoga. Instead I went to Africa, where the spiritual philosophies are proper doll-stabbing gri-gri, and therefore can’t be taken seriously by even the most open western mind. Perhaps that introduction grounded me with the cynicism that just because ideas are exotic and foreign, they aren't necessarily the answer.

I don’t think Nepali’s ever attend Stephanie’s yoga classes so it’s hard to see it as anything more that another one of Pokhara’s tourist attractions, alongside white-water rafting or trekking. If there is a tragedy in all this, and there probably isn’t, it’s that westerners come away from Nepal thinking they’ve discovered the essence of the country by thoroughly examined their own navels. Sadly, their home country promptly dissolves the Karma out of them as it dawns how irrelevant these philosophies are to their day to day reality. But worse, along the way they’ve missed the chance to understand the Himalayan agricultural cycle, the opportunities for permaculture, the impact of the annual rice yield fluctuations, the construction techniques of mountain roads and their destruction techniques by the rains, the common faults of Bajaj motorbikes, or how to bathe with your clothes on, which is all much more interesting and useful than the physical or metaphysical navel fluff we are so captivated by.

A Berk versus the Burka

Philip Hollobone, a conservative back bench MP in the UK has tabled bill to ban the Burka, and head scarves that cover the face.

Dressed up as a bill to protect Britishness (It’s “not the British way” to wear a face covering says Hollobone) this is nothing more than an insidiously shitty racist bit of legislation.

Cappuccino is not the British way to make coffee. Should we also ban Starbucks and force everyone to drink lukewarm instant coffee? Nachos, Baguettes, Mercedes, Halloween, Gwyneth Paltrow, none of these are British either. Something really must be done.

If face coverings are so offensive, should we insist motorbikers use open faced helmets, cyclists prevented from using pollution masks? Wedding dresses made without veils so the Bride's identity can be confirmed? And on a cold day no one should be allowed to wrap a scarf over their face. Foolishness. Hollobone would have more credibility if he said “I don’t understand the way these foreigners behave. I don’t like it and I don’t want to be confronted by it.”

The only redeeming feature of Britishness is that it’s one of the most cosmopolitan and tolerant societies in the world. Mainly because of it's overwhelming politeness, it accepts al-comers. Yet the far right politicians and press invoke this subconsciously populist idea that Britain should revert to a post-war blitz-spirit nation of cricket on village greens as Routemaster buses drive past laden with gentlemen commuting to work in bowler hats. Shoe-shines for a shilling squire. Happy days.

Except the austere 1950’s weren’t happy days, and ironically post war Britain was rebuilt with the sweat and ideas of an army of immigrants from Ireland, the West Indies, Southern Europe, India and Pakistan.

Having travelled through a host of Muslim countries, and in non Muslim areas like Rajasthan where women veil their faces against the sun, and in northern Mali where Tuareg men and women cover their faces to protect from the sand and wind, I’ve grown used to dealing with people whose faces I can’t see. Initially it was a bit strange, but it’s not that big a deal. Perhaps Hollobone has used a device called the Telephone which offers a similar experience allowing people to speak without seeing each other’s faces. Telephones were invented by an American, so they’re probably on his not-British-enough blacklist.

So much communication is non-verbal. As human animals, our brains are highly attuned to pick up facial expressions and body language, but legislating against people who don’t communicate well would involve a lisp ban, and perhaps prison sentences for mumbling?

Every counter argument I’ve read has been very quick to point out that the idea of women being forced to cover up by their misogynist husbands is abhorrent. And perhaps there are some cases of women who dream of skipping down the street without a blanket over them but can’t because of their husband’s enforced insecurities. However I suspect the reality is a bit different.

The conformity of the small Burka wearing community is probably a result of societal peer pressure from other women as much as men, and of previous generations. These are the same mechanisms that dictate how women dress in every other community. These particular standards may seem repressive to a culture unused to that level of prudishness, but it is normal in a lot of other places. There’s no malevolence and no reason for the huffy likes of Hollobone to feel insulted or threatened. The tribes of the Bijagos Islands, off Guinea Bissau, weren’t offended when I visited and wore more than just a leaf over my cock, even though they must have thought I was a bit weird for the T-shirt and trousers I had on. I can’t imagine being forced to conform to a level of nudity I’m not used to.

Amidst all this liberal and reactionary posturing, has anyone thought to ask Burka wearing women how comfortable they’d feel if they weren’t allowed to wear their coverings in public? Surely the Muslim Council of Britain should be commissioning the research as I type.

The sort of sweaty toothed wife beater that forces his wife and daughters to wear a Burka against their will, will be just as happy to prevent his wife and daughters from ever leaving the home if they aren’t allowed to wear their sackcloth in public. Even if legislation could be devised to punish that small breed of chauvinist dinosaurs it wouldn’t be as effective as the erosion British multiculturalism is already reaping on those values. Values which will have vanished completely within a couple of generations. Rest assured his daughter is already poking that handsome Jamaican boy from school on Facebook or in video chat-rooms with horny teenage boys from Saudi. This is what makes 2010 Britain Great, yet the white indigenous British are scared to rejoice or take pride in that. Instead they reminisce about the days of the Spitfire or Geoff Hurst’s 1966 World Cup goals.

I’d like to think I was a liberal neo-feminist supporter of women’s rights, and all that fluffy stuff, but as a man I know what goes through a man’s mind when he sees a woman in a figure hugging outfit. I’m not the only man that has these thoughts. I’ve conducted widespread research (“Here, mate, you seen ‘er over there? Phoarrr!”).

So based on the fact that men are such predictable Neanderthals, women have two choices. Either they can play us, by power dressing, reducing us to the loin driven simpletons that we are at heart, or secondly perhaps with a little more dignity, they can refuse to play. The idea that a woman chooses to keep the sight of her beautiful hair, or her beautiful face exclusively for the view of the man she loves, isn’t that alien from the idea that most British women wouldn’t flash their tits at every stranger in the street.

Rather than focussing the blame on "these people", (a phrase that is only ever used to thinly disguise racist contempt), - these dark skinned Muslim Johnny Foreigners with their suspicious religion and spicy food, who cover their women folk with potato sacks, - I'd say that every man who’s ever had a randy thought about a female stranger should stand up and say “I am to blame for women covering themselves in this ridiculous way”.

And that’s why the Burka is ridiculous. Women can’t escape the fact that men find them attractive. It's genetic. We'd have died out if it wasn't. It's not a bad thing, because most of us men manage to restrain our urges to a tolerable level.

The Burka is not the daftest thing worn in the name of religion; skull caps, circumcised foreskin, catholic guilt, protestant restraint, bishops hats, turbans, Bindis, saffron robes and shaved heads are also pretty ridiculous. So are high heels, hair straighteners, eyelash curlers, and make-up bags. But the best thing about Britain is that we indignantly tolerate it all, until it eventually adds to the net worth of our unique culture in some unexpected way we would never have predicted.

In the final assesment, a law that forces a lady to strip off her clothing is absolutely "not the British way". It wasn’t in the gentlemanly days of the 1950’s, and even more so, it isn’t now.

Vulture Restaurant

It’s only 20km away but it’s taken us 2 hours to get here, the early start, the amoeba in my stomach, and skipping breakfast has made the motorbike journey tough, but it’s the overnight rains that really slowed progress on Ramji Gautam’s motorbike. The only road that leads to the site of the Vulture Feeding Sanctuary is completely washed out.

For much the tough uphill parts of the journey I’ve had to walk up following the Yamaha scrambling over shale, pebbles and small streams that continue to erode what’s left of the track. In the dry season the road is fine Ramji assures me, small consolation to my sweat ridden body. His effervescent enthusiasm pervades every inconvenience in a way which is characteristically Nepali, and it’s hard not to be drawn into giggling at how close to collapse I am.

It’s at that moment we spot a couple of Egyptian Vultures above us. When perched, their hunched neck gives them a sinister demeanour in keeping with their reputation of untrustworthy carrion eaters. But after an ungraceful launch, once in flight, these birds are the most majestic in the sky. Their wings, stretching up to two metres across, lock into the perfect aerodynamic form, able to take advantage rising air currents with the smallest adjustment of the splayed feathers at the tips and a twist of their fanned tail. Their sizeable weight effortlessly circles up through the mountain terrain, able to cover distance faster and quicker than any other animal as they search quietly for food. Not killing for meat makes vultures one of nature’s few ethical carnivores, and their role in picking clean carcasses prevents the spread of disease in other species, including humans. None the less the unfair Machiavellian reputation persists.

It’s a good job this route is usually easier, because the “Vulture Restaurant”, as Ramji calls it, conjuring images napkined diners tucking silver forks into a vulture soufflé, plans to become self funding by bringing in tourists to watch the birds feeding. Numbers of the enormous and regal White Rumped Vulture have been decreasing over recent years, and the drop is largely attributed to the use of Diclofenac, a miracle anti-inflammatory used by local farmers to cure sick cattle.

On the occasions when the Oxen fails to recover, and dies with Diclofenac in its system, the meat is a toxic cocktail to the vultures that feed on the carcasses left out to be picked clean. The feeding sanctuary has been set up next to a small village near Pokhara, with donations from conservation groups and individuals to provide a safe source of food, to allow the population to recover. Local farmers have been encouraged to use alternatives to Diclofenac, and old cattle is bought for100 rupees (US$1.30) and brought to die in the specially selected area where vultures can feel unthreatened as they tuck in.

Oxen used to pull ploughs, and cows that provide milk, become an expensive burden once they are too old to work, so the farmers are pleased to sell them to the project in a country where the Hindu religion prevents slaughtering the sacred animals.

The Pokhara valley, where the sanctuary is based, is one of the last habitats where the birds can be found in any number according to Brad Sander, a record setting paraglider pilot, who last year flew the width of Nepal and says he didn’t see a single White Rumped vulture until he arrived in Pokhara, half way through his journey.

This anecdotal evidence is largely backed up by the research performed in Bird Conservation Nepal, which shows that White Rumped numbers have declined by 90% in Nepal over the last 11 years. The Royal Society for Protection of Birds has tracked vultures migrating 1000km in a week, happily moving along the Himalaya between Nepal, India and Pakistan, and the drop in numbers is even higher in the studies performed in India.

One reason that the Pokhara valley might be a relatively safe haven for the White Rump, and therefore an ideal site for the sanctuary, is that the local farmers prefer traditional organic cures for their cattle, largely unaware of Diclofenac unless it’s prescribed by a vet. The drug has now been banned for use in cattle thanks to lobbying work by conservation bodies in all the countries where the White Rumpe flies, however its cheapness and efficacy means its use persists illegally in places.

I ask Hari Datta Pokharel, chairman of the village committee set up to administer the sanctuary, what he thinks about foreigners giving money to protect vultures, which in Nepal have the same evil reputation as elsewhere. He tells me that having seen the birds feeding during the pilot stages of the sanctuary he has grown to admire and respect the birds. It’s true that a flock of birds using their wings to wrestling over the meat of a carcass, digging their necks into the heart of it, their heads bathed in drying blood as their sharpened beaks claw away lumps of red flesh, accompanied by the smell of rotting meat and guts filling the air, is a sight to inspire respect. But I would be more convinced if Hari had told me that as long as the project brings in the tourist dollars it promises, he’s happy to feed them old cows.

Ramji believes that other reasons may also be contributing the declining numbers. For several years he’s been studying vultures, performing counts, decoding their behaviour and surveying farmers’ attitudes towards them. His unique expertise is recognised by the university where he lectures as well as the conservation groups that ask him to advise on their projects. The increasing rural population according to Ramji has meant there is less space to dispose of carcasses safely without risking the spread of disease through rats and mice that also feed on the decaying flesh. Health education programmes are advising farmers to bury dead cattle rather than leave them to be cleaned by the birds. Less food means fewer birds, and the larger White Rumped, which need the most food, is perhaps the first to feel this effect. The smaller Red Headed Vulture have also declined in number but not as dramatically as the White Rumped.

Beyond the village is the sanctuary site. I’m faced with a walk down and then back up a 100m cliff. At the bottom I’m shown the cattle shed and the observation hide the villagers have built with the donated money. There are also the bony remains of 3 carcasses, and the dead body of a cow which died just 2 days earlier. The villagers have given over these five hectares of hard to farm land for the sanctuary, bordered on one side by a fast flowing river bend, and on the other by the cliff. On the far side are some old cows grazing, while villagers collect grass and wood around them. I’m panting for breath with every step, looking for a rock to sit on every time we stop. I apologise to Ramji that my stomach bug is slowing me down and he asks if I’ve taken any drugs for it. Not yet. I laugh nervously, realising me that I’ve just passed the sanctuary’s criteria for vulture lunch.

In six weeks the project will officially open its doors, with national and international guests, including key scientists invited to see the facilities, Robi Pokharel, the hands on co-ordinator tells me. His enthusiasm for the project seems more heartfelt than the chairman’s, and he makes no secret of the fact that he wants this to work to bring money into his village.

There are still a few jobs to do over the next week, he tells me in flawless English. The plastering around the observation hide needs to be finished off, along with storm drainage. They need to plumb in a water supply for the visitors, and they have to clear a path to transport the carcasses from the grazing area where they die, to the feeding area. Moving a dead cow over the rocky grassland by hand is no small task and if the carcasses aren’t in the feeding area, not only will the birds feel less comfortable coming to feed, but the tourists in the observation hide won’t be able to see them. Robi tells me he needs a camera so they can photograph the vultures show absent supporters how well the scheme is working.

To the casual observer, there is another problem. The old cattle are feeding on great pasture land, irrigated by the mineral rich glacial river, and far from keeling over after a hard life, they seem to be thriving in retirement. None the less in the four months during construction and pilot stage four cows have already died and been fed to the birds and the heard of fresh meat waiting it’s turn has grown to seven.

Ramji estimates that the meat from one cow would be enough to feed the vulture population for a month, but the birds can’t go a month between feeds and there is no obvious way to butcher or store the meat. The carcasses can remain unnoticed for a few days before the vultures come to feed, and then the feeding is all over in a day. The tight schedule of tourists wanting to see vultures feeding will be tough to co-ordinate with the natural death of a cow and the eagle eye of a hungry vulture. But the project supporters include Scott Mason a falconer, who runs Parahawking, a successful tourist business using trained vultures in Pokhara. His expertise and contacts in the local tourism industry will be crucial in developing the marketing and logistics of the tourist visits.

During our visit Ramji picks over the bones of a carcass pointing out a couple of broken ones. Vultures scrape the bones clean, everything goes, the sinew, the tendons, the fat. All that’s left is the stomach contents, the pristine white bones and the skin which can be sold to leatherworkers, while the bones can be used to make cutlery handles. But vultures don’t break bones when they eat. Dogs and Jackals do that, and unlike vultures, they spread diseases to humans. There’s a risk that if the project is not carefully managed, it could end up feeding the wrong predator.

The sight of a couple of dog-gnawed bones isn’t enough to worry Ramji, and these are precisely the sort of teething troubles which the pilot stage is designed to flush out. The model of using tourism to sustain a conservation project is keeping everyone, the villagers, the donors, and the conservationists motivated, and that gives the project a great chance of rewarding their efforts, and setting an example which could be replicated elsewhere.

When Sita, the wife of the Hindu god Rama was kidnapped, a vulture tried to stop the villains who cut off its wings. When Rama couldn’t find Sita the vulture told him what had happened. As a thank you Rama blessed vultures with the ability to regenerate and 1000 years of life. Ramji tells me that villagers often ask him if vultures, Giddha in Nepali, can really live that long. If this project can be made sustainable it could help regenerate the dwindling vulture population and give the species a chance to live as long as their mythical lifespan.

The Selfish Boodist

Pokhara is full of Dharma-wits that are coming or going to Pashmina Meditation retreats (I know it’s called Vipassana, thank you) and most of them seem filled with the vacuousness you’d expect of someone that hasn’t spoken in 3 days and got no idea why.

Rachel also spent time in a monastery but has uniquely brought some critical analysis to the experience, and is able to say more than most participant’s “It was amazing”. According to her, this sort of Buddhist invites initiates to pick and choose rituals from the monastery menu which are only practised by the most extreme monks after years of devoted study. To delve into this deep end of rites and practices without the understanding is as useful as buying a ticket for a ride at the Buddhism theme park.

Apparently one of the cores of Buddhism is that there is no Self. I’ve been struggling with what this actually means. Rachel who introduced me to this idea, thinks that outside of the context of a Nepali upbringing this can’t really make sense to a westerner, who’s every cultural stimulus since birth has rewarded the urge to feed one’s own needs.

At first I thought this absence of the Self meant you had to defer to the community, perhaps explaining the penchant for Nepali Maoists militants to commit acts of unconscionable violence in rural areas. But that’s not it by a long way.

Another friend who has signed up for a monastic course for people managing emotional distress (or the chronically-fucked-up as she and I call them) has been sending me emails, on the one hand parodying the other incumbents on the course and their neurosis’ , emails that make me cry with laughter, and simultaneously telling me I could benefit from controlling my emotions and should sign up for a dose of “Buddhism for the chronically fucked-up”, accommodation, food and spiritual salvation included. Just check your cynicism (or critical thinking as some might call it) at the door.

I’m getting this third hand so it wouldn’t be surprising if I’m missing some of the more salient details, but by “speaking right”, resisting the temptation to be rude or angry, or allowing your emotions into your communications, you can control your thoughts and consequently your emotions. I don’t think that’s true, you can hide your emotions, but that’s not the same as controlling them. But even if it does work, I don’t really see how that’s a benefit. Emotions are for having. We should have them. We need them. Acting on them is the problem. It’s OK to be angry just don’t make decisions based on anger. Use logic, reason, reductionism to plot your course of action, but you can still be pissed off when you carry it out..

I think that is a much better way of not having a Self. Denying your emotions by bottling the feelings is counter to human instincts, but controlling them is what separates us from animals. If you ignore your feelings for long enough, they don’t eventually just disappear. On the contrary, you may find your Self shooting up a high school.

During this trip I went through a phase of being really angry at the injustice I received; As a wealthy foreigner if someone caused me a problem like a dent in the bus or spilling oil on my clothes, they would just shrug it off and I’d have to accept that’s just the way life goes, but if the roles were reversed, I’d be expected to make amends. Now, I’m much more resigned to the unfairness, and I’ve accepted that if I want to drive my bus around the world, this is how it is. This acceptance is a form of compassion and forgiveness for my fellow human beings who dent my truck and spill engine oil ON MY ONLY PAIR OF JEANS, MOTHER FUCKER! Forgiveness and compassion are both important Buddhist mainstays, which I think mean I have in some ways shelved my Self.

Above all, the journey has taught me that disappointment is a totally futile emotion. How can you be disappointed with something that fate deals you? And everything that happens in life is something that fate deals you. That’s how it goes. Disappointment is nothing more than thinly veiled Self pity. Its only purpose is to act as a wet nurse for our damaged egos. Get over it, the world is big and it’s not all about you, because there is no you, no Self and no ego in this vast world. You’re so small, and the world is so big, you and your problems just don’t count.

This logic makes perfect sense in countries where nature is vast and powerful and might, on a whim, chose to destroy everything you have tonight, where people live under corrupt governments and don’t know their rights because they can’t read, where people are indoctrinated into a caste system which enslaves them, and where people have limited access to healthcare because of geography or poverty. In the West we have liability insurance and lawsuits which rewards the Self’s every disappointment with the promise of cash pay outs. But even then, there are times when we feel utterly helpless and defeated. Perhaps that’s the moment we should let go of our Self, and rejoice in being the flotsam on life’s beach.

As a good Buddhist, I should also stop desiring. But that’s just crap. Stop consuming, OK. But the desire to do, and to change things is a crucial ingredient in the recipe for good, and relinquishing ambition for it is just stupid. Nothing would ever get done. Did Buddhists invent gunpowder, the printing press or the compass? Er, well actually yes, I think they nailed at least 2 out of 3 of those, long before rationalism was even a glint in Plato’s eyes. And that’s a pity, because my point was going to be that sacrificing desires and ambition means you don’t contribute to making things better. The same forces can also make things worse too, but to deny them for that reason is to live by the creed of head-in-the-sand-ism, and not a valid reason to stifle your Self’s curiosity.

If you don’t have any feelings about things that are bad, you’re unlikely to try to make them better. Here more than elsewhere I feel like I’m missing the trick with Buddhism, but apart from this, just by being much more fatalistic than I used to be, I think I could pass my Self off as a convert.

I’m petrified that I’ll wind up fulfilling the hippy cliché and find myself smoking pot and playing the guitar in some dead-end Westerners hangout 20 years from now, droning on about what it was like to drive to India “back in 2010 man”, so it’s worrying to me that this journey from the UK may have unwittingly touched me spiritually, enlightening me without me noticing, and that heaven-forbid, I have unknowingly adopted some of the tenets of Eastern philosophy. If that’s the case, then the one saving grace is that there’s an awful lot of money to be made teaching this Buddhism stuff to Dharma-wits. Perhaps if I’d washed the bus more often I’d have learnt Karate by now too. Wax on, wax off.

Digital Displacement

Driving through mountains is a huge frustration for me. I use so much fuel going up, and wear out the brakes when going down.

I’ve been thinking that the perfect vehicle for paragliding should have a system of regenerative braking, which turns the energy from braking back into useable energy to push you along and up the hills.

The only way to do this, that I was familiar with, was to use an electric drive train, where the motor on the wheels can be used as a generator which slows the vehicle down and charges the battery.

Many trains have a diesel electric drive train, in which a diesel generator creates the electricity which drives a motor connected to the wheels. This seems like an unnecessarily complicated approach; when you have a diesel engine spinning away, it would seem to be more logical to connect it to the wheels rather than a generator connected to a motor connected to wheels.

In fact diesel-electric is more efficient, because there are less transmission losses (there’s no gearbox) and it allows the diesel engine to run at the speed where it is most efficient. Diesel engines are very inefficient outside a narrow rev range.

So the obvious answer is diesel-electric hybrid truck, or in my case veg-electric hybrid, with regenerative braking. I could take the gearbox out, and attach a generator in its place, then attach a motor to the differential at the back where the drive shaft would be. The Toyota Prius is able to capture and reuse about 50% of the braking energy.

Unfortunately the components required to control and power manage an electric vehicle are hugely expensive, and fitting them is much more complicated than just bolting on some off the shelf parts. But in theory it could improve the efficiency significantly, and I’d love to give it a try, because if there is one thing this bus is missing, it’s efficiency.

Last month Iain got in touch through Facebook and told me about "Digital Displacement" technology which I’d describe as a “diesel-hydraulic” hybrid system. Instead of a generator, a hydraulic pump is attached to the engine. This then creates hydraulic pressure, which can be stored in a pressure tank full of nitrogen or directed to a hydraulic motor attached to the wheels. The clever part of the system, which has been designed by Artemis Intelligent Power in Scotland, is the fast reacting valves that control how the hydraulic pressure is directed. The valves make the motor much more efficient than anything that’s gone before. The system is computer controlled, so that it acts as a variable speed gearbox. The engine always runs at optimum revs for the power required to move the truck along, and the speed is computer controlled by distributing the pressure to the sophisticated drive motor.

But best of all, the flow of pressure can be revered. The motor can be turned into a brake converting the energy from slowing the truck down into hydraulic pressure, which is stored and subsequently used to drive the car again. It’s much more efficient than an electric regenerative system, capturing and reusing 85% of the braking energy, because moving and storing energy at the high rate a braking vehicle generates it, is easier to do with hydraulic pressure than it is with the high currents generated and the batteries of an electrical system.

It’s a system that’s ideal for vehicles in stop-start driving scenarios, and the best energy savings will be on large vehicles, for instance bin-lorries and busses. Currently the technology has been sold to Bosch-Rexroth who will no doubt trial and develop reliable components first for this heavy vehicle market and then hopefully roll it out for smaller vehicles like cars if the energy and cost savings can be shown to be worthwhile.

There are other advantages over diesel-electric too. The components are lighter, and there isn’t the associated environmental impact of battery manufacture and ultra-capacitors burning out.

Using this gearbox on a large saloon car, Artemis have shown certified fuel savings of around 40%. This is one of those rare technologies that make a massive leap forward. In principle it’s a technology that can be retro fitted to any vehicle, especially trucks. I’ve been in touch with Artemis to ask if they have any components I could trial. The answer was an understandably lukewarm no, but I'm going to persist. This is prototype stuff and I suspect they don't have a license for road going vehicles anymore. I’m trying to get hold of people at Bosch to ask them too but I doubt they will want to let me test out the technology at this early stage, when they have everything to lose if prototype components are seen to go wrong.

The energy storage capacity needed to capture the energy of braking when driving down through mountains is much bigger than that for stop-go traffic so I’m still unclear how big the pressure tank would need to be to make the best use from the slow ongoing breaking energy of my 6 tonne truck descending from the Himalayas.

At the very least I hope the next Biotruck, Biotruck III, will be a Veg-Hydraulic hybrid designed for a tour of the world’s mountains.

Beautiful Energy

True beauty only exists in nature. That’s my stance in an ongoing debate with Rachel, an Israeli in Nepal for Buddhist meditation. Being as she’s Israeli, it’s good that we have something other than politics to argue about. Our one foray down that road leads to the whole restaurant stopping to listen to what turns into an aggressive shouting match.

Our friendship survived, only to be jeopardised again when she had the nerve to tell me the bus needs more colour, and proceeded to give me interior design tips. The idea of beautifying the physical manifestation of my philosophy of non-consumption/waste-consumption, with a lick of paint or some wood stain is almost as odious to me as the unfolding news of the Flotilla murders.

Next she accuses me of being a reductionist, incapable of appreciating art. I don’t see that as bad things. The world could do with more reduction. And anyway, I do appreciate art, for the ideas it presents, but not for it’s pure aesthetic as Rachel thinks I should. Its visual beauty is a manmade construct designed to manipulate emotions, and as Magrite said, C’est ne pas une pipe (This is not a pipe, this is a picture of a pipe). The ideas and history of artists and their artwork can be beautiful but how can you find their visual emotional trickery beautiful. Interesting, thought-provoking, but not beautiful.

Mountains are beautiful, and I don’t get to say goodbye to Rachel because she’s gone before I make it back from a stunning mountain trek which, for 3 days, bombards me with beauty. Not just beautiful landscapes, but beautiful ideas that are totally new to me, and ways of living whose functionality is beautiful.

It’s physically draining. My muscles tremble unable to turn my calories into movement strong enough to lift me up the path, or catch me as I descend down it. The unforgiving futility of dropping 400m and having to climb it again to reach a village less than a mile away batters my mental forces, and still my legs step on, sometimes so slowly I wonder if they are taking me anywhere.

I’ve never known a remoteness like this. My concept of time and distance can’t adjust to the world not being flat. I look at my map, and although the next village is close it could be hours away. The journey could more usefully be measured in terms of exhaustion rather than time, or by how much daylight will be left when we arrive, or by how much rain or sun we’ll get along the way, or how many rests the route will demand.

The second day is 8 hours of trekking, about the same journey time from central Rome to the centre of Milan by car. Walking on flat land you might cover 40km in that time. We finish the day 10km from where we started. Our first stop for rest is an hour into the day. I regain my breath as the sweat grows cold on my back. This would be the outskirts of Rome, motorway driving from here on, time to settle back after the aggression of driving through Roman traffic, set the music up for the journey, maybe a moment to stop for a cup of coffee or coke to fondle and keep me company.

As the crow, and rescue helicopter, flies, we’re never far from “civilisation” but the only way to get there for me is time and energy. I watch the eagles hovering perfectly still in the blustery ridge lift searching out a mouse or gecko on the ground, and dream of how much easier it would be to climb and traverse with a paraglider. Our 8 hour day could be done in 30 minutes with the right winds and an area flat and big enough to land.

There are no areas big enough to land. The only horizontal surfaces are the terracing, but they are so steep that the fields are tiny, barely big enough to lay a wing out, let alone land it. The work to make the terraces, drag a plough around them and move the plough and ox to the next one screams at me through the landscapes graceful tranquillity.

There are no internal combustion machines. It would take more work to get the fuel to them, than whatever work they could do. I’ve been to remote places in the Sahara, places that take days to reach, places that aren’t on the way to anywhere else, places so isolated that people have been transfixed, by my white skin and, in turn afraid then reduced to fits of laughter by my hairy arms and legs. But the difference is that here the remoteness is created not by distance but by difficulty.

The inconvenience of Gandruk and Goripani has created an infrastructure dependent on human and animal power because none of the alternatives we’ve invented are of any use here. It’s an infrastructure that totally sidesteps the things I am familiar with, roads, petrol stations, supermarkets. And it’s really good. It really works. It’s not full of compromises or cop-outs like most alternatives to the industrialised world. The whole way along the route people seem content. I’m sure it’s not utopia, but people are happy.

I’m accustomed to work, effort and labouring being the enemy, and conditioned to work, effort and labour only as much as necessary in order to avoid more work, effort and labour. Along the trek I see everything in terms of the energy it took to create with horror filled eyes. The natural forces that formed these mountains are countered by the forces of men that carried and laid the stone slabs making this never ending path, or by the strength of the mules that carried up the cement for the houses.

My morning maize porridge stares back at me politely reminding me of the effort to plough a field, harvest maize, grind it into flour, then collect wood and chop it for the fire to boil it into porridge. It’s full of calories in so many ways. Slowly my horror turns to the sort of respect that demands emulation, but my body doesn’t yet acclimatise to the pace.

We all have a base level of how physical our lifestyles require us to be, and this must be one of the most demanding corners of the world, but just like anywhere else, the kids play jokes and run up and down the path after each other on the walk to and from school.

They have electricity in places, created locally by small hydro-electric generators, and distributed by steel cables hauled up the mountainside and strung from small but heavy pylons, before being tightened by hand. Occasionally I see small solar PV panels, big enough to charge a radio or torches.

The last hour of the walk back to Birethanti is along 3km of roadworks. They are carving a road into the mountain. We time our run past a JCB on the cliff overhead to avoid the falling rocks and shale. Last month a local man was killed here. Carving a road through any landscape is an environmental holocaust; and in this landscape the destruction per mile is so much higher. It’s a thought that keeps me entertained when I am bouncing the bus over some shitty track, cursing the corrupt politicians for not having built a road yet.

It’s easy to be judgemental about road building, but roads bring healthcare, cheaper supplies and better profits for rural farmers. You can’t begrudge remote communities that. My magnanimity is made easier safe in the knowledge that there is no way man will ever be able to construct a road to Gandruk or Goripani. A thought, which along with the mountains that surround them, and the way of life there, is beautiful.