I had a bag carefully packed and weighed, a ticket for an aeroplane, a reflexive check for my passport every few minutes, patting down my pockets to make sure it was still there. I had all this, but I still I couldn't think of going as going away.
I left rain-washed Oxford with my coat zipped up to my neck and waved green and grey goodbye at the airport as England shrank beneath the trembling, hurtling metal climbing into the air. I slept and I read, and as we got closer, I watched the flight map on the small TV screen that floated a few rows ahead of me, counting off the European cities as we sped south through their skies. As we descended, I pressed my face to the window and let the excitement climb from my stomach into my shoulders, stopping it just short of the smile I was saving for the runway tarmac. The evening was warm as I walked down the metal steps from the plane; the kind of springtime heat that whispers a prelude to summer's inescapable shout. Everything was as I remembered - a collision of comforting familiarity and the novelty of a place so recently added to my story. My colleagues - more deeply and importantly my friends - met me in Arrivals and whisked me into the blue-toned dusk outside, my languages getting confused somewhere between my brain and my throat as we drove towards Martil. In town, skeletons of buildings had been fleshed out in seaside blue and white since autumn, and the strings of lights outside shops and restaurants danced in the breeze. We went to our usual haunt, eating handfuls of hot chips as our main meals cooked and snatches of conversations from the kitchen and the tables outside drifted into ours. Later, we dragged my luggage up the stairs to a different apartment in our familiar complex on the seafront, and I settled myself among crisp white and richly yellow walls, a lantern throwing specks of light at my bedclothes as the traffic rumbled outside. I slept until the swallows flitting through the courtyard grew too loud to ignore, then ate breakfast with the lithe, wary cats who wind around the tables and chairs at a cafe on the street, and occasionally, grudgingly, permit fuss from the men with their cigarettes and newspapers and scraps of egg and cheese. The day passed with documents and discussions; the paperwork of conservation that few people ever see. In the evening, birdwatching led us outside despite the dark clouds gathering overhead, and we walked through Laguna Smir with the wind whipping at us in indignant gusts, wondering at our insolence. Pochards and purple herons and gallinules appeared among the reeds, hovering in our binoculars as the grey sky pressed in and we noted them, excitedly, in our bird book. We left them alone before nightfall, letting them roost in peace, and drove back to town as the day let go of its grip on the sky. The next day would bring monkeys, if the weather was fine, and I could feel the forest waiting there in the distance, hanging at the happy edges of my mind. The roads and buildings smiled their memories at me as we passed them by; thoughts of other things I've seen and done in this place that is a home, as much as it is 'away'. In the clouds that rest on top of the mountains, the solemn waterways running through the town, the wildlife that lives in every corner, the people I know and the strangers walking down the bright and crowded streets, coming here is not going away. It is going home, somewhere else.
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On an October day made strange by hazy skies, we took our usual evening route, to Rio Martil, and the dusty track to the sea. The clouds hung heavy in the air, dressing the sunset in modest pastels and carving a quiet hollow around every sound. A lonely tractor churned dry earth in the field to our left, a small, hopeful block of blue amidst the brown. Birds followed it, an entourage of white catching creatures too small for us to see. As we walked, we kicked up dust and scuffed crunching gravelly stones, and the temperature, cold enough for jackets and warm enough for mosquitoes, licked confusingly at our skin. Plastic bags caught on bushes hung dismal against the green, and the unpaired shoes and bottle caps and a desk with no writer reminded us of the discarded pieces of human lives - all those people we couldn't imagine in the quiet of an evening watching birds.
A marsh harrier flew overhead, appearing sharply dark as it punctuated the turbulent expanse of white. To our right, a heron stood statuesque and poised for action, a pensive guardian of the water, unruffled by the smaller birds who couldn't sit and wait. The buildings in the background seemed to sleep, white walls and accents of pretty blue more suited to sunny days, summer noise, and heat to curl their careful paintwork. A few steps further, town behind us and the sea in front, a little owl skipped, perfectly camouflaged as it landed in the field. Only its eyes gave it away as it sat, beige on beige on brown on brown, moving its head occasionally, eluding our focus as we squinted through our cameras, missing it once, and missing it again. Closer to the end of the track now, the water to our left grew bigger and more open, revealing flamingoes in pink washed out almost to white. In the fading light they seemed to glide serenely, a reproach to the mosquitoes reaching fever pitch around our ears. Reluctant, we gave in to the specks of black that flashed into and out of our reach at blurry speed and stung our skin with burning bites. They followed us as we followed the setting sun, hanging back sometimes, but never for long enough. As we approached the car and the structures of Martil grew bigger, the spoonbills flew across our path, eight of them in line to stop us and make us smile. Then the ibis, strung together in flight like bunting fluttering in a breeze, dragging our gaze back towards the sea as they sped for the horizon. The dark drew in and we leaned our heads against the windows as we drove back through town. The shops had their lights on and neon signs flickered and flashed, inviting in the people walking quickly by. The river was still there, the town wrapped around it, and the peaceful haze still hung - behind us as we drove, but in the forefront of our minds. We arrived at Bukit Lawang at the end of a day that felt as long as a month and as improbable as a dream. The air in the bus was as hot as bath water and we scuffed relief into the dust as we unfolded ourselves for a crowd of men with motorbikes and easy smiles. They helped us with our bags, with our phones, with our stilted language and our tiredness, and we sat and ate rice and vegetables in the shade of a small restaurant awning, gulping too fast from bottles of pink fizz and feeling our brains switch on around the edges. Darma came to find us, his smile preceding him as he entered and, imperceptibly but irresistibly, lifting our travel-tired faces as we followed him back to the road.
We took a motorbike taxi with our thighs and shoulders pressed into the metal frame surrounding us and the road shuddering beneath us, and then we walked, trailing mud and weariness, across a bridge and through a garden, dark green and calming, the sensible cousin of the forest just beyond that enticed and repelled us all at once. In the blank cool of a room untouched by the buzzing, biting tangle of life outside, we scraped gingerly at ingrained dirt and untested memories, the orangutan we’d already met at the surface of it all as we talked with voices cracking about his rescue from the trees. The evening, bamboo cannons and birds, turned into a night of rain and cicadas, thick blackness outside and geckos jaundiced by the electric light indoors, and we slept fitfully with our thoughts. In the morning, we forced protesting feet into boots heavy with damp and took our falsely hearty smiles to breakfast. Darma appeared again, irrepressible enthusiasm carrying us across the swaying bridge and through bewildering streets as narrow as alleys but bursting with everything we could ever want to buy. We crossed the river at its widest point, perching on an inflatable raft guided by ropes, listening to stories about rainfall and flooding, and the history of Gunung Leuser. On the path into the forest, we stood with everyone else, eyes on the canopy until the long tailed macaques swarming past our knees and darting across the sunlit gaps in nearby branches caught our attention, then held it, in slim, quick hands grooming babies with comical faces, and skinny arms taking part in loud juvenile scraps. Appearing as if from nowhere, the orangutan and her baby emerged from the endless towering green, orange hair and graceful movements sweeping everything else into momentary silence in our minds. As we stared, Darma appeared from behind us, the smallest of gestures beckoning us away, ducking under branches on a path that took us deeper into the forest. Shaking off the trees that grabbed at us with thorny hands, we ascended, eyes cast desperately towards every sun-drenched gap in the canopy as it enclosed us ever further. We scrambled, and we tripped on roots and slipped on mud, and we caught up with the macaques, who looked at us with unconcerned curiosity as we lumbered in their effortless footsteps. We scrambled, and we stopped suddenly, and we saw them, at our eye level in a tree engulfed in vines. They could have been the only animals in the world - mother engrossed in baby, and baby engrossed in branches and swinging and stretching a little bit further - a little bit bolder - each time. We remembered how to breathe and our minds woke up, putting the sadness and guilt away for a bit. We turned to Darma and smiled, relief and happiness and enchantment with these beautiful, fast, slow, elusive, bright animals – family - friends – as they settled for a while, picking through the leaves with all the time in the world. With half an eye on the orangutans, always, always watching, we talked to Darma about the forest and the monkeys, and the apes and all the trees, and the palm oil and the sadness and the anger we couldn’t hide. He told us stories perfect and heartbreaking, stories of orangutans released, and those who could never be the same. He told us about rivers and houses and some people we’d met, and so many we hadn’t, and he taught us that we are all in this together, no matter what we think. When the orangutans moved, we moved with them, strolling if we could see them, and tripping, racing, scrambling again if all the orange turned green. We watched them eat and play, and hold each other’s hands, and when she rested in her day nest in the heat of the afternoon, we recognised a mother resigned to the way a baby tests boundaries, dangling out of reach, looking back over one shoulder, testing one little arm in its haze of orange hair. The leaf monkeys joined us for a while, monochrome and aloof on branches way above our heads. A tiny baby, startlingly white, looked at us around its mother’s back, safe in long arms that kept it in place. A small bird hopped in arm’s reach and butterflies passed by, stopping in the sun on their way to somewhere else. Still the orangutans sat, captivating us as the ants bit through our trousers and flies drank the sweat around our eyes. At three o' clock they left the canopy, melting away from us as they made for the feeding platform and we struggled to keep up, and when we found them again they were nimbly, quickly, taking their bananas and turning to leave. Their orange forms got smaller until it seemed as if they were never there. We walked back along the river and thought about orangutans in captivity, in forests disappearing, in chains and boxes and cages, and about the life we’d seen that day. Darma told us there was hope left and he told us what to do, and he told us, breaking through our fear and helpless feelings, not to be angry. Being angry with people won’t help, he said. We have to make people love orangutans and trees and forests, and that’s how things will change. Sumatra's orangutans, as those in Borneo, are in crisis, but there are people that love them, and there are people that care. My thanks go to some of these awe-inspiring people, without whom I wouldn't have had the experience detailed above: to the staff and volunteers of Sumatran Orangutan Society and Orangutan Information Centre, and of course to Darma Pinem, whose wisdom and positivity inspire me still. Please click on the links and support the work of these organisations. Orangutans need your help. I spent May in Morocco. It was beautiful, and it made me think and dream and smile from the pit of my stomach.
It started as it always does, the sand coloured road from the airport flanked by matching hills, and the rattling of the car competing with our conversation as we caught up on days and months of news. Then, a late lunch on the sea front with handfuls of chips burning our fingers and hungry cats winding themselves around the table's legs, and ours. In the forest the next day, we drove through villages, or walked when the path got lost in stones and mud, and talked to people about their dogs; about the fear of rabies and lives lost before. The oak trees painted the hills in swathes of brown, brittle and dry with their leaves lost too soon. We walked amongst them and saw their trunks transformed, more animal than plant under a mass of writhing moss. When we fell quiet to watch the caterpillars suspended above us on fragile silks that danced in the breeze, we could hear them slicing the leaves with their jaws, a ripple of sound that hovered on the edges of our consciousness, perfectly pitched like a horror film in sunlight. At the house in Lahcen, the dogs darted back and forth around our feet, too excited to know what to do or who to go to first, and as night fell and draped the mountains in silence, their barks still carried on the inky air. Another day, we went to Tangiers to meet important people and tell them our ideas. On our way back, we stopped at Assilah and walked the warren of streets, spotting flowers and graffiti, stark and pretty against endless eggshell-coloured walls. Tiny kittens caught our attention, all sticky eyes and dirty fur and thin, scratchy cries, in contrast to market stalls piled high with nuts and sweets and jewellery. Curled as if against the cold on a day bright with brassy sunshine, they staggered towards our legs as we crouched to see them closer. A man outside his house called inside for help; his daughter brought them food as we turned reluctantly away. On our way back to Tétouan we stopped by the sea, wetting our feet and running away laughing when the water felt too cold. The wind lent venom to the sand as it whipped against our legs and battled against the beach, lifting and stirring it into ribbons that caught shadows as they fell, and drawing shifting patterns from the sea to the road. The month went on and the days took on happy patterns. In town, we woke up to swifts and the sea and worked quietly in pale light that hung with the dust brought back on our boots from days in the mountains. When we left the flat - to go to the forest or the calcareous mountains; for trips to the pottery market piled like magic on the road to M'diq; or to see the fishermen in their dark, cheerful office by the sea - the scenery painted itself around us with a beauty never worn by familiarity. Sherbet coloured houses perched shyly against the land, trying not to detract from the patchwork of brown and green, and the ever present mountains, dressed in different colours with the changing weather, towered stately and reassuring in the background. In the forest, we woke up to cockerels and dogs, strong coffee, and breakfast spiced with cumin. We counted turtles in the chill before the sun pulled itself over the tree tops and observed the monkeys as they crossed the road, turned up the leaf litter, played with their babies and fell asleep on precarious branches in the dappled light before lunch time. Sometimes we stopped to break rocks and place them across mud-soaked tracks, ignored by steadfast grazing mules who, tails swishing, acknowledged only the flies gathering at their flanks. At other times, we stood shin-deep in impossibly sweet daisies by the foundations of our centre and talked about the future, or climbed on to the roof and watched the sunset streak the sky. There were days when we thought we would run out of money and days where the car broke down and days where there was too much to achieve and too little time to do it, but every day we laughed, and when the sun said goodnight to the trees, grazing their leaves with gentle orange fingers that reached glowing to the ground, we felt happiness place a calming hand on our chests and smooth the creases in our minds. When it came time to go, there were new leaves on the oaks, bright and hopeful, shaking off Miss Havisham as the grey curtains of old silk fell away. There were baby macaques - some brand new and tiny, and some that wobbled bravely through their giant forest on their own. There were friends who felt like family and work that felt, in the sadness of goodbye, like love. I spent May in Morocco, and it was beautiful, and it made me think and dream and smile from the pit of my stomach. I spent May in Morocco, and now it feels like home. |