The Peace Correspondent (30 page)

While the boatmen set to work on a gallon jug of brown tuba, a potent liquor made from the sap of coconut trees, a guide takes us to the nearby caves. Leading the way by lamplight and flashlight, he shepherds us through a maze of stalactites and stalagmites. Where the cavern narrows, we squeeze around tight corners and crawl on our hands and knees. When we stop to rest, we hear only our panting, the hissing lamp and bat squeaks.

Back in a larger cavern, the guide points out oddities such as “the igloo,” a small, sparkling white mini-cave; “ice cream,”
a cone with a white flat top; the stairway to heaven; and a “Madonna,” who resembles the sacred, rather than the current profane rock version. After hours of spectacular spelunking, we emerge from the dank caverns, squinting like moles at the sun. Compared to the netherworldy silence of the eerie caves, the jungle seems clamorous with insects screaming, birds calling and wind rustling through the trees. The boatmen polish off the tuba and, with cicadas screeching at us, we drift back downstream, back to the plane.

A geographical oddity awaits at the next island, Bohol, where we park the plane and embark on a rough 55-kilometer ride along a bumpy potholed road into the interior. This is rural Philippines, with sleek, belligerent fighting cocks tethered in yards, carabao (water buffaloes) and stooped women in straw hats working the shimmering green rice paddies. Aged carabao cowboys, bush knife swinging from hips, ride along the roadside. Bright bougainvillea and hibiscus hedges line village yards and copra dries on the ground.

The road gradually leaves the agricultural land behind to climb into the mountains and through mahogany and rattan forests. Our destination is the so-called Chocolate Hills, which turn brown when their thin grass covering dries in the summer. Today they are minty-green. Climbing steps up the highest hill, we survey the mounds stretching to the horizon.

“They look like drums,” says the lady diplomat.

“Like upturned cooking pots,” remarks the Canadian woman.

“Like a field of perfect breasts,” murmurs the journalist.

At the end of the week, we bounce through the air over the mountainous Cuyo Islands in Northern Palawan Island, set down along a palm-fringed rough dirt runway, and taxi to the “terminal” -- a thatched hut on stilts. This is the most remote place yet. After gulping delicious coconut water from big green nuts, we walk across the sugary sand and knee-deep through warm sea water to a seagoing banca (outrigger canoe).

Isolated El Nido Resort, nestled in a little cove on a black marble island of its own, is not a typical slick getaway. Built like a native village with communal toilets and showers, its basic cottages are set in a row on stilts over the water, along the beach and clinging to the cliff.

Although it has snorkeling, water skiing, wind surfing, this is essentially a diving resort. Schools of athletic Japanese clad in brightly colored dive suits and outfitted with the most expensive equipment and underwater cameras set out twice a day on the great outriggers to nearby dive spots. We non-divers explore El Nido island aboard a small motorboat, passing sheer, black marble cliffs and tiny, perfect white beaches like settings from a travel agency brochure. Turning in to a crevice in the cliffs, we squeeze under a tiny gap in the wall, ducking our heads, with just inches to spare. Inside is a fantastic lagoon of deep, jade green water surrounded by sheer cliffs jagged and black as sticks of charcoal. It was, I thought, the perfect lagoon, lacking nothing. Until back at the resort, when a Filipino waiter asks if I saw Brook Shields in the lagoon.

That evening, we set off fishing for our dinner from a banca, trolling, then bottom fishing in the gathering dusk. Sunset this night is as dramatic as any I have ever seen, the sky awash in reds and purples, bright as bougainvillea, the clouds tinged a soft, flamingo pink. It is a moment of perfect peace, the water slapping against the boat, swallows chirping from nests high on the darkening, brooding cliffs.

Peace, but no fish. We return in the cool late evening to the resort to eat chicken and pork.

Next morning, a 5 a.m. wake-up call of jungle noises drives us out of bed, and we return by banca to the dirt strip for our last departure. There, two village boys on a primitive sled without wheels, hauled by a forlorn carabao, come to see the strange apparition of a flying machine. Our pilots crisply run through the pre-takeoff checks, rev up the twin turboprops and release the brakes. We surge down the rough runway, engines roaring,
kicking up a trail of dust, lift off just before the land gives way to sea, and make a banking turn into the sky, back to Manila. Three pairs of wondrous brown eyes watch our departure to a mysterious, far-off world.

THE ancient Indian sun hangs like a saffron disc in the sky to our left as we leave New Delhi. Squatting figures with brass jars of water line the horizon, beggars rise along the sidewalks like rag dolls come to life. Sacred cows graze in the streets, ancient women in thin saris hunker in the shade making dung patties for fuel, babus in loose dhotis (loin cloths) and suit jackets carry brief cases and umbrellas to another day of bureaucrating. Mother India rises to another chaotic day.

The 15,652 kilometers from Vancouver to Tokyo, Bangkok and New Delhi on Japan Airlines was easy. The 203 kilometers to the ancient holy city, Agra, prove more complicated.

“Take me to the Taj,” I instruct Mr. Murkejee, my driver. “Yes, sahib,” he says, sliding behind the wheel of his grey Ambassador, a copy of the classic 1959 Morris. My driver speaks commendable Subcontinent English.

Two-wheeled tonga horse carts, three-wheeled scooter taxis, fearsome Sikhs in magenta turbans astride khaki Enfield motorcycles, brapping Tata buses spewing black smoke and noise into the morning air and trucks garishly decorated with Hindu gods race down Delhi's broad streets. As we jolt along the unfinished
road, I envisage approaching the legendary Taj Mahal through the red sandstone arched gate, its perfect white dome reflected in the long pool, as it is traditionally photographed and described by romantic travelers.

“You no smoking?” Mr. Murkejee asks, lighting up a beedi, a cone-shaped cigarette wrapped in a leaf. Soon the car smells of cloves, like an old dental surgery.

Elegant script on the back of every decorated truck exhorts, unnecessarily, “Horn Please.” Mr. Murkejee honks happily, his brown sandaled foot stabbing at the brake pedal. “To drive in India, sor, you must have good horn, good brakes, good luck.” A good Hindu reincarnationist, he swerves to avoid birds feeding on grains of rice on the road.

Past the Siddhartha Ferro Alloy Ltd., road signs warning “Liquor Licks The Driver,” and billboards touting Compa Cola, Thums Up and Disco Duble Seven soft drinks, we escape the crowded capital -- for the crowded countryside. Bullocks and bicycles with up to seven passengers, flocks of goats and white oxen with painted horns pulling carts now block the narrow road. Ominous, scrawny-necked vultures with wings like broken umbrellas hop clumsily as they land on the road to squabble over some flattened carrion.

Country maidens with big clay jugs clustering at village wells coyly let slip their veils to peek at passing cars. Camel drivers park their humped mounts at mud huts to squat on charpoys (string beds) sipping tea. Can we stop at one of these for a break. “Of course, sir, is coming,” Mr. Murkejee nods, pulling into a government rest house with souvenir shops, trimmed lawns, a camel to and a mahout posing with his elephant for photographs.

“Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,

Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;” (Kipling)

India's heat and dust has indeed raised a thirst. Time for a
Rosy Pelican beer.

Down the road again, Mr. Murkejee points out the Hare Krishna world headquarters and Mathura, Lord Vishnu's birthplace. Hindu India has plenty of gods to go around.

Outside Agra, my self-appointed guide escorts me through Sikandra, the emperor Akbar's multi-storied, minareted mausoleum, a “little Taj” where monkeys impudent as street urchins cavort among the fusion of Hindu and Muslim art and architecture. But the Taj, the marble monument to love Emperor Sha Jahan built for his favorite wife, Queen Mumtaz Mahal? “Coming next, sir.”

At the Dayal Bagh, headquarters of the Radha Soami sect, an offshoot of Hinduism, we join pilgrims in khaki sackcloth to gawk at the white marble temple still a-building, clothed in scaffolding. The Taj?

“Yes, Sahib,” Mr. Murkejee says with that little subcontinent, broken-necked head wiggle. Passing Agra, my driver-cum-guide parks the Ambassador before the elaborate tomb Empress Nurjahan built for her father in the 17th century, a forerunner of the Taj. But not the Taj. An English speaking Indian guide explains my demands to Mr. Murkejee. Amidst much shaking of heads, I hear the words “Taj” and “fort” repeated. “He will take you now,” the man promises.

Crossing the Jamuna River on a narrow railway bridge, we plunge into the midday melee of Agra, a confusion of animals, people and machines. Half-naked men in towel turbans unload rice bags from trucks amid sadhus, yogis, Gandhi-ji clones, gurus, young Americans and Europeans in white muslin dhotis (the Kharma Kola kids), black water buffaloes and white sacred cows. The hot air in the narrow alleys is pungent with coriander, cumin and camel dung.

“In the epic 3rd century BC Mahabharata, this town was called Agrabana or Paradise in Sanskrit,” Mr. Murkejee recites. “In the 2nd century, Alexander the Great's geographer Ptolemy showed it on his map as Agara. Moghul emperor Akbar made Agra his
capital and built the massive red sandstone Agra Fort.”

“Very good. But go straight to the Taj now,” I demand.

“Of course, sir.”

We next stop at the Red Fort where, like a mad dog or Englishman, I go in the hot midday sun to explore the serrated battlements, flanking bastions, turrets and machicolations. Through the latticework, the elusive, far-off Taj Mahal floats like a burnished opal along the sandy riverbank.

Outside the fort, a horde of mendicants, snake charmers, fakirs, touts, peddlers with wiggly sandalwood snakes and “Kama Sutra postcards” of the Khajuraho temple rock carvings swarm around with more grasping hands than the multi-armed goddess Kali.

Resigned that only the fool of Kipling's “epitaph drear” would hustle, or hurry, the East I crawl back into the car to await Mr. Murkejee's next move. We drive to the bazaar of souvenir shops and carpet emporiums, the Koh i Noor Jewelers, Krishna Footwear and the Agra Marble Works where craftsmen labor over spinning emery wheels.

“Sahib would like model of the Taj?”

“Sahib would not like model of the Taj.”

“Only looking, sir, not buying.”

Inlaid marble tabletops, lamps, chessboards, stone elephants and 100-pound scale-model Taj Mahals line the shelves of the cool, damp, tombstone-like basement storeroom. After a cursory only-looking-not-buying, I exit, as popular as purdah among feminists.

By late afternoon, we finally approach the Taj -- and drive by, to the river. “Very nice here, sir. You take boat ride.”

Baba Shree Kant, a young entrepreneurial holy man with red-powder third-eye-tikka marking his forehead and long matted hair, offers us his wooden boat. The holy man, his ancient boatman and I pole out onto the sluggish river for an unusual rear view of the magnificent Taj Mahal. We watch silently a moment as the river ripples against the boat and the plop, ploplop, plop
of women washing clothes echoes from the far riverbank.

The young holy man elbows me and winks, pointing out two Muslim girls calling from the far side. The only flesh they display are hands, feet and face. “We can giving them a ride?” he asks, as excited as a teenager cruising the suburbs in his dad's car.

“What will they say at the temple, a good Hindu holy man with Muslim girls?” I chide.

“Oh, no, sor, it is not like that,” he chortles as he helps the draped sisters aboard.