Meditation, Zebra Steak and Doughnuts in the Sky

The rocky attractions of Marlboro Land, spotting tree lions in Tanzania, and comparing genes with orangutans in Borneo

Bill Waterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, had to come up with appropriate illustrations to depict the incredible intergalactic journeys of Spaceman Spiff. Often, losing control of his ship, our hero landed in the weirdest spots in the universe. Like… Utah?

Watterson’s acknowledged debt to Utah has been our reward—the comics look fabulous. But wait till you see the real thing.

After hours of driving on the unsettlingly straight and empty roads of the United States, a city of stone rises on the Colorado Plateau. This is Monument Valley, part of the Grand Circle: a rock nation that includes the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Natural Bridges… in short, the finest, strangest works in stone that you find on our planet.

Pieces of the picture have become cliché. The Marlboro Man was photographed there, buttes in the background. Westerns seem incomplete without shots of the Mittens (Monument Valley gives us a pair: one for each large hand).

But change the line of sight, and the place becomes unrecognisable. Go deeper in the valley, and the landmarks play wicked tricks on you.

When my brother-in-law Basudeb walked off into the deceptively flat wilderness that faced Goulding’s Lodge, the monuments in the distance, I was a little worried. What was the need for this nonsense? Why not have a beer on the deck and take in the view? Or look for faces on the surrounding rocks?

Alert park officials spotted him—and asked him to buy a ticket. He’d left his wallet back at the lodge.

Okay. And what, the gentleman asked, was the purpose of his visit?

“Meditation.”

“Fine, go through.”

For the Navajo, the native Indian tribe whose property all this used to be, Monument Valley remains a place of worship. It’s fairly obvious why from a great distance, but close up, in the recesses of the valley, the imperceptible process of erosion is still perfecting shrines of staggering craftsmanship and scale.

The Navajo have evocative names for them: the massive aperture on an overhanging rock, through which you giddily see clear blue sky, is ‘the eye of the sun’; the place where a great hole on the rock face whistles perpetually is ‘the ear of the wind’. Elegant elders, a hundred feet high, stand tall in a wise and solemn congregation at another site. In an auditorium, the acoustics have evolved so that a whisper carries everywhere.

Nature doesn’t always work as slyly as the wind in Monument Valley. To the north-west, Bryce Canyon’s ‘hoodoo’ population gets a makeover every year because of rain and snow. Hoodoos are spires/fairy chimneys/thin rock men with unstable heads, whatever you want to call them. But somehow, through a process that depends merely on the different rates of erosion of different parts of a rock, there stand chiselled sculptures that have an unmissable spirituality.

If you are ever in the US, get to Highway 163, and then get off it. Let Spaceman Spiff take over from then on. There’s a weird and wonderful world out there.

1979. Tanzania. I don’t know if it was a member of my family, or another, who first raised the chorus: “Oii dekho!” I’ll be charitable and say it was perhaps a Gujarati with a Bengali accent (naturally, having lived in the UK and East Africa) in another open Land Rover who did it. The Nikon wielders from Japan were not pleased. More importantly, the almost mythical ‘tree-climbing lion’ gave up his perch—a robust branch on the banks of Lake Manyara—and came languidly down. The photo op was over. But at least the beast was real: I had seen it up a tree.

We had gone to Lake Manyara as part of a safari to the Ngorongoro area in northern Tanzania. Stopping at hillstations like Arusha and Moshi, from where we could see the not-yet-melted snows of Kilimanjaro, a regal, lonely mountain.

I’d rate it my best holiday ever, its high point a descent into the Gnorongoro caldera. As an 11-year-old, I thought life couldn’t get any better or more exciting. Odds are that I was right. Imagine walking on the 260 sq km floor of a colossal volcano that had collapsed onto itself. And now, imagine sharing that space with one of the densest lion populations in the world. And leopards, rhinos, elephants, buffalo. And dazzling herds of zebra and wildebeest that make the great migration from Serengeti every summer in search of food and water. I think we reduced the zebra population by one the night we were there. There was zebra steak on the menu.

Years later, when I would tell my friends the story, I said the meat was kind of tough and added the ‘fact’ that it had stripes. At least one, Tushita Patel (who later wrote a wonderful cookbook), believed me for a ridiculously long time. She didn’t include the recipe in her book, but from all accounts, the zebra population is doing fairly well in Ngorongoro.

The crater is special because of its physical features—it’s like a fortress walled in by the rim of the collapsed mountain. But it is self-sustaining enough to have one of the toughest lion populations in Africa. The abundance of food means that these cats are bigger—they defend their fortress very well against intruding prides. In nature, if the king eats well enough, then his subjects are pretty well fed too.

Last year, the BBC revived its Last Chance to See series on endangered animals. An internet clip of it—a flightless parrot trying to hump a scientist’s head in New Zealand—is a great hit, but the bigger story is that if we don’t see these animals now, we may never see them.

I know that the snow cap on Mount Kilimanjaro is now smaller, frayed by droughts, but apparently on the mend if recent reports are correct. I know that the tree-climbing lions of Lake Manyara are probably more difficult to spot. And I’ve read that the African wild dog isn’t around in the crater anymore.

I am glad I got my chance to see what I did when I did. I dearly hope it won’t be the last chance I had.

The last (and only) time I visited Sarawak, we were first taken to a slightly touristy ‘living museum’ kind of place at the edge of the rainforest.

The exhibits were Iban tribals, famous for rice wine and head-hunting (the first tradition continues), demonstrating life in their bamboo houses. There were little blow-dart competitions—you had to nail a Coke can from 15 ft to win two nights at a resort (easy). There were displays of traditional crafts and musical instruments from tribes such as Sarawak’s Orang Ulu. As we approached the man playing the sapeh (think mandolin), we heard the delicate strains of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. If I were to go back now, would I hear Sheila ki Jawaani? I don’t know. And really, to discover that Bollywood had penetrated the nearly opaque canopy was only a source of temporary amusement.

The real deal was the rainforest itself. Its complexion so rich that you half expect vigorous dark blood to ooze if you puncture a leaf. Its soft floor sliced by snaking rivers. And its oldest inhabitants—‘man of the forest’ or orang utan.

Orangutans are our most distant cousins among the great apes (our closest relatives). By some estimates, our genomes match a modest 97 per cent, whereas chimps and humans are 99 per cent similar. But in the rainforest, the 3 per cent difference is erased by the simple device of naming: orang means ‘man’. Orang Ulu, for instance, means ‘upriver people’.

If you have the fortune to watch orangutans even in the controlled environment of game park feeding routines, you will see why they aren’t considered very different by people who share the forest with them. The males pretend to work, show off their strength (the ranger might tell you that these guys are 8–10 times stronger than men, but this is a myth; a factor of two is closer to the truth). The females tend to the young, teach them manners. And both genders swing.

Humans haven’t been very kind to the other primates of Borneo. Apart from the usual habitat encroachment, there was also a culture of eating them. One gentleman said he was weaned off the habit only once he discovered a whole hand saying hello from his gravy. 

For over a hundred years, Sarawak was ruled by White rajahs. The first of these chaps, James Brooke, was born in Banaras and got to Borneo circuitously in 1838. By 1841, through textbook divide-and-rule, he wrested Sarawak from the Sultan of Brunei. In Kuching, the capital, there’s colonial architecture scaled to the Brookes’ ambition. In the forest, a magnificent butterfly named after the rajah might sit on you if you’re lucky. This could happen during a dip in one of the clear, cool pools that you reach once you’re out of the surreal cave system in Mulu, with its giant chambers and near lethal stench of bat droppings.

But there is compensation at dusk with the bat air show. Millions of bats leave the caves in the evening to go foraging. In groups that write numbers and draw shapes in the sky. Figures of eight morph into spinning doughnuts. Helixes appear, disappear. Night falls. And now, if you look up from a dingy drifting down a slender river, you see only a sliver of sky. The forest covers the rest.

About The Author

Avirook Sen