Dancing With the Bear - Upstreampaddle

Dancing With the Bear
An On-line Book by Liam Guilar
Presented by the Idaho State Univ. Outdoor Program. Designed & edited by Ron Watters.
Dedicated to the memory of Heather Leese.
Text and photographs © 1999 by Liam Guilar and are used by permission. Links to these pages are
welcome, but if you wish to reprint or reproduce significant portions of it, you should first obtain
permission from Liam Guilar at lguilar@bigpond.net.au.
Introduction to Dancing With the Bear
N 1993 THREE Australians and one Englishman took their kayaks to two rivers in
what used to be called Soviet Central Asia. As far as we can ascertain, it was the first
time kayaks had been taken into Uzbekistan and Kirgizstan, and probably the first
time kayaks had been taken down the Chatkal and Pskem rivers. *
First descents are really only worth claiming if they make the sponsors sit up and take
notice. As there were no sponsors involved and as the Russians have been hurling
themselves down these rivers in a bizarre variety of home made craft, the above claim
should be treated with the disrespect it deserves.
What we did do was travel in Russia and the Central Asian republics at a time when the
dust caused by the breakup of the USSR had still not settled and the Central Asian
republics were struggling to find their feet. Unlike the journeys described in most travel
books about Russia, we did not travel as guests of the state, chaperoned by nervous
officials, nor did we travel as individuals only able to make random contact with passing
strangers. We travelled with a group of Russian rafters whose attitude to the rules is best
described as indifferent. In Moscow and St.Petersberg, living as guests of these
hospitable people, we were able to see some of the reality of life in modern Russia. To
get from Moscow to our rivers we took a three day train journey my guidebook said was
closed to foreigners, and which a more up to date one describes as dirty and

unsafe. Travelling on the fringes of legality in Central Asia- we were "smuggled" across
the Kirgiz border, and fell foul of the police in the ancient city of Samarkand- we were
able to see a way of life in the hills that was untouched by the tourist trade. We returned
to Moscow in the middle of a political dispute which ended when Russian tanks shelled
the White house.
This book is the story of that journey, and the things we did and saw.
It is worth stating right from the start that there are two ways of looking at what we did.
The first is to see it as an achievement: a footnote to a rather small page of history, but a
foot note nonetheless. There aren't many rivers in the world worth kayaking that haven't
been kayaked, and most of the world's wild places have not only been visited but
developed to cater for people like us who like throwing ourselves down rivers in small
pieces of plastic. We ran two very difficult rivers, without any incident, and established
good relationships with a group of people who up until ten years ago were seen as a
Threat To Civilisation As We Knew It. Travelling unofficially, and sometimes illegally,
we were able to see a way of life that has vanished from the "western world" before the
developers get in and turn the rivers into places for western rafting yahoos.
The other way of looking at it is to see it as an expensive, slightly unusual holiday which
provided us with the opportunity to escape all the worries that usually beset us and, for
five weeks, allowed us to do not only what we enjoy but what we are good at doing. The
opportunity for such a combination is rare. There was no great purpose to our journey
other than our own gratification, and if we had never gone, the world would not be a
poorer place.
You may choose which version you prefer.
If you want an objective report of an expedition, this isn't it. The objective report is filed
with the Royal Geographical Society in London. This story is subjective and personal. I
am not an expert on Russian Politics and it is over ten years since I studied Russian
History. I am slightly embarrassed by the fact that I had never read a poem by Pushkin or
finished a novel by Dostoevsky. I have not even attempted to amass a wealth of
fascinating information about the lives of the villagers we met. I have no bibliography
and have avoided footnotes except to record the source of a quotation or an alternative
reading. I was only in the country for five and a half weeks, and although we crammed
enough living into that to pack a book, it does not make me an expert in anything, except
perhaps in filling the unforgiving minute.
Having nailed the colours to the mast, so we can't be accused of flying under a false flag,
we should raise the anchor, hoist the mainsail, sing yet another hearty chorus of the
Drunken Sailor, and leave the safety of port. And I promise to avoid such longwinded
metaphors in future.

What I did learn in the C.I.S. was that the Chatkal and Pskem, for all their idiosyncratic
beauty, are merely parts of the one River: begun when a scared fat boy blobbed down the
river Wye in a bath tub of a boat. A series of opportunities, taken or rejected over a span
of twenty years, meant that my arrival on the banks of the Sandalash river with three
Queenslanders, five Russians and a Blonde German Aerobics Instructor, was not only not
unusual, but somehow appropriate, even inevitable.
___________
Footnotes
* As far as we can ascertain. It is always possible that someone slipped down the river before we did.
Chapter 1: Apprentice Years and Dancing Masters.
FOR AS LONG AS I can remember I have wanted to go on an expedition. The genuine
variety: in which you take your kayaks to a place where they don't speak your language,
where the local officials are truculent and hostile and where, after surmounting amazing
political and logistical problems, you launch your kayaks on beautiful, demanding white
water rivers which have never seen kayaks before; rivers with endless rapids and scenery
that is mind numbingly beautiful, dotted with villages peopled by inhabitants whose
generosity is the stuff of legend.
The source of this ambition is easy to trace.
I was born in Coventry. It was, and still is, huge and grey and far from any
mountains. Its sad excuse for a river was a green slimly thing that sludged out of a
kayaker's nightmare and glooped though the city as part of the canal system.
Although my grandfather had been on the first scout camp neither of my parents went
camping. My dad had two saving graces (amongst all his other estimable qualities); a
love of books and an interest in other countries. When I was knee high to a grasshopper
he let me loose in the city's excellent libraries where I raided the history sections. My
earliest heroes were Drake and Magellan and Scot. (I dumped Scot from the list when I
realised how incompetent he had been. As an undergraduate student I added Sir Richard
Frances Burton: linguist, author, translator and traveler, my hero, and lost interest in the
others.) I became convinced that travel was not only exciting but worthwhile in a way
making money or being rich and famous could never be.
Unfortunately most of the people I admired had all been dead for centuries and while my
peers had football players and rock stars for contemporary role models, I had none. Of
course there were still unclimbed mountains but somehow that didn't, doesn't, appeal to
me. My aunt took me camping when I was nine, and I plodded up my first mountain in
wellingtons, convinced I was about to die of heat stroke. I remember being violently sick

in the tent and burning my hands and wanting to go home. Mountaineering is about
reaching a specific objective. As the Zen saying goes, you eat so that you can be hungry.
As I grew older my dad pushed H. Rider Haggard's books under my nose. I doubt if
anyone reads these now, but then they were considered the kind of books boys were
expected to read. The hero was always travelling into some strange land where magic and
romance was possible. Best of all, somewhere, hidden in the mountains, in a place you
could only reach after a hard and perilous journey requiring great physical strength and a
professorial control of arcane lore, there was an ancient city, and riches beyond your
wildest dreams (as the crooks in the books used to say) and the most beautiful woman in
the world waiting for only you. If you lived in a city like Coventry and went to an all
boys school it was hard not to find the idea attractive.
On Sundays there was a program called The World About Us. It was something my dad
always watched, like Tom and Jerry or the Saturday afternoon wrestling. One night they
showed a film of some kayaks. I think it was Mike Jones and crew on the Grand Canyon
but I wouldn't like to be dogmatic about it. Here was an adventure. Here were people
doing something that looked interesting. I decided that was what I wanted to do.
My parents obliged by sending me on a YHA canoeing holiday. In 1971 or 72 I spent a
week plodding down the river Wye in a two seat kayak with a glass fibre hull and a
wooden deck. The worst part of the week, apart from having to be with a group of
strangers who all seemed to be perfectly at ease with one another, the most dangerous
thing that happened, apart from some of the meals, was a capsize drill in a racing Kayak.
I couldn't get out and for years afterwards was terrified of capsizing. On the Wye I was
only happy when I could see the bottom. My partner came from the north of England and
I couldn't understand a word he said, not that he said much apart from "I'm not paddling
any more." He did teach me the first truly obscene joke I'd ever heard. I was eleven or
twelve years old and terrified. And it was the best
thing I'd ever done.
I dreamt about the Wye for years afterwards, and
paddled around on lakes and lochs in various
borrowed kayaks. Serious canoeing remained a
fantasy, as realistic as one of Haggard's heroines,
until I went to Birmingham University.
Birmingham is even bigger and greyer than
Coventry, and hell is a winter evening in Selly Oak,
with all the buses on strike and no way of getting
out of the city.
My first attempt to put an expedition together
occurred after I'd spent three years at university trying to balance a desire to go paddling
against the demands of Medieval Welsh and Anglo-Saxon.

I had been lucky to meet Bob Smith. On a crowded day at the Fresher's conference I
signed up for recreational canoeing. Two weeks later, on the day of the first class, I
decided to stay in the library. At nineteen I disliked crowds and groups of strangers, and
was terrified of not knowing the system, any system, even something as simple as getting
a locker key for the pool. I dithered but at the last moment bit the bullet and went. I was
the only one there, because I was early, and Smith, grinning broadly like a parody of a
bronze god in a Charles Atlas advert, was probably as nervous as I was. I have often
wondered what would have happened if I had spent the day reading The Wandering
Scholars.
I would have missed out on an excellent education. Bob was one of those rare people
who didn't treat enthusiasm as a dirty word, and there was always one more rapid to run
or one more story to tell. Within a year we were in America, on the River of No Return,
an amiable monster of a river in the Idaho wilderness. For ten days we did nothing but
paddle what then seemed huge rapids, eat extravagant meals and wonder at the toilet
arrangements. The next year we went to the French Alps where the toilet arrangements
were an equal cause for wonder among the Americans from ISU who accompanied
us. Possibly suffering from too much cheap red wine I decided I wanted to paddle the
Yukon river, all one thousand seven hundred and something miles of it. Why I should
want to do this escapes me now, but after leaving University I suffered from the bizarre
delusion that, unknown and unemployed, I was going to convince people to part with a
huge amount of money so I could go on a glorified and expensive holiday. As I was not
going to do a first descent, and the possibility of dying spectacularly was rather remote, I
failed to raise the money.
Five years later, married, ready to move to Australia, I went back to the States. The Main
Salmon didn't seem quite so terrible, though the toilet regulations had become more rigid
and the food was, if anything, even more extravagant than I remembered. After the Main,
Jerry Dixon, one of the world's great individuals, talked me into going down the South
Fork of the Salmon with him. While I suspect we vastly overrated the difficulty of the
river, the journey was what my history tutor would have called a "Seminal
Experience". Dixon, "shoes and shorts, a shirt if you need it, no water, no food, go light
go fast go far," and I moved effortlessly down the river ("If you need to ask how hard it is
you shouldn't be there") with everything we needed in the backs of our boats. There was
nowhere in Britain where such a trip would have been possible, and I became hooked on
the idea of long, lightweight journeys made by small groups. Cast of thousands
Kayaking has never appealed to me, and Dixon and the South Fork confirmed my
prejudices.

My second trip to the states was an apprenticeship in long river journeys, and having
learnt my paddling technique from Smith and practised it on numerous low division
slaloms during the winter; I studied under two masters of the art. Ron Watters, who I'd
met on the first visit and gone to the Alps with, is the sanest river runner I have ever met,
and if I had to chose to go down an unrun river in the middle of nowhere, would be one
of only three or four people who'd be an automatic choice. The great thing about Dixon is
his refusal to accept boredom. He is the child in the candy store on the first day of the
holidays, clutching his penny and trying to decide what to buy, and unable to make up his
mind, deciding that he wants to try everything. One drunken night on the South Fork, we
discussed unrun rivers, unmushed trails (Jerry lives in Alaska) and unclimbed mountains
and I got the idea that Patagonia would be a good place to visit.
In Australia, thinking about Patagonia, Jeff Clarke and I ran the snowy river. As trips go
this isn't very demanding, but it was winter, and it rained for two of the three days we
were on the river. On the third day the rain stopped and it started to sleet. The upstream
wind was so strong that Jeff swore he was blown to a standstill. I remember fantasizing
about hot chocolate and by the third day the fantasies were erotic in their intensity. As we
got off the river the sleet finally stopped and it began to snow.
Back in Sunny Queensland, Jeff talked me into the idea of going to Papua New
Guinea. Patagonia would be cold and the main attraction of PNG was warmth. I was
never that enthusiastic about the project; I don't like rain forests, snakes, spiders, hot
weather or violent people, but when Jeff lost interest I had spent so much time and energy
researching and writing to people that I felt I had staked something on the successful
completion of the trip. Common sense took a back seat and bloody mindedness
prevailed. This is necessary in planning a trip but also dangerous when you cross the
dividing line into the unrealistically insane. Every team I put together that could handle
the rivers fell apart. Mothers, Girlfriends and Wives tried to talk us out of it. We kept
meeting people who had just returned from the Highlands with bullet wounds in their
stomachs, or stories about how the rafters had been hijacked and had all their gear stolen.

And though I met a couple of old men who had spent time in PNG on the rivers there,
they both made it sound more like a commando raid than a kayaking trip.
Everybody I spoke to, whether they knew anything about it or not, said it was too
dangerous. Finally, in desperation, I asked a friend if she knew of anyone who would
go. Try Robertson she said, he likes adventures and he's crazy enough to try
anything. Fortunately she was right. He does and he is.
The end result of the New Guinea Expedition That Never Was was that I met Trevor, and
through him Jackie and Mark, talked the Australian Geographic into supporting my
expedition with a grant, and learnt a great deal about searching for sponsorship. But
before it had officially folded, even as the Courier Mail manufactured a picture for its
front page, I had started to write to Sasha Statiev in Moscow, and was planning to go to
what used to be the Soviet Union. I was determined that this time I was going. I had
failed twice and that fact lingered like a bad smell. Not only would I get to visit Moscow,
that haunted house of my adolescence, but at the end of the river, I was going to
Samarkand.
End of Chapter 1 . . .
Chapter 2: Why?
THE PART OF the expedition the public hears about, in newspaper report and magazine
article, is a mere fraction of the whole. Much more time and effort goes into getting it
together than is ever spent on the trip itself.
Exactly how I came to meet Sasha Statiev is one of those bizarre chains of coincidence
that makes me feel justified in adopting a totally fatalistic attitude to life.
In a rare spasm of altruism I had helped to found a canoeing club. I have always
been wary of these monsters. In my experience most clubs consist of little cliques who
don't get on with the other little cliques. They spend most of their time having meetings
about the colour of club jerseys or the provision of hot dogs for the next race rather than
actually going paddling. Still, together with some other local paddlers we formed a
canoeing club to "improve the recreational possibilities in the area". If this sounds
pretentious, it wasn't, it was a well meaning move on the part of the other people
involved. I should have known better. Soon I was involved, as secretary, in seemingly
endless meetings about the colour of the club jersey and the design of the club's float in
the local carnival and how we could make money at the come and try canoeing day on
the local dam. If we went paddling as a club it was to the dam or to the local river, which
is long and brown and flat.
As soon as the club was up and running I decided to resign. A couple of weeks before I
did I received a small package addressed to the secretary of the Ipswich canoe club. It
began:

Dear Friend,
One sixth of the world's land surface is yours to explore...
and went on to detail a variety of wild and remote rivers in the former Soviet Union
which the writer claimed he could take me to.
For a cost.
I still find it difficult to believe how Sasha got my address. In Moscow or Berlin he had
found a tourist brochure advertising Ipswich. (This is only funny if you know Ipswich).
He had written to the tourist board requesting the names and addresses of any adventure
groups who might be interested in rafting in the USSR. They had sent back the address of
the canoe club, which was making a lot of noise at that period, and the Scouts. I've
always wondered how the Scouts reacted. At the time I remember being curious rather
than excited. I wrote back. Sasha replied and his letter mentioned a river called the
Zeravshan, which sounded vaguely interesting, and then he dropped the magical name:
Samarkand. Had he searched for bait to hook me with he could never have been so
successful.
The name sums up all that is romantic about distance, an historically resonant symbol of
the inaccessible. In the four hundred years leading to 1850 only two Europeans are
reputed to have visited the city. If we all have our own Everests, then most travelers have
their Samarkands, and we dream of reaching them, trading the present against our hopes
of arrival.
Planning a trip is like being an adolescent in love; it's the idea and what it represents that
is attractive, not the particulars. And Samarkand was everything you could hang your
dreams on, like some distant beauty: familiar enough to be enticing but alien enough to
remain remote. Trevor was quite happy to switch his plans from a New Guinea trip that
was becoming increasingly ludicrous to an area of the world haunted by the ghosts of
some of history's largest figures. Alexander, Marco Polo, Genghis Khan, Timur-I-Leng,
had all been there. And now we were going too.
If I had realised it would take me three years to get there, I might have hesitated. But I
doubt it.
* * *
Getting a team together wasn't easy. It never is. I had learnt in the French Alps that
building a team from the best paddlers available is not a good idea. It's more important to
have a group of people who can live and travel together. I didn't want hairboaters out to
make a reputation, or gun boaters who would risk their lives and everyone else's when
sanity said walk this rapid. I wanted a group of people who would be flexible enough to
deal with what promised to be a wonderfully bizarre experience.

So I sent out the invitations. For a variety of reasons I wanted a mixed Australian and
American team. Trevor Jackie and Mark would provide the Australian contingent
because, on instinct, I trusted them.
My first meeting with Trevor and Jackie was a little daunting. After a humorous phone
conversation about the possibility of going to PNG they turned up at my house. They
brought their stack of videos with them and we sat in my front room and watched Trevor
hurl himself over a variety of awesome looking waterfalls. I really didn't know how I was
supposed to react to all this. There seemed to be a radical dichotomy; the mild mannered
man in rather respectable doctor type clothes and the yahoo lurching over the lip of
huge New Zealand waterfalls. Since then I have come to realise that most of us suffer
from a similar kind of professionally induced schizophrenia and Trevor's is only a little
more obvious than that of ninety nine percent of the population. The mild mannered
doctor, treating his patients with care and concern above and beyond the call of Medicare,
becomes Waterfall Man at the weekend, boldly falling where no one has dropped before.
Jackie Kiewa is a rare article in Queensland: a female paddling regularly at grade three
and above. Unlike America or Britain, where you can meet many female paddlers, there
are very few in our corner of Australia. The fact that she is also a fine rock climber has
proved invaluable on some of Trevor's more entertaining portage lines.
I met Mark Silburn on the way to the Nymboida River. Actually I was crammed up
against him in the back seat of Trevor's car. I remember thinking he didn't look like a
kayaker, and then thinking I didn't know what a kayaker looked like. He is one of the best
paddlers I have seen, despite an apparent lack of formal technique, with a fine eye for the
line down a river. This is offset by a rather casual attitude to being thrashed in huge
stoppers which sometimes makes me feel a little nervous. There are very few people I
would care to follow down a rapid sight unseen who I would also feel comfortable
sharing tents and rooms with in some out of the way part of the world, but he is one of
them.
While I wrote to Sasha and he wrote back, with a patience and humour that was both
reassuring and attractive, I went looking for sponsors to offset the cost of the expedition.
Most people who are interested in expeditions have heard stories about Fred
Fandoogleberry who raised ten thousand dollars in a week so he could climb Rumdoodle
2 and we all assume that if Fred can do it so can we. While planning to go to New Guinea
I had gone looking for sponsorship with the conviction that some one, somewhere,
wanted to sponsor a group of kayakers to go to a place everyone said was not a good
place to go to, to run rivers that were described as murderous on their good days. With
the aid of a new word processor (no paddler should be without one) I had kept Australia
Post in business for a couple of years.
Any potential sponsor has every right to ask what you can deliver in return for their
money, and what I could offer, at that stage, wasn't much. Besides, going after
sponsorship is a delicate ethical business. I was always aware that there are so many

worthier causes than a reckless desire to go and paddle in the wilderness. I live in a crazy
place, where the ambulance service has to hold a raffle to put defibrillators in every
vehicle but where the state Government is prepared to underwrite the staggering losses of
the Gold Coast Indy car race. It makes looking for sponsorship a dubious exercise.
Most of the big companies I contacted did reply, most of them politely, one or two in
such a way that disappointment was offset by amusement. A company which had been
using white water rafting in their publicity told me that they could see some connection
between what I was planning and their advertising but they had already put together an
advert using a kayak. When I later saw this piece of foolishness I didn't know whether to
be disgusted or amused. They had preferred to put a dummy in a kayak and then fake it
shooting a small drop into a pond to using real dummies, like Trevor, hurling themselves
over twenty metre waterfalls.
I have been told on numerous occasions during my life that I am unrealistic, but one thing
I did learn during the New Guinea experience was that realism is a very relative
term. The advertiser preferred a ludicrous dummy that turned the whole advert into a
joke. When the Courier Mail wanted to put the grandly labeled Central Highlands Kayak
Expedition on the front cover they wanted an action picture, so they faked white water on
the Bremer river (which is flat and brown and poisonous) by having a hoon in a jet ski
whiz up and down in front of me. See how close you can get to him, urged the reporter,
and I sat there helplessly, as the hoon roared closer and closer, with a glory look in his
eyes. When I discussed filming the New Guinea trip with one man he said: Of course,
you'll have to have birds of Paradise. There aren't any where you're going, so we'll film
them at Taronga park zoo in Sydney and cut them in after we've finished in PNG.
Attempts to find sponsors for the Russian trip were equally hopeless. This time I got a
response to my request for assistance from the Queensland Canoe Federation but they
said they couldn't see how there could be any benefit to them in our trip and wished us
luck. The company who used the kayak and the dummy were equally polite but non
committal. I suspect that telling them their advert was a national joke didn't help my case.
* * *
In my naivety I had seriously underestimated the amount of work involved in putting
such a trip together. The Americans finally had to opt out because they couldn't get leave
at that time of year. Sasha wrote to say that sadly he was emigrating to Canada and had to
go before we left for Uzbekistan. The film crew I had been chasing turned out, for
reasons I never discovered, to be incapable of delivering the goods.
And perhaps it is this that makes so many fine expeditions die stillborn. The newspapers
and those who aren't involved will ask you why you want to go. They don't know that the
why of it is irrelevant. The answers are usually too vague, too personal, and usually
essentially too selfish to be enlightening. Even if you could articulate them they wouldn't
understand. There is a fundamental gulf between those who do and those who don't

which no amount of good will can bridge in the clipped banalities of a newspaper
interview or polite coffee cup conversations. It is the same gulf which exists between the
adolescent in the throes of their first serious infatuation and all the worldly wise adults
who are telling them it's just a phase they're going through and they'll get over it and all
the other earnest and boring sayings adults use at this time which are meaningless to
those involved.
What matters in terms of expeditions is not why you want to do it, but how much you
want to do it. When the people you talk to tell you you're crazy, that you're going to die,
that they're disgusted that you intend to leave your wife and children, that they had a
friend who did something like this who wished they hadn't; when the letters you write
aren't returned, and the ones that are, are impersonal form letters where they, that faceless,
infuriating, insulting, blank unanswerable "THEY" haven't even bothered to chose
between the sir/madam on the letter; when it means staying up when you're exhausted to
write one more letter on the off chance the recipient might have that piece of information
you want or might be talked into giving you that small advantage you're looking for;
when the film crew turns out to have been a waste of time; when your partners seem to do
nothing but stall and prevaricate; when you realise life would be so much easier if you
just opened another stubbie and flopped down in front of the television and watched the
football...you have to ask yourself do you want to go badly enough to keep beating your
head against this brick wall entirely of your own making and choosing, until you break
your head or the wall caves in? Why you want to go is really irrelevant. How badly do
you want to go is the crucial question. I found a slogan on one of those inspirational
business tapes that seem to be so ubiquitous: "If you meet an apparently insurmountable
obstacle, the obstacle must give way: FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION" I made it into a
poster and stuck it to my wall.
Desperate to get fit, as all the films I'd ever seen showed that real expedition paddlers
were super fit athletic types, I even went to the local gym. I suffered the free fitness test,
and the lady who did it added up her figures, (Hers was fat free) consulted her charts, and
told me that I was only just below the average fitness mark. I had eight months before I
was going to leave. Ho Hum.
I started to learn Russian, by correspondence. This is almost as ludicrous as it sounds. I
knew that having survived the medieval welsh of Dayfd ap Gwyllum's poetry I could do
it. But the course didn't seem designed to make learning this tortuous language any
easier.
There is a bizarre comic poetry to most foreign language text books which suggests their
authors’ posses a wicked sense of humour cleverly hidden under a concern for
grammatical form. Why else would they have their students recite: "It is not my mother
who sings; It is your mother" if not for their own perverted amusement?
When I was at school learning French, in lust with my French teacher, the class would
stare, glassy eyed, at the pictures on the screen and chant: in French, "Here is Jean Luc,
Jean Luc is in the bathroom, he is taking a shower. Oh says he, the water is hot." I didn't

give a damn about Jean Luc in the shower. The French teacher in the shower was a
different matter. I wanted to be able to say: "You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever
seen. Let's find somewhere private to discuss my infatuation."
Had I been taught French like that I would have been a far more diligent student.
My Russian would have improved rapidly if I could have learnt essential phrases like:
"Help I'm Drowning" or "Swim you silly bugger, swim". Instead I found myself
repeating, ad nauseam, "it is not my mother who is singing, it is your mother who is
singing" which I knew would be useful in the villages of Central Asia. Unfortunately no
one has ever written a Russian Language course for Byron reading folk song singing
kayak paddling English teaching medievalists and until that day prospective linguists will
have to battle with useful phrases like: "My brother's teacher is an Engineer. He sings
well."
Trevor, to his credit, signed on the dotted line and went to night classes at the University.
* * *
After two years of letter writing we moved towards setting a date. Suddenly time was in
short supply. The gym went first. Then the Russian study. It was more important to
check up on visas and tickets and keep hassling the film crew, continue sending letters
out and spend ages on the phone than to tell the world that my brother has a teacher who
sings beautifully. Listening to one of my sons reading I realised that I wasn't even at
grade one standard in Russian. Given the time I had left before we flew out I wasn't even
going to be Kindergarten standard. To confirm my suspicions, when Trevor tried out
some of his Russian on me I couldn't understand a word he said, and realising that he was
the one attending night classes with an instructor and I wasn't, I gave it away.
Finding Brent Maccun at Red Bear Travel was a mixed blessing. Finding any one who
didn't say "You're barmy" was a relief, and finding someone with a knowledge of Russia
who specialised in organising travel within the country was a bonus. But Brent had his
own Russians who wanted our business and so every time I talked to him we seemed to
be at cross purposes. He probably thought I was an idiot and I grew increasingly
frustrated with the seeming impossibility of having a straightforward conversation with
him without having to defend my decision to stick with Sasha and his crew. It would
have been so much easier to let him arrange the whole thing but it was an irrational
decision, based on a sense of loyalty that had no realistic basis except for the fact that I
had actually met Sasha Statiev and I knew that I could trust him.
There were times it all seemed ridiculous and I had trouble believing we were going. My
paddling was hitting rock bottom in more ways than one. I was planning to go all the way
to Russia to paddle a grade five river when I was walking grade three rapids in Australia.
There was an attempted coup in Moscow, then a civil war in Tadjikistan closed down the
Zeravshan. Jackie wanted to go in June, to Siberia, but I was dreaming about Samarkand

and held on, even when it looked as though I might have to go on my own. I was so
determined by this point that I seriously asked Sasha if they'd take me if I turned up on
my own.
Sasha suggested that with the Zeravshan closed to us because of the civil war we should
go to the Chatkal and Pskem rivers. He sent me a copy of an article by Earnest Seeman
who had rafted the Chatkal with him. This described the river in glowing terms but
detailed his problems with "Vodka soaked-Horse riding shepherds," who had stolen some
of their equipment. The Chatkal sounded beautiful but the Pskem, "deeper, faster, more
powerful" sounded daunting. Mark kept pointing out that if we described the rivers we
usually run according to the Russian system of counting rapids over grade three they too
would sound horrendous. Jackie, however, was worried. She was to remain worried until
we reached the river.
There were also times, naturally, when I felt like giving up. Only a natural bloody
mindedness kept me going, that and a determination that having failed twice I wasn't
going to fail again. Failure was not an option. I was going to Samarkand.
* * *
Things only started to fall into place as departure day approached. JAL, apparently
impressed by an article I'd written about a descent of the Herbert river, offered to sponsor
us by giving us a fifty kilo baggage allowance, and in so doing saved us approximately
three thousand dollars each. Quality Kayaks in New Zealand, impressed by a copy of our
video of the Herbert offered to do a deal on La Luge Kayaks, which Trevor and Jackie
jumped at. I had been warned that dealing with the Russian embassy would be like
"trying to make love to an elephant." Never having had the opportunity to pork a
pachyderm I approached the task with a certain amount of curiosity. The people at the
Russian Embassy were polite and helpful, and despite all the rumours we had heard to the
contrary, swift and efficient.

We had one more meeting of sorts, in violent, unpredictable surf. Ironically, this was
probably the best preparation we could have had for the Chatkal. I discovered that my roll
was still bombproof and the equipment I had brought to replace my old gear stood up to
the thrashing it received. It was a wild and joyful morning, and I watched Mark getting
thrashed with an amusement that stopped abruptly when it was my turn to be put through
the tumble drier.
After the surf Trevor sat in my room pumping Mark full of a variety of inoculations, and
I fielded final questions about the trip. Even at that late stage the plans seemed more
optimistic speculation than credible timetable. The journey divided itself into three
phases. Phase one was getting to Moscow, Phase two getting to the rivers, and Phase
three was paddling them.
It never occurred to us that we had left out phase four; getting home.
The journey there was going to be harder than the rivers themselves. Going to Central
Asia was not going to be like hopping into the car and driving to Northern New South
Wales or flying to New Zealand or Nepal or North America where they're set up for
people like us. Where we were going they may not have seen Kayaks before. That was
part of the attraction, a shot at making a little bit of kayaking history.
I knew JAL could get us and our boats to Moscow. After that, everything was nebulous.
We had been told to avoid the internal planes, as they were reputed to be unreliable and
dangerous, so we had opted for a three day train journey the guide book said was closed
to foreigners.
I had been working on the assumption that our boats would travel with us on the train,
and Sasha had told me that in the absence of a baggage car we would have to buy a

sleeping compartment for them. The idea of putting my boat to bed and reading it a bed
time story was appealing, but now Brent's Russians were adamant that the boats would
never fit in the sleeping compartment. This left us with no guarantee that we could get
our boats from Moscow to the rivers.
From Dzhambul, if we got there, there were three hundred miles of bad road to the river.
We would paddle the Chatkal, 110 kilometres with 51 rapids graded three and above,
vodka soaked horse riding shepherds permitting, then the Pskem, with its three kilometre
portage, then we would split up. Trevor and Jackie were to go mountaineering while
Mark and I moved on to Samarkand. After that we would take the train back to Moscow.
For three years I had been moving at an infuriatingly slow speed towards the expedition,
but now the pace began to pick up and time seemed to compress and then disappear. At
work things were becoming unbelievably hectic, and though I thought I had it under
control I was too worried about finishing everything before I left to concentrate on the
trip. With the visas in our hands and our tickets in my top drawer, there was little else I
could do. People who knew I was going kept asking me if I was excited or scared, but I
was too busy worrying about grade twelve marking to think about grade four rapids.
There was a time when I was sitting facing a pile of papers that refused to get any smaller
when I realised with frightening clarity that the trip was impossible. Gibbering thumb
sucking imbeciles aren't allowed to leave the country.
I wasn't too tired to be amused by the variety of reactions to the trip. Most people
assumed I was going to compete in something because they are programmed to see sport
as competitive and competition as something very healthy and wholesome. At first I'd
patiently try to explain that I wasn't going to race anyone, but after a few unsuccessful
attempts I gave up. Had I been doing something socially useful; like ploughing up and
down a chemically infested swimming pool in the hopes they'd raise the flag and play the
national anthem at the end; or if I'd been contributing to the progress of civilisation as we
know it by running around a field after a ball, everything would, apparently, make sense.
If I wasn't trying to win a medal or a ribbon, if I wasn't in a Team Representing My
Country, perhaps I was going to make money out of this. That too would make it
respectable. And if I wasn't going to do that, perhaps it was really very dangerous and I
was either very brave or very stupid. You could see the banner headlines forming behind
their eyes: Australian Kayakers drown on Killer Central Asian rapids.
There were times I felt like wearing a placard:
No, I'm not competing.
I'm going to be in debt for a very long time.
No Indian drowned on a portage.
And I do most of my training in the library.
There was a television documentary about Soviet Nuclear testing in Kazakstan and one of
my colleagues, concerned for my safety, walked into my classroom in the middle of my

lesson to tell me about it. My dad rang one morning to tell me that there was an
epidemic of diphtheria, malaria and cholera in Moscow. One of my students asked me if I
was scared of getting shot. It seemed an ironic question when almost every night on the
news there was a report of yet another senseless killing in Queensland. The world seemed
dark and cramped and bitter that August. There was little laughter, just rage and anger
and an overwhelming helplessness. Two men broke into a house, tied and gagged a 17
year old boy, stabbed him 44 times and slashed his throat. I had nightmares about his
eyes.
One of my students looked at me quizzically and asked, but Mr. Guilar, don't you have to
be fit for this kind of thing. I would carry that like a mantra through Central Asia, and
every portage; every time I had to lift one of those huge Russian rucksacks or haul my
boat up and down a mountain side, her words would echo in my head and I would evoke
the bemused look on her face.
A growing understanding of the scale of what I was going to be attempting gradually
began to seep through in the oddest of ways. The week before I left I snuck out with
Gordon Hemphrey for a surf while Bronwen was in hospital recovering from the birth of
their baby. As I tied my boat back on the roof rack I turned to him and said: "The next
time this boat is on the water it'll be in Kirgizstan." That night, walking home from the
local shops, I suddenly realised the implications of what I was doing. Someone finally
tore back the curtain and said look! And there it was, a vision stretching away composed
of images of the Kremlin, the Aurora on the Neva and stark mountains and white rivers
leading to the blue domes of Samarkand.
I had a sudden feeling of vertigo. Like a diver realising the true height of his proposed
dive the true enormity of my own ambitions became apparent. And I shook all the way
home.
As it was I didn't think about packing until the Thursday, and finally left it to the Friday
night. I wasn't ready. Mentally, physically or emotionally. But you are never ready for
something like this. You just have to take a deep breath and step off the edge of your own
tidy world.
End of Chapter 2 . . .
___________
Chapter 3: Life as a Piece of Baggage
PUTTING MY YELLOW Mountain bat on my shoulder I carried it through the doors of
Brisbane International Airport. My eldest son struggled with my kit bag, determined to be
part of this adventure. Mark was waiting with Trevor, who'd given him a lift to the airport,
beside a pile of bags and another bat. Then the men at the JAL desk, who were polite and

friendly and helpful, took my boat and it was whisked away to become a piece of
baggage. See you in Moscow said Trevor, and rushed off to go to work.
We loitered over airport coffee, which was foul, and good-byes, which were no better,
and then taking a deep breath entered the labyrinth and became pieces of baggage
ourselves.
In Cairns airport, our first stop, the announcer's Japanese reminded me that I would be
spending the next five and a half weeks swimming through foreign languages, few, if any,
which I spoke. I was consciously hoarding little signs like these, trying to convince
myself we really were on our way. After all the years of waiting, I was shocked at my
own lack of anticipation or excitement. I felt exactly like a parcel, or how I imagine a
parcel to feel.
It all seemed unreal, or perhaps too real; as though I'd expected some sense of the unusual,
some heightened feeling, a tingling in the mind or the imagination. But it was all flat and
terribly banal. The plane droned and bumped along, the clouds passed beneath, the video
screen kept us up to date with details of the flight; 889km\h, 10,670 metres (35,000 ft)
external temperature enough to turn you into freeze dried meals in the batting of a frost
encrusted eyelid. A little white aeroplane dragging a fuzzy red line departs a green PNG
heading north. It was as banal as picking sprouts. It is easy to forget that travel itself does
not inspire awe; only travel at the expense of personal effort. The hardest thing we had to
do was decide if we wanted red or white wine with our meal.
The plane ride was everything a plane ride should be. We twitched and trembled and
droned along. The food was plentiful and good, given an added piquancy by our belief
that in Moscow we would be facing food shortages and limited and unappealing menus.
The stewardesses were attentive and smiled beautifully.
I had packed my bag with a stack of books, hoping to avoid spending hours regretting all
the things I would like to have said before I'd left but Mark and I started talking about
books we'd read. For some reason Yaeger put in an appearance, my memory suddenly
shuttling backwards and forwards between the flight and the South Fork of the Salmon,
where Jerry had told me of Yaeger and introduced me to the idea of "Pushing the
Envelope." Yaeger and the space race would stay with us for the rest of the journey, the
ultimate one out yak jockey, the greatest kayaker never to paddle a boat.
We had traveled 1,773 kilometres in our little technological marvel with a lack of
physical suffering which those early Victorian explorers would have considered sinful.
What was the point of going on an expedition if not to suffer? How could you return to
civilisation and say: Well, we walked across Africa, found the source of the Nile took
some pictures and came home. It wouldn't do at all. One had to suffer. After staggering
across the arid scrubland, savaged by wild animals, poisoned by vicious bugs and blinded
by the bite of the binga binga fly, one must collapse gratefully into the first puddle of
stagnant water to quench ones burning thirst, seeing, (despite being blinded etc) the
bloated carcass of a maggot ridden beef bobbing in the pool.

Later, having been forced to mate with the elderly rancid queen of the local tribe and her
sixty two syphilitic servants, you could return home and write your memoirs for all those
armchair travelers who wouldn't know the nympopo in oohlabalongaland to the squidgy
in Kensington if they fell in it. God forbid your journey should be as professional and as
effortless as those colonial scoundrels Lewis and Clarke who managed to cross an entire
continent with the minimum amount of fuss loss or anguish. You have to eat your boots,
or your companions, or not make it back at all; otherwise you'd end up like poor old
Amundsen.
Having solved the problem of the Northwest Passage, he says "Ve vill to the South Pole
Go" and off he goes and skis there and back with less fuss than your average family
skiing holiday to the Alps. Returning home he finds he's a villain because he didn't get
lost, lose half his team or lie down in a tent and write long tearful diary entries when he
was ten miles from food and safety. NO. Suffering is what expeditions are obviously
about. Ask Ranulph Fiennes. He wore the same pair of underpants for many weeks while
dragging a sledge across the ice. If there isn't any suffering, how can you distinguish an
expedition from a holiday? The truth is you can't.
For we are the heirs to the gentlemen adventurers, we are the "explorers" who insulate
themselves from the land they travel through, in cultural and technological capsules, who
are really nothing more than tourists. When I was an adolescent I remember how people
would preserve a distinction between the traveler and the tourist. It is a piece of semantic
egotism. We are all visitors. Columbus discovering a land people had lived in for
centuries, or Speke finding a lake people had been washing and pissing in since the dawn
of time; nothing more than gentlemen on holiday.
I decided to get involved in some serious suffering training, so refilling my glass with red
wine I settled down to watch the in-flight entertainment.
First on the screen was the Japanese news. The presenters all looked like Asian versions
of Australian newscasters, who I suspect all look like clones of American ones. They had
the same hairstyles, the same clothes, even the same earnest body language. The news
itself was bizarre; familiar in its rhythms and images yet incomprehensible. My favourite
part was the Japanese base ball. I didn't need to be able to speak Japanese to know one
coach wasn't happy, he threw his hat on the ground, stamped his foot and stalked along
the edge of the field. The players, presumably on the other team, were ecstatic. They
raced around hugging and grinning in the mud with joyful abandon. I wondered if body
language would be as easy to read in Russia. I was to learn it wouldn't be.
There was also an item on Moscow. Hoards of Russians enthusiastically eat American
ice cream in what I would later recognise as the Arbat. The camera got in close as they
experienced the true heaven of having to choose from 32 different flavours. We agreed
this was far more entertaining than the usual news from Moscow and made a welcome
change to the grim prophesies of starvation we had been dealing with.

This was followed by some programs devoted to Japanese technology. One showed the
production of film and cameras without the involvement of human workers. The other a
new way of reprocessing plastic food trays (which are apparently a big problem in
Japan). In the latter program there were humans. The worker, who looked like he had
dressed for the operating theatre, seemed to spend his time moving plastic bags full of
plastic trays from one stack to another.
I couldn't help wonder what kind of day that man could have. What kind of conversation
could he have with his wife when he returned home and she greeted him with his saki and
the Japanese equivalent of "How was your day dear?" Did he spend his day wanting to be
somewhere else, wishing it were evening, wishing it were the weekend, wishing he was
someone else anywhere else but where he was? Like the people I used to work with in
Woolies, who spent their weeks making plans for the weekend, ignoring the dreadful
repetition of their lives, where each day was a mirror image of the other. Or had he
achieved some kind of Zen mastery of his own boredom and treated his work as a form of
prayer and meditation.
I don't want to live like that. I want to enjoy each minute of my life. I want to pack it to
overflowing with ideas and sounds and sights and things done and doing. I'd spent so
long planning for this trip, I knew it would soon be over, soon be a memory.
Ah, a genuine twinge of suffering, the training must be working. I was beginning to have
my suspicions about the in-flight program.
I suspect that somewhere there is a man or woman whose job it is to plan this
entertainment, just as somewhere in the world there must be people who design build and
repair letterboxes. (What a job. Can you imagine it? Can you imagine explaining it to a
Martian?) Perhaps there are even people who do research on passenger boredom, writing
erudite PhD’s on the subject. I began to wonder if the juxtaposition of items was entirely
random or whether or not it was an extremely subtle form of puzzle that needed to be
deciphered.
What came next was a program about golf.
Now I have nothing against Golf; if you enjoy it, do it. What I don't understand is how
something so purposeless as hitting a small ball into a hole can attract so many people, or
why the people who do it can earn so much money. What socially useful function does
it serve? What skills does it foster which can advance civilisation as we know it? How
could you explain it to a Martian. "I made 800,000 dollars hitting a little ball around a
park while poor Fred Fandoogleberry stacks millions of plastic trays and dies of brain
death, earning less money in his life than I can earn in a week."
This golf program followed a small group of friendly smiling people in a round with their
local friendly smiling professional. They missed the green and, smiling, apologized for
not using the club he had recommended. They missed the hole and, still smiling, allowed

him to wrap his arms around them, wiggling their bums in synchronised ecstasy as he
swung their arms up and down.
The man in front of me was gleefully showing his companion a magazine with photos of
naked women in it. It seemed an odd magazine to have available on a flight. But I
couldn't work out which sight was more disturbing.
There are people in the world who think that Kayakers are strange. I wonder if they play
golf? Perhaps they make letter boxes for a living.
We arrived in Narita on time, and queued in the best of airport traditions to get shore
passes. Outside, in the humid night, we made two simple mistakes that revealed our
inexperience. The first was to step back, politely, to allow an elderly Japanese couple to
get on the bus. The rest of the queue accepted the invitation and piled on in front of
us. We were left to crouch in the stairwell.
We were also naive enough to marvel at the way the Japanese packed themselves into the
bus. On the short, cramped bus ride to the hotel we seemed to be passing through a set for
a science fiction film about a futuristic urban nightmare. The lights were smudged by the
fog and everything seemed to rear upwards to distant, vague neon signs. As we arrived at
the hotel a car was leaving. The porter bowed so low that he went past the ninety degree
mark and held it there, blood rushing to his head until the car had disappeared. It would
have been ironic anywhere else.
The hotel, while neat and clean, and well stocked with free combs and soap and towels
and everything else except free food, was grey and ugly. From the outside it looked as
though it had been built out of Lego blocks by someone who was not only colour blind
but who put ease of construction before grace or style. Out of the window of our room
there was a vast field of shaggy trees, but after admiring their greenery for a while I
peered round the corner and saw another ugly Lego building. The hotel was full of
English grannies on some sort of Granny convention and New Zealand students who
were loud and foul mouthed. In their own ways they both reminded me of home.
We braved breakfast, fearing Russian food shortages more than the prices in the hotel.
We eat enough, then calculated the cost in dollars and went back for more. The room
was filled with people eating with a common air of studious determination. In our case it
was due to the effort we were making to fill up before Moscow and do justice to the bill;
in everyone else to the demands of eating with chopsticks.
We checked out, after writing postcards, which seemed innocuous enough at the
time, and headed to the airport in the company of some Americans who were talking
about last night's karry oakey (Annie's sister?) and an Australian girl called Knneeekol
Getting into Tokyo airport is a complicated business. I couldn't see myself putting my bat
on my shoulder and just walking in. The bus was stopped at the entrance and the white
gloved officials politely checked tickets and passports. Then we were in the airport, a

genuine international airport; crowded, vast, confused, with people milling in bright
knots. While Mark struggled with a telephone system specifically designed to be simple
to operate and therefore impossible to fathom unless you posses a PhD in computer
electronics or the kind of mind that finishes the Times crossword in less than five minutes,
I wandered around the halls. There were flustered families, with dad going into a spin
because the tickets weren't in the pocket he put them in last week, and tour groups yelling
at perpetually smiling guides, and of course, the inevitable skiers.
The highlight of our wait in the airport was seeing our boats being loaded. At least they
were on the way.
On the plane we sat beside a Japanese academic off to a conference in Moscow. He was
mildly scared. He'd heard about diseases and food shortages, and was a little worried
about travelling there alone. When we asked him if he spoke any Russian he said "Only
Samurai Russian". We were intrigued by this phrase, which he explained was his own
way of saying he knew "survival Russian". He had a dictionary, a few words, infinite
patience and the desire to communicate. With this, he claimed, he would survive. He
was to prove to be perfectly right. Mark and I were to become experts in Samurai
Russian, and devotees of its cult.
While I struggled with our companion's English we were joined by the purser. She had
only recently heard that Moscow was in the grip of an epidemic of a variety of unpleasant
diseases. None of her crew had been inoculated. As she had an enforced stop over in the
city for a week she was unhappy. We made soothing noises, having been injected against
all the diseases we should encounter and some that might try and sneak up on us
unnoticed.
When we had checked in we had been told that there were no more window seats, but we
were occupying the seats by the door, which were good for leg room and allowed us to
see out over the wing. Unfortunately all we saw was the coast of Japan. We flew across
continental Russia and all we saw was cloud. After hours of this cloud, we were
descending to the green fields below. Brown and muddy, drab colours in the overcast sky.
The planes parked by the terminal looked seedy in the drizzle. Welcome home to Europe.
Rain and dirt and dinginess.
End of Chapter 3 . . .
Chapter 4: Moscow
MOSCOW AIRPORT is a dingy place; dirty, shabby, more like a tired railway station
than an international airport. Dingy and intimidating. After the almost antiseptic
cleanliness of Tokyo it seemed drab and second hand. This is the side of Europe I had
forgotten after seven years in the Australian sun; the shoddy almost dismal quality of the
light.

The passport controllers were pallid, juvenile blonde boys in uniform who all looked like
they needed a good meal. They took a long time to scrutinise each passport. While we
waited it was impossible not to feel uncomfortable, even guilty. This was Russia; after all,
this is the place where we had always been taught that Bureaucracy is rampant and brutal
in its indifference to the needs of the individual, where we could not expect justice and
fair play, a place where bribery was a way of life. As if to confirm this a sign on each
booth said: "The offering of gifts to the passport controller is illegal."
And then the baggage room. If anyone wanted to create a system that would induce
paranoia, they should study the international airport system. You wait, watching the
baggage going round, waiting and waiting, and the longer your bags take to arrive the
worse your imaginings. We knew the boats were on the plane, but was our other
equipment? Mark found the JAL representative who told us our boats were arriving and
two scrawny punks in baggy green overalls carried my boat into the hall. "Tweny dollar"
one said. "Bring the other one," I said. They did and against my better judgment I paid
them. At which point we reminded ourselves that fifty dollars was supposed to be the
average monthly wage in Moscow.
The man at the customs desk seemed bored by the whole thing, and only called me back
to write "Kayak" on my declaritisia. Dragging our boats and pushing our trolleys we
forced a path through the waiting crowd. At least Victor, who had taken over the
organisation of the Russian side of the expedition, had no difficulty recognising us.
Parting with our boats, which were whisked away, we were introduced to Julia, who was
to translate for us, and followed her outside to wait for Victor's car. There's always an
abrupt jolt stepping out of an airport. You leave the labyrinth. You move from structure
to chaos. Confusion. Cars milling, policemen, who everyone seemed to be ignoring,
waving and whistling, cars pulling over to park on the pavement. Grey European light,
drizzle and cold, and the damp smell of dirt. We piled into Victor's car and set off along
the Leningrad-Moscow road towards the city with Julia translating and questioning us.
We both got the feeling that she wasn't translating everything Victor said and at times she
seemed to be arguing with him. Mark was convinced they were married; they had the
body language of a bickering couple.
The road was broken, pot holed, flanked by birch trees and broken down cars and cars
stopped to sell things and brown petrol bowsers selling (black market?) petrol. We passed
grim blocks of high rise flats with washing draped hopefully on the balconies like sad
little banners, past a street market where there were numerous melons in the rain, and
finally up a narrow mud splattered side street, past a huge pile of overflowing rubbish, to
an old apartment block.
The paint was white and cracked, the building's number hand painted in black, the path
overgrown. We reached the darkened doorway through torrential rain, then paused to
bring our bags. Inside the unlit entrance hall four men sat on the dirty stone steps, a
discarded cigarette throwing sparks near our feet. The lift was small, old, a European
nightmare, big enough for two people and two bags. So I followed Victor up the stairs,

glad the landings were unlit, leaving the strange debris at the bottom of each flight of
stairs just a vague mess that needed avoiding, not identifying.
After the size of Australian houses, even the cheap ones I inhabit, the flat seemed tiny. A
clothes stand on the right, a narrow corridor leading to a room full of discarded scuba
gear and snow skis and heavy duty woodworking equipment, where we dumped our
bags. The hallway is narrow parquet, uneven and noisy. A right angled turn leads past
the toilet and bathroom to the kitchen. Off the kitchen is another room made up as a
bedroom. The Kitchen is small, the table barely big enough for four adults crammed into
a corner by the window which looks out over the road.
In Moscow people were being killed for flats like this.
The table was laden with food, and there were two ladies waiting for us. The younger
would be our cook for the week we stayed in Moscow, the elder her mother who had
cooked our dinner. The meal was excellent, giving the lie to the stories we had heard
about Moscow food shortages. After the meal Victor introduced us to the Russian
expression: "No talk without an open bottle" and we discussed our plans for the weeks
ahead.
As far as I could make out there had been a little creative misunderstanding going
on. Our boats would be flown to Dzhambul, and that would cost us a little extra. There
would be five Russians on the river, and a German girl who spoke English and
Russian. One member would be joining us for the Pskem, and he would bring Trevor and
Jackie's climbing gear with him.
Victor, who would not be with us on the river, seemed organised. Dressed in a denim
jacket and jeans and a fancy grey patterned shirt, he wouldn't have looked out of place in
Surfer's Paradise. Julia didn't translate everything he said; she paraphrased, sometimes
merely engaging in dialogue. The tone of voice and body language suggested that the
dialogue was not about clarification.
"No serious talk without a bottle". We were too tired to do anything but sip our vodka,
much to the ladies' amusement. Over pineapple soft drink we discussed our plans for the
week, paid Victor and were left to contemplate infinity. As Tanya and her mother did the
washing Victor informed us that the hot water had just been turned off in this block of
flats. I didn't know whether to believe him or not but it made having a bath an exercise in
creative contortion.
I tried unsuccessfully to phone my wife and finally gave it away and went to bed,
thinking this flat was the kind of place where you could be forgiven if you woke up in the
morning thinking you were a cockroach.
* * *

In L'Etranger, Meurseult spends the day at his window, watching the world go by. It
would be a fruitless exercise where I live, as all you'd see is cars and trucks and the
occasional dog walker. But the corner seat by the window here overlooks the street
below. The street is narrow and dirty, wide enough for two very careful small cars, with a
pile of exploded rubbish bins at one end, which was to become my landmark. A large
horse chestnut tree was outside the window, and between it and another tree my
ignorance left nameless I could see a patch of Ul. Elb. and a fraction of the local
park. There is a set of swings, some soccer goals just visible, but the pitch looks to be,
from the window, clay or gravel.
While I drank coffee and waited for Mark to wake up, something that was to become a
morning ritual, an entertaining parade of people passed across this little stage. My books
remained unread and I watched, fascinated. There are business types in long coats and
suits, carrying briefcases; men with short hair, smoking and hustling along, their narrow
shoulders in denim or leather and women and children and dogs and old women with
shopping baskets or improvised trolleys. Kids strutted past in bright tracksuits.
Settling back into being a European, I sat and watched the clouds part, and soon there
was enough blue sky to make a sailor a pair of trousers, my Grandmother's way of
discerning if the day would be fine or not. An old lady walked her dog round the
park. She had a staccato, rolling gait, and the dog was a black rat dog that hustled along
the way all rat dogs do. She wore a long heavy drab olive overcoat which reached to her
calves, and calf length boots. Her head was obscured by the left hand tree.
The flat was getting to me; it seemed the kind of place that makes western European
writers so self-centredly neurotic: the taps drip, the hall light won't turn off, the fridge,
full of jars of pickles, won't close properly, the door to the stove keeps falling off and two
of the gas rings don't work. The floorboards are so uneven that silent movement is
impossible, the windows jam and the latches seem merely there because windows should
have latches.
It is the architecture of neglect, shading towards poverty, and it bangs the northern
imagination back on itself. There is no possibility for expansion, no room to reach
beyond the crowded streets, except for the seasonal lurch towards optimism in spring.
This is the landscape that inspired a Kafka, that could lead someone like Sartre, who was
supposed to be intelligent, to have a character declare; "There are no adventures left."
Remembering the almost antiseptically clean light of the Australian sun I suddenly
understood why so many of the crusaders never went home. Most of their lives they must
have struggled to stay warm, stay dry, in their draughty northern castles, hounded by their
wives and dogs and retainers in the shadows and the gloom. Suddenly the vast sweep of
the deserts, the clean air and the smell of spice; from foot-rot and rust to the warm dry
desert air.
Tanya arrived promptly to make breakfast and lunch. Despite the rumours of food
shortages she prepared enough lunch for my family, four kayakers and Gut Bucket. At

nine thirty our translator hadn't turned up. By ten thirty we were idly speculating about
the possibility of there being a plan B. I tried my kindergarten Russian on Tanya, but she
was not confident enough to speak English and not patient enough to encourage my
Russian. Besides, I think she already knew her mother wasn't singing. Victor arrived. He
worked the telephone overtime and then a very apologetic sounding Julia told me there
had been a disagreement.
Back to the table for morning tea. Victor speaks no English. We speak no German, and
very little Russian. But we quizzed him about the rivers. Much laughter, much confusion,
but by miming and drawing and pointing to words in the dictionary (The pocket Oxford
Russian Dictionary, don't leave home without one) we confirmed our faith in Samurai
Russian. We learnt something about our rivers, and learnt the technical Russian terms for
some things we would want to avoid.
Then Victor drove us into the centre of Moscow.
* * *
It is a city of Paradox. A mixture of mind numbing opulence and staggering
ugliness. The huge Russian Hotel looks as if it were built by yet one more unimaginative
child with a set of grey Lego blocks while the gilded domes of the Kremlin churches look
like illustrations from a book of fairy tales. Beggars loiter in the subways; barefooted
gypsy women with dirty children, and legless men in wheel chairs or old women too tired
to lift their eyes or their hands; and the well dressed Muscovites hurry home with their
new video players and Sega games systems.
We were back in Europe. Old Europe with its huge blank buildings and wide littered
streets. A Europe staggering under the stifling weight of its past, still trying to define the
world in terms of itself and America, ignorant of the fact that it had been left behind by
the new powerhouse of Asia.
The traffic was anarchic. If there were road rules we couldn't fathom them and the
number of damaged cars probably testify to their absence or their lack of
enforcement. But then I remember thinking the same thing about Paris when we tried to
drive through on a hot August Bank holiday in two mini buses dragging two overloaded
Kayak trailers. Driving into Moscow I had the impression that the carnival had finished
the day before and everyone had gone home. The little kiosks on the pavement and the
litter gave the impression of a fairground which had spilled on to the streets and remained
when the rides had shut down. We parked on the pavement; simply drove over the gutter
and double parked. And met Olga, who was to be such an important factor in the success
of our stay in Moscow.
Olga; small and energetic and endlessly patient with all of our questions. A thin pale face
framed by long black hair. I think we solved the fitness problem rushing around Moscow

on foot trying to keep up with the frantic pace she set. Like the best of guides, she would
personalise the landscape for us, with stories of her own childhood as well as the more
usual tales for tourists. Her English is very good, though heavily accented. But I soon
found myself in the ludicrous situation of having to translate Mark's Australian into
English so she could understand what he was saying.
We drove towards Red Square. For the ex capital of the most powerful nation of the
world Moscow seemed dreary, dirty, shabby even in the sunshine. And full of people
eating ice cream. Leaving Victor we entered the subway. Street vendors had set up stalls
inside, and there were beggars, a feature of subways everywhere, and buskers and spivs.
The buskers here were a group of acoustic musicians. There are two songs, two voices
immediately apparent; the sound of the live musicians, the accordion players and the
other buskers playing Russian music and radios blaring amplified western rock. The
accordions are losing. As we drove into the city the cars beside us blasted out Michael
Jackson, Billy Joel, Dire Straits, the Beatles.
And then we were in Red Square.
We entered on the cobbled slope of the square, and St. Basils seemed to rise out of the
ground to meet us. The first sight is literally thrilling, and I could have stopped and
cried. Nothing had prepared me for the alien beauty of the thing, of the fact that after all
these years, I was there. When I was a child the Russians were The Enemy. The Russian
bear had been a character from a nightmare, a slavering starving figure, perched on his
nuclear arsenal; not just a badly mixed metaphor but a bogey man for Europe, the threat
the politicians had reverted to to keep us in line, as though we were recalcitrant children
who needed to be frightened into submission. Russia was the reason we couldn't spend
money on hospitals or old people, or schools. We had to have weapons and more
weapons, because one day the Russian bear was going to come storming out of the east in
his attempt to take over the world.
Russia, by existing, defined the West, the Free World, and justified the lunatic
nationalism of the space race and the criminal, dangerous extravagance of the arms race. I
remember the annual film of the May Day parade, the lines of tanks and goose-stepping
soldiers, the obvious threat to world peace and civilised values, and the nameless men
who stood on Lenin's tomb and smiled and waved for the camera.
On my right the red brick of the Kremlin wall, with the clean squat shape of Lenin's tomb
nuzzling against it, or growing parasitically out of it, depending on your politics. It is
closed on Mondays. But we watched the changing of the guard. You'd need a video
camera to convey the bizarre clockwork movements of the soldiers as the clock strikes
the hour. I had heard that the Guard consists of soldiers carefully chosen from country
boys or the children of workers. They are pared off carefully with partners of the same
height, leg length, and oval features. Apart from practising their intricate movements,
they are stationed in Moscow and have the daily services of an army psychiatrist. They'd
need one.

As we walked across the square we were assaulted by doll sellers, post card sellers,
Russian stamp sellers, photographers and little children begging for money.
We strode on.
The interior of Saint Basils lacked the majesty of the exterior; it is a dim warren of small
cells, like any monastic institution.
The inside is being refurbished, in fact most of the places we visited in Moscow, Saint
Petersburg and Samarkand, seemed to be in some stage of repair. The new brick work
looks out of place, although the original looks unusually tatty for a sixteenth century
building.
Olga told us about the architects. When they had finished, the Tsar had asked them if they
thought they could ever build a more beautiful building. One version said they thought
they could, one version says they thought they couldn't. Both versions agree that the Tsar,
to make sure they never would, had their eyes put out.
Perhaps it was from a fear borne from such experiences that a later generation of Moscow
architects were a little more careful in their dealing with the rulers. Olga showed us a
building that was obviously supposed to be symmetrical but the left and right wings were
starkly different to each other. Stalin had arrogated to himself the right to veto any plan
during his rebuilding of Moscow. For some reason two versions of the building were
presented in such a way that when Uncle Joe signed the paper, he signed across both
plans. The architects were too scared to ask him which one he wanted and so they built
the middle, which both plans had in common, and then flanked it with one wing from
each design.
Escaping from Red Square and its beggars and street vendors we set off to find Marx
square, where Mark had arranged to meet one of his professional contacts. In the ex-
Marxist capital of the world we could find no one who knew where it was. When we did
find it, opposite the Bolshoi theatre, Carl was covered in American Graffiti: NWA, Public
Enemy, and what used to be called "Choice Language". While Mark talked soil erosion
with Alexei I quizzed Olga about her life in Russia. While we talked three adolescents
arrived to skateboard on Carl’s' pedestal. They were dressed in jeans and under their open
shirts they wore the universal black T shirt, decorated with skulls and weapons and all the
other boring symbolism of "Heavy Metal" music. They weren't very good skateboarders;
my students would have laughed at them and dubbed them "Try-Hards", but they exuded
that quietly prickly air of moody contempt universal to disaffected Teenagers.
At the time I thought that twenty years ago Olga and I could not have had our
conversation, especially in such a public place. Realistically, there had never been a time
in Russian history when such a conversation was possible. The Russia of the Tsars was as
riddled with police, spies and informers as the Russia of Lenin and Stalin.
I liked Olga's stories, I instinctively liked her. But the great danger in travelling is to
generalise from very little information. Any one with any intelligence, no matter what

their nationality, is dissatisfied with their country's political system. But in Russia the
dissatisfaction went deeper than the individual's universal frustration with a system he or
she cannot control. It seemed to manifest itself as a despairing weariness. During the
putsch against Gorbachov, Olga, like so may others we would talk to, had feared the
creation of an anti-intellectual state regressing towards a popular wish for a "New Stalin."
She still feared it would happen. Like so may others she had backed Yeltsin, but was
now feeling betrayed by a man who had promised much and had seemed to deliver so
little. It was true that food shortages were a thing of the past, that many western goods
were now available, but the prices were frightening compared to wages which had not
risen to meet inflation. Crime was on the rise. Ten years ago, a woman told us, you could
walk alone after dark. Today, she shook her head.
We would meet many Russians who wanted a return to the "Good Old Days" of Stalin;
and not just old people lost in a new society their lives had not prepared them for, but
younger people wanting direction and stability. It is hard to believe. There are few
Russians who don't know about the brutality of Stalin's years.
The problem with understanding Russia and Russians is that while we are predisposed to
accept that the Chinese are inscrutable and the Japanese incomprehensible, we expect to
be able to read Russians because they look like us. Strip away the politics and somehow
we expect to find an average "westerner" cowering but ready to be helped towards the
daylight by a little free market economy.
The truth is that Russia is inscrutable for the simple reason that it does not fit into the
ready made metaphors we have been brought up with. When the wall went down and the
Communist party was banned, the old political maps, crude at the best of times, became
useless, their crudity obvious in their inability to describe the subtle nuances of the new
situation. The language and ideas, especially the metaphors and similes of social and
political commentary in the English language media, are not subtle enough to deal with a
mentality that is the product of a culture developing in this vast landscape at the
intersection of Asia and Europe. The simplistic dualities of western thought are
inadequate to describe the atmosphere in Moscow. We tend to think in terms of East and
West, Free and non free: Right and Left, Communist and Fascist. The vocabulary of
political abuse becomes blatantly ridiculous if you step back from it and ignore the
geography. Living in Australia all "East and West" is North.
For Russian women the struggle to be free has meant the struggle to be economically free
enough to stay home. The revolution owed much to the woman who worked in the
factories and the fields. In the Station of the Revolution, the statues of the heroes are male
and female. At the same time it seems that tasks around the house were, and perhaps still
are, clearly divided into men and women's work. After a full day at the factory or the
office, the woman was expected to collect the child from school or nursery, and cook and
clean in the evening. Now, according to Olga, women want to be able to choose to stay
home and bring up their families. They could do this if they had a good husband with a
regular job. But, she added, characteristically, there were few of these around. Most
Russian men drank their wages, forcing the wife to go out to work.

As if to enforce this the people in the park, sitting on their benches, were drinking
enthusiastically from a variety of bottles at the same time as well dressed office workers,
their ties undone for the lunch time break, wandered past gripping half empty bottles of
beer. The Russian love of alcohol is legendary, and their reputation as drinkers is, I
suspect, mostly deserved. The fact that medieval Russia was Christian is even attributed
to the fact that when the time came to chose a religion the choice was narrowed down to
Christianity or Islam and Islam was rejected because of its intolerance of Alcohol. One
set of statistics claims that during the ban on alcohol under Gorbachov more Russian
males died as a result of drinking home made hooch than in the Afghan war.
An old woman, her poverty engraved in her face and evident in her clothes staggered past,
her open hand outstretched in that most explicit of gestures. There was no one near her,
the gesture must have been so automatic it was no longer the response to the presence of
another person, just a response to getting through the day.
Soil problems solved, meetings arranged, we headed off to VDNKH. At the entrance to
the Underground elderly women were selling a newspaper. Stalinist said Olga, and
hurried past.
* * *
If the outskirts of Moscow had made me think of a carnival ground the day after it had
shut, at the Exhibition of Our National Achievements (VDNKH) the carnival was not
only over but the squatters had moved in. This is what the great Roman cities must have
felt like after the legions had gone home and the barbarians had moved in, too lazy to
knock the place down, too ignorant to know how to use it.
At the entrance a rocket swoops majestically skywards as a tribute to the heroes of space
exploration. Another generation of children were using it as a slide. The ticket windows
were closed, the great doors open. I had seen a tourist video of Moscow which showed
this place on a sunny day, full of crowds milling around the wonderfully hideous
fountains; and knew there was a cosmos pavilion here which I wanted to see. On my
video there is a crowd there too, gawking at the evidence of the Russian space
program. As the "Space race" had been such a part of my childhood I wanted to see the
Russian version. Instead of striding into space to embrace a future fresh with the
possibilities of starting again, the Americans and Russians had defined the manned
exploration of space as a race, and carried with them the mentalities and attitudes of
seventeenth century colonialists. The first astronauts went to the moon to stick a flag on
its surface and proclaim themselves, not human beings, but Americans.
Hum.
The grass is overgrown, uncut, untrimmed, and the fountains are silent. The melancholy
sound of an accordion player is drowned by amplified western rock music. A few stray

people stroll between the gardens, bottles in hand, and the thin smell of woodsmoke
advertises the shashlik sellers, who stand beside their barbecues with blood stained
aprons. Flies investigate the candyfloss, which hardens in the evening air, and we
wandered past the exhibition halls which were shut or selling something.
By the stone fountain which raised ugliness to a form of beauty, Olga told us the story
connected with it. There is a beautiful lilt to her vowels, and a melodic rhythm to her
speech, but she confused her pronouns. "There was a beautiful princess living in the
mountains. She fell in love with a young man. He brings him to the mountains and made
him make things. But he was in love with another girl so he let him go..."
We reached the cosmos exhibition I was looking for, and the hall is now full of shiny,
expensive American cars. As we entered the guard stopped Mark and pointed to his
camera and made it obvious he was not allowed to take photos. Why he thought anyone
would want to photograph a heap of imported American junk is beyond me. We
wandered along to the very end of the hall until we came to a small corner where some of
the exhibits were left. A model of the Apollo-Soyuz link up had been left stranded,
suspended from the ceiling. I remember this! I remember watching this on television.
The bastards had junked my childhood to sell expensive American cars that most
Russians couldn't afford if they lived to be a thousand.
Roma fuit. Urbis concidatus.
Depressed, I left. At the door the same guard who had stopped Mark from photographing
the cars stopped us again. "Present" he said, obviously exhausting his English, and gave
me an old guide book to the exhibition. I would like to have hugged him. I wish I
had. As we left Mark and Olga got involved in a discussion about Russian writers I
couldn't follow.
Olga said that the park is untended because no one can make money out of it any
more. According to my guide book funding was cut in 1990.
We returned to our flat, tired but satisfied with our first day. As we reached the door the
sound of loud rock music greeted us. Tanya was waiting for us, our dinner cooked, and
there was another Victor there who we dubbed, with great originality, Victor2. A tall,

dark eyed, thin shouldered boy with a young man's confidence. Body language
again. His English is good. I asked if Tanya had been working all day. "For 2 hours" he
replied. "Then she rest," he added with a sheepish grin. She quizzed him about his reply.
"Don't worry," he replied, smiling, "don't worry."
Their radio was tuned into a time warp. Nights in white satin, Bad Moon rising, ....later
Victor2 would tell me about the excitement of Michael Jackson's coming visit, although
the price for tickets was so far beyond his means that it was an impossibility for him to go.
They left us, to go dancing I hope.
End of Chapter 4 . . .
Chapter 5: A Visit to Lenin
IF I WAS A RUSSIAN I would write poems about the Metro, relishing its paradoxes.
The first paradox being the fact that it is worth a poem or two. I can not imagine any one
writing hymns of praise to the London Underground: graffiti strewn, cramped, cluttered
with advertising hoardings, and downright dangerous after certain hours. But with the
Moscow Metro, and the ones in Petersburg and Tashkent, you leave the drab city streets
and descend into light and space and elegance.
Mark and I became staunch metro addicts in our short stay and even went station
stopping to hop out and gawk, (there's no other word for it) at the architecture and the
decorations and the statues. It is an example of beauty combining with function. The
stations are built deep in the ground to serve as bomb shelters and the long escalator ride
allows time to watch the faces and the body language of the people going the other
way. There were very few fat people in Moscow. The trains leave with a reassuring
regularity. With a simple knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet, an up to date map, and a
little patience you can navigate around Moscow with surprising ease and do so at an
absurdly cheap price.
Travelling at the peak time we discovered how naive we had been to marvel at the way
the Japanese had packed their bus at the airport. The experienced Russian Commuter
gets on to the train by pushing his way on. No matter how full the carriage the newcomer
simply pushes steadily and either grumbles or jokes about it until his or her back is clear
of the automatic doors. The resultant crush would be paradise for a sex starved
adolescent and hell for a claustrophobic. On our rides to the city we inevitably stood, and
Mark read his book and I watched faces. I came to the conclusion that young Russian
women were very beautiful, or would be if they stopped chewing gum and dispensed
with the violent red lipstick. They all had long hair, and when I mentioned it to Olga she
told me that the Principal of her school had called her mother to his office to reprimand
her for allowing her daughter to have her hair cut.

On our second day we met Olga at the Revolution station, which was to be our meeting
point for the rest of the week. Beautiful might be the wrong word, but its spacious halls,
gleaming stone, and hallway lined with statues of the anonymous heroes of the revolution
would put some art galleries to shame. We felt very proud of ourselves, arriving where
we wanted to be and at the right time, but the journey hadn't been error free. The Metro
has its own idiosyncrasies and discovering them had cost us a few moments. We had left
our train at the wrong station, actually it was the right station but on the wrong line, and
as we stood at the top of the escalator, bemused, an elderly woman approached us and
tried to help us find our way. We conversed in Samurai Russian, which always begins
with the phrase (In Russian):
"Pardon me, I neither speak nor understand Russian"
"German? Niet. English?. burgle burgle "Gudbiy"."
"Where is Stansia Revolutionary Ploshchad."
"Ah. stanzia Burgle one burglee burgle station burgle burgle. Oup. Tak tak tak tak "
walking her fingers along,"tak tak tak" down an imaginary escalator."burgle burgle one
station."
"Ah. One station more."
"Da Da. god biy."
We reached Olga without further incident.
We went to visit Lenin. It was raining. Red square was cordoned off and the cobbles
were deserted. There was no one waiting to hustle the tourists. The photographer and his
easel had gone, the man with the badges, who had wanted to exchange his badge for the
small thermometer that hangs from my coat's zip, had thankfully disappeared. There
were only policemen in grey capes and the silent, unmoving guard at the entrance to the
tomb.
We tried to enter the square and were stopped by a smiling policeman, a blonde slav with
pale blue eyes, who was being firm fair and friendly and who explained that cameras
were not permitted. When we came back to the entrance after depositing our bags, Mark
was politely asked to extinguish his cigarette. There was no one else waiting outside the
mausoleum although a tourist bus was arriving behind us. There was a time when people
had come and queued for days, there had also been a time, after the banning of the
communist party, when Russians of the standing of Sobcheck, the mayor of St.
Petersburg, had called for the closure of the mausoleum and the burial of Lenin's body.
You enter the mausoleum and go down, down dark wide steps that lead to a large dim
chamber where Vladimir Illych is resting. He lies at right angles to the entrance and you
have to wander round the other three sides of the room along a black balcony. The glass

case is simple, and inside it, one hand open, one hand clenched, he sleeps through the
endless blank of an atheist’s eternity. The case is filled with a soft yellow light which
makes him look jaundiced although he looks a lot better than many folk who haven't been
dead for half as long as he has. The crowd hustles through. I wanted to loiter, began to
slow down as I came opposite him and the policeman in the corner moved towards me,
hurrying me out.
We all interpret the world differently. Here was a man who had decided that that wasn't
enough, that unlike the Mensheviks, those "dry as dust archivists" he would do something
about it. Such a strange, rare combination of dreamer and man of action.
As ruthless, though perhaps not as statistically bloody, as Stalin, the successor he had
come to fear and despise. He had died before his name could be associated with the
worst excesses of the Soviet regime and has somehow escaped much of the opprobrium
that has attached itself to Stalin's memory.
Outside in the rain we wandered along the Kremlin wall, past the statues of the not so
anonymous heroes of the Revolution. Flowers had been left on some of the statues, the
biggest bunch of roses lay on Stalin's.
To counterpoint such socialist nostalgia we went to GUM. Gum is the major department
store in Moscow, a kind of Harrods with architectural elegance. Our guide book said we
should visit it "for a bird's eye view of the misery of Soviet shopping." If any more
evidence was necessary to convince us that there was a new class emerging with money
to spend it would have been here. The complex is full and crowded with shoppers:
foreign goods; L'Oreal, Faberge, Teflon, Black and Decker; adverts for tampons and
shampoo in English, subtitled in Russian. Beside the shops little stalls with small arrays
of goods and hand written price labels. We had been told that Moscow was working on a
dollar economy, but we found very few places wanting "Hard Currency."
Our plan for the afternoon was to visit the Kremlin's churches, then take Mark to the
University. The churches are a long way from Western Gothic; they lack the spare
austerity of the great Cathedrals of Europe. They envelop you. Their interiors are richly,
almost sensually ornate. We gazed in awe at the rich warm colours of the Iconstatis and

the complicated patterns of the doors which seemed to argue a different relationship with
God, a more personal, more intimate relationship than one can imagine in the cathedrals
of Amiens, Chatres or Notre Dame de Paris.
We seemed to do the round of churches with a bored group of adolescent tourists who sat
anywhere they could and muttered and ignored their guide's attempts to explain
everything to them. We jostled through, admiring architecture, and icons, and then fled
into the gardens which are beautifully kept. There were other tourist things to see; the
biggest cannon in the world, never fired, the biggest bell, never rung, and we could have
jostled with a group of camera snapping Japanese to see these things, but what I
remember most is Olga singing me the Winnie the Pooh song in Russian and feeling
good that at least one worthwhile cultural icon had made the journey east.
Leaving Mark at the University, Olga and I wandered back to the metro, talking about
poetry. Russians not only honour their poets, but take their poetry seriously. Outside the
station in Tashkent someone had nailed a poem to a tree. They put flowers on Pushkin's
statue. I can't imagine your average Englishman laying wreaths on Byron's grave and the
idea of an Australian putting flowers on Banjo Patterson's is faintly comical. It is
permissible to be enthusiastic about poetry, to write poetry, to call oneself a poet. Days
later, on a dreadful coach tour of Moscow in the rain, we bailed out for a guided tour of a
cemetery, and found ourselves around Yesenin's grave.
I knew little about him except that he was married to Isadora Duncan. As we stood there,
feeling a little lost, one of the other passengers started an impassioned rendition of
Yesenin's poetry. When he finished the small crowd clapped enthusiastically and Olga
nodded; he did that well. The man beamed with pleasure, and returned to the sober
business of being a tourist.
When I returned home Tanya was studying, and I asked Victor2 about his school and the
books he had to read. I had not heard anything good about the Russian school system.
Olga was trying desperately to get her son into a private school to avoid what she saw as
the mindless regimentation of state schools. V2 explained that the Russian Literature they
studied was heavily classical (unlike Australian programs which treat the past as
something to be avoided at all costs in case the little Darlings have to make an effort to
understand something).
Victor2 seemed to accept, even to enjoy the authors he had to study, and distinguished
between those authors he liked and those he found heavy going but whose merits he
could see. He and Tanya got into a running argument about the relative merits of several
poets from the "Golden Age." To prove a point V2, who plays guitar in a rock band and
thinks the Rolling stones and Beatles are "OK", started declaiming lines.
I thought about my own students, thought about the faceless guardians of the syllabus
who scream in anguish and pain if a work program even seems to be "literature based"
and wondered if I could emigrate.

Moscow no longer seemed drab and dingy; it was beginning to feel as familiar as that
tatty old coat you kept because it was comfortable long after it was no longer fashionable.
We had visited Kolomenskoe in the afternoon, wandering through its park land by the
river, and as I came home, after negotiating the metro on my own, I loitered outside the
little park I could see from my window. It was a beautiful, warm evening, the light gentle,
the world full of the childhood smell of wet grass.
There were children playing soccer in the park so I stopped outside the railings,
wondering what my own boys were doing, but feeling good to be there, then, until I
realised that some of the mothers were watching me with misgivings. Wondering what a
solitary stranger lurking out side their park signaled in their minds, I went home.
Victor2 kept me entertained while Tania cooked our evening meal. I read in their English
text book:
"The Commonwealth of Australia is a capitalist, self-governing federal state and a
member of the Commonwealth of nations...The Government defends the interests of the
Bourgeois class ..The Progressive people of the country fight for a foreign policy
independent of the imperial powers and the development of all sections of the
population." p40-41 A.P. Sturkov and B.S. Ostrovsky English text book and reader 10.
End of Chapter 5 . . .
Chapter 6: A Gradual Love Affair
IN MOSCOW we learnt that the mind has a finite capacity for awe. If the cathedrals
were beautiful, and the exhibits in the armory exquisite, there was a limit to our
admiration, and after two or three days of gawking at exhibits we reached that
point. There were times I felt sorry for Mark, and wondered if he had regretted his
decision to spend this week in Moscow, but as long as we satisfied his addiction to coffee
and his need to eat every couple of hours, he seemed happy to tag along, developing a
fine cold as he sloshed through the numerous pools of water lying in the cracked and
cratered pavements and roads.
One day the curators of museums will recognise that putting five hundred masterpieces of
the silver smith's craft in a series of cases does little but numb the minds of the average
onlooker. For this reason my memory of the Kremlin armory is a vague blur of table
wear and carriages and dresses and armor, and the only thing I remember in any detail is
a dress with an incredibly narrow waist. I only remember this because we'd been
identifying tourists by the size of their stomachs, and Olga had been talking about
Russian men who don't like the thin image of western women, saying, "Are we dogs to
gnaw bones?"
We had anticipated huge queues in Moscow for food and other things. Amongst the
statistics thrown at me by various helpful people before departure was the fact that the

average Russian spends one third of their waking life in one queue or another. Although
the shops bustled, the queues were no worse than in the supermarkets back home. The
only big one I saw was outside the Pushkin Museum and the people there were waiting
patiently to get into an exhibition of Matisse's paintings.
We had time to kill before going to Victor's for dinner so we took Olga to McDonalds, as
she had told us she was addicted to strawberry milkshakes. I suppose within the world of
politically conscious green vegetarian gourmets the health conscious and environmentally
minded will scorn such thoughts, but the big McDonalds in Moscow is not the hideous
place I had anticipated. The outside is almost modest and the interior is almost
muted. No garish colour scheme inside or revolting building imposed on the older
architecture of the area. The entrance is as crowded and as noisy as any McDonalds
anywhere but the inside is imaginatively decorated with a variety of frescoes.
McDonalds may represent the globalisation of the I want culture, it may be everything
that is cheap and tacky, the ultimate in ephemeral dehumanisation of the individual, but
it is a godsend for travelers. When you're sick and exhausted, or want a break from
unfamiliar foods which have tied your stomach into knots, there is always the golden
yellow M and the knowledge that the food will be predictable, bland and
familiar. Stranded in Paris, one hot bank holiday on the way back from the Alps, we
wandered along the Champs Elysee with not enough money to buy anything, until we
found McDonalds, and getting over the shame of eating burgers in the gastronomic
capital of the universe, were able to at least afford to eat. While Russians find McDonalds
expensive, hence Olga's guilty enjoyment of her milkshake, to a westerner the prices are
ridiculously cheap.
Leaving McDonalds we headed to Victor's flat. The outside was shabby as the building
we were staying in, but the inside was opulent. One wall was covered with a mural of
mountain scenery. The furniture and wall hangings suggest a level of affluence we had
not yet encountered in Moscow, as did the presence of a huge television and VCR. The
flat had beautiful views of parkland and the river and the distant city. Sailboards and
sailing boats described lazy figures on the river in the evening breeze.
We flipped a coin and I won the shower, the first hot water we'd enjoyed since our arrival;
reappearing, clean and warm and sleepy, I had hardly sat down in the front room when
Victor said: "What do you think of Lenin and Stalin."
Inconsequential small talk was obviously not going to be on the menu. I didn't know how
to answer. And Olga had flipped into translator mode and wasn't offering any
suggestions. So I told them what I thought, and asked for his opinion. Victor, I suspect,
is like a lot of modern Russians, who have seen the possibilities inherent in the
future. And while an intellectual like Olga might express her fears by saying she
doesn't believe that Russia has a future, people like Victor are busy making it happen.
He had been trained as a nuclear engineer, but was now working in a variety of jobs, one
of which was his travel company. His wife, Natasha, was also an engineer, but was

etraining as an accountant. For him Socialism was a dream, a beautiful dream, but an
impractical one. He wanted to be a capitalist. He wanted to build a successful travel
business, and I had the feeling that he had the drive and the ambition and whatever
ruthless instincts are necessary to succeed. He was curious to hear our reaction to his city,
to the people we had met, greedy for information about our own country and our lives.
When Mark emerged from the shower we sat down to a huge meal, with Vodka of course,
although Victor was driving us home and would not drink with us. The vegetables came
from their Dacha outside of Moscow.
Victor continued to pump us for information, and I think we began to sound very
defensive. The word Utopia means there is no such place, and there are snakes in any
Eden, just as there are rainbows in any hell; living in Australia you have to deal with
Australian problems, and if these sound relatively minor to a Russian struggling with the
problems of life in Russia, then I felt like pointing out that to someone in Mogadishu,
Moscow would seem like paradise. Our conversation began to sound like the famous
Monty Python sketch in which a group of Old men sit around in a circle and reminisce
about how hard their lives were: "You were lucky," one speaker begins, "I used to dream
of living in a hole in the road..."
After dinner we moved to another room to see Victor's slides, and I suddenly realised we
had come all this way to go kayaking. Apart from our fractured conversation with Victor
at the beginning of the week I hadn't given it a thought since we had said goodbye to our
boats at Moscow airport. We watched slides of landscapes unfamiliar in their beauty, and
raging rivers familiar in their shape and difficulty. Olga later said, you do not look like
sportsmen. I know I said, neither Mark nor I are very athletic looking. No, she said, you
looked scared.
I was. I hadn't paddled for so long I was wondering if I could deal with rivers of this
standard.
Victor had been rafting for nearly twenty years, and for nearly twenty years he had run at
least one major wilderness river a year. Rafting had been a popular sport in the Old
Soviet Union, but had developed along distinctive lines to cope with two problems. The
first was lack of transport. To kayak you have to have access to a car, and roads to rivers.
So the Russians had developed the cataraft, a raft made of two inflatable sponsons with a
rigid frame. The cataraft could be broken down into cartable loads and transported on
planes and trains across the vast landmass of the Soviet Union. When the roads or rail
lines stopped, the boats could simply be packed into the rivers. The frame could be left at
home and one made from wood at the river bank. Sasha had told me of one trip he had
done where they had to walk for ten days before they had reached their river. Hard men,
these Russian boaters.

The other problem the Russians faced was the unavailability of equipment. They had
solved this by making their own, and the way in which they had obtained their materials
was to manipulate the system. A rafter heard a local Army officer was willing to
exchange some parachute silk for vodka. The rafter went and obtained the vodka, not
because he wanted the parachute silk but because he knew someone who was willing to
exchange some hypalon for the silk. With the hypalon he could build the floats for the
cataraft. Paddles were improvised out of anything the paddler considered suitable; we
saw at least one that looked as though it had been made from corrugated tin. Buoyancy
aids were made by putting children's balloons, one inside the other and inflating them,
then putting them into canvas pockets. The average Russian buoyancy aid provides up to
50kgs of buoyancy. The standard non Russian one provides 6.
We left late, to the view of the city lights across the river and a fat northern moon
slipping between the high rise buildings.
* * *
We had one more day in Moscow before leaving for St. Petersburg, and Olga and I took
the train and then the tram to visit the Andrei Rubalov museum. This is a tribute to the
greatest Icon painter in Russia, or so I'm told. As we entered the museum we found two
elderly ladies and a police man at each door. Icons have become an item on the
international market, and in one church we would see a blank space, left to remind
visitors of the theft of the icon that had once hung there. While we loitered through the
hall ways, I heard the sounds of an English voice and drifted over. A Russian guide was
explaining the icons to two English speaking tourists, her descriptions translated by a
rather stilted English speaker. Olga suggested I follow. The guide had an obvious passion
for her subject which animated her whole being. She told stories, and even if I didn't
speak enough Russian to follow, I knew they were good stories. It was like listening to
someone singing in a foreign language, and the lilt and cadence of her words were
enjoyable even if I didn't understand a thing she said. Her translator on the other hand

seemed mildly bored by the whole thing, and the effect was the same as listening to John
Williams and an orchestra in full flight on the concierto de Aranjuez and then hearing
someone trying to reproduce the performance on a cheap and tuneless banjo.
The Icons were beautiful; like so much of Russia alien in their unfamiliarity to eyes
accustomed to three dimensional paintings. The pictures of the Madonna being
comforted by the child were strangely moving. We picked up Mark and tried to go for a
boat ride on the river, saw some dreary modern art, and headed home.
The train stopped at Fili station, and after a while everybody got out. We followed. The
train doors closed, and the train left us all standing on the platform. Soon another train
arrived. We piled in, waited, and then everybody got out. We did this several times until
it got monotonous and we tried to think of plan B. Mark and I were never any good at
plan B. We couldn't ask anyone where we were or what was happening. Just as we were
going to leave and attempt to find a taxi everybody piled into a train and it left, with us
sprinting to catch it. It got some way down the track and then stopped, while men in
uniform walked up and down looking at what might have been an electrical cable that
had fallen on the line. I do not know at what point patience becomes something else,
resignation, indifference perhaps, but it seemed to me the people on the train, and many
of the Russians we had met, had crossed the line between them.
Victor drove us to Leningrad station. We were going to take the night train to Saint
Petersburg, which would be our introduction to Russian train travel. All the way to
heaven is heaven, I'd known that phrase of Catherine of Seinna's since Dixon had used it
on the South Fork in 1986, but I didn't understand it until I was driving though Moscow,
late one evening on the way to catch a train. We drove in silence, to the muted sound of
the radio, along long empty roads, lit by pale street light, to the city centre. I have always
loved night driving; always loved the feeling of separation it creates from the world on
the other side of the window, and I wanted to keep going, to drive through the night and
not stop, never have to face up to a new set of circumstances that would have to be dealt
with once we'd stopped.
But we did stop. The station was crowded, travelers sat on the floor with their luggage, or
slept on benches, others shared food in small family groups. We loitered with Victor, and
having made my first and last grammatically accurate Russian sentence in praise of
Olga's English, we lapsed into an embarrassed silence that didn't end until Victor said
goodbye and left us to our two berth compartment.
End of Chapter 6 . . .
Chapter 7: St. Petersburg
OUR GUIDE APPEARED in the doorway of our compartment and introduced himself. I
felt obscurely cheated. We had slept the night through and consequently seen nothing of
the landscape.

I have read glowing descriptions of St. Petersburg, the Venice of the North, describing it
as one of the world's beautiful cities. I remember the rain: the grey Baltic rain, cold and
persistent, and the gypsy beggars, with their dirty children and their outstretched hands. I
remember the pale grey water of the Neva, and the crowds in the Hermitage, the beautiful
paintings in the Russian Museum, the Museum of Ethnography, and one of the best
evenings I had in Russia.
Our guide's English was not good. We tried to work out our program for the day, but he
was worried that he had not been given enough money. We offered to pay our way into
the Hermitage out of our own pockets, but he didn't seem to understand. So much of our
ability to understand is based on assumption and prediction, and for our English speaking
Russians the lack of grammatical structure in our speech, and the vagueness of the
expressions we habitually used made understanding a miracle. Mark had asked Olga;
"Did you go to university?" "Oh yes," she had replied, "I have many friends here. I used
to visit them regularly."
I found myself translating Mark into basic English, which was ridiculous because he
speaks perfectly sensible English, but our guide still seemed bemused by it all. It took us
nearly half an hour to get through to him that Mark had a bad cold and wanted to get rid
of it. While he went off to consult a neighbour we watched the television.
Turning the television on while guests appear is a Russian habit we would encounter
again in Tashkent. This time it gave us some much needed amusement. We began with a
children's program in which a boy with an explosion of green hair, a rather pretty girl of
about twelve and a fat bald man with a parrot on his shoulder introduced snippets of
cartoons.
We watched Winnie the Pooh walking along singing the Winnie the Pooh song in
Russian, and then switched channels to watch a ludicrous looking man singing a driveling
song. Not knowing the words was a relief. So was not watching him so we turned over
and found a munch and crunch show. A blind vole like animal was munching in close up
on a variety of living things. A huge grasshopper lost a leg, which the predator continued
to eat until the grasshopper decided to move on. Then it munched on the grasshopper's
head.
Back to the music channel. A polite R&B band played to a small group of Springsteen
lookalikes who were grinding away self consciously on a small dance floor. Close up
they looked embarrassed, from a distance they looked silly. The finale was set in a
swimming pool, The band, wearing swimming costumes, stood up to their waists in the
water and played while the singer swam around trying not to swallow any water.
This was followed by some kind of cops and robbers show in which all the actors had
obviously studied in the American soap opera school of facial tics. In this style of acting
the actor conveys the powerful emotions coursing through his or her veins with a variety
of rapid but infinitesimal movements of the lips and eyes. Remembering that Victor's
daughter had got the sulks because she couldn't watch Chances while we were having

dinner, we decided that the Russians were following the American and Australian
example of reducing all television to the sub moronic level, where stories that would
never be published if they were written down are turned into highly expensive and highly
praised "drama".
We decided it was time to explore.
* * *
Cold grey Neva: its bridges hidden in the slanting rain, as we picked our way between the
water filled potholes and negotiated the inevitable umbrella war. Baltic sea rain: it was
below ten degrees C, with a strong gusting wind. The city was far more European than
Moscow, it felt much more settled, lacking the bustling sense of constant improvisation
that made Moscow fascinating.
We entered a pharmacy trying to find something for Mark's cold. Three condoms cost
195 roubles, or approximately 20 cents. But they wouldn't cure his cold. There was a
strange randomness to the display cabinets; shampoo sat beside packets of western drugs,
each with a hand written label which seemed to suggest that the exhibit on display was
the only one in the shop.
The rain was still heavy and cold as we dripped to the Hermitage. There was no queue
outside, but inside was heaving with damp humanity. We queued to get rid of coats and
bags, and then queued for tickets. Our guide insisted he buy them at the Russian price,
claiming he disagreed with this overt squeezing of foreigners. Although we only
scratched the surface of the Hermitage's many rooms it was a disappointing experience,
but oddly in keeping with the rest of our Russian stay: We had got lost looking for the
statue of Marx in the world's capital of Marxism, found the "Museum of our National
Achievement" devoted to American cars and now we managed to spend a morning in one

of the world's greatest art galleries without seeing any art. I still don't know how we
achieved this.
The museum of Ethnography had a sign up saying "Closed. Saturday/day off." which was
confusing at the time as it wasn't Saturday. So we strode back out into the rain and went
to the Russian museum, tired and cold and damp, and fast approaching the point where
the sight of another bloody painting or silver goblet was going to drive us both nuts.
Our guide tried his trick of getting us in at Russian prices, despite our offer to pay, and
we were stopped at the top of the stairs by the lady whose job it was to stop people like us
getting in at the wrong price. A policeman loitered nearby. These people are not Russian
she said. Our guide argued. The lady was adamant. Wait here he said, disappeared down
the stairs and returned with a Snickers bar which he slid into the woman's hand. She
smiled as though the whole thing was a great joke and waved us in.
"Your faces did not change when we talk," said our guide. So we made a mental note to
practise facial twitching and steeled ourselves for another display of dreary paintings.
Once we'd got in, we saw some fine pictures. Three stick in my mind; the first, The
Bronze Serpent, because it was the biggest painting I have ever seen. Mark and I spent
some time seated opposite it, speculating how we could get it in to our living rooms. The
next was a picture showing a group of Cossacks sending a letter to the sultan. Their faces
were splendid in their variety like a similar piece called Barge Haulers on the
Volga. But the piece I remember most, the second painting I've ever seen which I would
like to buy, is called Russian Knight at the Crossroads. It seemed appropriately fatalistic
for a kayaking expedition. A shaggy Knight sits on a small, long maned pony, lumbered
with all the accoutrements of battle, staring at the sign post which looks more like a
gravestone than anything else. To the right; death, to the left; death. He sticks in my mind,
as does the caption to the Cossacks. "Cossacks Writhing a mosking letter." It was the first
of many Blodwynisms, although we didn't know then that that was what they were called.
It was only much later that I realised that I knew absolutely nothing about Russian
painters. My informant, a lady I met on the plane on the way home, pointed out that
whereas music is easily moved around and performed, paintings aren't and need
advocates. Go find the paintings of Repin. The man was a genius of faces.
* * *
We stayed in St. Petersburg with Sergei. He works with computers and makes about a
hundred a month. His wife, an "economist"(who was on holiday in Moscow with their
daughter) makes about 70. (How much you earn is a topic which occurs in almost every
conversation with Russians.) By his own admission he was not poor. His flat has two
TV's, a remote controlled VCR, a tape deck and a personal computer. But he could not
afford a car, and had a picture of one taped to his fridge. My dream he said. A new car

would cost between ten and twenty thousand dollars. A new flat would cost him twenty
thousand. He says he is not crying, but he knows how hard life can be in Russia.
Walking through yet another subway we had stopped to listen to a group of acoustic
musicians. One played the largest balalaika I have ever seen. It must have been three or
four feet across the base. (Either that or it was being played by a midget). "Kazak music",
Said Sergei, nodding, "I know this song." He threw some coins into the hat, and we
wandered on. "I have guitar," he said, as though testing an idea by articulating it, "it is old
guitar, not good guitar."
"No," I said, having played it while he was out buying bread for his sick neighbour. "It is
good guitar."
He stopped and looked at me as though my martian disguise had finally slipped and he
glimpsed a recognisable human being beneath it. "You play guitar?" It was impossible to
tell if he was excited by the thought or struggling with his English.
I confessed. And Sergei seemed to be a much a happier Russian.
He left us alone to go and buy some cognac, and returned with two bottles and his friend,
Ulya, who offered to cook dinner. We had an odd, excellent meal, and at about nine
o'clock he produced the guitar and we swapped songs. While I was playing I heard
strange, nostalgic, mouth organ music, and turned to see Mark, who had produced one
from his pocket, playing along.
After that the evening simply got better. I was in the Bear's bedroom swapping songs
with him. It was better than dancing, which I do extremely badly, having two left feet and
all the physical grace of a tinned salmon. It was something I had wanted to do, and
Sergei, who had apologised for not being a sportsman any more, and had seemed at a loss
as to how he should deal with two international sportsmen of Mark and my standing (his
English wasn't good) seemed to grow into the smoke filled evening, finding confidence in
his ability to perform old Russian folk songs, and modern Russian songs that reminded
me of Jacques Brel and the French tradition of night club singers.
Alcohol and smoke and memories. It is in moments like this that the random elements of
your life fit together and your history seems to have some kind of unity. With little talent
or ability I have swapped songs in dingy student digs, in elegant French sitting rooms, in
smoky British pubs where the boys were so loud you couldn't hear a note that you played,
and around campfires on four different continents. The memory plays tricks, the hands
follow, and I was enthusiastically thumping out The Drunken Sailor. I hadn't played it
since the night before my wedding. It was about to become the theme song for the
expedition.
Enter Igor, with bananas. In our honour they talked English. Igor exuded an aggressive
friendliness. He insisted I speak Russian and set out to teach me the history and grammar
of the Russian language in less than half an hour. He had the knee in the balls approach to
teaching and brutalised my attempts. Without actually grabbing me by the throat and

shaking me when I got things wrong he destroyed any desire I had to experiment with
Russian in his company. I wondered, abstractly, if he thought his own English was so
good, but resisted the urge to pick him to pieces. So we drank cognac and sang songs in
the intervals between Igor's stories which got longer as the night wore on, and then the
soup arrived.
It was sometime later that Sergei began to sing a song I thought I recognised as The
Carnival is over. It wasn't. It was the song of Stenza Razin, Cossack bandit and folk hero.
The phrase had been running through my head all the time I had been in Moscow. Now
the tune took hold and stuck.
Ulya and Igor had to leave. The bridges across the Neva are raised at night, cutting off
one side of the city from the other. Igor offered Ulya a lift home. But how can I repay
you she said.
"A kiss from a princess," said Igor. "One kiss or ten."
She laughed. "This is an insult. If one is too many, then ten is not enough." They left.
Sergei, who was gently drunk, seemed to be in imminent danger of a bad attack of the
miseries, so we kept him company in the kitchen while he smoked one more cigarette and
we all drank one more glass of cognac, because it is bad luck or bad manners to put the
lid back on the bottle.
And there are those in both our countries who would put us in uniforms and have us try to
kill each other.
Next morning, nailed by cognac, I wondered if my headache was a genuine piece of
Expedition Suffering, but decided against it. I met Sergei staggering out of the bathroom.
"It is too early Liam. Go back to bed." I couldn't. I picked up the guitar and tried the folk
baroque approach to Waltzing Matilda. "Liam," said the bleary voice, "It is too early. Go
back to sleep."
* * *
Ulya arrived while we struggled with breakfast. She had agreed to accompany us for the
day, but I suspect that Sergei wanted some moral support. While he wandered along
talking with her, Mark and I strolled behind them and talked about boating. It wasn't a
subject either of us had broached up to that point. I knew I would paddle better on a long
trip like this one than on weekend raids on local rivers back home, but the last time Mark
and I had paddled together on any serious water I had paddled so badly I felt totally
unqualified to be there or to be talking about paddling with someone of his skill.
The museum of Ethnography, in Saint Petersburg, gets my vote as one of the best
Museums I've been in, and I have visited lots of them. For once everything was placed in
a context. The only place we'd seen comparable in Moscow was the Boya-Romanov

Museum which is really little more than an old house, carefully preserved, but in which
you can actually imagine the lives of the people who lived in it. This is what's missing
from museums like the Armoury. The cup, for all its sophistication, is really an
irrelevance. Its the hand that made it, and the lips that drank from it, that are of
importance. Instead of cases full of things with labels, the exhibits in the museum of
ethnography; clothes, tools, even a crazy boat, were arranged in displays which
demonstrated their use. A family group sat in a yurt, another fished in a frozen waste, a
man in a fishskin suit waited patiently for something to bite on his line. The fact that
many of the things we saw in Central Asia looked as though they should have been in the
museum made it all the better. For once I didn't feel guilty dragging Mark around a
museum, as we peered into tents and stared at woodwork, marveled at fish skin suits, and
saw a Shaman's outfit which was worth the price of admission.
Feeling much better, we left in search of coffee. We were always in search of coffee, and
ended up in a park, eating sandwiches which Tanya had made for us before we left
Moscow. As we had walked towards the Winter Palace the day before we had seen the
beggars preparing to go to work, and now they lurked around the park, arms
outstretched. Emotional warfare; the thin faced, dirty children with wide, imploring eyes,
professional beggars, growing up in the family tradition, not the crippled and old in the
subway. While Olga had always walked on, Sergei always dug into his pockets. Judging
by the reaction of the other people in the park, on a good day, I figured the begging
family made more than Sergei did in a month.
Not far from Peter the Great's house was the cruiser Aurora. The ship that has the gun
that fired the shot that started the revolution was memorable for a number of
reasons. Along the jetty there was a street market, selling, amongst other things, Icons,
Police and Army hats, and what purported to be KGB identification papers. We went to
the ship, which is just another warship, with absurdly steep stairs leading into small
rooms with absurdly low doors. But it does have the gun that fired the shot that signaled
the start of the revolution.
While we were there a wedding party arrived, the bride in white, the man in a sailor's
uniform. They posed on the rail of the ship that has etc, and then moved back to the quay
side to eat chocolate out of foil paper and drink from paper cups in the back of the bridal
car. It seemed muted and sad; the usual self-conscious wedding day smiles for the
photographer made more so by the staring tourists and the grey water and the rain.
In Moscow the married couples lay a wreath by the flame of the Unknown Soldier on
their wedding day. Most of the people we spoke to seemed to have a low opinion of
Russian Marriage. Even the ones that lasted seemed to do so through indifference rather
than anything else. The girls are brought up to want to marry and have children, its
cultural programming, but the men seemed to get bored quickly. Perhaps it's the cramped
living conditions, the general apathy and boredom, the expectation that, sooner or
later, everything falls apart, but one in three marriages end in divorce.

Many men have mistresses. Their attitude was summed up in one story we heard. The
man was embracing his wife, and carried away by his passion began murmuring the
wrong name. Angrily she fought her way free of him and screamed: "You've been
having an affair. I knew you were going to Moscow to see another woman."
"Why not," shrugged her husband, "I'm a free man aren't I."
Having said all this, according to The Australian's advertising, nearly one in two
Australian marriages end in divorce so too much should not be read into the Russian
statistics. Given the cramped conditions they live in, the fact that two out of three survive
is amazing.
Our last stop was the Peter and Paul fortress. As bored as we were by now with
architectural wonders; bored is the wrong word, we had exhausted our ability to admire
and we were getting itchy to go paddling, the cathedral is stunningly beautiful. But our
guide wanted to hurry on, and "Pardon me, I do not know the word." He flipped through
my dictionary. "Ah. Here. I want to do Hooliganism."
Hooliganism consisted of ignoring the no entry signs. Climbing the stairs up the fortress
walls, we walked along the green metal roof of the fortress. This gave us good views of
the city and the river, or would have if I'd felt inclined to take my eyes off my feet. A
Cossack band played frenetically happy music on the slip way and the wind ruffled the
Neva. In winter people break the ice to swim in the river. And perched precariously on
the wall, I thought how truly Russian or guide's attitude to the rules are. There are so
many rules, so many written and unwritten laws, that I suspect you'd go nuts trying to
keep them all. So you ignore them and do what you want to do, until the rules snap back
and try to eat you. Then you try to talk or bribe your way out, and if you can't do either,
you shrug fatalistically, and cop whatever's coming. It's a lesson I should have learnt then.
It would have saved me much confusion later on.
We went back to Sergei's, had another evening meal that couldn't be beat, another bottle
or two of cognac, and sang some more songs, then left for the train.
As we strode along the platform I saw a well dressed man staggering along with a half
empty bottle of Cinzano. I had still not got used to the sight of business types in the early
stages of public drunkenness. Thankfully we would be insulated from all this on our
return journey.
I was wrong, we were in a four berth cabin, and the drunk with the Cinzano bottle, now
empty, was to be our companion. A heavy, full faced man with an expensive leather
jacket, he asked curiously if we were American, and then, on hearing we were from
Australia, sat up on his bunk. "Really. You are truly from Australia." I knew how the
martians would feel when they landed. "Truly, you're from mars. But you're not green."
His wife dreamed of going to Australia because she had heard that there were no women
there and that Australian men would like real wives. Were there women in Australia, and

were they better than Russian women? I deferred to Mark, who is single and can
therefore speak with authority on this subject.
Our Russian, who didn't introduce himself, was interested, in our reaction to his country.
I was reminded of the question I kept being asked when I was travelling in America.
"Tell me which do you prefer? Britain or America." I remember Martin briefing me
before I entered the Cowboy Bar in Jackson Hole; "What ever you do, don't say Britain."
We tried to discuss our reaction as coherently as anyone can with someone speaking a
foreign language after they've drunk a bottle of Cinzano. Sympathy was inadequate and
any expression of it sounded trite. It seemed to me that Russia was caught between a
painful past and an uncertain future, between Communism and coke a cola. I could not
deny his country was in a mess, and I could not deny that I felt they were throwing the
baby out with the bath water. If the communist state was brutal and dangerously stupid,
it was at least, in theory, dedicated to looking after its people. Replacing it with a
doctrine of self centred greed seemed like swapping syphilis for AIDS and calling it
progress.
For me, he said, it is sad. We have an expression, he clenched his fist and flexed a bicep,
the strength of the people of Russia. But now? Where is the strength of the Russian
people? Where is the strength that pushed back Napoleon, where is the strength that held
on to Stalingrad and Leningrad and won the battle at Kursk. I have a friend who is a
brilliant mathematician, he has been invited to America to talk to their academics. He
can't go. Why? Because this brilliant man earns forty dollars a month. I spend that much
in a day. Today, I go to St. Petersburg to see my East German friend. She is a lady, I like
to show her round, take taxis, go to restaurants... And you know what, the Americans
invest in Russia. He laughed. I think they are stupid. And I am manager of American
company.
Capitalism, he said...I don't know where it goes. I think we need a strong man in charge.
Another Stalin... he seemed to consider the idea, then as I wasn't going to say anything,
seemed to lose track of it.... but tell me, Australian women, they like to fuck?
I deferred him to Mark, who was either asleep or pretending to be so, and fell asleep
thinking about Australian women or one in particular.
Next morning we longingly eyed the muffins and yoghurt and tea cups on the table, but
not knowing if it was free or if we had to pay for it or if it all belonged to the morose
Russian in the top bunk, we left it alone.
End of Chapter 7 . . .

Chapter 8: Trains and Buses
"IT IS ONE O'CLOCK in the morning of the 30th. And the carnival is over. Trevor and
Jackie have arrived and it feels crowded now and our holiday is finished and we need to
concentrate on the serious business of a kayaking trip. Re-adjust. Re-align.
We went to the Arbat, in search of coffee. The Hare Krishna were parading. At the head
of the column, the true devotees, in orange robes, with shaved heads, with drum and
microphone, shuffled up and down the pedestrian area between the buildings. Behind
them those in a mixture of robes and western dress, and then those with neither shaved
head nor orange robes. Then the women.
We headed in the rain to Olga's half renovated flat and waited, writing postcards and
waiting, and finally they arrived, clomping up the stairs in plastic mountaineering boots,
loud and exhausted and the whole paradigm shifts. So it is one O'clock, and I have
spoken to my wife who sounded small and hoarse, and I have a letter from her about the
boys, and I wish I was home now playing with them.
Enough of this. You chose to be here.
30th August. 1993:
"Moscow, in the rain, singing the Carnival is over. In my room are two piles of paddling
gear ready to be packed. I feel as though someone has pulled an obscure plug and I don't
know if it's exhaustion or T and J's arrival. We make our maps and then find they are
inadequate. The great metro stations are not only a monument to Soviet engineering but
an exhibition of struggle. The brave strong workers overthrew the capitalist menace; now
the communists are the menace and I suspect that Russians, with their long tradition of
totalitarianism, will adopt a pure form of Capitalism including the brutal myth that since
all have equal opportunity to succeed those who don't are responsible for their own
failure. Gloomy thoughts. There are those who read 1984 not as a warning but as a text
book."
Midday:
We are sitting in a steamy bus outside a metro station and have been doing so for nearly
half an hour. I suspect we don't move until the bus is full. The guide looks like an ex
boxer and is enthusiastically trying to entice more people into the bus. This morning's
torrential rain is easing. In the subway a man collapsed. No one helped him. Drunk, dying,
for the crowds an entertaining little break in the morning's monotony.
12.45:

We are parked outside a monstrous puddle near the Kremlin wall. The bus has negotiated
the narrow back streets to show us banks and the Lubyanka, and now we're sitting outside
the Kremlin and the guide is talking non stop. Even Olga has given up trying to translate.
Jackie is asleep and Trevor and Mark are reading. It is pointless, a waste of time and we
are only doing it to avoid the rain. I'm glad we walked into Red Square. Saint Basils
looks drab from the steamy window of the bus. Other colours are very strong. Dirty
brown puddles, deep deep green grass, the gold of the church domes and the deep red of
the Kremlin brick.
I wish this man would shut up. I didn't bring Byron with me."
He didn't. He kept talking. Our only programmed stop was in a cemetery. The rain had
stopped, the sun was out, and I didn't want to get back in the bus.
After lunch in a subterranean Armenian restaurant Mark and I returned home to wait for
Victor, who was going to take us and our gear back to Olga and then to the station for the
ten o'clock train to Dzhambul.
We were about to step off the edge of the world. When Tanya came to say goodbye and
wish us luck all the excitement I had anticipated on leaving Australia rose up and hit me.
I felt like a soldier off to a war; perhaps the presence of the military and so many ex-army
trucks on the roads encouraged the metaphor; perhaps it was the sudden shift of context
from gob smacked tourist to kayaker. As we drove to Olga's, Moscow put on a show.
Wrapped in soft orange light the city and the river looked genuinely, coyly,
beautiful. The summer would be done when we returned.
Victor crammed our gear and the other three into his car and set off, arranging to meet
Olga and me at the station. We took the metro. Her parents had lived in a communal flat
where there were 11 people and two children. Some of the old people were bordering on
the insane, some were sick, tempers flared, silence was unknown. She had lived there
until six years ago.
I asked her how she managed to be married in these conditions, but it seemed she and her
husband had not lived together, they just met from time to time, and decided to have a
child. Now the husband lives with another woman who "Is very beautiful and they are
very happy and very much in love." He pays Olga three hundred roubles (about thirty
cents) a month in maintenance. (Ten eggs cost roughly two hundred, a Mars bar nine
hundred roubles)
Outside the station a long line of silent people faced the entrance. Each held something; a
sausage, a cooked chicken, some tins of fish. They said nothing, they just stood
there. We had seen numerous people selling things this way in the subways, simply
standing stock still, holding out the item for sale. In the subway leading to the Arbat the
people were selling pets. Only the eyes move, following each passer by, without
registering any emotion.

The station was crowded but this time there was a huge pile of gear in one corner. I
guessed it was ours because Jackie was sleeping on it. There seemed to be people
everywhere with some sort of connection to our journey, and we were introduced to an
alarming number of them whose names and reasons for being there I promptly
forgot. Our passports reappeared and Mark was reassured that he could get back in time
to take off on a guided tour of soil erosion sites. An impromptu discussion of
Dostoevsky’s characterisation seemed out of place so we settled into waiting mode. We
were baggage again.
Andrei the climber put in an appearance. We had met him in Olga's flat where he had
discussed climbing plans with Trevor and Jackie. He was going to meet us in Bishmulla
with their climbing gear, and then they were off to climb a mountain that sounded
suspiciously like Rumski Doodle. He was reputed to be able to speak English but I
couldn't understand a word he said. He didn't seem to understand Trevor's Russian. I
hoped that on the mountain communication would be possible through hand signals.
"Liam?" he handed me something wrapped in a series of bags. "River guitar." I lost the
rest, something about Sergei in St. Petersburg. While marvelling at this little piece of
thoughtfulness, we were finally introduced to the TEAM. A droopy looking bear of man
with a sad face and down turned gaze beneath an American baseball cap was introduced
as Volodya. He crushed my hand. I recognised Gena as the stranger who had raided our
fridge a few days earlier. We had been staying in his flat. He seemed hooked to some
invisible source of electricity. He hopped around, went away and came back again,
smiled nervously, was never still. Third was another Sasha. He was small, wiry, graying,
with austere blue eyes. To distinguish him from Sasha Statiev, we christened him Sasha
Sputnik as he had worked on the space program.
And last to arrive, a pair of girls in jeans. The blonde one introduced herself as
Christianne. "You must look after me. I am the translator." She said goodbye to her friend
who seemed to act as though she never expected to see Chris alive again.
The reason for the huge number of camp followers became apparent when the time came
to take the gear and put it on the train. We hurried along the platform over burdened with
bags, apologising to anyone who got in our way and was trampled in the rush. As we
reached our carriage door an argument broke out. An angry woman was standing in the
entrance waving her arms and shaking her head.
"She is saying we have too much gear". Victor disappeared inside the carriage. It was, I
thought, no contest. The woman didn't have a chance. Victor reappeared and we were on.
All we had to do was solve the simple problem of fitting all our bags into two
compartments and leaving room for the eight of us.
Goodbye goodluck, no band, no streamers, and the windows were locked. No dangling
out and waving to the receding figures whose names I never learnt. Olga had brought the
guitar to the carriage and left.

The Russians produced food and vodka, and we settled into the rhythm of discovery.
Sasha talked at length, emphatically, eager to share his knowledge of the rivers with us.
After three glasses of vodka his voice began to blend with the sound of the wheels and
bed beckoned.
When I was a child the train journey from Coventry to London, all ninety something
miles of it, was an epic adventure. "Look," my parents would say, "Cows!" My sister and
I would rush to press our noses against the glass and stare in awe at the animals in the
fields. "Look, Sheep!" and we would rush to the other window and stare at the
sheep. The beauty of train journeys is that they deny you any responsibility for your own
progress. You can be a child again, with your nose pressed to the window.
Insulated from the need to deal with people we couldn't communicate with, looked after
by enthusiastic companions who felt their role in life was to keep us comfortable and fed
and out of mischief, there was nothing to do but settle back, relax and enjoy the
experience. I had Byron's Don Juan, a guitar of sorts, and three of the most voracious
readers I have met as travelling companions. (We may not have been the best kayakers
who ever left Australia, we were certainly the best read.)
Day One:
The samovar at the end of the carriage provided an endless supply of hot water for tea
and coffee. The Provodnik, a small man who rarely smiled, had his cabin there and
shared it with a variety of other people who may have been friends relatives or groupies.
Provodniks are, as most people who have been to Russia seem to agree, a force all of
their own. Your Provodnik is the little God of the carriage to who it has not occurred that
you are the paying customer and he is but a servant. The windows stay shut or open
depending on his or her whim. The toilets are clean or foul depending on his attitude to
work.
On our return journey our Providnik was a Joe Stalin look alike who had obviously
studied in the Genghis Khan memorial charm school. He was a hard working man who
kept his carriage scrupulously clean, but we fell foul of him when the Admiral began to
open a large cardboard box that was taking up vital melon storage space. Seizing his
property the Provodnik stormed off. He had his first go at us when we asked if we could
borrow his small hand held vacuum cleaner to clean the carpet in our compartment. "My
friends," he bellowed, standing at the door and obviously enjoying the attention he was
attracting,” My friends, you are pigs, you live like pigs." Later, as the Admiral and Chris
stood in the corridor, enjoying the beauty of the sunset and the spectacle of the train
flowing round a long gradual curve in the line, he abused them roundly for being up
when he wanted to go to bed. His final dig at us was by far the best; we had returned the
bedding and hand towels as we approached Moscow station, and he came striding back to
stand in the compartment's door: five foot nothing of affronted dignity: "My Friends, I
gave you this towel to wipe your hands and faces on, not your bottoms."

Our Provodnik going south did very little to keep the carriage clean, apart from walking
along the corridor sprinkling water on the carpet to lay the dust. He was absolutely dead
set against opening the windows, despite the heat. The only place you could grab air was
in the space between carriages. But since this was also the only place smoking was
allowed the air wasn't fresh. There was a notice there proclaiming that fighting was
forbidden. Our Provodnik also commandeered the toilet at his end of the carriage for his
personal use. There was much debate about the legality of this. Most of us were adopting
a policy of avoiding the toilet and so didn't really care. Chris decided she would ignore
him and use it. He spent the time on his knees peering through the grill at her. She
discovered this when she tripped over him on her way out.
I had been wondering about food on the train. There was a restaurant car but it consisted
of a lot of empty bottles and a grotesquely fat man who seemed to have melted into a
shapeless heap and was either very drunk or very tired, because on the two or three
occasions we passed through the diner he was falling asleep, waking up or snoring. On
the way north the train had a cook, but his meals were as devastating as the Mongol army
on the war path and the smell was seen to clear corridors.
As the train pulled into each scheduled stop people flocked on to the platform. Amidst the
usual meetings and farewells, a market would spring up. On the first station we stopped
at they were selling mainly fruit, and while Trevor filmed, Gena and Sasha haggled over
a bucket full of plums and apples. A Woman walked up and down the platform holding
aloft roasted chickens, another pushed an old pram selling potato pancakes wrapped in
cloth; a man had bread and beer for sale, someone else wandered down the corridor
selling home made vodka.
A line of small trees, a snowbreak of sorts, shadowed the line and occasionally broke to
reveal the flat landscape stretching away to the horizon. It was so dully similar that little
things made a huge difference and I took to keeping note of them. A few hayricks, some
small houses; a young man waiting by a lamppost; a motor bike and sidecar disappearing
into the distance, two men in a field standing by a horse, and the little houses turned their
backs on us and the pallid Russian skies went on forever.

We crossed the Volga. It was a huge expanse of water, and we trailed it for a while before
turning to cross it. Down this river the Vikings came, and then the Russians in their push
to the south. This was the home of Stenza Razin, whose song we heard for the second
time, this time getting Chris to tell us the story. It seems Stinky Rodney was a bandit hero,
sailing down the Volga with his mates, and the local Lord gave him a princess. When the
time came to leave, Stinky was caught in the traveller's traditional dilemma. Leave her,
chorused his friends, return to the river and the journey. The woman fluttered her
eyelashes (the precursor of facial twitching, now sadly relegated to cartoons) stay with
me she pleaded. Stinky dumped her in the river and went on his way.
We applauded his decision.
The river banks are cluttered with the functional litter of a people who work their river.
Off in the distance there were many small boats dotting the surface, presumably fishing,
and close in, on the shore line by the oil slick, there were wooden launches and rowing
boats and cabin boats tied to rotting jetties. Larger boats waited by silent cranes and a line
of barges disappeared northwards.
At the Samovar end of the carriage there was a family with a small blonde daughter. She
had just started to learn English, but all we could get out of her was one giggling hello
and then she retreated to blushes and silence. Her mother was the first person to offer us a
place to stay in Dzhambul if we needed somewhere.
Another man was travelling home to Japan after spending three years wandering round
the world. He listed the places he had visited, and when I asked him how many languages
he spoke he said:” English, Japanese, some French." He didn't need languages to travel,
and waved his hands around to show how he communicated. At the other end of the
carriage was a fat man who spent his time staring out the window dressed in his pyjamas,
and in another compartment there was a hard looking woman who Mark claimed looked
as though she was naked despite her clothes. The Provodnik may have agreed, because he
actually smiled at her, and once let her use his private toilet. (Whether or not he got down
on the floor to peer up at her through the grill I don't know.)
We were also trying to work out our Russian companions. It would have been easy to
label them as inscrutable. I made the mistake of asking Sasha, through Chris, to identify
something I saw out the window. Twenty minutes later he was still explaining, Chris had
given up translating, and I'd forgotten what it was I'd asked about. Gena smiled a lot,
seemed to have the food organised and spent most of the first day sewing a harness for
what we would later identify as our food barrel. We also learnt, to my surprise, that
Volodya was to be the Admiral, the man in charge. He seemed too droopy for the job.
Sasha was the obvious leader, although we later learnt he was an unknown quality as far
as the others were concerned. Someone pointed out that of the three Russians in the train
Vlod was the only one who spoke English. He seemed reluctant to use Chris as a
translator. We learnt how good his English was when Trevor decided to film "convivial
scenes" in the carriage. He set up an interview in which Mark was to ask a series of
simple questions. The conversation went like this:

"So, Vlod, Tell me, what are the rivers like in the Caucuses?"
"EH?"
The Admiral smiled and leant closer, pointing his ear at Mark's mouth. Chewing his
thumb he repeated the word Caucuses over and over to himself.
"Ah." He blushed, and shook his head.” No, I think Gena is a better cook than I am."
Later, when I showed the video Trevor had made to Christainne and Sasha, I learnt how
confusing the conversation actually was. While Vlod was confusing cooking and
caucuses, Trevor was helpfully repeating what he thought was the Russian for
mountains. What he was actually saying was "hero, heroes."
Trevor spent much of that first day trying to get together a glossary of river terms that
might be useful for us in the future. Russian is, in many ways, such a precise language
that confusion was inevitable even if Trevor and Vlod could understand each other. On
the other hand Russian is also infuriatingly vague. As far as we could make out the verb
to paddle a raft and to swim the river were the same. After a morning of riverspeak Vlod
became convinced that scouting a rapid was called "Prevention." It became a standing
joke, river running's answer to safe sex; "We paddle to the gorge, then we get out.
Prevention first, then we swim the rapid."
Day Two:
September the First
We have crossed into Kazakstan, though I don't know when. It is early morning and the
sun is bright and the landscape dreary; a hot yellowed grass land reaching to a horizon
devoid of trees or any other distinguishing feature. Drop a human being down in it and
you'd lose them, geographically in an absence of landmarks, spiritually in the vastness of
the place. This is nomad country, where the horse and the camel rule; Genghis Khan
country metaphorically if not literally. It's the kind of place that makes you realise how
ridiculous is the idea of owning land. Last night we stopped, or appeared to stop, for a
long time, with harsh voices seeming to argue over loudspeakers. I was expecting some
uniformed Customs official to slide the door open and turf us out but nothing happened.
The train lurched and twitched like a plane without the drone, and the piped music was
mournful and minor and a suitable accompaniment to the landscape. After a while the eye
grows weary of bleached flat stillness and looks for movement. A road parallels the line
and two or three trucks move along the horizon. A crow sits on a fence post, cawing
silently; a man on a wooden cart is pulled by a tottering pony across the world framed by
the window. It's like an art gallery where one picture shivers into another; now framing
two shepherds lying in the sun while their dogs watch the ragged sheep, now framing a
small town with the international dilapidation of the rural poor; the squalid looking

uildings, half finished or half started, reminding me of rural France and the back lanes
of Brittany.
We stopped again, and piling out amongst people selling bread and sausage and cooked
chicken, felt the first thrill of the market. We were in Asia now, and the sunlight had
changed, the black earth was brown and the people were beginning to look different.
There is no poetry in poverty. Small stone buildings; broken, their windows removed,
their roofs gone, and old wooden structures, low and squat, with hay drying in the roofs.
Grazing horses and a man riding a camel.
"Camel?" said Trev. "Where, let me film it." And after that it became a game; "camels!"
we'd shout and Trevor would leave his attempts to teach Volodya English river terms and
learn the Russian ones and rush for the video or someone else would grab a still camera
and the Russians would smile tolerantly and go back to playing dominoes, which they did
with the seriousness of domino players the world over.
The trees had been replaced with telegraph poles, their bases splinted, pacing the train as
they ticked off the distance and proclaimed the presence of other roads across the steppe.
When the telegraph lines converge, you find a town, and the town is a strange collection
of the dirty and commonplace. A group of men work to build a house; some boys loiter
on motorbikes, chatting up the girl under the trees, a smaller girl struggles with the
weight of a water bucket and a woman, thin and brown and dirty, her bright dress covered
in red dust, stares blankly at the train.
The evening was lovely; the colours rich and soft as the sun set uninterrupted by
clouds. What seemed flat and dead by day took on the tones and hues of the setting sun
which cast shadows to soften the landscape. A line of camels lollopped along, in a
landscape still changing, becoming increasingly arid.
We were standing at the window, staring. Desert ships, said a small smiling lady, then
corrected herself. Ships of the desert. She explained that she had been listening to me
singing and figured we were English. She had been teaching English in Chimkent for
nearly twenty years, but had never met a native speaker. The simple accident of our
presence on the train meant that all her Christmases had come at once. Her English was
very good, but what she wanted to do was sing the English songs she knew with native
English speakers. So we did, and she didn't just smile, she beamed at us, and gave us her
address, and told us that we were welcome to stay with her in Chimkent if we couldn't
find a place in Dzhambul.
Day three:
Lost between clock time and river time we were discovering train time. It is curiously
divorced of external references. There was time to crawl out of bed, time to eat breakfast
which the Russians prepared so methodically, time to drink tea; the time when the queue
for the toilet was non-existent; the time when everyone seemed to congregate in the

corridors. And in the spaces in between measured out by the wheels and the shifting,
meaningless view from the window, lost time, when we all but ceased to exist.
On this, the last day, the view from the window changed three times; it began as arid
desert, became green fields, and then turned mountainous.
At first the landscape remained monotonously flat, punctured occasionally by a small
village, announced by the obvious convergence of roads and telephone lines. Out side
each settlement there was a small collection of well constructed brick buildings which
Sasha identified as the town cemetery. Apparently the people lived in poverty and spent
eternity in rather grandiose mausoleums. It was at this point that we discovered an
embarrassing ignorance of Islam. Christianne, who was studying Russian and Theology,
thought she had heard something about a seventh Heaven in which men lived surrounded
by beautiful celestial virgins, but that was the limits of our knowledge.
It seemed strange that between us we could have given a good account of Christianity in
its many doctrinal and historical mutations, Judaism, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism and
Taoism, I could even add Shamanism, and various hypothetical interpretations of
European witch cults while Jackie could have probably thrown in the mythologies of
Greece and Rome, and at a pinch we could have included the mythologies of Egypt and
Central America, but of Islam, one of the most powerful forces in the latter twentieth
century, and, if the papers are to be believed, after the decline of Communism as a state
driven institution, potentially the most potent political driving force on the planet, we
knew nothing apart from some highly publicised features which we in the west deemed
barbaric.
I have often wondered since if my disappointment in Samarkand was partly due to my
failure to understand the forces that had built the place.
I returned to my bunk and stared at the ceiling. Playing the guitar, reading Byron, or
staring were ways of giving time some kind of meaningful shape. The idea of an afterlife,
the idea of dying even, was far more attractive if it opened up the possibility of meeting
the people one admires. The Celestial virgins I could do without, thank you very much,
they sounded like trouble. Heaven had to be an endless river, preferably continuous grade
fours, where the sunrise and sunsets were stupendous against vast mountain backdrops of
which one would never tire, and idyllic campsites free from sandflies, with access to all
the books I hadn't got round to reading, where language was no barrier, where the bread
was always fresh and didn't come sliced in plastic bags and the wine red and tasting of
the blood of the earth. The conversations and the music would be endlessly varied,
provocative and entertaining.
I would like to talk with the man who first mouthed the lines of Beowulf, or wrote down
the Epic of Gilgamesh. I would like to listen to the teller of the Tain, and meet the mind
that shaped the Mabingion, discuss the truth of early English history with Vortigern and
Hengist, and spend some time with Edwin. Talk with Sterne, Stevenson, Peter Fleming

and Rider Haggard, Bruce Chatwin, Marco Polo, "Sir John Mandeville". Share a meal
with Mary Kingsley.
But I fear the people I would most like to meet would have failed the entrance exam. I
can't imagine eternity without Byron or Burton, and both those sinners would have failed
according to conventional criteria. I guess Mallory and the first Plantagenet’s might not
have got there either. Wouldn't it be awful to be too good to go wherever they were, not
because you were virtuous but because you never had the courage to do the things that
might have earned your own damnation.
Maybe God has more humour and a better taste in poetry than her followers, and like
Genghis Khan (now wouldn't that be a meeting) a greater tolerance of divergent opinions
about how one should lead one's life.
I had a ludicrous vision of wandering round heaven asking "anyone here seen Arthur".
"Arthur who?" says a man who looks painfully like John Cleese.
"King Arthur, the famous knight of the round table."
"There's an Arthur King over there." says Michael Palin, resting between journeys round
the globe. "Oi Arthur, did you have a night on a round table...."
I was drawn back to reality by the conversation in the bunks below. Someone was
reading bits of the Snow Leopard, and an argument was in progress about the value of
"philosophy". It seemed to me that the ability of the individual to perceive reality is of
crucial importance to anyone who wanted to write a book about their travels.
The view out of the window, as it framed each little tableau and passed on, denying the
coherence of context, inviting speculation without ever offering the possibility of
investigation, was the perfect metaphor for what we were doing; seeing without
understanding, and not ever seeing clearly through the thick glass of a dirty window.
Filters. Later, drunk, I told Andrei that when I was young I wanted to change the world,
when I grew older I wanted to understand it, and now all I want to do is describe it. But
before you do that you have to understand what removes you from the real object and
shapes the object you perceive.
If I was going to write about this experience, if I was going to have the arrogance to
change a private record into a public utterance, I would have to foreground me, so the
reader knew where they were.
Such speculation passes the time. We passed the ruin of a fort which Sasha said was
thirteenth Century. Its walls were crumbling into jagged pieces, leaving the suggestion of
a tower, the outline of the base, and the train moved on. Hard to believe anyone would
have fought over this land, but to our left or right, somewhere, was the Oxus of History,

and we were moving into Great Game country that had been fought over since Alexander
at least. Silk roads, Mongols, Samarkand.
No one had ever danced with the Mongol bear. As one contemporary writer put it, "They
came, they uprooted, they burned, they slew, they despoiled, they departed." (Quoted
by Blount in The Golden Road to Samarkand. A different translation is given by Chatwin
in Songlines. The latter also gives a different version of the story of Stinky Rodney in an
essay in What am I Doing Here.) Only those who had run and run quickly had ever got
away. The rest had been hacked to death.
Even those who had laid down and played dead had discovered that the armies had never
been bored by the work of slaughter. When the city of Merv surrendered each Mongol in
the army is thought to have been responsible for the execution of 300-400 citizens. The
death toll is estimated at half a million people. And this is in the days of the sword and
the lance and the bow.
We are victims of a series of accidents, says a character in The Sirens of Titan. And it
seems true of nations as well as individuals. The Mongol armies had been poised to
smash their way across the rest of North Western Europe. Think of how different France
or Germany would be today if they had developed under Mongol rule. The only thing that
stopped that from happening was not the mounted chivalry of Europe, which had been
smashed in Austria and Hungary, but by the simple accident of a quarrel over the
succession to the Khanate.
And thinking of accidents one thirteenth century English chronicler claimed that King
John, during his altercation with the Papacy, sent a delegation to the Emir of Cadiz and
offered to convert England to the Islamic faith if he would accept John as his vassal.
Imagine, an Islamic England in the thirteenth century. We are victims of a series of
accidents, but in hindsight our past connects together like the stations on the railway line,
and we think the line we have travelled is the only one that exists.
Did my presence on the train depend on a decision I'd taken one Thursday afternoon in
Birmingham? Or could I have arrived at that point on the line through a different series of
accidents. And if not, then how far back did you have to go to find the first accident that
led me to that point? If my Aunt hadn't met Colleen and she hadn't taken me camping
would I still have gone canoeing, or if my Grandmother hadn't gone for a walk in Hyde
park on the day the war ended in 1918 would she have met my grandfather somewhere
else? How far back down the line do you have to go? After three days in the train such
speculation provides an endless rubric's cube which if not actually entertaining passes the
time.
At the stations the air was thin and hot and we sniffed at the coming excitement of Asian
markets. The buying became aggressive. If you didn't know what the people were saying
it sounded like they were squaring up to fight rather than trade. Sellers dragged their
melons in old tin bathtubs on the chassis of an old pram. We bought beer and hot potato
samosas from men with squinting weather beaten faces under small turkish caps, and

women with bright floral headscarves framing flat and wrinkled faces. After stopping at
one station where there was a train laden with dust covered tanks I found a very precise
slit in one of my pockets. Someone had taken a razor to it.
"They can't recognise Kayakers here," said Mark.
"What."
"Well who in their right mind would think a dag like you would have anything in his
pockets worth stealing."
We rose into mountains; green mountains speckled with snow, not beautiful but abrupt,
and we began the long business of getting our gear out of the compartments and into the
corridor. The military metaphor returned; Second World War parachutists ready to jump,
waiting patiently beside lines of gear. But the journey was all but over. Phase one and
two had gone well. Now, if our boats were waiting for us at the station, phase three would
begin in Dzhambul. We would finally be in familiar territory and be no longer baggage.
After all, we reasoned, no matter how ridiculous, a car shuttle is a car shuttle is a car
shuttle.
We were wrong.
End of Chapter 8 . . .
Chapter 9: A Car Shuttle With a Difference
WE HAD BEEN INEPTLY "smuggled" over an indifferent border. I was lying on the
floor of a stranger's house, listening to the distant, barking dogs. There was an occasional
growl closer and the simultaneous grating of a chain running out. Sleepless, I listened to
the sound of the other sleepers in the room, and the strange nocturnal song of this place I
couldn't even name. And only then, I realised I was finally there, in Kirgizstan. After
three years of planning and dreaming and disappointment, I was finally on my way to
Samarkand.
True, we had spent a week in Moscow, but Moscow, for all its idiosyncratic beauty was
just another large European city, and I had lived in and worked in and visited many large
European cities. They have museums and art galleries and beggars and you wander
round like a "star dazed tourist".
In some ways travelling to Moscow from Australia had felt like going home. But now I
was in Kirgizia, and tomorrow we'd be on the banks of the river we'd dreamed about for
so long. Tomorrow I would no longer be a useless piece of luggage to be stamped and
sealed and delivered to its destination. Tomorrow I would be an independent paddler,

who would be testing twenty years of paddling experience against the first of two
demanding, remote rivers which, as far as we knew, hadn't seen kayaks before.
Too excited, and too confused by the past few hours, I couldn't sleep.
* * *
We had left the train in Dzhambul. After the steady progress of the last three days the
tempo had suddenly picked up. As the train stopped we struggled down the corridor with
our bundles, and built a huge pile on the line beside the train. A smiling bear with lunatic
eyes in a red windjacket grabbed my hand and welcomed me. He looked scruffy enough
to be a rafter. The train left and a small crowd gathered to watch the fun as we started to
move our pile of gear through the station to our waiting transport.
For reasons I have never understood we jogged the distance, bent double under Russian
rucksacks heavier than we were. A small delivery van was waiting for us, beside a park
with a statue of Lenin at its centre. There was some confusion. The Admiral consulted
Andrei and Oleg, the two rafters who had met us, about Visas and they disappeared back
onto the station to solve the problem, returning not with visas but with a sausage.
While we piled our gear into the back Mark walked his boat through the overgrown
garden so Trevor could film our arrival. Lenin didn't bat an eyelid, he merely continued
to point the way forward.
The Russians disappeared in to the back of the truck and the Foreigners piled into the cab.
We had been given strict instructions to pretend to be Estonians if anyone stopped us and
asked us who we were. At the time it made little sense. Our clothes and body language
betrayed us as foreigners, and we spoke no Russian, so perhaps we were supposed to be a
party of deaf and dumb Estonians on holiday from the local asylum.

"We must pull this curtain; he says he only has a licence for two passengers in the cab."
Despite the flimsy curtain we could still see out of the side window. The driver moved
off, down wide metalled roads lined by trees. It could have been anywhere urban, apart
from the thin quality of the light, and the presence of a man on a donkey cart loaded with
hay, or a family sitting in the kerb, around a small fire. The driver swerved to avoid the
numerous potholes, waved to everybody he passed, who waved back, and chatted merrily
to Chris, who sat at the juncture of the two blinds and therefore peered out straight ahead.
How old are you? He asked.
25.
Which one is your husband?
I am not married.
25 and not married. And you don't wear makeup. Aren't you afraid of not finding a
husband? I only have one wife...
Suddenly Chris withdrew behind the curtain and pulled them tightly closed. By now it
was dark. The truck stopped. Don't speak, she said. It's a border crossing.
The driver jumped out leaving us to wait in silence, hidden behind a flimsy screen with
five sets of feet visible beneath it. For a long time nothing happened and no one spoke. I
discovered, much to my surprise, that I wasn't frightened, merely impatient. I wanted
something to happen so we could deal with it. The worst part of waiting was our
ignorance of the possible consequences of this absurdity.
Oh no Said Chris, they're coming, and ducked back behind the blind. The customs officer
sauntered over, pulled back the blind, said;” funny looking apples" and went round the
back where he discovered a pile of kayaking and rafting equipment and a group of
Russian rafters. There was some haggling, a fine was paid, (3000 roubles) and we left
Kazakstan. We stopped again at the Kirgiz border, but this time passed on without
incident.
We decided it was a game, a strange game, because if they were trying to smuggle us into
the country it was a spectacularly inept attempt, and only the most indolent customs
official could have failed to spot us. The Russians piled into the front of the cab and we
continued along a road that rose into moonlit hills. Illuminated by the moon, a dam,
marked by the phosphorescence of the outflow, spilt water in to a dark lake.
The driver and Chris were talking again when a shrill whistle brought us to another halt.
This time it was a police road block and the driver's papers were confiscated because the
Russians were sitting in the cab. They piled out, the Driver paid the inevitable on the
spot fine, and we edged on into the darkness of streets without streetlamps. Picking the
Russians up again we continued, down narrow, unmettaled lanes between houses and
walls, avoiding the police on the main road and pulled up outside a house.

Don't speak, said the Admiral, which was a silly thing to say as we had no idea what was
happening. As far as we knew we were supposed to be staying in a hotel in Dzhambul,
but this wasn't Dzhambul and it certainly wasn't an hotel. With dreams of a hot shower
and a bed that didn't move in ruins, we unloaded the bus, gave the driver one of our
Australian Geographic stickers and piled into the house.
Our host was a bald headed, muscular man, who would have been ideal for the part
of maniac axe murderer in a cheap splatter movie. His outer room, where the Russians
began to prepare a meal, had a bare concrete floor and a wall hung with serious cooking
and butchering equipment. There were jars of pickles in almost every available space,
onions and garlic and bundles of herbs drying in the ceiling and a large wooden table
covered with loaves of home made bread.
We moved slowly around the table, while our host and his wife hovered and tried to
make us as comfortable as they could. They reminded me of Irish relatives with their
concern for the comfort of strangers. Chris was led off to the shower, while the
Foreigners were shown to the bedroom our hosts had vacated for the night. We moved
around the table, drinking milk, eating fresh bread, and then drinking peppermint tea. The
Admiral approached me.
"Liam. We leave tomorrow, four O'clock." He pointed to his watch to make sure I
understood.
"Four Am," I repeated.
"Da. Four Am."
I didn't trust his English so called Chris.
"No," he said. "Not need Chris. We leave four Am."
My major role on Robertson's Canoeing Trips is that of alarm clock, and though I only
wake him up at the required time and pussy foot around so as not to disturb his beauty
sleep, I have copped so much abuse from him in the morning that I decided to make sure
we were synchronised.
"No," he said, emphatically, "Volodya just told me we're leaving at five. Means we don't
have to move until four thirty."
Jackie was disgruntled because the Russians were reluctant to let her carry the big
rucksacks. When we had arrived at the station they had told her to stay and keep and eye
on them while the men carried the loads. She was characteristically offended.
Mark, rolling over on the bed, murmured, "For fifty five dollars a day they should be
carrying you, let alone your rucksack," and promptly fell asleep.

At three thirty I gave up trying. I was too excited. Rolling up my sleeping bag as quietly
as possible I wrote up the bizarre events of the day before in my note book.
"Liam," growled Robertson, in tones distorted by Morning Peevishness," we're not
leaving till five o’clock."
I snarled back. I didn't care what time we were leaving, I didn't want to waste the
morning lying in my bag staring at the ceiling. As Warren Zevon used to sing, you can
sleep when you're dead.
It was the closest we came to an argument in six weeks.
* * *
After tea and bread we piled in to the back of another truck, perched on the top of our
boats or cramped into the spaces formed by rucksacks. To a raucous chorus of "We're all
going on a summer holiday" we lurched off through the early morning streets and began
to climb into hills almost immediately we had left the town.
All good river trips begin or end with a dirt road, and as a general rule, the worse the road,
the better the trip. We stopped where a barrier blocked the road, and waited for someone
to come to lift it. A conversation, another bribe, and we started to jerk and rattle our way
over a road that was nebulous at the best of times; it seemed to be the flatter bit of rock
between the mountain rising on the left and the river falling on our right. The rock was
grey and shattered, and the hillside was strewn with scree.
After half an hour of this it became obvious that conversation was impossible and travel
sickness a real and embarrassing possibility. We groaned and ground our way up a steep
snaking road, past Yurts and the camps of wild looking men who huddled close to bright
and inviting fires. There were also memorials to those who hadn't made it and the road
side was littered with bits of rusting machinery that had once been part of vehicles
attempting this route. The driver made no concession to the surface or the insane
tightness of the bends but screamed along, throwing us around in the back.

We reached the summit of Black Camel pass, at 3,500 metres or 4,00 metres, depending
on whether you wanted to believe Sasha or The Admiral, who seemed disposed to argue
about it. We got out, pretending to admire the view and take photographs, but in reality to
see if any limbs were broken. The morning was climbing the valley behind us to catch up,
but it was numbingly cold on the pass. We could look down the valley to see the road
snaking its way up the hillside, looking exactly like a snake coiling up the mountain side.
If this is a cliche, try being original after you've been smashed around in the back of a
truck for two hours.
Reluctantly we got back in and began the descent. The driver approached this with the
same manic enthusiasm. The road followed a small stream which cut its way between the
grey rock, white on the black of water smoothed stones. As it grew I began to eye it
longingly. If it would only get just a little bit bigger we could leave this rattling box and
paddle to the river.
Unfortunately, although the stream grew to paddleable size it had a disconcerting habit of
disappearing under grey snow bridges, which seemed to appear with alarming suddenness.
Escape from the truck was out of the question. Sooner or later we had to cross the stream
and when we did the bridge was enough to have us all out, cameras ready to record the
truck's plunge in to the rushing torrent below.
The original bridge, a frail looking construction of logs, had sagged to the point where
someone had decided to repair it. This had been achieved by simply building another
layer of logs over the first, which continued to sag below the new bridge. The new
surface was anything but level, the down stream side of the bridge being noticeably
higher than the upstream. Logs dangled off, ready to spear into the stream below.
The truck, minus us, edged out on to the uneven surface and stopped. We waited,
listening to the tyres whirl, cameras poised, then it inched forward to the other side. As

we walked across we discovered the pale logs lying across the width of the bridge were
all lose. As we piled back in another truck approached the bridge. The driver didn't even
change down the gears but zoomed over and crashed on down the hill in a cloud of dust.

Our driver was obviously inspired by this because the descent was far more violent than
the ascent. Twice I took off from my perch on the boats and hit the ceiling, the second
time smashing down into Jackie's back. I thought at first I'd broken my nose. I looked at
the blood. Aha! At last, some genuine Expedition Suffering.
There was nothing else to do but fall asleep, so I did.
The upper valley of the Chatkal is lined on one side with impressive snow capped
mountains, although the river was invisible as it cut between steep banks. We had been
told this part of the river was uninteresting, so we drove on down towards the village of
Janke Bazarre, passing a variety of small collections of huts, most of which seemed to
have a barrier across the road.
Our driver was known to most of these people, and at one he was warmly congratulated
by a man, drunk on Kumis, who was standing on the back of a truck. Apparently our
driver had a new grandchild. The drunk then fell off his truck and tried to kiss everybody.
Crossing the turquoise waters of the river we headed down towards Janke Bazarre, but
seeing a military patrol the driver suddenly hung a fast U turn and headed back up the
valley. Recrossing the river he turned off the road and came to a stop at a ford that
crossed the Sandalash.
We had arrived.
End of Chapter 9 . . .

Chapter 10: A River Made in Heaven
WE HAD CAMPED where a dirt track, turning off the "main road", crossed the
Sandalash River. Upstream, there were kilometres of hard rapids, but we had arrived too
late in the season to paddle the Sandalash. Downstream, the Chatkal, with its gorges, and
fifty one rapids graded at three and above.
There was little to do but pitch tents and watch the Russians build their boats. After a
while this became tedious, and the lure of a little rapid by the campsite got too much for
all of us. Pulling on paddling gear we walked up through the dry bush to a large eddy and
put our boats on the river. I watched Jackie, looking from the blue grey of glacial water,
to the high, bare, distant mountains still laced with snow, to the bright little boat and its
gaudy occupant. The first Kayak on a river in Soviet Central Asia? Did it matter? We
had never been here before and that did.
It was good to be back in a boat again, to feel it move against the frigid water, and spin
and dance on little waves and tiny eddy lines. While I was having irresponsible fun Chris
and Sasha took the two seat catamaran for a trial run. Chris had never been on a river
before, but she had read a German book on rafting so she was already something of a
proto-expert. They skidded from the top to the bottom of the rapid with little control, and
managed to wipe me out of the eddy I had been sitting in to take a picture of their maiden
voyage. They would obviously need some practice to balance Sasha's vast experience
against Chris's lack of it.
While Andrei and Oleg continued to build the big cataraft there was nothing else to do
but laze in the sun, read Byron, and talk. Chris was wondering about the sleeping
arrangements. Since Jackie wasn't going to forsake Trevor it looked as though Chris was
going to have to share a tent with either two young Russians or three older ones. Mark
and I earnestly sympathised with her dilemma and gave her the benefits of our experience
in such matters, which was non existent. After the tickity tack of the train we had the
sound of the wind in the trees and the rushing of the river. As the day ended it was
peaceful.
Almost.
Two boys appeared and wandered into our camp. One was dressed in a tracksuit, blowing
bubbles from the gum he was chewing, the other in the kind of jacket and trousers that
seemed ubiquitous. (The style, not the particular pair of pants). They greeted Mark and
me, who were lazing furthest from the river, and squatted down to watch Mark smoke.
Instant discomfort. It was impossible to forget the hassles Seeman had reported with the
locals, and we wondered if they were casing our campsite. Should we be friendly, should
we be openly hostile, should we ignore them? After a while they wandered off and began
a leisurely progress round our camp. Then just as abruptly they left.

We carefully hid all our equipment, or tied it to our tents or our boats on the assumption
that the boys had been up to no good.
After dinner the Admiral asked for our cups.
"My friends," he said,” I propose five drops to toast our arrival." He began to pour Vodka
into our mugs.
"Eh, no thanks," said Trevor," I'll drink this." And taking the top off a two litre bottle of
coke which had magically appeared amongst the debris of the meal, poured himself a
mugful. He took an enthusiastic swig and began to cough and splutter.
When Gena stopped laughing he pointed to the bottle and said "Coke po Rusky" (Russian
coke), his own brew of vodka, instant coffee powder and sugar.
And then the Russians disappeared.
Their sudden disappearance was almost magical. No loitering by the campfire, no endless
story telling in the wood smoke. One minute they were there, the next minute they were
in bed. Mark and I tried to sit by their cooking fire but they had built it between two trees
and that made it awkward if not impossible. Things would have to change. This was no
way to spend the evening on a river trip.
In the morning, nothing had been stolen, though most of us had dreamt that the camp had
been raided. When Sasha heard this he looked puzzled."The children? They were trying
to sell fox skins."
Day one of the river trip proper began with a test of courage and tenacity which we all
failed. Breakfast was to be the first, and in some ways hardest obstacle of each day of the
journey. The Russians would have probably endorsed Tilman's adage that the traveller
should have the back of an ass, to bear all, and the mouth of a hog, to eat whatever is put
before him (or her, I add, for political correctness).
Each morning a mountain of porridge, made from either Semolina, oats or polenta, was
followed by bread or biscuit, spicy sausage and a cheese which even at the beginning of
the trip leapt aggressively off the chopping board to fasten itself around your throat and
nostrils. The Russians simply could not understand our appetites, or lack of them, and
continued to provide this huge breakfast for the next three weeks, which, with a couple of
exceptions, we continued to fail to eat for the next three weeks.
Our images tarnished by this failure we began the river trip.
Each day began with the same struggle to get all our equipment into our boats. It is a
conjuring trick that never fails to surprise me. You stack the articles by the boat, and
wonder how they will ever fit. The first couple of days you sit on the deck and push and
swear and sweat, struggling with coats that seem too large and sleeping bags that refuse
to compress, cramming gear into waterproof bags, ramming it into the space behind the

seat of the boat until it all, eventually, disappears. After a couple of days of doing this the
equipment has been beaten into submission and seems to go peacefully and effortlessly in
to the boat. But knowing this is no consolation when you're struggling to get it right in
the beginning.
The waters of the Sandalash, cold and fast and shallow, raced down to their meeting with
the Chatkal. I tagged along at the end of the convoy, watching the big cataraft thumping
over the waves like an aggressive smoothing iron, attempting to flatten out the river's
wrinkles. At the junction of the Chatkal and Sandalash there was a lovely wave, and I
caught it, and surfed it until the blue catamaran came and wiped me off it. It was obvious
the Russians were unused to the concept of playing on the river, and even at this early
stage their progress seemed earnest and methodical rather than joyous.
A small collection of buildings appeared on the left and at about ten thirty we skidded to
a halt on a gravel bank downstream of the village of Janke Bazaar. Here the Admiral had
to find the "ranger" and obtain permits for our trip down the river. No one had suggested
we slip past. Obviously attempting to cheat the river ranger was considered a far greater
crime than ignoring legalities at border posts.
The Admiral, armed with a two way radio, set off for the village. Trevor, happy as the kid
in the candy store, took his camera and went to film "ethnic scenes" and Jackie and Chris
and Andrei went with them.
I stayed. I don't know why. I think I wanted to listen to the river, to lie in the sun and
sleep; but I also felt uncomfortable about strolling into a village and pointing my camera
at someone; "How cute you are, let me photograph your squalid existence so I can amuse
my friends back home." It seemed, seems, an overdone reaction, like the suspicions of
the night before.

But I stayed, and waited, and after a while the spectacle of Oleg washing the rafts down
to keep them from over inflating in the heat lost its amusement value. Sasha disappeared
and returned with a handful of berries. They were so bitter it was hard to believe they
were not poisonous. So we huddled into the little shade available and practised being
patient, which is a quality you need in Central Asia.
Nothing can be done quickly. You can't just walk up to a man and say:" S'cuse me.
Where's the river ranger." You have to ask him about the wall he's mending, his dog or
his children, or all three, and then get round to asking the question, whereupon you
discover he hasn't the slightest idea but his brother may know and while his son is
dispatched to find him, he offers you a cup of tea and something to eat, which it would be
the height of bad manners to refuse.
They were gone a long time and when they did return, there was no Admiral and no
permit, just Chris playing the pied piper to a host of children.
They had the noisy laughing curiosity of Children everywhere, and they wanted to sit in
our boats and try on our helmets. They looked skinny but vital. The girls were dressed in
vivid colours, the boys in variations on the theme of shirt and trousers and jacket.
The little ones had wide dark eyes which laughed
easily, though the elder, more adolescent, hung back,
shy or self conscious. Martians again. But Chris
explained that they didn't learn Russian until they
were in third grade, so they knew as much as we did.
Cute they were, but cuteness has a limited shelf life
when you're worrying about the fiddly bits that keep
your footplate in place.
They seemed to come down in shifts, on bikes, on
foot, on horse back, on donkeys. The little ones scrabbled amongst the stones, and finding
a crumbling grey, chalk like rock, began to eat it.
One boy wore a toy digital watch; the information on the face was in English, though he
spoke nothing but Kirgiz. They clustered round Chris for food as she tried to help
prepare lunch; posed, stock still and grimly straight faced for our cameras, and then
fought to help us carry our boats back to the river.
The Admiral arrived with the Ranger, who was given a present and a bowl of soup. Then,
to the delighted cries of the children, we set off down river again, surfing the waves to
give them something to yell about.
Leaving late, we came late to the first of the Chatkal's gorges. The Admiral had told us
that the first grade six rapid was in the gorge and it was an obligatory portage. As the
sides of the river steepened, the Admiral pulled the raft off the river, and we followed suit.

"Prevention my friends."
What we didn't know was that the Admiral had a habit of stopping at the beginning of
any rapid he thought might cause him trouble. No sneaking down the eddies, infiltrating
the rapid until one reaches the point where one is obliged to get out and look, which is
standard practice when kayaking. The Admiral stopped at the beginning, walked the
whole thing, and then paddled it or carried it. Since some of the Chatkal's rapids are very
long, he was to do a lot of walking.
Following Chris up the hillside I wondered idly if Russians indulged in foreplay or just
went straight from prevention to penetration. We scrambled up to the road. We were a
long way from the rapid, but we ambled down the gorge. I found myself in the horrible
position of playing canoeing instructor and trying to explain to Chris what the various
river features we could see below meant.
It hadn't occurred to me that under that fiercely competent germanic exterior was one
nervous novice river runner. We passed a concrete Yurt where the road curled inwards to
a bridge passing over a tributary stream, where a stone mountain cat of some sort
watched the valley. Snow Leopard said Trevor, who had traded his camel fixation for a
bear and snow leopard one. While we looked at the rapid in question a man on horse
back stopped to greet us and gave us apples.
The drop was ugly, but probably not unrunnable. I knew that look in Mark's eyes, I knew
the way a doubt about the necessity of portaging the rapid would turn into a full blown
desire to test his hypothesis. But it was late in the evening and we were a long way from
home.
After a boppy run through the gorge, which contained some big stoppers, the river piled
over a double drop. The first part was runnable, but to avoid the first big hole you'd have
to take a line that would put you into the second one. Like most difficult rapids the
decision to run or not to run depended on your attitude, if not to a short life, at least to a
long and serious thrashing.
We walked back, agreeing to do the sensible thing and portage, there would be plenty of
white water later on.
We paddled down through the big water of the gorge, to a large flat pool on river right,
and began the tedious task of carrying our gear past the drop. Once we'd carried our
loaded boats we went back, and much to the Russian's surprise, began to help carry the
rest of the equipment, relaying the gear to the end of the rapid.
We then reloaded the big cataraft. There was a lack of logic apparent in the Russian plan,
if they had one. We couldn't all get back in the little eddy at the same time, so Mark
suggested that we would help them get their boat loaded and follow afterwards and they
should go on down and get the meal started. This they did.

Sasha and Chris had a few bad moments trying to clear the wall, and then it was our turn.
We got in in pairs, because the eddy was surging up and down, and then, as we peeled
round the corner, I thought, we've made the unforgivable mistake, we haven't scouted the
rest of the gorge. The sun began to set, and the river and the steep banks turned into
bands of varying depths of grey. There was just enough light for me to follow Jackie, just
enough light for us to pick our way through the swirling waters of the gorge, with its big
waves and holes.
We pulled up where the Russians had halted, glad to be off the darkening river,
wondering about Trevor and Mark who were following in the rapidly fading light.
They arrived.
After dinner, which was almost as challenging as the gorge, Chris set out to introduce the
Russians to the delights of a campfire. They sat in dutiful silence while we laughed and
played the guitar. The Drunken Sailor went down well, as did Trevor's famous Mick
Jagger impersonations. One by one, they made their excuses and disappeared. It was
midnight before we followed, and the moon, which we had watched rise over the hills,
was so bright that a torch was unnecessary.
End of Chapter 10 . . .
Chapter 11: The Drunken Sailor
I LOST TWO DAYS in my note book. The cause was simple, a surfeit of Coke Po Ruski
on the second night and exhaustion on the third.
Day two on the Chatkal was mild and beautiful. Jackie, who was asking Vlod at the
beginning of each day what the rapids were like, was relaxed, happy to learn that we
would encounter two gorges, but no rapids harder than grade three. She would, by

evening, be convinced it was the best day's introduction to white water you could ask for,
and if it was only a little nearer to Brisbane, would have used it with her students.
The river moves swiftly, almost green, cold, the result of melting snow and ice in the
mountains, so the hands are cold and the rest of the body burning in the twenty to thirty
degree heat. The gorges were neck wreckingly beautiful; vertical rock walls rising up
from the river, which was narrow and in shadow as it wound its way through. High above,
in a cloudless sky, birds wheeled, so small they were merely specks of dirt moving across
the blue.
The colours were strong and clean; the gorge sides a mixture of deep orange, pale greys,
faint yellows all patched with green of bush and moss. The blue green of the water
flecked an intense white where the rapids were. And always the noise of the river.
By the end of the day we had enjoyed ourselves immensely, and as we organised camp in
daylight I decided I didn't want to spend the evening smiling hopefully at the Russians.
Andrei (call me Andy) spoke English of a sort, and I knew he wanted to practise, so I
called him and Oleg over and tried to start up a conversation. I was intrigued to know
how a Russian could get involved in Rafting, especially a younger Russian. I knew that
Vlod and Gena had met at university and took up rafting there. After half an hour I was
none the wiser. I think that Andrei was saying that in the past it was easier, now all the
rafting clubs are trying to make their hobby into a business. For him the chance to work
on this trip had been a great opportunity.
While we were talking, my mug, my old battered blue plastic mug, had taken on the
magical property of those vessels in fairytales which never empty. After a while I found it
difficult to focus on Andrei's face let alone his struggling English.
"Chris," I called, "We need a translator."
She came over. "You know, I am sick of people calling me all the time. Chris, Chris,
Chris."
"Ok," I said,” I’ll call you Blodwyn, but translate what this man is saying for me."
The evening unravelled, came apart at the seams, and soon we were feeling no pain,
perfectly immobilised, drunk. Or I was. The guitar was produced.
"Liam," called Gena, sitting by the fire,” Hooray. Hooray."
I realised even in my dislocated state that he was requesting a song, not cheering the
thought of my performance. Strangely there was nothing in the Russian's repertoire,
either in Saint Petersburg or on the river, to match the joyful rhythms of songs like the
Drunken Sailor.
When Chris finally got around to translating the words, some days later, they were
astonished to learn that such a happy sounding song is so cruel, but I think that made it

even more appealing. So we sang, and my mug refused to empty, and I remember Chris
deciding she was going to kiss everybody, except Gena, who kept picking on her accent,
and so he kissed Jackie, rather passionately, and offended both Jackie and Trevor and
Hooray and up she rises, they were dancing to the Lewis Bridle song and "Tonight will
be fine", for a while anyway, and people were dropping off to bed. There was no way I
was going to attempt to lie down before I was sober, so I staggered to the fire and sat
down on a log.
"I am drunken" said Blodwyn. Mild grammatical mistakes were common in her English,
and were not to be confused with fully fledged Blodwynisms, which were the result of
trying to juggle four or five different languages. Great Blodwynisms of the trip included:
"I have a sensible nose, do you have a mushroom I can blow it on." and "My fiend, she
puts cows in her rucksack and runs up and down hill to keep fit."
Oleg had taken the guitar and was singing some lugubrious Russian folk songs that
sounded for all the world like a young Leonard Cohen, drunk and falling asleep. It
sounded wonderful.
There is something about campfires which turns us all into philosophers. The
conversation was one of those dialogues which seem quite sensible at the time but when
recorded or scrutinised are so pathetically banal that they are embarrassing. A drunken
Blodwyn seemed worried by the fact that at twenty five she was still unmarried.
"You are a man," she said, revealing how truly perceptive she was," tell me: is there
something wrong with not being married."
Gentle reader, consider the author's plight. Here he was, a long way from home and loved
ones, tired, happy, very drunk, and here was this increasingly attractive girl sending out
all kinds of confusing signals. It was enough to drive a saint to sinning. This was genuine
Expedition Suffering, of a moral and physical nature. I recalled my good catholic
upbringing. I took imaginary cold showers.
"You have to go with the flow," I said," Face que voudras, it's like paddling rapids, you
have to find the grain in the wood and follow it."
I did warn you that the conversation was not staggeringly intellectual, but I record this bit
of it, with its muddled metaphors, because it would return to taunt me in Tashkent.
I finally rolled into my bag at two thirty, and still managed to be one of the first to rise,
without any kind of hangover. There was a curiously fragile quality to the morning. The
Russians, in particular Gena, were worried that Jackie and Trevor had been offended the
night before. When Trevor appeared he looked far too fragile to waste his energy on
indignation. I failed breakfast, drank four mugs of coffee and didn't manage to urinate
until lunchtime. Let that be a lesson to you said my kidneys, you're too old for this kind
of behaviour.

The river picked up in size and intensity and we were forced to scout from the bank. It is
difficult to pick lines from the boat, as you're only a metre or so above water level and at
that height its almost impossible to distinguish waves from stoppers and holes.
Lunch was a long drawn out affair. As most of us had less than four hours sleep no one
seemed enthusiastic about moving. The Admiral had been searching for an abandoned
orchard, where he hoped to supplement our supplies with some fresh fruit. Following the
path through the dry scrub and trees, I was back on the Main Salmon in the States;
following a path to ruined buildings; same warm dry air, same smells, same river noise.
We wandered of to find the garden and saw a building through the trees. There was a wall
of twigs, like a small palisade, and an earthen gate which had fallen apart. Inside the
enclosure a headless scarecrow kept watch over the bee boxes. We thought the place was
deserted; the walls were broken and the roof holed, but a silent dog chained to the gate
suggested otherwise.
These solitary homes, huddled in river valleys and mountain passes, seem a greater
monument to the courage and tenacity of the human race than any gilded cathedral
stuffed with art no one can use and few can see.
The story is universal and biblical in its simplicity. A man comes here and stays because
there is something about the place which appeals to him. He breaks his back to clear the
land and build a house and plant his garden, and maybe there is a woman with him, or
maybe he finds her later, but they raise crops and children, and the children grow and
leave, because the garden isn't big enough and there are other places to see, and the man
and woman grow old and die and the land reclaims the house.
At five o'clock we arrived at the start of a long, large, noisy rapid. Unusually for the
Chatkal this one had a name: "The thing you strain spaghetti through after you've cooked
it." We were supposed to have paddled it and portaged a fall and camped below, but we
had travelled very little distance. That didn't worry anybody.
We walked down the bank to scout it through the trees. Scouting is a complicated process;
and the ability to do it successfully is one way of defining a paddler's experience and skill.
It's not just a matter of finding a line that will lead through all the obstacles although even
that requires an understanding of what the river is going to do to the boat, and how the
force of the water can be used to the paddler's advantage.
It's not enough to say;” I’ll start over on the left, move right to avoid the pour over then
get back to the left to avoid the stopper." As the difficulty of the rapid increases, the
consequences of getting it wrong become increasingly severe. On a grade five rapid if
you do something wrong, you're going to get hurt. There is a scary level beyond this
where you can do everything right and still die. So when you look at the rapid you have
to ask yourself not just what the route is, but what are your chances of making a mistake,
and then are you prepared to live with the consequences of such a failure.

The thing you strain spaghetti through after you've cooked it was graded five. It was long
and complicated, but with acres of room to move away from one or two obstacles that we
definitely needed to avoid. Trevor, characteristically, was for "running through the guts"
but I didn't feel like risking the consequences of getting pushed off line half way down
the rapid, where visibility would be non existent. It would result in getting trapped in
either the big pour over or the stopper. While either would eventually spit me out, the
chances of staying in my boat given the pressure of the water were remote. The eddy line
was a good grade three technical rapid and that would allow me access to the rest of the
rapid. Walking back to camp we agreed to differ. We often do.
Andrei and Oleg were obviously very close friends; brotherly almost. They touched each
other often, hugged in the morning, and after rapids; walked arm in arm and seemed to be
in charge of the cooking. They had built a fire between two trees and strung the pots on
the wire between them. I offered to help, and we made compote out of the wild fruit we
had picked. Oleg spoke no English, but knew some French, so while we cooked we
talked French.
I learnt that he was married, with a small boy he missed greatly, and that he was one of
the numerous Russian "Engineers" who were now looking for work. Everybody with any
education in Russia is an engineer. It occurred to me that I had been talking almost
exclusively with Blodwyn, not because she was tall blonde and pretty but because she
was the only foreigner I could talk to and the only way I could gain any access to the
others. Trevor was still trying to speak Russian. I had given up on my attempts to learn
when I realised I couldn't understand what he was saying.
Now I discovered the Russians couldn't understand him either. His pronunciation was a
source of gentle hilarity. The Russians were flattered he had made the effort to learn their
language but amused by his way of speaking it.
The Admiral was nursing a cold, but had been seen to smile on occasions. I was trying to
justify his caution to myself. If something went wrong he was the one responsible, but his
method of river running was painfully slow. Sasha seemed very good, if equally cautious.
He seemed to be able to bring the blue catamaran through most things by going with the
flow. He did snap at Blodwyn once or twice, but I suspect he was used to being in total
control of his boat and I doubt he'd be used to paddling this level of water with a beginner.
Not being able to rely on her to act instinctively would be enough to make anyone a little
nervous.
While Oleg and I talked, Blodwyn revealed she had spent a year in Paris, so after
correcting our accents, she declared this was our French evening and only French was to
be spoken.
While we talked she asked me if I was scared. I didn't think too much about the answer, I
merely said, of course, you can die down there. (It sounds nifty in French.)

It was strange to sleep with the roar of such a rapid in your ears, knowing that if you
survived breakfast you were going to have to run it. Small streams might provide a
poetically popular sound that lulls you to sleep, but a big river thrashing its way through a
long drop seethes with a monstrous malevolent sibilance which envelops you and does
strange things to your mind. I can't count the number of nights I've clambered desperately
from my sleeping bag, still half asleep, convinced the tent was being flooded.
At least Mark seemed to have the same problem, because on a number of occasions he
woke me violently in the middle of the night to tell me the river was pouring through the
tent. One night on the Pskem I woke to find him hanging off the tab in the tent's roof:”
Grab the tent, Liam," he was saying through clenched teeth, "grab the tent and watch out
for the rocks." After two or three days of paddling the problem is compounded by the fact
that your body refuses to believe you are no longer in the boat. You close your eyes and
you see rapid, and the tent floor sways and rolls and you might as well be back on the
river.
But scared?
For me there is a curious paradox in what we do. As we discuss the next rapid, looking
for the ideal line, I know we have to be serious about the job in hand. But at the same
time I cannot take the expedition and paddling too seriously. I don't have to be there. I
could be at home with my family, eating at a table, having hot showers every night,
sleeping in my comfortable bed. I have chosen to put myself beyond convenience, and I
feel reluctant to dramatise it. If there is no pleasure, only fear, then there is no reason to
be here.
Fear, yes. Of course. But it is not the nagging fear of daily worries; the parents' fear for
the sick child when the doctor can't diagnose the illness; the workers' fear for the security
of their job; the father's fear that the money won't last until next pay day; nor is it the sick
frustrated fear of the headlines, when you see the world gone sick and nasty and you can
do nothing about it. This is physical fear, intense and brief, the body is designed to cope
with it, and the release at the end is almost sexual in its power.
The BCU used to have a sticker that claimed "Only Screwing beats canoeing." They were
wrong. I took a student down Grandtully rapid in Scotland. He was sixteen and it was his
first big rapid. When he got to the bottom he turned to me with the biggest of smiles and
said; "Eee sir, that beats f__ing any day."
Big water kayaking requires a certain frame of mind. You cannot conquer a river. How
can you defeat something that is never the same twice, that is unaware of your presence?
To the river, we are so much flotsam, and if we forget that the results can be decidedly
final. It is often difficult to remember the force of the river in places like this; the water
can smash a swimmer to pieces on the rocks and leave them broken like a doll or a piece
of rubbish bobbing in the backwaters of an eddy.

There was enough force in "The thing you strain spaghetti through after you've cooked
it" to rip us from our frail craft and pound us like so much drift wood. And the river
wouldn't even know we were dead. There can be no competition, no way we can fight
against the huge forces we travel on. We have grace and style and experience, but our
arrogance is tempered by humility.
Standing with a throw bag in case something went wrong, I had time to admire the grace
of my partners as they danced their way through the mess of water. They are very good.
But it is a dance, never a contest. Like a ballet dancer with a sumo wrestler, or a child
with a bear, as long was we dance, we survive. The minute we try to compete, to fight the
river, we are crushed.
One by one the paddlers squeeze into their three and a half metre craft, stretching their
spray deck over the cockpit. Despite the heat the water is cold, uninviting, and from the
seat of a kayak the waves look ominously huge and the noise drowns conversation. The
features that were so obvious from the bank are now obscure, and it takes a lot of
experience and discipline to remember the line. Each kayaker remembers their own
signposts, rehearsing the moves they must make. There will be no time to try and
remember half way down the rapid.
It was a portion of gateaux. Almost an anti-climax. Trevor ran the centre without incident,
we skidded through the rocks on the left hand side, and came out into the main channel
after the nasty bits were over. The cataraft took Trevor's line and crashed through the
waves to the bottom. Vlod had told us this was followed by another grade five rapid, but
we trusted our own judgment and moved effortlessly down the eddies, avoiding some
monstrous holes.
It seemed crazy that with experienced paddlers of the skill of Mark and Trevor in the
crew we were trying to run a river on second hand information which was, at best,
crudely translated. Off the river, we needed the Russians like a baby needs its mum.
We simply couldn't have reached the Sandalash without them, and I suspect we had fallen
into the habit of a semi conscious reliance on their judgement. On the river we were
equals, our different techniques the result of our different craft. It was obvious that we
would have to free ourselves from the Admiral and his river notes, and back our own skill
and judgement. Once we began to do this, moving as we usually did on a river at home,
we quickly began to outpace the Russians.
A grave by the river marks the spot where a girl died in a rafting accident. It was a
sobering little reminder. The rapid was graded six. We got out to look, agreed with the
definition, and began the long, hot, arduous portage. Mark and Trevor ran the first section,
but carried the rest along a well beaten trail through dry yellow grass. It seemed to take
forever. It didn't occur to any of us that we could have easily delegated someone to get
lunch ready while we humped rucksacks and gear to the end of the rapid. By the time we
were ready to move off again it was nearly four o'clock.

Dropping through big waves we came to the start of a long rapid and the Admiral got out
to scout. This time I ignored him, saw big eddies, and hopped down to a point where the
rest of the rapid was obscured by rocks. We got out to scout, Trevor taking his camera to
film some big water action. "It's only breaking waves," he said,” go though the guts."
I followed Jackie while Trevor and Mark filmed. She missed the eddy at the top of the
rapid, then disappeared through the rocks. I meant to follow her closely, but the eddy line
spun me back in to the eddy. On the second try I had the line right and began to work
left.
No sign of Jackie; then I saw Mark turn, lower his camera and take a few steps
downstream. Shit, thinks I, Jackie's in trouble. But by now, sliding between big rocks and
lining up for Trevor's "Breaking Waves" I was stuffed, gasping for air, and too busy
staying upright and on line to worry about her. In one of those bizarre moments that
occur when you're suffering from oxygen deprivation and exhaustion in the middle of a
rapid, I remember thinking: Hastings Point; Beach break surf on a bad day.
The waves came from all angles on top of each other; I braced and pulled and pivoted,
trying to use the crest of each wave for turning and sight seeing. Trev's "Breaking waves"
looked suspiciously like boat munching stoppers to me. I was aiming for the Admiral's
rock, a big rock on the left hand bank, where the river began to bend left and where an
obvious eddy offered some safety.
As I was about to pull into it I waltzed into a wall of white water and the boat crunched to
a dead stop. Almost immediately it felt as though a big hand pushed down on the stern
and the nose rose and we popped out and into the eddy. Breathless, euphoric, alive, I saw
Jackie sitting on the other side of the river. She crossed over and indulged in a most
unladylike series of expletives. Her run had been even more dramatic than mine as she'd
been stopped dead, spun around and side surfed in a stopper.
We waited for the others, who conspicuously avoided running "through the guts" and
then we hooted and hollered and were high, all talking loudly and at once. We waited for
Vlad the inhaler and his raft. I scrambled up the bank and met him helping Sasha carry
the blue catamaran. Indecision time. Should we complete the rapid, which ran away
round the corner, or wait for him? Were we camping here? Yes? No? Perhaps? So we
waited. And waited some more. We had finished our run at about five thirty. The big raft
didn't appear until seven o'clock.
But they were laughing and happy, and seemed to have enjoyed themselves. Before I left
home my eldest son had sold me ten bars of his school's fundraising chocolate.( A state
education is free in Australia, ha ha.) I had been keeping it stashed in front of my foot
plate. Now I broke it open and shared it around, Mark contributing strange things he had
brought with him.

I had never camped half way down a rapid before. The next section of what Mark had
decided to call "All Day Sucker", in honour of the gob stoppers of his childhood,
contained the ugliest looking pour over I had seen in a long time.
It was dark by the time the meal was finished, and we adjourned to the campfire. But the
wine had been drunk and the leavings were stale. There is a time when you get tired of
excitement and strangers and foreign languages and more than anything else you crave
familiarity. I can construct this feeling for myself with a guitar and some songs I have
known for nearly twenty years. But the inevitable campfire game of "do you know"
began, and I thought, I don't need this, and went to bed early.
Which was a bad move. The noise of the rapid was like a wall of amplified sibilance and
the numerous sandfly bites itched desperately. Instead of falling asleep I dozed,
imagining conversations which could not be happening.
The next morning was to be our last on the Chatkal, and the beginning of the best day's
paddling so far. Mornings were cold. My thermometer, which had caused such
excitement in Moscow, a million years before, did not rise above ten degrees until the sun
was on the campsite. Mornings were therefore slow; someone worked to get the fire
going, someone else mixed baby powder until it resembled milk, and I stole water from
the porridge pot to make myself coffee, eventually getting one for Mark when breakfast
was approaching.
On good mornings I got the water out before they put the salt in. It was a time for sitting
in the growing sun, writing diaries. Jackie would try to get Vlod to explain his river
notes so she could know what she faced that day. These river notes were difficult to
follow, not only because questions like "how far will we travel today" blew Volodya
away, but for the simple reason that the river was higher than expected for this time of
year and some rapids were obviously blurring into one another.
Volodya thought that "All day sucker" was followed by another grade five rapid, but after
some more difficult ones the last rapid on the river was "The Diaphragm", which the
Admiral told us was spectacular but easy. He made whooshing noises, and seemed to
mime a shoot running down between narrow rock walls.
"And is there a stopper at the bottom of the chute?" asked Jackie.
"There is no problem," said The Admiral,"no problem at all."
As if that wasn't enough to get Jackie worried the conversation turned to what would
happen when we got off the river. We would stay at an hotel. "Like the one in
Kirovskia?" "No No. Real hotel, over looking lake, with banya."
You could translate the word Banya, but you couldn't translate the mystical overtones the
word seemed to posses. Vlod sounded as though he was expecting to find the holy grail,
the gold at the end of the rainbow and the celestial houris all waiting for him in a place
called Bishmulla on Charvak lake.

"Banya," said Blodwyn, getting visibly excited. "A banya. What bliss." It turned out that
a Banya was the Russian version of a sauna. We couldn't quite work out what was so
exciting about sitting in a room full of steam, we did that every Christmas during the
Queensland summer, but it appeared there was more to it than this, and Vlod and
Blodwyn talked excitedly about Great Banya's They Had Known. There was apparently a
lot of ritual involved.
I wasn't paying much attention, I was idly writing down bits of the conversation for
future reference and thinking about the rest of "All day sucker", until Blodwyn said,"You
know. I don't mind being naked with you guys, but I think I would feel uncomfortable
with the Russians."
"Naked," Squeeked Jackie, who had been following the conversation with growing
alarm."Do we have to be naked?"
"Of course," said Blodwyn.
Our line for the rest of "All day sucker" was down the extreme left, hugging the bank to
avoid the horrible mess in the middle. It should have been simple. The left hand line
tipped me out into the centre, and over I went. I saw rocks, with the water rushing over
them, thought, this river's shallower than it looks, went under bumping my helmet on the
river bed, and rolled automatically without thinking about it. I was glad the roll still
worked, because all day sucker developed into a field of waves that would have been
horrendous to swim.
Mark called the next big rapid Binary Proposition: it was a matter of life or death, a
simple choice, success clear cut for a change. It was a short, narrow rapid by Chatkal
standards. It dropped through a harsh diagonal stopper kicking right and plunged into a
F__ing great crater. Jackie and I ran the first part and portaged the rest. Mark and Trevor
ran the whole thing. Mark making it look easy, Trevor getting a little off line and
dropping in to the hole, which promptly spat him out. I didn't feel too good about having
portaged the last part. After four days on this glorious river I was still keeping a long way
back from the edge of the envelope.

The Admiral had asked me to stand in a safe place and catch the raft's throw line to
ensure they didn't get swept down the next rapid before they had a chance to walk the
length of it and scratch their heads and decide where they were going to run it. I found
the first big eddy and waited.
The raft ran the rapid like a smoothing iron, flattening out the waves, but then jarred to a
trembling halt in the last stopper before the crater. As they did so, the tube bucked and
the Admiral's foot slipped between it and the frame. They came past the big hole, saw
Jackie standing taking photographs and thinking she was me tried to get in to the micro
eddy beside her.
Oleg threw the line, then leapt out to try and secure the raft, which was inevitably swept
on to the nice big eddy I had found for them. I threw my throw bag, and dragged them
in. It took a while for them to free the Admiral and when he got out he acted like a bear
with a sore head rather than a bear with a sore leg. We watched in amusement as he spat
the dummy. Then he abruptly stopped, and smiled sheepishly. I think it is good rapid, he
said.
Below Binary Proposition there was another rapid which Jackie had already walked down
to look at. She claimed it was merely a case of swapping from side to side to avoid the
holes. What she omitted to mention was that the stoppers in the middle of Multiple
Choice were huge and the opportunity for zigging or zagging were almost non-existent.
Jackie, Mark and I found ourselves in a small eddy on river left with no way of knowing
which way to go.
For the first and only time on the Chatkal I felt we had pushed our envelope and arrived
on the outside edge. It was not a pleasant feeling. Trevor filmed us running through more
big waves and stoppers and suddenly the river opened out into fields of waves.
Blackadar boating, (drifting sideways and only straightening out to punch through
stoppers we couldn't avoid) we ran on down. After a while I came screaming round a
bend and saw a beautiful mountain appearing to cap the valley. Below it, a large pool or
eddy, the first we'd seen since leaving Multiple Choice. We pulled into it and collapsed in
the sun.
The Chatkal is one of those rare rivers, designed in Heaven, which don't let up. Most
either begin with difficult rapids and peter out into long flat stretches, or they have the
hard bits in the middle, but it is rare to find a river that just keeps on getting harder.
As we continued it was obvious we were entering another gorge. The river kept dropping,
kept falling away, and the walls closed in. I got side surfed in a stopper, spun backwards,
buried in a hole and I kept hearing the voice say;"relax, react."
We passed the obvious point of no return, where we were committed to finishing the river
as there was no place to camp on the steepening banks. The sun illuminated the
mountain ahead of us, and the mountain behind, but though they glowed a warm orange
the river was in shadow and the walls were dark in the growing cold.

The Cataraft had disappeared ahead of us, and we were dropping though a series of steep
rapids, edging closer to the uncomfortable feeling that we were heading towards this
"Diaphragm" without the chance to pull out if it turned out to be nasty.
I missed an eddy, skidded sideways down a narrow grey rapid and reached the ultimate
bad place of every Kayaker's nightmare.
The whole river funnelled down to a narrow gap between vertical rock walls that was
narrower than the length of a kayak. The Admiral had told us that the "Diaphragm" was
harmless. What he hadn't told us was that the river was higher than he remembered, and
that the approach was through a series of grade three to four rapids. I found myself
hurtling down towards a breaking wave crammed between two sheer sided walls.
Stay calm said the voice. I hit the wave determined not to go sideways, was surfed
backwards into the wall and recycled in the eddy. Shuttle memories; France and Al
Lowande telling me "Whatever you do, when you hit the wall, lean into it," I leant into it,
it was pocked and pitted but smoothed by the water. Lean in to the rock said the voice,
stay calm. Stay upright. Because you have to get through this. I felt the boat slide
backwards out of the eddy and found myself surfing backwards on the face of the wave.
This is a trick I have attempted on numerous rivers, and now that it was the last thing I
wanted to do I finally managed it. I heaved on the paddle, and I finally popped through,
the Mountain Bat standing on his tail and dropping me into a whirlpool of sorts. Stay
upright said the voice, which was beginning to sound a little tense as the paddle
disappeared down the yawning hole. Fig 5.7 "The vertical disappearing paddle brace."
Try teaching it sometime.
I found the cataraft crew, all of them smiling. Gena mimed someone taking a deep breath
and squeezing through a narrow space.

The swift current we had followed for so long had disappeared. In place of the free
running river there was the deep water of the lake, and large boils slowly breaking the
dark surface. We found a flat sandbank and realised we had finished.
Euphoria had to wait while the boats were unloaded and we dithered, hoping Gena would
fail to find some transport so we could spend one more night on the river. He did, and so
we pitched camp and settled down for the night. I could hear voices discussing how hard
the Pskem would be, so wandered off on my own to play the guitar while the stars came
out and the mountains were black outlines on the clear night sky.
I was so happy to simply be there. Then. I had no desire to rush towards problems that
may not exist. I had run some of the best continuous whitewater I'd seen in a long time,
and all I needed was my family and it would have been a perfect evening. I had been
daydreaming about my boys for most of the day; I had a powerful visual image of
walking through the doors at Brisbane airport to their noisy welcome.
After dinner in the dark the Admiral said; "My Friends, I propose five drops to the
Chatkal." It was after two O'clock before we'd drunk the bottles dry and sung ourselves
hoarse, to celebrate our descent of this stunningly beautiful river.
We woke to the wind battering the camp. The Admiral's tent would have taken off if
Blodwyn hadn't been sleeping in it. Vlod and Gena had disappeared early to try and find
some transport. The sand had drifted into our tent and everything was infected by silt.
After so many beautiful mornings, it seemed an anticlimax but it was time to leave the
Chatkal. The Admiral returned with our transport, a small green van.
Piling our gear into it we found, to our delight, seats. We lurched off towards the hotel
complex outside the town of Bishmulla. For the first time on the journey I felt old and
tired, but as my companions looked more like a bunch of geriatric wrecks than hard core
boating heroes, it didn't really bother me.
End of Chapter 11. . .
Chapter 12: Postcards from Bishmulla (Paradise
Without the Houris)
IN BISHMULLA I was happy.
I was suffering from an absurd, irrepressible, inescapable sense of joy. It bubbled and
cackled like quietly lunatic laughter. Everything seemed worthy of note; the dirty table
cloth, the cracked plates, the empty salt and pepper shakers and the foul glasses. Even
the monumental indifference of the waitresses was a source of fascination.

We were renting rooms in an hotel on the lake shore which would have embarrassed
Basil Fawlty. It was undeniably seedy. Our three bed room, with panoramic views of the
construction site, was swarming with flies. The toilet was a pear shaped hole in a shit
spattered concrete block, also swarming with flies. In the restaurant they had trained the
flies to die in surreal patterns on the fly paper tacked to the wall. It was an unusual form
of decoration.
The cook looked like a mountain bandit, with wonderful,
thin uptwirled moustaches. He toyed with his meat
cleaver in a way that suggested he found the idea of
carving Australian Kayakers far more entertaining than
cooking for them. There are restaurants designed so that
you can see the Kitchen staff prepare your meals. This
was not one of those places and I was thankful it wasn't.
The food was fascinating, but dangerous.
With supplies of toilet paper reaching a critical low,
starvation seemed the safer option. The restaurant also
possessed the most hostile waitress service I have ever
encountered.
The fact that they were dressed in dirty white overalls
and aprons that made them look like workers in an
abattoir didn't help. Reacting to simple requests, like, "Waitress, could we please have
some glasses for the tea" as though they were profoundly insulted by the suggestion
that
they should interrupt their conversation and do something they reminded me of Mrs
Ogmore Prichard, in Under Milk Wood who ran the boarding house but wouldn't have
boarders in case they breathed germs on the furniture.
It was beautiful. Even the sullen, dark eyed waitresses, who never smiled when they were
facing the customers, were beautiful.
Externally the resort looked like every lake side resort I'd ever been to from Jindabyne to
Maccall. The scenery was magnificent, green hills falling to the water, and clusters of
buildings huddling where the hills met the lake. Someone was building a new hotel, and
who ever they were, they weren't monochromatic lego freaks. This new unfinished
building managed to look modern and still blend in with the surroundings.
A man with a fibreglass pole knocked fruit down from the trees near the entrance.
Women with wrinkled faces, wearing bright patterned headscarves and loud floral
patterned frocks, sat on a blanket and sorted fruit into buckets. Jackie was looking for a
rubbish bin, frustrated by its absence, until she realised that these people have no rubbish.
They carry their fruit in iron pails, their food in cloth. Their meat is not wrapped in
plastic, it's wrapped in flies.

Look closer. Dilapidation, shabby neglect. There are roses growing by the doorway that
leads to our rooms, but try and count the flies buzzing merrily around Mark's bed or the
open toilet. Each room has a carpet, a table, chairs, a wardrobe, even a framed picture on
the wall. But everything is in the process of falling apart.
The paint is chipped, the wardrobe broken, the chair's strength questionable, the carpet
long past the stage where cleaning was a remote possibility. It seems as though the idea
and its execution exhausted whatever energy the people have and maintenance is not an
issue. It seems that form, not function matters here. The bathroom had a shower that
didn't work, and cold water that rattled and spluttered from the tap into the filthy basin.
The crowning irony was that there were salt and pepper shakers on each table in the
restaurant, but they were all empty. It did not occur to whoever set them out that they
were useless unless filled, and that their value as table decorations was non-existent. I
was too busy admiring the wild exploded hairstyle of a middle aged Russian lady who
Blodwyn had decided was going to be my dancing partner at the local hop that night.
The complex had a covered area, with walls on three sides hung with pictures of couples
dancing, dressed in a variety of ethnic costumes. All day piped music played. I liked the
music. It was alien and eerie.
I liked everything about Bishmulla. Even getting sick seemed appropriate.
After what seemed an age, during which several bad tempered people moved in and out
of our rooms, we were allowed to take up residence. I never did understand what the
hubbub was about. I remember sitting on my kit bag in the corridor waiting for orders;
too numb and too tired to move. Blodwyn was back to worrying about the sleeping
arrangements, but they were quickly solved. She scored the pleasure of sharing a room
with Mark and me. The Admiral was being tactful; giving Jackie and Trevor a room to
themselves.
After breakfast, and our reunion with Andrei the climber, who had managed to bring T
and J's climbing equipment from Moscow, we headed for the banya. Mark was muttering:
"All I want is a hot shower and the chance to get clean." Blodwyn was rambling about the
more esoteric intricacies of taking a banya, giving me instructions out of the goodness of
her heart which I was forgetting as soon as she said them and Jackie was still worrying
about the possibility of mass nudity.
I was tagging along in a beautiful daze. I hadn't felt like this since I was a child, on
beautiful afternoons when it snowed, and I came home from school and the rest of the
day stretched before me so cramful of possibilities that it was almost impossible to know
where to start.
The Banya house was very clean, very modern. The toilets were polished porcelain, with
seats, and a cistern that worked, although it took me a while to work out that used toilet
paper went in the ripe smelling bucket by the side of the bowl, and not down it. Jackie

and Blodwyn disappeared in to the banya, and the males got themselves comfortable and
settled down to wait. Tea was served, green tea, by more large wrinkled ladies. We
listened to the muted sounds of splashing and laughing, refilled our cups, and waited
some more.
Someone turned the television on.
Mark ceased to murmur. Trevor began talking to the Admiral about Russian politics. I
drank more tea.
An hour and a half after entering, the ladies emerged. They looked as though they had
bleached their skins.
And so to the Banya. A cold echoing room, walled with white tiles, with a plunge pool in
the centre and showers down one side. Then a smaller wooden room. Steam. Choking
steam. The smell of hot damp wood, and more steam. Vlod the banya monster wanted
heat, more heat, and worked hard to cheat the thermostat in to believing it was cooler in
the sweatbox than it actually was.
He lay down on one of the top shelves, with a look of bliss on his face. The foreign
contingent sat on the lowest bench in the steam like three lost garden gnomes, or the three
wise monkeys, bereft of clothes and wisdom, gasping for breath. This was obviously
Expedition Suffering at its best, because we were doing this out of a sense of loyalty to
our friends. It was obviously important to them that we enjoyed this sacred institution.
"How long do we have to wait before we can leave?"
"Give it another minute."
"I may be dead in another minute."
We left, trying to smile, and leapt in to the icy water of the plunge pool. "Dr. Robertson,
are such extreme variations in temperature good for your heart?"
"We're supposed to do it again."
"I've just gone conveniently deaf. I didn't hear what you said. I think those showers
work."
We emerged from the Banya to the tea room. The ladies were sitting sipping tea. Gena
produced some Russian Champagne. "To the Chatkal!"
About the Pskem said Jackie. Vlod wants a meeting this afternoon to discuss what we're
going to do.

I was going to sleep. As we would be in this earthly paradise for two days I was going to
sleep and then explore the town tomorrow, having extracted a promise from Blodwyn
that she would come with me and translate. I was planning to send a telegram home so
they knew we were safe.
The other three were going "For A Walk". I warned Mark about this, but he bravely set
off. They were his friends, he'd known them for a long time, and he should have known
better.
So should I. When I closed my eyes I was back on the Chatkal, skidding down towards
the diaphragm. The bed swayed and yawed, responding sluggishly to my paddle
strokes. After Mark had returned, muttering about Mountain goats, we had our meeting.
The Admiral spread his map on the floor and began to describe the river.
The Pskem begins at the junction of three rivers and ends in Charvak lake approximately
90 kilometres and 24 rapids graded three and above later. Rapid number five is graded six
and is two kilometres long. 6 and 7 are graded five and are both three hundred metres
long. Jackie didn't want to paddle this section, nor, to my surprise, did Trevor. Although
two kilometres was a long way to carry the kitchen gear Mark and I were for doing the
whole thing.
Plan B, the Admiral's new plan, was to start twenty kilometres further down stream at the
Pskem bridge. We would then have time for a rest day, and one day to walk up to a
scenic lake. The Admiral wanted earlier evenings, which meant travelling less distance,
as no one was suggesting we get moving earlier or shorten lunch. I had the distinct
feeling that it didn't really matter whether I agreed or not, plan B, to all intents and

purposes, was now the only plan and we either put in at Pskem bridge or put in at Pskem
bridge.
There didn't seem any point in arguing. It would be easier to talk the pope into installing
condom vending machines in the Vatican than to get Trevor to change his mind, and what
was the point in trying to force Jackie into attempting something she clearly wasn't happy
about. I thought, to hell with it, I was on holiday, outvoted, and it sounded as though
there was plenty of white water on the rest of the river. The new plan didn't jeopardise the
journey to Samarkand and besides, we had one more day in Bishmulla.
I was too happy to be disgruntled, and after a volleyball game against the locals, in which
the Russo-Australian team, led by the jungle volley baller from Toowoomba, Mark "The
Spike" Silburn, gave the locals a run for their money, we adjourned to the restaurant. This
time I couldn't eat. But while loitering over the tea, after almost everyone else had
gone, it was fascinating to eavesdrop on the waitresses. One said: "I will be back
tomorrow, for the afternoon shift, or perhaps the next day, for breakfast."
She was no longer dressed in her meat killing clothes, but was wearing a long dress of
rich dark patterns, and a gold and red headscarf. Her eyes were dark, her lashes darkened,
and she was laughing and smiling with her friends. While she talked a young man in the
inevitable jacket and trousers arrived, and after much good natured banter which didn't
need translating, they left together. Professional schizophrenia at its worst.
After breakfast Mark and I wandered into Bishmulla with Sasha and Blodwyn. Storm
clouds were piling up over the lake as we strolled into the outskirts of the town. Sasha
surprised us all by announcing that this was a popular ski resort in the winter.
The local children were coming out of school, which apparently occurs in shifts. They
eyed us with open, giggling curiosity. Sasha seemed to be window shopping and we
pulled into Bishmulla's answer to a hard ware store. A dim interior, with a counter that
ran along three sides of the room in front of shelves of nondescript junk; a display case
full of assorted electrical bits and pieces; one of each, their price tags and identification
all hand written. I wondered what would happen if you wanted two of anything.
The other shops were the same; one seemed to be selling nothing but thousands of pairs
of the one style of shoes, another little but huge jars of pickled things. Blodwyn said the
great thing about shopping in Central Asia was that nothing tasted the same twice. You
could buy two jars of the same pickles, and they'd taste different. No factories, no mass
production.
The post office was dim, wooden, hopeless. I don't think they could have coped with a
letter to Moscow let alone a telegram to Australia (The connection to Mars has not yet
been established, please hold the line.) Blodwyn was looking for toilet paper and a T shirt.
She was doomed to failure. Thankfully the popular ski resort of Bishmulla isn't
sophisticated enough to make the "My Friend went to Bishmulla and all they brought me
back was this .......T shirt." T shirt.

We found the local bookshop, which contained, amongst other things, a beautifully
illustrated poem by Pushkin in a soft cover book the size and shape of a comic. And then
met the Admiral who was depressed by his inability to conjure up some transport for our
move to the river.
With little else to do, we retired to the local tea house. At the entrance two old men, with
long white beards, were playing chess. Inside, another group of men played cards for
money, sipping tea and throwing their cards down with exaggerated disgust.
The tea was green and beautiful, the bowl of Russian delicacy whose name escapes me,
looked like large bits of ravioli adrift in a broth of salt, with a delicate layer of grease on
the surface. Sasha began telling Blodwyn about the Camchatka, and after a while she
forgot to translate. It would have been boring sitting there listening to them rabbiting on
in Russian if the locals weren't so entertaining.
A younger couple in western style clothes appeared. The woman wore no scarf. While
they decided on which delicacy they would purchase from the restaurant's one dish menu
they touched each other. They were the first couple we had seen since leaving Moscow
who physically demonstrated any public affection.
The houses were a pale brown, made mostly from mud brick, their blank walls facing the
street. The road was bitumen which faded into dirt at the edges. Along the outside of the
road a small stream ran, occasionally transformed into a permanent fountain by the
addition of a piece of hose pipe tied to a post. Cows and goats ambled aimlessly along
the street. Trucks and the ubiquitous motorcycles and sidecars threaded their way noisily
between the houses. The locals didn't slow down when approaching livestock on the
road; they simply slalomed in and out and if one got knocked over; instant shashlik.
As we passed the houses we occasionally saw into a courtyard; a glimpse of trees, roses,
gardens. We heard the rhythmic pulse of a drum and the sounds of happy voices, and saw
a circle of brightly dressed women dancing. Wedding said Sasha.
Later, as we left the town, we heard more music, the repetitive wail of a reedy pipe and
the clatter of a drum. An open truck was being loaded. Old men were crowding into the
back of the truck, sitting in a line against the back of the cab. To the accompaniment of
pipe and drum, the sheep was helped into the back, to stand beside huge chunks of
firewood and a large wok like implement. The proceedings brought the traffic to a halt
but no one seemed to mind, and we watched, taking photos, until the truck set off, still
piping the sheep to the shashlik where the women were waiting in the town below.
Fruit drying on flat rooftops. Sun dried tomatoes had just become the gourmet delicacy in
Australia and were ludicrously expensive. I wondered at the market value of the roofs of
the things in Bishmulla. Three little girls trailed us, doing silly walks behind Mark's back
until he turned and took their picture and that sent them scampering away in a riot of
shrieks and giggles.

As we walked back the first heavy drops of rain fell, exploding on the roadside, leaving
crazy, dark orange patterns in the dust.
Half way through the celebration shashlik the Admiral arrived to tell us we had transport
and we were leaving immediately. So we piled out into the damp, rose scented evening,
and threw our gear into the back of an open truck, and returned for the last of the shashlik;
burnt bits of lamb on flat skewers that looked like a racial memory of the times when the
Khan's horsemen had barbecued their meat on their swords (though I have no idea what a
Mongol sword was shaped like). Climbing on to our gear, to one more chorus of "we're
all going on a summer's holiday," we left for the Pskem river.
I was happy in Bishmulla.
End of Chapter 12 . . .
Chapter 13: The Plov That Never Was
THE EVENING WAS beautiful. Ravaged mountains rose around us as we curled along
the lake and headed across a rickety wooden bridge that crossed the drowned lower
reaches of the Pskem. The road turned up the valley.
The rain had softened the air. The evening smelt of warm damp hay. We rumbled through
clusters of houses, too small to be called villages, their roofs covered with fruit and
vegetables drying in the sun. In a green field a man on a wagon forked hay into his loft;
colourful women and men in suits, turned their brown faces to watch us as we passed,
and the children running after us, played bang bang. We stopped in a small village to
drop T and J's climbing gear, then continued in the gathering dark along horror show
road.
The valley of the Pskem is much narrower than that of the Chatkal. On either side the
horizon line is broken by numerous impressive mountains flecked with snow. The truck
lurched along as the road became a switchback clinging to the steep sides of the valley. I
was wondering why the driver kept peering out of the cab to stare at his wheels but gave
it up, deciding that speculation in this case was not advisable.

From time to time we could see the river, pinched and dark, with huge rocks trailing
white streamers against the grey water. "Category six," said Sasha, nodding down to the
river. It grew dark, then it began to rain steadily, and we pulled the plastic sheet we had
used for a table cloth over our heads. The truck began to lurch violently, gears screamed,
the wheels spun, and then the engine stopped.
The river was narrow and loud. We had stopped on the right hand side of a rickety
looking bridge that crossed the river to a small hut where we could see the orange glow
of a fire. The driver didn't fancy his chances on the bridge, so we began the long carry to
the hut, intimidated by the roar of the river, by the change of pace, by the darkness and by
the presence of the two silent, watching men. While we stood staring at our pile of
equipment, two men on donkeys carrying hay from upstream arrived and stopped to talk.
We hustled in the dark to a flat spot a hundred yards up the river from the hut, and
relayed our gear, worrying about robbery. Once the tents were up in the cramped little
space available the boys commandeered the fire and began to prepare tea. By now my
stomach was suffering from a surfeit of Bishmulla and I practised positive thinking,
trying to convince it that everything was fine. When this didn't work I reminded it that
we had failed to replenish toilet paper supplies in Bishmulla and I couldn't be trusted to
recognise Central Asian poison ivy. That did the trick. For a while.
The little man who lived in the hut, sleeping outside it on an iron bed by his fire, was the
guardian of the bridge. His job was not to keep the bridge in good repair but to watch
who came across it as it gave access to the cultivated fields up stream from our camp.

Next morning it was raining on the Pskem. During breakfast we watched the villagers
parade across the bridge on their way to their fields; women and girls with iron buckets,
wiry men on stringy horses with lean tatty dogs, old men on donkeys, and boys on foot
passed over and up into the mountains. They all stopped to talk with the guardian, who
spends the whole summer here. He was an adept scrounger. His method was to sit and
watch until he was offered whatever was going. He watched Mark rolling cigarettes, he
watched Vlod cooking breakfast, he lingered around Blodwyn.
Our first task was to carry all our equipment up the river to a flat where the Russians
could build their boats. This was not a pleasant experience. But the campsite was flat and
open, and preferable to our cramped quarters under the Guardian's scrutiny.
Sasha asked me if I'd like to go fruit picking, I agreed as long as Blodwyn promised to
translate anything that wasn't a private conversation. She agreed and we set off for the
garden of Eden. Sasha hailed a passing truck, and we leapt up on the back, and bouncing
along in the cool breeze entered a landscape designed by Rider Haggard. The dirt track
went uphill, past a ruined barn with a huge mountain of hay beside it. Across the river we
saw other, greener gardens. The road went through fields of potatoes where a man stood
glaring intently at his spuds, and then stopped abruptly in an orchard.
Rows and rows of fruit trees, planted with an apparent lack of logic: apples, plums,
cherries, apricots, all interspersed. The grass between had been cut and had been left to
turn into hay. It was like wandering into a Rider Haggard novel; the English man
suddenly stumbling into some paradise hidden in the mountains. All that was lacking was
the ruined city, with vague architectural memories of Greece and Rome and a beautiful
woman who was waiting to shower me with gold and grant my every wish if I'd only
forgive her for something she did to me twenty thousand years ago. I'd never have to
stand in front of a sullen class again.
The fat child's dream and the adult's reality came perilously close to fusing. Sasha was
looking for an apple tree he had found here three or four years ago, so I ambled along
testing the fruit, trying to make a daisy chain. Should the World's Desire put in an

appearance I was going to be ready. I had been ready since I first made her acquaintance
in the Library in Coventry over twenty years ago. Should she fail to materialise I could
always give the daisy chain to Blodwyn, and there was always the clear air and the view
of the surrounding mountains to offset any disappointment.
As we returned, laden with plums and apples, we discussed the mysteries of the universe.
We met the other foreigners striding up the hill and pointing them in the right direction
continued on down. A family had parked their car by a stream and invited us to join their
picnic. We declined and returned to camp, where Gena was cooking lunch. While he did
so the wind continued to rise until the Admiral's tent was heaving around like a lady in a
Victorian dress billowing in a gale. For the first time on the expedition I pegged my tent
down, then all hands were required to save the Admiral's tent and move it to a more
sheltered spot.
After lunch we finally got around to river stories. This was something I had been missing.
Usually you put a group of river runners together and they tell stories. We had failed to
do this because it was so tedious having to have everything translated. Blodwyn was on
holiday, she wasn't a professional translator. Huddled into the shade of a tree Mark and I
told Sasha the story of The Worst Journey in the World which he seemed to enjoy, and
that got us going on worst trips we have been on.
The rain interrupted our story telling and drove us into our tents. My note book records
the fact that it was Trevor's turn to be ill. While I was lying in the tent Mark came to ask
me if I truly believed that you should only sleep when you're dead. Since the answer was
yes we headed for the Russian tent and a party that ended with Gena roaring drunk and
Mark and I playing for Blodwyn who wanted to dance round the campfire. It was difficult
to believe that we were going paddling the next morning. The first rapid started just
above the bridge and was supposed to be a kilometre and a half of grade five water.
If the Pskem moved through a landscape designed by Rider Haggard, Spike Milligan had
rewritten the script and the play was being performed by the Monty Python crew. We
were going to take seven days to run forty to fifty Kilometres of river. On two of those
days we wouldn't be paddling. "On rest day, Banya. By river," announced Vlod, his eyes
glazing over at the thought of it.
The sun came out and dried our gear, and we tried to get our heads into paddling mode.
Gena had retired from the cooking and for some reason I was now expedition cook. After
breakfast no one seemed to want to move, but we packed and swung out into the current,
which raced us down towards the rapids. The rapids on the Pskem were caused by a
combination of the river dropping through huge rocks which littered the riverbed. The
position of flood debris, mostly river worn wood, perched on the top of housesized rocks,
and the massive undercut banks showed that in flood this river would be horrific.
An hour after setting off we had got no further than the bridge. This had nothing to do
with the severity of the rapids. We were waiting for the Russians. Mark entertained
himself by spending three quarters of an hour trying to surf a small hole.

By the end of the day it was obvious that the Pskem was going to be a kayaker's river,
that at this water level the rapids were no where near as difficult as their grades suggested
and that our downstream progress was going to be painfully slow.
A kayak team made up of reasonably competent paddlers can move swiftly down an
unknown river if they can trust each other's judgement and skill. The paddler in the lead
has the job of picking the best line down the rapid from his or her boat.
This takes skill and experience. The standard method is to hop down the eddies, using
them for resting and scouting, with the rest of the team following, usually leaving one
eddy between the probe and themselves. When the rest of a rapid is obscured by rocks or
drop, then the lead paddler has to be able to pull off the river and scout from the bank
which means they tend to paddle from eddy to eddy, always making sure there is one
which they can get to and get out in.
If the rapid is long and involved, or difficult, the rest of the team, arriving in the last
eddy, will get out and scout. Frequently, however, the rest of the paddlers can stay in
their boats and simply follow the probe's advice, if they trust his or her judgement.
Mark Silburn is a splendid probe, with a fine eye for a good line down a river and a
common sense approach to risk taking. The last thing you want to do on an unknown
river is to follow some slash and burn hair boater round a corner and into a boat
munching hole or over a waterfall.
We easily outpaced the Russians, who were scouting everything from the bank. On the
Chatkal the cataraft had been able to run through stoppers and holes we had been obliged
to avoid. On the Pskem, their basic lack of maneuverability meant the moves for each
rapid had to be planned in advance.
At lunch the Admiral and Andrei tried their hand at kayaking. Trevor introduced them to
the art of long cold swims but they dealt with it with good humour.
The evening too was eventful. The Russians punctured the left sponson of the raft, and I
found a wonderful piece of wood worn by the river to look like a windblown hag. I had
asked Sasha to find me some herbs, and he disappeared soon after we arrived and
returned with herbs, wild onions, and garlic. Both he and the Admiral had a passion for
herbs, and whenever Vlod made the lunch time tea he would throw handfuls of green
stuff in; "This is for the heart" he would announce, or "This is for headaches."
Blodwyn had announced that she was going to cook the evening meal and had been
planning something vaguely exotic for dinner. When it came time to cook she
disappeared, and left Trevor and I to hunt for pasta or spaghetti or rice. All we could find
was bread and biscuits. Nothing but bloody bread and biscuits. Andrei the climber had
taken over the organisation of food for the Pskem. He didn't seem to know what was
going on. We were reduced to potatoes with Garlic and herbs, and the ubiquitous tinned
meat which looked and smelt like pedigree chum, topped with a cheese so devastating

that it would have made Russia's nuclear arsenal redundant. Blodwyn returned after
Trevor and I had finished cooking to give her approval to our efforts.
The night was vodka free and silent from songs. We sat by the fire, watching the
spectacular stars, which glinted with precision in the blue black sky, and I got an
astronomy lesson from Sasha. I hadn't seen the plough for seven or eight years, but it was
good to see its familiar shape, which used to be visible from the back door of my parents'
house.
The Russians seemed to have slowed to a stop. In the morning the Admiral and Gena
worked on their injured raft; dried it, cleaned it; scoured it and patched it in the time
honoured method of rafters everywhere. While they did this I lay in the sun trying to
convince my stomach to behave and watched Andrei and Andrei make breakfast. They
were so slow. They sat so closely together while they worked that they could probably
have done with only one set of clothes. They were making omelets with dried egg powder.
Breakfast was such an oddly disconnected affair that I gave up and went surfing. I could
get the boat vertical but couldn't pop it up.
Another day of fine rapids followed. Trevor, getting out to film, was able to tell us the
basic line and so we scouted little but waited a lot. Fortunately the scenery was
magnificent; high snow capped mountains were visible from the river, and we wallowed
in blue skies and sunshine. We hadn't seen much wildlife, a few goats, probably domestic,
one snake, some distant soaring birds. The Admiral found a large horn, possibly of some
kind of wild goat. Neither he nor Gena managed to catch any fish. The Russians found
bear scat, and I found a bear trap when I narrowly avoided standing in it, but we saw no
bears.
The evening meal was bizarre even by our standards.
"What am I cooking for dinner Andrei?"

"Tonight. Plov."
"Sounds good. What do we need for Plov."
"First we cook onions and tomatoes and garlic, then we add meat and herbs, then we add
rice."
"Good. Where are the tomatoes ?"
"We have none"
"Onions?"
"We have no onions."
And so on.
End of Chapter 13 . . .
Chapter 14: Hard Times
14th SEPTEMBER . . .
It's nine thirty and the others have gone. They're hiking up to a lake about eight
kilometres from here. Andrei and Gena have left to go shopping in the nearby village
leaving me to watch the camp. I'm not really sure why I'm staying. My hip joint hasn't
popped for months, although it's stiff and sore and my leg is very tired. I could do the
walk. But I don't want to.
I woke up last night with Mark lashing me in the face. He sat up suddenly and grabbed
the tent. "Who's moving the tent? where are we?"
"In Uzbekistan you silly bugger. Go back to sleep."
"Uzbekistan!" He calmed down instantly." Oh. Ok." And went back to sleep.
I've washed some of my clothes. It's odd how the stains remind me of things. The blood
on my hanky from the bone bashing ride into the Chatkal. It seems like another life ago.
I had been woken by the noise of someone driving cattle. It sounded as though they were
coming through or over the tent. When I got up they were gone, but on the other side of
the river, which was a steep cliff face topped by grazing land, we saw a boy herding

sheep. The bank, a dark orange, was stained darker where the water ran through, and dark
green vegetation draped itself in the running streams, like streamers of shining moss.
Then an old man in traditional dress appeared and stood and stared at us, to be replaced
by a shepherd on a horse. He whistled loudly, threw stones into the river, generally tried
to attract our attention. Then his wife and children appeared, and they sat down in a row
on the edge of the bank and settled down to enjoy the show.
I had thought Andrei was staying, but I was also wondering how Gena was going to cross
the river. I was half dreading a day in his doggedly friendly company but as soon as they
had left I was dreading the arrival of some Uzbek shepherds who's language I couldn't
speak. I didn't even have the pot so I couldn't boil any water and offer any visitors tea.
For the fist time since the Chatkal I was beginning to think about going home. Bishmulla
was the watershed, and from it the journey turned towards Samarkand and inevitably to
Australia.
I will spend the morning in the company of Byron. So far he has been consigned to the
excess baggage bag I dumped on the cataraft. This was rather unfortunate as he's a good
travelling companion; witty and knowledgeable, and occasionally thought provoking. I
will skip the bonking bits as being inappropriate for my present situation. So I will read
and sleep and try and pump myself full of fluid. All toilet paper gone.
1.O'clock:
The problem with Byron is that the cadence of his verse is infectious. I went to sleep and
dreamed in Byronic rhythms:
When a man has no rivers to paddle at home
Let him go and seek those of his neighbours
Let him surf in his kayak on alien foam
And get thrashed in vast holes for his labours.
The rest of the team were due back at six and from three o'clock a scrubbed and sober
Gena began to prepare what could justifiably be described as a banquet. Fresh salad,
pancakes, tinned fish, goats cheese. The latter came in small hard white balls.
Gena gave me one to taste, and thinking it was sweet I bit into it and gagged, much to his
obvious amusement. While we cut and chopped and Gena methodically made pancakes,
Andrei slapped me gently on the wrists. He said that before Bishmulla he had felt we
were all one happy family; after Bishmulla he wanted to stay away, he felt unnecessary
because of my affair loving with Chris. The affair was news to me. I tried not to laugh. If
he could be so staggeringly wrong about something like that, how accurate were my
observations about these people whose language I couldn't speak.

Once he got over the glums he talked about other things in his fractured English. He had
not paid any attention in his English classes at school, a thing he now regretted. But his
life seemed to lack any kind of pattern. Although trained as an engineer in the computing
field, he was now unemployed.
His father had been transferred to somewhere in Siberia when he was young. In the days
of the Soviet Union graduates had to work away from the big cities for a year or so before
they were allowed a job in the big urban centres. This is similar to the Queensland
education department's policy towards it teachers, and I could sympathise with the
frustration of any one who has to uproot their life because the faceless THEY'S think it's
bureaucratically convenient.
We waited. Gena seemed surprised by the fact they did not turn up at exactly six o'clock.
I would have been shocked if they had. While we waited I calculated I had thirteen days
left before I flew home. And recognised the familiar tension, a terrible one at that. You
travel to a foreign country and meet people you like, and then you leave them. In thirteen
days Sasha and Vlod and Gena and Blodwyn would be memories. So the only possible
recourse was to ignore that and squeeze each moment dry; take each moment for
everything it offered.
They arrived at seven, tired but elated after a long day in the hills. The walk was as hard
as they had anticipated, the lake as beautiful. They met a man and his sons on horseback
who had invited them for tea. He has(had?) 5 wives and is expecting his 11th child.
Apparently he was aiming for 15. They were surprised that our party carried no guns;
there are bears in the hills.
On the 15th Andrei and Andrei left for Tashkent, to buy tickets for the train. Our bizarre
progress down the river became even more odd. With two on the Admiral's barge, Vlod
and Gena could only run straightforward water. Then they needed assistance.
We came to a long rock garden, where the river wove its way between large rocks, and
towards the end of the rapid funneled its way under some of them. Undercut rocks are
one of the worst things you can encounter on a river. A body or a boat crushed up against
them can be held there by the force of the water. Where the water is actually going under
the rocks, the problem is worse.
We ran the rapid in our kayaks, and then Mark and I walked back to help Vlod. "I will
still love you both," said a laughing Blodwyn as we passed her, "even if you have no
legs."
Her meaning became immediately apparent. We knelt in the bow positions, our legs held
in place by metal hoops. I was jammed in so hard I wasn't convinced I could get out in a
hurry. The paddle seemed huge, but then it needed the length to reach the water; it
twitched and flexed unpleasantly.

The Admiral began to tell us the line, then stopped: You understand the river, you'll know
what to do. Dry mouthed, heart pounding, we pulled out into the current. In the bow you
feel as though you're being hurled at rocks, dropped into holes from a great height, buried
in the frothing water. Breathless and heaving on the flexing paddle, the barge responded
painfully slowly. We made a good run. And I suddenly realised how much skill the
Russians possessed to be able to run this technical water.
The Blue catamaran's run was not as successful. They washed up into an undercut wall,
and struggling to stay upright backed out of the current in to the slack water by the bank
where all the water eventually went under something. We hauled them out and they
carried the boat around the last big rocks to a huge pool at the bottom of the rapid. I
remember this for two reasons. The pool reeked of something that had died and rotted,
and while we were labouring with the boat Mark popped what may have been the first
Kayak loop in Uzbekistan.
After our second run in the Barge we were left boatless, and had to scramble back up the
bank to the road, across another fragile looking bridge. As we were paddling away two
men on donkeys came to cross the bridge. And stared at us. While we stared at them.
Martians again.
The others hadn't waited, and it was easy to see why. They'd stopped above a fierce
looking rapid on a swinging S bend. We edged closer, scrambled along the bank, and
vacillated. The first drop looked ugly, the river, confused by the abrupt turn, dropped
over a ledge and the main current piled into a large hole on the right hand bank.
Some of the current kept going right, into a mess of rocks, the rest made it round the
corner to a frothing pool of sorts and then turned again. The second drop had a river wide
stopper in it big enough to thrash a kayak until the river level dropped. There seemed to
be a path through, which began with a tight squeeze between two rocks, but from the
bank the line looked too thin to be elegant and the consequences of failure were absurdly
terminal.

On the Herbert river Jackie had told me that statistically most outdoor accidents occur at
four pm. It was five past four. Mark wanted to get it run and done, but the Russians were
on the other bank making camping signals. Searching for flat spots between the rocks we
smoothed out some sand and found a home for the night. It was strange to sleep above a
rapid I hadn't decided whether or not I was going to run. Jackie had taken one look and
decided to portage.
In the morning everyone decided to go for a walk to take photos and collect fruit. The sky
was overcast and it rained on and off; the world looked bleak and cold, as if someone had
forgotten to tell the weather man the sympathetic fallacy was no longer a popular literary
convention. I had reached the stage of lightheadedness. What better preparation for
running a rapid.
While I waited for the others to return two cocky white Russians in a baby catamaran
appeared. Their gear looked upmarket, looked bought rather than made, and their paddles
looked like paddles and not bits of roof nailed onto to metal tubing. They stopped long
enough to talk to the Admiral and then disappeared round the corner.
We went and had another look. There was no possibility of not hitting the hole after the
first drop. It was running at an angle however and I thought that as long as I hit it six
inches to the left of centre, with my nose going left, I'd arrive eventually in the pool
below. The second drop still didn't look good, but I could easily portage it on the left
hand bank if it looked ugly from the water.
These rapids require a different sort of commitment. Miss a move and the consequences
are fairly painful. At the top of the rapid paddlers rehearse the moves they must make
before setting out on their run. And in the back of one's mind is the alternate plan, what to
do if you miss that eddy, if you hit that hole.
There will not be time for improvisation on the river. Paddling long technical rapids is the
sort of experience that only practitioners of the silent sports and Zen masters
commonly encounter. There is no future or past, only the now of this move flowing into
the next; there is no distinction between motive and movement, between thought and
desire and action. The paddle is moving to correct and brace and drive but the brain is not
consciously telling the arms to move.
Mark and I decided to get it over with. The river hurried to the corner, the current driving
us towards the white wall that was the hole. I slid quickly over the ledge, buried in the
foam, and shaking my face clear of water, found myself sitting comfortably in the hole. I
was in there long enough, the boat bouncing and twitching, to give me time to wonder if I
had misjudged it. I worked my way out, back into the main current and yahooed into the
eddy.
From the water the line through the next drop looked far more obvious than it had from
the bank. Trevor, who had been carrying Jackie's boat, had raced to catch us up and now
overtook us. It was merely a question of putting the boat through two rocks, nose

pointing left to catch the eddy, then turning to follow a seam through the stopper, down
through some big waves, avoiding holes on the right, and into the safety of a big eddy.
Then waiting. Sasha and Blodwyn disappeared. They were gone so long Trevor went to
see what they were doing. Sasha was pumping up his raft. The Silburn Theory of Fear
Displacement, first enunciated on rapid fifteen on the Pskem, which is, surprisingly
graded six, is that kayakers deal with fear by trying to get the rapid over and done with,
rafters fiddle endlessly with their equipment.
This may supplement Neely's Law that the amount of time spent inspecting a rapid is
directly proportional to the amount of time you spend getting thrashed by it, because
when the blue boat finally swung round the corner their line on the first drop was
spectacular but messy, their line on the bottom non existent; they went up the rocks in the
middle, slid off, spun round, wallowed through the hole and then crashed through to the
eddy below. The big cataraft, on the other hand, with Blodwyn and Sasha as guest
paddlers, ran it with a precision that was almost graceful. I was beginning to appreciate
the Admiral's skill.
Silburn also propounded his Theory of Elastic Time but the sun was out and I'd had
enough theory for awhile.
After a bop downstream through a narrow gorge without serious rapids we came to a
place we all decided to portage. The cataraft was ahead of us, but Blodwyn was sitting on
a rock and the catamaran was on the bank above. The river funneled down between two
big rocks in to a monster hole. It was big and loud and ugly and we stood and admired its
power, speculating about the type of kayakers who might run it. The Admiral appeared,
to tell us he and Gena had run the hole without incident, and then he and Sasha walked
back upstream to run the little boat through.
They seemed to drift out into the current and move with an apparent lack of urgency
towards the drop. At the lip they started to paddle hard, but they slid down and crashed to
a buried halt. The pressure on the stern forced it under and the boat reared up vertically,
shedding white water from its glistening blue hull. Sasha was flailing, his paddle no
where near the water. Vlod, buried, was still going for his stroke even though the boat
was obviously going over on its back. It's the mark of a good paddler. A lesser boater
would have dropped the paddle and clung on.
It crashed down and was spat out of the hole. Vlod was quickly back on the upturned boat,
paddling for shore. Sasha worked frantically to free his spare paddle and then they
paddled in.

We stood on the banks laughing, giving ten out of ten signs, much to Blodwyn's
confusion. A dripping Sasha appeared, and told Blodwyn that today was his birthday. He
was forty seven. It was a spectacular way to celebrate.
Rapid eighteen on the Pskem is graded six and for once no one was arguing. There are
rapids graded six you can see a theoretical line through, even if you don't like the
consequences of failure and decide to walk. There are rapids you don't run but feel that
on a good day you might have got away with it. But there was no line, theoretical or
otherwise you could have held to get you through rapid eighteen. You would have to
begin and then abdicate all pretence of control over your destiny. Your life or death
totally at the caprice of the river. There was no way to line the boat up to escape from the
frothing bowl of thrashing roaring water; no chance of swimming, little chance of staying
in your boat, and even if you did manage to stay in your boat your death was a sixty forty
chance.
Trevor asked Vlod what the line was.
"Right, left, you can go straight down the middle. You can go anywhere you like as long
as you go without me."
We looked at this ugliness, then paddled down to the big eddy above it to shorten the
portage. There was one heart stopping moment when we thought Gena and The Admiral
were going to miss the eddy and do the drop backwards. This made us all a little nervous,
which is probably why Mark and I misunderstood Sasha. We thought he intended to walk
down to the eddy so we walked back up to help him carry his boat. I got disorientated
scrambling back up from the river so stopped to play the bear in the sweet
blackberries. While I was doing this I saw the blue boat running down towards the eddy.
Confused, we raced back to meet them. Then helped to portage the canyon. Mark and
Sasha took the boat, while Blodwyn and I took the rucksacks. Staggering under the
weight of the bag I had a vivid memory of my student looking at me quizzically and
asking; "But Mr. Guilar, don't you have to be fit for this kind of thing? You don't look
very athletic."
Are you watching me now?
We followed the line of the river, over crumbling shattering rocks that slid away from our
feet, forcing our way through brambles and bushes, Slithering down a steep embankment
we arrived at the point where the others, having followed the portage trail, had left the
boat.
We blundered back for lunch. I had seen enough of the lower gorge to think it was
runnable, and Mark and Trevor had come to the same conclusion. So I carried Boat past
the first drop and then sat down and waited, feeling gradually sicker and colder as the day
turned gray and the temperature dropped and rain began falling in random showers. I

couldn't even work up the energy to climb back to help them carry the raft. Expedition
Suffering was no longer a laughing matter.
Mark had three rules of Kayaking he had learnt in New Zealand: don't be stupid, shit
happens, bring beer. I added a fourth while waiting, to turn it into a quatrain.
When Kayaking, don't be stupid,
Shit happens, Bring beer
And never fart in your wetsuit
When suffering from Diarrhoea.
We finally ran the gorge; it was fast and narrow and we emerged from it into the valley
which seemed to be opening out. The big raft ran the rest of the gorge too but The
Admiral spat the dummy about the run for some reason. Sasha then celebrated his 47th
birthday by having to walk all the way back to our lunch spot to reclaim his camera.
There was an obvious possibility of mutiny concerning the campsite. Flat spots were rare,
but the scenery was magnificent. A creek ran in to the river on the right hand side,
weaving its way down from the valley higher up. At its head, in the distance, a huge
mountain blocked the V with ramparts of grey rock patched with snow. On the left an
impressive water fall carved its way through the vertical rock walls of the bank.
We made camp, and then celebrated Sasha's birthday. Blodwyn, who had taken to calling
him "father", got excited about it all. While we cleared a space in what the Admiral
claimed were narcotic plants, she dropped a scarf over a rock to make a small table, cut
up the last remaining energy bars and Mark's last Cherry Ripes arranged them like a heart,
put some of the Admiral's narcotic in the centre as a table decoration and lit a candle.
Sasha hid behind his concern for the kasha. Trevor gave him a roll of film. I gave him
my last bar of chocolate, which he promptly cut up and shared around.
Then five drops, and five more drops; to the river, to Sasha, to us. To friendship. And five
more drops and some songs.
For the first time in several days I was feeling no pain. The warmth of the fire had eased
the numb chill that had settled on me all afternoon. I was afraid to move in case I started
to feel sick again, so I huddled by the fire, long after everyone else had gone to
bed. Blodwyn and the Admiral were still there, still talking in Russian, oblivious to my
presence. Or so I thought.
But Vlod had questions he wanted to ask, and so Blodwyn translated them for me. What
is a good kayaker? Can you be a good kayaker and still portage rapids? And why did
some people obviously feel compelled to do things they didn't want to do?
Today I think that Russians go to the river like it is a war; a test of their courage and
strength.

We go to the river to dance.
End of Chapter 14 . . .
Chapter 15: The End of the Pskem
I SLEPT BEAUTIFULLY, undisturbed by bad dreams; mine or Mark's.
Gena had got his act together. Scrubbed, groomed, sober, he was back to work, producing
salads, going to bed early and not getting rip roaring drunk. However, he did begin this
day by making himself a foul looking concoction from last night's left over tea, with
honey and vodka. We had run out of coffee.
My hands were a mess, something I noticed as I wrote up my notes. They were withered,
dried out by the sun and the air, burnt dark brown, creased with white lines and scratched
and scarred by the brutal portage of the day before and the guitar's strings. As I was
staring at them Andrei and Andrei appeared. I was hoping they had brought us coffee and
toilet paper, but the Admiral didn't sound too happy to hear their news.
We missed out on so much being unable to eavesdrop on their conversations. When they
came back from scouting rapids, when they were discussing the day's program, when
they were talking round the fire. Blodwyn was on holiday, as she reminded me when I
grumbled, so most of the time we flew blind, picking up clues from body language and
the few words of Russian we knew. I would have bet that the Admiral and Blodwyn
weren't discussing kayaking the night before, but remembering Andrei's mistake I wasn't
prepared to get dogmatic about it.
Time to wash clothes, lie in the sun, write up diaries and read. Our only plans were to
have the banya in the afternoon and then after the evening meal walk up the road to a
camp where the Andreis had spent the night before and where we were to go
dancing. While I was sitting on a rock, watching my gear drip, I looked down and saw a
guitar pick. Thank you God. A day without plans, a day to wallow in sunshine. While we
cleaned ourselves and our gear (Yes folks, the manufacturer's claims that you can wash
these trousers in the clear running water of a mountain stream are true) I asked Trevor
and Mark what their definition of a good kayaker was.
As we talked, or as they talked and I made notes, it occurred to me that this was probably
the first conversation the three of us had had since leaving Moscow. The question is not
as daft as it might sound. If you have two musicians then the better one is likely to be the
one who can play the harder pieces. There is a tendency to see the grade one paddles as
the defining factor; someone regularly paddling grade five is automatically seen as being
a better paddler than someone who only paddles to grade four. But we had all met plastic
heads who survive grade five rapids on their second river trip. Did that make them better
paddlers than those kayakers who never paddle grade five but who paddle grade three
with precision and control?

Trevor thought that the ability to read the river was important. A good paddler had to be
technically competent above grade three. He also thought that the willingness to paddle
outside your comfort zone, to push the edge of the envelope occasionally, was fairly
important, but so was knowing when to quit and start walking.
The discussion led us into other areas and no nearer to a definition, or an answer to the
Admiral's question. Did the fact that I might portage a rapid another paddler might run
define our relative abilities? I have paddled with people who run rapids on sight that I
wouldn't even dream of attempting, people whose ability is so vastly superior to mine that
I have often wondered why they let me tag along. And I have watched videos of rodeo
competitions where paddlers have effortlessly performed acrobatic manoeuvres I have
spent afternoons trying to decipher. Usually it doesn't bother me. After all, as Chaucer
said: This life so short/this craft so long to learn. What surprised me was not the
realisation that I wouldn't rate as a good kayaker on the Admiral's scale, but that after so
many years of arguing about the sport, and watching it and teaching it, I couldn't come up
with a definition that satisfied me.
We all agreed we really hadn't pushed ourselves to the edge of the comfort zone on the
river. Fifteen and sixteen had been hard, but we'd been in control. I think Trevor was still
regretting his decision to portage the big hole. Neither Mark nor I, who enjoy surfing, had
indulged ourselves on many of the big waves we had passed, but part of the reason for
this was the cold. The idea of rolling in the frigid water was unappealing.
Mark and Trevor and Jackie walked off to the local village. It was half an hour away up a
steep hill. I had been vacillating about going, but when Blodwyn announced she wanted
to sleep, it seemed silly to struggle to reach a place where all you could do on your arrival
was smile hopefully. Andrei the climber agreed to go, but I still couldn't understand
him. Since God had been kind enough to provide me with a guitar pick I decided to
honour her gift by tuning up and playing for myself for a change.
The gentle sound of the creek flowing over the rocks and the dull rush of the river
provided a bass accompaniment. I had retreated into my own comfort zone. Mark had
said the best thing about trips like this was that the biggest problem you had to face in the
morning was finding some toilet paper.
All day the Russians worked on their river banya. First they built a kiln of large stones
and then they collected a huge pile of firewood which they spent all day burning until the
rocks were heated. Andrei patiently sewed our plastic ground sheet into a tent.
About two o'clock there was a great commotion as the banya set the hillside alight. We
rushed around with water, laughing and putting out the flames, then erected the tent using
paddles as poles. It was ready. I had been watching with interest as Vlod collected
bundles of leafy branches and tied them together. Now I found out what they were
for. First you stand in the steam, choking and breathless, sweat pouring from reddening
skin, while a friendly helper beats you with the twigs, ostensibly to stimulate your
circulation. Then, when one has had enough of the heat, or the beating, one races into the

frigid waters of the river to cool down, and then back in to the steam. Repeat as
necessary. I watched Blodwyn beating the Admiral and thought people probably pay
thousands for that kind of treatment in the red light districts of big cities the world
over. And we were getting it for free.
Squeaky clean, in clean clothes, we had an excellent dinner and then, as it grew dark, set
out for the dance. Andrei the climber insisted it was only a kilometre away. It was the
longest kilometre I have ever walked. The path led up the side of the hill, over shattered
rock, along steep banks to the road.
We saw a group of figures walking towards us and recognised Vlod and Gena, who had
gone shopping.
A wide eyed boy with a torch peered up at us: "Who.Are.You?" he asked, to the
amusement of the other adults who were with him.
"I'm from planet earth. What corner of the galaxy do you come from?"

They were space cadets. Technically they were followers of the Bagwhan who
Dixon had told me about on the South Fork. They had come from all over the old Soviet
union to this camp which was a training ground. From here they would take their
message back to their homes. What the message was I didn't find out. As we entered
their camp my automatic reaction was to shut up shop and make myself invisible, but the
music and the dancing were compulsive; soothing; like a massage without the physical
violence.
So one by one we joined in. There was a lot of group hugging going on and numerous
blonde women in a variety of pre-loved sixties fashions "getting heavily into the rhythm";
they swayed and flowed in the firelight, their faces ghostly in the glow, like a coven of
latter day witches. The only harsh note was the photo of their leader placed in the centre
of the writhing circle; the eyes were repulsive; sinister; unsettling.
I had been reading Byron's advice on how to pick up ladies at dances; he was into ogling.
There was a lot of it going on across the fire. Gena seemed almost embarrassed though he
was enjoying the attentions of a couple of ladies, Andrei was involved in a mammoth
hugging session with a plastic blonde in tights while Blodwyn danced with the Admiral,
who was "grooving with the beat" but grumping about the music. Their leader, a neat
looking man with a beard and skull cap, who looked remarkably like John Wilde,
welcomed us formally, and invited us to dance, pointing out that we need not if we felt
threatened.
Next morning Jackie would say that their religion seemed like a curious mixture of the
spiritual and the sensual. Mark had been admiring the fact that they incorporated physical
ecstasy in to their worship. I agreed. Just because European man hitched his star to a god
of self denial whose preachers claimed the earth was a foul place and man's only
redemption lay in denying it and hoping for better luck after he was dead was no reason
for the rest of us to follow suit.
When we returned in the dark we learnt to our cost that most of the Russians didn't own a
torch worthy of the name. I couldn't face another night when the Russians spoke Russian
and the Australians spoke Australian and the twain never met. So I went to bed, wrote up
my journal and went to sleep rocking to the gentle rhythm of remembered music.
The last day on the river began well. I had been watching a small hole while I played the
guitar the day before, calculating my chances. In the absence of convenient eddies getting
in was going to be awkward, and a hundred yards downstream the river smacked into a
huge undercut rock, but it was time to push the envelope a little.
Shedding gear from my boat I went out to play. There is something elemental and
childish about playing on a wave or in a hole. The water thunders in your ears, the boat
bounces and lurches, seeming to be travelling at incredible speed although it goes
nowhere while the spray from the planing hull blinds you. Then, if it's steep enough and
you can hold it straight, there is the sudden plunge and slow motion lurch as the boat
shoots skywards. I went vertical. Then managed half a pirouette, and finally got my loop.

It is an immensely satisfying feeling, the elegant wrench of the boat plunging down and
then rising to somersault over its own nose. To my own surprise my roll was swift and
effortless. Though I could get vertical again I couldn't get another loop. Trevor came out
to play while Mark set himself up to take pictures. I popped a half loop, rolled back up,
and saw Mark making "T swimming" signs. I went after him. Apparently he had tried to
ferry glide above the house sized rock and been washed against it. Baling out he had felt
himself held in the undercut and then washed down river. He had a long cold swim,
which was exhausting rather than dangerous, but it somehow set the tone for the rest of
his day.
Before leaving, Jackie, still paddling the guide book, announced:"It's all easy from now
on, only grade threes and fours," which was received with laughter she joined in when
she realised what she'd said.
After leaving the last gorge the Pskem seems to relent. Instead of big long rapids it
becomes a continuous run of boppy grade twos and threes, with some fours thrown in for
good measure. There were enough big stoppers around to make it impossible to get too
casual. I followed Andrei and Sasha down in the blue catamaran. As if freed by its
performance in the hole, Boat had finally decided to dance, and for the first time in the
trip we seemed to have settled our differences and were a unit instead of two disparate
parts trying to go in opposite directions.
After an hour we had completed half the day's run and stopped for lunch at a bridge.
Trevor's bad day was continuing. He had swapped his kayak with Vlod and was paddling
the cataraft, and had managed to bruise his foot. It was just what he needed before his
attempts to climb Rumski Doodle.
Over a long drawn out lunch we made helpful noises, offering to amputate the bruised toe,
or drill his nail with Mark's swiss army knife (no paddler should be without one; does
your knife have the hole in the toe drilling gadget: if not how would you save your
friend's life?) Trevor put up with all this silliness with good humour, and in the absence
of Russians, who wandered off to find shade or fruit and herbs, lunch was more like
lunch on a river back home. We talked aimlessly of films we'd seen and books we'd read
and places we'd like to go to next.
The rapids in the afternoon were continuous, with big holes and big waves, and the
Admiral, paddling Trevor's kayak, took three long swims. The first with me chasing him
frantically. In the second he capsized just above a drop, and was forced to swim it. I
paddled after him, yelling swim, you silly bugger, swim, but he was trying to climb on
the upturned kayak the way he had climbed on the upturned catamaran and the boat just
kept rolling over and filling with water.
His third and last swim occurred just as we reached the pullout point, and the rafts were
swept on past it. After floundering through a series of grade three drops, Mark and I
finally got him to the side. He emptied out the boat, still grinning. If this man could only

get hold of a kayak, what a boater he'd make. I apologised mentally for ever doubting his
right to be the Admiral.
We then spent a good half hour trying to figure out where to camp. Sasha finally came
back from scouting downstream to announce that he had found an ideal spot but we had
to run one more rapid. The prospect seemed suddenly unappealing. We had grown cold
waiting, and the words, Bolshoi Botchka, (which is Russian for bloody big stopper) did
nothing to make it sound more inviting. But we paddled round the corner and it was over.
The river had widened out, allowing us glimpses of the mountains that line the valley;
vast, vertical rock. In the evening light the mountain wall opposite the campsite was the
spires and turrets of She's city, crumbling away as the light slid over it and multiplied the
shadows.
Andrei and Andrei set off to buy food "for our celebration" and Euphoria waited again
while we lugged our gear up to the flat ground of the camp site and made our fire. She is
not a patient lady. She came and smacked me full in the face as I struggled under one
more massive Russian Rucksack, using two homemade Russian paddles as walking sticks,
along the crumbling scree strewn path to the campsite. We'd done it. We'd kayaked two
superb rivers in Central Asia. The euphoria was short, almost exquisitely painful, and
then there were boats to unpack and tents to put up and a meal to cook.
A and A returned after dark, with potatoes and tomatoes and peppers and chili. I made
irish stew a la Pskem, with chili and capsicum as an elegant variation. Then the formal
toasts began; to friends, to rivers and the people who run them, to hugs, and "To the stars
that shine above us, to the rivers we travel on, and the earth beneath us" our last vodka
gone before anyone was drunk. Sasha, usually so reticent, proposed a toast to the group,
to our ability to work together, as friends, and to our ability to get down the river.
We settled down to sing, the guitar pick saving my right hand which had been torn
ragged on the wires; The Drunken sailor, The Lewis Bridal song, Tonight will be fine,
The Rising of the moon, and two men arrived, carrying guns. Hunters said Blodwyn, men
who don't hunt but who look. Um.
She had sensed my irritation with her frequent failure to translate, so we hammered that
one out and one by one people slid off to bed, until I was on my own by the fire.
The Pskem and Chatkal had been kayaked.
An Achievement?
I think so.
And down the golden road, tomorrow or the day after, the blue domes of Samarkand, and
then the journey home.

End of Chapter 15. . .
Chapter 16: This is the Way Our Lives Are--A
Journey to Samarkand
AT FIVE THIRTY am, we packed in the dark and began to haul our gear to the road. As
we sat waiting for the bus the light slid down the hill. The river did not know we'd been
there.
It continues, devoid of adjectives or adverbs. We hadn't conquered it; you can't conquer
something that doesn't even know you exist. It makes no distinctions between the brave
and the foolhardy, the cautious and the timid; it had no rewards to offer, no tolls to
extract. It is too busy with the business of its own existence to worry about our
technologically splendid flotsam.
And this river trip was over, but even as we turned away, somehow, inevitably, another
trip begins. If I had learnt nothing else in twenty years of river running, I did know that
it's all one river trip; that the journey began in a two seat kayak on the river Wye all those
years ago has weaved its way across continents and continues to this day.
The road was quiet. As the sun rose and warmed our pile of junk we could hear the river
and the distant cows and cockerels. In the distance, a minute, solitary figure took a life
time to walk up the dirt path to the village; a car stumbled along the road, a man drove a
herd of goats and sheep, cows ambled along the verges, searching for grass. By ten
o'clock it was obvious our bus was not going to turn up.
Gena and the Admiral set off to the nearest large village to organise another bus and
Sasha took Mark and Blodwyn and me to an orchard in search of shade. We entered,
Sasha explaining he'd ask permission if anyone turned up. We heard a dog barking and
the soft sound of rippling Uzbek music.

The owner came to meet us through the trees, a squat man in a collarless white shirt. His
son, a small brown-eyed child wearing a magnificent top hat, hid behind him. Like
everyone else we had met in the mountains this bee-keeper welcomed us, despite the fact
that we didn't speak his language or worship his God.
The man lived in the valley during the summer. In winter he went down to the town. His
living quarters were sparse; a small dim hut surrounded by fruit trees and herbs. The
only machinery we saw apart from his battered car was a complicated set of scales and
the radio that was tuned in to the gentle music. His wife produced bread and honey and
tea and the yogurt that wasn't yoghurt and we sat down to enjoy their hospitality.
My father used to tell me stories of rural Ireland where such hospitality was the norm, but
I knew it would never happen in Australia. You'd never invite some passing stranger in
to your house for fear of what he might do to your wife and children. Sadly your fears
would probably be justified. I wondered if they were so open and free with strangers
because they had no possessions to worry about. But their generosity is one of the things
I remember most about Central Asia.
Sasha talked, Blodwyn slept, and then we heard a truck and saying goodbye raced back to
the road. It wasn't our truck.
We found a raised platform not far from the road, still in the beekeeper's orchard, and
crashed. I envied the beekeeper his uncluttered life. And for a few hours mine was
equally uncluttered and it was perfect. The sound of the breeze in the orchard, a loose
slate stuttering on the lean-to's roof, the buzzing of the bees and the drone of the flies;
Sasha humming tunelessly to himself; the smell of the earth and Blodwyn's hair and
dozing off and waking up when we heard a truck or bus banging along the road.
The Admiral and Gena finally returned about One O'clock. We piled all our gear into the
back of a bus and squeezed in to the spaces we had left and finally set off for
Tashkent. On any incline we moved at less than walking pace. The Bus stopped
frequently. The driver disappeared under the bonnet to rip pieces out of the engine. Some
he put back in, some he left on the roadside. At one of these stops Mark and I hopped
out for air.
We could see the river, no longer running and wild, but backed up, green and still in the
approaches to Charvak lake.
"For the first time in six weeks we aren't heading towards a river."
"For the first time in three years we're not heading towards a Central Asian
river. Sumatra sounds interesting."
"I'd like to go home. Now. Beam me up Scotty."

The driver was worried that he wouldn't have enough petrol to get back, so after crawling
around Charvak lake we detoured off the road towards Chimgen. The first petrol pump
we came to was closed, and even after we'd got the owner out of bed there was no petrol
to be had. The second station was deserted. The driver wandered over to the shade,
shook hands with the small circle of seated card players, talked, sauntered back. By now
we'd discovered the driver's mate's role in life. He kept leaping out of the bus to crank
the reluctant engine back to life with his trusty, rusty starting handle.
We finally found a petrol station that was closed but which had queues outside while a
bowser filled the petrol tanks. We queued for petrol, then queued while the cashier sent
someone for change. "C'est la Vie," said the Admiral, sadly, as his timetable fell apart
and lay in ruins on the dirty floor of the bus, "this is the way our lives are."
The road to Tashkent is mostly built up, although the urbanity is offset by orchards where
tethered goats cropped the grass. There were no gardens in the useless ornamental
western fashion. The closer we got to Tashkent the more people we saw; many looked
positively European; trams, queues for buses, and police every five hundred yards or
so. Traffic lights, and blondes with lipstick. Civilisation.
Our plans to spend the night in Samarkand were in ruins. But we had been travelling
long enough not to be disappointed by this minor set back.
Arriving at Tashkent station we unloaded, to the amusement of the locals. We looked
ragged. Our boats disappeared towards a freight train which would carry them slowly
back to Moscow. Bags followed. The guitar had finally died, but the Admiral was
determined it could be rebuilt. Andrei and Sasha, the latter still clutching his pieces of
river wood, were taking the train home. They would take any gear we didn't need with
them.
Good bye, good luck, and thank you. See you in Moscow.
Suddenly we were alone in the silver evening light watching the hoards of people while
Vlod and Gena went to book us into a hotel. They returned with Constantine, whose
mother had just died. He had a spare room we could have. Once more we piled into the
back of a truck, heading through an unknown town. Once more, under strict instructions
to speak no English, we piled out and following Constantine through the courtyard found
ourselves installed in a large room with three beds inside, a hall way with another bed,
and a small kitchen.
After a coffee, the delights of a hot shower. I had mixed feelings about the Tashkent
Hilton. If I had to spend a night in town then I wanted the Nikko Narita; I wanted to be
able to drink cold beer, wander freely, phone home. But we were there and then and that
too was fine.
As soon as we had entered the room Constantine, fussing over our welfare, had tried to
turn the television on. When it hadn't worked he had disappeared and returned with

another set which he switched on. The news, full of dead burnt bodies and a story in
which I caught the words "John Major" and "Marks and Spencers" was replaced by the
Uzbek answer to MTV. The colours of the back drops and costumes were garish, made
worse by the set's poor definition.
We turned it off.
Constantine, returning to tell us the Admiral and Gena hadn't returned from their
shopping expedition, turned it back on again. Every time he went out we switched the set
off, and every time he came back in, with blankets or eventually food in case the others
didn't return, he turned it on.
Gena and Vlod returned, exhausted but successful, with their bags full of food and
drink. We prepared a banquet and proceeded to get perfectly drunk, to celebrate our
rivers and the fact that nationality is a accident, not a definition. Gena's cure for my
stomach was a mixture of equal quantities of salt and vodka. I was prepared to try
anything.
I was wondering who scored the floor, there only being four beds for five people but the
problem was already solved.
"You told me to go with the flow," said Chris, who was drunken. "So I took your advice."
The idea of anyone following my advice sounded so hysterically funny that I laughed
myself to sleep. As any paddler will tell you, the flow often leads into some strange
places.
* * *
At five am, when enthusiasm is usually impossible, we walked out through the streets of
Tashkent, to take the metro to reach the bus that would take us to Samarkand. There was
the same thin, silvery quality to the early light that I had noticed in the evening. In the
absence of cars and dogs, the morning was almost silent. Outside each gate a tin bucket
full of used toilet paper and a box of rubbish waited, presumably for collection. The thin
sweet smell of the rubbish pooled and faded as we strode in to the spaces between
them. An old woman was sweeping leaves from the gutter, and burning them on a small
fire, as though it was the most natural thing to be doing at five thirty in the morning. I felt
like singing and skipping, we were on our way to Samarkand.
After the spacious elegance of the Metro, which was like the Moscow version without the
beggars and street vendors, in a cramped and crowded coach, we drove towards the city
of my dreams; still pretending to be Estonians so we could travel at the Rouble price. We
had been averaging ten kilometres a day on our rivers. Now we would travel three
hundred in four hours through a landscape bleached and flat and uninteresting. We
would only have four hours in the city, as we had to return and catch the early train to

Moscow the next day. The bus steamed and filled with the stale smell of unwashed
bodies. It must have unhinged Mark's mind. By the time we arrived he was suffering
from a postcard fixation from which nothing would shake him.
The landscape was disappointing after the dramatic mountains we had passed
through. Bleached scrub land stretched away to the horizon. Apart from the faint thrill of
fear every time we stopped and the bizarre moment when we passed an isolated building
with "Fresh Hot Bread" written in gaudy neon English lettering above the door, there was
little to do. Blodwyn was asleep, and Estonians don't hold long conversations in
English. To while away the time I reviewed what I knew about Samarkand.
It is a city of legend, and it has stood here, in this valley, while the great waves of history
rolled over and past. There had been a city there before the arrival of Alexander the
Great. In 1200, just before it was sacked by the Mongols, it had an estimated population
of nearly half a million people.
As we drove down the valley it was difficult to imagine this troubled history. Today it is
a vast cotton growing area and the Zeravshan, which we crossed, has been diverted to
irrigate the crops. Seeing this old river, which had been our first target when we had
begun to dream of paddling in Central Asia, was like meeting a long lost acquaintance
who has fallen on hard times. It no longer flows past Samarkand through gardens known
to Tamburlaine, or makes the final miles to the Aral sea, but peters out in the
desert. High banks and tall islands testified to the size of the now dead river, whose bed
was being dredged.
My head hurt. Samarkand itself has seen some riotous parties in its history. Alexander
held a huge feast here, and in a fit of drunken rage killed Cleitus, a close friend who had
saved his life. The Mongols were prodigious drinkers, although a law of Genghis Khan
made it illegal to be drunk more than three times a month. They drank Kumis, fermented
mare's milk, and I'm sorry to say we hadn't been able to try any. Tamburlaine the Great
threw a party here before setting out to attempt the winter conquest of China. It was the
last big party of his life and it lasted for several months in the gardens on the banks of the
Zeravshan, the Spiller of Gold.
When the armies of Ghengis Khan had swept up the valley, in wave after wave of
disciplined horsemen, Bokhara, further down river, had fallen after a short siege. The
citizens had surrendered although the Governor and his body guard had retreated to the
citadel and refused to budge. This was hardly surprising. The previous Governor of a
town to fall into the Khan's hands had been rewarded for his bravery by having molten
silver poured into his eyes and ears.
But Bokhara fell and the city, famous for its libraries and the learning of its wise men,
was burnt to the ground. Samarkand held out for five days and then surrendered. The
Turkish soldiers of the garrison were slaughtered, the artisans, craftsmen and able bodied
citizens were taken off into slavery, and the city sacked. For some reason it escaped total
destruction and the markets survived to be mentioned in the Travels of Marco Polo. In

other cities, like Nishapur, not even the cats and dogs were spared, and the only thing left
standing when the Mongols departed were pyramids of human skulls.
Samarkand was rebuilt by a descendant of Genghis. Timur, known as imur-i-Leng,
Timur the lame or the Iron limper, known in English as Tamburlaine. A conservative
estimate puts the number of human beings slaughtered by the armies of this man at seven
million.
Such a record of slaughter is neither edifying nor entertaining. The empires of the
Mongols, of Tamburlaine and Stalin were all built at a cost of millions of lives, and
they're shadows now, memories like the crumbling walls of the city of
Macarandia. Tyrants and persecution are a fact of history, and will be, as long as
nationality is seen as a definition and not an accident. As long as people deal with race
and creed and politics, as long as they hide behind the worst forms of professional
schizophrenia and forget the human faces behind the uniforms.
The bus steamed, my head hurt, and my mind wandered. I doubt the Mongols would
have had much time for kayaking. They believed in the sacred value of water to the
extent where, until their conversion to Islam, they wouldn't wash in it. There are
descriptions of their bodies crawling with lice to the point where their skin seemed to be
mobile. However, as they weren't adverse to eating the lice it was one way of carrying
supplies.
After four hot hours, we finally saw the blue domes of the city, but the bus depot is on the
outskirts. The first thing that strikes you about Samarkand is that the pictures you have
seen suggest the famous blue buildings are isolated. They are surrounded by the busy
little town, with its shops and houses.
To get from the bus station to the town we caught a Marshrutnoe taxi. As we walked
towards the "taxi rank" a policeman stopped us. Look away hissed Blodwyn. The
Admiral talked to him, then came back for Gena's passport. We escaped and managed to
get a seat on a Marshrutnoe taxi by climbing over the people who were trying to climb
over us. It was like catching the school bus home in the dark days before teachers
policed the bus lines. I sat in the back, fending off irate women in floral headscarves,
mildly bemused by my own success. Having been brought up to regard queue jumping as
a heinous offence I felt like someone who had just dropped his trousers in church and got
away with it.
The bus dropped us outside the market.
Power walking through the shady streets in search of the post office I noted the
monuments as they flashed past: The Bibi Khanum Mosque, now covered in scaffolding,
was one of the largest religious buildings in Central Asia before it crumbled under its
own weight. Soviet style shops, the post office. It was a shadowy, hopeless
building. Wooden corridors led to closed service windows.

The Admiral, typically, ignored signs saying the Uzbek equivalent of "Back in five
minutes" and continued to push open doors and make himself unpleasant until an irate
woman put down her tea cup and answered his questions. No, they did not sell postcards.
Yes, they did sell stamps but no, you could not buy one unless you had the postcard to
put it on.
Mark was insistent that he wanted postcards, and he wanted to find a place where he
could sit down and write them. As it was the first and only time on the expedition that
he'd insisted on doing anything I didn't feel like arguing with him. The Russians were
visibly confused. They'd brought us to this city and all he wanted to do was sit down and
write postcards? It was at this point that we should have gone our separate ways. The
Admiral was obviously keen to show me around, Mark wasn't really interested in seeing
buildings, and Blodwyn wanted to go shopping.
Instead of splitting up we headed for the Registan. I had read glowing descriptions of this
place. In the late nineteenth century, Lord Curzon, possibly one of the first English men
to see it, had called it the noblest public square in the world. In Apples in the Snow, 101
years later, Geoffrey Moorehouse described it in almost ecstatic terms. My first reaction
was euphoria; I'd arrived. My second was disappointment. Perhaps it was illness,
exhaustion, lack of sleep. Perhaps we had spent too long in the mountains, where the
fractured rocks suggested ruins in the shadows of morning and evening.
The place is small. It lacks the arrogant upward reach of western Gothic and the famous
blue mosaics with their scrolling patterns lack that attempt at infinity that characterises
the manuscripts of Medieval Europe. The architecture is beautiful; but neat, precise,
modest. I kept trying to avoid the word "polite" but it wouldn't go away.
We wandered inside. Almost every little room has been converted to a dim souvenir
shop stuffed with tatty and expensive junk and staffed by aggressive salesmen who could
not believe we didn't want to spend all our money in their shop. I had been harbouring
romantic notions of sipping tea in the courtyard quoting lines from the Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam, surrounded by roses and gentle Uzbek music. The roses are there but what you
get is imitation Coke called "Thums Up" (sic) and the sound of pseudo western rock
leaking from the bar.

We had been travelling as a group for so long, focussed on the shared goal of getting
down two hard rivers, that the thought of splitting up to achieve our separate ambitions
hadn't occurred to anybody. Having bought a set of postcards Mark now wanted to find
somewhere to write them. I wanted to see all the things I had read about. The tension that
had been building all day finally exploded when Blodwyn stormed off towards the
markets claiming she wanted some time on her own. I didn't want to go souvenir
shopping so I watched the others follow her.
In my mind I had been travelling towards this place for three years. And now, alone,
with the linguistic competence of a two year old, I had less than three hours. Too tired
and frustrated to be disgusted or angry, I wandered through the famous market. The
sweet thin smell of spices lingered at the entrance, reminding me of the shit buckets in
Tashkent. The fruit and vegetables looked lovely. Traders whistled shrilly to attract
attention to their wares. Exotic, frightening, entertaining and strangely disappointing it
was like every other street market I'd ever been in. I don't know what I expected. I wanted
some overwhelming sense of place to rise up and grab me by the throat. I wanted some
palpable emotional reward for reaching somewhere so remote and exotic.
I watched two urchins stealing goats cheese from a stall, and then decided to leave and
investigate the Bibi Khanum mosque on my own. From where I was I could see the blue
dome of the Mosque growing an adolescent beard of grass. The same growths had been
apparent at the Registan. I also wanted to find the Gur-I-Emir Mausoleum where
Tamburlaine is buried. The legend said that if his tomb was disturbed catastrophe would
follow.
The day after Russian scientists examined the body the German's invaded Russia. As I
headed for the exit to the market I saw a policeman checking papers. We didn't have any,
and I suspect our presence in Uzbekistan was illegal. I worked out I could say, in my
best Samurai Russian, that my Visa was in my hotel in Tashkent, and that my Guide was
meeting me soon. But I turned back from the confrontation. I had had enough of
policemen and "donations". There was a line of shops selling what looked like a variety
of sweets, and a soviet style emporium which sold stereo speakers and twenty copies of
one large pink doll.
By the time the policeman had left it was time to meet the others.
More paradoxes. An old man on a donkey cart moves slowly along the road beside a line
of Skania trucks. In a culture famous for its hospitality to strangers the grudging
indifference of the waiters in the restaurant bordered on hostility. Mark was still insisting
on sending his postcards from Samarkand. Gena offered to take him back to the post
office after we had eaten.
Blodwyn and the Admiral and I returned to the bus station where an aggressive
Policeman discovered our lack of visas and after roundly abusing the Admiral ordered us
to follow him.

We moved down a dim corridor to a small dark room full of computers and desks and
other officials. I had just kayaked two dangerous rivers, but for the first time on the
journey I was genuinely scared. I have read too many stories about brutal policemen and
felt painfully vulnerable with Blodwyn standing beside me.
But we did not need to be scared; it was a game, like being "Smuggled" across the
border. Blodwyn and I were ordered to wait outside, watched over by two young
policemen who obviously thought it was a great joke. A sheepish looking Admiral soon
followed and hurried us out to the waiting bus, where Mark happily told me, in a
Australian voice, that he had sent his postcards.
I don't think I've ever apologised for telling him to shut up and get in the bus.
The regular coach back to Tashkent was no more reliable than our bus from the river. At
one point we were overtaken by a man on a donkey. The closer we got to Tashkent, the
more road blocks, but the police waved us through. Mark and I gave up pretending to be
Estonians. We were exasperated enough to be ready to say; we haven't got visas, this
man here told us we didn't need them, which sounds brutally disloyal at this distance but
at the time seemed like the only logical course to follow.
We discussed the expedition and our relationship with our Russian fellow
travellers. When it came down to it, we were obviously paying customers, not
companions. I didn't like the way I couldn't get a straight answer from the Admiral
about what had happened in the bus station; it was as though he didn't trust us to deal
with the information. It was obvious that we were no longer worthy of being treated as
equals. We were back to being baggage.
A baby cries, someone near by is eating something that smells like it should have been
buried years ago and the driver fiddles with the radio trying to find something to keep
himself awake. If there is a waiting room to hell, I have heard its muzak on a bus from
Samarkand to Tashkent.
End of Chapter 1 . . .
Chapter 17: Going Home
IT WAS AUTUMN now in Moscow; the leaves had turned and begun to fall. I had
forgotten how beautiful the interaction of autumn colour and sun light looks. The horse
chestnut tree outside the flat had dropped the conkers of my childhood on to the
pavement below. I wondered if children in England still went conker crazy in autumn or
if the sounds of Sega Gameboys had replaced the sound of shattering horse chestnuts.

I had also forgotten how painfully beautiful the northern autumn is. Not the rich sensual
beauty of Keats' ode, but the austere promise of the coming winter, the tightening of the
light and the first hint of the pinching cold to come.
The train had worked its gentle magic. The day we left Tashkent we had waited, at 3 AM,
near the railway station. I had felt as empty as a station platform in the dim hours of early
morning, when the bustle of the day is just a stale echo lingering with the litter in the
shadows. Old and tired and disgusted; bitter and tired and bitterly disappointed; sick of
being treated like a piece of luggage or an idiot child. Stand up. Sit down. Look away.
Don't speak. Everything is Ok, everything is just as it is and you don't need to understand,
just do as you're told.
But after three days on the train, I eddied out. It was time to leave that flow, time to
concentrate on other destinations. After a while the landscape I had denigrated as flat and
boring becoming soothing; the houses and villages I had dismissed as squalid were now
simply the way the world was. The gentle, alien beauty of the Registan, lingered,
hauntingly, long after any sense of disappointment had gone. Like thousands before me
down the centuries I had left the mountains for the city and the plain, seeking a place that
only existed in my imagination. I knew that sooner or later I would begin to see the
funny side of the trip to Samarkand, if only I could live long enough. Perhaps I would
laugh about it as I strode up Senlac hill to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the
Battle of Hastings in October 2066.
We returned to Moscow in the early stages of the political argument that reached a
climax when Russian tanks shelled the Russian Parliament on the orders of the Russian
president. I have avoided the word crisis, because, for us, there was none. History might
record those last days of September as being the turning point in the evolution of the
Russian move towards "Democracy". For me they were gentle days in which we trailed
around Moscow, without any purpose except our own pleasure. It was a valuable history
lesson. How many people heard the shot that started the revolution and understood its
significance? The day the Bastille fell, how many Parisians were waking up with
hangovers, or getting drunk, or making love, or going to work, or dying?
As we drove past the White House on the way back from the station I saw a line of
policeman on the steps. On the bridge across the river motorcycle police were stopping
pedestrians and checking their papers. I was distracted by Blodwyn's laughter. She had
just asked her friend Katya to fry her hair after she had had a shower. I asked what was
happening, and Victor said: We are staging a small political crisis so you won't be bored
now you have returned to Moscow.
I tried to find out what was going on. Tanya's little radio struggled to receive the BBC
world service. I learnt that a descendant of Robert the Bruce was organising a service out
side Westminster abbey to exorcise an age old curse. There was a crisis of some sort in
Israel and the British media were still discussing the fact that Keating had touched the
Queen.

I tuned out and found Radio Australia. Sydney had gained the Olympics for the year two
thousand. Whacky do. There would be newspaper articles about the feeble state of sport
in schools, there would be huge amounts of government money pumped into sport, and it
would be a national disgrace requiring committees of inquiry and investigation if
Australians didn't run faster, throw further and jump longer than the rest of the world. Of
course, if we did swim faster and ride harder the press would be howling with
nationalistic glee and schools would still be facing cuts in their funding and you'd still
have to wait an age for an operation someone else decided wasn't important. Ho hum.
There was also a political crisis in PNG. Of Moscow, not a word.
Next morning I finally succeeded in talking to my wife. She was obviously worried. She
didn't know what was going on, but It, whatever It was, was bad. And did I know the
Broncos had made it to the grand final having finished in fifth place, and no team had
ever won from outside the top three? No I didn't, and I still didn't know what was going
on in Moscow.
We finally discovered a version of what was happening by reading the free English
language paper in Pizza Hut.
But there was no fighting then. The odd convoy of Black Limos raced along the streets,
with noisy motorcycle escorts, and I thought I heard a few shots on the Friday night. But
we were too busy searching for that holy grail of a good cup of coffee to take much
notice. We finally found one in the cafe on the ground floor of a large hotel. The service
was friendly, the coffee excellent, and the cake cheap and fine. But the atmosphere was
cramped and negative, a group of Armenian men, in tatty clothes but hideously expensive
Reeboks, and their overdressed women, reminded us of all the stories we had heard about
organised crime in the city. So we left, to find a church Blodwyn wanted to see.
As a special favour the caretaker took us upstairs to see the iconstatis. The floor was
genuine. original. 14th century. We were stopped and ordered to put on felt overboots.
While we gazed, a wedding party arrived, which included a man with a video camera and
a woman in an ill fitting green dress with a remarkable resemblance to miss piggy with
anorexia.
No one stopped the wedding party and insisted they put on felt shoes. The caretaker
wouldn't let them film the wedding couple on the steps of the alter, but Mr Fix-IT waved
roubles in plenty around. The caretaker weakened visibly. As someone said about the
trade in Icons, a customs official can earn more by not doing his job for ten seconds than
he can by doing it for a month. They had their picture taken. The babushka in charge
kept pushing us out of the way, muttering, ah the young. The bride looked bridal in white,
the boys looked like the mafia brothers, and miss Pigglova Piggivich looked like she was
hoping Kermitsky was about to put in an appearance. We left. Laughing.
The flat, no longer shabby, no longer uncomfortable; a new guitar, courtesy of
Victor, filling the kitchen with its music. We had a huge celebratory party, and the

Admiral and Blodwyn stayed the night. I kept thinking that the evening should be set to
the music of Norwegian Wood, it had the right self mocking tone.
The flat, no longer shabby, no longer uncomfortable; a new guitar, courtesy of
Victor, filling the kitchen with its music. We had a huge celebratory party, and the
Admiral and Blodwyn stayed the night. I kept thinking that the evening should be set to
the music of Norwegian Wood, it had the right self mocking tone. I lent Blodwyn my bed
and crawled off to sleep in the hall after making the Admiral a bed in the kitchen.
In the morning, Mark left after three hours sleep for his tour of soil erosion sights. I was
sorry to see him go. He had been a good travelling companion. We never did manage to
explain our sense of humour to the Russians
All through the journey we had been scaling new heights of the bizarre, but that breakfast
set an altitude record. Blodwyn decided she wanted to make cafe au lait with UHT milk.
I tried to explain to her that boiling it and beating it to death with a fork was not going to
turn it into frothy cappuccino. But she wouldn't listen. All the way down the river we had
heard stories of what a great cooker she was, and now she seemed determined to prove
it. The Admiral and I watched her performance, and when she finally set the coffee down
in front of him he asked; "Do I frame it or drink it."
What a man. What courage. How could I have ever thought he was droopy? While
Blodwyn tried to deal with this blow to her culinary self esteem the Admiral and I got
into a discussion about history. He believed that Russia needed a new Stalin. A strong
man who would lead them. The past, for all its brutality and waste and stupidity, was
preferable to the present with all its uncertainties. He believed that we cannot know the
present until it had become the past and the documents relating to it studied.
He had an almost childish faith in documents and facts, which, for a man living in a
country where rivers, mountains and cities were left off the maps because they were
politically unacceptable, and history was rewritten with enthusiasm to suit the political
climate, seemed a little too bizarre. I could understand how an old person, having
survived the terror and the crippling mediocrity of life for forty or fifty years, could feel
lost in a new world where there were an infinite number of directions but few signposts. I
couldn't understand how an intelligent person could long for the blatantly cruel and
inefficient Stalinist times.
It really was time to go home.
* * *
In Moscow airport the customs official still seemed bored, and to enliven his afternoon
insisted I put my kayak through the x ray machine. Victor and I tried to tell him it

wouldn't fit, but he wouldn't believe me until I actually jammed the nose in the
entrance. Poor Boat stuck, with his tail in the air like a bent banana. The roller whined
sadly. The customs official waited for something to happen. Nothing did. He waved us
through.
Good bye, remember to write, see you next time.
There is a plastic paddy pub in the departure lounge, you get Irish coffee and a certain
smoky ambience for a dollar. Next time perhaps. Green signs and shamrocks. Oh Bogle,
Eric, where were you when I needed you. I decided to buy something to read for the long
ride home. Don Juan was finished and re-read. The bookshop had an understandable
array of books about Russia and by Russians, and I dithered between Robert Byron's
First Russia then Tibet and a set of Chekov's stories.
I should have gone for the Byron. Feeling a melancholy fit about to fall I made the
mistake of buying a travel book about Australia written by an English journalist. The
blurb promised me I would laugh at every page. I should have known better. Just over a
year later, I was back in Moscow airport having traveled there by train from Beijing. The
bookshop had gone, replaced by a shop selling CD's. I didn't make the plastic paddy
pub either.
The expedition finally died in Tokyo airport, in the clean surroundings of the departure
lounge, with piped musak and coffee I couldn't afford. For five weeks we had been filling
the unforgiving minute, now I was killing time. I had ten hours between flights. Ten
hours was a Chatkal day, two and a half times our stay in Samarkand. I estimated I had
been gone from home for approximately 964 hours. Ten of those I spent in Tokyo airport
watching the planes take off and land. I wish (I wish I wish) there was a way in which
you could bank time; store the hours you didn't need, the empty dreary minutes, and be
able to retrieve and use them when time was at a premium.
So I slept, and in the sick space between sleep and waking, in that awful haunt of the jet
lagged and exhausted, I decided I had died and the planes were carrying dead souls to a
variety of unpleasant destinations. The clear precision of the announcer's voice only
emphasised the fact; All souls for the second circle, please board your flight located at
gate C83; the old and crippled will be boarded first, please have your boarding pass,
ticket and authenticated list of sins ready for inspection; have a sad eternity.
But the toilets betrayed the fact that this could not be hell. They sparkled with reflected
light. The washbasins filled with hot water at the turn of a tap and the toilets flushed,
noisily, enthusiastically. I visited them often, to marvel at their cleanliness. And the
abundance of soft white toilet paper. I know hard core expedition boaters aren't supposed
to worry about such things, but only someone who had been forced to choose between
Byron's Don Juan and the Lonely Planet guide book to the USSR to solve the toilet paper
shortage in Tashkent could appreciate this abundance of soft white tissue. (I couldn't do it
to Byron, he'd been too good a travelling companion, though I suspect he would have

laughed at the dilemma. Note: write to makers of guidebook and suggest they use softer
paper in future.)
I hadn't eaten since the breakfast on the plane, so I watched a pair of lovers having a
noodle fight with some reservations. A small English girl did endless repeats of the same
card trick for her patient grandpa and no matter how many times I watched her I couldn't
work out how she did it. A ragged looking Australian woman in tatty hippy gear smoked
steadily and kept staring at me. If I smiled back I knew she'd call me deary and tell me
her life story. I was homesick for Moscow, for the crylic alphabet and the crowded metro,
only now realising how much I had enjoyed the company of our Russian friends. And I
was homesick for home, and my family.
I heard the first English voices as I boarded the plane. Mr and Mrs Fat; he with glasses, a
squashed red face and a belly contained under an untucked shirt; she in double knit suit,
small and beaten, with a thin pointy nose and aggressive little eyes, and their children,
son fat, with the same style glasses on his squashed red face which was stubbled with
adolescent whiskers and pimples, his belly close to bursting out of his silk patterned shirt,
and daughter fat, long lank blonde hair framing a pale dead face, also pimpled, thick
thighs straining against the seams of her trouser suit, giving me the once over and turning
up her spotty nose. They wobbled their way down the tunnel making loud stupid fat jokes
about the Japanese flight attendant.
It seemed such a long time since I had sat on a plane, sipped red wine, and made jokes
about expedition suffering.
Three elderly English people sat in the row in front of me, twitching and fretting and
fussing the way the English do. Were they in the right seats/ Were they on the right plane/
Could they move out into the empty central isle later on. What happened if the food was
only that Japanese sushi stuff? They seemed to take a perverse pleasure in anticipating
every possible and impossible discomfort.
Thinking "I've been smuggled into Kirgizstan, busted in Samarkand, seen the sun rise and
set in valleys where the rivers of heaven run," I watched them all with that smug,
unjustifiable superiority which one suffers from when one thinks one has done something
really hard and worthwhile and superior. The feeling didn't last. It never does. There's
always someone who has gone further or faster or higher or harder, and after all, you're
not the only one dancing with the bear.
The customs officials in both Cairns and Brisbane had obviously been on exchange to
central Asia; as helpful and friendly as our Provodnik going north they reminded me of
the thug in uniform I had met in Samarkand. With malicious glee they strutted their stuff,
and I watched and thought, welcome home.
In Brisbane airport the Baby Bears were waiting; loud, happy to see me, they fell over
each other in their enthusiasm to help carry poor scratched Boat to the waiting car. The

house was festooned with balloons and handwritten posters I couldn't read. At two in the
morning I woke up and didn't know where I was...
I dreamt I had been appointed cook to Genghis Khan, I was chasing sheep with a meat
cleaver, prior to preparing shashlik. I woke to the sounds of foot falls near the tent.
Today we split up. Jackie and Trevor leave with Andrei the climber for Rumski doodle,
and we pack and leave for Tashkent. If all goes well tomorrow we'll be in Samarkand,
and in eight days time I'll be home.
We didn't pack, we didn't leave, but it was a perfect day all the same.
Autumn had come to this beautiful part of the world. The sound I had heard in the
morning was the ripe walnuts falling from the trees and rolling down the hill amongst the
dead dry leaves that littered the hillside. I watched the sunlight slip down the mountain
wall on the western bank, and then watched the shadows rise.
The climbing party left. We watched them struggle up the steep slope to the road. Then
we read our books, swapped addresses, and slept in the sun. The walnut gatherers rained
walnuts on the campsite. A man shook the trees and two women in trousers and over
skirts collected them in the inevitable iron pails. They sat in the shade, watching us,
laughing and blushing, and seemed to eat as many walnuts as they put in the buckets.
Towards evening we climbed the steep slopes of the river to the road and wandered into
the village of Palvanak; Sasha was looking for milk. The same brown, blank buildings,
cows ambling along the street; the smell of farms: children staring at us. A group of men
sat at the bus stop and we stopped to shake hands and talk. They dispatched a youth on a
push bike to lead us to a house near the shops and post office. We went past the school,
to the village square. The setting is awesome. Everywhere you turn you see fractured
mountain faces, rising abruptly.
We found the house we were looking for, entered a dim courtyard and emerged into a
wild garden with water piped around it. The buildings made two sides of the square. A
woman dressed in a purple headscarf with large dark eyes made us welcome and insisted
we sit down at the table. She brought out a tray of sweets, then home made bread,
pancakes, delicacies, and bowls of something I thought was Yoghurt but which Blodwyn
was adamant wasn't. By this stage I was too sick to care.
As soon as a male arrived our soft eyed hostess (how's that for a nineteenth century
description) retired. Mark had begun reading A Ride to Khiva which describes how
much a Tadjik bride cost in the nineteenth century. At the modern rate we figured one
would cost us about 200,000 roubles. We had that much between us. Look what I
brought Mum, better than any T shirt.
Men wandered in and out, shook our hands, sat down to drink tea with us. A little girl in
red stockings and woollen beanie loitered by the steps; a snotty nosed boy played

eyebrows with us round the corner of the door, and an indeterminate child with a face
blotched with running sores eat a peach.
The hospitality daunted me. They came home from work, found strangers in their house,
and stopped whatever they were doing and sat down to talk. The man who owned the
house worked in the military police. He and Sasha were talking, as far as I could follow,
about the war in Tadjikistan which had denied us access to the Zeravshan. Sasha wanted
to know how a people so kind and hospitable could turn on each other. The man was
convinced the war was being stirred up by agents of Saudi Arabia and America, creeping
over the Afghan border.
They had no milk, but they filled our bags with bread and sent their women up one of the
trees in the garden to get us apples, refusing any payment. Sasha disappeared with the
owner of the house and reappeared with two pieces of cut timber. He seemed very
happy. He makes brooches and pendants from wood.
We walked back. A beautiful quarter moon hung in a cloudless sky. I asked Sasha about
the Space race. What Paul Theroux had once described as its `Looney Nationalism' had
cost so much and seemed to promise so much, and had drivelled out into endless
attempts to park highly sophisticated junk in orbit so we could watch 132 channels of shit
on the tv and the American military could bomb targets no one could see. Sasha said the
Russians had been proud to get the first man into orbit but disappointed that the
Americans had been the first to put a man on the moon. He had not been surprised; the
Americans had more money, more Germans, and better qualified people . . .
. . . The room asserted its familiarity. I could hear the distant sound of nocturnal surf. I
wondered how my friends were. The news was full of pictures of armed Russians. There
were tanks out side the White house, and prophecies of impending Civil war. I had no
way of knowing if the climbing party had got back to Moscow, or if Blodwyn had
managed to leave for home...
. . . That last day, after we had said goodbye to the Admiral, we had gone to the Lenin
Hills, and found refuge from the bitter wind in a grey smoky cafe where pigeons stuttered
around the floor. Despite the bone aching cold a well dressed lady daintily eat a choc-ice
with a plastic spoon. Two lined, hard looking women served us coffee in plastic
cups. Three thuggish looking men with cropped hair and leather jackets smoked steadily
at a corner table eating sausage and drinking vodka, joking loudly with the women.
Blodwyn and Katya discussed lovers and love affairs and, inevitably, marriage. The cake
we bought was dry and tasteless. The coffee was vile. Its only redeeming feature was that
it was warm...
. . . Near where I live there are coffee shops that serve the most beautiful coffee, and cake
shops that twist your mind into knots of indecision with their arrays of delicacies. There
are shops you can wander in to where the cups are clean, the service fast and friendly,
and the beer cold. But they have no value if there is no time for meetings in places like
these, no time for the conversations that measure themselves out in the empty cups that

stretch across the table. There should be time for evenings by the water, when the sun sets
over the towers of Surfers Paradise and the place looks like a fully functioning star trek
set. Time for family and friends and conversation, for music and dreams of other
destinations. Not pinched time stolen or squashed between the demands of your working
day. There should be space and time to allow us to be human.
If a thousand hours can be crammed with such discovery; why not a whole life time? One
year is roughly 7,410 hours. A lifetime, 65 years, is 481, 650.
Why waste any of it?
There should be time, too, for all the problems that await us, which we will endeavour to
negotiate, like the rapids we have left behind, with humour and grace; there will be time
to be gentle, time to face up to our fears. There must always be time for another dance
with the bear.
And yet, There is only
One great thing
The only thing
To Live
To see in huts and on journeys
The great day that dawns
And the light that fills the world.
(Traditional Inuit Poem. Translator unknown.)
End of Book . . .
Acknowledgments
On behalf of the expedition members I would like to formally thank the following, in
alphabetical order, for their support. The reasons for our gratitude are explained in the
body of the text.
The Australian Geographic Society
Japanese Airlines
Quality Kayaks New Zealand.
We would also like to thank Brent Mccunn at Red Bear Travel in Melbourne for his
assistance in getting us to Moscow.
I would like to steal this opportunity to thank the many people who made Dancing with
the Bear such a success and who may not have figured prominently in the
narrative. Firstly, my greatest debt is to Sasha Statiev, without whom I would never have
thought of going to Moscow in the first place, and without whose good humour and
patience the trip would never had happened. Without Victor Smegin, who organised

everything from Moscow, we could not have reached our rivers. Tania and Larissa played
mum for Mark and me in Moscow, and Sergie and Ulyia looked after us in St. Petersburg,
and their hospitality and hard work remains one of the best memories of the expedition. I
have recorded my debts to Olga in the body of the text but it is a gratitude that will not be
worn thin through repetition. To all the nameless people whose hospitality we enjoyed in
the mountains, on the trains and in the cities, who will never read this, my thanks.
My thanks to our Russian rafting friends, especially to the Admiral and Gena and Sasha,
for all their tireless efforts on our behalf. The trip would have been so much less without
Blodwyn that it is hard to imagine what it would have been like without her. Above all
my personal thanks go to Mark Silburn, Jackie Kiewa, and Trevor Robertson, for proving
me right in thinking they were the best people I could have chosen to go with, and to Mrs
G and the Baby Bears, for still being there when I got back..
Wattery Ron (Watters) read an early version of this manuscript and his generous
encouragement and advice will go some way to offset the memory of his Birmingham
Chili. My apologies go to Peter Hart, because the Russian chapters began life as a letter
which he still hasn't received.
Lastly I'd like to thank Ron for putting the thing on the Internet and to hope It goes
someway to say thank you to the Outdoor Program at ISU for the great times I've had in
Pocatello.
This Book is dedicated to the memory of Heather Leese.
End of Acknowledgments . . .
Dancing With the Bear: The Team

From left to right:
Jackie Kiewa is a lecturer in Outdoor Education at Griffith University. She has paddled
extensively on the Eastern Sea board of Australia and throughout New Zealand's South
Island. A Senior Instructor with the Queensland Board of Canoe Education she is also an
experienced Rock climber. Having finished her Masters in Educational Psychology,
specialising in adventure based education and counseling, she is currently completing her
Ph.D. Since Dancing with the Bear she returned with Trevor to Central Asia in 1997 and
in 1998 took part in "Fatchance Diplomacy", the second Fatchance Sumatran expedition.
Liam Guilar. Liam is the author of Dancing With the Bear.
Christianne Durk was born in Germany and lives in Berlin. Fluent in four European
languages, she is currently studying Russian and Theology at the University of Berlin. A
full time Aerobics instructor, the Chatkal and Pskem were her first rivers. She has
traveled extensively, spending a year in France, making several visits to Russia and
spending time in Central Asia prior to the 1993 expedition.
Mark Silburn thinks he began paddling with the scouts but has been doing it for so long
he can't remember a time when he wasn't kayaking. He has paddled most of the difficult
rivers of the Eastern Sea Board, from the Tully to the Murray gates including the Gwydir,
reputedly Australia's hardest river, in monster flood, as well as having made numerous
trips to New Zealand's most difficult rivers. A soil conservationist by profession, he is
currently completing his Ph.D. Since Dancing with the Bear, he has paddled in Pakistan
(Where Silburn's first law of kayaking: "Nothing is ever as bad as it looks" was altered to
"Nothing is ever as bad as it looks, unless you're in Pakistan") After several Fatchance
Road Trips, he took part in the first Fatchance Expedition to Indonesia in 1997 and
despite all the pain and suffering went back again in 1998.
Trevor Robertson rafted the Franklin in 1978. He began kayaking soon afterwards and
since then has paddled most of the best rivers on Australia's East coast. As well as
paddling on lesser known but equally demanding rivers in Australia, he has paddled
extensively in the South Island of New Zealand. He has gained a reputation for paddling
difficult white water and hurling himself over water falls. He is a general medical
practitioner working in Brisbane and he is not studying for his Ph.D. Since Dancing with
the Bear he has paddled in America, returned to Central Asia and took part in "Fatchance
Diplomacy" in 1998.

Liam Guilar
Author of Dancing With the Bear
were totally lacking.
IF YOU READ Dancing With the Bear you'll gain
some insights into this unusually talented writer from
Australia. In his self-effacing manner, he says that
he has been kayaking long enough to remember four
meter kayaks made of wood and long ago realized
that longevity would suffice where skill and ability
His ambition to be a serious medievalist was thwarted by a chance meeting with Ron
Watters at a party in Pocatello, where he thinks he contracted a rare social disease that
requires him to spend hours tracing blue lines on maps of places with unpronounceable
names.
In rare bull-free moments he will admit that the only reason he organized the '93 trip, on
which the on-line book Dancing With the Bear is based, is because after waiting for
twenty years he finally realized that no one else was ever going to ask him to join their
expedition.
Since Dancing with the Bear he has run what might have been the only specialized
kayaking school in Australia, organized and run the first national rodeo in
Australia (now a regular event called Plastic Pig day), got promoted to Head of Faculty
of Languages and Literature at his work, and, desperate to escape all this, created
Fatchance Expeditions.
The philosophy of Fatchance Expeditions is best summed up by John Wilde, one of
Australia's most experienced expedition kayakers, a fellow member of the British
Kayaking Mafia and a participant in "FATCHANCE DIPLOMACY":
"Fatchance Expeditions , the brain child of Liam Guilar (of Plastic Pig fame) involves
taking a group of totally disorganized canoeists [he means kayakers yonk dudes] to a far
off land where no one speaks English, via airlines that have a reputation for
unreliability, in order to paddle rivers that no one knows anything about, in an
environment that is regarded as unpleasant by any normal person and where the chances
of getting sick if not totally disabled are high. He probably thinks that this is good for the
soul. The expedition cry 'fatchance' is the only reliable theme"