stuff 'n other stuff

I’ve been reading a biography of Henry Rawlinson, one of these larger than life nineteenth century characters who was one of the first to translate Cuneiform script, as well as incidentally being one of the people responsible for fomenting the mid nineteenth century British paranoia about the Russian expansion into Central Asia.

Like most people of his time Rawlinson’s world was based around scripture and an assumption that it constituted a historical narrative – it basically formed the underpinnings of his universe of discourse, and consequently Rawlinson was very interested in Mount Ararat and evidence of the ark – just as he found cuneiform inscriptions about the capture of Valerian and the accession of various Persian kings mentioned in the story of Alexander he expected to find similar information about Ararat and the Ark.

So, why Friedrich Parrot?

Parrot was the first westerner to ascend Ararat, but also turns out to have been one of these larger than life characters. The English Wikipedia entry doesn’t really suggest this but the French Wikipedia has considerably more detail.

I’d first come across Parrot when I went cross country skiing in the Pyrenees twelve or so years ago, where he was credited with being the first (recorded) person to travel the mountain chain from end to end – and being blessed with a memorable name helped made sure I remembered him.

What is of course interesting is the extent to which Parrot’s career as a scientific explorer flourished as a result of Russian patronage and their interest in their newly acquired territories in the Caucasus, and that scientific expeditions were not just a British or French nineteenth century phenomenon …

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As I tweeted earlier today, I suddenly realised that it’s around 40 years since I wrote my first code – as part of a maths option in high school.

The programming language was Algol68 and the code was a hello world program – something like

BEGIN
print ("Hello World!");
END.

The code was written on punched cards. I can’t remember what machine it was run on, other than it was at the local technical college, so I’m guessing it was probably something like an ICL minicomputer given the choice of language.

Stood me in good stead too – in my first year of university we did some formal bnf stuff in mathematical methods and wrote some AlgolW to validate it …

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I’ve previously written about Alexander Burnes and his Scottish connections. Burnes was of course a participant in the ‘Great Game’, the jousting for power in Asia between Britain, through its Indian Empire, and Russia with it’s expansion East.

There is a tendency to focus on central Asia as a theatre for the Game, perhaps because of Kipling’s novels and perhaps because of the crucial importance of India to the British Empire – without India the Empire was unsustainable – look how quickly it dissolved after 1947.

However the Great Game was much more of a global phenomenon – for example, during the Crimean War, British and French ships attacked Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky in the far east of Siberia, later, during the US civil war, the Russian navy maintained a squadron in San Francisco, in part to protect shipping from confederate commerce raiders.

When the Russian warship Bogatyr visited Melbourne in 1863 it was partly a spying mission in case there was a need to intervene, given Britain’s tendencytolooktheotherway as a far as confederate commerce raiders went.

The interesting thing is that the Bogatyr went on to New Caledonia afterwards – the northern Pacific was of value to Russia, if only because of the whaling trade. In fact Russia’s engagement with the Pacific is a forgotten story with the one time establishment of a fort on Hawaii. We also tend to forget that in the nineteenth century Russia posessed a significant navy that was seen by both Britain and France as a credible threat.

At the same time Britain, the US and to a lesser extent Russia were jockeying for position in the pacific northwest of America (leading to the oddity of a Roman Brick in Portland Oregon), not to mention various struggles for influence in post Meiji Japan between Britain, Russia and the US, involving such interesting characters as Thomas Blake Glover, just as we saw similar battles for influence between the West and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

And of course Manchuria and Korea were of great strategic significance to Russia, just as Siberia and Manchuria offered Japan access to significant natural resources …

In the course of reading about nineteenth century travellers in Central Asia, I came across Alexander Burnes.

His story is well known, and I won’t repeat it here but the thing that piqued my interest is that he originally came from Montrose in Scotland.

My family also come from Montrose, so I decided to check out his family tree to see if I recognised the name as any of my antecedents. I didn’t, so I’m probably not related, at least in a formal sort of way.

I’m saying formal, as according to William Dalrymple, Burnes is described in one of the Persian epics describing the Afghan War as the fornicator Burnes, which at first sight could just be routine invective except for an unexplained bequest in his will and some evidence in his correspondence.

So, let’s just say he seems to have taken after his uncle Rabbie as afar as the ladies were concerned.

However that’s not my point. The interesting thing is that looking at his family tree, the number of his relations that were also in India, and consequently how India must have offered unrivalled opportunity to a lad o’ pairts like Burnes, due to the need of people working for the East India company to have raw ability with languages to be able to engage with the local populace.

I’ve written before about how you see the most unusual conjunctions in the history of the British Empire, but this is something that had not previously occurred to me – the needs of commerce allowed men of ability to step outside the straitjacket of aristocratic preferment and succeed on their own merits.

Visting Sri Lanka, I was struck at the number of Scottish names – Cargill’s groceries and Mackay’s wholesalers to name but two – that were still attached to businesses – and that this must have had a significant impact on nineteenth century Scotland …

I’ll research and write more on this.

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Travel is quite often not about the big in your face experiences but about those quiet discoveries.

• Tomato sauce with Chilli

There’s nothing quite like the moment you discover that taste of a rich ketchup with a little bite of chilli – enough to sharpen, not enough to burn. Quietly addictive.

• Franciscan sisters marmalade

I like a good marmalade preferring the dark traditional ones like Keiller’s (I used to be able to see the factory chimney from the window of my auntie’s apartment when it was Keiller’s of Dundee) or Frank Cooper to the lighter fruity ones. but I’d willingly make an exception for the fruity orangey one produced by the Franciscan Sisters. Truly a marmalade to enjoy at breakfast.

• Elephant trucks

Ever wondered how they get elephants to poya festivals – all over Sri Lanka on poya days they have elephants in parades. These are local events without the exuberant lights and costumes seen at Esala Perahera in Kandy, but they do have elephants. And when we were in Habarana it was Poson Poya, which is very popular in the Ancient Cities area, and you would see these trucks with elephants riding in the back being taken to the various local ceremonial posessions. I defy anyone not to smile at the sight of an elephant in the back of a 1950’s Bedford truck …

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I originally planned to make an ebook out of my various Sri Lanka posts, in much the same way as I did with our Laos trip. However, half way through the process I realised that after editing, I only had around fourteen A4 pages of material, which seemed a bit thin. Certainly I’d feel like a cheat charging people to buy it from the Amazon store.

So, if you’ve enjoyed the posts and would like them as a single document, click to download. I’ve also added an epub version and a mobi version for the Kindle if you’d prefer them in an ebook format. For the technically minded, the original markdown documents were converted to odt with pandoc and assembled into a single Libre Office document which was cleaned and spell checked. The epub was generated using the write2epub plugin for  Libre Office and the mobi was generated using Calibre to convert the epub document.

Please note that the document is creative commons licensed with no derivative works, and no commercial reuse – if you’d like to reuse any of the material, click on the contacts tab at the top of this blog to find out how to get in contact with me.

From Kandy we went on to Rangala, a guest house in the tea growing hill country behind Kandy.

The minivan colecting us was late, stuck in traffic. When we phoned to see what was happening we were told that the van was not leaving until four o’clock, despite our previously having agreed two o’clock. We feared a rerun of Fawlty Towers, but need not have worried, the van was genuinely stuck in traffic, and while the road up was wet and slippy in the rain – at one point the driver touching his good luck wreath as the van slid and skidded round a corner, we got there, the fire was lit, and there was hot tea and ginger biscuits.

The rain even held off a little, which was heartening as we had planned to go walking during our stay.

The next morning the sky was almost clear with a stunning view down the valley back to Kandy with the sun glistening on rice paddies below.

The walk itself was a fairly simple one up through the tea estates and women picking tea, past informal Hindu shrines up to the top of the hill where there should have been a view, but there wasn’t as the weather began to close in again and we made a hurried descent.

The tea pickers are all descendants of Tamil workers imported by the British, and quite distinct from both the Tamils in the north who have been there for several hundred years and the surrounding Sinhala population who are all Buddhist (except for those that Christian missionaries got to.)

It’s quite noticeable when you’re in a Tamil area – the roadside shrines with images of Buddha are replaced with statues of Ganesh, and sometimes other members of the Hindu pantheon, and out in the fields you come across little informal shrines, this time with lignams not Buddhas.

Interestingly, in Christian areas, statues of the saints appear in roadside shrines, just the same as happens with Buddha or Ganesh – a collision of tradition and belief.

That afternoon it rained. However it did stop long enough to walk down the road to a handloom factory where people were weaving cotton cloth of incredible delicacy by hand in a non descript shed. The looms looked like the traditional tweed looms used in the Western Isles of Scotland and the factory was probably not that different from a pre industrial revolution workshop.

On the way back our guide gave us an impromptu botany lesson, identifying various spice plants growing wild at the roadside, including coffee bushes – a legacy of the British attempt to start a coffee industry. In fact if it wasn’t for coffee blight in the 1870’s, the hills would probably be covered in coffee trees, not tea bushes.

The next day we’d planned a longer walk up over the watershed to the next tea estate and down that estate to the main road and back.

The walk was quite leechy, and just before we got to the watershed and the boundary between the two estates the heavens opened, and we retreated back down the slope. The tea workers obviously also thought it too wet to work and were huddled under little shelters of plastic sheeting waiting to see if the rain would pass.

The original plan had been to go to a tea factory that afternoon. In fact it was so wet we didn’t and were rather glad when the guy who was going to take us phoned to apologise that he’d had a flat and was delayed while he had it repaired.

While we enjoyed our time, by this time the wet was getting to us and were rather glad to move on to Habarana.

Habarana and the ancient cities …

Habarana is nothing special, a road junction, a railway station and a town, but it is in the middle of a roughly triangular area that includes Sigiriya, Polunaruwa, Dambulla and Anandrhapura, the prime historical sites of Sri Lanka.

We didn’t make it to Anandrhapura and only drove past Dambulla, but we did visit both Polunaruwa and climb Sigiriya.

Polunaruwa is a vast ruin of a city bounded by an artificial lake to one side, littered with magnificent ruined buildings and sculptures. As always when visiting ruins significant on someone else’s culture you do tend to lack context and it does tend to retreat into hot dry incomprehensuble spectacle, which I’m afraid Polunaruwa did for us.

That said it is well worth a visit for the sculpture alone, but it’s also a good idea to take a decent guidebook and read up on things first. There are guides available but they don’t relly tell you much, and if you are interested in the culture you are probably better going on your own with a guide book. Take plenty of water and if you have hired a van to get there ask your driver to take you to the reclining Buddha and to the other sites at the far end of the lake.

After Habarana we visited Sigiriyaa quite remarkable 200m high rock in the middle of Sri Lanka with substantial arachaeological remains on top of it, we hired a guide at the suggestion of our driver. The guide turned out to be fairly useless and intent on telling us about how many concubines the king had and how the monks didn’t like pictures of naked ladies, rather than the history of the place.

To climb the rock you have to clime a set of steep steps and narrow iron staircases, which is moderately challenging, and at the top you get a magnificent view. Other than the frescoes and the view there’s not a lot that is visually appealing but it’s something that everyone should do once.

The day we climbed Sigiriya it was the Saturday of Poson Poya weekend, the full moon festival that marks the arrival of Bhuddism in Sri Lanka and one that’s especially popular with the people in the area around Habarana, which meant that Sigiriya was busy with local tourists cimbing the rock and consequently rather crowded, if you are at all claustrophobic or worried about heights you might want to visit on a non poya day.

And then suddenly it was our last non-travel day in Sri Lanka.

And we decided to chill. It was warm, sunny, and the hotel we were staying at was part of the same chain that had a resort at Trincomalee so we negotiated for a free pass to use the private beach, hired a car and headed to the beach for a day – Chaaya Blue (hotel) in Uppeveli is the place to be in this season as it’s not monsoon there – hot, dry, laid back, interesting -it also has a crab restaurant called, surprisingly ‘Crab’, and the crab cakes are good. Wonderful to swim in the sea again – the first time since Mirissa. We saw some reminders of the war in Trinco itself – a burned out tank, and the presence of military checkpoints everywhere.

Trinco itself was shut for poya, but did go to Fort Frederic, which is a massive military fort still partly used by the Sri Lankan army where photography is restricted, but you can visit on the pretext of visiting the Hindu temple on the point.

Interestingly the fort also conatins it’s own herd of deer, which are looked after by the soldiees. Trinco has a history as British naval base, and while there are no obvious remains of the British presence we did learn afterwards that Charles Austen, Jane Austen’s brother, and Percy Molesworth the astronomer and one time British military surveyor are buried in Trinco.

The next day it was back to Colombo wher it was, predictably, wet. The best thing was the Galle Face Hotel where we stayed – an old edifice dating from 1864 and facing the Indian ocean, where you can see a lovely sunset if there is one. We saw a storm coming in instead.

We lucked out and had an upgrade to one of the ocean rooms as the hotel was in the midst of being renovated.

The towers all round the hotel are manned with soldiers with very large machine guns trained out to sea – quite disquieting when you are swimming in the pool to look up and see groups of armed soldiers on te rooftop of the neighbouring tower block – they probably don’t want a repeat of the Mumbai attack of 2009.

Armed soldiers are everywhere in Colombo, and the old parliament building, which looks like a smaller tawny version of the State Parliament building in Melbourne is surrounded by a security fence. In fact a whole lot of the old government area is out of bounds behind security cordons.

One thing we did do in Colombo is visit the Dutch House museum, the old Dutch governor’s residence in the Fort. The museum is down a side street and it’s probably best to get a tuk tuk to take you, and has a slightly lost and desolate air.

What it does give you however is a sense of just how extensive the Dutch East India Company’s involvement with Sri Lanka was, down to the cases full of duits picked up in the fort.

After that it was home via Singapore – a long drive in traffic out to the airport, endless security checks and the joy of a 1 am flight to Singapore.

Singapore

While we were in Habarana we’d had a reasonable choice of English language channels on TV, and in among adverts for the Lovely Professional University in Punjab (Google it, it really exists) and Windows phones from Nokia (India is one of teh last Nokia holdouts) we’d had the opportunity to see some news and had discovered that Singapore was blanketed in smog – the Haze – caused by burning forests to clear land for palm oil plantations in Indonesia.

When we landed the air was reasonably clear, and on the way to the hotel the cabbie told us it had rained really heavily the night before and cleared the air so that it was now back to the high end of normal.

After an overnight flight we crashed for a couple of hours, went shopping, had an incredibly overpriced drink in Raffles hotel on the balcony overlooking the street and meal in a japanese restaurant and crashed again.

The next morning the air was still clear so we set out on the MRT to visit the Singapore zoo to see the big cats. What we failed to realise was that (a) we’d turned up on the fortieth anniversary of the zoo’s foundation and (b) it was school holidays so everyone was taking their kids to the zoo as the air was clear.which wasn’t such a good idea because it was the zoo’s 40th birthday and school holidays and every Singaporean child was being taken to see giraffes, giant mole-rats and kangaroos, so we stood in a hot queue for an hour. The Sumatran tigers we remembered from last time were all gone, replaced by a grumpy white one.

A singapore sling in Raffles Hotel is a tourist cliché, and a bit of fun. People get their pictures taken there by the waiters. A satay at Lau Pa Sat food hall was more a genuine Singaporean experience, though these days it’s surrounded by skyscrapers, and then it was back to a chilly Canberra winter …

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