Fairy lights on the veranda, tea lights on the table

Hear us roar

compassrose — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 12:46:00 GMT

The wail of an Algonquin chief undulates on the October wind. He launches sorrowful prayer towards a darkening sky. Foam whipped up by waterfall crashes down, battling with the din made by beaver-skin drums. White gulls shriek in reply, as though birds too mourn a landscape unscarred by human hands.

When I reached Akikodjiwan, or ‘Pipe Bowl’ Falls, I’d come to witness the sacred. But I saw so much concrete. Dammed water tumbled through the jaws of a gunmetal grey structure punctuating the rapids in a gap-toothed grin. Diggers and other hungry looking machinery guarded the perimeter, crouching open-mouthed behind chain-link fences.

For millennia, the falls have been a place of worship for indigenous peoples as far-flung as Mexico. The waterfall-carved basin embodies the bowl of a great peace pipe. Mists from white-water are smoke rising to the Creator.

Two centuries ago, settlers who had claimed Ottawa began to monetise the river. Leases were created to steal the land from First Peoples and sell it to the timber industry. The dam was built to harness its hydropower. Loggers no longer need it. Now the sacred land is destined for luxury apartments.

Years pass but the status quo remains.

“Kwey kwey,” the chief gently greets curious passers-by as five First Peoples’ descendants prepare for ceremony. They feed tobacco fluff into the whirlpool below – stoking the Great Pipe. Firepit embers are fanned into flame by the ballooning wind.

“My sisters! My brothers!” His mounting drumbeat lifts the hair on my arms.

“You wouldn’t let developers desecrate the Vatican!” His lament addresses all humanity. “You wouldn’t build skyscrapers over Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall!”

Mournful howls electrify the air. They call the spirits of the falls. They pray to free the sacred – and all of us.

No one mentions the people who greedily took possession of this land. Or that those people look like me.

Chanting and drumming reaches a crescendo, spiralling above the roaring falls and merging with smouldering white sage smoke, then snatched away on south-westerly winds. Their voices are borne far over northern Québécois tundra – over boreal forest and black bears snuffling through pine needles – and scattered out as waves of green and pink light dancing across the Arctic Circle.

Grounding myself that evening with a huge, heart-taxing dish of French fries drowned in gravy, I accidentally squirt maple syrup on the waiter’s apron. He apologises profusely.

Like the British, whose ancestors settled here, Canadians typically act amusingly, excessively polite. While devouring poutine, I try to square our courtesy with our dark history.

“Well, I’ll be damned…” I’ve googled the falls and found a sepia photo. Before they were dammed, they rivalled Niagara. Settler blood pounds in my ears.

Before flying home, I visit the falls for one last look. Seeing beyond concrete, I marvel at water’s raw power. Lifeblood flowing through the veins of Canada’s capital.

This time, no Algonquians are here singing. Instead, thundering white-water competes with an ominous orchestra of diggers and drills. Together, they roar.

Psychedelic souls and sky giants

compassrose — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 23:38:00 GMT

“¡Cuidado!” someone shouts, as a quetzal with a six metre wingspan catches a gust and soars upwards, rippling my hair as I duck. The giant bird lurches as her reins pull taught, and she begins to dance proudly back and forth on the rising wind.

Hundreds more kites begin to unfold around us: some miniature, some cartwheel sized, and others lurid leviathans of painted rice paper stretched over colossal bamboo frames.

Cheers from the crowd echo around the tombstones every time a kite takes to the air, battling the autumn winds. One mammoth multicolour creation, two months in the making, crumples to the ground after ten minutes airtime. Locals whoop.

Winds chase the lingering souls away from this little Sacatepéquez graveyard and into the afterlife.

Petals snatched off graves swirl around us in a psychedelic cyclone. A single teal feather breaks free and spirals downwards. A boy jumps, catches it and fist pumps the air. He uncurls his hand to inspect his treasure, then presses it into my palm. Ancient Mayans traded with quetzal tail feathers as currency. Enchanted, as though amiga rather than tourist, I kiss his cheek.

The audience swells, hordes from the market bursting into the cemetery and between the crypts. Freshly laid flowers are trampled as people climb graves and jostle for the best view. I head for a safe place to stand but a kicked wreath lands at my feet and I falter.

Stopped in my tracks, I see an old man fight against the throng to hold up string around a small newly dug rectangle. His silent grief is unseen by the boisterous crowd. He's trying to protect the grave. As I watch, a kid barges past, knocking the string out of his hands, one foot falling obliviously on recently churned earth. In a flash, the kid was gone. The elder rakes over the footprint with weary fingertips and picks up the string, returning to his grim vigil.

About to make a clumsy gesture, I finger the centavos and 1 quetzal coins in my pocket, but brush something soft. I pull out a turquoise feather. It isn’t much, but… I offer it to the elder. His old eyes are startled, then calm. A locket sized photo smiles up from between flowers as he presses the feather to his lips. He produces a rusty Zippo and on the third spin it catches alight. We watch synthetic cinders ride the wind.

Dusk falls and the ritual kite burning begins, like a Mayan parallel universe Burning Man. The market stalls invade my nose with savoury sizzling, and I pick my way slowly back. No longer quite just a tourist at a kite festival.

Dinnertime

compassrose — Wed, 27 May 2015 11:53:51 GMT

Scanning the glitzy neon lights of the Senegambia Strip, I gulp. Malaria tablets never settle well in my stomach and it's been hours since I’ve eaten something.

Music throbs out of bars, steel pans merging with incongruous Eurodance beats, mini dancefloors spilling out onto the streets. A sunburnt white woman in her 60s lolls against two tall, young locals, their muscles bulging under tight t-shirts. Bumsters. They’re everywhere, approaching you in cafes and on beaches at Kotu and Kololi, even staking out the airport, waiting for lovesick older Western women who might take them home. Love and sex and VISAs.

The music swells and the woman laughs loudly as the bumsters try to teach her how to twerk. Underneath the lobster-hued skin, her face looks a little like my grandma’s. My stomach gurgles. I turn away from the Strip. On the main road, a bushtaxi rattles past noisily, a battered minibus chock-full with an eclectic bunch of passengers. “Abaraka!!” I call, mind racing for a word in Mandinka. The bushtaxi shudders to a halt and I climb aboard, gratefully pressing a fistful of dalasi into the driver’s hand and launching straight into the laps of the front row as he puts his foot on the gas. Adults chuckle good-naturedly whilst children roar with laughter somewhere by my feet. The exhaust splutters into life and I lean out, gratefully inhaling a blast of coastal air as we head out into the maze of bustling dirt roads.

“Serekundaaa!!” the driver screeches as we pull up outside a mini mall, in which lies the Gambia's only escalator. Most passengers climb out; I stay on. Taxi horns and ghettoblasters fade away. Roads become wider and leafier and the driver even eases off on the gas as we sail past silvery ribbons of river. Spiky mangrove silhouettes frame mud islands and the call of night birds echoes in the waterways.

“Lamiiin Lodge!!” – the final taxi stop and I jump down, grinning up at the two-storey wooden structure looming out of the water on stilts: an oyster farm turned restaurant, a palace of bamboo.

Settled on their veranda with softly flickering tealights reflecting in the water, I sip wonja hibiscus juice and settle into my seat, waiting whilst grilled barracuda in banana curry is prepared for me in the kitchen. A vervet monkey scampers under the table and immediately locates a packet of cashew nuts in my pocket.

Back towards the coast I can make out the neon street sign glimmer of the Strip in the distance. From here, it’s beautiful.

Sub-Saharan GMT

compassrose — Thu, 8 May 2014 18:24:44 GMT

"Smile! You're on the smiling coast," Rastaman Babu demonstrates with a yellow roll-up pinched between his teeth.

The old dreadlocked fisherman steers his painted wooden motorboat past the mouth of the sea and deeper into the swampy waterways. He navigates languidly through a maze of mud islands, each thickly forested with mangroves.

Our boat is two hours late for lunch. Babu dismisses my worry with a cheery adage, "All one love; no stress!" The clocks run to the same hour as London, but to what locals fondly call ‘GMT’: Gambia Maybe Time. We might arrive an hour late, or two, if we turn up at all. I rest my head against the sun-bleached wood. Lulled into meditative slumber by the propeller's gentle spluttering and the calls of birds I cannot name, I vow never to run for a bus or dive through closing Tube doors again.

Flying fish jump as a trio in our bubbling wake, skimming the water and speeding alongside us like winged dolphins. Babu flicks a ditakh fruit into my lap and I crack open the hard shell, eagerly exposing sour green flesh. On the distant beach, an origami paper crane becomes a pelican folding back its huge wings and settling into its nest, a mass of tangled tree roots to which myriad rows of oysters cling.

I spot a red-billed hornbill and giggle with delight, identifying him as Zazu from The Lion King - a cartoon made real, his mannerisms and inelegant hop identical to the animation and just as comical.

Later, at dusk, we walk slowly along the line where the water laps the shore. Translucent crabs scuttle away from my lazy footfall and disappear into the sand, each falling haphazardly into one of a hundred tiny holes. Removed from civilisation and street lamps, we navigate with torches and swim dreamily in the starlight. Babu talks of the herd of hippo that sometimes drinks here, and my mind races. Most fatalities by a wild animal? I wriggle out of the water. How did I end up here, night swimming in an inscrutable African lake?

Cashew tree blossom crunches underfoot and a mouthful of blunt hippopotamus teeth gnashes in my head. I freeze, and all is still. The otherworldly outline of a behemothic baobab tree looms above the water against the purple sky, its seeds eerie dangling orbs suspended in shadow. Under our feet it drinks, unseen, whilst the uppermost of its intricate twig lattice almost but not quite touches the moon.

Rastaman Babu chuckles. "Reggae baby!" He uses the pet name I heard in Banjul and liked. "You’re still smiling!"