The Ends of the Earth

Roger Willemsen, Peter Lewis

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781909961029
• eBook ISBN: 9781909961036
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

An author, foreign correspondent, academic, and television personality, Roger Willemsen is a familiar figure in Germany, and The Ends of the Earth offers English-language readers a chance to engage with his uniquely astute take on the world. Consisting of twenty-two essays recounting and reflecting on a lifetime of travel to the far and forgotten corners of our planet, the book offers remarkable encounters and mysterious entanglements in locations as diverse as a Kamchatkan volcano, a Burmese railway station, an Arctic icebreaker, and a Minsk hospital ward. Willemsen is the perfect companion, reveling in the strange and unlovely, and tracing unexpected connections among places, times, and peoples.

The North Pole

Contemplation

This July, the city has all the trappings of November. A halfhearted, chilly drizzle descends over Moscow, and beneath the pallid, swinish sky, even the colourful modern estates in the affluent suburbs, with their apartment blocks banked up like amphitheatres and the geode-like jerry-built highrises on the city outskirts – indeed, the whole human anthill that is the Russian capital – take on a uniform greyness. But in the interstices between buildings, the billboards advertising liquor and mobile phones sit up on high like Vestal Virgins and reign supreme.

On the streets beneath them, the careworn, even brutalized faces of both the new and the old proletariat – those who can still remember a time when politics claimed to speak in their name – are milling about. Back in the old days it was seen as a mark of distinction to have a face like this, a haggard, exhausted mien. In the meantime, impoverishment can be seen in people’s clothes and beards. Every car contains a small family. In every bus window, you see a drinker with a boxer’s nose. And in the gaps between the vehicles buildings with their ribs showing.

The first time we set eyes on one another – we little group of travellers who variously call our impending trip together an ‘extreme holiday’, an ‘expedition’, an ‘adventure’, an ‘annual vacation’ or a ‘dream journey’ – is in a nameless Russian hotel. I leave the breakfast room and go to drink my coffee at a window table in the anteroom. A wiry blonde woman of about sixty, but who looks somewhat younger, joins me, lights up a cigarette and, drawing on it with a pained expression, remarks:

‘You and I should stick together.’

‘Yes we should,’ I reply, ‘the thing is, though, I’m a non-smoker.’

‘Well, get a load of that!’ she chuckles. I haven’t heard that expression in years.

To get to the airport, we choose the bus with an English commentary, sit together, queue behind one another at the desk, and take adjoining seats on the Tupolev to Murmansk, commenting on what we see out of the windows, and in the pauses between looking out, regaling one another with selected excerpts from our lives. Marga is Austrian and was formerly a flight attendant; she quit the airline she worked for on bad terms, but got a handsome pay-off and now helps out in a dance club. She’s unmarried and childless and this is already her second trip to the polar regions. Before, she got as far as Franz Josef Land. That was three summers ago. The expedition leader on that occasion was Victor Boyarski, the most experienced of all Arctic explorers, a man who once reached the Pole on a dogsled, and sub-sequently was received by presidents and fêted by the world at large. He’ll also be heading up our trip.

‘You’ll like him. He’s waiting in Murmansk for us. Let’s see if he remembers me!’

Seen from the outside, the Tupolev is as sleek as a paper aeroplane. But inside, the cabin smells of smoke, all the springs in the seats have collapsed and my tray has lost its clip and only stays in position against the seat back in front of me because the vomit that a previous passenger deposited on it has spread over its surface and gained adhesion as it dried, holding it in place. When I finally manage to unstick the tray, the dried, congealed mass shatters into shards and tumbles into my lap. The seats themselves have seen better days, too. Where there should be upholstery, there’s now bare metal, and the foam rubber filling has either crumbled away or been wrapped with black insulation tape to keep it from deteriorating further. In fact, only the heavily made-up air hostesses in their vivid blue uniforms and their aubergine-coloured wraps look so wholesome and fresh that they could have been imported from some other hygiene zone. The carpet under their feet is heavily patterned with Persian motifs, but is badly stained.

Marga looks out of the window.

‘“As the crow flies” really does mean just that over deserts and Arctic tundra.’

Our fellow travellers, some of whom are clearly seasoned tourism snobs, chat occasionally to one another, putting on airs like they’re God Almighty:

‘Then we did the South Pole, then went through the Northwest Passage, and after that it was Patagonia, and two years back we climbed Kilimanjaro …’

You can hear the conquistadors in their conversation, and picture a hand sticking little flags all over a map, but the tales only have value in so far as they relate to the person telling them, and people like this invariably take one bit of their story from the television, and characterize another as either ‘indescribable’ or ‘unbelievable’. Evidently, several of the people here, finding themselves in extreme places, felt extremists themselves, and so neglected to answer the basic question all travellers should pose themselves: Where was I?

Marga complains that the springs in her seat are digging into her buttocks. The steward gives her a sullen look as he listens to her complaint, sensing an imminent attack on Aeroflot or on the Russian Empire as a whole. Then he shoots her a fleeting look of concern and shrugs his shoulders, a mere two centimetres up at most, by way of apology.

‘What an apparatchik!’ groans Marga and, advancing as the crow flies between two clichés, adds: ‘the next moment he’ll start crying, you wait and see.’

But she isn’t really very worked up, or at least can’t be bothered to take the matter any further. She far prefers spying out her fellow travellers from her inwardly superior standpoint and concerning herself with what they might be saying or thinking. From this vantage point she also casts her gaze on us:

‘They’ll probably be saying that I’ve hooked myself a toy-boy,’ she whispers, briefly resting her slim hand on my forearm. ‘I just know it. All you’ve got to be is unmarried and have no children, and the gossiping starts. I can hear them at it right now.’ At Murmansk airport, we are once more divided between two tour buses. The area around where we’ve landed is barren and undeveloped, and the airport terminal is not much larger than a filling station. But the broad, sweeping bay with its scrubland and bright silver-birch woods and meadows spreads out generously below us around inlets of the Arctic Ocean. From here, only the town itself comes across as grey and pragmatic, unaffected by a sense of idealism, a defrosted organism that swallows the light between its walls – in other words an individual of a city, original in its unloveliness. No sooner has the bus started up than a Russian travel guide stands up from the front seat and greets us:

‘Dear friends. As we drive into town, I’ll point out one or two of our notable places of interest.’

‘Places of interest!’ scoffs a cocky Berlin voice from the back seat of the bus. ‘Can’t wait to see those!’

In the absence of anything attractive about the city itself, the travel guide imbues every word she utters with the utmost charm. In fact, her words are more enticing than what they’re meant to describe, and so it’s her that ends up being the real feature of interest.

‘On the right here you can see a town house with its garden. Then comes a dacha. And next door to it you have an example of standard bureaucratic architecture.’

She pronounces everything likes she’s reading fluently from the works of Gorky, Gogol or Chekhov, only then to take any shine off her pronouncements by saying: ‘You won’t see anything special on the way into town. We grow normal vegetables here. In the city, you’ll also notice one or two Norwegian filling stations.’

‘The old dear’s talking such a heap of shit,’ the Berliner announces.

Beaming, the guide turns to her left and waves her hand in the direction of a scrubby hollow the bus is passing, an empty aisle of nothingness running between industrial complexes and high-rise blocks.

‘Here you can see the Valley of Contentment, as we call it, where our athletes train for the Olympic Games.’

This calls forth a ripple of laughter in the bus. Valley of Contentment, indeed! A clump of birch trees on a patch of worn grass is the only remotely homely-looking thing about the place.

‘Contentment! Now I’ve heard everything!’

‘And this,’ the guide continues tirelessly at the next roundabout, ‘is the Square of Five Corners. But, my friends, you won’t find five corners here.’

Today, a circus has set up its big top on this square, a circus that specializes in singing sea mammals.

‘You can have seals kiss you!’

‘I’d just as soon kiss the old dear,’ the Berliner chimes in, still casting around for accomplices. His companion grins at this splendidly vulgar alpha male and seems ready to become a disciple.

‘Now we’re entering the city’s northern district, which isn’t so attractive …’

‘Just like you,’ the Berliner shouts.

He goes on, gazing from afar out of the bus, to declare the place ‘uninhabitable’. But the travel guide looks serious. She tells us how many people have left the city in recent years, and how hard it’s becoming for those who remain:

‘But then it’s not always easy for you in the West, either!’

‘Oh, she’s priceless!’ the Berliner calls out to the bus in general, then turning to the front, quips: ‘People in glasnost houses shouldn’t throw stones!’

He then pronounces everything that takes place within these walls to be a life not worth living. At the top of his voice; he couldn’t care less if she hears him.

And what about winters here? She tells us about winters when it’s been so cold that you can only stay outside for short spells at a time, and you find yourself having to break even shopping trips into stages. For the seven months that winter lasts here, shelters are even put up on the street so people can warm up quickly. Sure, sometimes far too much vodka is drunk in this season, but with this in mind, policemen are stationed in doorways to come to people’s aid if a drinker turns violent. Even so, violence here isn’t markedly worse than in other big cities; people are far more worried about potential food shortages.

‘Allow me to clear my throat,’ gasps the Berliner, and gives a hacking cough. ‘I know what the score is here: it’s a case of raise your glasses and cheers everybody, the management’s sozzled!’ We’re approaching the harbour, which used to be a nuclear exclusion zone. Nowadays, though, it’s like a ships’ graveyard, full of rusting barges, naval patrol boats, tugs and icebreakers. The shore is lined with policemen, who are young and yet still scowl, and in the harbour itself lie several high-legged floating cranes that remind you of insects. They’re a permanent feature of the port. Beneath them cower the hastily welded rumps of new vessels taking shape, looking like metal sculptures by Jean Tinguely.

The bright red atomic icebreaker Yamal is a real beauty amid the dull-painted naval vessels in Murmansk harbour. On either side of this leviathan’s bows, a grinning set of shark’s teeth has been painted, a childish gag that has transformed this floating nuclear power station into a kind of toy Matchbox steamer. The gangway up to the deck is a walkway that leads diagonally up the side of the hull. At the top, jovial and full-bearded, waits Victor Boyarski, shaking everybody’s hand as they step aboard. When he sees Marga, his expression freezes. Then he extends his long arm and shakes her solemnly by the hand. He’s recognized her all right, but it’s not exactly what you’d call a warm reunion.

Our sleep that night feels like a midday nap; after all, the sun never even gets close to touching the horizon. The ship smells of salt and diesel. The thick red paintwork of the Yamal has blistered in places, which have then hardened, broken, and been painted over again. The Russian ensign is blatting away on the mast, and the fog is so dense this morning that you can barely see fifty metres ahead. It’s as if we’ve been caught frozen in motion, as there’s no horizon line visible to give us any sense of progress. Not even the tone of the grey surrounding us changes; it simply remains unrelentingly grey between the sky and the sea.

I have occupied cabin number 39, which at other times is used by researchers, engineers or ship’s officers; it’s a bare, purely functional set of rooms. Any romanticism here is in the names: the fan is called ‘Zephir’, and the hairdryer ‘Scarlett’. I slept on a sofa bed, made up for me by a robust Russian woman, a single mother from Murmansk. By its right-hand corner stands a Formica table, and a fresh, icy wind is blowing in through a small, open porthole. I sit down on a rickety office chair and stare out, happy that we’ve now irrevocably set sail into Nothingness. The feeling of doing something desperate, of not being able to dodge it any longer, that’s the thing above all that gives this trip the flavour of an ‘expedition’. Indeed, the very term ‘research ship’ serves to rein in any expectations of comfort we might have.

‘So what?’ Marga says when I chat to her the next morning. She’s quite the old hand, and has seen it all before. She knows all about the cabins and the routines on board ship, and there are even some crew members who acknowledge her with glances. Yet she keeps herself to herself. It’s only me whom she has rather high-handedly shielded from the other passengers, even physically putting herself between me and them, while at mealtimes she searches out a table apart from the others, where she’ll sit and talk quickly and aimlessly about past injustices in her life, and tell me about stupid things our fellow travellers have said or done, and less frequently about the icy landscape that awaits us. Her attention takes on something of a manic air.

After two days I begin to widen my circle of acquaintances, moving to stand besid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Indice
• Frontespizio
• Diritto d’autore
• Acknowledgements
• Eifel – Departure
• Gibraltar – The Ne Plus Ultra
• The Himalayas – In the fog of the Prithvi Highway
• Isafjördur – The blind spot
• God’s Window – The final curtain
• Minsk – The stranger in the bed
• Patagonia – The forbidden place
• Timbuktu – The Boy Indigo
• Bombay – The oracle
• Tangkiling – The road to nowhere
• Kamchatka – Ashes and magma
• Mandalay – A dream of the sea
• Lake Fucino – Wasting away
• Gorée – The door of no return
• Hong Kong – Poste restante
• The Amu-Darya – On the frontiers of Transoxania
• Toraja – Among the dead
• Tonga – Taboo and fate
• Kinshasa – Scenes from a war
• Chiang Mai – Opium
• Orvieto – The fixation
• The North Pole – Contemplation