In fact, unable to read the train signs at Osaka station, we missed the fast connection and found ourselves on the slow train with more than thirty stops to our destination. But it proved to be an advantage: throughout the journey the train labored from halt to halt with local peasants getting on and off, clutching baskets of eggs, cages of live chickens and ducks, all the paraphernalia of market day in rural Japan. After recovering from the shock of seeing two gaijin sitting in their train, the locals chattered and beamed away, even though we understood not a word, an experience very few tourists achieve on the streets of Tokyo, particularly since only about 15 percent of the Japanese are rural anymore, the huge majority now urbanized.
Koyasan is a monastery of immense age and holiness, featuring the graveyard where the remains of the founder of Shingon Buddhism are laid. It takes paying guests in the form of pilgrims who wish to spend a long weekend living in the style of the old medieval monks.
The first stop was to meet the abbot, who greeted us in broad American. No need for an interpreter this time. He had fought with the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Second World War, been captured, and imprisoned in California and stayed there until the fifties.
The living accommodations were literally unheated cells, and the diet various cold foods, but nothing hot. The better news was that one could place an order for warm saké, which we did, in quantities that raised a few eyebrows.
There is a small town grouped around the monastery, something that enabled us to wander and see a side of Japan not to be observed in the cities.
At one point, I asked the abbot if his own monks confined themselves to the cold vegetarian food that we were being served.
“Good God, no,” he said. “I wouldn’t have a congregation at all if I demanded that. No, they just serve you pilgrims, then go around to McDonald’s.”
It may have been the altitude or the saké or both, but we slept soundly on our futon mats and were up before dawn fo
r the early-morning service in the temple. I’m afraid I made an ass of myself.
Squatting on the heels with the buttocks just off the floor and the knees under the chin was the required posture, which Sandy could manage with ease. Before we met, she had spent twenty years in the film business, ending with over two years as PA to Elizabeth Taylor. To stay sane in a completely crazy world, she had taken up kundalini yoga. This included retaining her British calm while attending the garden funeral of the Taylor family goldfish with complete Judaic rite presided over by a rabbi. As for me, after a few minutes, my old knees were on fire.
I had no choice but to let my backside hit the floor and take the weight, and straighten the knees. But that posed another problem. It is very rude to point the soles of the feet at fellow worshippers, so I had to squirm until the soles were pointing at each other and I was squatting like a frog on a lily pad. At the end, it took four other pilgrims to help me up.
That apart, it was a beautiful service, all in Japanese of course, with copious helpings of joss and incense, bells and chanting. Among the several hundred worshippers, we were the only other gaijin present, and therefore objects of some curiosity.
But top of the range in the hilarity stakes was the ritual communal bath. This was absolutely crucial to the worship, the ritual washing of every part of the body. The women went one way, the men the other.
The Japanese regard dunking a dirty body in unmoving water as peculiar. The washing comes first, then the immersion. I was shown where to strip, given a towel to wrap around the waist, and a small booth with a showerhead, soap, and a scrubber. The booth faced away from the open piping-hot water of the pool.
I noted that there were half a dozen middle-aged businessmen in the pool, just disembodied heads on the surface of the water, staring at me. So I faced the wall, dropping the towel, and scrubbed from chin to feet. Finally, I had no choice but to turn around and face the pool.
The six heads were still staring, but not at my face. Two feet further down, and the expressions were of considerable worry. As I turned, the six expressions changed; not to horror but to the most profound relief. Someone had clearly told them something about naked Europeans that was completely untrue.
After that, it was a farewell to the abbot, then the train (the fast one this time) down the mountain to the railhead and the bullet train back to Narita Airport and home.
A VERY UNTIDY COUP
With hindsight, it was probably a mistake to go researching cocaine shipments through Guinea-Bissau, and I certainly never intended to land in the middle of a coup d’état.
The reason for the visit to this West African hellhole of a place was simple. I had spent months researching a novel, which became The Cobra and was based on the enormous criminal world behind the cocaine trade. These quests had taken me through Washington and the DEA, London, Vienna, Hamburg (again!), Rotterdam, and finally to Bogotá and Cartagena in Colombia, source of most of the white powder.
But there was something missing. In South America, I had discovered that much of the cocaine destined for Europe did not take the direct route at all. Ships with very large consignments left the coast of Colombia and Venezuela to steam due east to West Africa and unload their cargoes in the creeks and mangrove swamps of countries where the entire law-and-order infrastructure could be purchased with bribes.
Then the cocaine bales could be broken down to smaller loads and taken north, via the land trains across the Sahara to enter Europe from the south. Foremost among these African transshipment points was Guinea-Bissau.
This is the former Portuguese colony where I had staged through forty years earlier, perched on a crate of mortars, when a bullet came through the floor and went out the ceiling. Since then, it had had twenty more years of independence war and twenty of civil war that had left the capital, Bissau City, pretty much gutted. There was (and for all I know still is) a community of Colombian gangsters who have built themselves seaside palaces and oversee the cocaine operations. As the Michelin Guide used to say, “worth a detour.”
The United Kingdom has no embassy there, nor even a consulate. Nor does Guinea-Bissau have representation in London. But I traced a consulate in Paris and was duly issued a tourist visa. The only air passage is from Lisbon (the old colonial connection) to São Tomé island with a stopover at Bissau.
Finally, the honorary British vice consul in Bissau was a very nice Dutchman with a franchise for Japanese off-road SUVs. I had been in e-mail contact with Jan out of London and he kindly agreed to meet me on landing and show me around.
My TAP airliner took off from Lisbon at eight thirty p.m. What I did not know was that hardly had it turned south than, in the Guinean army HQ, a large bomb went off, blowing the chief of staff into several artistic pieces all over the office. That was the start of the coup.
Later revelations showed that those responsible were probably the Colombians. The timer and trigger mechanisms were assuredly too sophisticated for local assembly. But that was not the view of the army, which wanted revenge and suspected President João Bernardo Vieira. It was all tribal; the bulk of the army are Balanta, but the president and his entourage were Papel. There is no love lost. So at 33,000 feet, I sipped my champagne and tried for a couple of hours’ shut-eye before landing at two a.m. local time.
On touchdown, the aircrew clearly did not want to hang around and did not even shut down the engines before leaving. Those descending were three or four Guineans and me. I entered passport control quite prepared for the long hassle of luggage search and bribe contributing that are habitual between touchdown and car park.
Then Jan came bustling through, waving his diplomatic passport, and whisked me out in double-quick time. We made the usual introductions, he grabbed my valise, and strode to his SUV. When we were bowling along the high road to the city, I remarked that he seemed to be in something of a hurry.
“Look in the rearview,” he said.