The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place by Ian Baker (Penguin, 2004)
This is a good, pacey and engaging
travelogue, which – in the tradition of ‘an American abroad’ – reminded me a
little of Peter Hessler’s River Town.
I read The Heart of the World
primarily because I am interested in the lives and travels of Eric Bailey and
Frank Kingdon-Ward (who could almost be this book’s co-author, given how often
he is quoted throughout!). And also because I am interested in how the Tibetan
Buddhist concept of ‘beyul’ (sBas yul) has been co-opted and adapted
into the Western idea of ‘Shangri-La’ – for which this book offers a number of
interesting insights and points to other literary works which it might have
been hard to find or trace otherwise. The journeys made over several years
which Baker recounts are tough trials of stamina, both physical and spiritual,
with obstacles which are both natural, seemingly supernatural, and, of course,
bureaucratic. However, I do agree with the comments (made on GoodReads)
regarding the authorial persona; which, perhaps ironically for someone who
presents himself as an aspiring Buddhist practitioner, comes across at times as
somewhat egocentric. Similarly, while Baker is often at pains to stress that he
is not a privileged white-man of the old explorer mould – this is exactly what
he is at most points in the text, especially when, towards the end of the book,
he and his companions are attempting “to close the gap” on the “last unexplored”
five-mile stretch of the Tsangpo, utilising indigenous labour to enable them to
do so (not that there would be any other option, of course).
There is a clear desire to complete
(or exceed?) the endeavours which Bailey and Kingdon-Ward failed to achieve
themselves; and, in the closing pages of the book, there is an equally palpable
desire to beat a large Chinese expedition to find and measure ‘the last’ major waterfall on the Tsangpo. Although Baker is very evidently self-aware of these
particular flaws, and perhaps understandably circles around them uneasily and
inconclusively. No matter how informed he is about the region, its spiritual
geography and local traditions, he cannot escape the fact that he is an
outsider. However deeply he manages to enter, he always has to reconcile
himself with the fact that he must ultimately leave again at the end of
whichever trip it is he is narrating. Naturally, the reader is drawn to empathise.
But the book does also indulge time-and-again in poetic and spiritual flights
of fancy which skate a little too close to cliché in places (e.g. – to give but
one example, how often it seems that the weather brightening up is attributed
to the possible intervention of divine favour, or a lama happening to appear on
the scene at the moment the sun comes out), which, for me at any rate, raised a
bit of a barrier between reader and author.
That said though, I have read a
particularly mind-numbing Chinese book (in translation; The Yarlung Tsangpo
Great Canyon: The Last Secret World, by Zhang Jimin) about the enormous
Chinese expedition (that features in the closing chapters of Baker’s book)
which mangles all its references to Kingdon-Ward, including something as simple
as getting his name right. One can’t help but sympathise with the local
Tibetans’ conflicts of interest in wanting Pemako to remain unviolated by
outsiders whilst also needing to make a living in such an ‘out-of-the-way place’
by acting as porters to comparatively affluent external interlopers. No matter
how difficult or sacred the terrain, in the covetous eyes of such outsiders
(Baker as much as the Chinese) the lure to conquer and possess these ‘unknown
realms’ – real or imagined; physical or spiritual – in the end amounts to the
same outcomes.
All too often, it’s simply a matter
of time until others encroach and transform a place into something other than
what it once was to those who have gone before, and even moreso to those who
have always called such places home. Perhaps in this sense, Baker is an
eloquent witness to the completion of a process which was begun by those whom
he has sought to emulate, i.e. Bailey, Kingdon-Ward and Cawdor. Hence, one can’t
help but feeling both forlorn and perhaps vicariously a little complicit too
(having enjoyed the narrative of Baker’s journeys), when closing this book
after reading its concluding chapter.
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| Ian Baker |
Also on 'Waymarks'
Exploring the Land of the Blue Poppy - Frank Kingdon Ward & Tibet
See also: 'A Man Who Heeded The Call of Shangri-La,' by Susan Salter Reynolds in Los Angeles Times (7 January 2005).
And the Tibet Hidden Falls website by the Gillenwater brothers, who travelled with Ian Baker in the 1990s.
Plus, Hamid Sardar-Afkhami, ‘An Account of Padma bkod: A Hidden Land in Southeastern Tibet,’ Kailash, Vol. 18, No.3 (1996), pp. 1–21