the other Cañadas photographs

The real reason for the visit to Tenerife and the Caldera de las Cañadas in particular was to take another sort of photograph from those travel snaps previously posted. Images of less obvious subject matter, in many instances with no inherent scale.

This first images comes from the Minas de San José - wonderful, coloured picon landscapes that straddle the TF-21 midway between Los Roques and Portillo. Picon is composed of small rounded pumice up to 20mm across. the San José picon ranges in colour from green-greys, through yellow-greys to red-greys. And in spite of the numbers of visitors they maintain their dune-like forms and discrete swirling colour bands. And there's very little litter around the place.

This second image comes from the very top of the huge gash in the landscape between Montaña El Cerrillar and Montaña de Arenas Negras. This shows a slab of lava resting on top of layers of pumice. As the pumice is granular it is subject to wind and water erosion, causing collapses in the lava slab.

While these are fairly intelligible images, there is no positivel sense of scale here. Other images of rubble, scrub, and rock have no palpable scale.

There's something worrying about the colouration here that I'm going to have to deal with. It's just a little anachronistic from a technical photographic perspective (think C19th landscape photographs).

three walks in the Caldera de Las Cañadas

Los Roques de García: This is probably the best introduction to the Caldera, and to get away and see what the folk in whistle-stop coaches and cars can’t see from the Mirador de la Ruleta. It’s an easy 4km hill-walk, with less than 150m combined ascent. As Sendero 3 it is an ‘official’ footpath, but do not rely on signage or waypoints, especially on the descent. The path starts impressively wide and manicured by the vehicle turning circle at the Mirador car park, thinning off in inverse proportion to the number of the ill-shod who give up. You get full-on views of the volcano and all the Roques as the path winds its way up to the high point of the walk – and you’ll know when you are there…

You’ll appreciate good footwear on the descent. There’s little path as such, just a wear marks on the rocks and screes which may be less easy to follow in wet weather. But there should be no problem as, assuming you can see it, basically you need to be aiming for the large rock appropriately named La Catedral. The right fork there takes you to the Mirador del Llano de Ucanca on TF-21, the left fork returns to where you started. The first part of the climb back up is well-trodden, and on an obvious ridge there’s a spur which gives the best view of the plain below (and you’ll be in all the photographs taken from the coach parties above). The last section up to the viewing platform places you in front of a full audience, the problem of actually finding a path, and avoiding any embarrassing slips…

The best map I’ve found for exploring the Caldera is the IGN Map and Guide to the Teide National Park, published by the Spanish Ministerio de Fomento (ISBN 8-423434-180254) available online from Stanfords (they also have shops in London and Bristol).

Montaña de Arenas Negras: A good introduction to the rim of the Caldera with a total ascent of around 300m in around 9km. The trail (as Sendero 4, “Las Siete Cañadas”) starts near the El Portillo Visitor Centre on TF-21. There’s a large Park notice board marking the start of the walk which follows the wide track for around 500m before forking to the left and becoming Sendero 2. After some time you’ll come across warnings about bees! Hives are brought up here during the flowering season. It’s rather worrying to be warned about the local bees if you are used to well-behaved English bees. According to the Park map (see note below) the trail skirts gently around Montaña El Cerrillar, giving views over the north coast clouds. Sendero 2 is well signed up to the highest point on the walk, but the path is never difficult to follow. There are some wonderful visual surprises after the high point (around 2300m)… Then Sendero 2 signs kick-in again after the exhilarating slide down the picon screes of Montaña de las Arenas Negras, meeting up with the painfully obvious Sendero 4 and the stroll back up to the car park.

(The Austrian ‘Kompass’ map and the Walk Tenerife guide both list El Cerrillar as Montaña de las Arenas Negras. The Park guide seems more sensible, labelling only the steep black picon hill as Montaña de Las Arenas Negras.)

Guajara: The highest point (2718m) on the Caldera rim, and with over 700m of ascent in 10km, a bit of a challenge for me. The trail starts at the far end of the Visitor Centre car park over the road from the Mirador de la Ruleta, striking off into lava scrub, but soon joining the obvious Sendero 4, (“Las Siete Cañadas”) near Las Piedras Amarillas. It skirts around overhangs and cliffs, flattening out, eventually forking off as Sendero 5 (the “Degollada de Guajara”) at the customary Park notice board, which rates the trail as difficult. It’s a slog all the way up from here, made more trying by the thin air. The pass (“Degollada") is about a third of the way up Guajara from the valley plain, affording dizzy views to the coast over 2370m below – and there’s another 340m up to the summit…

The trail is not too hard nor too difficult to follow from here, and on a clear day, the summit gives amazing views of Teide and the full sweep of the Caldera walls. The rubble/ruins up here are what’s left of an observatory built in 1856, replaced by the Izana observatory in the distance to the north. Now you are presented with two options for the return. The easy recommended version is backtracking down the way you came up. The more difficult - which carries warnings about danger, “everything you do not want in a descent”, and “nur für Geübte” (“only for the experienced”) – goes straight down the face of Guajara! It was a real hoot. The top third is one exhilarating scramble through boulders and under an enormous overhang, never more than a couple of steps away from a very steep fall. There was not a cloud in the sky when I took this route, but it would be tragically easy to lose one’s way or footing in low cloud or wet weather, and a definite "no no" in snow and ice. But the sting in the tail for me came on the lower half of the route which is hideously uncomfortable, eventually joining up with Sendero 4 under Las Piedras Amarillas, and an easy stroll back.

The view of El Teide from the summit of Guajara (2718m) at 13.30 on 3rd September 2008. Teide is another 1000m higher, the highest point in Spain, and the third highest island volcano on the planet (the others are in Hawaii). It was well worth the slog up Guajara just for the views, better still, at this point in time I had no idea how much fun the way down was going to be. And the silence - in the six hours I spent on the mountain, I only saw 4 other people – two Germans who met me on the summit, and two Spanish who were about an hour behind me on the way up. On the Los Roques trail, once past the half-hearted, I only saw 4 people. And on the Arenas Negras route, I saw nobody until I met up with guided group of around 15 puffing, mixed and ill-dressed folk at the base of the picon scree. I toyed with the idea of seeing whether they’d make it up the hill, but my interest in belated lunch was greater...

terra inconcessa

Some summers ago, when I could still cast my shadow on the young trees in my garden, I was woken from dozing by a small insect buzzing around my face. I swatted it away, opened my eyes, and literally in that twinkling, saw a same-size conjunction of the insect, a passing gull, and a 747 heading out into the Atlantic; before all three separated on their separate lives.

This memory came to light on finishing reading W G Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn" again. I'd turned to Sebald's humbling yet voluptuous melancholy as a antidote to the vain and specious prolixity of Clive James' "Cultural Amnesia," a book which had really wound me up with its auteur centricity. I needed something positive to think about...

I think that "The Rings of Saturn" is best read in one sitting if you can, punctuated by nothing other than tea and calls of nature. The dense-pack text complemented by some quite remarkable ephemeral images tells around Sebald's walk through an empty Suffolk in late August 1992, and its historical, personal and meditative fallout that ranges from silk-worms to the Cold War.

As the family home of a former girlfriend, with whom I had successive operatic relationships from Cannes to Buenos Aires, Suffolk is terra inconcessa for me. Thus Sebald offers me appropriate covert ingress into its coastal landscapes and its loss.

Sebald died in a car crash in 2001.

[image of The English Channel, looking out from Kent towards the wrecking Goodwin Sands]

Baldanders

I got an uncomfortable feeling of slipperiness about Clive James in his book, Cultural Amnesia. I recalled, aptly, a passage in Borges' A book of Imaginary Beings about the creature, Baldanders (left).

Baldanders first comes to light in C16th Nuremburg. A self-descriptive German play on words ('bald' = soon, 'anders' = another), the creature is a rapid shape-shifter, a constant changeling. In 1668, in Grimelshausen's book Simplicius Simplissimus, Baldanders first appears in a forest as a stone carving of a idol, but then changes into an oak, a sow, a sausage, a meadow covered with clover, a flower; before returning to stone.

There is something similarly shifty in Cultural Amnesia - hindsight. As Borges says, "Baldanders is a successive monster, a monster in time."

the sultan of snide

On March 17th 1662, two elderly women were hanged in Bury St Edmunds, England. Rose Cullender and Amy Deny had been found guilty of malevolent witchcraft. The prosecution case relied heavily on the 'evidence' based on the alleged victim's recall of their dreams.

On 7th October 1939, Vivian James was born in Kogarah, Australia. Due to vanity and/or machismo, he would later change his name because of a Hollywood movie.

On 3rd February 1975, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges wrote in the Afterword to his “A Book of Sand” ("El Libro de Arena"),

"In spite of John Felton, Charlotte Corday, and the well-known words of Rivera Indarte ('It is a holy deed to kill Rosas') and the Uruguayan national anthem ('For tyrants, Brutus’ blade'), I do not approve of political assassination."

On 24th March 1976, a military junta under General Jorge Videla overthrew the Perón government in Argentina. On 19th May, Borges, Ernesto Sabato and other writers met with Videla, expressing their support for the overthrowing of the Perónista terrors, and for Videla's stating that "the development of culture is essential for the development of a Nation."

Between 1976 and 1983 an estimated 30,000 people were 'disappeared' by the Argentinian Dictatorship.

On 15th December 1983, writer Sabato became president of the newly-formed National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, the government-established commission empowered to investigate the 'disappearance' of persons in Argentina over the previous 20 years.

In 2007, in his book “Cultural Amnesia”, (the now) Clive James published a personal diatribe against Borges, confiscating his years of creative work and judging him posthumously guilty of silence during the Dirty War of the Argentinian Dictatorship (1976-1983). A few pages back James was eulogising about Sir Thomas Browne’s “infallible sense of cadence that could operate through a whole sentence, making it a long poetic line.” So what?

Well quite a lot of ‘what’ if you bother to look…

Browne, like Borges, has enjoyed a string of admirers, particularly for his 1658 work, ”Urn Burial”. Yet Browne is not known for noisily expressing his views on the genocidal activities of the regicidal dictator and Browne contemporary, Oliver Cromwell. Browne had identified himself with the Royalists during the Civil War, and had been subsequently knighted by Charles II, so it is unlikely that he was unequivocal about Cromwell. James may be forgiven for overlooking this silence, but he cannot be forgiven for deliberately ignoring Browne’s documented unsilent role in the Bury St Edmunds Witch Trials which materially led to the deaths of Rose Cullender and Amy Deny. Then James seems to have little interest in the lives of women, of the 890 pages of Cultural Amnesia, just 37 feature women. Adding insult to death, some pages further on in his book, James describes Jean Cocteau's actual mingling with the Paris Propaganda Staffel as "not admirable," and excuses him on the grounds that "nobody died because of him." Still, 90,000 French Jews were killed in WW2.

James praises Sabato, "whose fantastic novels were dedicated to including all the horrors of the real world, and raising them to the status of dreams, so that they could become apprehensible to the imagination, which would otherwise edit them into something more easily overlooked." This sounds like the very stuff that sent two innocent women to the gallows in 1662.

James claims Sabato was unsilent during the Dictatorship (but no citations), then rather shoots himself in the foot with, "that a man so out of touch with the regime as Sabato should nevertheless have seen merit in the Malvinas adventure is a token of how indisputable the claim to the islands looked from the Argentinian side." James fails to mention the 907 people pointlessly killed in the conflict.

It may also be true that James ignored Borges’ stated position on political assassination, or he may have ruled this out of bounds of the 1976 coup - by all of 13 months. Which leads one to ask for motive behind the diatribe, pitching himself alongside Browne and Sabato at the expense of Borges. Iconoclasm for self-aggrandisement?

The hindsight bias of Cultural Amnesia is peppered with snide comments, evincing a failed suppression of the would-be comic within. He ridicules the clinically-blind Borges' lack of awareness of the terror with, "a cocked ear would have heard the screams (of those being tortured)". And though critical of Borges meeting with the Generals (left: Sabato, Borges and Videla), he's more than happy to brag about his meeting with Thatcher; and commenting that, "the opinions of intellectuals may be an adjunct to sound government but are no substitute for it." James comes over as the Jeremy Clarkson of criticism - a kicking pantomime horse desperately seeking attention. The attack on Borges is a most complete example of snide as whingeing vanity.

"Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time." Thomas Carlyle, c 1881

Notes on the cast:

Rose Cullender (-1662) and Amy Deny (-1662) The so-called witches' trial was documented in a 1682 pamphlet, "A Tryal of Witches"
Vivian James changed his name to Clive as he felt that after Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind" (1939), his given name became irrevocably a girl's name no matter how it was spelled. One wonders how he came to choose Clive - Rhett would surely have been the obvious Hollywood antidote to Vivian. C S Lewis abandoned 'Clive' in favour of Jacksie, but this was on account of a road traffic accident...
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentinian writer of short stories, essays, poetry, literary criticism, and translations. Borges has influenced the writing of Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, William Gibson, Gabriel García Márquez, and W G Sebald.
John Felton (1595-1628) assassin of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham in 1628, featured in Dumas' "The Three Musketeers." He was set up by "Milady." The real-life assassination of the corrupt and incompetent Buckingham turned Felton into a minor hero but did not save him from the hangman.
Charlotte Corday (1768-1793) famously assassinated Jean-Paul Marat in his bath-tub with a kitchen knife. Marat was the figurehead of the movement that would become the Reign of Terror. At her trial she said, "I killed one man to save 100,000." As if to prove this point, she went to the guillotine, after which a postmortem was carried out to determine whether she had any accomplices - by physically assessing her virginity. Neatly completing the circle with Sir Thomas Browne, Marat's heart was interred separately - in an urn...
Jose Rivera Indarte (1810-1845) was an Argentinian writer and journalist bitterly critical of Rosas' methods. His "Rosas y sus opositores" listed Rosas' alleged victims.
Uruguay's national anthem actually now has the more sanitised 'shake/tremble", "Tiranos, temblad!"
Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877) was an Argentinian General infamous for killing his opponents, or even those whose did not support him. Rosas was eventually defeated and fled to England. Borges openly hated both Rosas and Perón. Along with issuing pardons to military officers for their actions during the Dictatorship, President Carlos Menem had the remains of Rosas returned from England and interred in La Recoleta, as an example of the "futility of continuing to nurture old hostilities." Such is the ocean of cultural difference that lies between us.
Ernesto Sabato (1911-) Argentinian scientist and writer, became president of the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP) established by President Raúl Alfonsín on 15th December 1983. The commission's final report, Nunca Mas (Never Again) was delivered to Alfonsín in September 1984. The commission reported on about 9000 individual cases of disappearance out of the estimated 30,000 - fear of reprisal still reigns...
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) English writer on medicine, science and religion. Author of Urn Burial (1658) - "Hydriotaphia, Urne Buriall, or a Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk."
Browne also wrote, "Religio Medici," containing the passage, "It is a riddle to me, how this story of Oracles hath not worm’d out of the world that doubtful conceit of Spirits & witches; how so many learned heads should so farre forget their Metaphysicks, and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures, as to question the existence of Spirits: for my part, I have ever beleeved, and doe now know, that there are Witches; they that doubt of these, doe not onely deny them, but spirits; and are obliquely and upon consequence a sort not of Infidels, but Atheists." Religio Medici was firmly on the Papal Index, and these pronouncements from an expert witness rendered the prosecution's spectral (dreams) evidence admissible in the 1662 trials and the deaths of Rose Cullender and Amy Deny.
Browne's Urn Burial has influenced the writing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Herman Melville, Thomas De Quincey, W G Sebald, Virginia Woolf, and Borges himself.
Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) in brief - after succeeding the English Civil Wars I and II, as Lord Protector he had Charles I executed in 1649; then after Civil War III, he set about the genocide of Irish Catholics.
Guerra de las Malvinas (1982) - The Falklands War. The futile bloody war which hastened the end of the Argentinian Dictatorship, the rebirth of Margaret Thatcher, and 907 deaths.

such is the man’s persona*

While browsing in a well-stocked Delhi bookshop for some local reads, I was persuaded to buy Shashi Tharoor’s “The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone” as it would give a foreigner an insight into the India of today. So the shop owner said. As did the blurb.

I went along with the advice, happy to have found some answers. Sadly, with few exceptions, the articles in Tharoor’s well-hyped da capo collection of OpEds and essays gave me little insight into the realities of the contemporary India that would hit me in the face as I walked out of the world of the shop. Though it did generate a worrying glimpse into the mind of one who, but for the grace of god and the Security Council, nearly assumed a global mantle.

Tharoor (see his eponymous website) has had an inexorable rise to stardom since graduating from exclusive St Stephen’s, Bombay, learning how to write con tedio, and leaving India; achieving the lofty height of India’s friendly-fire candidate for Secretary General of the United Nations. If you are interested to know how impossible an aspiration that was, you only have to read his essay on the sari and its sad follow-up. Then maybe not. The UN managed to ignore the 4th Secretary General's background. Stalking saris pales into nothing in comparison...

Like many ex-pats – sorry, NRIs – Tharoor often falls into harking back. Usually critically of British occupation, partition, cold-war politics, or corruption; only occasionally to distant Golden Ages or Globalisation. But also harking forward to when (his) India becomes a tiger in the global jungle. Most irritating from a foreigner’s perspective is his incessant ingratiating posture to (his) India of today. Papering over gargantuan issues from destitution to infrastructure. Maybe I’m wrong. I only spend 4 or 5 weeks a year in India and only read all the English language Indian newspapers I can lay my hands on while there. But I am aware that my views are tempered by my cultural background.

Tharoor shares many qualities with another famous ex-pat, Australia’s former Minister for the Yarts, now Cultural Attaché, Sir Les Patterson – oozing excessive bigotry, sexism, and xenophobia. However, one doesn’t get the feeling that Tharoor has humorous intentions. Rather, he turns inside out Barry Humphries' maxim, “there is no more terrible fate for a comedian than to be taken seriously.” Such is Tharoor’s seeming ability to miss the point entirely, to ignore late C20th inclusivities, to manipulate language as if it was something semi-solid he’d found in his nose, and to play the archetypical ex-pat who’s gone left-field, that he would have had to have been invented by a Barry Humphries had he not done it himself first!

So yes, read “The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone” as you would read John o’Farrell’s contemporary “An Utterly Impartial History of Britain.” You will discover that the latter is a funny and accurate historical critique of Britain today, while the former - well we've been there already...

*the last words in a recent unctuous screed on Tharoor.

quit before the bandh strikes out

Kolkata, Wednesday 4th June: Thank goodness for good old British small talk. During pre-meeting nattering this afternoon in Kolkata, we learned that news of impending bandhs had just broken. Bandhs, we discovered are all-out strikes. And thank goodness for cellphones as I was on to my travel agent to rearrange our itinerary and got the last two seats on the last flight to New Delhi before two days of dawn to dusk bandhs ground Kolkata to a complete standstill. We managed to complete all our meetings without undue haste, (sadly) checked out of our rather wonderful hotel (The Sonar), but managed a quick drink before the dry flight across the full width of India.

Next day we read about torrential rains flooding in Kolkata’s domestic terminal – made all the more piquant by overflowing toilets. Incredible India, as they like to say!

(image from Times of India, Friday 6th June, shows eerily deserted streets, and that heavy rain - if you've ever been to Cal, you'll be amazed at the absence of vehicles and people...)