In 1773 a young Polynesian man called Omai was taken by Captain Cook back to London where he was introduced into high society. An instant hit he was invited to society functions, painted by many of the great painters of the time and even had a play written about him. He affected the mannerisms of a Tahitian prince and was even introduced to the British King George III.

By 1777 British high society had lost interest in Omai and Cook decided to take him back to Tahiti. Although Cook set him up on his home island with a house, gifts and even a horse and a suit of armour, Omai never settled back into island life. He considered himself better than his peers and was rejected by them. He died a few years after being returned to the island.

Why do I mention this? Well I have just watched the first episode of Meet the Natives, on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, where five tribesmen from Yakel village on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, are flown to the UK to see how they fit in.

The hook for the series is that many people on Tanna believe that the bigotted old curmudgeon and useless husband of the Queen of England, Prince Phillip is a descendent of the god of their island and they are hoping to meet him and ask him when he will return to Tanna. Undoubtedly they will be disappointed. Though if they met the gaffe-prone idiot who famously told English students in China that they would end up with slitty eyes if they stayed in the country for long and asked Aborigines in Australia if they still threw spears at each other, they would probably be even more disappointed!

Now I visited the village of Yakel a couple of years ago and was struck by the way that although the people were aware of the outside world they had chosen to live a kastem life and preserve their own traditions. The village was a balanced and happy place, and the chief had made the decision to keep their children from school and not allow missionaries in order that they preserve their own traditions and are not swayed by the lure of the West.

The Chief is one of the people taking part in the programme. They have already stayed with a middle class pig farmer whose wife asked them if they eat their pets. Next week they stay with a family who live on a Manchester council estate and are shown smoking cigarettes.

The actual programme was quite entertaining and the tribesmen came over as articulate and humourous, but my worry is what will happen to them when it is time to go home? Will they be able to fit back into their village life or will it change them and their cultures for ever, and just for our entertainment?

This program is just one more example of TV production’s large budgets and small conscience combing the world like Romans looking for oddities to chuck in the Arena for our entertainment. Programmes like Meet the Natives and Return of the Tribe which it blatently copies, claim to respect fragile tribes and cultures, but by exposing them to the full onslaught of Western culture they are irreperably damaging them for our titillation. They claim to be anthropology, but at best they are just more exploitative reality TV. Shows like Last Man Standing don’t even claim this higher purpose, they just use a game show format to take six Western ‘athletes’ to various tribes to fight them like modern day gladiators!

A notable exception to this panoply of Roman-esque exploitation is the TV series, Tribe where Bruce Parry visits remote peoples with a small crew and lives as a member of the tribe. He eats what they do and tries do everything that they do, including hunting. Parry’s low impact approach seems to have little negative effect on the tribes he visits. He stays with them in their homes and the crew camp a little way away. The tribespeople are given a voice and their subtitled ribald comments about Parry are a highlight of the whole programme. Tribe is a celebration of tribes around the world and does not seek to turn them into a freakshow, or expose them to influences that will irrevocably change their traditionsa and way of life.

It is shame that some of the other programmes can’t say the same!

Words & pictures © Steve Davey 2007

This week in its continuing series Climate Connections (a year-long project undertaken with National Geographic), National Public Radio reported on the effects a shortened Arctic ice season is having on seasonal scientific research stations in the ever-evocative North Pole. Obviously, the news is not good, the prognosis so predictable that it hardly counts as newsworthy anymore: the ice is returning for shorter periods each year, and is consistently thinner and weaker.

News programs like Climate Connections and Marketplace’s series Frozen Assets have followed the mainstream tone of the global warming conversation by focusing on economic impacts and changing ways of traditional life from Jakarta to Juno. What occurs to me is that loss of ice — serious, massive ice that envelops the traveler like being in outer space — will wipe out landscapes that have inspired some of the most riveting travel writing in the history of the genre.

Extremes of weather have always made for excellent travel writing, whether it’s monsoons in India in the 1400s, or blizzards on Everest in the 1990s. Ice and cold, though, force a traveler to turn to a personal, inner landscape in a way that only desert life, such as that Wilfred Thesiger pursued, can compare with. Ice is not just cold, it’s pure, or at least seems so. Its nothingness invariably transforms into a land of awe-inspiring features for those with the patience to watch it. The nothingness itself can transform the inner person.

We no longer live in an age of real exploration, not of our own planet. Never again will a book such as The Worst Journey in the World, narrating Captain Scott’s last attempt to reach the South Pole, be created. Its author, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, was a budding scientist so gifted with a sense of drama and storytelling that his Bible-sized tome, meant simply as a chronicle of an expedition, is impossible to put down (it also happens to be one of my all-time favorite travel books).

Even though the age of explorers like Scott and Rasmussen is gone, we can always hope for a resurgence in the age of those who notice, and think, and go. Writers such as Gretel Ehrlich (This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, among other chilly books) view travel through a prism of cold, breathtaking beauty. Those cold places, those icy places, wrap themselves around our skin, demanding that we take notice of every speck of nature that refrigerates our eyelids and numbs our fingers.

Personally, I love ice. I love cold. Throw me somewhere hot and humid (like where I now live) and I either wilt or stalk around with a temper like a Grizzly dragged out of hibernation. Winter is when I wake up. I could spend forever tramping around a frozen Russia, never seeing its summer, and keep grinning. I daydream of landing that tremendous freelance gig of being sent to the nether parts of our world’s iciest places. Ice and cold are things I believe in, like a religion.

And I believe in the writing that comes from experiencing these places, narratives and stories and outlooks that add much-needed facets to the human experience: not only The World Journey in the World, but the clean lines of Jack London’s frigid northern tales, or the ancient, wild Sagas of Icelanders, which rival the budding fiction of Europe’s Middle Ages in their complexity.

I’m curious to see how vanishing ice and milder temperatures will transform our literary landscape. I envision something a little more humdrum, a little less independent, a little more threadbare in those insights scoured clean and pure by an Arctic wind. In the meantime, I hope to pay obeisance to the ice in person, while it’s still there.

I noticed that World Hum had some news on the first deaths to result from the current uprising in Burma/Myanmar against the authoritarian regime.

Related links: 

***   BBC World News Myanmar update on YouTube.

***   “Finding George Orwell in Burma“ book review. 

***   “Exercising possibility: a morning in Burma” by Rolf Potts on Vagablogging.  

***   Burma (Myanmar) Blog. 

***   ”The Ice Maker of Burma” by Matthew Van Saun on BootsnAll.

****    Lonely Planet’s Myanmar guide, with a discussion of the regime and travel to the region. 

Amid much hoopla and “it’s about time,” the venerable US newspaper The New York Times has stopped charging for most of its content and has opened up its online archives for anyone to peruse.

The entire NYT travel section is now your playground, including the very useful series “36 Hours“ that gets you through a varied weekend in towns and cities mostly around North America, from Boone, North Carolina to Astoria, Oregon.  Some parts of the Times have always been available at no cost, but I always seemed to run up against the “paid-only” content pretty quickly. 

No more.

Jason Kottke has an engaging post with other gems from the Times archive, including,

” - On The Table, Michael Pollan’s blog from last summer about food soon after the publication of The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

- Urban Planet, a [now-discontinued] blog about cities from Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map.

And one more: a report on the sinking of the Titanic.  A small mention of the sinking was published in the paper the previous day.”

I have been quiet for the last couple of weeks. The plan was to have a couple of weekends away, get out of London and relax. After spending so much time away last year shooting Unforgettable Islands to Escape to Before You Die (where I flew the equivalent of 7.5 times around the world) I have been taking things a lot easier this year. I guess I had forgotten just how stressful leaving home can be.

First weekend away, driving down to Bristol to see my parents. Less than 150 miles, motorways most of the way. We left on a quiet day, sailed out of London without seeing a traffic jam or a red traffic light. Things seemed to be going well until with just twenty miles to go the engine blew up. Ever seen a Formula 1 race when an engine blows? That was what it looked like. Clouds of smoke, no gear box, cruising in to the hard shoulder. Waiting with a baby at the side of the motorway for a tow truck!

Last weekend, a train down to Cornwall. Five hours passed well. It was a modern train and even had electricity points, so I could catch up with some work on my laptop. That is when little Amber Sashi wasn’t thrashing the keyboard. I knew that downloading Alpha Baby was a mistake.

St Ives in Cornwall is a beautiful Cornish town with a traditional fishing harbour, three very different beaches (including a surf beach) and a number of galleries. At the tail end of the season, the weather was good, and the summer crowds had gone. All was perfect until I got a phone call from the neighbour who was looking after my aged, arthritic, diabetic cat saying that he had disappeared. To cut a long story short he had been rescued/kidnapped by the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) with a suspected broken leg.

I say suspected as they had him for three days, didn’t bother x-raying him and would have only kept him on their kitty-death-row for a week (still with an untreated broken leg) before killing him! It says a lot that after three days at an RSPCA hospital he had to spend three days on a drip at my vets until he was well enough for a x-ray. His broken leg now pinned, he is in a confinement cage at my house, lucky to be alive. The RSPCA is of course one of those phenomenally rich organisations who encourage old grannies to leave money to them in their wills and make all those reality tv shows about how they rescue sick animals. It’s a shame that Rolf Harris wasn’t there when Simba was picked up, they might have just treated him if a tv camera was there!

After two relaxing weekends away, I now need a holiday. My fear now is that if I do have a holiday, I will need another one just to recover! Travel is stressful. If only I had read this New York Times article, before I left, I might have opted for a quiet weekend at home!

© Steve Davey 2007