A review of the recent film “In The Land Of Saints And Sinners”
April 30th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
The ‘land’ in question is the “forgotten county” of Donegal in the Republic of Ireland and the cinematography is so gorgeous that at times the film looks like an advertisement from the local tourist board.
Although the director is American, the scriptwriter and all of the cast and crew are Irish. Set in 1974 at the height of “the troubles” (I was working in the Northern Ireland Office at the time), it pits a team from the Provisional IRA against a local one-time assassin, so we have the juxtaposition of bloody violence in a beautiful landscape.
It works to a degree, but the main characters are somewhat unbelievable. It is hard to envisage someone played by the ever-watchable and ever-honourable Liam Neeson as an assassin for hire who’s killed so many that he can’t remember the number. And his sudden desire to give it all up and his friendship with the local Gardai are beyond credibility.
Then there’s the leader of the IRA team, a woman (played by Kerry Condon) who is so irredeemably foul-mouthed, aggressive and violent that she’d give Lady Macbeth a run for her money. But the final shoot-out is worth the wait.
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A review of “The Great Empires Of Asia” edited by Jim Masselos
April 29th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
Long before European powers encircled the globe, Asia was home to some of the greatest empires ever seen. This excellent work describes seven of those empires covering a wide range of geography and time. It does so in a concise and readable manner with each chapter having a short table of key dates and a helpful map. The book is edited – with introductory and concluding chapters – by Australian academic Jim Masselos and then each chapter is written by a different academic who is expert on that particular empire. The seven topics are:
- Central Asia: The Mongols 1206-1405 This was – and remains – the largest contiguous empire in history. By 1260, the empire stretched from the Sea of Japan in the east to the Mediterranean Sea and the Carpathian Mountains in the west and it could mobilise approximately a million men under arms. A remarkable aspect of this empire was its policy of religious toleration in an era of religious strife across much of Eurasia. The initial driving force was the man we now call Chinggis Khan, but other noted Khans were his second son Ogodei, Mongke and Hulegu.
- China: The Ming 1368-1644 As a consequence of this empire, for 276 years a population far greater than than of Europe enjoyed long periods of peace. Astonishingly, between 1405 and 1421, the emperor Yongle commissioned six major maritime expeditions under the command of Zheng Ye, reaching as far as the east coast of Africa. Yet the Ming period was one of technological stagnation and, as a result, China failed to make the transition to an industrial revolution. Instead Ming society was highly bureaucratised with an elaborate system of examinations involving an emphasis on Confucian classics.
- South-East Asia: The Khmer 802-1566 This was a long-lived empire that reached its apogee at the end of the 12th century, covering much of modern day Cambodia, north-eastern Thailand, most of the Mekong Delta area of Vietnam, and southern Laos. However, our knowledge of this empire is limited because so few written records from these times survive. What we do have is a a vast collection of temples and other edifices, most famously Angkor Wat which is the world’s largest religious monument. A key feature of this empire was the Khmer mastery of water resources with an elaborate system of canals.
- Asia Minor and Beyond: The Ottomans 1281-1922 Lasting over six centuries, this multi-ethnic and multi-religious polity was among the militarily most formidable, bureaucratically best-administered and culturally most splendid empires in world history. At its most expansive, it covered modern day Turkey plus much of the Middle East, the southern rim of the Mediterranean, all the Balkans, and even Hungary. Indeed, in 1529 and again in 1683, the Ottoman armies marched on the gates of Vienna (but both times were defeated). It’s capital – Constantinople, later Istanbul – straddled Europe and Asia.
- Persia: The Safavids 1501-1722 This empire reached its greatest geographical extent during the reign of Shah Abbas I ‘The Great’ in the early 17th century. It was shaped – as is modern day Iran – by a particular form of Shia Islam which revers the twelfth imam, a direct descent of the Prophet who disappeared in 873 and is expected to return at ‘the end of days’. The capital shifted from Tabriz to Qazvin to Isfahan, the last being the site for stupendous architecture which survives in the Image of the World Square.
- India: The Mughals 1526-1858 The Mughals – a corruption of the dynastic name Mongol – were a Sunni Muslim dynasty who ruled over a predominantly Hindu South Asia covering all but the most southern tip of the Indian sub-continent. The empire was founded by Babur who was succeeded by Akbar (who was the greatest of the Mughals), Jahangir (who took a Persian wife), Shah Jahan (who built the Taj Mahal) and Aurangzeb (who was the most conservative ruler). The end of the Mughal empire saw its acquisition by the British empire.
- Japan: The Meiji Restoration 1868-1945 It lasted only 50 years, but it was the only non-Western empire of modern times. Following a rapid modernisation of it military forces (with Western help), Japan defeated China and then Russia, later took over Taiwan and Korea as well as Manchuria, before allying itself with Germany and Italy in the Second World War and rapidly occupying most of south-east Asia. The defeat of the empire was sudden and total with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its occupation by the USA.
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Is there anyone out there? How would we know?
April 28th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
If there is an alien civilisation, it is probably on a planet circling a star, right? There are an estimated 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. A lot, right? So how come we have found no evidence for any other intelligent life?
I’d always assumed that evidence could come from the use of the electromagnetic spectrum for purposes such radio and television broadcasts and mobile communications. These signals would propagate through space for ever and we ought to be be able to detect them.
But, in an interesting article, Robin McKee, of the “Guardian” newspaper, quotes Chris Lintott, of Oxford University, as follows:
“We have relied in the past almost exclusively on radio telescopes to detect broadcasts from alien civilisations just as our radio and TV transmissions could reveal our presence to them. However, to date, we have heard absolutely nothing.”
Nor should we be surprised, Lintott argues. “Humanity has already passed its peak radio wave output because we are increasingly using narrow beam communications and fibre-optic cables, rather than beaming out TV and radio signals into the general environment.”
Humanity could become radio-quiet in about 50 years as a result – and that will probably be true for civilisations on other worlds, he added. “They will have gone radio silent after a while, like us. So Seti radio telescopes will need to be augmented with other ways of seeking aliens. We are going to have to be more creative about what we’re searching for in the data and find unusual things that reveal they are the handiwork of aliens.”
It could well be that we’ll never know if there is other life in the universe.
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Have there been lost civilisations? How would we know?
April 28th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
In this fascinating article, the wonderfully-named Flint Dibble – an esteemed archaeologist – effectively rebuts the arguments of Graham Hancock. He writes:
“It’s the quantity of actual archaeology, an enormous body of positive evidence, that proves the negative. There is no lost civilisation from the Ice Age that was global and used advanced technology to build monuments or grow crops. A civilisation that Hancock has stated was “as advanced as our civilisation was, say in the late 18th or early 19th century”.
He claims archaeologists haven’t adequately explored the Sahara, the Amazon, or underwater to disprove the existence of this civilisation. However, in each of these areas archaeologists have surveyed or excavated hundreds of thousands of sites. And the tens of thousands of Ice Age sites found show hunter-gatherer people resiliently thriving in difficult conditions.”
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A review of the stunning new film “Civil War”
April 27th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
Written and directed by the British Alex Garland, this action-thriller was not what I was expecting.
Sure, it’s a war movie – very much an anti-war movie – but there is no explanation for the war and the apparent cause (a secessionist alliance between the states of California and Texas) makes no sense, while there are no battle sequences, only a series of taunt and ultimately bloody encounters.
It is a road movie in that four characters seek to traverse a war-torn America, travelling from New York to Washington DC, but the travellers are not soldiers but reporters and the purpose of their immensely risky enterprise (an interview with the President) seems ridiculously impossible and even meaningless.
This sense of the absurd grows in strength as the film develops so that, by the end, I saw the narrative as a kind of parody with elements of both “Apocalypse Now” and “Dr Strangelove”. War makes no sense and reporting on it objectively is impossible. In the end, looking for the great shot or the snappy quote, makes the reporters complicit in the madness of it all.
So this is a genre-confusing work but it is brilliantly executed – always captivating, often very tense and scary, and visually arresting (a scene with a forest on fire is almost dreamlike).
Garland has written that his movie is intended to be “an attack on political polarisation” which makes it frighteningly contemporary. Perhaps nowhere is this sense of polarisation captured better than in a chilling scene where one of the reporters, in pleading for his life, asserts that he is an American, only to be answered by the gun-wielding solder: “What sort of American?”
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A review of the 1942 classic movie “The Magnificent Ambersons”
April 23rd, 2024 by Roger Darlington
When Orson Welles signed a two-picture deal with RKO Pictures in 1940, the result was the acclaimed masterpiece “Citizen Kane” followed by the butchered masterpiece “The Magnificent Ambersons”. Again Welles wrote, produced and directed, but this time he did not star – in fact, it was the only film that he ever directed in which he did not act – although he was the narrator.
The film is an adaptation of the 1918 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington and narrates the decline of a family and a lifestyle at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, as epitomised by the replacement of the horse-drawn carriage by the automobile. It is a film about decline and nostalgia for the past and it is full of the virtuoso camerawork which made Kane so famous, such as a long, moving shot in a ballroom sequence.
As originally crafted by Welles, the film ran for 148 minutes. By the time it was released, it was only 88 minutes – as well as savage cutting which makes the storyline somewhat disjointed and sometimes hard to follow, the whole tone of the movie was changed by the studio to make the ending more up-beat. All this was done while Welles was down in Brazil and without any consultation with him. The director later opined that the studio had destroyed his work and, in doing so, had destroyed him.
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Holiday in Pakistan (12): conclusion
April 21st, 2024 by Roger Darlington
The conclusion of my holiday in Pakistan was almost as disruptive as the beginning, with a threatened flight change. At Islamabad airport, I was not given a boarding pass for the onward journey from Doha. Then, at Doha airport, I had to visit three desks of Qatar Airways, be told that my intended flight was fully booked, and have a suggestion that I fly home via Athens, before I eventually secured a seat on the same flight as the other group members.
The problem was unusually heavy rain in the Guif region which had substantially dislocated flight schedules. Climate changed is seriously impacting global travel now.
So, how to assess this holiday?
There are so few foreign tourists in Pakistan that all the hotels, restaurants, shops and tourist sites made us incredibly welcome. Everywhere ordinary people wanted to speak to us and be photographed with us. “How are you?” “Where you from?” “Thank you come to Pakistan” were said over and over.
Internationally, many view Pakistan as an unsafe destination. Certainly we experienced lots of road checkpoints and security at hotels and we saw armed guards, police and soldiers everywhere, but we never ever felt threatened. The danger is not to tourists: the day before our departure, two suicide bombers on motorbikes attacked a Japanese delegation in Karachi.
This was a wonderful trip in so many respects: the vibrancy of Lahore, the modernity of Islamabad, the historic sites, the mosques and markets, and above all the absolutely stunning mountain scenery of the Hunza Valley. We had some delightful accommodation and delicious food.
However, overall it proved to be the most challenging holiday of my life. I always expect some things to go wrong on long-haul ventures, but the scale and frequency of the set-backs this time were unprecedented.
Really, Pakistan – as I found in Ethiopia – is not yet ready for tourism and we paid the price for being pioneers. The country does not yet have the transport infrastructure, in terms of good roads and reliable flights, for large-scale tourism. We met so few foreign tourists outside a few from Thailand and Taiwan.
As far as the Jules Verne group was concerned, the biggest challenges were at the beginning and the end: a delay of over 40 hours at Heathrow airport, so that we lost two days of the programme, and that 18-hour road journey from Gilgit to Islamabad, when we lost a third day of the itinerary.
However, I am still pleased that I made the trip. It was a real adventure in a very different country. Geographically, the highlight was the glory of the mountainous Hunza Valley. Emotionally, the biggest buzz came from my mountain climb at Shigar Peak, the toughest climb of my life.
To summarise: Pakistan is a fabulous tourist destination but it is not for the faint-hearted or infirm tourist.
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Holiday in Pakistan (11): Islamabad and Taxila
April 20th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
We finished our holiday in good spirits since we had the best hotel of the trip (the Serena), the weather was excellent, and we had some interesting visits. We drove along the wide Constitution Avenue in Islamabad, on which many government buildings are located, and then north-west to the ancient city of Texila which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, the third of our trip.
Old Taxila was founded around 1000 BCE and, for a time, it was c the capital city of ancient Gandhara, situated on the eastern shore of the Indus River. In 326 BCE, the city was conquered by Alexander the Great who gained control without a battle.
At Taxila, we visited the museum with its impressive collection of artefacts from different empires, the railway station built in 1881, one of the 30 local archaeological sites (Mohra Moradu), the Gandhara Resource Centre, and a yard carrying out the Pakistani cultural phenomenon of ‘truck art’.
Back in Islamabad in mid afternoon, some of the group rested, some went to a market, and I visited a special mosque. The modern Faisal Mosque was a gift from Saudi Arabia and it is a huge structure with four minarets visible from much of the city. I was surprised at the relaxed family atmosphere in the surroundings as the mosque’s location doubles up as a kind of picnic park.
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Holiday in Pakistan (10): the worst journey of my life
April 19th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
The antepenultimate day of our holiday (Friday) should have been nothing special. The plan was to take a one hour flight from Gilgit back to Islamabad and visit some tourist sights in the Pakistani capital. What could possibly go wrong? In short: everything.
The morning flight from Gilgit was cancelled for some reason that was never revealed. So we had to return to Islamabad by road. The summer road was not available because there was still snow in parts. The road we took would always have been challenging, but it was more problematic because of the exceptionally heavy rain that has hit Pakistan this April.
So most of the journey was on a constantly winding road hugging the mountain side with high rock mountains on one side and precipitous rock falls down to the Indus River on the other side. The road was basically single lane so that, whenever we overtook a vehicle or an oncoming vehicle passed us, one vehicle had to move against the mountain or the edge. At regular intervals, there would be the usual potholes and then, because of the recent rain, rocks would have fallen on the road or streams would wash over the road.
I lost count of the number of police checkpoints. On two occasions during the hours of darkness, they insisted on providing us with an armed escort for a section of the road.
The opportunity for toilet stops were rare and the toilet facilities were miserable: no opportunity to sit, no toilet paper, no water to wash. The last toilet stop was about three hours before we finally reached our hotel. Lunch was from a box packed by the hotel – it left a lot to be desired – in a remote village called Sunbar Nala situated by a roaring river. Dinner was the usual meat, rice and dal during a quick stop in a town called Besham.
Even when we reached the vicinity of our hotel, our troubles were not quite over. All the usual access roads were blocked for security reasons because the hotel was hosting the New Zealand cricket team, so we had to go round and round to find an access point.
We left our hotel in Gilgit at 7.20 am and finally arrived at our hotel in Islamabad at 1.05 am next morning after an exhausting and bottom-numbing journey of almost 18 hours. The last third of the journey was in darkness and cold because we had dressed lightly, expecting to be in warm Islamabad. We only changed driver after about 12 hours.
Could any journey be worse? Well, yes.
The night before, I was struck down with a severe case of diarrhoea during which I almost passed out. In the morning, as well as diarrhoea, I had vomiting. I was so weak that, for the first third of the journey, I lay on fold-out sears arranged by helpful members of the group and just slept and slept. During the whole day, I took every opportunity to relieve myself and took one Imodium tablet after another. I ate absolutely nothing all day and drank only one cup of green tea.
It was the worst journey of my life.
And it means that, having lost two days of our holiday because of the 40-hour delay in the outward flight, we have now lost a third day.
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Holiday in Pakistan (9): more of the Hunza Valley
April 18th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
Our last day (Wednesday) in the Hunza Valley was a very long one. We left the hotel at 8.45 am and I was finally back in my room at 10.30 pm after almost 14 hours.
The mountain-side road went through five tunnels – one very long indeed – built by the Chinese before we reached our first destinations: a view of the Passu Cones (a collection of high snow-capped peaks), a view of the Passu Glacier (receding fast as a result of global warming), and the Rainbow suspension bridge. I had fun crossing the bridge and back, carefully stepping across the gaps of about a foot and a half.
Next stop was another suspension bridge, the Hosseini Bridge. This is at least twice as long as the Rainbow Bridge, but again I walked the full length and back. Alongside the bridge are zip wires and our guides and a few of the group returned across the river by one of these wires. I didn’t bother because it was such a simple zip wire experience compared to the one I had in Costa Rica with 11 lengths.
Lunch was at a bed & breakfast place called “Mokhsha” in a village called Gulmit. The local community has built a stone pathway of some 1600 steps from the village to the ruins of the Ondra Fort. We were driven to a point where it was about 600 steps to the top which is 2,770 metres (about 9,100 feet) high. It was a very tough climb, but we did it and the views were breathtaking.
It was a short drive to our next experience. In January 2010, a landslide blocked the Hunza River and created Attabad Lake (also called Shishket Lake), resulting in 20 deaths and 8 injuries and effectively blocking about 16 miles (26 kms) of the Karakoram Highway. The new lake extends 19 miles (30 kms) and rose to a depth of 400 feet (120 metres) when it was formed as the Hunza River backed up. We had a short ride on the lake.
The final tourist stop of the day is called the Eagle’s Nest Viewpoint. There are no eagles, but there is a 360 degree view of high peaks in all directions, including six peaks over 7,000 metres (23,000 feet). And there was coffee at the “Hard Rock Hunza”.
We did not return to our hotel but proceeded straight to dinner at a restaurant called “Odyssey” in a village called Dorkan. Pakistan is a ‘dry’ country, so we had drunk no alcohol for two weeks, but somehow at this restaurant we were offered “Hunza water” which is a light red wine.
After a good meal, we went out to the hotel’s garden for an informal cultural show. We were entertained by music, singing and dancing, all in the old Hunza traditions. Our guides urged us to take part in the final dance, but the British are a reserved people and only two of us did so. I represented my country with moves observed earlier and replicated to the best of my aged ability.
On Thursday, we left the Hunza Valley and, for about two hours, drove west and lower in altitude to the town of Gilgit. The only sight of the journey was the Kargah Buddha which is an archaeological location located about 6 miles outside of Gilgit. It is a carved image of a large standing Buddha some 50 feet (15 metres) high, in the cliff-face in Kargah Nala. The carving, which is in a style also found in Balistan, is estimated to date back to the 7th century.
After a quick lunch at our new hotel (the Gilgit Serena), we drove the short distance to the military grounds of the GB Rangers (this GB stands for Gilgit-Balistan) to view a polo match. We didn’t have a clue what going on, but we met a retired local hero of the game called Bulbul Jan and we were feted – food, drinks, caps, and endless photographs and filming by local media. I was invited to throw the first ball of the match and one member of the group, Lisa Rowe, gave a television interview.
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