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For close to 70 years, RenĂŠ Burri has been capturing the life and lives around him, one moment at a time.
by lary wallace / photographs by tanapol kaewpring
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t was a special kind of luck that put René Burri down in the dirt that day in Spain, beaten and bloodied, another victim of Francisco Franco’s counter-revolutionaries come undone. He’d been there to photograph a parade, and the parade just ran right over him. But it was a special kind of luck, because it allowed Burri to eventually encounter the man he’d been pursuing for nearly seven years. This was 1957. Burri was still in his mid-twenties, mad to meet and to photograph Pablo Picasso, an artist whose work had inspired Burri for so long and from so far away. Except that sometimes it wasn’t very far at all, geographically – even if, practically, it might as well have been entire worlds that separated the two. Like the first time he’d tried to meet Picasso, some six years earlier. He hitchhiked to Paris, and every day he’d go knock on Picasso’s door, whereupon the secretary would tell Burri he needed an appointment, and Burri would go away until next time. After about a week of this, Burri determined it was not an effective strategy. “It’s okay,” he said to himself, determined as ever. “I know what I want.” Shortly after that, he met Picasso’s art dealer, in Switzerland at a showing of Picasso’s work. Burri handed over a book of his own art – of his photographs – and asked if the dealer would pass it along to Picasso. The dealer did so. But then, Burri was told, Picasso had lost it. Back at his hotel after being trampled by Franco’s parade, Burri was packing his things for a hasty escape from
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Spain. He took some time out to clean his nose and let it dry. While sitting there, he saw a newspaper announcing Picasso’s recent and forthcoming presence at the bullfights. Burri got in his car and drove all night to Picasso’s hotel, fuelling himself with coffee. When he got there, he asked, “Where’s Picasso?” At Picasso’s room, a lady welcomed him, telling him, “Everybody is here.” And sure enough, there was Picasso, sitting on the bed and playing to a large party of revelers by mimicking the motions of a bullfighter. With Picasso’s assent, Burri got his snaps. “Thank you, Maestro,” he said, leaving. Back in his room, he slept, waking many hours later, in the evening, all of his clothes still on, Leica resting soundly on his chest. He remarked to himself upon the fantastic dream he believed he’d just had in which he met Picasso. Downstairs in the hotel, he ran into Picasso’s oldest son, Paulo, ten years older than Burri himself, who recognised Burri and said he was needed at dinner. When he arrived, it looked like The Last Supper in there. Picasso, apparently, was superstitious, and had dispatched Paulo to find a fourteenth diner. The next day, they all went to the bullfights together. nd now, on this perfect Saturday afternoon in March, Burri is able to look back over it all, wistful and proud, from the patio of his colonial suite at the Dhara Dhevi luxury resort. He’s come to Chiang Mai for a career-
Papa,” Paulo said, “I found one. It’s the photographer. ” “Sit down,” said Picasso. “Eat.
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The Rolls-Royce of cameras,” he calls his Leica. It has the old classic, boxy design, but with digital capabilities. spanning exhibition of his work, “René Burri: The Iconic Photographs,” put on by the Projecto Group. The Picasso photos will be there, along with those of Churchill and Che, Nasser and Nixon; landscapes and cityscapes; actors and authors and artists and architects; as well as obscure, ordinary folk just going about the business of living in the 20th century. Picasso may have been superstitious, but Burri is not, not particularly. He believes in luck, but he believes, most of all, that luck is something one either exploits or fails to exploit, and that the matter of whether one exploits it is determined by deliberate preparation. “Luck – you cannot wait for it,” he says. “It happens sometimes, or you say, ‘Oh, whoa, whoa,’” he adds,flailing his arms around helplessly. “You have to shoot back like a sharpshooter. But it’s also a combination of what you know, because in that moment, either you can pack in some of your thinking and feeling, or the thing is gone. And then the luck leads to nothing.” Burri was intent upon his luck leading to something, and that’s why he’s sitting out here in the sun now, about to be feted at a dinner in his honour and then, tomorrow, guided through a curated exhibit containing the photographic evidence of his remarkable knack for meeting luck halfway. He’s relaxing at the table out here on the deck, barefoot in white Capri trousers and a turquoise polo. Wrapped snugly about his throat is a scarf of gauze-like density to meet the heat, and on his head is one of his cherished
Stetson Panamas. His digital Leica M8 hangs at his neck, or, alternatively, is slung rakishly over one knee. Spontaneously during our interview, as if by long-nurtured impulse, he picks up his camera, rotates it 45 degrees, and, peering through the viewfinder, captures my portrait. ené Burri began photographing well before he acquired his first Leica. The photograph of Winston Churchill to be featured in the exhibit is the first he ever took, doing so at age 13 at his father’s insistence. “He gave me his Kodak and said, ‘This man is very important.’ So I went there [to witness Churchill’s motorcade through Zurich] and took a picture. That was ’46. I had no idea that I would ever do photography. But it was this unconscious, great stroke. I just took one picture. I got into this without any real training in photojournalism, but you learn very quickly.” He still hadn’t decided on photography as his life’s primary pursuit. “I always wanted just to do films,” he says, “but Switzerland was far away from Hollywood or even French studios. When I was 17, I was at art school, not even knowing what to do – painting and the whole thing. And they said, ‘Boy, let’s decide what you want to do.’ And so they showed us the different classes. In art school you have architecture, you have classic design. I had seen some of the French films. I wanted to express emotion, you know? But then they showed me the photo
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school, and it looked like a little film studio. I studied for four years there, doing right from the beginning some films. But I had to learn photography, you know?” After graduation, he received a fellowship to study some more at the film school. It was then that he began receiving his first professional jobs. A cinematographer from Disney came to town, contracted to do a film about Switzerland, and Burri became his assistant for a year, working on one of the first ever films to be shot in CinemaScope. He soon began doing some documentaries of his own. “I liked it,” he says. “I loved to do the filming myself. In some of these films, I almost lost my shirt. Filming was great, but it required so much energy. I realised I wanted to do the same thing in photography – to lift up and go behind something.” That’s when he bought his first Leica. In 1955, when working at a graphic-design firm, Burri stepped out to photograph Le Corbusier, on spec, at his offices in Paris. Le Corbusier, then in his twilight, had just completed the Notre Dame du Haut and had already achieved legendary status as architect and urban planner. Burri captured an array of images depicting La Corbusier still very much hard at work. Here he is directing earnest young members of his staff amidst an office full of disarrayed blueprints – rolled-up, foldedup, hanging off of desks, or simply laid out on the drafting tables where they’re being worked on. Or consulting with Dominican monks on the grounds of what was to become
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the Sainte Marie de La Tourette priory. There is even a photo of Le Corbusier’s work table, shot from above, that manages to come alive with the varied abundance of its utilitarian detail. These pictures are what got Burri in with Magnum Photos, the international agency, which he’s been affiliated with in some form or another ever since. urri first came to Thailand in 1961, and he remarks today on the incredible changes he’s seen occur, episodically, in each of his visits since. In some places, the changes are more subtle than in others. “Bangkok,” he says, “has completely changed.” Five decades ago, he travelled to the island of Koh Samui and took black-and-white photos of monks, monkeys, beaches, bulls, coconuts, cockfights, schoolchildren, and palm trees. These photos, taken together, convey something essential about life on the Thai islands. Their uncanny composition – their depth of focus and feel for symmetry – give them the quality of fine art. There is one of melon farmers toiling beneath the river’s morning mist, backgrounded by a row of palm trees and then, further still and buttressing the entire image, the terminal hills beyond. There is a colour image – relatively rare in Burri’s oeuvre – of the beach at twilight, the descending sun creating a glow in the watery grooved places of the sand, which alternate
Burri first came to Thailand in 1961, and he remarks today on the incredible changes he’s seen occur.
with the elevated rolls still darkened by impending night. Burri still remembers the first time he was told, pointedly and directly, to photograph in colour. “In 1958, I proposed a story on Argentina. They said, ‘You must bring back some colour.’ I was annoyed, because the sky was too blue, the grass was too green. But I brought [the photos] back, and from that moment on, I had a second camera.” One for colour and, always, one for black-and-white. “When the magazines started turning to colour,” he remembers, “I said to myself, ‘Well, I don’t have time to start inventing a colour style.’ But I put the colour film in and had a good run with colour photography. They’re two completely different things.” His propensity for both blackand-white and colour he describes as “almost a little schizophrenic,” but no one would ever come away from a representative René Burri show believing he preferred the latter. He’s always chafed at the idea of a fixed identity, whether imposed from without or within. “At the beginning of my career, they couldn’t nail me down. I didn’t want to have a style. Like Picasso, I had several styles. But at the end now,” he says, referring to the retrospectives he’s been doing of late, “I’m bringing things together.” e’s at work on a book now, except that unlike his other books it will be comprised largely of text. That’s only appropriate, when you consider the subject: the photo not taken. It will be about 30 of the times when he could have
taken a picture but didn’t, and why, and what it all means. It promises, if done correctly, to be absolutely fascinating. There was this one time, pretty early in his career, when he could have photographed Greta Garbo. She was right there. But it wasn’t a public function, and the idea of becoming paparazzi was always more than a little distasteful to Burri, who’d made a conscious choice not to be that way. “I couldn’t get the Leica up,” he says. “It was such a magical thing. I couldn’t even do it.” And then there were those times when he took the photo even if, perhaps, he shouldn’t have. There are many of those, but none more ill-advised than the time he followed President Nasser of Egypt and his entourage into a Hilton elevator. As the door closed, the bodyguards reached for their guns, but Burri was faster on the draw: he’d already gotten his shot before they could react. Ten storeys later, the elevator doors opened. The bodyguards stood with their guns drawn. As Burri stepped out of the elevator, Nasser slapped him approvingly on the back, as if in benediction, and all the bodyguards put their pistols away. The head bodyguard got in Burri’s face and said, “Don’t you ever do that again!” before giving Burri his own slap on the back, but not in benediction. Burri promised he wouldn’t, patting the bodyguard where his gun rested in its holster. anger was always a part of the job. There was danger involved in the single most famous, most iconic
He’s always chafed at the idea of a fixed identity, whether imposed from without or within.
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All of a sudden my driver shouted, 'Stop!' And I looked: I was standing in the middle of a minefield.
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images Burri ever took, even if he didn’t know it till after the images had been taken. These were the ones he got of Che Guevara. After the photos were safely in Burri’s camera, but before Burri was safely out of Cuba, Che had a message he wanted Burri to give to a mutual acquaintance of theirs, a fellow photographer for Magnum named Andrew St. George, who had been a member of Che’s revolution before turning disloyal. “Tell your friend Andy,” Che said, not knowing the two were barely even acquainted, “that when I see him,” and here Burri draws a finger slowly over his throat, before adding that the incident left him “shaken.” Besides Che, he’s met many men who set out to change the world on a large scale but inevitably ended up changing themselves much more, and not for the better. Muammar Gaddafi, he insists, had been “a nice chap” when he met him, “a young [military] officer who had just deposed his king.” Then he got power and he became a monster. So, later on, Burri tended to stay away from the world leaders, “the arrogant SOBs,” and he tended to stay away, too, from the wars they made. But not always. Once, while doing a story on the Palestinians, “down near the border of Israel, I’d gotten out of the car, and all of a sudden my driver shouted, ‘Stop!’ And I looked: I was standing in the middle of a minefield.” Burri very carefully walked backward in his own footsteps.
“There is a tension [war photographers] have to live with which I didn’t need,” he says. “I was interested more in what happened before or afterwards, or the tragedies around it.” Often the tragedies involved the correspondents themselves, and Burri has known several who have died, in Vietnam and elsewhere. “Today, there is such a fetishisation of violence,” Burri says. “But there is another way of showing people, and that’s what I tried to do.” omorrow will begin his 18th international exhibition in just the last ten years. There will be a lunch in his honour, where media types and other invited parties will ask Burri questions. He will reminisce about getting inside Alberto Giacometti’s studio, photographing what was sculpted there, and how. A young visual artist will volunteer as to how he never lets anyone inside his own workspace, to which Burri will reply, “Then you are a Stalinist!” He is joking, yes, but there is an edge to his humour, discernible to anyone familiar with his beliefs about political extremists, not to mention photographic access. Photographic access is what gave him his life. Sometimes he had to seize his access, but most often it was granted, albeit only after contact had been established and a relationship nurtured. Out on the patio now, he talks about all this, deliberately and often meanderingly, in a voice wheezy and wizened with age. He talks so much, in fact, that his ice-cream sundae melts in its dish,
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and when a waitress comes to take it away, Burri gently stops her, saying, “I’ll still take it. Even if it melts.” “If I hadn’t had the camera,” he says, “I probably would have gone crazy, or become a thief or something. I used it as a weapon to push away the unbearable thing of seeing the time go. What I can say is that through this, I got some pictures that tell something about people, about history, about children, about women. And when I look at it, I find now some images, all these moments, and I can recall them.” He’s already done all the work for his next show, which will be in Paris in the fall. Its theme will be “Movement,” perhaps Burri’s favourite theme of all, the one that he believes best captures the essence of what photography is about. Photography is also, ideally, about revealing something heretofore concealed. It’s about going beyond the main event, behind the scenes or way out abroad, far beyond the realm of where others have thought to look for transcendent truth. “Why did I go to Australia or Timbuktu?” he asks rhetorically. “Because I’d seen a picture or read a story about it that made me want to go. And I think that’s what [photographers can] do – maybe without knowing, inspire some people to go beyond what they probably thought they could do. So, young photographers: go and do it, look behind, put your nose in.” And this: “Come back with some pictures you are proud of.” He’s proud of the photos he himself has taken, but, that said, none of them hang in either his Switzerland
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home or his Paris office. When asked why, he seems to consider the question too silly to require any answer beyond a “Why should I?” There is in fact one photo of his that hangs on a wall at home, of Che Guevara, but that’s only “because a friend of mine made an incredible [painted] frame around it.” Maybe he doesn’t hang his works at home because it would make him feel retired, and a true photographer never retires. “A good photographer never quits,” he says. “I use the camera now like a notebook. Continuously when I travel now, I take notes…. In fifty years, we should be able to say, ‘That’s how people lived,’ and not just imagine these things.” He is not sternly disapproving of the capricious photographic habits that cellphone cameras have inspired, and indeed will prove it at tomorrow’s luncheon, when he takes a picture of the shrimp and foie gras and petit fours on his very own plate, just like all the amateurs do. “What I say to people now who have cellphones is, ‘Go and take pictures of your children, your grandmother – take some snaps, because this moment will never come back.’” And maybe that’s why he doesn’t bother to hang his own work on his walls. Maybe it’s because he understands, as he’s always understood, that this moment is the one that matters most, the one that needs to be attended to the most, because it’s the one moment that can still be captured, and will never return unless it is.
Go and take pictures of your children, your grandmother – take some snaps, because this moment will never come back.
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bespoke babies
Powered by increasingly sophisticated services, the multi-billiondollar baby business is booming in Thailand and around the world. Should we be concerned?
by nicholas grossman / illustrations by thanawat chaweekallayakul
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n February 2011, Bangkok police arrived outside an upscale suburban home to conduct a most unusual raid. The gated two-storey house hid a commercial operation staffed by 15 Vietnamese women, seven of whom were pregnant. They had been “hired” to help create unique “merchandise” worth hundreds of thousands of dollars: babies. For US $32,000, the baby broker, Baby 101, which managed the house, had promised its mostly Taiwanese customers a healthy newborn child. On its website, it advertised – in plain site for all to see – that it would take care of all the details, from conception (normally through donated eggs and sperm from the customers) through surrogacy and then delivery at a local hospital. For those unable to provide a healthy egg, Baby 101 offered an array of women who could. The most immediate reason for police intervention was that the Vietnamese women were being held against their will. Passports confiscated, they had been confined to the house and kept under constant surveillance. Baby 101 had decided to take no risks that the women would flee with their fetuses. The immediate public reaction to the Baby 101 scandal was, unsurprisingly, outrage. The house, referred to as a “baby farm” in news reports, made international news. Here was a new low, a vile combination of human trafficking, slavery, invasive procedures (that some called rape) and breeding, in the name of the most pure of products, a child. Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch commented to the news wire AFP at the time, “The mind boggles that something like this could happen.” But there was another side to the story that wasn’t so appalling. Baby 101’s customers may have been deluded by the website but they were not criminals. They were couples trying to fulfill a very human yearning: they were desperate to have a child. And these wannabe parents were also not unusual in the lengths they had resorted to, nor the money they had spent to fulfill their dream. In fact, Baby 101, while illegal in its methods, was just a perverse offshoot of a new and legal industry in human creation that has been booming for decades. In the US, at more than 400 fertility clinics, around 50,000 babies per year are being produced through around 150,000 in vitro fertilisation (IVF) procedures (the process for which the term “test-tube
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Today, fertility clinics offer an increasingly extensive buffet of options that threaten to change the face of human reproduction. babies” was coined). Since its introduction in 1978, an estimated 3 million babies worldwide have been conceived outside the womb through IVF. Science, technology, infertility and the natural wish for a child have combined to create a fascinating and complicated new marketplace in which mostly well-heeled and well-intentioned people pay money for a life – and more. Today, fertility clinics offer an increasingly extensive buffet of options that threaten to change the face of human reproduction. New technologies allow embryos to be screened for over 3,000 genetic diseases or one much more simple but important trait: gender. And the future promises increasingly sophisticated techniques and data. When DNA sequencing replaces genetic testing on chromosomes, doctors and parents will have a vast amount of information at their disposal. In some ways, this is not an entirely new situation. Sperm banks have long offered detailed dossiers on their donors. According to Debora Spar’s excellent book The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception, one bank in the US provides a 24-page résumé covering the donor’s eye and hair colour, height, weight, religion, health, education and more. When a hopeful mother buys or is given an egg, she might even meet the mother in person or know her already. Now that clinics are creating new consumer choices, where will this lead? While gender selection is already a reality, very soon parents may be able to select a much wider array of traits. What if everyone could choose their child’s eye or hair colour or gender? How might societies change? According to Spar, in China and India,
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ultrasounds, a technology first used to detect submarines in World War I, are already widely used to determine the baby’s gender in the first months after conception. Both societies favour males, so many female fetuses are aborted. Their populations are thus disproportionately male. Nightmare scenarios of science and selection gone awry have already played out, of course, in Nazi Germany. The combination of eugenics and fascism inspired, at first, a sterilisation program and then later genocide aimed at eradicating those who were deemed to be from an inferior gene pool. The disabled, Jews, mentally ill, alcoholics and homosexuals were all targeted. Newborns would be marked with a plus or minus sign determining their fate. he modern-day realities of the “baby business,” as Spar labels it, are vastly more humane. Indeed, the industry’s highly skilled medical professionals are mostly focused on inspiring life by assisting women to conceive, promoting the health of mothers and babies, and preventing disease and illness. The vast majority of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) and IVF cases have nothing to do with creating a “master child.” Instead, most couples seek ART or IVF because they are infertile, an affliction which affects between 10-15% of men and woman. Infertility commonly results from a physical defect with the women’s uterus, fallopian tubes or eggs, or from the man’s sperm. But any couple that has been trying to conceive for over a year without success is defined as technically “infertile.” Until modern science determined its causes, historically infertility was stigmatised. But nowadays, whether it is the sperm, the egg or just bad timing or bad luck, whatever is preventing the conception of a baby, couples are aware that fertility clinics can come to their rescue. Since ART combines cytology, endocrinology, surgery and many wings of medicine and science, its development contains many key moments. But arguably the most obvious and significant breakthrough occurred in 1978, with the birth of Louise Brown, the first “test tube baby” (a term now discarded for the less sensational “IVF”). Brown’s mother, a British stayat-home wife named Lesley, had a common problem. Her fallopian tubes were blocked so she was unable to reproduce. British doctors removed a healthy egg from Lesley, fertilised it with the sperm of her husband in the lab, injected Lesley with
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hormones to trick her body (and womb) into acting like it had conceived, and then implanted the resulting lab embryo into her womb. Lesley Brown was able to carry and give birth to a healthy child. As with most breakthroughs in such an intimate area of humanity, outrage and much debate – inside and outside government – ensued. But because IVF provided a solution to a heartfelt problem faced by millions, medical professionals continued to pursue IVF and most governments ultimately accepted it. To this day, in the US and Thailand it is not strictly regulated. (Germany, in contrast, treats the “baby business” with more skepticism. It has banned surrogacy outright and does not allow the donation of eggs.) There were other reasons to support the advent of IVF. If a woman turned to a surrogate mother to deliver her child, her own egg and her husband’s sperm could be used and thus the child would be genetically theirs. In addition, over time, medical advances have allowed doctors to screen the egg and resulting embryo for genetic defects. For women whose children were at a high risk of being born with Down Syndrome, cystic fibrosis or Tay Sachs disease, any embryos possessing such defects could be discarded in place of a healthy one. In addition, there was a financial incentive to support IVF. Given the product was life itself, customers would naturally pay high sums for the service. In addition, this was a novel industry in which doctors would, in one sense, be rewarded for failure. As IVF’s success rate is 30 percent, couples typically have to try multiple times to get pregnant. In 2012, according to MarketData Enterprises, the baby business, covering fertility drugs and clinics, sperm banks, egg donors and surrogacy programs, was worth $3.5 billion in the United States alone. IVF accounted for $1.88 billion of that figure. In the US, the procedure is typically $12,000. In Thailand, it is far less but still in the thousands of dollars. In Bangkok there are more than 20 clinics providing IVF. Their clients, like those at fertility clinics around the world, are mostly well-off couples unable to conceive. Due largely to the high costs of drugs and procedures, only a small percentage of infertile couples resort to IVF. But the number is growing every year and thus the “baby business” is an industry with excellent growth potential.
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octor Poonsak Waikwamdee of Bumrungrad Hospital is one of Thailand’s leading fertility specialists. One wall of his Thong Lo clinic, SMC, is covered in photographs of happy couples holding their newborns. Cards thanking Dr Poonsak for his help are scattered on tables. I first met Dr Poonsak with my wife several years ago during our own attempts to conceive. At that time my wife was in her late 30s and he said time was running out. The reproductive peak of a woman is 27 and after 35 her chances drop every year, and quite drastically after 40. Dr Poonsak screened us for any medical issues and, after finding none, suggested my wife receive hormone therapy. These drugs increase egg production. Simply put, more eggs means more chances to conceive. (The application of these drugs also explains the increased incidences of twins and triplets being pushed around sidewalks in cities around the world.) If we still did not conceive, we would graduate to the second stage, called IUI. This is basically artificial insemination enhanced by the filtering of the sperm so only the healthy ones are used. This stage would also include hormone therapy. Again, the math was quite simple – more sperm, and only healthy ones, directed at multiple eggs, equals more chances to conceive. The third, and the costliest stage, would be IVF, which has by far the highest chance of success. Dr Poonsak, who receives more than half his business from IVF customers, predicts that the current success rate of 30 percent will rise as high as 70 percent per procedure in the future. In retrospect, my wife and I were a typical modern-day infertile couple: both in our 30s, both working, both anxious that we had waited too late. After several years without success, we felt lucky there was someone like Dr Poonsak who could guide us. Couples today, Dr Poonsak told me in an interview, don’t want to or can’t waste time having an unhealthy or unsuccessful pregnancy. At his clinic, they can undergo tests and highly selective treatments that maximise their chances.
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Drugs and cutting-edge procedures have improved the reproductive chances of women in their late 30s and 40s worldwide. Whereas 20 years ago, when he started his practice – one of the first in Thailand – Dr Poonsak was focused on fixing problems such as ovarian cysts, his clinic is now focused on proactive medicine. His customers have a timeline in their heads and a schedule they want to meet, and so his practice is now about “customising to their needs.” And due to social factors, those needs are becoming much more varied and what can be “customised” much more sophisticated. According to Dr Poonsak, the future of the “baby business” will be increasingly defined by new social demands. For example, in countries where surrogacy is legal, homosexual male couples can help conceive a child that is produced from one partner’s sperm, offering a genetic connection to the child. Women who know they might wait until late in their reproductive life (say, after 40) can improve their chances of conceiving by having their eggs frozen and stored in their 20s or 30s. Even a post-menopausal woman – one who produces no eggs – can potentially conceive a child now if her uterus and body are still healthy enough to carry it. Science is not just intervening in “nature” – it is changing the very nature of reproduction. It is a situation that has alarmed many philosophers and ethicists who see a slippery slope in which market-demands and increased consumerism combine with, say, income inequality, to slowly but surely dictate future generations. Will the future “master race” be one based not on fanatical dogma but simply money? Dr Poonsak agrees there are real concerns but he seems to have faith that the medical community will continue to make health the focus of its work. For my wife and me, Dr Poonsak’s clinic did provide the solution we were looking for. After about eight visits, my wife conceived twin girls. They are eight months old now, healthy and the joy of our own lives. Who said money can’t buy love?
Even a post-menopausal woman – one who produces no eggs – can potentially conceive a child now if her uterus and body are still healthy enough.
A file picture of William Warren.
treatment in paradise Although not quite five years old, The Cabin in Chiang Mai is perhaps the most popular place in Thailand to receive treatment for addiction. by lary wallace here are many ways to treat addiction in Thailand. There are, it seems, as many ways to treat addiction as there are addictions to be treated. Perhaps the most popular place for treating addiction in Thailand is The Cabin. It sits, securely and inconspicuously, behind wooden gates off a non-descript road in Chiang Mai: an idyllic retreat forested with tropical trees and studded with handsome teakwood buildings. At lunchtime on a weekday afternoon, The Cabin’s 50 or so residents will file out of their second group session of the morning and, in the indoor-outdoor dining facility, help themselves to whatever they like from an elaborately well-appointed buffet consisting of both Thai and Western foods. They are young, most of them seeming to be in their twenties to forties. And nearly all of them, as with the counseling staff, are foreigners. Most of them appear not just healthy, but relaxed and happy. Many eat faster than others, then congregate at a swinging wooden bench just off the main deck where they can smoke butts, gossip, laugh, and generally unwind, with a view of the Ping River and the swimming pool and all the green magnificence that surrounds them. When left alone for a moment during my own lunch, a counselor sees me sitting there by myself and approaches me, introducing himself.
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are daily made to puke their guts out – along with, ideally, their addictions – after drinking a special concoction comprised of secret ingredients. Many experts are skeptical of the effectiveness of this approach, and they’re skeptical, too, of the advisability of Tham Krabok’s four week maximum stay policy, reasoning that recovery does not always respond to such stringent deadlines. But sometimes it does. Paul Garrigan, who wrote about getting sober at Tham Krabok in his memoir Dead Drunk: Saving Myself from Alcoholism in a Thai Monastery, actually identifies the temple’s absence of “a revolving-door policy” as “the thing that I liked most,” and as what contributed more than anything to his successful (to date) 204
He sits down uninvited and gently opens himself to further conversation. He’s mistaken me for a resident. And much as I might, in some ways, wish that I were, I have to tell him that I’m here under different circumstances. I’m flattered that he mistakes me for someone who can afford to reside at The Cabin – because, although many of the residents’ stays are covered by insurance, most of them are not. At US $12,000 a month, it is not cheap, but, compared to similarly sophisticated and luxurious treatment centers worldwide, it’s not expensive, either. A comparable facility in the United States will cost almost three times what The Cabin does. A typical stay is one to three months, sometimes extending all the way up to half a year, if resources and necessity both allow. And there is conscientious aftercare. Residents are evaluated not just upon intake and discharge, but also three, six, and
twelve months after leaving. There is a sober house, too, a secondary treatment facility, usefully situated square in the midst of whatever recreational temptations are offered in Chiang Mai’s premier drinking-and-dining district. It costs less than half what the primary facility costs, and is considered a crucial component of successful recovery. Even in paradise, staying clean is never easy, but outside the wooden gates, beyond the tropical trees and teakwood homes, is where the real hard time is served. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, and most of Thailand’s treatment facilities would be empty. But it’s not, and they’re not. ou can find any kind of addiction treatment you want in Thailand, as well as some that you never dared imagine existed. Most famously, you can find the so-called “Vomiting Temple,” Tham Krabok in Saraburi, where residents, as a central component of treatment,
recovery there. “At Tham Krabok,” he says, “it was made clear to me that I could only go there once. By this stage, I was fed up [with] trying to get sober, and a one-shot deal suited me perfectly. I’d already decided that if I did drink again, there would be no further attempts to stop.” He says that “On my first day at Tham Krabok, one of the monks explained the addiction philosophy of the temple. He said that I used alcohol as a tool to help me cope with life, but if I found a more effective option, I’d no longer need to get drunk all the time. It was that simple. There was no talk about alcoholism being a chronic disease of the mind, and I wasn’t expected to join a special fraternity made up of ‘recovering
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psychological basis, if they give an addict hope, and, what’s more, if they keep him in treatment. ne form of treatment about which seemingly nobody has anything negative to say is mindfulness meditation. Its results, both anecdotal and clinical, are so overwhelmingly demonstrable, and over such a long period of time. For his own part, Garrigan considers his introduction to this technique the most redeemable phase of his early, failed attempts at treatment. It first happened during a 26day retreat at Wat Rampoeng in Chiang Mai, where he was “allowed...to experience a level of mental freedom I’d never known existed. It changed my relationship to alcohol – I no longer wanted to stop just out of fear about what drinking was doing to me but because I wanted to once again alcoholics.’” enjoy the mental freedom I’d “I’m very grateful,” he adds experienced at Rampoeng temple. later, “for the help I got over I also began to use mindfulness the years [before trying Tham Krabok], but I sometimes wonder to help me deal with addiction cravings.” how much of my problem Mindfulness meditation is [getting sober] was due to the a very prominent part of the medicalisation of addiction. In order to finally break free, I had to treatment program at The Cabin. The mindfulness coach there not only give up alcohol but also is named Daniel Daly. When being an ‘alcoholic.’ This is what I’m introduced to Daly, on the the treatment at Tham Krabok second-storey porch-deck of allowed me to do.” Garrigan attributes the temple’s one of the cabins, I stare into a pair of eyes so luminescent, effectiveness to psychological of such an uncanny shade of principles that, although not white-grey touched by a bluish applicable to everyone, are glow, that I believe they must perfectly sound. And while be the tangible properties of psychology is far from the only supreme enlightenment – the component of addiction – mental made mystical, and the particularly in the cases of alcohol mystical, in turn and at last, made and heroin – even the most conservative experts believe that not physical. I want them to represent a verifiable and achievable end only is it half the ballgame; it’s the attainable by all who pursue second, most crucial half. That’s why physical treatments meditative enlightenment, until enlightenment, quite literally, that are not necessarily effective, begins to glow from within, as physical treatments – that magically manifested in the very are in effect placebos – can windows to one’s soul. be substantially effective on a
Even in paradise, staying clean is never easy, but outside the wooden gates, beyond the tropical trees and teakwood homes, is where the real hard time is served.
A file picture of William Warren.
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They’re so striking, these eyes, that in the midst of our talk, I can’t help asking about them, whereupon Daly tells me, disappointingly, that they simply came from his parents, as well as “a very clean diet.” And then, undistracted as ever, he continues talking about meditation: “Most of us breathe in the upper register of our chest – fight-or-flight, Paleolithic man or woman. It’s great for running away from dinosaurs, not so good now. So what we do with breathing techniques – or meditation, or mindfulness – is to learn how to encompass the whole diaphragm in breathing. When you get to the bottom of the diaphragm, on the physiological level, you activate the parasympathetic nerves, which brings relaxation into the mind. So there are physiological reasons behind this as well. It’s basically allowing someone to see that if they hold their breath, on a physical level, it’s an indication, it’s a clue, that potentially I have a reaction. And it could come out as
an emotional reaction that could snowball into an ineffective coping behavior, or it could move into a full-on relapse. If you can bring awareness enough into yourself, you can have a moment before the reaction actually occurs when you can see the reaction. And it takes time. It’s not something one learns in the course of a weekend or a week – it’s a lifelong practice. This is a spiritual practice.” When very young, Daly got involved in martial arts, which brought him to Zen meditation. After that – this was twenty years ago – he journeyed to India, where he studied yoga. He also practices traditional archery, which he will soon be bringing to The Cabin, “using the longbow release as a way to mindfulness.” Anything can be mindful, really, if it’s done with properly concentrated attention. “Gum-chewing,” he says, “can be mindfulness, as long as you’re present.” editation therapy isn’t just something that brings recovery-seeking addicts to The
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While psychology is far from the only component of addiction, even the most conservative experts believe that not only is it half the ballgame; it’s the second, most crucial half.
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Cabin; it’s also, more broadly, something that brings them to Thailand in general. Although meditation-as-therapy is finally being accepted as a viable form of treatment in clinical practices throughout the West, it still flourishes here like nowhere else. But there are other sources of Thailand’s popularity as a recovery destination for socalled rehab tourists. There is the climate, of course, and, particularly in a region like Chiang Mai, the scenery. There is the famous Thai friendliness and hospitality, which comes very close to meeting its reputation. There is all of this and, depending on where one is coming from, there is more. The Cabin’s director, Simon Lewis, estimates that 40 percent of their residents are from
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Australia. “The treatment there is so far forward,” he says, “it’s gone backwards. They don’t believe in abstinence really; they’re very much a minimisation program.” After repeatedly running up against the wall of unsuccessful treatment, many Australians find their way to Thailand. In Lewis’s native UK, many are trying to escape London’s dreary surroundings, or a national healthcare system that many consider impotent. Middle Easterners come seeking privacy from their small communities, where addiction is stigmatised and treatment can bring shame on their families. Singaporeans, meanwhile, are escaping something altogether more tangible: a perversely punitive legal system, and a country where no rehabs even exist except those run by the government, and which people often talk about in terms more often associated with prisons. “Being in Thailand,” Lewis says, simply and succinctly, “we get to experiment more.” And The Cabin isn’t just a rehab facility that happens to exist in Thailand; if one comes here with the intention of engaging and exploring the country at large, one will have the opportunity to do so. Sunday excursions are organised every weekend. This week’s options include zip-lining, canoeing, and (for the quieter-tempered) a temple tour. The staff want The Cabin to be more than a place where people come to dry out and receive treatment, while life itself, in all its variety, lapses into a default hibernation mode. “People could do six months here,” Lewis says, “and never do the same excursion if they didn’t want to.” n the office shelves of The Cabin’s program director,
Alastair Mordey, are several copies of Alcoholics Anonymous’s Big Book, whose 12-step approach to addiction-recovery few have seen fit to tamper with since its initial publication in 1939. I ask him why he believes the book and its precepts have remained sturdy and virtually unchanged over the last 75 years. “The answer to that,” he says, “would be the same as the answer to ‘Why has the fellowship itself endured for so long?’ Because it’s for a common purpose that is not for personal gain, as such; it’s for survival from a fatal illness. [Recovery movements usually] will become corrupted by some personal need at some point – some personality will have ridden over the principles, some personality will have become prominent.” The Cabin has adopted the 12-step principles, but not in their original language. They’ve translated the parochialised preoccupations with the Christian God, making the steps sound both more modern and more cosmopolitan – more appropriate, in other words, for an international centre in the 21st century, privy to the findings of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and other systematic approaches that have verified, by more sophisticated means, the program’s original assertions. “What I’m seeking to do,” Mordey says, “is translate the steps for modern people. We’re explaining the twelve steps from the perspective of the other psychologies you’d use in a psychological service. You are powerless. We now know, from neuroscientific research, that that is exactly true. Addicts have a disconnect between their midbrain and forebrain, or the reward centre and the impulsecontrol centre. They have a genetic talent for it. Once the
disease is unleashed, it cascades down, and the addict becomes totally unable to control his impulses with regard to controlseeking.” So it is that the third step, for instance, that of making “a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him” becomes, in The Cabin’s official translation: “We commit to following the guidance of a process greater than ourselves.” In a third column beyond that will be a simplified explanation of the step’s function; in this case, “Acknowledging need for psychological and spiritual growth.” Mordey’s office, beyond its bookcase, is dark and cool and sparsely appointed, with light from the window giving a glaze to its polished wood surfaces. He sits with his fingers often templed at his chin, or firm on the armrests at his side in a command posture. He is muscular-athletic, with a shaved head, and has about him a smug self-composure that somehow never reads as arrogance. Occasionally, when giving a lengthy and well-considered answer to a question, he will interrupt himself, punctuating his remarks with a deferential “Isn’t that right?” and then waiting for your assent before continuing. According to the gospel espoused at The Cabin and elsewhere, there is no such thing as an ex-addict, and so, even though Mordey has been clean some thirteen years now – or since he was 28 – he considers himself an addict still. His staff is comprised largely of recovering addicts, and I ask him about the importance of this. “It’s more like the team of counsellors,” he says. “How much experience should there be in the team? is what I would say. If you’re an individual practitioner, it would help greatly – it’s worth its weight in gold. I’m not saying non-
addicts aren’t any good at it, but if you are one, potentially, you are extremely good at it. Potentially. But there are ex-addict counsellors that are no good whatever. The question you need to ask is: in a treatment setting, what percentage of the team is in recovery? It needs to be the majority of the counselling team. You may then make the decision where the medical staff — the doctors and psychologists and nurses — aren’t in treatment. You may even have the odd counsellor who isn’t. But by and large, the majority of the people who are doing the psychological therapy with addiction really do need to be recovering addicts, because it’s such a curious illness that nonaddicts just don’t spot the signs. They just don’t have the lexicon, the signposts, that recovering addicts do.” When Mordey hit his own rock-bottom, it was with heroin and crack-cocaine, a period in his life that he describes now as “very, very desolate. I had a number of fairly traumatic incidents involving relationships, involving the way that I had to make money, regarding the way people felt about me, regarding my parenting abilities, about my safety around other people. I was a fairly out-ofcontrol young man. But I got it – I got it pretty quick. I had a spiritual awakening, is what I had, for sure.” Saving up for counselling courses with wages earned at hard labor, Mordey was eventually able to begin working at an agency specialising in the treatment of children, work that often touched on addiction but not always. He then worked at getting addicts and alcoholics off the streets of London and into rehab centres. “I got to the point where I was notorious in my sector of London for being a firebrand and a renegade.” Firebrand and renegade that he was, frustrated with the pace
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and impracticalities of England’s healthcare system, he began organising his own enduranceathletics charity, with the help of a mayor who was himself something of a firebrand and renegade. “So we started to get this quite odd endurance-sports charity going in urban North London,” he remembers, “with recovering addicts and street drinkers. So we had street drinkers running marathons and rock-climbing and power-lifting and things like that.” When he heard about the program being started in Chiang Mai at The Cabin five years ago, he got in touch and was invited to come aboard as one of four partners (and the only clinician among them). He was recruited, in part, for his ability to find ways of working outside the system, and for his ability to experiment, responsibly, with methods underpracticed and under-appreciated. Of all the unorthodox methods available in Thailand, there are many Mordey has tried, many that he hasn’t, and many
that he never will. When I ask him if there are any unorthodox methods he’s considering implementing at The Cabin, he answers suddenly and with no equivocation, “Yeah, there is.” He intends to implement EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), which Mordey identifies as “eye-movement training, essentially, specifically for use with trauma,” through which, “by tracking eye movement, you can help to re-train a belief system developed in a traumatic moment. It sounds wacky; it’s actually not. It’s actually hugely evidence-based.” This is where Alastair Mordey stands now, out where he’s stood all along, on the furthest frontier of addiction-treatment discovery, scouting out where to cut his next path. There are as many ways to treat addiction, it seems, as there are ways to get addicted, and for as long as those ways exist, there will be people like Mordey, always looking out, searching, into the elusive distance.
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HARBOUR HEIGHTS The scenic port city of Bergen drips with age-old charm. by keith mundy
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Anish Kapoor’s stainless steel Cloud Gate sculpture in Millennium Park.
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ho doesn’t love a beautiful harbour city? Cape Town, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong: they all have romance, with their dramatic settings and distinctive characters. Add one more you may never have heard of: Bergen, Norway’s historic city of seafaring traders, surrounded by mountains and styled “The Gateway to the Fjords.” On a long summer day, Norway’s second-biggest and most scenic city seems blessed, its historic waterfront lined with a rainbow of brightly painted wooden warehouses, with a backdrop of forested mountains rising behind, and a blond populace who look notably healthy and affluent. Not many nautical miles away, easily reached on cruise boats, are some of Europe’s greatest natural glories, the mountain-walled sea inlets, or fjords, carved into the southwestern coast of Norway. And then, offshore – invisible in Bergen but deeply reassuring to every citizen – there is the black gold, the North Sea oil that is the fount of Norway’s extraordinary modern wealth. Perched precisely two-thirds of the way from the Equator to the North Pole, Bergen is a city of white nights when the sun sets only briefly in mid-summer, of white winters with frequent snow falls, and of wet days, two out of three in fact, with the autumn months the rainiest. Still, local people claim there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. And so they make lovely woollens to wear: Norwegian pullovers and cardigans that are legendary in design and quality. With reindeers on them if you so choose. For real reindeers, you’ll have to go a lot further north than Bergen, up to Lapland and the Arctic Circle. But if you just want spectacular scenery and a fine
In the course of the 20th century, Bergen’s fishiness became challenged by a range of rival activities and today its economy includes agriculture, shipping, the offshore petroleum industry and higher education, as well as burgeoning tourism.
old European town, Bergen’s got it. No matter how you arrive, by train or boat or plane, it’s a good idea to get an elevated perspective on this salty old city first from the top of Mt Fløyen (320m), directly above the city. Ride the Fløibanen funicular railway up to the summit and see Bergen laid out beneath you, its several harbours with their varied shipping, its clustered multicoloured houses, its deep blue bay called Bergen Fjord, the green hills and islands around about, the North Sea beyond to the west and the mountains to the east that form Norway’s backbone. From the top, well-marked hiking tracks lead over hills, through forests and past lakes – and one trail makes a delightful walk back to the city, switchbacking down to Bryggen. A Fishy Story Bryggen is the area just north of the main harbour where the city was founded, from where it later expanded to occupy the
fingers of land that point out into Bergen Fjord, climbed the hillsides around, and colonised many islands with suburban sobriety. Threaded with quaint cobblestoned streets lined with timber-clad houses, Bryggen is where the old warehouses present their bright wooden frontages – oxblood red, yellow ochre, maroon, white – to the waterfront, cheery signs of a long history. Bergen was founded in the 11th century, a remote settlement destined to grow rapidly and become Norway’s capital during the 13th century. By this time, the city states of Germany had allied into trading leagues, most powerful of which was the Hanseatic League based in Lübeck on the Baltic Sea. The sheltered harbour of Bryggen drew droves of Hanseatic traders and they established a trading post, or kontor, there around 1360. Hugely successful, the Bergen kontor became one of the league’s four main foreign facilities, with up to
2,000 mostly German resident traders whose main business was importing grain and exporting dried fish. At its zenith, the league had over 150 member cities and was northern Europe’s most powerful economic entity, its trading network stretching across the North Sea and Baltic Sea from London as far as Novgorod in Russia. For over 400 years, Bryggen was dominated by a tight-knit community of German merchants who weren’t permitted to mix with, marry or have families with local Norwegians. However, by the 16th century, competition from Dutch and English shipping companies, internal disputes and the rise of the new Atlantic trading routes sent the Hanseatic League into decline. By the early 17th century Bergen was nonetheless the trading hub of Scandinavia and Norway’s most populous city with 15,000 people. During the 17th and 18th centuries,
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Bryggen is where the old warehouses present their bright wooden frontages _ oxblood red, yellow ochre, maroon, white _ to the waterfront, cheery signs of a long history.
FACT FILE Getting there Thai Airways (with SAS) flies daily and Norwegian Air flies three times weekly from Bangkok to Oslo. Details at www.thaiairways.com and www.norwegian.com. Both offer connections to Bergen. The Bergen Line is a scenic train route from Oslo to Bergen, details at the Norwegian National Railway website www.nsb.no Stay Grand Terminus Hotel (Zander Kaaes gate 6; tel. +47 55 212500). A great railway hotel splendidly revived for the 21st century. Hanseatiske Hotel (Finnegårdsgaten 2; tel. +47 55 304800; dethanseatiskehotell.no). A pair of old merchants’ houses knocked together. 218 218
Visit Torget Fish Market (Torget; www.torgetibergen.no ; open 7am7pm June-August, 7am-4pm September-May, closed Sundays.) Hanseatic Museum & Schøtstuene (Finnegårdsgaten 1a & Øvregaten 50; www.museumvest.no . Open 9am5pm mid-May to mid-September, shorter hours rest of year). Celebrate Tall Ships Races, July 24-27, 2014; details at www.tallshipsbergen.no Bergen Food Festival, September 5-7, 2014; details at matfest.no Information A 24-hour or 48-hour Bergen Card gives free public transport and discounted entry to most attractions. Tourist Office, Strandkaien 3, tel. +47 55 552000; visitbergen.com. Open 9am-8pm, May-September.
The largest fjord in Norway, the Sognefjord
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many Hanseatic traders opted to take Norwegian nationality and join the local community. The Hanseatic kontor was closed in 1754 and replaced by a Norwegian kontor, run by Norwegians. Bergen continued as an important maritime trading centre, and only in the 1830s did the city become outdone in size by Oslo, Norway’s capital. In 1890, an American traveller, Lilian Leland, wrote of Bergen, “Everything is fishy. You eat and drink fish and smell fish and breathe fish.” In the course of the 20th century, Bergen’s fishiness became challenged by a range of rival activities and today its economy includes aquaculture, shipping, the offshore petroleum industry and higher education, as well as burgeoning tourism. A dynamic city of around 270,000 inhabitants, Bergen is as modern as any other sizeable Scandinavian city, with a thriving downtown of department stores, theatres and so on. But it is old Bryggen – which means “wharf” – that is still the focus for visitors. The Wharf Where It All Began Bergen’s oldest and most enchanting quarter runs along the northern shore of Vågen Harbour in long, parallel and often leaning rows of gabled buildings with stacked-stone or wooden foundations and roughplank construction. The district was rebuilt after the great fire of 1702, but the building pattern remains that of the 12th century, and 59 of the 18th-century buildings survive today. In their heyday the waterfront buildings combined business premises with living quarters and storage space. Each one had its own loading crane and a large room for meeting and eating. That atmosphere of an intimate waterfront community remains intact, even as the
creaking premises are occupied by shopkeepers, restaurateurs, designers and architects. Concentrate for a moment and you may still smell the stacks of dried cod and hear the shouts of fishermen trading their catches with hard-nosed Hanseatic merchants. Losing yourself in Bryggen is one of Bergen’s great pleasures. Wandering through the cobbled streets, one must-see is a beautiful reconstruction of a merchants’ assembly hall, called the Schotstuene. The merchants’ premises were not allowed any heating for fear of fire so they clubbed together to build a hall where they could eat, drink and be modestly merry and conduct business in convivial fashion. Even more educative on the traders’ world is the terrific Hanseatic Museum. Housed in a rough-timber building from 1704, it starkly reveals the contrast between the austere living and working conditions of Hanseatic merchant sailors and apprentices, and the lifestyle of the management. Highlights include the manager’s office, family quarters, private liquor cabinet and summer bedroom; the apprentices’ quarters, where beds were shared by two men; the fish storage room, which pressed and processed over 450,000 kilograms of fish a month; and the fish press which squeezed the fish into barrels. Fish continues to be a big thing in Bergen. This is a nation which still hangs cod out to dry down by the shore on wooden racks, produces wonderful salmon – all along the coast you encounter fish farms – and has discovered at least a dozen interesting ways to pickle herring. Bergen’s 300-year-old fish market is the place to discover the local seafood, located at the head of Vågen Harbour next to Bryggen.
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Housed in a roughtimber building from 1704, the Hanseatic Museum starkly reveals the contrast between the austere living and working conditions of Hanseatic merchant sailors and apprentices, and the lifestyle of the management.
Hanseatic Museum
Torget Fish Market is both open and covered, its stalls offering a wide selection of salmon, herring, shellfish and whale meat, mostly to cook at home, but also to eat in sandwiches and lefses (a sort of Norwegian wrap) at its many tables. A splendid place for a quick bite, the market offers everything from king crab baguettes to lobster salad with Norwegian caviar, and even good old fish and chips. Sometimes there’s reindeer and elk meat too, in case it all wasn’t Nordic enough already. The elk also appears in local clothing shops, of which Bryggen and other downtown districts have many. At Laeverkstedet on Billgarden, Ingvild Nordahl has been creating bags, jackets and accessories of soft Norwegian
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elk leather for more than 40 years in her adjoining workshop. When you see an elk head with its huge antlers mounted on a wall, you’ve found it. For Norwegian knitwear, which is a great souvenir as well as immediately wearable, Dale of Norway offers weatherproof versions that are Gore-Tex-lined and Tefloncoated. They’re pricey, but they last a lifetime, even a rainy, snowy Norwegian one.
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Further Forays A couple of trips to the outskirts reward you with cultural riches in atmospheric settings. Norway’s most distinctive form of architecture is the stave church, a stepped-roof wooden style from medieval times. Fantoft Stave Church stands in a lovely leafy setting south of Bergen. Built
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beside the waters of Sognefjord around 1150, moved to Bergen’s southern outskirts in 1883, and burned down by a Satanist heavymetal musician in 1992, the church was painstakingly reconstructed. Although not the most impressive of Norway’s stave churches – some are mind-boggling piles of multiroofed extravagance – Fantoft has great rustic charm. Edvard Grieg is Bergen’s favourite son, Norway’s greatest composer, best known for his Peer Gynt suite. Taking a light-rail service to Troldhaugen, you hop off when the train chimes a bar of his music and head up a hill to a house looking down on a sea inlet. Grieg spent his summers in this beautiful villa, and it has been preserved exactly as it was when he died in 1907, cosily filled with family photos, drawings and memorabilia. A Fantoft Stave Church
Edvard Grieg’s summer villa
winding path leads down to the hut where the composer did most of his work, where you see his Steinway grand piano. Standing at the waterside looking out at the wooded islets, you hear only the murmur of the wind through lofty pines, which must have been music to Grieg’s ears. You can’t get the essence of the Bergen region without a foray into a fjord, and there are plenty of fjord tours on offer, with the tourist office providing a full list in its “Round Trips – Fjord Tours & Excursions” brochure and doing bookings as well. If you’re really short of time, then there are simple one-hour tours of Bergen’s harbours and modest fjord. If you’ve got a half-day to spare, then take a four-hour tour to nearby Osterfjord. But you really should do at least a full-day tour to experience the majesty of a truly spectacular fjord. The “Norway in a Nutshell” tour is a great way to see far more than you thought possible in a single day. After a train-andbus trip, a ferry takes you up
the gorgeous Nærøyfjord to Flåm; from there a stunning mountain railway ride takes you to Myrdal, and another train gets you back to Bergen. You can do that tour all year round. From May to September, other trainbus-boat day tours take you to Hardangerfjord, south of Bergen, or Sognefjord to the north, which is Norway’s longest fjord at 205 kilometres, but whose best claim to fame is the exquisite drama of the branch named Nærøyfjord. What do you see in a classic fjord? You enter a sea inlet walled by steep mountainsides, clad in rich green, some higher than 1,000 metres, where on a clear day the blue skies are mirrored in profound waters with depths as great as 1,300 metres. You become heady with the grandeur of nature at its most spectacular. You reflect that Bergen may be remote, chilly and very expensive, but that the natural splendour is one hell of a compensation for those who live in this distant corner of northern Europe.
photo: ©corbis / profile
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ALTERNATIVE FJORDS Fjords are indelibly associated with Norway, but some other parts of the world have similar geography caused by glacial erosion of coastal mountains.
South Island, New Zealand On New Zealand’s South Island is a magnificent landscape which rivals that of southwest Norway. Conserved in a World Heritage Site called Fiordland National Park, it includes 14 fjords that are locally called sounds. Here waterfalls cascade hundreds of metres into dark blue waters, granite peaks tower above and ancient rainforest clings to the mountains in a landscape of primeval glory. Most spectacular and most visited is Milford Sound, which Rudyard Kipling called the Eighth Wonder of the World. Lying at the park’s northern and most accessible end, Milford Sound offers some of the world’s most staggering coastal scenery with its dramatic peaks and dark waters. The area’s frequent downpours only enhance its beauty, sending numerous waterfalls gushing down the cliffs. Doubtful Sound, three times longer and ten times larger than Milford Sound, is renowned for its wilderness and wildlife. Cruise boats ply the fjords, there are ecotours to the less accessible ones, and some can be explored by kayak.
Patagonia, Chile Chilean Patagonia glories in numerous fjords and fjord-like channels, from the Reloncaví Estuary all the way down to Cape Horn, presenting what many people consider the most dramatic and awe-inspiring of all the world’s coastlines. A mountainous area fragmented into innumerable islands, channels and inlets, this is the planet’s most varied fjord region, with immense glaciers, a wealth of birds and sea-life, and the mighty Andes dominating the horizon. The Patagonian Channels have high, abrupt shores with innumerable peaks and headlands, their bold, rugged heads possessing a gloomy grandeur. The narrow fjords penetrate deeply into the mountains of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, their water drained from glaciers of the ice-capped, storm-swept heights. An important part of the ice field is protected within national parks such as the Bernardo O’Higgins and the Torres del Paine. Some fjords and channels are important navigable routes providing access to ports like Puerto Chacabuco and Puerto Natales, and numerous cruise ships enable tourists to get to close grips with this extraordinary landscape.
British Columbia, Canada Majestic inlets of the Pacific Ocean, the great fjords of the British Columbia coast, called “sounds,” rival those of Norway in length and depth but have even higher mountain scenery with a more alpine flavour. Howe Sound is the southernmost fjord, situated immediately northwest of the city of Vancouver. Dominated by towering peaks that rise straight out of the sea, the sound is Vancouver’s playground for sailing, fishing, diving, camping and a host of other recreational activities. The fjord incorporates many islands, three of which are large and mountainous in their own right. Further north, Desolation Sound was so named by the British explorer, Captain Vancouver, since “there was not a single prospect that was pleasing to the eye.” Today’s Canadians beg to differ. Against a spectacular mountain backdrop, they find it a great place for boating of all kinds and for wildlife watching, including seals, dolphins, orcas and eagles.