Victor Saunders - Structured Chaos: The unusual life of a climber

(19541961)

Each time Id woken during the journey, as the night bus from Singapore lurched from one pothole to the next, Id seen a strange, obsessed look on the drivers face. Sometimes he would gun the engine until the bus was taking corners on two wheels. I managed several times to get back to sleep, but dreamt only of news headlines:

BUS PLUNGE IN PAHANG!

Sixteen killed, including lone foreigner! The Kuantan News Agency reports that bodies were difficult to identify after the high-speed crash, probably the result of driver error. The Kuantan News Agency

Kuantan! Wake UP! This Kuantan. KUANTAN!

I rubbed my eyes and staggered off the bus. The driver really had been in a hurry; it was 4.30 a.m. and we werent due in for another two hours. Yet here we were: safe, alive and early in Kuantan, the main city on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia. My next bus, to the small town of Pekan, left in an hour. At the station cafe, a group of road people, Malaysians and Thais and Cambodians, were having an early morning breakfast. I joined them. Roti chenai and tea made with condensed milk. The roti was a particularly skilful effort, the cook spinning out the dough into crpe-thin pancakes before folding them over into small buns, and serving them with coconut curry sauce. But I was still half asleep when the local bus arrived, the slow coach to Pekan, slow because it stopped every few minutes for schoolchildren and agricultural workers along the way. I began to think that reaching Pekan was analogous to a mountain climb, not least for the persistence in goal-seeking.

I had come here in the year 2000 looking for a connection with my childhood. Pekan is where I spent the first decade of my life, running around half naked in the tropical rain and sun with my younger brother, Christopher. We did not know it then, but in hindsight it was paradise. After growing up in the Elysian jungles of Malaysia, we returned to the British Isles, where Christopher and I were incarcerated in a miserable Scottish boarding school.

By then our parents had separated completely. Our father, George, ran a small import business in Gloucester. Our mother, Raiza, scraped together a paupers living in London. I remember how she had once visited us at school, taking the train to Aberdeen, missing the connection and, in order not to give up spending a few hours with us, taking a taxi to the school. This was in 1963, when a cab ride of that length was more than a weeks wages for most people; it must have taken my mother months to save for the journey. But her visit was the best gift of my childhood. This obsession with seeing journeys through, I inherited from her.

I had arrived in Singapore fresh from the Himalaya, although fresh isnt perhaps the right word. You dont arrive anywhere fresh from a Himalayan climb. I had arrived worn out from a spell of exploration and the first ascent of Khoz Sar, a 6,000-metre mountain near the PakistanChina border, climbing with Phil Bowker, a software engineer from Belfast. In Singapore, I had been the guest of the Singapore Mountaineering Association, which like its hometown was in the ascendance. In the 1990s its members had organised a series of bold expeditions with near-Teutonic planning, culminating in an ascent of Everest. My lecture was done, and now I had three days spare. Three days in which to rediscover my childhood home on the edge of the Malayan jungle. After that I would go home.