Successful expedition.  Grytviken basking in balmy zero.   Back on shelf at minus 14, well stocked with lamp oil, whalemeat, blubber, pickled cabbage and two bottles of aquavit!!  Freezing fog.  When we speak outside, the words stay in the air and hang around the tent.  Voice message from Oates there last night.  Unrepeatable, poor chap! 

Capt.RF (Keep Dancing) Scott RN.

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And the people seem robust and healthy, the trimmed physique of the men carries not an ounce of fat, their teeth are intact, their skin not infected with sores. The women are strong and bear healthy infants at their hips. 

The children are infinitely curious, open and engaging.  They want to know about everything and are fascinated by my equipment; camera, glasses, binoculars, books, pencils and especially postcards.  I show them how to draw and how to play noughts and crosses.  They pick up the idea very quickly. They go to school in the village until they are about 11 and then help in the fields.  Some girls, who couldn’t have been more 12 pass with baskets on their back and machetes on their belts, heading for the creek.  An hour later they return, their burden of firewood supported by the wooden yoke across their shoulders and a band of rattan around their foreheads.

But Northern Laos is a land in transition. Even in this village, one of two young men have a moto, a small fifty cc motorcycle, there is a rusty satellite dish outside one house servicing the village’s sole television that is powered by car batteries, and there are two solar panels outside another house, from which emanates as from some magic cave, the multicoloured winking lights of mobile phone chargers. A UN team is doing a survey to work out how they might build a proper latrine and pipe in water from a reservoir in the hills.     

This village is lucky.  The changes that have taken place have not changed the basic structure and function of the community.  The community is still run by a committee of village elders.  The government has had little impact, yet!  

Elsewhere, the changes are more drastic.  The communist government has devised a  policy of moving rural villages to the main roads. The new houses are based on a traditional design, but more are made of wood and brick instead of bamboo and rattan. They have lost their soul; their identity. People work in the new rubber plantations that have grown up along the deforested hillsides. Others take a moto or tuk-tuk to work in town.  Community is being eroded; individual expression is more the rule.  Under one house, a toddler was careering around in a fancy baby walker,  in brand new pink baby suit and flashing new trainers.  And the Chinese are coming.     

There is a big school in the roadside village. The children gather from miles around and play on ‘the green’, the big area of hard dirt in the centre of the village. It was like a painting by Pieter Bruegel. There were home-made whipping tops, a hopping game of tag, a game where children took it in turns to hop down a track balancing a bean on their free foot. There was a game of skittles played with big beans that skimmed along the concrete floor outside the classrooms, there was a skipping game where the rope was held very high and the girls had to reach up and pull the rope down with their foot. Older boys played boules and a few kicked a football about.  Sinoy, one of the local guides, made a small square shuttlecock by weaving strips of banana leaf together into a box and inserting a stick topped with a leaf or a bit of plastic in the top. It flew perfectly and we played endlessly batting it to each with hands, feet, knees and forehead. It was great fun! Games reinforce companionship and community and are all the more important at a time of such rapid change.  

But people seem less open and friendly, the nearer the village is to the road.  Maybe they sense danger.  Strangers stop and buy food from stalls set up at the roadside.  It’s easy to see they might soon be stopping for sex; perhaps they already do.  The proprietor of the guest house is the local Mr Big, a swaggering, obese young man dressed in a bright red top emblazoned with the Manchester United logo, long French football shorts and brand new trainers. The children eat sweets and have pot bellies and a permanent dribble. Every young person has a moto and a mobile phone; it’s obligatory. There are more satellite dishes and most houses are supplied with electricity. This was not just a village in transition; the whole culture is in transition; in fact the whole developing world is changing, fast.  Traditional ways of life are disappearing or retained as window dressing for the tourists. Eco-tourism is big up here, only don’t look too carefully.  The cultural reality of it is disappearing before your eyes, managed by fat boys in designer gear who marshal groups of ethnics for photographs.

Of course, it does not do to romanticise this too much.  The forest can only support a small number of people and there are nutritional and infective risks if population levels increase.  An expanding population is going to need more intensive farming and access to town.   

In Hanoi, a wonderful Museum of Ethnography has been created for people to understand their vanished ethnic heritage. It feels infinitely sad that it is necessary to create a museum of a way of life was quite viable and wondrous in its diversity.  Yes, progress cannot really be halted but progress is a kind of meaningless unification.  Piped water, electricity, television, motos and other labour saving services and devices may make life easier, but what they take away is invaluable; the identity and meaning of a culture that has evolved over thousands of years.           

Most exploit the change, of course; they have to, but it doesn’t always bring happiness.  Our guide, Pon, is a sharp young man caught between cultures.  He clearly loves trekking through the jungle and knows ‘everybody’, bring medicines for the shaman’s stomach ache, cigarettes for his male friends, smiles and love songs for his girl friends and the occasional T shirt for the children. He enjoys his role as envoy between cultures.  But when we visited him in his home with his lovely wife and cute son, it was clear that he is  not happy. He has been exposed to a western way of life that he can never have. He has the expectations of western lifestyle, but his salary as a guide is limited and he is too dependent on meaningless charm to exact additional large tips from his clients.  His wife does not speak English.  They live with her parents. He can’t travel, see the world, he can only look at the television.  He is trapped!

The same dichotomy was all too apparent on the coach that took us from the sprawling dust of Phnom Penh to The Cardamom Hills along the highway built by the Thais in 2008.  The video played endlessly showing images of young men in sharp suits, driving long shiny black sports cars (sometimes a sports car is just a sports car but often it’s not), and picking up pretty young girls, whom they transport to a moonlit lake to sing their songs of romantic love. The story is always the same; if you want the doe-eyed girl of your fantasies, don’t be a loser and work in the fields, but get yourself sharp clothes and a smart car. Cambodia is still dreadfully poor, but these videos purvey an impossible dream, a dream that makes every young person feel like a loser. London was never paved with gold and Cambodia can never be Beverley Hills! That’s the reality.

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It’s an experience driving in Phnom Penh.  There are few traffic lights and roundabouts and  no obvious rules.  Drivers and cyclists just seem to know how others will behave and avoid them as they would just as if they were walking along a crowded pavement.

It’s the same if you want to cross the road on foot.  Just step out into the flow and keep walking slowly and deliberately so that nobody has any doubt of your intensions and they drive round you. 

Despite the volume and chaos of traffic, we saw just one accident, when somebody fell of their moto at the side of the road.      

Drivers are not neurotic in Phnom Penh.  There are no stops and starts, no irritations, no speed merchants, no horn honking or shouting just a blending into a steady inexorable flow of traffic.  Everybody seems to know what is expected.

But the way, they drive their motos looks incredibly dangerous; police in England would have a field day. Mothers balance children on the handlebars as they drive one-handed through  heavy traffic.  A family, a little baby sandwiched between mother and father, careers along in the flow.  A man controls his moto one-handed while wheeling a bike with the other.  Another balances a big water tank on the handlebars and peers round the side of it.    

Sundays evenings are the busiest time. Then everybody seems to go for a ‘promenade en moto’.  It’s the time to see and be seen.  Men ride upright in shiny suits while their women sit side-saddle in their best pyjamas.   And their children stand up on the seat in their designer football strips and wave.

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Maybe it was the tiredness.  Maybe my body was physiologically in a state of conservation and repair.  I’d stopped fighting or thinking.  I was just existing.   With the first few bouts of fever, the sensitivity of my scalp, the persistent headache, the shivering, induced a state of despair.  I was  delirious and repeating, ‘ Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God’, worryingly reminiscent of my mother’s  anxiety dementia.  But then I seemed to give up and accept whatever would happen. 

 Such states of body and mind correspond to Hans Selye’s  General Adaptation Syndrome (1936),  in which he documented a stereotypical responses to stressors of all kinds, physiological, medical and psychological.   They all, he concluded, tap into the same mechanism. 

The first response to a stressor is to fight it with the sympathetic nervous system; hence the anxiety, the pain, the shivering  but this gives way to a state of sweating and sleep; a state of conservation  dominated by the parasympathetic nervous system.  You see the same response in animals, whose ultimate response to overwhelming stress is to curl up in the corner of their cage and ‘play possum’.   But both people and animals vary according to whether or how quickly they exhibit which response.     

Post Traumatic Amnesia is a kind of dissociation.  It is a response to overwhelming trauma and could be thought of as a mechanism that protects the individual from the knowledge that would destroy their sense of self, like risk of death, abuse, or the collapse of a key relationship.   It is often associated with other aspects of the post-traumatic stress reaction, such as nightmares, bodily weakness, and a variety of somatic symptoms.   If you cannot remember or deal with what has happened, then nightmares and somatic symptoms often remain to express the trauma in coded form. 

So what is the mechanism?  But what is the mechanism?   The stress response not only involves the autonomic nervous system (sympathetic and parasympathetic), it also includes the hypothalamo-pituitary adrenal (HPA) system, which releases a cascade of transmitters and hormones (CRF, ACTH, cortisol, aldosterone) as a compensatory mechanism to offset the damaging effects of excessive and sustained  sympathetic arousal on the body.  The HPA system maintains the function of the organism in the face of overwhelming stress, maintaining energy supplies, damping down the immune system, suppressing inflammation and pain and blocking memory.  

So can it all be explained by activation of the HPA axis.   If so, why are Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Alexithymia (the disconnection of the emotional and rational expression), which may both coexist as part of the post traumatic reaction, associated with diminished cortisol responses.   Does this represent a state of exhaustion or switching off.  There is never an easy response to anything. 

With a days of the Malaria being treated, the tiredness disappeared is.    I became frustrated with  being in hospital and although still weak began, to devise strategies for discharge.  The will to live had reasserted itself; what would have been the point of remembering what it was like?

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According to legend, the Empress was sitting under a mulberry tree when a white egg-shaped cocoon fell into her tea and she observed a thread uncoiling from it. She picked up the end and started to wind it round her finger.  It didn’t break and just kept on coming and coming.   

Eventually, having leant how to dye, weave and fashion clothes from this precious thread,  the Chinese traded it to the rest of the world via the Silk Road, an overland trade route though the legendary Samarkand and the deserts Central Asia to the emporia of Europe.  The Venetian, Marco Polo followed the same route in the opposite direction to bring back knowledge of China to the west.

 The Silkworm (Bombyx mori) is the caterpillar of a pallid moth native to Northern China.  Over the centuries, it has been inbred to the point where it can no longer survive in the wild. It has a fat body and small wings and cannot eat or fly.  It just reproduces and dies within five days, just enough time for  the female to lay, on the underside of a  mulberry leaf,  200 to 500 lemon-yellow eggs that eventually turn black and hatch into tiny caterpillars.  The emerging silkworms are fussy eaters, dining only on mulberry leaves ( Morus alba)  for 4 to 6 weeks until they are nearly 3 inches long, having moulted several times.  When the silkworm has had its full of mulberry leaf, it spins a cocoon from a single strand of silk made of protein secreted from two salivary glands in the caterpillar’s head. This process takes 3 or more days.  The silk covers a hard brown-shelled pupa, from which the adult moth emerges.

In Northern Laos they let the caterpillars grow, feed them on fresh mulberry leaves until they form cocoons and pupate. Some of pupae are allowed to hatch into a silk moths and produce a new crop of silkworms, but the rest are first steamed to kill the pupae (which  would break the silk if they emerged as moths).  Next the cocoon is dunked in hot water, (rather than tea), to dissolve the sticky coating that binds the silk.  Then they wind the half mile strand of silk that makes up each cocoon on a small wheel, spin the threads from several cocoons together,  dye them and weave them on a small loom to make the cloth.  The Loatians do all of this in the space under their houses on stilts, the silkworms protected from predators in small mesh cages. 

I wonder if the cocoon altered the taste of the Empresses tea.

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The concentrated syrup is brown and tastes like fudge or maple syrup. It is just right for cooking as a moderate heat makes it runny. It sweetens the coconut cream and fish sauce in Fish Amok.  It is delicious when poured on fresh mango and coconut sticky rice and when added to tamarind juice and lime, it make such a refreshing drink. Or just buy a packet of palm sugar lozenges wrapped up in a palm leaf. So much better than Kendal Mint Cake.

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A magnificent butterfly, I thought,  so eye-catching in its dress uniform of red and black with white flashes, but it’s forewings were long, black and lacy and used for propulsion; only the hind wings were designed for display, like banners or the logo on tail of an airliner with its fuselage  painted the brightest red.   No butterfly this, but a magnificent lacewing, some two inches from wingtip to wingtip.   It flew in figures of eight but always returned to dip its abdomen in the same patch of wet sand and deposit a few more eggs.    

They call them inch worms, but they don’t slither along like most worms, they grab with their mouth parts then bring their nether regions up, folding their body like a paper clip before stretching forward again.  Not that they move very much; they lie in wait in the damp shade under leaves  for months and then drop off and attack themselves to any large mammal (like us), who comes past and brushes against the vegetation.  They are so sticky, wipe them off with your hand and, like burrs, they stick to your fingers.  But most of the time, you don’t know they’re there unless you knock  them and they burst in a pool of blood.  Leeches secrete an anaesthetic and an anticoagulant.  They inch their way into your clothing and secretly latch on to a tender area of naked skin and only detach when they are full and distended, whereupon they seek moisture and shade for their long digestion.

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What is going on?   My guide explains.  ‘At the new year, we remember our ancestors and we make gifts to appease their spirits and give ourselves good karma.   It’s not real money, but fake paper money.  Some also burn paper models of cars, servants, possessions.  You see, we believe in the afterlife here.  If we can appease the spirits of our ancestors, then we will have a good life too.  It will bring us luck.’

In the Buddhist temples, they sell paper effigies like soldiers in red coats and hats to burn.  Buddhism sits comfortably alongside superstition here.  Many of the tribes in the country are animist, they believe in spirits.  In a wood outside a village in Northern Laos, just a dozen miles or so from the Chinese border, we came across a group of huts on stilts topped by a pole bearing the remains of a flag.  The huts were surrounded by a stockade and a moat.  There was a wooden board in front of it bearing a photograph of the deceased and the dates of his life.   His possessions were stacked under the eaves together with the remains of food and flowers. 

‘When a parent dies, we look after his spirit in death in the same way as we looked after his body in life.  That way we will get good karma and show our children how to look after us when our time comes.’

‘But the people who live in the village, the Black Tai, do not go to the wood after dark.  They are afraid of the spirits.’ 

A few days later, in the Khmer village, we came across an structure that looked like two sets of poles for growing runner beans.  Between it was a table with clay figurines on it. 

”The people here believe that if they touch the body of a dead person, they will die.  So the shaman  builds these arches and covers them with leaves and symbols.  The relatives then pass through the arches three times and leaves a clay model on the table to protect them from the spirits who might take them too.’

We met the shaman, jolly toothless man with a wispy beard, no shirt and a cigarette tucked behind his ear.  My guide left him some indigestion tablets for his wife.  Strong medicine!

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And the weather, the accursed weather!  It has been raining for three days; not just a shower, but sheets, curtains, blankets of it, driving up from the sea, turning the ground to mud, running off the hillside in white torrents, creating rivers of the roads. 

Nothing can be kept dry, the grain in the Horrea has gone mouldy, the bedding is damp, there are even drops coming though the roof of the principia!  But at least we have the caldarium, one slight token of civilisation, though the other day the rain was so bad, the furnace went out. How can a Roman survive without hot water?  

And those Brigantes; they always chose the worst weather to launch another attack.  It’s as if they know how much we hate the wind and rain and that awful cold that gets into your very marrow.  So we double the guard, sent out another patrol, chase shadows into the cloud.    

Why our glorious emperor, the illustrious Hadrian (may the Gods preserve him!)  bothers with this barren place, I’ll never know.  He even built a wall across the whole country to protect perfidious Albion  from the Pictish barbarians in the far north. Protect what?  There’s nothing of any value here, just a bit of lead and tin way down in the south.  Nothing grows; no grapes, no figs, no olives, not even any spices!  What passes for food is dull and tasteless;  porridge and warm mutton every day.  We can’t even get a tasty dormouse!  And there is no wine, just sour beer. And the Britons are impossible; nothing but trouble ever since the dreadful queen of the Iceni had the temerity to sack Camulodunum.    

To think we came all the way from Dalmatia for this!  Oh Dalmatia!  Those warm nights, the wine, the music, the restless warm sea and the women.  Ah, the women!  But how could I know she was the consul’s woman?  She didn’t say, and she was so careless; he was bound to discover us.  I thought he was going to kill me, but he had a worse fate in store.  I and my men, my brave cohort, all five centuries of them, were banished to Britannia at the very ends of the world, where we cling with freezing fingers to this cold wet mountain, waiting for another futile attack.

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A troupe of black musicians with southern accents and joyful, toothy grins were waiting to board the flight to Stockholm.  They wore earphones and were jigging, jerking, twitching, beating out syncopated rhythms on their knees, table and the arms of their seats.     

In the restaurant, a conclave of heavy metal rockers, long hair, serious beards, provocative shirts.  One was in a wheelchair.   

A Viking, his long straw-coloured hair parted in the middle and plaited, a wispy beard and dragon head tattoos on his shoulders; his face lined with cruelty. 

Lonely faces in repose on the Underground, their tragedies land fears etched deep into their skin.

Smooth, blank round eyed faces, like those of infants lost in transit, their expression a mixture of boredom, fear, and need.   

Buzz Aldrin, a face of wide-eyed wonder and disillusion.  ‘I’m the man who walked on the moon, damn it.  Why has my life been so tragic?’

The ninety-eight separate muscles under the skin of the face are controlled by twiglets of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves and advertise the complex nuances of our feelings.  

After a lifetime, the dominant emotional themes of culture and experience that has constructed the rail network of nerves is fixed in the shunting yards of our faces.

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