Ghosts

Are you contacted? Or Uncontacted?

Jason and Ishmael, brothers in traditional and modern dress, Papua New Guinea

After a long absence, I'm back home. For all of those of you who signed up in the last couple of months: Thanks! And hello. It was not, I hope, a fruitless thing to do. I will be posting new stories, and any gaps will not be so long.

For the last few weeks I've been travelling down the Amazon. Since boyhood I had wanted to go up that river, but it turned out my destiny was to go in the opposite direction.

The journey reminded me of something that happened almost a decade ago in Colombia.

It was not a big seaside resort, not even a resort, just a few bamboo cabins set behind a beach. We had spent five days trekking in the mountains of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and now we were going to have a day on the Caribbean coast. There was Sophie, my partner, and me. We got in our swimming costumes and were about to head for the sand when she stopped me. "There's something on your back, let me look."

She moved in close. "Urgh! It's a tick. Wait a minute, there's more..."

In fact, there were a lot. Up there in the jungle I had spent a great deal of time bashing through the undergrowth, trying to photograph various birds. Santa Marta is a massive outlying peak and its isolation has allowed the evolution of several endemic species. That had sent me scurrying off at every available opportunity, pushing into the bushes, picking up passengers. It turned out I had brought an entire ecosystem down to the coast with me.

We got in the sea. The trek had been memorable in many ways, but it wasn't the insect life that kept us talking afterwards, it was the people. The mountain is inhabited by indigenous groups, notably the Kogi and Arhuacos people, who have managed, against all odds, to maintain many aspects of their traditional culture. In order to do the trek, you take guides from the community and follow a prescribed trail to the 8th century lost city of Teyune, sleeping on the way in hammocks inside thatched shelters. The guides seemed taller and better-nourished than the ordinary villagers who we met, but there were obviously individuals and families who had bridged the cultural gap and managed to have a foot in both worlds. Others had chosen not to. Our guides had said that outsiders were generally not allowed to go deeper into the territory and so some villages never had any contact with the outside world unless they chose to. Soon after they told us that, we came across a few women and children dressed in simple white tunics, carrying baskets filled with jungle leaves and roots. I was, as usual, photographing birds and one took an interest, particularly in the bird guidebook I was carrying. I handed it over, but she struggled to manipulate the pages and one of our guides, Eduardo, stepped forward and leafed through for her. Ar first she seemed bemused, unable to fathom what she was seeing. A crowd gathered. Eventually she recognised a bird that she knew and gave a little squeak of joy. One of the other tourists in our group handed her a half-finished bottle of Coke which she accepted, without any squeak of joy.

I'm not sure why, but my fascination with people from outside my own world started young. As a small child I lived in Cumberland on the Scottish border and one day we had a visitor, a large cheerful man called George who said he lived in a very faraway country called Colombia. Quite what he told me, I don't remember, but it was sufficiently impressive for me to embark, aged three, on my first expedition. I sneaked into the kitchen, opened a storage tin, and sneaked two jam tarts into my pocket. Then, suitably supplied for a long and dangerous journey, I went quietly out through the side gate and set off for Colombia. I walked for a mile and reached the main road to Carlisle, but now I had a dilemma: left or right? I had no idea. I ate my jam tarts, then asked a couple of passers-by. They took me home. I arrived to find the place in uproar. Two jam tarts were missing.

People who live outside of our world are few and far between these days. Back in the 1960s there were certainly such folk in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and many parts of South America, but the relentless march of 'civilisation' has gobbled most of them up. If they are lucky, they live in the same place, like the tribe I visited in the New Guinea highlands, still living the same life with their culture largely intact, except for a few additions. They had rigged up a black-and-white television, a video recorder and a car battery so they could watch films. Their all-time favourite, they told me, was about a tribe who rebelled against invasion by an army of arrogant outsiders. It was called Braveheart.

Much of that process of gobbling up uncontacted peoples was completed by missionaries determined to 'save', which meant insisting they wear shorts and tee-shirts. In Borneo I once travelled far upriver and stayed in a longhouse that, two generations earlier, had been a centre for headhunting. There was a single American female missionary living with them, like a large cuckoo in their nest. She kept them in thrall by dispensing wisdom and presents sent from the USA - mostly baseball caps and second-hand tee-shirts. In the centre of the longhouse was a fire that smouldered all day long, and above it I noticed a basket hung from a beam. In the gloom I couldn't see what was in the basket so I asked one of the men. He laughed, "Oh, that's the basket where our grandfathers used to put the heads they had hunted. They dried out in the smoke."

I peered closer. "There's something in there. Is it a skull?"

He stopped laughing. "No, no, we don't do that anymore."

It was then that I saw the basket contained music cassettes.

"They are sermons," he explained, "Sent from America."

Back on our Colombian beach, evening came and we strolled westwards to where we had been told there was a small restaurant. We found a half dozen tables set out on the sand, most of them already occupied by fellow tourists. We ordered cold beers and ceviche. There was happy chatter from the other tables and music. As more beer was drunk, the noise got louder.

I think we were onto our main course when it happened. I saw a movement in the corner of my eye and looking up, came face to face with a man standing next to me. He was barefoot, long-haired and dressed in a white tunic. His face was utterly expressionless, but he was inspecting our table with some interest. When he moved I saw there were other people, a whole group: young, old, male, female. They were all in similar white tunics. Some carried baskets decorated with geometric patterns, but they had nothing from the modern world. They were silent. There were some white dogs with them. The entire group was drifting  through the small clutch of tables, staring at the food, the clothes, the hair, the shoes. All the other diners kept talking and eating. The waiters still served. The music suddenly seemed incongruous, but no one turned it off. Did they not see these newcomers? Were they afraid that they might be beggars? The small band of people kept going, quite slowly and silently. They inspected everything, but touched nothing, nor did they speak to each other. There was no sign that they wanted anything. Only Sophie and I appeared to see them.

And then they were gone. Sophie and I stared at each other. "It looked like they had never seen people eating from plates on tables. Who were they?!"

I looked down the beach, into the gloaming, but there were no silhouetted figures.

"It was like only we saw them."

Sophie nodded. "Like ghosts."

But later that night, as we walked back to our cabin, I wondered if, in fact, it was we who were the ghosts.