From Johnny Turk To

The Month's New Reading

The Giraffe Women

In an age when it is difficult to do anything that half a million people have not already done; or to find a place that has not been trampled to death by Coca-Cola drinking tourists, two new books manage to get genuinely off the beaten track.

ONE is Welcome the Wayfarer, by Nancy Phelan, who describes a long wander in Turkey. The other is Why Buddha Smiles, by Jorgen Bisch, a Dane, who went 600 miles north of Rangoon, in Burma, to see giraffe-women and stayed on to enter a Buddhist monastery.

Nancy Phelan is well-known in the South Pacific. She once worked with the Social Development section of the South Pacific Commission and during this period took a long holi day in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands.

One result of this was the entertain ing and often hilarious Atoll Holi day, published several years ago.

It is a very long way from the GEIC to Turkey but the author manages to make the transition with the minimum of trouble. Perhaps there was more exuberance in the first book and a slight air of strain about the second, but if so, it cannot be wondered at.

Pacific Is "Easy"

Pacific Islands are “easy”—even if the Phelan expedition to the Gilberts pre-dated the present air service.

Turkey certainly is not. Outside of tourist Istanbul, Turkey is primitive in a Middle Eastern fashion no Pacific Island has ever been; it has a language few Westerners speak; a different cultural background; and a running war with its nearest Euro pean neighbours, the Greeks.

All this being so, Nancy Phelan’s friends and relatives were full of forebodings, warnings and dire pre dictions. Nonetheless she took off and finally entered Turkey through the Dodecanese, travelling in a motor-boat from the island of Chios to the Turkish fishing village of Cesme, just west of what used to be called Smyrna and now is called Izmir.

Greek and Turkish islands are almost interlaced at this point but

although it was a comparatively tranquil period in their relations, communications between the two parties were very sketchy indeed.

At Cesme, recounts the author, she was led to the Customs house, and “into a small, stark room con taining a desk, bench and portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, very handsome, dressed as though for a conjuring act with white tie, gloves and top-hat. Here beneath the

Father of Modern Turkey’s cold pale eyes > 1 s P ent three hours waiting for my bags to be passed, benevolently tended by a gentle, simple-minded gorilla in a shabby uniform.

G f languages that I was from Aus tralia (‘Ah! Avustralya! Gelibolu!

Anzac!’) and that I travelled alone. . . .”

Later the “gorilla” found her a terrible meal in a fly-blown gazino and a seat in the crowded bus to Izmir. The adventure had begun, To help her on her way she had a Press Card, issued by the Turkish Government; and a letter of intro duction to an Australian woman married to an Istanbul Greek—but from this point onward she appears to have wandered with no set plan in view; sometimes being passed on from one member of an adopted

Turkish family to another, more often going it alone.

In this way she got into some extraordinary hostelries, meeting some very peculiar people and her gift for describing the latter and making them live is quite consider able.

The rascally kaptan of the small, open boat which took her along part of the Mediterranean coast from Demri to Fethiye, who wore long cotton underpants with crochet round the ankles; and Mustafa who looked like a Middle Eastern spiv of the worst type and turned out to be a “not bad sort at all”, both become three-dimensional characters.

So do the hundreds of others en countered on comfortless bus journeys, leaking sieves masquerad ing as boats, and the places that out-of-town Turks called “oteli”.

Except for the übiquitous motor bus, with which even the most out landish Turkish road seems to be equipped in some measure, these Phelan journeyings have about them much of the flavour of the 19th century. They could, you might think, have equally as well have been performed by camel, so remote from the usual tourist gambollings do they seem.

Australians have had a profound respect for the Turks since they fought them 50 years ago on the cliffs of Gallipoli. This book will do nothing to impair these good relations. Up country hotels might often be a vista of “impossible lavatories, no washing facilities, flies, dirt and the all pervading smell of urine” but the people are warm, friendly and incredibly hospit able.

The book is illustrated with the author’s photographs.

JORGEN BISCH’S Why Buddha Smiles is also away-from-it-all.

He is a well-known writer and photographer in Europe, although little known in Australasia, and has been wandering around the more un usual places of the earth since 1938 when he was 16.

He was sitting in Raffles Hotel in Singapore with a Burmese acquain tance when he heard of the giraffe women 600 miles up-country from Rangoon.

They were reputed to be in credibly shy and averse to being photographed but he was determined to see them. This he finally was able to do with the assistance of an abbot of a Buddhist monastery.

Giraffe-women are so called be

cause they encase their long necks in coils of copper wire, beginning the first coil at about the age of five, increasing its length until, in adulthood, the coils form a collar about six or seven inches deep. On top of the coils rests the chin and a tilted-back head.

Once a giraffe-worn an, says the author, always a giraffe-woman.

After some years her neck, if re moved from its supporting copper rings, is so weak that it cannot hold up the head without assistance.

These long, wire-bound necks were once regarded as a mark of beauty but they are now considered slightly old-fashioned and giraffe women are slowly dying out.

The abbot who had made it possible for Bisch to meet and photo graph the giraffe-women also induced him to enter a monastery so that he could learn at first-hand something of Buddhism. For a time, there

fore, he shaved his head and his beard and donned the yellow robes of a monk, begging for rice for his one meal a day.

Fortunately, his interest in Buddhism is not so deep that it obscures his sense of humour, in or out of the monastery. His travels in Burma, with side excursions into Cambodia and Thailand, his troubles with bed bugs and mosquitoes who favoured his shaved head in the monastery where all life was sacred, make entertaining read ing.

The book is illustrated with over 50 coloured photographs taken by the author. These are a riot of golden pagodas, saffron-robed monks, metal-encased giraffe-women and

Buddhas in all dimensions.

JT.

(Welcome The Wayfarer. Mac

millan. 45/-.)

(Why Buddha Smiles. Collins.

38/6.)