Ella
The joy of chance encounters on the road, how connection is the simplest form of travel, and beauty in lived experience; in saeculum.
There is a word, saeculum, that describes the measure of a lifetime linked to an event in the lived history of a place. The word brings together human connection and experience and time. Coming into contact with someone who lived through an event is experiencing a certain form of saeculum. I first met Naomi Duguid in a market in Chiang Mai, and in the first 2 minutes of talking we had moved from religion to Himalayan weather patterns, to the specific racisms that can occur in the naming of things, particularly with kaffir lime. Her mind is alive and it is electric. Naomi changed the way cookbooks look and feel, and you might not know that but there is a whole genre of biographic-travel-non-fiction cookbooks that she has pioneered. Below is a story she wrote about meeting up, by chance, with a travel writer we both admired. We add it here with permission from the author, and it is a little slice of something that vibrates, a slice of saeculum.
The tall blue-eyed woman staying in the dormitory of the Kunming Hotel caught my eye. She wore lots of chunky silver rings set with Tibetan turquoise. She was over sixty years old, I thought, very unusual in a dorm full of twenty-somethings, but she had a vigor to her that was younger than her age. I asked her where she was from, and how long she was staying in Kunming.
"From Switzerland," she replied. "I'm taking the overnight train tomorrow to Chengdu, then I fly straight to Tibet."
I had a ticket on the same train to Chengdu, so we shared a taxi to the station the next day. The station was crowded, and as we stood in an echoing noisy tunnel under the tracks, waiting in a crowd to board the train, we almost had to shout to each other to be heard.
"Do you know the book Forbidden Journey?" she asked me.
"A wonderful book! I've always wondered what became of her, the author," I said.
"Well," she said with a smile, "I’m Ella Maillart. It's my book." I was stunned. I'd read many of her books, extraordinary books.
She had lived as a student in Moscow in 1932 and then traveled through Soviet Central Asia, experiences she describes in her first book, Turkestan Solo. In 1934, she went to Beijing, and from there she made an epic six-month journey on foot and horseback west across China all the way to Hunza (in present-day Pakistan), a trip she describes in Forbidden Journey. Her books are classics, travel literature about a kind of travel that is unimaginable now in the age of e-mail, cell phones, and rapid airplane connections.
On the train, we spent much of the twenty-three-hour ride talking. Ella told me about driving overland from Switzerland to India in 1938 with a friend who was a morphine addict; about spending the war years in India; and about her long friendship with Nehru, India's prime minister from independence, in 1947, until 1964.
"I haven't talked about these things in years!" she said. "This will be my first time to Tibet," she went on. "I didn't get there in the thirties, and then for many years, because of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, I thought that it would be wrong to go, but now I'm getting old [she was in fact eighty-two when we met] and I might never have another chance."
"I'm also headed to Tibet," I told her, "but by bus, from Golmud."
"Then hopefully I'll see you again."
Two weeks later, I got to Lhasa and found Ella at the Snowland Hotel.
She was packing. It was her last night in Lhasa. We went out for supper at a nearby eatery. Ella was a vegetarian, so we shared plates of stir-fried cabbage, stir-fried bean sprouts with slivered scallions, boiled potatoes with coarse salt, and a plate of chile-hot tree fungus.
"Why didn't you ever marry?" I asked Ella as we ate.
"I never found a man who was interested in the same questions I was," she replied, her blue eyes gazing straight at me.
"I've decided not to return to my job," I followed, perhaps looking for advice, looking for approval.
"Il faut suivre ta boussole” [You must follow your compass], as we say in French. Do what feels right to you, then figure out how to earn a living at the same time."
We finished eating and exchanged addresses, and the next morning she was gone.
This was written and experienced by Naomi Duguid, Writer, photographer, traveler, story teller, home cook; author of THE MIRACLE OF SALT: Recipes and Techniques to Preserve, Ferment, and Transform your Food, and of the award-winning cookbooks TASTE OF PERSIA: A Cook’s Travels in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, & Kurdistan; and BURMA: Rivers of Flavor; co-author of six other award-winning cookbooks of food and travel, among them Flatbreads & Flavors and Hot Sour Salty Sweet. The job Naomi mentions above was a career as a lawyer which she did not return to and instead followed another path.
Ella Maillart was a Swiss adventurer, travel writer and photographer. Some of her books were Turkestan Solo, Forbidden Journey, and The Cruel Way. Ella lived an examined life, she knew humanity and empathy, she wasn’t running from, but running to and knew how to put all of that to words on the page. She is often quoted for her inspired way of living, of allowing her curiosity to be honest and important and trusting that it will lead her well.
Something is shared when we experience saeculum, something is transmitted.