This is getting pretty sordid! The German bird just called and she seems to have lost it! Between her mumbling and the call dropping I could only pick some words…it seems that their bike conked off along the way after Rohtang and they took a lift in a tourist van (of course she didn’t get the license plate number of the van). They were bone tired and the girl claims to have slept off immediately while Mark decided to grab a snack. This is where it gets really nuts – Just before Leh something inexplicable happened, she claims that the driver switched off the engine and the car still kept moving at a steady pace…as if being pulled by a magnet!! This was near some hill just before Leh. She slept off thinking it was some sort of oxygen deprivation induced hallucination (not the only thing she was high on, I think). When she woke up, Mark was gone. The van driver was spooked as hell and wouldn’t answer any questions. The only good thing (if there’s any good in this) is that the Police have traced the driver. Looks like I’m going to have to head out to India and have a chat with him. In the meantime, Does anyone know about this place? This ‘magnetic hill where cars move on their own’! Please post any info you come across (as comments), and PRAY for my friend mark
Archive for the ‘Mysteries’ Category
Help!
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009Mark’s missing!
Friday, July 3rd, 2009Ok this is a distress post. Mark seems to have disappeared!He’s done this before but this is quite something else. He was supposedly riding up to Leh Ladakh in India with this German girl, they stopped for some supplies in Manali and rode up to Rohtang. It seems they halted there for the night and
rode non-stop after that to Leh but a bit before Leh Mark seems to have disappeared into thin air!! (it’s quite literally thin air up there)
The girl on the phone was hysterical so i asked her to get her head around this and call me again in a few hours but if Mark’s trying to pull off a joke, he’s gone too far this time! Will post again as soon as i know more..
Riding on the Legend Reborn
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009I’m off to the lake districts, for a much needed snoozer and some rest, away from this madness. When I searched for some weather update on the lakes this one caught my eye. Imaginatively titled ‘Hazards’, it says ‘high risk’ at least trice in the same paragraph. Clearly a case of overkill or will I find out otherwise? suffice to say my interest is piqued. An old friend has kindly agreed to let me use his cottage up after the Hardknott pass and I think I might even ride out (on the Triumph, what else) there! The Thunderbird has been giving me the you-don’t-care-for–me-anymore look of late! Come to think of it I’m not really leaving the legend behind; the Triumph Thunderbird is also advertised as the Legend reborn
Hidden stories
Saturday, June 20th, 2009and now the National Gallery (in London, where else) is running a special focus this month on hidden stories and scenes in paintings. Apparently there’s even a trail
that tells you the real story behind the facade of the National gallery.
Thinking of grabbing a quick sandwich on the steps outside (admire the traflagar square and it’s energetic tourists)
and sign up for the story-telling
Theobroma – the food of gods
Friday, May 29th, 2009
If any man has drunk a little too deeply from the cup of physical pleasure; if he has spent too much time at his desk that should have been spent asleep; if his fine spirits have become temporarily dulled; if he finds the air too damp, the minutes too slow, and the atmosphere too heavy to withstand; if he is obsessed by a fixed idea which bars him from any freedom of thought: if he is any of these poor creatures, we say, let him be given a good pint of amber-flavored chocolate….and marvels will be performed. —
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2263247.stm this news report in the beeb about the smuggling of cocoa in Africa took me rushing back to a quiet windswept night spent on an outpost in Ghana. I’d spent a fortnight drawing up plans for a missionary school being built by my good friend George Kapodo and he was repaying the favour by letting me spend a night in wait for a mythic creature that supposedly guards the precious Cocoa! Ghana by the way is the second largest producer of cocoa in the world and some of the finest chocolate makers in the world source the stuff from there.
Kapodo had a taste for the dramatic and he told me many stories about cocoa and its mysterious powers, imagining the somewhat innocuous looking cocoa as an aphrodisiac, a psychoactive food and even the food of devils! Ahh..i can almost smell the warm vapors warming my cheeks on that cold night spent on the farm with kapodo’s tales..but…there was a particular story, a mystery, well…a legend that he told with utmost reverence…(why are the hair on my hand tingling!!)
If I remember correctly, my memory is as tattered as the pages of my passport crammed with indelible stamps of places I’ve seen, smelt and tasted, he mentioned a particular type of cocoa grown in Ghana that was so fine that it was fiercely guarded by mysterious forces and only those who’d earned it would be allowed to partake.
A legend.
Now, as an architect I like things that fit, things that work with logic and I told him exactly what I thought of this TALE..
In the next few posts I’m going to tell a story that’s never been told, of my run-in with this Legend, how right my friend Kapodo was and how I earned it..
