Searching for Shangri-La

In ways, we are all searching for Shangri-La in the sense of looking for a better life, or somewhere better to live it. This collection of stories recounts a few steps of Ron's path on this endless journey, and below is a sample story to whet readers' appetites. This story will occasionally change, but to read the entire collection, you'll need to buy it online at Amazon. To listen to Ron reading this story, click on the play button on the audio player below.

Searching for Shangri-La

​The whine of the plane's engine increases its pitch and my shoulders are thrust back into the seat as we take off. The plane banks, offering a glimpse of patchwork fields below, before the wings slice through a thin layer of cloud, detaching us from the world. The plane levels out, the seatbelt sign goes off, and the passengers settle into the twelve-hour wait to arrive on the other side of the world. Some stroll up and down the aisle, others are plugged into the movie channels, or flick through the pages of the inflight magazine. A long night awaits us, flying from Asia to Europe, moving with the turn of the planet. I take a deep breath, let my eyelids fall and, not for the first time, try to make some sense of my life.
 
Coming of age in the UK during the hippy era (late 1960s in case you weren’t around then), I shunned the goal of a stable career, along with the promise of financial security and respected status, in favour of uncertainty and adventure. Not for me a life of delayed gratification and constant mortgage payments; I preferred to take things as they came, following my instincts even if they didn't seem sensible. By my mid-twenties, I had worked as a bus driver and taxi driver, building labourer and scaffolder, gardener and machine operator. Life in London was becoming drab and routine. On a whim I took a job as a volunteer teacher in Sudan, and without knowing it had started my lifelong search for Shangri La.
 
In a sense I stumbled on it right there, because now, about thirty years and forty or fifty countries later, I have still never met a people as warm, hospitable and generous as the Sudanese. I already had a suspicion that the less people have, the more they are prepared to give, and vice versa. These suspicions were confirmed in Sudan, where I was hardly ever allowed to pay for meals or a roof over my head. In camps made of nothing but sacks and tin on the dust and rock of the desert, I learned the joy of giving, something overlooked in favour of correct table manners and other superficial social graces in my homeland.
 
As a teacher, however, I was unable to repay my hosts for their priceless gift. In the classroom, sixty pairs of eyes looked out from the dark recesses of their faces, desperate for me to explain the text of 'Oliver Twist' to them in a way that would enable them to pass their English exams and get to university in the big city. The cultural divide between Dickensian London and rural Sudan was too great for me to accomplish the task, and rather than them leaving in glory for Khartoum, it was soon myself who made an unheralded exit, having contracted malaria on a trip into the bush. Sweat and shivers shielded my sadness to know that my cosseted background would not allow me to take up a nomad's life in the tropics, and that wherever my Shangri La was, it would not be so lacking in material comforts as that vast nation in the heart of Africa.
 
From sun to snow; from south to north; from poverty to luxury I ran. Sweden was Europe's wealthiest nation at the time and I went there, persuaded by an old girlfriend that I only had to ask to get my share of the rich pickings. Things started great. Living with a government employee, I was instantly entitled to social security payments that made me feel like a millionaire. I walked around the spotless town centre of Norrkoping with a smile on my face, unworried about catching deadly diseases, and passing a couple of hours each day in language classes also generously provided by the government. I settled in to enjoy life in a centrally-heated apartment in snowbound Shangri La.
 
Then came work and winter. The paper mill was set well out of town, an ugly expanse of ochre towers and windowless warehouses in the middle of a forest doomed to provide fodder for exercise books and magazines. My task was to feed the furnace with bark stripped from the trees and dispose of the huge trailers of resulting ash. Despite protective clothing, I went home each night or morning (this was shift work) covered in a grime that would not wash off. Our dump site resembled a post-nuclear vision. The snow, ice and sub-zero temperatures ceased to be so endearing, and the days were down to a few hours of half-light in which car lights were never switched off. Late one night my girlfriend answered the phone to an invitation from another old boyfriend to join him on his yacht touring Polynesian islands. I shrugged my shoulders and packed my bags.
 
The tropics beckoned again, but I had to find somewhere with a few more creature comforts than Sudan. The answer lay on the northern coast of South America. Venezuela was oil-rich, and desperate for English teachers to educate their people working for multinational companies. Its capital Caracas seemed the answer to my dreams - just 20 minutes from the Caribbean coast, with a perfect climate and the scent of easy money everywhere. By now I had learned the tricks of language teaching on a crash course in England, and I set about helping company managers prepare for upcoming visits to the States at the modest rate of $50 an hour.
 
In my free time I breezed around the idyllic beaches, the Andean mountains, the Orinoco Delta and the wondrous table mountains of the Gran Sabana, returning each time tanned and refreshed to my cosy apartment on the slopes of the Avila mountain. Within a couple of years I had a good job at the Central University, was a fluent Spanish speaker, and my foreign accent seemed to amuse the beautiful 'mestizas' of Venezuela, who at the time were walking away with the crown of Miss Universe year after year. It seemed my search was over.
 
During my time there, I saw many other foreign teachers leave within six months, scared off by the hot-blooded and sometimes violent temperament of the locals. I prided myself on my ability to adapt and thought little about the routine of locking and unlocking the multiple locks on the apartment and the car, feeling this was a small price to pay for the kind of exciting life I was leading. But when I was robbed at gun-point one night, and later returned home to find my car gone and apartment ransacked, I realized that my paradise had been a tightrope strung above a chasm of terror, and I had finally slipped off. I decided to cut my losses, withdrew my savings and headed for California.
 
As 'everybody's favorite city', San Francisco was a hot contender in the Shangri La stakes, and my day-to-day existence as a postgrad student (on a Creative Writing program) was nothing short of idyllic. I ran through Golden Gate Park and along Ocean Beach each day, hung out in jazz and blues bars, ate food from every country I'd visited and many more besides. In the long holidays I took off in my trusty Plymouth Valiant to Hollywood and Vegas, the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, Yellowstone and Olympic National Parks. It was easy to imagine the awe in the eyes of the early settlers as they reached the Pacific coast after months of hardship.
 
California is a paradise for anyone with free time, but when my savings ran out and no publisher would print my book of short stories, it was back to the cab rank for me. Working nights, I sat with my head lolling at 2 am outside the Daly City BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) terminal, praying that some overworked pen-pusher would have fallen asleep on the last train and need a ride all the way back to Oakland. But most of the radio calls were from pushers and pimps, hookers and hawkers of dubious goods. After spending the most terrifying half hour of my life with a self-proclaimed multiple murderer in the passenger's seat, I knew I was no longer likely to stumble on Shangri La in California, so plotted my escape.
 
Where else to turn but the land of smiles, saffron robes and non–violence? Thailand is one of the few tropical countries never to be colonized, and has a history full of cultural and artistic achievements. I settled into Chiang Mai in the lush hills of the north, taught English to enthusiastic and eager students at the local university and wandered round exotic hilltribe villages at the weekend. The people were warm and gentle, the food the best I had ever tasted, and the living was easy. I felt this was the end of the road. After all, wasn't Shangri La supposed to be somewhere in the foothills of the Himalaya?
 
Then climate change kicked in, and what had previously been a couple of hot and humid months between the end of the cool season and the onset of the rains suddenly became the smog season. Visibility dropped to almost nothing during this time, and Chiang Mai’s guardian mountain, Doi Suthep, disappeared completely from sight. The daily count of large particles in the atmosphere was constantly in the red, indicating grave danger to anyone inhaling it, yet the face masks that everyone started to wear seemed totally ineffective. Still I was determined to stick it out, until one morning I watched a group of bare-footed monks walking through the haze with alms bowls in their hands and what looked like gas masks on their heads. No doubt we’d all be wearing such hideous headgear soon, all of us cut off from each other by our survival suits. Before my lungs became choked with dust or my mind became alienated from my surroundings, I booked my ticket out of there.
 
So here I am, sitting on a plane and still searching. My eyes flick open; it's just after dawn and a veiled sun sheds a peachy light over fluffy clouds that look just like pillows. Then suddenly, in this hushed cabin, some five miles above the Earth, I have a revelation. Of course I will never find Shangri La in any particular country. It was under my nose each time I flitted from place to place. For how much closer can a human get to paradise than sailing silently through the air at six hundred miles an hour, being waited on by a dreamlike hostess with a cake and coffee at dawn? Now I can relax. My search is finally over.