“Planned a mission to Mars lately? Ever replaced a gyro on an orbiting telescope travelling at 17,600mph in a full vacuum?”

There just aren’t enough recruitment ads like this. These are the opening lines of NASA’s guide to employee benefits for its next intake of astronaut candidates – which is open for applications right now. Being an astronaut has been a dream to young people ever since the dawn of the Mercury and Vostok programs, but for a select few, it can be a reality.

But have you got what it takes to be an astronaut? And just what is it that you need to become one? To find out, DCM assembled some of the most knowledgeable voices imaginable: the head of astronaut selection at NASA, and two of the nine surviving men who have not only gone into space, but walked on the surface of the moon. You can’t get better advice than that.

To see this article as it ran, as Discovery Channel Magazine’s cover story, click here: Discovery_How to become an astronaut

THE GLAMOUR

“I was naked, lying on my side on a table in the NASA Flight Medicine Clinic bathroom, probing at my rear end with the nozzle of an enema. Welcome to the astronaut selection process, I thought.” So wrote Mike Mullane, who flew three times on the Space Shuttle.

For astronauts, the rewards of their missions are almost unimaginably good: sights that few others will ever see, and a chance to be part of the history of human endeavour. But all who have worked in the space corps are keen to stress that there is a lot of hard work, discomfort and a surprising amount of boredom involved in getting there.

Consider this: Alan Bean had one of the most stellar careers of all astronauts. He flew on Apollo 12 and was the fourth man to walk on the moon. He was mission commander on the second manned flight to the Skylab space station, and set a then-record for time in space. But in an 18-year career at NASA, he went to space just twice. Many fly once in an entire career. Vastly more time is spent waiting than adventuring.

“It was very frustrating,” Bean recalls from the Houston studio where, today, he paints pictures of his memories of the lunar surface. “Other people in my group were flying and I wasn’t. I felt that I wasn’t measuring up to the guys who were being selected.” But it was the same for all potential astronauts, even in the Apollo era when they tended to be fearless and hot-blooded “right stuff” test pilots from the Navy and Air Force who wanted nothing more than to get airborne. “Even in the early days there was a lot of preparation that went into a flight; it wasn’t just ‘let’s go strap it on’,” recalls Charlie Duke, the 10^th man to walk on the moon, on Apollo 16, who had been selected while a test pilot under legendary aviator Chuck Yeager. “So for an astronaut patience was a good character trait, because you needed to wait your turn.” He waited six years between selection as an astronaut candidate and flying in 1972 – his only ever flight into space.

But how to get into the queue in the first place? It’s no longer like Bean and Duke’s time, when you had to be a pilot (and a man) to stand a chance. For NASA at least, a surprisingly broad range of people are considered. And it really all starts with education. “To get to this astronaut selection office, you have to come through the door of the Johnson Space Center,” says Duane Ross, head of the astronaut selection board at NASA. “But that’s the second door. The first is the door to the school building.”

While NASA no longer requires doctoral level degrees, as it did when the focus started to shift from pilots to scientists in the late 1960s, it does require an undergraduate degree in engineering, science or maths. You no longer need to have flight experience – that can be trained later – and you certainly don’t need to have been in the armed forces. “As the Shuttle progressed, fewer and fewer who were selected were pilot astronauts,” recalls Duke, who was around for the early years of the Space Shuttle program. “There were more mission specialists and payload specialists. Plus, of course, 50% of the competition was cut out for my generation – because no women were allowed.”

In fact, you’re more likely to be restricted by health – which obviously must be good – and by height than ability to fly a plane: the earliest Mercury and Gemini-era astronauts could be no taller than five feet eleven, so as to fit into the tiny one-man capsules, and even today the height limit for the latest NASA intake is between 62 and 75 inches, to ensure you can fit in the Russian Soyuz capsules that NASA currently has to use to take astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). “If you’re going to fly in space, you’ve got to fit in the spaceship,” says Ross. More than just height, he says NASA assesses what are called anthropometric requirements, such as the lengths of your arms and your legs, as spacesuits are also constrained by size.

Nationality is still an issue; NASA only accepts American citizens. But it’s no longer like the 1960s, when only a Russian or American could hope to go into space. Today, people from 38 nations have flown in space – and there’s every chance that the next person to set foot on the moon could be from China.

Don’t give up

The next thing you need is persistence. The first time Bean applied for the Apollo program, he was rejected. “They didn’t ever tell me why,” he recalls. But he noticed everyone who was selected was older and more experienced than him, so he just got more experience and applied again, this time successfully. In his view, it wasn’t just a question of being top of the class – which he was not, either academically, or as a pilot. “You need to be a certain IQ so you can learn things quickly, but you don’t have to be the smartest guy in the class. You’ve got to be able to get along with all sorts of other people, and not everybody can do that either. You don’t just hire a valedictorian and hope they work out.”

Some NASA intakes have attracted 8,000 applications, and the last time, 3,500 applied. 113 were interviewed, 48 got to a second interview – and just nine were hired. “There are two messages,” Ross says. “One, it’s very competitive. But two, the one guarantee is that if you don’t apply, you can’t get picked.” Like Bean, he stresses that being a genius isn’t the whole point. “It’s pretty simple: you need nice people. The world’s best scientists or pilots may not be the team players you need to go fly in space, particularly now we’re flying six months on the International Space Station. There is a huge personal aspect to this.”

Study once selected is intense. Ross calls it “kind of like getting a doctorate degree in being an astronaut in a two year period.” Since most space travel in the world today is geared around the ISS – and Russia’s Soyuz craft are currently the only way of reaching it since the Space Shuttle stopped flying – it is thought that astronaut training is fairly similar in Russia, Europe and the US today. On the menu are training to understand ISS systems, competence at flying (in NASA’s case in T-38 jets), land and water survival training, spacesuits, EVAs (extra-vehicular activity, or spacewalks), robotics on board, and mastery of Russian.

Parts of this are guaranteed to set the pulse racing: the jet flying, the simulators, the so-called Vomit Comet flights that simulate weightlessness. There’s plenty of work in 300-pound spacesuits in deep swimming pools.

There is, though, a lot of repetition. “In our lunar module simulator I probably landed on the moon 2,000 times over the time I was there,” recalls Duke. “I crashed it a few times too. But in the one that counted, we pulled it off.” In his case, one almost unique branch of training was the lunar rover, which he and John Young spent much of their three days on the moon driving around at what looked a fair old clip (in fact 11 miles an hour – the record for the fastest land speed attained on the moon).

Life in space

So you’ve waited the best part of a decade for your chance; you’re on the launchpad, ready to go. What should you expect about life in space?

OK, let’s deal with the obvious one first. Apollo veterans say the question they still get asked most frequently today is how you go to the bathroom. “When you’re on the moon and you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go,” Duke says. “You don’t run over to the nearest rest room and say ‘excuse me’.” In Duke’s day, when he was getting dressed in the lunar module to prepare to step onto the moon, the first thing he had to put on was something called an FCD, basically a diaper, followed by another similar gadget for urine, followed by a set of long underwear filled with plastic tubes to distribute cold water around the body and keep him cool. “One of the most efficient air conditioners I’ve ever had the pleasure of being associated with.”

By the Shuttle era, flight suits for take-off and spacewalks featured a sort of condom male astronauts would roll on before flight to take care of their urine; creating a similar system for women has been an enduring challenge. One of the biggest problems shuttle astronauts talk of is when they’re still on the ground, strapped on their backs, facing upwards, for several hours as the various checks are conducted during countdown. That condom device is all well and good, but try urinating directly upwards when strapped on your back. On board orbiting craft or space stations things are a little easier, with functioning toilets that never existed in the Apollo era, where they had to try to persuade their waste to descend into bags in a zero-gravity environment. “This bag,” says Duke, “is not a triumph of technology, believe me.”

Zero gravity is said to be a magnificent, freeing, euphoric experience, but it brings some curious reactions. Duke recalls zero gravity as “really fun, but at first very uncomfortable. Your head throbs with every heartbeat, your sinuses fill up; it’s like having a headcold. But within hours, everything adjusts.” And spacesickness has been a challenge ever since Apollo 8, when mission commander Frank Borman vomited and had diarrhoea, filling the cramped capsule with globules of vomit and faeces. Tricky to maintain mission camaraderie in those circumstances.

Odder still, astronauts routinely get taller in space, a consequence of the vertebrae of the back stretching out. “I grew about an inch and a half on my way to the moon,” Duke recalls.

Bean went into uncharted territory when he went 59 days in space on Skylab. “My concern to begin with was that we would get weaker and weaker as time went on,” he says. Much effort was spent on working out an exercise regime. “We began to understand what humans can do, which is why now they can go up on stations for six months or more and be OK when they come home.” This has given him some useful ideas about space tourism. “Someday when passengers go up in space, they’re going to have to spend an hour a day with a physical trainer. If one says ‘I feel sick today’, the captain’s going to say: ‘you got a choice. Exercise, or you go in the brig. Otherwise when you get back you’re going to die and then blame it on me.’”

NO FEAR

One thing early astronauts speak very little about is fear. It’s very much the Apollo-era way to be dead-pan about death (Duke on the parachutes on his returning capsule after re-entry: “Without those chutes, we would hit the water at a great rate of speed that would spoil your whole day.”) But both Duke and Bean had every reason to be fearful. Bean’s ship was hit by lightning in the first minute of its ascent, prompting Pete Conrad’s famous remark: “The flight was extremely normal for the first 36 seconds and after that it got very interesting”. One of its guidance systems was knocked out. And before his flight, Duke had seen the dangers while on the back-up crew of Apollo 13, which suffered an explosion and came within a whisker of losing its crew before a rescue even more remarkable than the flight itself.

But they were well trained and knew the odds. “We knew about risk before we joined up; we’d been doing things like that in airplanes for our whole career,” says Bean. “Some who weren’t so good at it got killed. You have to have luck. Look at Challenger: no matter how good an astronaut you are, you’re going to get killed.”He recalls Neil Armstrong saying he had a 90% chance of coming back alive and a 50% chance of making a landing; asked about his thoughts ahead of his own mission, Bean says his odds were “about the same. You have in your head these thoughts, but you think: is it worth it? Obviously, to us, it was worth it.” Chillingly, he adds: “Losing two crews on the shuttle [Challenger and Columbia] was better than we thought. We thought we’d lose more.” It’s a price crews are willing to pay to do what they love. “When you want to explore, it’s not like the American public think it is. You are on the cutting edge of what you can do.”

For Duke, the one moment he recalls fear was somewhat comical. He and John Young had spent three days on the moon and had achieved a great deal; it was almost time to go home, and with all their work done, in one-eighth earth gravity, they decided to conduct their own Lunar Olympics and set the record for the high jump. They began bouncing, then Duke fell flat on his back. You’ve probably seen the famous footage of Duke falling on his front earlier in the mission when attempting to conduct a drill experiment; his bouncing, press-up attempts to get upright again added to the sense of fun and humour of that whole mission. But falling on your back was a very different deal. “That was scary,” he says now. “That backpack was not designed for that kind of impact. If I’ve split my suit open, I’m dead.” He survived – and his high jump record still stands.

Nevertheless, acknowledgement of potential danger is essential. Mullane says that during his training, astronaut candidates for the Shuttle program were played the tape recording of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee as they burned to death in the testing of Apollo 1 in January 1967, just to remind them what they were getting into. And, indeed, many members of Mullane’s class did die on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.

There are sacrifices, too; separation from family is taxing, and not just on the astronauts. When Duke wrote his autobiography he did so in partnership with his wife, who wrote openly and movingly about how the depression she felt in being neglected during Duke’s career led her almost to suicide.

SO NOW WHAT?

For the Apollo moonwalker astronauts in particular, another question is just how you find meaning in your life after having done something extraordinary. “After Apollo I was standing on top of the mountain,” Duke says; “…there was nowhere else to go.” It’s fascinating to see the variety of paths their lives took. Buzz Aldrin suffered clinical depression and alcoholism after his return before successfully beating both; Armstrong became something of a recluse. Edgar Mitchell found belief in the paranormal and faith healing, while Harrison Schmitt became a Republican senator in New Mexico, and something of a sceptic about climate change.

For Duke, after a few years in the space shuttle program and a shift to business, he found meaning in religion. “I found peace and a purpose through my faith,” he says. And Bean found perhaps the most distinctive next phase of all: he has spent the later years of his life painting images from the Apollo missions, using small amounts of moondust from his mission patches, and applying texture through a bronze cast of his moonboot and the hammer he used for experiments while on the moon. “When I’m dead and gone these paintings will remain, and tell stories that would be lost any other way,” he says. When DCM calls, he is painting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s lunar module, the Eagle, flying over a crater looking for its landing site.

Have we put you off with this list of challenges, sacrifices and negatives? The final word, then, to a positive, to remind you what it’s all about. We asked Charlie Duke to cast his mind back 40 years to the Descartes Highlands of the moon and tell us what image stayed most clearly in his head. He thought for a moment.

“On our second EVA, we drove the rover to the south and up the side of Stone Mountain,” he says. “When we got up two or three hundred feet off the valley floor, we turned the rover around on a little bench on the hill and looked across the valley of the Cayley Plains. There was a distinct gap between the lunar surface and the blackness of space, with the lunar module sitting in the middle of the valley. It was a very dramatic sight… the beauty of the moon.”

It is for memories like this that people will always dream of being an astronaut.

Sidebars

Charlie Duke’s famous line

If you don’t know Charlie Duke by name, you know his voice. One of the most famous radio exchanges in history took place when Neil Armstrong piloted Apollo 11 on to the surface of the moon for the first time in 1969. Having found his planned landing site unsuitable, he flew over a crater and was almost out of fuel when he finally landed. “Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed,” said Armstrong. A broad southern drawl responded: “Roger, Twanq… Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”That was Duke, serving as CAPCOM on the ground in Houston.

Today, he recalls: “The actual moment of landing was one of intense relief. I remember the tension in mission control was the highest I have ever felt it. There was dead silence, which was extremely rare, as people focused on their consoles. When Neil came back and said ‘The Eagle has landed’, it was like a balloon popping in mission control. I was so excited I couldn’t even pronounce ‘tranquility’. And it was true: we were holding our breath waiting for that landing.”

Charlie Duke’s famous measles

Charlie Duke had one of the world’s most famous cases of German measles. In inadvertently exposing Ken Mattingly to the illness, he caused Mattingly’s withdrawal from the Apollo 13 mission just three days before its ill-fated launch; it would have been him, rather than replacement Jack Swigert, who flicked the switch that caused the craft’s oxygen tank to explode, triggering the most audacious rescue in history. In real life Mattingly still got to fly to the moon, but on Apollo 16 instead – with Duke, the man who exposed him to the measles in the first place (which, incidentally, he never got).

Office politics on the moon

Even in the glorious Apollo era there were office politics when astronauts were jostling for assignments on to lunar crews. Alan Bean, prior to his assignment on Apollo 12, decided he must have been failing to show his good qualities to Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard, the Mercury 7-era astronauts with the greatest power in assigning Apollo crews. “If I had my time over, I would learn to hunt and go hunting, because Deke was a big hunter,” he says. “There’s politics in everything, it’s just the way it is.”

Looking back he thinks he was impeded by his tendency to go to Shepard and Slayton with occasionally crazy ideas; his colleague and mentor Pete Conrad, who would be commander on Apollo 12, told him to keep the weirder ones to himself. “I learned to shut the f*ck up. It worked out OK.”

But today, Bean thinks the differences in his approach serve him well – in his painting, such as using moon boot soles and a lunar hammer to give texture to his creations.  “If Al and Deke had been on my committee as a painter and I’d told them that, they’d have said: that’s a crazy idea, Bean. They’d be looking at me like: that is really stupid.”

Record breaker

The man who has spent the most time in space is Sergei Krikalev, a Russian cosmonaut. He spent time on Mir – he was up there when the Soviet Union disintegrated beneath him – flew on the first US/Russian joint space shuttle mission in 1994, and was one of the first two men to enter the International Space Station in 1988. By the end of his sixth mission in 2005 he had spent 803 days, 9 hours and 39 minutes in space.

Changing politics

It’s no secret the Apollo missions were launched primarily to beat Russia at something: they were a function of the cold war. “Apollo was a political decision in the beginning: a race to space with the Russians,” Duke recalls, although he said once selected, it was never really an issue. “The political context quickly changed to a scientific one.”

Today US-Russia relations have improved so much that American astronauts must use Russian Soyuz capsules to get into space, and are expected to learn Russian in their basic training. Russian cosmonauts must learn English and do parts of their training in the USA.

Instead, if there’s a space-race competitor today, it’s China. “I don’t have a sense of what China does at all,” says Ross. Well, the China Manned Space Engineering Office didn’t return DCM’s calls, but we do know this: the first Chinese man, Yang Liwei, flew to space onboard Shenzhou 5 in 2003; China launched a module called Tiangong 1 into space in September, then an unmanned ship, Shenzhou 8, to dock with it in October; and the first section of a permanent space station should be in place by 2015, with the full station complete by 2020 – when the International Space Station is due to retire. Further ahead, China has announced plans to send a man to the moon by 2025, to build a lunar observatory, and to send missions to Mars.

But increasingly, politics aren’t going to matter at all as the business of space travel – particularly cargo and space tourism – passes from state-backed agencies like NASA to the commercial world of groups like Virgin Galactic. Once it becomes viable to earn a profit from these ventures, expect space to become very crowded with private sector businesses.

Passport in Senegal

When Space Shuttle flights departed from Cape Canaveral in Florida, they had an option of a transatlantic landing if one engine failed, which on some launches would put them in Dakar, Senegal. To deal with this possibility, one astronaut would be sent all the way to Dakar International Airport to help air traffic control – with their entire crew’s passports and pre-arranged Senegal visas. Mike Mullane wrote: “I had a vision of standing in the customs line at Dakar airport in our shuttle flight suits with our helmets in the crook of our arms while a bureaucrat asked: ‘Anything to declare?’”

What’s next?

Since NASA no longer has a shuttle, why apply? In the short term, astronauts are being trained for the International Space Station. But a new multi-purpose crew vehicle is being designed (known as Orion), capable of taking humans beyond earth orbit. Further afield are plans to visit an asteroid.

But for Ross there’s one ambition that matters above all others. “For me, since I was a kid, all I think about is going to Mars,” he says. “That’s got to be one of the first destinations we go to. That’s the next hill we’ve got to go climb.”

Other missions will include developing and deploying a successor to the Hubble space telescope, and exploring what is probably the most exciting celestial body in our solar system – Jupiter’s moon of Europa, an ice-covered moon believed to have a water ocean beneath it. If there’s life elsewhere in our solar system, Europa’s our best candidate.

Advice from the man

Nobody’s advice is more relevant than the man in charge of astronaut selection. So, Duane Ross, what should budding astronauts do? “Don’t do anything just for the sake of getting to be an astronaut. A good education will help you whether you get to be an astronaut or not. Getting in to science and engineering is a good place to be. Also, it’s not just academics; be well rounded, do a lot of things, show teamwork, and enjoy working with other people in different situations and environments.” So far NASA has selected 330 astronauts since 1959.

[Facts and figures]

1. $45,360: The minimum price to commission an Alan Bean original.
2. 130-140: the measured heart rate of Alan Bean and colleagues when lightning struck Apollo 12 at launch.
3. 12: number of men who walked on the moon, in six successful missions. 24 men have been to the moon – three of them twice – but only half landed on it, and none more than once.
4. 1963: year Soviet Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. 20 years later Sally Ride became the first American woman in space on the Challenger Space Shuttle.
5. 100: kilometres to the Kármán Line, where space officially starts (though NASA designates anyone who reaches more than 50 miles in altitude as an astronaut). Either way, it’s not far: you could drive there in an hour if your car would go straight up.
6. US$64,724 to US$141,715: pay scale for NASA’s latest intake of astronaut candidates (most new recruits will be at the bottom).
7. Charlie Duke left a picture of his family on the moon, including a dog called Booster – which provided a paw-print.
8. Among the benefits NASA lists for becoming an astronaut are “free parking”.
9. Transcripts of Bean’s flight are filled with Pete Conrad’s country and western music, starting with San Antonio Rose.
10. Apollo astronauts underwent not only the incomparable thrust of a Saturn Five rocket, but the jolts when one stage of the rocket stopped and was discarded and the next one fired up. Duke said it was “like a train wreck. So violent my first thought was we’d blown up.”
11. Apollo 16 was nearly aborted just a few miles from the lunar surface.
12. The first thing Duke and Young were ordered to do after landing on the moon was sleep.
13. Duke had a leaking valve in the drink bag within his space suit as he walked on the moon. Frequently a globule of orange juice would come out and start flying around his helmet. “It was very frustrating. It would hit my nose and start crawling up my head.”
14. Some found moonwalking easier than others. “John [Young[ could run like a gazelle,” Duke says. “I just waddled around like a duck.”
15. When Bean opened and Conrad opened their checklist on the moon, they found a picture of a naked woman had been added, presumably by a back-up crew, with a note: “See any interesting hills or valleys?”
16. On the way home Apollo 16’s Ken Mattingly did a space walk. As he did so his wedding ring, which had earlier been lost, drifted out of the capsule and into space – but bounced off the back of his helmet right back into Duke’s hand.
17. The last man on the moon was Eugene Cernan, who flew with Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17 in December 1972. The youngest remaining moonwalkers are in their late 70s; Bean believes there will one day be nobody alive who has walked on the moon.

Qantas The Australian Way, December 2011

In 1997, Arundhati Roy’s book, The God of Small Things, introduced the world to the southern Indian state of Kerala. In truth, it’s an odd sort of a cultural flag-bearer: it is a story whose key moments hinge on prejudice, betrayal and loss, and doesn’t always portray its community in a positive light. But its language is so evocative, from the “fatly baffled” bluebottles and the “nights, clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation” of the opening lines, that it has served as an incantation for millions of readers. Many have found it so seductive that they have come to see the place for themselves.

Today, the areas Roy wrote about scarcely need any help in attracting visitors. A few miles from the towns she described sits Kumarakom, where resorts are thriving to attract tourists to one of India’s most beautiful regions.

To see the article as it ran in Qantas: The Australian Way, click here: qa1211_Kerala.indd

Just two hours from the city of Kochi, which has direct flights from Singapore and the UK among other places, Kumarakom has become a leading place to enjoy one of southern India’s most compelling attractions: the Kuttanad backwaters.

It is impossible to discuss this place with anyone who has been here without the expression “god’s own country” turning up sooner or later – it’s part of state branding now –  but it is unarguably magnificent. On converted rice barges called kettuvallam, guests drift around a network of inland lakes and rivers, watching everyday life proceed on the banks: people bathing and washing clothes in the water; carpenters artfully chiseling Jesus and Virgin Mary statues for the Syrian Christian churches of the area; men standing in tiny boats and herding hundreds of ducklings up waterways toward dedicated farms.

The houseboat experience, while fully entrenched – around 500 of these boats ply the backwaters – is not (yet) ruinous or twee, and is simply one of the most relaxing and peaceful things one can do in India. Kumarakom, sitting on Lake Vembanad which connects to the backwaters, is perfect for exploring it: since the resorts back on to the lake, houseboats come straight to their door to collect them.

Kumarakom is also a starting point for boat trips through the more intricate and less visited networks of waterways that lead many miles inland between the paddy fields, where sometimes the rivers are all but invisible beneath the weight of surface duckweed covered with blossoming hyacinths. An hour or so in one of these boats will take you to Arundhati Roy’s home town, Ayemenem, in which most of the action of her book takes place; the house and factory are based on real locations (and the pickle factory is run by Roy’s uncle).

One Kumarakom location, the Vivanta, operated by the Taj group, is where the area’s tourist industry and Roy’s literature coincide. The resort’s centerpiece is a grand, 134-year-old house built by a missionary called George Baker, and housed four generations of his family before the last of them left in the 1970s, after which it passed first to the state, then to the Taj group. Fans of the book will know this as the secretive History House, in which the novel’s devastating climactic scenes take place; Baker, in the book, is kari saipu.  The resort has handled its heritage with some deference, and was strengthening the building’s roof and upper stories at the time of writing; it has built a limited number of guest villas between the house and the lake, among ponds designed to nurture local birdlife. Roy wrote of “cold stone floors and billowing, ship-shaped shadows on the walls, where waxy ancestors… with breath that smelled of yellow maps whispered papery whispers.” And, while it’s hard to feel that in the bars and hotels that sit in the former Baker family rooms, the place remains evocative and atmospherically decorated.

Roy was somewhat scathing about the tourist influx into Kerala. “Toy histories for rich tourists to play in,” she (or, more precisely, the book’s narrator) called it; “history and literature enlisted by commerce.” She bemoaned the compression of Keralan traditional kathakali performances, “collapsed and amputated”, and mocked the “old communists, who now worked as fawning bearers in colourful ethnic clothes, stooped slightly behind their trays of drinks.”

Nevertheless, Kerala and tourists do appear to have embraced rather well so far: the interaction is still friendly, the waves from the shore apparently genuine, the people engaging and not obviously cynical. As always, there’s a risk: in the backwaters, the impact of five hundred barges running daily on diesel cannot help but be felt eventually. And there are ever fewer children along the main byways who have not learned the ubiquitous: “One pen! One pen!” But tourism has been better planned along the backwaters than in many other places in India.

Kerala is a fascinating state, politically and culturally, and this too forms part of the texture of Roy’s book. Kerala and West Bengal are among the only places anywhere in the world to have democratically elected a Communist government, and both states have consistently voted them back in again ever since. Several side-effects of this are visible in the state today: high literacy; an orderly plotting of land; and, apparently, a higher representation of women in bureaucracy.

And, while local theatre and dance is no doubt compressed as Roy complained, it is at least made central to tourists in the resorts, along with many other local charms: the practice of ayurvedic medicine and massage, which thrives in the hotel spas as well as in local towns; and Keralan food, quite different to other Indian cuisines, with widespread use of the local bounty of coconut and mango.

Kumarakom is just going to get bigger. A Radisson has opened here now, and hoteliers report growing tourist numbers both domestic and foreign. British lead the charge, with Australians somewhat unrepresented: they tend to head further north. But not the least of Kerala’s attractions is that it offers the magnificence of India with a palpable dilution in the hassle involved in enjoying it. It’s a peaceful, calmer India, and those who overlook it for the tout-clogged riches of Rajasthan and Agra are missing a trick. There are certain places where you tell your closest friends to go there before it gets ruined, but you don’t tell everyone because you don’t want to be part of the ruining. This is one of those places.

BOX: Elsewhere in Kerala.

Kerala has it all. It is served by two international airports, in Kochi (Cochin) and Thiruvanathapuram (Trivandrum) – many travelers enter by one and leave by the other. Aside from the world-famous backwaters, attractions include:

• Kerala has some of India’s best beaches, although Australians will be disappointed by their cleanliness. Near Trivandrum, Kovalam is the most developed beach centre, with top-drawer resorts, though it has correspondingly lost much sense of local charm; those in search of a more Keralan experience instead head further north to Varkala, where the beach is flanked by laterite headlands and the hotels perch above it on a scenic cliff.
• Kerala also offers some of the best wildlife reserves in the south. Arguably the best, the Tholpetty and Muthanga reserves within the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, take some getting to but offer wonderful scenery, good eco-resorts, and occasionally even sightings of tigers. Closer to the cities, Periyar, centred on an artificial lake, is a good place for spotting wild elephants; Thattekkad is a world-class bird sanctuary; and Eravikulam is famous for its antelopes.
• Munnar is a tea-growing town high in the hills with beautiful mountains and forests. It’s also close to the Eravikulam wildlife reserve.
• Of the cities, Kochi/Cochin is perhaps the most attractive, with a harbour and well-preserved colonial architecture embracing the Portuguese, Dutch and British eras. Its signature sight is the lines of Chinese fishing nets, a beautiful image at sunset.
• Kerala is the best state for experiencing Ayurveda – whether a massage or lengthy stays for holistic herbal treatments. It is also known for its kathakali theatre and the kalarippayattu martial arts. Kochi in particular offers a range of kathakali experiences, from a one hour introduction to (literally) all-nighters. One of the highlights, for many, is to get there early to watch the extravagant make-up being applied.

Discovery Channel Magazine, 2011

Interview with Stephen Cave – author of Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization

You argue that mankind would cope better physically than psychologically with immortality. If we were unprepared, would productivity drop, you think? Would we fall into a “longevity funk”?

Yes, we would fall into a longevity funk. The deep problem is this: the value of a thing is related to its scarcity — someone conscious of their mortality values their time and aims to spend it wisely because they know their days are numbered. But if our days were not numbered, this incentive disappears: given infinity, time would lose its worth. And once time is worthless, it becomes impossible to make rational decisions about how to spend it (eg, when to stop studying and start work; or just when to get out of bed. Life as we know it may be too short to watch daytime TV, but eternity wouldn’t be). The consequences of this for an individual would be bad enough; for a civilisation of such ditherers it would be disastrous.

If this speculation of infinite time sounds a little abstract, we can look at the experience of those who suddenly realise their time is very finite. People who narrowly escape death frequently experience a realisation of the shortness of life and at the same time a new found joy in its preciousness. The psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom who works with the terminally ill has noted that even those diagnosed with diseases such as cancer experience an “enhanced sense of living… a vivid appreciation of the elemental facts of life… and deeper communication with loved ones.” So evidence suggests that life is already so long that we fail to appreciate it — more time, or indeed infinite time, could only exacerbate this.

You suggest death plays an important part in our motivation levels to act, and reinvent ourselves. Is death like the ultimate deadline that provokes us to act now?

Yes, death is the source of all our deadlines. It enables us to shape a life and make decisions about how to spend it. Given indefinite time, such decisions become meaningless or even impossible.

Yet surely eventually, without the immediate focus on death, people might spend more time on making this planet a more liveable place? Wouldn’t we see more long-term thinking and planning from people and companies, knowing that we’re not going anywhere else, any time soon?

This seems to me unlikely. People today are short-termist, even though they can reasonably expect to live for eighty years, and even though the world they create will be inherited by their children. People will always prefer jam today. And given finite resources and infinite time, this could get the human race into a lot of trouble.

If immortality is not the good news we expect, might science better focus on improving the lives we have, rather than prolonging them?

Prolonging lives is a worthy cause — but not at any price. Longevity is increasing at the impressive rate of two years per decade (meaning those born in 1970, say, can expect to leave two years longer than those born in 1960). But only one quarter of this additional time is spent healthy. In other words, of those additional two years, 18 months are spent in ill health or disability. We can all expect to spend many of those extra years unable to wash or dress ourselves, unable to recognise loved ones, our senses fading and our strength gone. We are not so much living longer as dying slower.

There are two revolutions we need before a new longevity revolution: the first is the one that brings long life to the disadvantaged of the world — we should worry about whether children in poorer countries are living to see their first birthday before we worry about whether we will see our hundredth. Second, we need a revolution in care for the very elderly, including both better facilities and more research into diseases such as dementia that will soon be affecting a huge proportion of the population.

Your recent article said that you weren’t worried about the ability to cope from a resources perspective. Why not?

The point is perhaps not that we would definitely be able to cope materially if everyone became immortal, but more that if a resource-crisis is coming, then it is coming regardless. This is the maths: If people stopped dying, the world would start to fill up a little faster. Currently, some 135 million people are born each year. At the same time, every year around 57 million people die. So 78 million more people per year are coming than going — hence population growth, at a rate of about 1.1%. Now imagine nobody dies: instead of a mere 78 million extra people each year, the world is burdened with all those 135 million babies with no one shifting over to make space for them. The growth rate is therefore instantly pushed up to 1.9%.

But this is lower than the population growth rate seen for most of the 1960s and 1970s, when it was over 2% — and we coped then (albeit with ups and downs). Immortality for all would mean that instead of reaching the 10 billion mark in 2083, as currently predicted by the UN, we might hit it at the slightly earlier date of 2050.

So if we are going to hit a resources crunch, immortality would mean we would hit it a bit sooner. But people who live longer tend to have fewer children (this is the real world trend) — and indeed a fifth of women in many developed countries are already choosing to have no children. So it is possible that we would adjust to immortality by foregoing offspring. (Not that I’m advocating such a world, having two small daughters who I would not want to forego!)

Lake Vostok is one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world: about the area of Lake Ontario, and much deeper. But you’ve never seen it. Neither has any other human being. That’s because it’s almost four kilometres under the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, kept liquid by the pressure of the ice above it. And it’s been in complete isolation from the rest of the world for millions of years – since before the evolution of mankind.

But we are probably just weeks away from penetrating this lake for the first time. In November a team of Russian scientists and engineers will return to Antarctica to take the last step in a decades-long effort to drill to the lake. They are just metres away already. And when they break through, the secrets of the most pristine and remote wilderness on earth will be revealed – a discovery that many in the scientific community wish could be left unmade.

To see this article as it ran in Discovery Channel Magazine, click here: 21. BIG DRILL

Vostok is so remote we only became certain of its existence after analysing satellite data in the 1990s, following curious British radar soundings 20 years earlier. It so happened that it was directly underneath Vostok Station, a facility the Russians had set up in the 1950s.

The Russians, without knowing there was a lake there, had been conducting deep drilling for ice cores since 1970, and continued towards the lake before stopping in 1999 amid concerns about contaminating the lake. Progress would be halted for eight years of debate with the international community, but drilling resumed in 2005 and last February reached 3,720 metres – probably about 50 metres from the surface. Then, tantalisingly close, they had to fly out on February 6 to get the last plane out before the winter set in.

So what do we know about Vostok? “We know this is the largest sub-glacial lake in the world,” says Valery Lukin, head of the Russian Antarctic Expedition. “We know the character of its coastline, the thickness of the ice sheet, the thickness of the water and the sedimentary rocks.” He says the lake has been untouched by any external force for “many millions of years. I believe the lake was formed before the glaciation epoch in the Antarctic – and that took place 35 million years ago.”

We don’t know, but can estimate, exactly what the water is like: Lukin believes there is an upper layer of fresh water, and beneath it a layer of mineralised water, with geothermal activity beneath it. “We assume the surface layer is very rich in strongly dissolved oxygen, which kills all living organisms.” But not the layer beneath. And that’s where things get interesting.

Ice cores taken from above the lake – so formed from frozen lake water below, not glaciations above – have shown some very strange findings. “In the cores we have detected bacteria – the same sort of bacteria which inhabits very hot water,” Lukin says. It’s similar, he says, to bacteria found in the geysers of Yellowstone national park, or the smoking underwater cones along the mid-Atlantic ridge. Not what one would expect here: Vostok Station is home to the lowest temperature ever recorded on earth, minus 89.2 ̊C.

Reaching the lake, and learning from it, brings together an eclectic cast of characters. Lukin, who has headed the Russian Antarctic Expedition for 21 years and has had direct involvement with Vostok since 1994, spent the first 20 years of his career as an oceanographer, once leading a landmark US-Russian expedition to the Weddell Sea that established a station on drifting ice. Today he is more of an administrator, co-ordinating matters from St Petersburg, and will not be at Vostok for the breakthrough.

The team on the ground is typically of 10 people, eight drillers and two glaciologists, who will work in shifts 24 hours a day on the drilling (if you stop, it freezes in the borehole). The man in charge of the drill, and of all operations on the ground, will be Nikolay Vasiliev – not a scientist or a polar explorer but a drilling specialist from the St Petersburg State Mining Institute. The two glaciologists assist the drillers with knowledge about the ice, and then examine the cores. “I make preliminary measurements to determine the total length of the ice core, and the depth of the borehole,” says Alexey Ekaykin of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, one of the glaciologists who has served on previous teams and should go back in November. “Then I cut the ice core into samples, and measure properties such as electrical connectivity.”

Another key man, not on the ground in Vostok, is Sergey Bulat, a molecular biologist from the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute. Pulling bacteria out of an ice core is a treacherous business: there’s the constant risk of contamination from drilling fluid and from the handling of ice on the surface. Interesting things are often found in ice cores, but unless it can be proven that they are not caused by contaminants, they are not much use. Bulat created a database of contaminants so as to eliminate them; it’s through his approach that we know about the hot spring-like bacteria in the lake, suggesting hydrological activity and the likelihood of life. “If we find something, it will be a real discovery,” says Ekaykin. “On the other hand, we do not know of any ecosystem on our planet which does not contain any kind of life. So if we do not find anything in the lake, that’s also a great discovery.”

There are plenty who believe we shouldn’t be looking at all – or not yet. Claire Christian of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition acknowledges the great scientific merit in understanding Vostok. “However, because these lakes have been isolated from the outside world for so long, there is a real danger that the act of exploration itself will damage the very characteristics or organisms that researchers are most interested in,” she says. “There is no rush to penetrate any of the lakes.” Vostok is actually one of dozens of sub-Antarctic lakes, though by far the biggest; ASOC advocates technologies be tested on smaller lakes first. It also questions why Russia is using “an old dirty borehole” rather than a new one drilled with the latest technology.

There are four methods of deep drilling in the world: Russian, European, American and Japanese. The first two are more or less the same and use a mixture of kerosene and Freon as drilling fluids, whereas the US system uses hot water – the system ASOC would rather see used, citing US-led academic findings. Lukin disagrees. “I am certain hot water drilling is more harmful, and brings more contaminants, into the sub-glacial lake,” he says. He explains that when the drill finally breaks through to the water’s surface, it will immediately be withdrawn, and pressure will push lake water up the borehole. Since kerosene and Freon are lighter than water, and cannot mix with it, the contaminants will not enter the lake. Lukin cites the accidental breach of a sub-glacial lake in Greenland by Danish drillers, who were also using kerosene, as an illustration the technology works.

The drilling itself has got a lot more difficult at greater depth. “The properties of the ice are changing as the temperature changes and we approach melting point,” says Ekaykin. Lukin says crystals here can reach three metres in diameter. “Nobody in the world has faced crystals of such size,” he says. “It is very difficult.” Indeed, in an event that worries environmentalists, in October 2007, a drill was irretrievably lost, requiring a new divergent borehole to the sunk. That original drill’s still there, trapped in the ice.

So what’s next? In November the team of drillers and scientists will begin a long, long journey south from St Petersburg, first to Cape Town, then by plane or ship to Novolazarevskaya Station near the Antarctic Coast, then by small Canadian planes to Progress Station, and finally on to Vostok. “They will spend some time reactivating the borehole and install new instrumentation in the drill system,” says Lukin. “In the beginning of January we will start the drilling operations proper. We believe we will be successful this season.”

When the water rushes from the lake into the borehole, it will swiftly freeze. It will probably be the next season, 2012-13, before the team can go back, extract a core and learn about the lake’s secrets. The following season, the intention is to lower some measurement systems into the lake to learn more. That’s when we should discover if there’s life down there – possibly something we’ve never encountered before.

The team are trying to remain sanguine. “For me, I am not in a hurry,” says Ekaykin. “If we have one more year to prepare, that’s not a tragedy at all.” He also manages to make life at this most desolate of locations sound bearable. “It’s not that harsh in the summer. Minus 15-20 in the daytime, minus 25 at night. And it’s not very windy.” But there’s a palpable sense of expectation.

Arguments about the ethics of the program will rage long after breakthrough takes place, but the Russians are not cowed. “It is human nature that we want to explore unknown objects,” says Ekaykin. And Lukin has a different take. His interview has been conducted through a translator, but at the contamination question he grabs the phone and speaks in English. “Tell me,” he asks. “Did the Americans worry about contamination when they went to the moon? Please write this.”

SIDEBAR: How others do the drilling

The Russians are far from the only group to have tried drilling in Antarctica. Many recent initiatives have been led by New Zealand, which runs the Scott Base that supports much of the scientific research conducted in Antarctica during summer months.

One of the most significant is ANDRILL, for ANtarctic geological DRILLing, a collaboration between New Zealand, Germany, Italy, the UK and US involving more than 200 scientists and researchers so far. This project’s mission is to drill back in time: it extracts cores to reveal the history of glacial and interglacial changes that have taken place in Antarctica – and to help model scenarios of global warming for the future.

Antarctica New Zealand manages operations and logistics for Andrill, while the scientific research is coordinated through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In 2006 and 2007 near McMurdo Station it drilled through ice, water, sediment and rock to recover two cores of up to 1,200 metres, representing some 20 million years of geological history. Scientists have been analysing the cores ever since, and have learned that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was much smaller during a period of warm global climate – “similar to those projected to occur within the next 50 to 100 years,” says Richard Levy, senior scientist and Andrill project leader. Andrill is now preparing to drill to ice and sediment reflecting conditions 24 to 45 million years ago at a new project called Coulman High, with drilling expected to begin in 2014-15.

One notable characteristic of the Andrill program is that is uses hot water drilling, as opposed to the kerosene and Freon mix used by Russian drillers. At Coulman High they will melt a hole through the 260 metre Ross Ice Shelf. “We melt snow to produce the initial water required to melt the hole through the ice shelf, and then pump sea water through the system to maintain an open hole once we have penetrated the bottom,” Levy says. They then lower a steel pipe through the hole down to the sea floor, to accommodate the drill.

Qantas The Australian Way, October 2011

Two South Korean soldiers stand facing north, fists bunched, in a taekwando stance, staring straight ahead. A few metres away a North Korean soldier looks straight back at them. More South Korean soldiers join their colleagues and glare with them, their intended sense of menace enhanced by sunglasses that leave only the rictus clench of their jaws from which to guess their expression. Time seems to stand still. But the moment passes; an everyday standoff.

And the 20 watching tourists file away.

Welcome to Panmunjom, also known as the Joint Security Area (JSA) – the border of North and South Korea. Bill Clinton once called this “the scariest place on earth,” and he was on to something: the tension is everywhere in this extraordinary location, the only place where you can see what’s left of the Cold War up close and personal. It’s a stark illustration of one of the most dangerous potential flashpoints on earth, a mental and sometimes physical conflict that has held fast for more than half a century. But it is also, improbably, the heart of a burgeoning tourist itinerary.

To see the article as it ran in the magazine, with photography, click here: qa1011_Korea indd

Three Seoul tourist operators – only three have been licensed – specialize in tours to both Panmunjom and the broader demilitarized zone (DMZ), a 4 kilometre wide, 241-kilometre long coast-to-coast no-man’s-land along the border that was the basis of the 1953 armistice at the end of the Korean war. And if it seems an absurd thing to do with a free day in Seoul, think again; it’s hard to think of a tour that could teach you more about the threat and tension that Koreans face every day.

A typical tour takes one of two approaches, or combines them into a single long day. DMZ tours focus on one of the four North Korean tunnels that have been discovered in the South’s territory since the 1970s, each one bigger and more sophisticated than the last. The third of them – the biggest and the closest to Seoul, having reached just 44 kilometres from the city – has been opened to tourists as an attraction, and a popular one too.

Donning a hard hat and heading down a slope 73 metres into the ground, visitors reach a dark tunnel that runs 1.6 kilometres, of which they can walk a few hundred yards. It is an extraordinary sight. Officially it’s two metres by two, although it never really feels that high; apparently that’s big enough to get a full infantry battalion through in an hour. At the end of the section that’s open is one of three concrete blockades, each protected by coiled razor wire. It is chilling to think what’s beyond them and what these tunnels were intended to do.

It also demonstrates the way that these tours combine the terrifying with the somewhat surreal. When South Korea discovered this tunnel by boring in 1978, the retreating northerners set about coating the walls in coal dust, so that they could claim they had been looking for coal; to this day, all you have to do is rub your finger against the wall and find your finger coated black but a solid block of coal-less granite behind. In fact, the whole idea is somehow preposterous: this instrument of invasion has been turned into a lucrative money-spinner for the South Korean state, which is nothing if not making the best of things. Guides say that the north has since, in all seriousness, asked for a share of the proceeds, since it put the effort into digging the tunnel in the first place.

The DMZ tours usually take in the Dora Observatory too, where there is a viewing platform with binoculars allowing a clear view into the North. From a distance, it looks surprisingly beautiful: a range of pleasing peaks, often covered in snow. From here one can clearly see two of the tallest flagpoles in the world, one on each side of the border, a game of one-upmanship eventually won by the North Koreans whose flag files some 160 metres high.

It’s no surprise that visits into places like these come with some eccentricities. Most nationalities (but not South Koreans, who must undergo a separate approval process) can do the tour, though you will have to sign a disclaimer warning of the “possibility of injury or death as a direct result of enemy action”. Photography is complicated too. At Dora, there is a painted yellow line some distance back from the viewing platform; you can’t take pictures any further forward, thus rendering any useful picture of the north impossible. (It may be, though, that this is to stop cameras being mistaken for weapons by alert snipers. “We had to close this observatory recently because you are a target for North Korean soldiers,” says our guide. “But I think it should be OK this week.”) Elsewhere, you can’t take a camera into the tunnel, but can buy a jigsaw of a photo of the tunnel in the gift shop, right next to the DMZ baseball caps and the officially endorsed DMZ barbed wire gift sets; and you can’t take a lens any bigger than 100mm into Panmunjom.

Still, the Panmunjom visit – the alternative to the DMZ tour – does illustrate clearly why tour guides take precautions. When one is facing North Korean soldiers with binoculars barely 50 metres away, it is best not to give them any reason to think you are armed. Photo-opportunities here are strictly moderated, and the trip is preceded by a detailed briefing at nearby Camp Bonifas – named, if a reminder of the gravity of the place was needed, after one of two US soldiers hacked to death with axes after attempting to cut down a poplar tree that was interfering with the view between two checkpoints.

There is, though, plenty to see here – far more than one might expect. The border is straddled by a series of blue UN buildings in which official meetings are still often held, and you can enter one. Since the border bisects the main table (upon which three microphones record every word that is spoken), this is the one place where one can wander unrestricted into North Korea, or at least a few metres of it. Next to the building, you can see a small concrete line that marks the border. Also in the JSA, you can see the so-called Bridge of No Return, one of two locations (the other being the Freedom Bridge at the south of the DMZ, covered on both tours) where prisoner exchanges have taken place over the years.

The whole area is full of surprises. There is a town practically on the border on the South Korean side, called Daesong-dong, and apart from the constant threat of imminent invasion it’s not such a bad place to live: there are no taxes, no national service, and the land is free, while farmers raise ginseng, rice and beans. Also, since nobody in their right mind (Daesong-dong apart) has built within the DMZ for more than 50 years, it has evolved into a wildlife reserve, with flocks of birdlife, and wild deer skipping within sight of the tour buses.

There is a hope that, when reunification comes, this will remain an environmental haven. But the truth is reunification is much further away now than it was eight or nine years ago. And for all the perplexing novelty of a border tour, it’s also a sober reminder of the brutality of the Korean War. They call it a fratricidal war: that is to say, brother against brother. A glimpse of the border in action provides both a reason for hope that it will never be repeated, and an illustration of the fear that it might.

BOX: You went where? Five destinations to brag about

1. North Korea. It’s actually not that hard to visit North Korea for real. The established experts are Koryo Tours, a westerner-staffed outfit in Beijing; in particular they specialize in getting people in to the stunning Mass Games, among the most remarkable things you will ever see. It’s safe, too – apart from the flight in.
2. Darvaza. In the 1950s, Soviet gas explorers accidently collapsed the roof of a cavern in the desert. Within, they smelled methane, so decided to burn it off before continuing exploration. They thought it would take a day or two; it’s still going after half a century. Now in Turkmenistan, camping next to this vast, flaming crater is like the gates of hell – which occurred to the locals too, since Darvaza means Gateway.
3. Chernobyl. Remarkably, Chernobyl is now a tourist attraction run by the Ukrainian government. The 30-mile exclusion zone is now open, although some areas are still considered too dangerous to visit.
4. Anthrax Island. Gruinard Island, off the magical Scottish highlands, has a sinister past as a hope for biological warfare testing  in 1942. But after decontamination – including the entire island being drenched with formaldehyde – it was declared clean in 1990 and is now openly promoted to tourists, as well as harbouring plenty of healthy sheep.
5. Everywhere else. When you think about it, the world is full of macabre attractions predicated on suffering of some form or another, from Alcatraz to the Tower of London, Changi prisoner of war camp to Mandela’s cell on Ryker Island. And if you think Australia’s different, just pop over to Sydney’s Pinchgut Island.

A senior Indian policy official has denied that a new definition of the poverty line in India will penalize millions of the country’s poor.

On Tuesday India’s planning commission filed an affidavit with the country’s Supreme Court to re-set the level at which people are considered to be poor: those in rural areas living on more than 26 rupees (around 50 US cents) per day, and more than 32 rupees in cities, will not be considered poor – and therefore ineligible for government assistance such as food subsidies. The figure is starkly lower than the World Bank’s definition of the poverty line, at $1.25 per day.

But Kaushik Basu, chief economic adviser to the government of India, told Emerging Markets that the government had not yet decided which definition of poverty to use, and that the final definition would allow assistance to as many individuals as possible. “We are inclined to use the most generous definition,” he said, “by which I mean a definition where more people will qualify as poor.” Asked if the definition would impact who would qualify for food subsidies, he said: “Who will qualify as poor will certainly depend on this.”

The move has been widely derided as an attempt to make India appear to have less people in poverty than it does, but Basu said it was instead related specifically to a new food security program. “There are three competing definitions of poverty that are used in India,” he said. “When we switch from one to another, we don’t want to the mistake of… having poverty going down just by changing the definition: of course we don’t want to do that. But now we are going into a new food security program where we are going to try to reach out to a very substantial portion of the poorer population, we have data on the new definition so we can do that job better.” Previously the main definition of poverty in India has been based on calorie intake rather than income or spending.

Amar Bhattacharya, Director of the G24 Secretariat – and an Indian national who was previously a senior adviser on poverty reduction at the World Bank – also defended the move. “As long as you are consistent in the measure, I think that makes absolute sense,” he told Emerging Markets.

India’s opposition has pilloried the move. At a press conference in New Delhi yesterday, the BJP party spokesman Prakash Javadekar said the new criteria were “like rubbing salt in the wounds of the poor.”

“Estimating the numbers of people in poverty is an exercise which often ends in number crunching for the sake of justifying the government’s miserly investment in food and services for people living in poverty,” said Avinash Kumar of Oxfam India. “This seems to be the case here. This will exclude a vast number of people from essential services, when what is needed is universal access to basic needs like food, healthcare and education.”

Kumar added: ”In the past few years, four different commissions set up by the government of India have come up four different estimates of the number of people living in poverty. This confusion within the government itself is a testimony to the government’s shoddy and often self-serving attempt to shy away from its real responsibilities.”

Basu also claimed that poverty was declining in India. “From 2005 to 2009, we know that poverty has gone down quite substantially no matter which definition you use.” Even based on the new definition, India would have more than 400 million poor, or around one third of the population.

There’s an odd contradiction in the way we see piracy today.

On one hand we have Johnny Depp, with bandana and beaded beard, ready to unleash a fourth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise. His Jack Sparrow, all Keith Richard swagger and reprobate swigger of rum, has become one of the most iconic characters Hollywood has produced in the last 10 years. Our attachment to the romantic Long John Silver type, of eyepatches and parrots, wooden legs and a hearty “Arrrr!”, still clearly holds fast. Pirates of this salty sea-dog style even hold a popular place in children’s culture; one of the most popular characters among the Australian preschool megastars The Wiggles is the cheerfully inept Captain Feathersword.

And yet on the other hand, maritime piracy has never in living memory been a bigger problem than it is today. It is, in every possible respect, getting worse: more attacks, on bigger vessels, with more brutality, more sophisticated weapons and over an ever-bigger area. And in Somalia, the root of the modern problem, there is just no obvious way to fix it.

It has been said that piracy is as old as ocean commerce itself. It’s certainly been a fixture in the Mediterranean for at least 3,000 years, and turns up prolifically in Greek and Roman history: Julius Caesar, in one of the less celebrated moments of his career, was captured by pirates for ransom (and, when the ransom was paid, immediately sent a fleet to kill the pirates and get it back again). Since then, wherever there has been naval activity, and wherever trade has taken place on the seas, there have been pirates too.

Regardless of where they appear in geography or history, pirates have rarely been pleasant to deal with, which makes it puzzling that the swashbuckling image has risen to such popularity in modern culture. It probably dates from the Buccaneering age, from about 1650 onwards, when a growth in seaborne trade was reflected in a blossoming of equally active piracy to steal from it. This is the era of Blackbeard and Calico Jack, rock stars of their time, and over the following centuries these caricatures found their way into literature for authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson (whose Treasure Island introduced the world to Long John Silver) and JM Barrie (whose Peter Pan featured Captain Hook).

Today, there is not a shred of romance attached to piracy. It is a brutal, mushrooming menace. There were 239 attacks worldwide in 2006; in 2010, 445. In 2006, 53 attacks involved guns; in 2010, 243. Seven ships were fired upon in 2006; 107 were in 2010 – and these days the attackers are likely to be armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. And while 188 unlucky people were held hostage in 2006, by 2010 the figure had risen to 1,181.

All these figures come from the ICC International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre, and its head, Captain Pottengal Mukundan, pins the blame chiefly on one state: Somalia, which accounted for 139 of the 2010 attacks and was the source for a further 80 from the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden to deep in the Indian Ocean. “The most important fact is that Somalia is a failed state and there are no law enforcement agencies, or anyone else, to deal with this,” he says. “And there isn’t really any strong deterrent against these criminals.” Ransoms are readily paid and so more is asked for each time. On top of that, a new technique of hijacking an ocean-going vessel – sometimes as big as a tanker – and then using that as a mother ship from which to launch other attacks gives the pirates an almost limitless range of operations.

The world has plenty of examples of piracy being effectively dealt with. Southeast Asia, and in particular the Malacca Straits, used to be a hotbed of piracy, but attacks there peaked in 2004; Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore took action and have largely solved the problem. There was a period when the South China Sea, and in particular the Gulf of Tonkin, were a problem; China took action, executed pirates and that problem stopped too. But there’s no way to bring such measures in Somalia because there’s nobody there in a position to do it. “We have not in the recent past had the scenario we have here:  a failed state with a very large coastline,” says Mukundan. The long term solution is to fix the country itself, to build infrastructure, encourage foreign investment and provide a functioning economy. But that, he says, is “a very long term project.”

In the meantime, the responses of attacked ships and their flag states has started to become considerably more animated. When a South Korean tanker, the Samho Jewelry, was hijacked in January, the country’s navy went in, stormed it, killed eight pirates and captured the rest. Malaysia’s navy has taken a similar approach. Elsewhere, there are agreed standards for ships and their masters going around the Horn of Africa, setting a policy for reporting suspected attacks, sharing information and working together. Oddly, it has brought together navies of countries that have never been allies – sometimes quite the reverse – to try to deal with an increasingly global problem. So with more firepower and aggression on both sides, what comes next? The battle lines have been drawn.

The locals call it the gates of hell. And you don’t have to get too close to see why.

Deep in the Karakum desert in Turkmenistan is a flaming crater that has been burning for half a century. At night you can see the glow for miles, and up close, it’s truly, beautifully, diabolical. Flames lick up from vents in the rock in a crater three hundred metres around. It’s like looking at burning barbecue coals on an epic scale, and when you get downwind of it, and the shimmer of intense heated air comes your way, it’s like being microwaved: a vast, consuming heat, a cooking stove bigger than a baseball diamond.

This geological oddity owes its existence to the Russian gas exploration activities of the late 1950s. In 1959, when Turkmenistan was part of the Soviet Union, experimental drills were conducted all over this desert, seeking to tap into the region’s bountiful stores of natural gas.

To see the article as it ran in Discovery click here: GatesofHell

Then one day – locals say May 19 1959 – a drilling rig collapsed into a hidden pocket of gas; its engineers had unknowingly been building on the ceiling of a cavern. As the roof went in, taking the drill equipment with it, a massive crater was formed, and from it came the familiar smell of methane.

The geologists, reasoning it was better to burn off the gas in the crater rather than letting it pour out unignited, took a decision: they would set it alight. “They thought it would burn in one or two days,” says a local person, repeating stories he has heard about the crater. “Then they could drill some more or just leave it.”

That was 1959. More than 50 years later, it’s still burning.

The flames outlasted Russian exploration in the area; that was dismissed as uneconomic and unproductive the following year. Then they outlasted the Soviet Union itself: Turkmenistan became an independent state in 1991. They outlasted the president who has stamped his image all over the nation in gold statues, towering monuments and a cult of personality to rival Mao: Saparmurat Niyazov, who renamed himself Turkmenbashi (the country’s main port would later take his name), died in 2006. And it seems that it will take man’s intervention to ever extinguish them.

The flaming gas crater is one of three craters in the area: one is filled with salty water, another with bubbling, sulphurous mud, though they appear to be natural rather than man-made. And they have become a curious tourist attraction – there are few more unique camping locations than under the stars next to leaping flames with a glow that never fades. It’s tempting to dangle a lamb kebab over the side and let nature do the cooking.

But learning more about the crater and how it came about is difficult. Turkmenistan does not welcome journalists and my guide and driver declined to be named or photographed. Local people who have assisted foreign journalists have been imprisoned in the past. Turkmenistan is the only country in the world where the author of the local Lonely Planet has insisted on anonymity, to protect the locals who helped with the research. And there’s no point looking for local people who might remember because there is no longer a local town.

There was: it was called Darvaza, or gateway, named after the crater. A small town grew, sustaining itself on natural gas pouring from the ground in such quantities that it didn’t even need to be drilled for. (There is so much gas under Turkmenistan that it is free to locals: their only cost is the matches to light it.)

But in 2004 Niyazov saw Darvaza – some say he visited in person, others that he viewed it from the air – and didn’t like what he saw. It was tatty, ramshackle; it didn’t fit with his vision for a golden age for Turkmenistan, writ large in the imported white marble grandeur of the national capital, Ashgabat.

“In 2004 there was a law that all families should leave this place,” says my guide. “The government said they wanted to close it. That is all.” Why? “He thought there was no job for the people, and it will be better for them to get out from this township and move to the cities and try to find work there. Therefore he says it is not necessary to be here if there is no job.” It’s an odd claim, as those who recall the town say it was self-sufficient. “Families were traditional people, using natural gas; they cooked, they weaved their carpets,” says one. “I head the president demolished it because he didn’t like it from the air.”

Niyazov ordered the town razed, its mainly Uzbek citizens resettled elsewhere. And today, all that remains of Darvaza is the skeletal steel of a drilling rig on a hillside. With it has gone all hope of local memory of what happened in 1959.

Instead, unlike Turkmenistan’s cities, there is a sense of decay out here in the desert despite the vast mineral wealth. Miles down the road there is a town called Airport. But it doesn’t have an airport. That closed after sulphur and agricultural production left the area. A village clings on in the desert.

As for why the crater continues to burn, it’s clear that the geologists set fire to a large seam of methane that continues to pour from the rock and ignite today. How much gas has been wasted, and how much more might follow, is anybody’s guess.

But it might not last much longer. Locals say the government plans to stop it, whether by sealing the crater, dousing it or drilling elsewhere to tap the flow. Signs on a nearby highway announce a gas project for a Russian company. In mid-2010, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, who succeeded Niyazov, was reported to have ordered the crater to be filled in.

If it happens, it will be something of a shame, for Turkmenistan excels in oddities that have a certain quirky appeal for travellers. This is the home of a huge sulphurous underwater lake; of some of the world’s most outstanding dinosaur prints (the country has attempted to name the culprit a Turkmenosaurus); of a leader so ostentatious he topped his city’s main monument with a gold statue of himself that revolved with the sun until its removal in August this year. Locals find it odd that foreigners would get on a plane to see an inferno that rose from a mining accident. But, in small numbers, they do, chartering guides to drive them three hours into the desert from Ashgabad.

“It is one of the unique things of Turkmenistan,” says my guide as we breakfast on bread dipped in lamb fat, boiled on a campfire. “It will be sad if it goes.” People don’t appear superstitious about it, more pragmatic: they call it the Gates of Hell because that is undeniably what it looks like.

While the government considers how to end it, the crater blazes still; jutting pieces of steel at one edge, severed and bent, are a reminder of how men created this demonic vision. The glow rises high in the sandy air in this place where the earth is on fire.

Air magazine, December 2010

There is a signboard at the start of the track up Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in southeast Asia, bearing the names and times of the winners of the latest annual race up and down the Borneo peak. Two hours, 40 minutes and 41 seconds was the best 2009 performance.

When you get back down from Mount Kinabalu, bruised and exhausted, perhaps drenched from a tropical downpour and with knees that no longer obey rational instruction, that signboard appears a cruel joke. Your own odyssey will have taken two or three days, never mind two or three hours. But the board reflects not only local fitness but local connection with the mountain, and you see it everywhere: my guide, a 44-year-old father of five called Yamin, has a personal best of three and a half hours up and down and reckons he can beat it next year. He’s reached the summit more than 100 times.

To see this article as it ran, including my photos (all except first), click here: qp1210_Mt Kinabalu (2)

There are few peaks so tightly embedded into their surrounding society as Kinabalu. The nearby state capital of Kota Kinabalu takes its name from the mountain. The distinctive profile of the peaks appears on the state flag of Sabah, the Malaysian territory within which the mountain sits. Sabahans take pride not only in the beauty of the mountain and the exhilaration of the climb, but the extraordinary biological diversity of the mountain and its surrounding national park: between 5000 and 6000 plant species, over 300 types of bird, and animals including the (rarely sighted here) orang-utan. More pragmatically, they value it as a source of work for guides and porters.

Foreigners feel the attraction too. Malaysia has rightly made Mount Kinabalu one of its most heavily promoted tourist drawcards. But it has perhaps been guilty in the past of misrepresenting what climbing Kinabalu involves.

Climbing Mount Kinabalu involves almost nine kilometres of relentlessly uphill hiking, summiting at just under 4,100 metres (13,450 feet) – plenty high enough to cause altitude sickness. It involves getting up in the middle of the night and climbing up an exposed granite face, hanging on to steel cables bolted into the mountain, in complete darkness.  It doesn’t require specialist climbing skills but it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a stroll. None of which is a reason not to do it: many consider it a lifetime high point. Just be ready for the challenge.

These days the park authorities make sure walkers comprehend the difficulty, and insist that everyone who goes up must be accompanied by a registered guide. The numbers of people who can climb at any one time are limited by the accommodation at which people spend the night on the mountain, at a place called Laban Rata, six kilometres in to the climb. Here, a guesthouse can accommodate 146 climbers, while another 48 can stay in other accommodation nearby, meaning on any given day about 200 people plus their support staff of guides and porters will be heading up the mountain, and the same number heading down. That feels like capacity, especially on the summit, and is a sensible limitation – though it does make one of the biggest challenges of Kinabalu the logistical effort of finding a date with free accommodation in the first place.

Some are disappointed by the first day. It is relentlessly, stubbornly upward, with few views since the path cuts through deep forest, though the tame local squirrels and flora like the distinctive pitcher plant provide diversion. Most of the track is built with wooden stairs, and there’s no need for technical ability, just plodding, dogged stamina. It is recommended to allow five to seven hours for this part of the ascent. Most greet the Laban Rata guesthouse – comfortable, heated at night, with hot water at some times of day and a surprisingly good range of food – with relief.

But climbing Kinabalu is all about the second day. The routine is to rise early – very, very early – in order to reach the top by sunrise; most are underway by 2 a.m. For many, the first stretch out of Laban Rata is the hardest part of the trek: you come out, probably without having slept well, at 11,000 feet, and start climbing up over slippery, uneven, endlessly uphill boulders. The 6.5km marker, just 500 metres out of Laban Rata, is greeted with disbelief from climbers certain they’ve done three times that distance since leaving the guesthouse.

It’s followed by the fixed cable section: probably the most dangerous part of the ascent. In the dark, on slippery granite, it combines open rock with a lot of traffic, including many climbers who are unfamiliar with using rope. It’s probably just as well you can’t see the exposure on some of these faces until you descend again in daylight. Eventually, climbers reach the Sayang Sayang checkpoint – where your climbing pass will be checked – and then you really are on the face of the mountain, hand over hand, step by step, pushing on.

But by now, everything’s different. Since you’re exposed, you can see the sky, Orion and a host of other constellations vivid against the darkness. With a greater sense of where you are, you gain inspiration. Every step now is painful, vertical gain as much as distance, hand over hand on the wire. But as the first hints of light begin to appear, you realise you are among peaks: Short Peak, Gorilla Peak, Donkey Ears Peak. With every moment of additional light the desolate glory of the surroundings, a granite plateau that is beautiful all the more for its lunar starkness, becomes more clear, and Low’s Peak – the true summit – comes in to view, a gruelling final 200 metres to the top.

You won’t have the summit to yourself: hundreds share it every dawn. But it’s worth the effort. Sometimes the first sight of the sun is greeted with applause. And as it rises, and the peaks are bathed in their first sunshine of the day, the whole place takes on a different texture. In one direction you look out to the ocean, the shadow of the mountain cast dozens of miles over the water in the shallow angle of the sunlight; in another is the famous Low’s Gully, an 1800 metre deep monument to the scouring power of glaciation. Usually, dawn is clear on the peak, though you may be looking down on cloud beneath you. The clarity doesn’t last long: that’s why everyone tries to be there by dawn, before the summit hides for the rest of the day.

Getting down has got a whole lot more interesting since the opening of a Via Ferrata, a system of fixed cables and ladders and bridges – the first in Asia, and the highest in the world, at 3,800 metres. The idea of a Via Ferrata is to give the feeling of mountaineering without the danger: you are permanently connected to the cable by two caribiners, and also to a guide by rope, meaning that if you follow instruction it’s impossible to fall more than a few feet. Commonplace in Europe, where they date back more than a century in the Alps, they are far rarer in Asia.

The Via Ferrata on Kinabalu is done properly, and everything about it impresses. There is a briefing near the Laban Rata guesthouse the afternoon before you climb, without which climbers may not attempt it; the equipment is good and the guides clear and calm; and two alternatives are offered – a short, beginner’s version with limited exposure, and a much bigger version including a descent down a large part of the granite rock face (and an irksome stretch of slippery jungle). Both can only be done in descent, and both conclude near to the Laban Rata guesthouse. Naturally you can also get down the same way you came up, by simply following the trail back down.

For those who have the energy, the full version is strongly recommended. Starting a short distance down from the summit, it is usually attempted at around seven in the morning: the sun is rising, the sky still brilliant blue before the clouds roll in, and the feeling of being on the edge of a rugged mountain face – yet actually being perfectly safe – is a vibrant sensation of being alive. It is hard work, though, and combining this with a full descent off the mountain in the same day is asking a great deal of your body.

Which brings us to the worst part of the whole endeavour: the descent from Laban Rata. Slippery, often in rain or mist, and without the inspiration of the pending summit to drive you on, you just want to snap your fingers and let it be over. Many are surprised to find themselves in more discomfort on the way down than the way up, but the pounding on the knees is endless, and it is not uncommon to find people needing to be assisted down, even carried. If you’ve ever been tempted to walk with knee supports, this is the moment to try it.

And so, finally, back to the start line, and that signboard of the fastest ever climbers, their feats rendered not so much impressive as Biblical by your own experience. Even if their speed is incomprehensible, it doesn’t dim the sense of relieved achievement at having taken on the roof of Borneo and succeeded.