Colin Thubron

Travel long and far enough and over time you’ll have looked out several airplane windows.  Through the oval frame you will have seen the glaciers of Alaska and the rice fields of Bali, the Pyramids of Giza and the temples of Bangkok.   You’ll have gazed upon the White House in winter, the Eiffel Tower the day Princess Diana died, Jerusalem's glistening Dome of the Rock at the hour of sunrise.  You’ll have seen the close proximity of Jewish settlements and Palestinian refugee camps, waves crashing over freighters in the Sea of Japan, a volcano called Anak Krakatoa.

While looking at all this, you’ll also sometimes catch your own reflection in the window.  Perhaps the sight will jolt you slightly, because that face, reflected from a window moving at 500+ miles per hour rather than from your more stable bathroom mirror, can suddenly seem strange, foreign.  Aloft, moving at speed, and in the act of leaving something behind and going to something new, you see yourself for the first time.  The airplane mirror is a reminder that you are connected to all that is scattered across the Earth, and this requires some digestion.  You simply cannot see yourself the same when you find you are in relation to rice fields and volcanoes, refugee camps and architecture, several billion men and women living out your window.

I am now in Colombia and will be here through the month of May -- walking the streets, taking in the history, and meeting the people.  I’ll also be taking photographs.  Seldom is there just one reason why a person travels, a point Colin Thubron eloquently makes in the opening pages of the Shadow of the Silk Road:

Sometimes a journey arises out of hope and instinct, the heady conviction, as your finger travels along the map:  Yes, here and here…and here.  These are the nerve-ends of the world…

A hundred reasons clamour for your going.  You go to touch on human identities, to people an empty map.  You have a notion that this is the world’s heart.  You go to encounter the protean shapes of faith.  You go because you are still young and crave excitement, the crunch of your boots in the dust; you go because you are old and need to understand something before it’s too late.  You go to see what will happen.

I saw this horse on two different visits to Isla Bastimentos, in Panama’s Bocas del Toro archipelago.  Drawn to the salty taste of the surf, it would wade into the water and then mostly stand still, letting the occasional wave slap its face.  After maybe half an hour it would then return to the beach and slip silently back into the jungle.

It was a captivating scene: the clear and vibrantly colored water, the jungle-green backdrop, the horse maintaining such solid focus on its salty bath.  Its life didn’t seem that bad.  Certainly it was less stressful than many of its ancestors would have known, given that for much of human history horses have been instruments of war.  Since before 3000 BC they've been ridden in battle, and a training manual for chariot horses was in existence as early as 1350 BC.  It wasn’t until after the time of Christ, however, that the paired stirrup came onto the scene, revolutionizing yet again the tactics of war.  The English travel writer Colin Thubron, in his book Shadow of the Silk Road, explains its spread and significance:

The heavy stirrup was a Chinese brainchild as early as the fourth century AD, it seems, and as it travelled westward, stabilising its rider in battle, it made possible the heavily armoured and expensively mounted knight.  To this simple invention some have attributed the onset of the whole feudal age in Europe; and seven centuries later the same era came to an end as its castles were pounded into submission by the Chinese invention of gunpowder.  The birth and death of Europe’s Middle Ages, you might fancy, came along the Silk Road from the east.

Yes, this beach-loving Panamanian horse had it pretty good, as did the rest of us on the island.  We had put our shirts and stirrups aside, and the history of war felt rather remote.