HOUSE OF THE TIGER KING


THE EXPLORER’S VIEW – TAHIR SHAH

You have to understand something. It’s simple. Searching for a lost city in the Peruvian cloud forest isn’t the same thing as a beach holiday in Benidorm. There are no hot showers or feather pillows, no room service or cocktails by the pool. The only certainty is terrible hardship. As the person who’d come up with the grand plan – however crazy it may have seemed – it fell to me to drag the team forward. To push them, as hard as I was forced to push myself.

Anything that held us back was our enemy. A low budget expedition has as its core strength, the ability to move fast, and to change tack at a moment’s notice. My team’s equipment was basic and modest. Most of it was bought from LOOT. Any of it could be cannibalised, dumped, or given away without much thought. But throw into the equation a full film crew shooting 16 mm film, and we found ourselves drowning in literally tonnes of gear. On a jungle journey, someone has to carry it all, and that creates tension – the kind that can smother an expedition completely, or rip it apart.

In his desperation to document my search for the lost city of Paititi, David Flamholc and his crew almost snuffed it out. For them, the mishaps were material, film in the can. For me, they were problems to be overcome – each one of which had the ability to stop us in our tracks. Their kit-bags and Peli cases filled with film stock, cameras and clapperboards, a generator and lights, were a good example. My porters had to carry it all, week in, week out, month in, month out. The more gear you have, the more porters you need. And the more porters you have, the more food you require to feed them. The more food you have to lug ahead with you, the more men you need. It’s a vicious circle – one that’s preoccupied armies since the time of Alexander.

The lost city of Paititi was our distant goal. When we set out, we dreamt of the fame that finding it would bring. One thing is clear – you only go in search of a lost Inca city for one reason – for the glory. Anyone who tells you differently is lying. But after weeks in the jungle, we began to understand that finding Paititi would utterly destroy the region through which we travelled. There would be a Paititi Hilton in the blink of an eye. The tribal warriors would be bell-hops and bus-boys before they knew it. It sounds all cosy and smug, but we decided as a team to rip up the grid co-ordinates, if we did ever happen upon the ruins.

The journey of sixteen weeks changed us all. It helped us to understand that the reasons we had for setting out on the adventure in the first place, were not so important after all. Locating Paititi would have turned me from a humble traveller into the most famous explorer in the world. For David Flamholc, it would have given publicity to his film. But, as we concluded, finding the ruins would be meaningless. As every real traveller has known, it is the journey itself that gives meaning to the experience.


THE DIRECTOR’S VIEW – DAVID FLAMHOLC

I should have known what I was throwing myself into from the start. Only a week after our first day of shooting, it turned out that our main lead, an ancient manuscript packed with cryptic clues and a ‘lost’ Inca map, turned out to be created by Tahir himself.

Some filmmakers would have stopped right there, packed their bags and headed for home. But I was bitten by the bug. I was desperate to film jungle expedition. We were already in Lima and I wasn’t prepared to call the whole thing off. Tahir announced he was leaving for the jungle straight away, with or without me. He said he didn’t give a damn about my film. It seemed crazy at the time, but I decided to get used to Tahir’s eccentric methods for improvised exploration, and to use them in the film, rather than seeing them as obstacles. I knew that what ever happened I’m a filmmaker. Keep shooting, and I’d have a film.

Four months of pouring rain, dense jungle undergrowth, dealing with mud, insects and dangerous river-rapids, tested our will to continue to the limits. Moving up the rivers with no skin on our feet, worn down with dengue fever, was hard enough. Documenting it all in film was all the more challenging.

Even though the last of my personal savings, and the film project itself, had got the expedition off the ground, Tahir never stopped moaning about the amount of film gear I needed to bring. He regarded my team as a threat, an opponent – a reason for potential failure. He said that I smothered the delicate flame which I was so eagerly trying to document. Every morning, when I woke up and got into my rotting clothes, I knew breakfast talk would be about what piece of equipment I’d have to leave behind. He’d rant on that the generator was too heavy, that the duct tape was useless, or that he was putting my crew on half rations to compensate for it all.

I was in a constant battle with my own intentions. At times, I found myself torn between the two sides of the same object. Even though I wanted to find the lost city as much as Tahir did, there was no point for me to go on if I couldn’t film our progression. It was the reason I was there. But then again, what point would it be to stop and let Tahir carry on by himself? That would hardly have made an entertaining film, if it would ever become a film at all.

Thankfully, we struggled on, together. The horror of each day in the jungle is burnt into my memory. I knew that the conflict between our goals and between us was creating the film for me. I prayed that it wouldn’t destroy the connection between Tahir and me, before we were at the end. The stakes were high at times. The whole thing could have blown up in my face. But I knew that if I could make it work, the tension would mirror in the film, and I would have an ending – one that would be far more poignant than if we found the lost city itself.