TINTIN: An adventure like no other
Gyan C. A. Fernando tries his hand at a script, with apologies to Herge, in our very own island in the sun
Iwent to see the Tintin movie at the Liberty Cinema in the company of my young nephew and his lovely fiancée. I wanted to see it on the big screen but was rather reluctant to go on my own, so the young couple took pity on the old Uncle and off we went. Mind you, I did pay for the tickets!
It was nice to visit the old Liberty after a lapse of 35 years. I have known Tintin circa 1955 whereas Steven Spielberg first discovered Tintin only in 1981! Shame on you Steven! This of course makes me a Tintinologist and even a Professor of Tintinology. The film was good but, having been brought up on the books, I couldn’t help feeling that the books were better. I must have been five or six years old when “The Crab with the Golden Claws” was first serialised in a Sri Lankan daily newspaper. Each day, two strips ending in a cliffhanger would appear in the “Cartoon” page and we could not wait until the next day to find out the outcome. It took a while for the books to appear in Sri Lanka and so we were dependent on the daily newspaper strip.
We were all hooked on Tintin, even staid old Dad. Dad could predict what would happen next with a fair degree of accuracy and which he did with the air of a sage. Uncle Melvin, just to annoy Dad, would come up with an alternate and totally weird twist, much to our amusement.
I tried to comb my hair in Tintin style but without much success. At school we tried to play Tintin but it was not much of a success as we all wanted to be Tintin. A couple of bumbling classmates, who happened to be twins, were forced into the roles of Thompson & Thomson. They had no choice.
Many years later when I started traveling to exotic destinations I visited Peru, primarily because of “The Prisoners of the Sun”. On my first visit there I learnt, from the tour operator, that most men of my age group visit Peru because of their Tintin upbringing.
I was not disappointed. The artifacts in the museums of Peru are pure Herge’. At Sillustani, in the middle of nowhere in the Peruvian desert, I came across the mummy of Rascar Capac. (Actually, there were hundreds of mummies sticking out of the desert sand.)
The local little Peruvian boys in Cuzco, Puno and La Raya all looked like Zorrino, the little local boy who guides Tintin and the Captain to the Temple of the Sun. Then there was the rather fiery local Pisco of course, if you want to get drunk like the Captain did and whose example I followed.
In pursuit of “The Cigars of the Pharaoh” I have visited Egypt. I found “The Blue Lotus” in China, “The Broken Ear” in Paraguay and “Tintin and The Picaros” in the whole of South America.
On a visit to Geneva I found the Hotel Bristol where Tintin and Captain Haddock go to meet General Alcazar (“Red Sea Sharks”), the Hotel Cornavin (“The Calculus Affair”) and of course Lake Geneva, where their car skidded off the road and they ended up in the drink.
Then there were the souks of Morocco (“The Crab with the Golden Claws”) where I nearly bought a burnouse….you know the hooded robe- like thing that Thompson and Thomson wear in this story.
At one time I worked in Scotland and discovered the settings for “The Black Island” (Try the Outer Hebrides, if you are interested).
It is a pity that I haven’t been able to visit all the places that Tintin went to. I haven’t been to the Moon, for instance, but at least I know the locations.
Not many people know that the Farasan Islands are real islands in the Red Sea and belong to Saudi Arabia (see “The Red Sea Sharks”). I did get to Siberia but Herge was rather vague as to the exact locations in “Tintin in the Land of The Soviets”.
Then of course I have been to Tibet. By the time I visited Tibet I had changed quite a lot, for the worse. I was no longer the freshfaced Tintin, and with my unkempt beard and my drinking habits, I was more of a Captain Haddock.