The Art of Travel

2008-06-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

The Lost Coast

We stood at the entrance to the bone room, thinking “man oh man what is this place?” It was a Phrenologist’s dream, with bones piled from floor to ceiling. Sea lion skulls and scapulae peeped amongst the horse tails that had thrust in under the plank walls. From the rough hewn ceiling skeins of smaller bones dangled, rattling gently. In the corner a pile of bleached whale vertebrae were stacked up like a cone of nesting chairs. Several students that we had met on the beach came in with us, and they were walking gingerly through the bones; cautious, silent, respectful. This was Cape Alava, the meeting place of the currents, the lost home of the Makah.
We had walked a day to get here. Actually, you can walk the loop trail from the Ozette Ranger Station to Cape Alava, along the beach to Sand Point, and then back again to Ozette in a 9 mile loop that takes a day. But we had wanted to stray a little bit along the trail, watching for wildlife and waiting for events to come to us. So we brought along some fried chicken from Port Angeles and while along the trail we stopped to eat, chatting about history, politics and the ecology of the Washington coast.
The trail from Ozette to Sand Point is great fun. From the ranger station a boardwalk of split cedar planks rises and descends through a charming coastal rain forest. Much of the walk is through prairie, with gnarled cedar giving way to sedges and grasses. Then you hear the surf in the distance and you stroll down through hemlock and salal to the beach.
If you turned to the south and walked along the beach eventually, after fifty miles, you would reach La Push. Instead we set our sights on Wedding Rocks, a couple of miles to the north and lost in the late afternoon mists. It was a desultory trek. We walked along a rocky monochromatic beach at low tide. With the mist, everything gradually faded to grey. It became cold, and while looking for a campground we quickly pulled on long pants over our shorts.
Along this portion of the coast the high tide line comes right up to the woods. Obviously, camping on the beach wouldn’t be advisable. Eventually we discovered a small patch of grass covered in tiny white goose flowers. We apologized to the flowers and spread out our tent. Down the beach a hundred yards away a tanin stained creek flowed into the sea- our water source! While Yasha set up the tent I pumped and hauled the water; it was a ritual we had learned on many a trek across mountain passes.
After diner we descended again to the beach. We had heard that there were petroglyphs in the Wedding Rocks area, and despite the mist and general gloom we decided to search until dark. The Rocks themselves weren’t too hard to find really; we almost ran into the huge eroding pillar as the beach narrowed down into the woods. But where were the petroglyphs? We stumbled around in the near dark until Yasha literally sat down on a rock with cup and ring marks. We found stylized faces and dozens of carvings that surprisingly resembled nothing more than a group of flying clams in an old Rainier Beer commercial. After shooting some photographs we resolved to return in the morning.
The following day we inspected the Wedding Rocks under a better light. We found carvings of dogs, of people, of ghosts and of killer whales. Who were these people? Was this some sort of ceremonial site? We continued on to Cape Alava to find out.
The walk from Wedding Rocks to Cape Alava is short- a mere mile or two.
Yet along the way we paused to inspect the rafts of seaweed that had washed up on shore, ducked under numerous fallen trees, and finally with Cape Alava in sight we sat down on a wave-scoured log to discuss the life of the Washington coasts’ most famous castaway.
In 1834 Otokichi was a 14 year old cabin boy on the Japanese rice freighter Hojun Maru sailing the Inland Sea for Edo. A storm came up before they could flee and the ship, rudderless, dismasted, drifted for the next 14 months across the trackless Pacific. During that time the crew dwindled through dehydration and starvation from fourteen to two men and the cabin boy, Otokichi. Finally the hulk of the Hojun Maru drifted onto the beach of the Makah, and the Japanese were promptly enslaved. In time Otokichi became a man, was saved by a factor from the Hudson Bay Company and traveled to London. Renamed John Matthew Ottoson, Otokichi returned to the Orient as a translator. He snuck back into Japan posing as a Chinese, married well and often, and in the end, played a minor part in the opening of Japan to the West. Such was the fate of a survivor. Sighing, we proceeded the last hundred yards to the Cape.
Sadly, even as Otokichi was returning to the Orient the Makahs were coming under increasing Western control. All the children of Ozette were ordered to attend the government school in Neah Bay for a “proper” education. A grim Fate. Ozette was abandoned. Not too long afterward the federal government forbade the Makah the use of fish weirs to capture salmon. Without the salmon the Makah steadily declined.
For the past thousand years the Makah at Ozette and Neah Bay have been part of a larger linguistically related group of natives living on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Nootka. Frequently in the old days the Makahs would sail across the Straights of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island, raising havoc and capturing slaves. All of that now is gone. In the 1970’s an eroding bluff at Cape Alava revealed a series of Makah longhouses buried by a mud slide more than three hundred years before. This was a treasure trove for archeologists and the Makah themselves, for suddenly they saw themselves for what they were.
It’s easy to see why the Makah would have liked it here. Offshore, an island guards the beach from storms. The beach itself is nice, broad and flat and with plenty of room to pull up your canoe. The mist swirled around us and we could almost see the beach as it used to be. In the kelp beds a quartet of cormorants raised their heads like spears and then dived in unison. We climbed up an unused trail through the horsetails and found an abandoned cabin sitting back amongst the grasses. When I tried the rusted doorknob it fell away in my hand, so I pushed the door open. Inside, a half opened backpack lay on the floor. Dirty dishes moldered in the sink. In a back room, sleeping bags were spread out on the bunks. I started getting uneasy like I was Goldilocks furtively searching someone else‘s house. There were carved wooden masks and thimbles, halibut clubs and sea lion scapulae. The floor was littered with bones and half drunk 40’s of Steel Reserve. It was spooky. I shot some photographs and we eased out the door.
From the beach again we could see another house, a small longhouse, with a group of students clustered around the door. This was the bone house. Inside the Makah had made a bronze plaque thanking the long vanished Ozette people for teaching them how to live. Overtime the bronze plaque was capped with a giant carving of a whale, whale ribs were added, and the longhouse eventually became a shrine of bones. Again it felt spooky. Life and death, abandonment and the passage of time were all co-mingled like fog in the sky. Shaken, we returned to the beach for air.
“Lets walk back to the car!” Yasha said, “I bet the sun is out and its warmer there.” She was right. We climbed up the bluff behind Cape Alava, leaving the lost coast behind. Before too long the sun began to burn through the mist. First the raincoat came off, then the first shirt and then the second. By the time we got back to the car I was in shorts and the travails of the Makah were fading into the darkness of memory…

2007-08-14T00:29:00.000-07:00

I

It was July 15th and in two days our Chinese visa would expire. I couldn't say I was sad about that. In a way, movement itself had become a guilty pleasure. The routine of trains and buses, of guest houses and greasy restaurants, was an intoxicant. In fact, in a Muslim culture of abstinence it was the only intoxicant we had at hand.

In Idries Shah's "Tales of the Dervishes" holy men wander across a desolate landscape. Destitute, dressed only in rags, these Sufis sought a spiritual Ecstasy with God, Allah. Sometimes their movement was circular, trying to attain Union with a centrifugal motion. Other times their motion was just straight and pure, like a dove flying singlemindedly across the desert. I don't mean to confuse their motives with ours, which are worldly and profane. We try to dance the same dance, only our steps are different.

On July 15th the road from Kashgar ran inexorably to the south, a seething metaled road laid across an incandescent desert. Above the waves of heat an illusory image of the snowy Pamirs rose into the sky, higher by far than the clouds. I wondered what the pilgrims and merchants had thought a thousand years back upon seeing this mirage: joy at leaving their home country, or trepidation, fear and regret. Fortunately for us, those thoughts were smoothed by the uneventual running of the sleek Chinese bus. Kirghiz folk songs played over and over again on the DVD player. Behind us a young Kirghiz man quietly sang along.

They are crazy about music, these Kirghiz, so crazy that Islam has adopted itself to them. That night we stayed at Karakul Lake - Black Lake in Kirghiz - and in the morning we stumbled upon a music video being shot amongst the yurts of the village. There was a Romeo in a bright red clown suit sitting on a boulder, badly lip syncing to a tape deck. Behind him was Mustagh Ata - The Father of Snows - a 7500m giant, draped in glaciers and and perpetual wind and snows. Dancing girls, looking like they had just stepped out of "I Dream of Jeannie" posed beside a snowy white yurt. The singer stopped singing and imperatively ordered the videographer to stop also. Slowly he adjusted his tall, white felt hat, stretched out his arms towards the steppe, and let out a bellow of pure song. Beautiful.

The steppe, the beating heart of Central Asia, lies all around Karakul Lake. Every direction leads to a different pass, a different thread of the Silk Road. To the west lies the Wakhan Corridor, Afghanistan, Samarkand, and if you looked hard enough, ancient Rome. To the South, the riches of India and the complexity of a Buddhist world system. Eastward lay the Middle Kingdom, China. With an aging visa, our choice was simple.

To the south, greenery appeared on the mountain sides. First, it was like a mistake, as if the only color in existence was brown. But then the green was crushed velvet, and a gentle rain began to fall. Our bus labored upward through the steppe, with crags unseen in the mist above. Sadly, this ethereal solitude was marred by PSB border police manning the gates of the empire. To the very end the Han appeared rigid and distant; their government, one of control.
A lone mustached Pakistani border guard raised the barricade. He gave us a toothy smile, and with a wave, gestured us onward.

II

From Khunjerab Pass the pot holed road descends a precipitous 2,000m into the heart of a jagged wilderness. While the Pamirs were wide and open here everything was narrow and steep. Enormous dun colored peaks, dripping with ice, lorded above the isolated villages. This is the frontier between Central Asia and the lands of turmeric, cardamon and spice. Although the country is Pakistan, the feel is wholly Central Asia.

At Sust, where we checked in, the streets were crowded with Pashtun Afghans, dark Punjabis from the Sindh, and the curious, blue eyed tribesman that we had met on the roof of the world.
We booked a mini-van for Passu, 60km down the Hunza Valley, and soon we were passing through dusty villages hidden amongst apricot groves.

We had heard that in Pakistan women were sequestered, and when they were allowed to leave their homes looked like something out of a medieval fantasy. Yet here women were not only seen but evidently equal. At every turn men kissed the hands of elderly women who pulled back their shawls with a flourish and blessed them. Everyone seemed to speak English, and when Yasha asked the women sitting next to her in the van who these people might be she simply replied, "We are Wachi". Unwittingly we had stumbled into the land of the Ismaelis.

With the death of Muhammad in the late 7th century CE the Muslim world was riven by the first of a seemingly endless struggle of succession. Muhammad's cousin and son in law, Ali, claimed the right to the Prophet's cloak by right of birth. Others claimed that Muhammad himself had insisted that his successor be elected through a committee of Elders. With Ali's murder the Muslim world descended into a cycle of revenge and retribution: on one side were the Shia, the descendants of Ali, and on the other were the more orthodox Sunni. Each side considered the other to be apostate, a legal term which conferred the immediate blessing of death.

As time passed dissatisfaction with the wealth and status of the Caliphs grew within the more radical sectarian groups, and they called for a return to the purity of Muhammad. One group of Shia, however, took their extremism to new heights. Believing all of creation to be God's work, even down to every rock and tree and blade of grass, the Ismaelis retired to the mountains of Afghanistan. From there they carried out a guerrilla war against their more orthodox brethren. Known as the Assassins, they would allegedly imbibe hashish until they entered a world of unknowingness. From there they stole into the palaces of Caliphs and Wazirs where they practiced their deadly art.

Regrettably for the Ismaelis there was only one man in the world who didn't fear them. In fact that man, Genghis Khan, didn't fear anyone. When he and his horde swept down out of the Northeast in the early twelfth century there was nothing the Assassins could do to even slow his progress. He cracked their fortresses like a strong man cracks a nut. Everyone was put to sword, down to the last man, woman and child. Today, some three million Ismaelis remain scattered throughout the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan, through southern Tajikistan and northern Pakistan.

Today the Ismaelis have been transformed. Lead by the Aga Khan, who rules benevolently from a penthouse in Paris, modern Ismaelis follow a liberal doctrine of gender equality, community development and love for all of Allah's creation. In truth their pactices, once considered apostasy, now demand to be considered orthodox. We were astounded.

To the South, in the North Western Frontier, suicide bombers were immolating themselves and innocent bystanders in an orgy of hatred and violence. "Stay here" we were uged by local Ismaelis, "There are no troubles here. This is Shangri La." And they are right.

We hired a local man, Zakir Hussain to guide us on a five day trek along the Batura Glacier. Supposdly there were shepherds along the way, grazing thier flocks in high altitude meadows. Unsure of our reception and relying on our guidebook's advise we thought it simply safer to be accompanied by a local.

Unfortunately, the first two days were hellish. We struggled across the glacial terminus and then along the giant lateral morraine in high 30 degree centigrade heat. There wasn't an inch of shade and even less water. For a respite from the sun we would briefly crouch behind boulders.... but to even stop in this parabolic oven of an environment was a mistake. We lagged badly. By the end of the day we looked like a pair of raisins fresh out of the drying shed.

But the view from Yashpirt was sublime. We stood amidst a brillant green meadow sprinkeled with sheep and goats. Across the glacier to the south was a massif of 7500meter giants - The Batura Wall - glistening in the late afternoon. It was almost too bright to look at. The 1st Ice Floe - an ice fall of enormous proportions - cascaded in one unbroken line from the summit of Batura I to the valley glacier below. Batura I is a killer; five climbers were lost in 1970. Since then, this side has remained unvisited. With further fragmentation of the glacier due to global warming it is unlikely that it will be climbed any time soon.

We spent several days trekking from meadow to meadow in the Yashpirt area. During that time Zakir repeatedly mentioned that a women's group would be ascending to the Yashpirt meadow. Not just any women's group, and difinately not a western women's group, this was delegation of local Ismaeli women from nearby villages who had never gone higher into the mountains then the Karakorom Highway. Returning one afternoon from the Ibex Grass Glacier we found the group picknicking beside a small stream. Instantly the made a place for us and bade us to sit. We ate cheez whiz on chapatis, raisins we had brought from Turfan and apricots from Hunza, all the while eyeing each other hungrily. They wanted to know us just eagerly as we wanted to know them. Some had headscarves, some didn't. Some were young and some were old. Remarkably, they weren't so very different from us.

We walked back to Yashpirt in a gentle rain, the icefalls white and blurry in the distance. Before long, the women and shepherds had an impromptu game of cricket going, men and women mixed. (How this violated my sterile concept of a sequestered, burka clad Pakistani female!). For sure there weren't any leg spinners amongst them, and the women's batting was, if possible, even worse than their bowling. Yet their laughter was so free and unforced it felt like we were observing the Innocents at the dawn of Man. The laughed at everything, from a dropped ball to the wicket - a five gallon plastic jug, and the end I began to feel envious. In the West we rarely laugh, and when we do it is generally at someone else's expense. But here, free from the addictions of the modern world, people can take joy in the simple joys of life.

The cricket match died in the early evening's darkness. But the games weren't over yet. A giant rope was laid out in the now muddy meadow and two women's teams squared up for a match of Tug 'o War. Yasha was dragooned into joining, and before too long she was being dragged through the mud along with the rest of the loosing team. I laughed until I thought I would cry.

Then it was my turn. Quickly, with some trepidation, I found myself gripping the giant hawser slick with moisture. I knew that due to my hernia that I couldn't, or shouldn't pull, but my companions didn't know that. After an ineffective struggle I fell, and then the rest of my teammates followed. Willy nilly we were dragged through a freezing cold mud comprised mainly of sheep shit. Finally I understood why they were laughing...

The following day it was time to return to Passu. The Ismaeli women, dressed in snow white Salwar Kameez and scarves, held hands in a circle and prayed. It was inspiring: the green of the meadow, the circle of Believers, and the icefall, calving with an occasional boom in the back round. We followed the women down the moraine in a fine mist. It was a perfect day for walking despite the reduced visibility. The women ahead of us started singing, first one song then the next. Finally, raising their arms above their heads they sang sing-song like beautiful birds, "We will welcome you, We will welcome you!"

In response I too raised my arms. But instead of singing I simply repeated over and over again to myself "Thank you Lord for we are blessed!"

III

Some six hundred kilometers south of Passu the Indus River finally emerges from the grip of the mountains. Brown and muddy, it carries the weight of both the Himalayas and the Karakorom. In the plains of Punjab the river is corseted again by the concrete channels of irrigation canals that lead it, eventually, to the sea. But foolishly we had left already left the Karakorom Highway in Rawalpindi for a very slow road to Lahore. Our aged bus jerked and wheezed along a roadway crowded with renegade trucks, luxury vehicles and immense oxcarts pilled high with hay. In the bus, we were trapped in seats designed for a midget. But at least we had seats. Above us a wall of sweating Pakistani men swayed towards us with each lurch of the bus. Fleas scampered up our legs in search of greener pastures. In fact, it was only their nipping that kept us awake in somnelent atmosphere of the bus.

At one stop, which lasted more than an hour, a family used the bus for a moving van. Loading all their worldly possessions onto the top of the bus - two beds, cabnets, innulmerable metal boxes of clothing, a dishwasher(!) - was accompanied the usual south asian gamot of arguments, prostrations and tears. It was impossible. At one point an older man sat next to me and inquired how I liked Pakistan. "Oh very much!" I lied, and then proceeded to bable on about the virtues of Pakistan. He regarded my silently for some time before simply saying, "Too much hot!" With that he got up and left.

In Lahore we checked into a squalid little guest house, the Regale Internet Inn, where the beds were so close together that you had to climb across your neighbor to reach your own. Yet the Regale has one thing all the more expensive hotels lack: an owner who will take anyone, for free, to the greatest show in town. Locally, its known as Sufi Night.

I had seen Sufi dancing before, but they were Turkish Sufis of the Mevlana Order. Its generally what you think about when you imagine Sufi dancing. An impeccably dressed dervish, all in white, with white leggings, and a short white skirt, topped off with a red fez, slowly revolves around himself like an independent and self contained cosmos. The Pakistanis, as I was to find out later, would have none of that. They liked their ecstasy sharp and raw, with a wiff of sweat and more than a touch of violence and pain. This was Allah with street credentials.

By evening one of the periodic brown outs that characterize Lahore had settled across the city like a noxious blanket. On the ride to the Sufi shrine we experienced a "sympathy blackout"- every one of the four rickshaws of our group drove without its head lights. At first I thought it was a war zone, but no, its typical for south Asians to drive without lights. They try to extend the life of the light by not using it! It makes sense too when you think about. Needless to say, it gives a night trip through the winding gorges of the Karakorom a whole different feeling...

We arrived at the Shrine of Baba Shah Jamal to find it packed with a throng of young Pakistani men- the only women present were westerners in our group. But already it was plain that this wasn't the place to bring your young Muslim sister. In fact, it had more of the feel of a college fraternity house than a shrine! There wasn't any alcohol- Pakistan is a dry country, Instead, almost everyone, to a man, was either rolling or smoking a hashish cigarette. The air was blue with smoke. I saw may old college friend the carburetor there - a one and a half liter plastic coke bottle, empty, with five joints protruding from its base. For a second I wanted to stand up and shout, "Yo, let me show you how a real man handles that thing!" Then mercifully, sanity returned. In retrospect, the carburetor had only brought me trouble. Plainly, it was going to bring trouble, at least amnesia, to those poor fools who were greedily sucking at its smoking mouth.

An hour quickly passed. Free food was past around, and as we ate, a beatific bearded man dressed in white, evidently a saint in train, wandered amongst the crowd. He carried on his back an industrial three gallon hand pump, the same kind that firefighters or farmers use. Instead his was full of rosewater. When the crowd grew too boisterous, or too hot, he would pump the air full of a heavenly mist.

Finally, space was cleared and two men stepped forward with several large two headed traditional drums, the dhol. The drum is worn around the neck with a strap, and played with a straight stick and a curved wand. It sounds like both a rhythm drum and a tabla taken together. Soon these two guys were just flying along, alternating leads and counters as melodies passed between them without even braking a sweat. Then from out of nowhere a crazy guy jumps up and starts playing slow sweet jazz on a soprana saxaphone. It was like Sufi Night at the Knitting Factory in NYC. The saxaphonist noodled along for an hour, playing a series of solos, while the drummers played hard and fast underneath. It was totally cool.

Eventually the horn player grew tired and left. The crowd was pushed back even further, and six dancers pogoed into the center of the crowd. They were all madly shaking their heads like they were trying to induce a fit.... at first it was a little ludicrous. Then one guy starts hopping up and down; his head was shaking so violently that the whites of his eyes showed. His greasy hair flew around his head and then he raised his hand into the air and cried "Allah!" over and over again. Heartened, one of the other dancers started to whirl. Crouching low, like a twirling bowling ball with extended and clenched fists he would spin until he crashed out of control into the other dancers. Soon they had gathered around him in a senseless brotherhood, holding their hands in the air in praise as they guided his violent meanderings. It was like on old time full contact revival, with greasy hair and white soulless eyes.

Again space was cleared and the two drummers stepped forward. They had been playing without a break for hours and sweating like pigs. So I couldn't believe it when they started twirling, first one and then the other, both keeping time and playing frantically. One of the drummers was huge, a big man; he leaned back as he twirled and his drum flew about him like a giant missile. It was most impressive!

But soon the dancing began to break up. Some people were too high too high to walk, and their stumbling would trigger a pushing and shoving match. And then it would trigger a fist fight. It was time to make a graceful exit while most people's attention was driected else where. We squeezed down the stairs and out into there night. There, below us in the darkened street, was a sea of taxis confined by endless foodstalls, all illuminated by candles. Stoned Pakistanis pushed too and fro. Somewhere amidst this mele were our rickshaws, and hopefully, a way home to our bed....

2007-07-11T21:01:00.000-07:00

"What is history but a fable agreed upon." Napoleon

A brief disclaimer- this entry is first draft of a potential article on the wandering monk, Xuan Zang (also spelled Hsuan Tsang). Unfortunately, I don't really have the biographical material at this point to back up the article. I don't even have a copy of Xuan Zang's "Journey to the West in the Great Tang Dynasty" to use for back round information. What this article simply does is record what Yasha and I saw as we followed in his footsteps.

I

If I were to ask you what famous classical adventurer walked the farthest over the greatest period of time you would undoubtedly reply "Marco Polo, of course!" Ah, but I didn't tell you that this was a trick question. I used the word 'famous', and 1.6 billion Chinese would just have assuredly answered "Xuan Zang!" As far as famous goes, numbers win out.

Xuan Zang was a monk, a decidedly brilliant Buddhist monk, living in the 7th century CE. When he discovered inconsistencies and omissions in the available Chinese translations of Sanskrit originals he promptly decided that he would go there himself, to India, and translate the texts himself. Yet Xuan Zang was more than just brilliant, he was also remarkably dedicated and perseverant. First he learned Sanskrit, then he learned Tocharian, the lingua franca of the western regions. Then when the Tang emperor, Tang Taizong, refused him passage to the west he simply slipped away at night, fleeing from a comfortable life in the greatest city on earth to that of a wandering indigent. It would be 17 years before he returned to the Tang capital of Xi'an.

Today, Xuan Zang's story has been told and retold in China a hundred different times. The Ming era classic, "A Journey to the West", immortalized Xuan Zang as the monk Triptika. Aided by magical creatures, his story continues today in Anime cartoons and poorly costumed Chinese TV productions. And yet, 1300 years after his death one still wonders, who was he?, what did he feel, what did he see? With a month left on our Chinese visa Yasha and I decided to find out. We would go where Xuan Zang went, within reason that is, and try to see, if not what he saw, but what is there to see now.

They say that every journey begins with a single footstep; but for us, retracing Xuan Zang's trail began by following our nose. Behind the pleasant tree lined courtyards of the Great Mosque in Xi'an lies a narrow alley entirely given over to the pleasures of the flesh. Meat is everywhere, unrefrigerated, hanging on hooks, on tables, or sometimes simply spread on a bloody sheet of canvas, on the ground. The smell, needless to say, is indescribable. Noodle and kebab houses are a dime a dozen, yet it is the more arcane practices of animal rendering that attract the nose.

In a little decrepit courtyard full of broken bicycle parts you can see a man standing in a sea of frothy lung, doggedly chopping away. Along Beiguang Jie there is a whole string of liver stands (turn your face away!) with reeking tables groaning under the weight of baked liver, swollen like bowling balls, slowly cooking a second time in the sun. And then just when you feel like you need to rinse your nose out with salt water a new smell insinuates itself, something you've smelled before, something you love. There, virtually hidden by a crowd of pushing customers, is a take out sandwich stand. All they sell is beef brisket, corned beef, and for less than a dollar you can have a piece of Muslim flat bread, so hot that you can barely hold it, filled with a spicy and fragrant meat so soft that it falls apart in your mouth. Why do they even wrap it? In the best tradition of American fast food we merely moved several meters away from the crowd before gorging ourselves on a simple, but guilty pleasure.

Ironically, as you move away from the Muslim quarter Xi'an feels less like a village, something Xuan Zang would understand, and more like the modern Chinese city that it is. Xi'an is locally famous as the place to score a cheap mobile phone. Along the repetitious main streets and under the futuristic office towers it seems as if little else is sold. The immense city walls, 16km square, look as if they were built yesterday- and they probably were! Festooned with a million red lanterns the walls attract wealthy tourists like a moth to the flame. We got burned ourselves, paying 40 yuan apiece to climb to the top to view what is essentially an artificial set piece. That is the China of today, you pay more, but get less.

This, plainly, isn't what Xuan Zang was all about. I began roaming farther and farther afield, searching for a place where the mind of the great Tang philosopher might still reside. On my tourist map of Xi'an I found two spots that looked promising, two spots of green far from the city center. Tang pleasure gardens perhaps? One long day I ventured forth- only to find a wilderness of plastic recycling yards, coal depots, and grandiose construction projects. I wandered down increasingly more narrow lanes bordered by seemingly endless industrial brick walls. In the haze of early summer skeletal apartment blocks, apparently abandoned, ringed the horizon. Eventually the path turned to dirt, and I realized that I was lost. A battered three wheel cart bumped past me and I was pressed back against the brick wall. Then, from behind me, I heard a bird sing, and my heart filled with an unexpected joy. For a second, just a second, I felt close to the world of Xuan Zang.

II

To the west of Xi'an the landscape begins to change. Rain fall decreases, and the mountain ranges that rise from the desert are black, devoid of vegetation and ominous. This is the land of the Hexi Corridor, a narrow 1,000 km strip of irrigated land hemmed in north and south by the mountains. For China, the Hexi Corridor has always been its window on the West. Pilgrims, caravans, bandits, the wealth of Asia and the Occident traveled back and forth along its storied length. Xuan Zang walked here, and saw some of the things that we saw. Above all else the Hexi Corridor is an agricultural place, in the rhythms of socially conservative farm life one can see a bit of the past. In fact, nothing is more primeval Chinese than the image of a man, or a women for that matter, with a hoe. The metal head rises at the end of its five foot wooden shaft, pauses teasingly at the top of its arc, and then descends again and again into the earth.

We stopped in Lanzhou to look at the farming and religious life of the Hexi Corridor. Xuan Zang would have seen similar fields of wheat and yellow rape seed. He would have seen men harvesting the wheat by hand, with a small sickle, and then stacking it before the south facing entrance to the family compound. He would have seen the horse and donkey carts that are still used and he would have smelled the shit running behind the walls of the village. This much hasn't changed.

We traveled to Xiahe, a Tibetan community four hours by bus south of Lanzhou. In 630CE, when Xuan Zang passed by here, there were no Tibetan monks or Tibetan monasteries. The grass lands immediately to the south of the Hexi Corridor were then home to brigands and nomads, barbarians by Chinese standards, while Buddhism was unknown here. But today Xiahe contains Labrang, one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist monasteries outside of the TAR. With monastic life largely absent from China since the Cultural Revolution it is at Labrang where one can see something like what Xuan Zang saw. Labrang lies at the base of a cliff, with four or five large prayer halls dedicated to various deities and literally hundreds and hundreds of monks' dwellings. A three km outer wall, studded with thousands of large prayer wheels, surrounds the monastery and is focus of pilgrimage for Tibetans from far and wide.

Tibetan Buddhism varies in many ways from the mainstream Mahayana of the Tang era and it is easy to emphasize the differences, not the similarities. Yet in his day Xuan Zang himself was a proponent of the Yogacarya or Mind Only School. Today this school has been absorbed into Tibetan Buddhism and forms much of the basis for advanced philosophical debate. But perhaps it is not so much the details of the philosophy that Xuan Zang would have recognized but the everyday facts of life of a large monastery; the hi jinks of the novice monks at early morning prayers or the solemn demeanor of the ordained monks squatting in a line in a back alley, peeing into the dust. Mostly Xuan Zang would have recognized the predawn coolness at early morning prayers and the seemingly timeless chant, "I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, and I take refuge in the Sangha!"

One afternoon we slipped away from the monastery. A narrow valley led between the arid hills, leading to the west. We tried to ford the creek, failed, and then scrambled up a ridge, gaining 500m through flowering wild rose. From the summit we could see that the hills diminished into flat grazing grounds. To the west there was a sea of grass, undulating gently, bisected by a little road that wound itself into extinction. We ate a lunch of nectarines and Muslim flat bread, gazing far into the distance, where grasslands, mountains and sky all met in a cerulean haze. Undoubtedly Xuan Zang would have identified this view... well not this exactly... but the view of distance, and how that translated into time and effort. He would have looked into the distance and understood the transience of it all, and how out of this transience, or impermanence, all the infinity of forms arise.

III

The days that followed passed in a blur of movement and heat, of train stations, bus stations, and cheap Chinese food. Lanzhou, Zangye, Jiayuguan; now they are just names of cities along the Hexi Corridor. From the window of our bus a bucolic landscape scrolled by; fields of cabbage and beans bordered by copses of cottonwoods. Packed earth greenhouses marched across the valley floor. Once I saw a man with a hoe over his shoulder leading a white horse by its bridle; five minutes later I saw a pig and a cow standing nose to nose in deep meditation. Then the cow jumped back, evidently surprised by the extent of their unspoken inter species communication.

But what I remember most of all was the heat. How could Xuan Zang stand it? And him in heavy monk robes! Did he continue wearing the brown and grey of everyday monk's attire, as illustrations from the time show him? Or did he shuck down instead into an orange loincloth, and find shelter under a broad brimmed straw hat?

Like Xuan Zang, we faced the difficulties of petty Chinese bureaucrats and the weaknesses of our own bodies. In Zangye, after paying to see a thousand year old reclining Buddha - the largest in China - we discovered the entire statue wrapped in scaffolding, the Buddha barely visible in the dark, hiding the heads of the disciples surrounding him. When we complained and demanded our money back the gatekeepers merely laughed. How funny we must appear to them! The Chinese themselves are too afraid to complain. To stand up, to expose yourself, is not a Chinese quality. In Jiayuguan my body failed me. I woke, blew my nose, and gave myself a hernia! Despairing, I consoled myself with thoughts of all the other pilgrims that have walked this path. Many were killed by wild beasts, others encountered bandits that stripped them and left them alone to die in the desert. Supposedly Xuan Zang himself traveled at night, both to avoid the heat as well as the ever present eyes of the dacoits.

From Jiayuguan we turned south, leaving the Hexi Corridor behind. The mountains that had funneled us along the Corridor, the Black Mountains and the Quinlin Shan, faded to nothing. In their place was a seemingly endless stony desert. On occasion we passed a remnant of a silk road fort, it's sun baked clay bricks now eroded like a child's sandcastle after the tide has come in then gone away again. The bleakness of it all was heartbreaking.

One the southern edge of the Gobi Desert are a series of small ravines, nothing dramatic, where an seasonal stream cut it's way below the desert floor. Cottonwoods and poplar lie close to the ravines edge, while around the brackish pools of the drying watercourse thick rushes hide both raptors and songbirds alike. 2,000 years ago Buddhist monks and craftsmen came to these ravines, carving three separate cave complexes within a 150km radius. The greatest of these is are the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang.

Xuan Zang had passed through this area on his return trip from India. In the intervening years the desert has advanced, Chinese dynasties rose and fell, the caves were looted by westerners,

and finally, used as a stable by fleeing White Russian Cavalry. Today the caves see some 5,000 visitors a day, all carefully managed by multilingual docents with instructions to show each group a mere 10 out of the 492 caves. If you want to see more you pay more; this is China, after all.

I was unprepared, however, for the scope and grandeur of the Mogao Caves. There are two giant Buddha Maitreya statues, one 35m and the other 31m in separate caves, with enormous faces moulded delicately in the high Tang style. In another cave is a Reclining Buddha of equal length and sensitivity surrounded by grieving Arhats. And then there are cave after cave of exquisite frescoes guarded by giant clay gatekeepers, their smiles still as ferocious as yesterday.

It's difficult to critique a place such as this; it's a tour de force, truely world class.

Yet the beauty invites a question: Who was there to see it? These caves are virtually inaccessible, even today. In the classical era one would need to cross hundreds of miles of desert just to reach the next oasis, and then what? Where the Mogao Caves the ancient Chinese version of "build it and they will come"? Or is there more to it than that? Xuan Zang, in fact, wasn't advancing into a vacuum. The silk road was populated with settlements of Persians and Greeks, Turkmen and red-haired, green-eyed Russians. There were soldiers, mercenaries, camp followers and thieves, nuns, whores, holy men and fools. Great fortunes were made and lost in the transportation of goods. Along with the goods, inevitably, came ideas. The Great Mosque in Xi'an, for example, was founded in 741- a mere 100 years after the death of Mohammad. There may not have been a mobile phone net work in the 7th century, yet information still traveled surprisingly fast.

IV

We traveled onward. In two weeks time we traveled as far as Xuan Zang did in a year. Then he had slowed in Turphan, and so did we.

At 154m below sea level Turphan must be one of the most unlikely places for a settlement in the world, yet it has prospered for nearly 2,000 years. We alighted in Tulufan, Turphan's distant railway station, after an unpleasant night's journey on a hard seat. Instantly we were staggered.

Not only by the heat, but by the terrain. Turphan lay 50km away and 1,500m below us, a tiny green oasis at the bottom of what looked like a crater on Mars. The distances were vast, the heat inescapable. So it was with some trepidation that we continued onward, roaring down the hill towards Turphan in a cheap cab, the windows wide open, the 45C heat pinning our ears back and making our eyes water.

Turphan is alien in many respects. Despite the presence of only one time zone for all of China you can still feel Turphan, and all of Xinjiang Province, for that matter, starting to drift away. Where does allegence lie? To the center, the East, or towards the Turkic Muslims groups of the West. This question has been asked often before.

Xuan Zang spent several unwilling years in Turphan. Forced to teach Buddhism by royal decree he was a most reluctant tutor. One long hot afternoon we traveled to the old royal palace site at Gaochang, 35km to the east. We paralleled the Flaming Mountains before dropping down into the oasis surrounding the old city of Gaochang.
Like Turphan, Gaochang is primarily a Uighur town. Old men in white shirts and pill box hats, their whispy white beard lying stiffly on their chest, sat on the kerb, watching the world as they knew it pass by. The women, in open toed high heels, glittering Russian style dress, and dark head scarves reminded, strangely, of a picture I had seen of the old Persian Shah's wife. Beautiful, cosmopolitan, distant. And then one saw the palace site...

Attacked by Kublai Khan in the 14th century the city was burned and the population, as they say, put to the sword. Those who were left promptly converted to Islam. Today, passing through the immense city walls, is like entering a grave site. At first there is a sense of disappointment; is this all there is? But then, in looking closer you can see that the city is nothing more than a slag heap that has melted and while dripping pooled on the ground. In places, a dark hole opens into a cellar where you dare not descend. Jutting from the ruin of the royal palace are two tall spears of bricks, unknowable cyphers of what had once been. These were the remains of the Lecture Pagoda, the location were Xuan Zang spent his years of enforced tutelage. Everything else is gone - burned, blown away, now dust cycling the globe. I sat down in the shade of a melted wall and drank what little water I had left. The fear and suffering here must have been intense, as hot as the fire. Perhaps the souls of all those who perished here, like dust motes dancing in the sky, still remain here. Now that was a disquieting thought. I rose and left before the setting sun could paint the ruins red.

V

Xuan Zang's travels were never easy. On the road from Turphan to Kashgar he hid from robbers. Unseen, he considered himself lucky to have escaped death. I suffered an almost similar fate in Kashgar. While changing the film of my camera at a vegetable market I neglected my tripod. Behind my back the tripod was snatched, and just like that, it was gone. Some people saw him run, some people didn't, but no one, not even the police, spoke English or could alter the fact that the tripod just wasn't coming back. But I was lucky. I wasn't killed by wild beasts, or sold into slavery, or any number of less desirable fates. In the end we will lose everything, even our bodies. A tripod, regardless of price, is really a most inconsequential thing - or at least so I told myself.

Nor did it dim my appreciation of Kashgar. Surrounded by mountain ranges whose names are legend - the Tien Shan and the Pamirs - Kashgar is a polyglot mixture of every Central Asian race. I loved it. You could sit in a second story tea and dumpling shop in the old city and just watch faces all day. Who were they? How did they get here? History was writ large in every face.

Along the poplar lined streets leading into the city donkey carts still make haste in the early morning hours. But by late afternoon people move at a more languid pace. Smoke from the kebab stands rises into an air like incense for the Gods, calling the men from their evening prayers to the more convivial life on the streets. And there, unfortunately, we must leave them. From Kashagar Xuan Zang struck out to the west, across the Bedal Pass. Regretably, international protocol forbids us from following him. Instead we will follow the path of least resistance but, perhaps, of greater danger. Tomorrow we will leave for Kunjerab Pass and the Karakoram Highway into Pakistan.

Just as Xuan Zang confronted danger by praying not only for his own well-being but for the well-being of all creatures so do we. Just as compassion was his armor may it be our's also. Hopefully his spirit and our's will walk together where ever we may go, whether it is to Pakistan, or to India, or into (gasp!) the deepest heart of America.

Peace.

2007-06-17T01:57:00.000-07:00

The Caterpillar Fungus

At the eastern end of the Tibetan plateau is a mountain once considered taller than Mt. Everest.
Solitary, draped in perpetual ice and snow, Minyak Gankar rears 1500m above its 6000m companions. To Tibetans, Minyak Gankar was the home of the wrathful Dharma protector Dorje Lutru. The mountain itself, wreathed in clouds, rarely seen, was his shining crystalline abode.

For centuries the merit making Buddhists of the eastern Tibetan plateau would come on pilgrimage to Minyak Gankar, circumambulating entire mountain massive in a torturous month-long kora. Today its infrequently accomplished. Roads, clear cutting and farming have obliterated most of the old trails, while the heart of the pilgrimage, Gankar Monastery, was razed by the Red Guards in the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution. Rebuilt in the 1980's, the gompa is still trying to reclaim itself.

We had also come to the Minyak Gankar region to walk on the pilgrim trail but we were pilgrims of a different sort. Tired of the crass commercialism of Lijiang or "Shangri-La" we yearned to see a slice of Tibetan life like in the old days. Unfortunately, after the the ravages of the twentieth century, it's hard to conceive what that traditional life may have been like. China, like the rest of the industrialized nations, has abandoned the world of Faith and Belief for a more material future. Those not on board are forever left behind. In truth we are not pilgrims but witnesses: witness to the dying of the sacred.

A half an hour's drive south of Kangding the road ends, petering out in a cart track running high above the river. There, along the trail, you can find the usual detritus of Chinese civilization: plastic Pepsi bottles, delaminated sneakers and garbage bags, not so much discarded as released from the hand when their usefulness had ended. Above us, the mountains loomed.

We passed a gravel pit and a half completed dam. Then, a turquoise colored kingfisher, dead, crumpled beside the trail. Its orange awl-like bill was as long as my finger. The air was filled with sadness, but I suppose really it must have been just me. When we came across a group of yaks bestride the trail they fled, their bells tinkling through the dense forest.

The air grew chill and the shadows longer as we ascended the valley through the late afternoon. Finally we paused to wait for our Chinese companions in a beautiful but rubbish strewn meadow. To the east, the enormous wedge of Chiburongi soared a thousand meters above diminutive herder's tents. To the west lay the Gyazi-La, a long day's climb away. We were in caterpillar country, and from the mountains above resounded the occasional cry of success when the Tibetan hunter captured his prey - the caterpillar fungus.

Sometime ago, while reading Sir Christopher Bonnington's "Tibet's Lost Mountain", I came across a delightful chapter where Bonnington's friend, Dr. Charles Wilson, described the life cycle of the caterpillar fungus. In this case, truth is stranger than fiction.

A caterpillar - whether of a moth or a butterfly I ca'nt say - crawls through decomposing leaves under the harsh Tibetan sun. Turning this way and that, finally it scents under the ground the mycelium of a fungus, and then it begins to burrow. (To most human mushroom eaters, the mushroom, ah! the mushroom! is all that matters. But in all reality the mycelium, the thin, strand like fungus living below the ground is the real creature. In some cases it stretches for hundreds of yards as a single entity below a grove of aspen trees. At other times it is the white webbing in a rotten log. But know this, the mushroom is only the fruit; the mycelium is the plant.) It is the mycelium the caterpillar craves, and once engorged it dies, poisoned. Wrapped in the embrace of the fungus the consumer becomes the consumed. Soon miraculously, a tiny brown tendril rises from the subterranean tomb of the caterpillar and pierces the ground; the mushroom!

It is this tiny centimeter high fruiting body the caterpillar hunter spies, and with a special tool he, or she, or in many cases children unearth the caterpillar from its tiny dirt encrusted sarcophagus.

Everywhere in eastern Tibet you can find men loitering on street corners, who when given the chance, furtively offering you a much folded baggie of caterpillars. For a nomad living outside the cash economy this is one of few sources of income.

I don't know what the scope of this whole operation is. How many caterpillars are harvested; does anyone know? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A million? We were quoted fifteen yuan for a single caterpillar fungus - about two dollars. Some people get rich off of it. To the Chinese it's an elixir for the lungs and kidneys. To me, it's the craziest thing I've ever heard of.

The questions it brings to mind are many, but paramount among them is how can a species of butterfly (or moth) survive when its intermediary stage gorges itself till death in such numbers that it supports a bizarre health industry? When I first read Dr. Wilson's account Yasha cried out "What was God thinking?" As usual, I didn't have an answer.

As we climbed higher, day by day, to the Gyazi- La, our Chinese companions lagged farther and farther behind. They pursued the Caterpillar fungus as eagerly as the caterpillar pursued the fungus itself, and the Tibetans in turn pursued them. They came down from the hills when we were camped at night, or in the morning, or when we were struggling towards the pass. The Chinese (and we all know their reputation!) haggled, dickered, accepting one caterpillar and rejecting the next. I couldn't tell if it was a game or in earnest. At one point we saw a Chinese women, usually the friendliest of companions, throw a five yuan note back into the face of an astonished herder. Hard bargaining I guess.

Impatient, we crossed the pass and watched mist roll into the giant granitic amphitheater below Mt Grosvenor. To the south, the bulk of Minyak Gankar remained hidden; only the summit, the spire of Dorje Lutru's crystal mansion, sailed serenely above the clouds.

We walked for another day, far ahead of the Chinese, through a valley devoid of trees. Only yaks, yaks everywhere. Then we came to Yulong-xi, the village where we would stay for the night.

To our Han Chinese companions Tibet must have seemed like a rude border country, and it's people, the Tibetans, ignorant peasants, counterrevolutionaries... or worse. Certainly there may be an objective basis for their judgements. Taking my turn being last, I straggled up the hill to an imposing Tibetan house. Looking more like a fort than a house it was two stories of wood and packed mud. Small gaily painted windows were the only bit of color or ornamentation in it's impassive dun colored face. In the muddy courtyard a Tibetan mastiff strained at it's chain - I gave it a wide berth. Then there was a frantic shout and two of the Chinese women burst from the house, their hands covering their mouths. Like most Tibetan dwellings the ground floor was the stable, and reeking pools of horse and yak pee congealed in the dimly lit interior. Coupled with the odor from the "dry toilet", the outhouse hanging from the second floor of the house that discharged directly onto the ground outside, the smell could only be called appalling.

Upstairs was our host family, huddled around an iron stove. Slowly they kneaded by hand tsampa in a bowl of butter tea. The Chinese, taking no mind, swiftly set up their propane stove. They chopped and diced vegetables and pork, steamed a massive amount of rice in their new pressure cooker, unwrapped their pickle relish, opened a couple of bottles of beer, and over an excellent meal proceeded to examine their now considerable bags of caterpillar fungus. It was an impressive performance of cultural superiority.

But cultural superiority is a tricky thing. It doesn't revolve around wet toilets or dry toilets, or whether you wipe with water, paper or dirt. The Tibetans, feeding yak dung into their stove, gave us a little lesson of this later that night.

The Chinese were in their sleeping bags, napping on the floor. I was sitting, my sleeping bag around my waist, when our host walked up to me, squatted down, and closely examined the medallion around my neck. It was a picture of my teacher, a Tibetan lama. When I explained who he was, and that I was a Buddhist just like him (a claim I really couldn't substantiate), he silently unlocked an elaborate cabinet and removed a well worn picture album. There were faded pictures of him with various monks, pictures of Tibetan deities, a picture of the young Karmapa. Then he showed me his prize possession: a dog eared photo of the Dalai Lama.
"Oh yes!" I said, "We've seen the Dalai Lama many time and have volunteered at his teachings! He even touched me on the top of my head!"

Yasha explained through sigh language that she had some Mani pills - Tibetan herbal medicine that had been blessed by His Holiness himself - that she kept in a silk purse. Suddenly we were surrounded by a ring of unwashed faces blazing with yearning and devotion. There wasn't a word spoken. They held out their hands, imploring, and Yasha quietly placed three pills in each hand. But even then they wouldn't leave. They stood in a group, three or four women, several men and children, and they stared at us simply because we had seen the Dalai Lama and they hadn't. I felt very small and unworthy. I looked at myself and saw the expensive sleeping bag, the Patagonia shirts and Mountain Hardware tent and saw that we had everything that they lacked. And yet they had the one thing we didn't have, the one thing that we've been looking for and couldn't find, and that's Faith.

The next morning we left the Chinese behind and proceeded on our own, up towards a mountain pass. Eventually we would reach the monastery at the foot of the icefall, and then we would bow at Dorje Lutru's crystal feet.

2007-05-11T06:07:00.000-07:00

THE SISTER MEAL FESTIVAL
Taijiang and Shidong, China

I

We were all dancing around to the left in an enormous circle, the Miao women shuffling along under a mountain of silver, their tall buffalo horns swaying. The Miao men were dressed in black and were dancing faster, leading the circle, swinging their ten foot pan pipes in unison.
In the center of the group there was trouble- two five gallon plastic containers full of whiskey- and around them a group of old Miao women, laughing riotously.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a dark shadow, a wraith really, rushing towards me. I shrank, but without much difficulty the toothless crone grabbed me by the back of the neck and poured a glass of molten firewater down my gagging gullet. I choked, the raw alcohol dribbling down my chin. There was a strange buzzing in my head and I knew without a doubt that I would have to flee before it was too late.

But where was my wife? I had last seen her in the company of two black clad women, dancing and drinking.

"Well," I thought, "She's a big girl, she will have to take care of herself. Its every man for himself!" And putting my head down, I eased myself out of the circle

The origins of the Sister Meal Festival are still shrouded in mystery. Traditionally, the Miao of the Taijiang District would gather on the 15th day of the third lunar month for a marriage festival. Before the festival would begin the young girls of marriageable age would ascend into the rice terraces and harvest several wicker baskets of sticky rice. It was then steamed and dyed the colors of the rainbow. When a suitor would present himself at the dance she would offer him a packet of rice with either a negative answer-a pair of chopsticks-or a positive answer-a piece of satin-secreted inside.

Today, of course, none of this charming ritual persists. Few young men remain in the village; most have fled for the comparatively easy life of the city. The mock weddings and sticky rice presention, for example, are now held strickly for the tourists. But still, the Miao love a good party. The Sister Meal Festival is their opportunity to dress up in family heirlooms and show off their wealth. It is time to sing and dance, to express their pride in being a small minority people in southern China. And most importantly, it is a time to drink!

We had come to Taijiang directly from Kunming at perhaps the worst of times. It was China's "golden week", a May Day holiday when the entire country has the week off. Literally hundreds of millions of people were on the road, the sort of organized chaos that China seems to revel in.
Every hotel was booked out, every bus and train packed. We had stepped off the bus in Taijaing, discovered the hotels to be full, and without even removing our backpacks began dancing. It was insane.

Sitting under the giant, grim statue of general Zangb Xongt Mii in the Taijiang square I still couldn't catch sight of Yasha. There were dancing wheels everywhere, a riot of sound and color, with Miao and spectators revolving around the drummers. I shot a few photographs of the dancers, details of silver work while they whirled past, yet it was difficult not to get alcohol splashed on my camera.

Finally I returned to the dance circle I had fled some time earlier. Inside the circle of shuffling Miao women I could see a hard cluster of spectators, and around them a predatory group of photographers. I pushed my way through the dancers, and then the photographers... to find Yasha and the old women, arm in arm, dead drunk. Their cloths were soaked from spilled whiskey and they raised their heads in a fearsome laughing croak. At their feet were the two jugs of firewater; one empty and the other half full. It didn't look good.

"Yasha," I cried, "What the hell are you doing?" I pulled here out of the dance circle. It was plain we had to leave, to go somewhere, but she could hardly walk. We staggered down the main street of Taijiang,our backpacks still on our backs, the laughing stock of the locals. I would have felt humiliated except that I have been known to pull similar bone headed stunts myself. So I kept my mouth shut and looked for a hotel. Unfortunately, we could neither read, write nor speak Chinese.

Before long Yasha collapsed on the steps of a nondescript building and refused to rise. It seemed like our journey was over. I didn't know what to do. "Hotel, Hotel", I shouted at the mob of astounded men standing at the top of the steps. In my phrase book they showed me the word for 'hospital.' "No!" I said, "Sleep, she just needs to sleep!" And I made the universal gesture for sleeping, my head on my hands. They smiled. Yes, miraculously, they had a room, probably the last one in town. We graped her like a sack of rice and dragged her upstairs.

Perhaps now it is best to draw the curtain on this pathetic scene to best protect the reputation
of those involved. Suffice to say, what goes up most come down; or in this case, what goes down must come up. My father used to say that "a word to the wise is sufficient." Let's hope so. Rice whiskey is a powerful drug and shouldn't be drunk without extreme caution. But most of all watch out for those old ladies!

II

The ramshackle bus slowly climbed along a pock marked dirt road, crested a ridge, and descended again. We were on our way to Shidong, a small village several hours north of Taijiang, for the third day of the Sister Meal Festival. I rubbed at the condensation on the bus window but it didn't really improve the view. Like an old Chinese painting I could see pine trees rising into a misty nothingness. Along the road red azaleas and wild honeysuckle bordered rice terraces; it was beautiful. Jet Li was starring in 'Fong Sai Luk II' on the video, and when it turned out there wasn't a second CD we got to watch the first half over and over again. Yet it made me feel as if we had gone back in time to a simpler China, a place where the tiny hamlets of wooden post and beam Miao houses were devoid of the ubiquitous satellite dish.

Two thousand years ago the predecessors of today's Miao had begun a migration from the upper Mekong region in Tibet. Driven by population pressures and warfare they descended the Mekong River, displacing some groups, avoiding others. The Miao always traveled the ridge tops; perhaps it was easier walking, perhaps it was easier to find game, or perhaps it was simply to avoid already established groups in the valleys.

Today the Miao extend across all of Southeast Asia. During the first Indochine war the Vietnamese called them Montegards. In Laos and northern Thailand they are called the Hmong.

After the fall of Laos and Vietnam in 1975 tens of thousands of Hmong fled their homeland... they had sided with the losers. In China however they are still a viable minority group with a culture that is still relatively intact.

Our bus again crawled up to a ridge top; the mist cleared, and mountains and rivers seemed to stretch forever around us. Then again we descended towards a village only to be stopped by a line of cars blocking the road. The drivers were gone, towards the village ahead. It was Shidong, and the day's festival had begun.

Unfortunately it really wasn't what we had been expecting. We navigated our way through all the abandoned cars to find a mock rice presentation in progress. Chinese photographers were everywhere; I had never seen so many photographers in one place. All of them had either a brand new Nikon or Canon SLR, all of them had photographer's vests and hats that said NIKON or CANON, and all of them had a brand new tripod to rest their expensive equipment on. It was as if in the privacy of their own home in Beijing they had consulted some sort of guide on 'how to be a photographer', bought all this expensive stuff, and then gone on vacation.

Milling around the rice presentation were a dozen Miao, dressed in more silver chains and necklaces than the Mayor of London on the Queen's birthday. Their elaborate headdresses- tall silver buffalo horns, silver birds and flowers, towered above the crowd. It was merely a photo-op, but of the most obnoxious sort. The Chinese photographers would rudely demand them to stand here, or stand there, and when the girls were slow in compiling they would grab them by the arm to move them to a new spot. I was shocked and a bit uneasy. Yet the Miao women seemed to take it all in stride. No money was exchanged, this was all gratis, a way for the Miao to show their visitors a good time. It was simultaneously impressive and saddening.

We descended to the river where the dancing was to be held. It was like any small town Chinese fair, with booths selling sour bean curd and rice noodles, watermelon slices and ears of cooked corn. Boys shot at balloons on a backboard with an imitation AK-47 pellet gun. Young lovers held hands. Closer to the river several men paraded around their champion waterbuffalos- the winners of a bull fight held previously. The buffalos posed for photographs also, gazing mournfully up at the sky as waterbuffalos do, with a big pink ribbon pasted on their forehead and a pair of live ducks hanging from their horns.

The symbolism, needless to say, was obscure.

Finally, at three, the dancing began.. First one drummer started drumming and a circle formed.

Then another drummer appeared, and another and another. In the end there were more circles than I could count. But they couldn't really dance. There were so many spectators surrounding around them, so many photographers, that there wasn't even enough room to move. Even then photographers would stop a dancer and pull her out of line so that they could get a shot. It was astounding and inexplicable. Surely it seemed like the Miao's patience was being tried. Yet without speaking Chinese we couldn't ascertain the real state of affairs. And perhaps we never will.

Eventually we tired of the spectacle. We climbed back up to the road and found our bus, trapped in a sea of cars. So that is were we sat for the next several hours as the police tried to unsnarl the mess and to send the photographers home.

2007-04-17T00:57:00.000-07:00

At the back of an unfriendly little restaurant in Sam Neua, Laos, lies a gadget rarely seen in the West, or in any other part of the world for that matter. It sits in a faded faux wood cabinet with an aging 17 inch screen and an outdated console carpeted with the mildew and dust of a dozen monsoons. But when the proper CD is inserted - as an old man did the night we were there - this old karaoke machine becomes something special: The Political Karaoke Machine!

Once it came on I couldn't keep my eyes off of it.

The music, oddly enough, sounded strangely like a poppy love song. The video however was something else. Grainy black and white images from the last Indochinese war scrolled madly across the screen. There were scenes of howitzers firing, anti-aircraft guns firing, soldiers running frantically through trenches, hot shell casings spilling out of machine guns, and all the other paraphernalia of war. There was even a shot of one idiotic - or brave - soldier getting up on the lip of his trench and wildly firing some kind of antiquated rifle into the sky.

Then, like the boogie man being let out of the closet, the object of all this animosity appeared: down out of the sky a silhouette fell through smoke and fire. Black, malignant, it was unquestionably the workhorse of the American air war in Indochina, the F-4b Phantom.

I felt a shock of dismay. Somehow,in just in a split second, I could see that this jet represented not only all that was wrong with this world but something we must all fight against. At least that is what the video seemed to say.

Still, I was hungry, so I picked up my chopsticks and resumed eating. Yet I couldn't stop watching the video. The old man played it over and over again, the same scenes of explosions and men running, the jet descending... I wanted to stand up and shout "Yes its me... I'm the killer!" Finally I thought I was going to be sick.

A Dutch man eating dinner with us turned to me and said, "What's wrong? Does seeing this video make you want to defend your country?" I shook my head no. Yet it was plain that I simultaneously felt both offended by the video and guilty of my country's conduct in war. I remembered the old bumper sticker from the Vietnam War: "My Country - Right or Wrong!" But what does that even mean in these circumstances?

I tried to explain that I had protested against the war as a college student, had rioted and run from the police with a bandanna over my face and tear gas in the air. Then I fell silent.

"It seems as if the war isn't really over for you, is it?" Yasha asked. "Maybe our trip to Vieng Xai tomorrow can help you clarify you thoughts..."

Vieng Xai was the famed Hidden City of the Pathet Lao, a warren of caves riddling the cliffs and valleys not more than a dozen miles from the Vietnamese border. At the height of the war 23,000 peasants, soldiers and commissars hid underground as the Americans rained down death from the sky.

"Yes," I thought, "Maybe going to Vieng Xai really will clarify my thoughts." But I certainly wasn't looking forward to it.

The mountains to the east of Sam Neua rise in a gradual arpeggio of misty ridges and passes to the highlands of Vietnam. It seems as if summer will never come there. What is a sweltering day in the lowland provinces is a chill and rainy day in Houphang Province. It is no wonder that the people of northern Laos and north Vietnam, Hanoi especially, are considered cool, taciturn and reserved.

The next morning our bus - the covered back of a truck - slowly climbed through the gentle rain. Hmong tribes people stood idly beside the road, the children entirely naked, the adults dressed in rags. It is ironic that Houphang Province is known as both the birthplace of the Lao Revolution and as the poorest region in the country. A staggering 40% of the population earns less than $1 per day. "Is that gross or net" I mused, watching the rain. At that rate I suppose it doesn't matter. The clouds parted, drawing back like the curtains in an old time movie theatre. Below us, in a lush green valley framed by limestone cliffs, was Vieng Xai.

Unfortunately, our first impression of the Home of the Revolutionary Heroes was not a particularly positive one. The bus terminal was an open space, a sea of mud, bordered by a few poorly populated market buildings. The mist thickened again and rain swept across what little we could see of the valley. Ducking our heads, we set off in search of a guest house.

We quickly found a two dollar a night cheapie, and after settling ourselves we decided to take a look around. By then it was the early afternoon and we had missed the guided tour of the caves. So armed with a hand drawn map we set off in search of the revolution.

Inextricably, it wasn't what we expected at all.

In the interregnum between the end of the American bombing in 1973 and the establishment of the Lao People's Republic in 1975 the army escaped from the caves. In front of each cave housing a Central Committee member, and there were five of them, a lavish dacha had been built for their own personal use. Unfortunately, since then, time and tide have changed.

We ambled down a muddy road flanked on one side by pretty vegetable gardens and on the other by imposing cliffs. The rain abated and we found ourselves before a rusted ornamental gate. It didn't seem to be locked, so we put our shoulders against the dripping metal and slowly pushed it open. The sign, in streaked letters on a decaying cement wall said, "Mr. Souphanouvong's Memorial." Hand in hand we walked up the path.

At the base of the cliff was a beautiful dacha, clearly in a soviet style but modulated by the sensibilities of the French. The horizontals and verticals of the pink and blue building were offset by the sensuous curves of Champa Lao (frangipani) trees in the garden. It was a stunning ensemble.

The house was deserted and the cave turned out to be locked. Yet while walking up a brick path behind the house we came across a stupa dedicated to Mr. Souphanouvang's son, the so- called Red Prince. He had been set upon in 1969 by South Vietnamese commandos who had slipped across the border and brutally beaten to death. His death was just one more small death in a horrible war, but the picture of this young man's face on the memorial was strangely affecting. Amazingly the sun came out, and the stupa, and the flowering Champa Lao trees, were bathed in a radiance of grace.

The following day we took the tour, something I had been dreading. However, when I said that I was an American our guide merely smiled, the same smile he gave Yasha when she said that she was a German. Quickly he led us on the tour. The five caves, the underground theatre and hospital, the meeting room of the Central Committee, all passed rapidly. It turned out that he was in a hurry to attend his English lessons. We shook hands and parted.

So for the rest of the day we wandered around Vieng Xai. We watched Yao tribeswomen in blue and white checkered kulaks and elaborate vests fringed with red pom-poms striding resolutely in bare feet through the mud of the bus terminal. We watched farmers planting slash and burn style, with a digging stick and a seed, dropped on at a time, into the hole. We watched Hmong tribes people digging tubers, and when we stopped to say hello everyone smiled the slow easy smile of country folks. No one cared who we were, or what our politics were. They were there in this valley before the Communist Party came and they would still there after the Party left. They are survivors, and the rituals of planting and harvesting are far more interesting and necessary than the diversions of ideology.

I suppose there must be a lesson here somewhere. Big countries all over the world push around small countries, and I just happen to be born in one of the big countries. To carry the guilt for something I never did would, in the words of Mr Spock, be illogical. But I guess that is the way it is. Hopefully some day I can attain to the equanimity of the Hmong and the Yao and simply live, joying in the rising of the sun and coming of the rains. Until then I will bow down and consider them, as all people are, my teachers.

2007-03-20T22:03:00.001-07:00

2007-03-20T07:12:00.001-07:00

The old men with the tattoos sat in a rain shed above the river, with one eye watching the occasional traffic on the dusty street, and with the other the cluster of canoes at the landing stage below. Tiny Iban women, their earlobes distended almost down to their shoulders, sat on rattan cargo baskets at their feet. To the south, a wall of darkness from the tail end of the monsoon hung above the jungle's horizon. A rainbow flashed, and then was gone. The heat was stifling, overwhelming....

The old men sat there loosely, relaxed and not smiling. Some of them were simply dressed in shorts, and across their torsos played a panoply of tattoos; sunflowers, stars, bizarre tribal arabesques, and on their throat, an unimaginable little tattoo that meant they had taken a head. One old man swiveled around and goggle-eyed me, the dreaded black tattoo like a brand on his adam's apple consuming my entire attention. I turned away, ashamed. How could it be? I thought headhunting died out in the early 20th century. Either these guys were somewhat older then they looked or else they had been getting in a little action on the side. Either way, it was plain there was alot I didn't know about Borneo.

We had come to Malaysia on a whim, and a cheap flight from Penang to Kuching had quickly brought us to Sarawak. A bus ride later and we were on an express boat ascending the Rejung River for the frontier town that bills itself as "the gateway to the heart of Borneo," Kapit.

And what an ironic gateway it was! Dozens of large timber freighters with names like the Transveener Pearl or the Mineral Harvester fought for space along the impossibly crowded waterfront with express boats from Sibu and hordes of local canoes. The center of attention, the Battang Rejung, a half a mile wide and muddy from the erosion of a thousand lumber camps, rushed down from the mountains of the interior. It felt like Dawson Creek in the 1890's. Except here the gold had been replaced with timber. But just like Dawson Creek the wealth here was flowing downstream as fast as it could go.

Later, after the old men had come and gone, Rumpang sat down beside me.

At first sight, it would be hard to find anyone as un-Iban as he. His pants were freshly pressed, while his salmon-colored button-down shirt bore none of the enormous sweat stains that characterized everyone else in this little frontier town. Yet his brown smiling face said that he was all Iban. We chatted briefly. Then when he offered to take us to his longhouse - some three hours upstream on a tributary of the Rejung - at a fee to be discussed later - we jumped at it.

Perhaps we should have looked a little closer before we leapt, yet our time in Sarawak was extremely limited and so too, ultimately, were our choices.

We met Rumpang the following morning on the waterfront. He had lined up his brother's longboat and a 30 horse Honda outboard; but fuel was expensive and we still needed food, so perhaps we should just give him 700 ringgits now?

That was like a gut-check; we didn't even have that much cash on us. The bank turned out to be a further adventure, with back country chinese tellers holding up our travelers check to the light as if it was a mysterious cypher from outer space.

It wasn't until the early afternoon before we finally left Kapit, and by then the heat was heavy on the waterfront. We drifted down to the fuel barge to take on 15 gallons of gas, then we were off, cruising upstream past giant gravel barges, plywood factories and lumber camps. Finally - and why not - we sighted Sarawaks pride and joy... the loading dock for Borneo's only open pit mine!

Fortunately Sarawak hasn't always been this way. When James Brooke appeared off Borneo's shores in his armed yacht The Royalist in 1834 Borneao was a pristine tropical wilderness with a smattering of Malay kampungs along the South China Sea. Vexed by marine piracy, the Sultan of Bunei offered Brooke a portion of his kingdom in return for ridding the Sultanate of this sea-borne scourge. When Brooke succeeded, he became the first "White Raja".

It was an unlikely rule, yet today it is considered by many to be the golden age of Borneo.

Complicating Brookes' rule was the continuous migration of a sizable group of indigenous peoples from Kalimantan into northern Borneo. The Iban today are considered the prototypical headhunter. Walking for five days, then camping for two years, then walking again, they slowly came into conflict with more established groups in Sarawak. The Iban drove all the weaker tribes before them, attacking resident longhouses and slaying those who resisted. Headhunting eventually became a cultural activity, a cult of masculinity, a reason d'etre for any young man wishing to prove himself and add to the harvest of souls hanging in the rafters of the longhouse. By Brookes' time headhunting groups criss-crossed Sarawak, driving some tribes into extinction while playing havoc with any concept of trade or of an orderly society. All walks of life were affected. It was left to James Brookes' successor, Charles Brooke to forge peace between the warring groups. Fifteen years later the Japanese invaded and a new horror began.

The end of the war and the integration of Borneo as Sarawak into the Federation of Malayasia brought about a new era. Sadly, this era has been characterized by resource exploitation at the hands of the Sarawakan government, aka the Sarawak Forestry Corp. Today this exploitation continues unabated.

An hour out of Kapit we left the Rejung and entered the Baleh, a tributary descending from the mountains to the south. Both rivers are immense, more than a kilometer wide, and drain vast swaths of the interior. Rumpang waved his arm at a small church high on a bluff above the river. He had spent his childhood here at boarding school, the ward of an African-American missionary from Des Moines. Like most Christians in Sarawak he was a Methodist. We turned again, and finally entered the Mujong.

Gradually the devastation eased. The river flowed pure and clean and trees arced over the water like the upraised fingers of a hand. The whirr of cicadas swelled and we raced into a world of shadow and light.

The river became shallower and soon we were fighting our way upstream through rapids. Sometimes we would shoot up a flume like a salmon going home to spawn, other times we sped in a back-eddy along the shore, ducking as epiphytes and vines swept above our heads. It was delightful. Then, as the light began to dim a longhouse loomed on a bluff above yet another set of rapids; Rumpang swerved the canoe towards shore, cut the engine, and we were there.

A visit to a foreign country, especially if you dont speak the language, is somewhat comparable to a blind man making his way down a foreign street without a cane. He can tap something with his foot to try and surmise what it is, but in the end its all just guess work. Of course one could say that life itself is no different. But in a foreign country all the usual clues - verbal, cultural - are missing. Its hard not to look like an idiot.

Our time in Rumpang's longhouse, Rumah Liok, was like that. We climbed up the mud bank from the river in the gathering twilight and immediately encountered a group of bare breasted women sitting on a mat and culling through a large pile of nuts. Yasha asked, "Is it ok to take a picture?" and Rumpang quickly replied, "Sure, no problem!" But the look the women gave us said that it was a problem... a big problem. Yasha and I quickly moved off, confused.

We were never able to reconcile the inconsistancies in the behavior of Rumah Liok's inhabitants. Some people were friendly, some weren't, and some were merely neutral. And what about Rumpang? Perhaps he was the real problem. Perhaps there were resentments between him and all the neighbors that he had left behind. Our presence there, uninvited by the longhouse itself, may have just been the final straw. We were like a pair of sightless pilgrams tapping our way down a darkened street.

Essentially a longhouse is a single family dwelling divided up into individual apartments. A covered verandah is a common meeting ground, workplace, and cultural center. In the old days, all longhouses were elevated as protection from raiding headhunters. Today many of them, like Rumah Liok, were constructed in the 1950's. The verandah, as well as the longhouse itself, sat on the ground on a concrete base. Some modern longhouses are entirely built of concrete and look like some sort of bizarre old age home. Some are so long that the express boat has to make two stops to drop off passengers.

While musing over our rejection by the bare breasted women Rumpang called us to dinner. We had heard before how the Iban liked fat, pig fat, and how a feast is primarily composed of what is for us uneatable portions of the wild boar. So I shouldn't have been shocked by the cubes of white pork fat fried in oil, nor the bony fish fried in oil, nor the tapioca leaves fried in ? I wasn't shocked, really, just a bit concerned. Rumpang had told us that after eating we would be drinking, and I knew that what went down greasy could come back up just as easily. And Rumpang was right; after dinner we retired to the verandah to drink...

We sat in a circle of men with the head man, Tioh Liok, in the middle. Multiple tattoos, sunflowers, stars, eagles, rippled across his shrunken chest. With a flourish he ripped the metal cap off the first bottle of arrack with his teeth. I winced. He poured himself a full glass of the evil smelling stuff and drained it in one gulp. Pouring another he handed the glass to me and said "One go! One go!" Rumpang commented, "He means you should drink it all at once, just like him.!" But I already knew what he meant. He meant I was in big trouble.

Sometime later I found myself staggering through a rice field on the edge of the longhouse. A half moon floated distantly overhead. I was beyond drunk, and before long I sunk helplessly to my knees and vomited. Then the dogs who had been following me gathered around, seeking the pork chunks. "Oh" I thought as I settled to the ground, "It doesn't get worse then this!"

Needless to say, it does.

I was woken early by loud and sarcastic cries of "One go! One go!" Fortunately the humiliation was muted by the pounding in my head. We immediately set off downstream through a landscape of mist and quietude. I hung on as best I could until a barking deer, trying to swim the river, attracted our attention. Rumpang and his sister drew their knives; turning the longboat into the current they took up the chase. To the deer this was like a death sentence. Crying out with a strangely human voice of fear and horror it floundered at the water's edge. In my befuddled state it reminded me of all that was wrong with this place, and with me too for that matter. For a long moment it scrambled on the bank. Then, as we came up on it, it fled to the safety of the forest. I almost wept with relief.

By noon the sun had burned away the mist and we had turned into an even smaller tributary of the Mujong, the Pakuh. Shallow water flowed beneath giant trees that buttressed the stream bank. These were 'enkabang' trees, the elephant nut tree, a giant of the forest. Flowering only occasionally, and then in unison, they produced a nut as large as a hens egg. With its fluted wings the entire nut was over six inches long; for days we had seen them riding the currents of the Mujung. In the eddies they collected like cord wood. In turn, the Iban collected them. Dried and packaged in 100kg bags they fetched 2.50 ringgit per kg and were, at times, a major component of the Iban's economy. Tethering the canoe to the bank we went in search of the elephant nut.

I really cant remember a day that started out so miserable ending as enjoyable as this. The forest, an incrediable mixture of hardwoods and softwoods, seemed to extend forever. Here and there we stopped to climb a tree and harvest 'monkey apples', or while eating them getting down to examine a giant centipede, armored with black shoulder plates like a samuri of old, slowly clambering through decaying leaves. Everything spoke of great age, and in turn of mutual dependence. It was plain that we all had a common ancestor, and that it was this common parentage of DNA that allowed us to sample the fruit without harm, or to utilize the bark of the Bintangor tree for its anti-AIDS properties. By the late afternoon we had several rattan baskets full of elephant nuts and had experienced the jungle, not as a commodity, but as an organic whole. Strangely, I also felt relatively happy and sober. We untethered the canoe, now heavy with elephant nuts, and pushed it out of the shallows. Slipping through sunlight and shadow we began polling downstream.

2007-02-27T20:47:00.000-08:00

if you haven't seen any of yasha's writing before please check out the previous post.

28/2/07

At first glance the ferry ride from Butterworth to Georgetown seems strangely reminiscent of the ferry ride to the southern Indian city of Cochin. Plainly both these towns are situated on easily defensible coastal islands and both towns were founded by colonial powers. In Cochin's case the Porteguese took control in the seventeenth century. It wasn't until a hundred years later that the tide of colonial ambiton and the English washed up on the western coast of Malaysia.

But here the similarities between the two islands ends. The English imported Indians from their own holdings in both southern and northern India to work in the agricultural plantions of Penang, Malacca and Kuala Lumpur. At the same time Chinese miners flooded down from an overcrowded and oppressive mainland China it work in the tin mines of the Malayasian interior.

Today this ethnic melange has produced a rich and vibrant cultural that is niether entirely Malay, Chinese or Indian. But it is undoubtedly Malaysian.

We've spent several weeks here in Georgetown, walking through street after street of crumbling Chinese shop houses. The breadth of Chinese culture is deep here, deeper even than in mainland China, where the cultural revolution eliminated the old ways forever. In the Chinatown of Georgetown you can walk down an ancient street and then wander into a two hundred year old clan hall.
There, surrounded by incrediably intricate and gold painted wooden carvings, are the tablets which record the geneology of the clan.

At first we couldn't understand what this was all about. We stopped some people and asked, "Is this a Buddhist temple or what?" And the answer was yes and no. Mostly clan halls perserve the local gods - or protectors - that the original clan members brought with them from China. To the right and left of the main shrine is a shrine to a god of prosperity and then frequently a shrine ot Kuan-yin, the goddes of compassion. On a busy morning the clan hall is full people franticly lighting incense and rushing from shrine to shine, paying homage to ancestors, praying for prosperity and begging for mercy. The air is cloudy and scented with incense; light slanting down from the central courtyard reveals a scene that could have been in the middle ages. it is fascinating.

After viewing the mideval atmosphere in the clan temples we would return to our hotel, the Oasis Hotel, on the apptly name Love Lane. Love Lane had an atmoshphere of a different sort.
By day, the ancient shophouses seemed the same as the rest of chinatown, but at night, the hookers came out to play. Some were tall and attractive but with a strikingly deep voice. Others hung out at a street corner, creating a tableau like something out of the Parisian photographs Brassai. The clerks themselves at the Hotel Oasis had an ambigious sexuality, frequently sitting outside the hotel, drinking singha beer with the transvestites on the long, hot, langorous afternoons.

We timed our visit in Georgetown to be during Chinese New Year, and during that week there were never-ending lion dances, puppet shows, Chinese opera on a mainstage, traditional music with fiddle and zither, and of course, a dangerous amount of firecrackers. We had a wonderful time. But what made it even more wonderful was that the Chinese people were so eager to show us their culture. We stood in numerous clan halls, furiously shooting photographs, and people would move around us as if we weren't even there, bowing, placing incense before a shrine, and then someone would stand beside us and explain exactly what was going on. Yesterday afternoon, for example, we quietly sat in the gold maker's hall, drinking tea watching a group of men playing mah jong. The periodic clicking of the pieces as they were shuffled, the bird-like movements of their hands, were hypnotic in a way that we rarely experience in our busy lives. I cant emphasize enough how much fun it was.

Of equal fun was our trip to the Tamen Negara National Park. (I was just told that tamen negara means national park, so somehow i've got the name wrong)
Perhaps the confusion stems from the fact that Tamen Negara was the first national park in Malaysia, established by the English in 1939. Initially it was a game preserve to safeguard the dwindling numbers of Seldang, a large and aggressive wild buffalo. In time Tamen Negara became the premier national park on mainland Malaysia, with thousands and thousandsof acres of pristine tropical rainforst, wild elephant and tigers.

We spent a week trekking in Tamen Negara, sleeping in elevated game watching blinds or "hides". The first "hide" we slept in was perhaps the best. Yasha and I were the only ones there, sleeping on a pair of hard wooden bunkbeds. It was a rare experince to see the jungle gradually going dark, and to hear animal calls increasing, not decreasing, as the daylight waned. We sat in silence holding each other, watching firefles rise into the star-filled night.

But trekking in the jungle has its own rules, far different from that of a temperate climate. After a rain storm, for example, the leeches would come out. We had one twelve kilometer hike where the leeches pursued us so hotly that we really couldn't stop. To rest we would stand on a fallen log above the ground and flick the leeches off our shoes with a stick. After awhile our legs were dripping with blood from leech bites. But strangely enough, their bite contains both an anesthetic and an anti-coagulant, so the wound doesn't hurt even though it bleeds quite freely. In the end it just becomes another inconvenience that can be dealt with. Unfortunately we met some other trekkers who weren't as well prepared as us. They were trekking in sandels, so after a couple of kilometers their feet resembled a pair of bloody stumps! ouch! It hurt just to look at.

Perhaps most amazing about the rainforest was the amount of species diversification. In an acre of forest there are more than two hundred species of trees, all competing for sunlight. (as a brief aside, yesterday we went for a walk through the jungle out to the lighthouse here on penang island. After picking some pitcher plants were told that there were 24 different species of pitcher plant on Penang and mainland Malaysia). In Tamen Negara there are hundreds of species of rattan, a bamboo like plant, and in many areas this was a dominant component of the jungle. What differentiates the rattan from the bamboo is that the rattan uses spines to keep itself erect. If a stem falls over (and some are sixty feet tall) the spines along its stem will catch on neighboring trees to hold it up. Other rattens trailed long tendrils of spines through the air, some like long strings of razor wire, and more than once, while walking blithly along, I was impaled in the nose or eyebrow by a virtually invisible razor wire of green.

We spent a week all in all in Tamen Negara: one night we slept ontop of picnic tables in a fishing shelter while a storm raged outside, the rest of the time we slept in hides. We learned that we could make our way through this jungle, but that walking, due to the heat, perhaps isn't the best way to go. On our next adventure, in Sarawak, we plan to explore by boat....

2007-02-23T23:16:00.000-08:00

seeing burma the slow way

it's hard to describe myanmar in a few sentences... as peter has pointed out it's a complex country with a long history.
what struck me maybe most is how very friendly, openminded + welcoming the burmese people are. the living standard of the average burmese is very low compared to that of many other countries around. very few people own cars + those you see are dented old models that have been on the road for a long time. most people get by with their old bicycle or the ox-cart, or if they are more successful financially they might drive a moped. the only new cars we saw (apart from government vehicles) were the tourist busses that are operated for the package tourists + ply the few well maintained stretches of road between any official tourist site + the nearest airstrip. since all land travel is slow + bumpy most tourists on a 1-week-tour jet from yangon to mandalay, take the tourist-cruise along the irrawaddy to bagan + from there jet to inle lake before the flight back to yangon. undoubtedly, you will see a lot of beautiful places this way; however, you probably won't mingle much with the average burmese. also, a big chunk of your tourist dollars will find their way into the pockets of the government which heavily taxes these package tour establishments.

another way of seeing myanmar is to take time + join the locals on old dented minibusses that pack an incredible amount of people, live stock + goods, or squeeze onto a hard wooden bench on a truck bed among families, monks + nuns; the young guys usually prefer to stand on the ledge or ride on the roof amidst boxes, crates + baskets. it's not the most comfortable mode of traveling, it's invariable very slow because of numerous stops to pick up more + even more passengers, but it's an excellent way of meeting people + making friends.

on the s-l-o-w train down from the shan hills we got to sample many local delicacies that were offered by our fellow travelers + in turn we shared the cookies + fruit we had packed for the ride. another day we spent tuckering along on a ferry through the canals in the irrawaddy delta watching the rural life on the shore. the only way to get back was on the back bench of a crowded bus that rattled along the pot holes tossing us about. a young muslim scholar insisted on offering us his seat so we wouldn't hit the roof standing in the aisle.

wherever we went we were greeted with hospitality, curiosity + lots of giggles. the further away from the tourist tracks the broader the smiles. burmese are gentle + beautiful people, nobody seems to be in a hurry + nowhere did we hear harsh words. considering that the media are still censored + foreign books are hard to come by - as foreign products in general (no mcdonald's or starbucks here!)- burmese are surprisingly well informed about the world + politics outside myanmar. everywhere we went people came up to chat or just practice there english, yet open criticism is not the burmese way. the local head of the "national league for democracy" that we talked to acknowledged cautiously that equality + freedom are still far off, that it is only a small percentage of people who benefit from the package tourists, but welcomed us with a smile + assured us that he wants foreigners to visit + see his beautiful country + support their plea for more openness by sharing our appreciation + concern with our friends + family back home.

most burmese men + women wear their traditional longhy, a sarong-like cloth wrapped around the waist + knotted (for men) or tucked in at the waist (for women), a practical garment that can be worn bathing or sleeping. most women use the traditional tanakha to protect their faces from the harsh sun, a beige wooden paste that is applied to cheeks, nose + forehead. i did not see many women with short hair, apart from the buddhist nuns (+ there are an astounding number of nuns + monks of all ages). most women have looong beautiful glossy black hair, often waist-long, sometimes down to their knees. we saw several women gracefully riding their bicycle with their long hair wrapped around their shoulders like a long shawl.

although myanmar is home to many muslims, hindus + christians the vast majority of burmese are devout buddhists. pagodas + chedis dot the country side. even the smallest hamlet has at least one pagoda + a monastery. people can be found praying or bringing offerings any time of the day. as everywhere in asia merit-making is taken very serious. one might have little money to live on but a good part of it will be spent on offerings to the buddhas + nats (local protective deities).

any occasion to celebrate is welcome. we arrived on a national holiday at the end of a week-long celebration. many streets were closed off + loudspeakers set up to transmit music late into the night. coming from bangkok burma felt like a time-warp, refreshingly low-tech + slow-paced. kids + adults gathered in the streets to play barefoot soccer. teenagers played badminton. little ones gathered around the popsicle-cart. games + races were in progress + i realized that it had been a long time that i have seen old + young mingling like this.

all in all - myanmar is a magical place that takes time to discover + i'm looking forward to return + see more of it. i hope you will, too.

yasha

2007-02-04T23:26:00.000-08:00

Myanmar
Jan-Feb, 2007

In a land far away, across the oceans of place and time, lies a place called "the golden land". In truth it is the land that time forgot. Travel to the capital of the golden land, Yangoon, formerly called Rangoon, and you are immediately confronted by a place that looks like India, like Calcutta, but it isn't. Immense colonial buildings some painted pink, or blue, or hot yellow, slowly decay in the tropical sun. The power supply is intermittent, so at times the city is illuminated at night like any other city, and the giant golden spires of the pagodas shine like a searchlight into the sky. More commonly, the city is plunged into darkness, and business is transacted by candlelight.

But already I am mistaken about Myanmar. The capital, Yangoon, formerly known as Rangoon is no longer the capital. Fearful of attack from their perceived enemy, the United States of America, and advised my a number of astrologers, the military government that rules Myanmar moved, one dark and rainy night, the entire capital to a small town some hundred km away. Today, hardly anyone knows where it is.

One hundred years ago Myanmar, formerly Burma, was a small holding of the great colonial power, England. The English quickly overwelmed the limited defences of Burma, sent the king into exile, carted off as many gold covered Buddha statues as they could, and then settled into a century of beign neglect.

One thousand years before the English came to Burma the Buddha did, or so it is told. He left behind giant footprints, pieces of hair that became the centerpieces of glittering temples, and culture of mindfullness and awareness that even the tropical sun and rain couldn't dim.

It was World War II that began the serious troubles. Hundreds of thousands of people died, almost every town was bombed, and the local culture was devestated. With the war's conclusion, Burma sued for independence from England. This was quickly granted. But since then the various generals that have controled Burma have embarked on ill conceived economic experiments. All the chinese and indians, the shopkeepers, were driven out. Thousands were executed. The local currency, the kyat, was devalued overnight, to make a classless society. Instead of rich and poor, everyone was poor. To signal the dawn of a new day, even the name of the country was changed, from Burma to Myanmar. And over the country a darkness settled that even the golden temples couldn't shake. This is the land that time forgot.

We spent a month in Myanmar in January. Much of it was similar to the last time I visited, ten years ago. The people are still incrediably friendly, the roads still unbelievibly poor, and the devotion of the average person for buddhism still equally intense. Unfortunately though I wasn't able to post anything to this blog while in Myanmar, it just wasn't practical. So instead of writing about everywhere we went I'm just going to write about one place, and hopefully that will suffice.

When you think about development in a third world country you have to ask yourself, "what would that look like? Who would benefit? What are the pitfalls?" In mid January we left the dusty Are Iwaddy plain and traveled into the hills of the souther Shan state to visit one of Myanmar's most famous tourist destinations, Inle Lake. As a tourist destination Inle Lake is forced to confront the issues of development that most other locations in Myanmar merely wished they had. But more of that later.

Set in a shallow bowl between two golden brown ridges Inle Lake looks like a chip of liquid sky has fallen to earth. It extends as far as the eye can see, from the village of Nyaungshwe in the north for more than thirty misty miles to the south. The amazing thing is that the shoreline is hard to find; there isn't any really. Instead, the water imperceptably turns into floating marsh islands that have been cultivated in a neverending series of gardens. To prevent the islands from drifting away they are anchored along their length by tall bamboo poles driven into the bottom. Amongst the floating gardens are some 17 villages on stilts. Almost all of them are only accessed only by boat.

I had visited Inle Lake some ten years before. Sadly, I was suffering from a case of traveler's dysentary at that time. Although I cant remember much about Inle, except for the path to and from the toilet, I can still remember the place that gave me the dysentary, and the young mother holding her barebottomed child in her arms as she served me some foul tasting soup in Mingun.

Even then I can remember Inle Lake to be a touristy town. There was an organized infrastructure of cheap hotels for backpackers and a jetty where motorboats took tourists on tours around the lake. I hadn't taken the tour back then, but Yasha and I had decided that this time, even if it was touristy, we would do it.

Yet on our first night in Inle Lake we were given a bit of a shock. We were hanging around the jetty at dusk when, a fleet of immense tourist buses began to arrive. Plainly they had just made the trip from the airport, some thirty miles distant, and hadn't made the bone-jarring 15 hour drive from Yangoon or Mandaly. These were all package tourists, on a two-week tour of Myanmar. They were helped down from the bus and directly into a motorlaunch. Their samsonite baggage was loaded, and off they went in a cloud of spray. Something major was going on.

Later we learned that five mega resorts have been positioned around the lake, and that the packpackers, although they contribute more money to the local economy then the package tours do, have become the minority.

At this point, Yasha dug in her heels. She wasn't going to go on some expensive tour on the lake with a bunch of other tourists. I agreed, but it seemed a shame to come all that distance and not explore the lake just due to our outraged moral principles. So the following day we decided to rent bicycles instead.

We cycled in the early morning sun on a dirt path between two marshes. Naked children were riding on the backs of water buffaloes, hordes of ducks were squaking, and golden light illuminated everything with grace. It was beautiful.
After awhile, we stopped by a huge, seemingly abandoned monestary. Constructed all of wood, it stood on pilings above the marshy lake front. We walked inside. At least it looked abandoned. The entire first floor was bare, but in the corner there were several pairs of sandals next to the stairs to the second floor. We ascended to find two old monks sitting on a carpeted platform. In the front of the hall, wooden Buddhas, gold painted and seeming of great age, surmounted the alter. No wonder the monks lived in the shrine room, it was probably the only way to deter smugglers. Then, surprisingly, they offered us lunch.

Later we continued on our way. We cycled down a dirt road to find a group of villages rebuilding a crumbling group of stupas (zedis) and buddha statues. We wanded to the lake front. Immediately a woman asked us if we wanted to go out in their canoe. Why not? We paddled out to their village, which was set on stilts admist floating tomato gardens. Just to the south of us we could see the imitation Shan archetecture of a mega resort. It seemed odd, probably none of the westerners in the resort had even been to this village.

After paddeling for some time we went to their house. Set on stilts, with walls of woven bamboo, it comprised a mere two rooms. A little gangplank in the back led to the outhouse. Of course, it emptied directly into the lake. Not more then ten feet away people were bathing. One room of the house had a bed, with a mosquito net, for husband, wife, and three children. The other room was virtually bare. a broken mirror stood on a shelf, two chairs were against the wall, and everyone just squatted next to the fire. The children were chewing on pieces of just-cut sugar cane.

When we left, we paid our new friend 2,000 kyat. That wasn't even two dollars.
Several hundred yards away poeple were relaxing in their hundred dollar room and probably preparing for a spa treatment. It all seemed obscene. But who is to blame? The military government, that enjoys wealth yet deliberately keeps its population poor? The sanctions imposed by the Bush administration on Myanmar? The deliberatly valueless kyat? Even Yasha and I are complicit; in America we aren't even considered middle class, yet in myanmar we have what no one else has, the right to vote.

When we paddled back to our cycles our heads were spinning. There really isn't anything we could do to help these people. All we could do was show them that we had hearts, just like them, and that we cared. Quickly we got on our bikes and rode off. Yes, this is the land that time forgot. But i guess it is now our job to make sure that people in other countries dont forget.

2007-01-03T05:50:00.000-08:00

3/1/07
Sukethoi
Mae Sot
Umphang

We blew into Sukethoi a week ago after another interminable overnight bus ride. For some reason, on the cheaper buses, the air con is turned on to a frigid level. Perhaps the privalege of air con for poorer thai people requires an ungodly level of cold. Everyone else except for us was dressed up for the arctic, with hoodies pulled tight, but we were in shirt sleeves. After 12 midnight hours on the slab we arrived in Sukethoi seriously chilled. We sat in the bus terminal from five am until light spread across the fields, then we walked along a narrow path through cucumber and beans to a guest house in town.

Later that day, we took a sangtheaw (a pick up with seats in the pack) out to the Sukethoi historical park. To all intensive purposes, Sukethoi had been the first capitol of the nascent Thai state, and as such it is revered as basis for the present one. It rose in the 13th century, and fought off Burmese and Khymer challangers until it was absorbed into Ayuthya in the 15th century. Unfortunately, Sukethoi was plundered for building materials for Ayuthya, so reconstruction efforts didn't have much to build on.

If you have been to similar 13th century asian cities, such as Bagan or Angkor Wat, Sukethoi is a bit of a disappointment. We arrived late in the afternoon, and quickly surmised that most monuments face the east. It was an easterly show, as one would say. As a consequence, all the Buddha figures, everything, really, was in deep shadow by the time we arrived. So we walked around and checked out the scene as best we could. Unfortunately, we had already paid for an expensive non refundable ticket.

At this point, I dont want to say who first suggested that we return the next day and sneak in. Y. would rigorously deny it if i suggested that she was the one who came up with such and underhanded idea. However, we walked around in the waning twilight and noticed that that there were places, if we so desired, that one could jump over the barbed wire fence. Fortified in this knowledge, we returned to new Sukethoi.

Early the next day, we rose and returned to the historical district. Sneaking in isn't easy. You've got to keep you eyes open and play it cool. I can remember thirty years ago, when my brother John, his young wife Kitsie and I tried to scale a high fence to sneak into the King County Fair. The two of them that preceeded me and made it over successfully. Unfortunately, barbed wire caught the crotch of my pants, and then I was spotted by a security guard. Much merriment ensured, with me fleeing into the fairgounds with torn pants and bloody hands.

At Sukethoi we cruised along a dusty road, with cars and buses passing and the occassional bicycle passing us as we strolled along trying our best to look casual. We spied a gate for workers that seeminglly wasn't locked, and in a flash we were there. We looked around once or twice, and then i slowly pulled the rusted fence open

Oh what a squeak it made. It was as if it was crying out, "Look at me! The foreigners are trying to sneak in!" I didn't know if I should go forward or flee. Then Y. shoved me from behind and whispered, "Run!"

"Shhh," I whispered back. "Don't attract attention to us!"

But then she said again "Run!" and she was off and running and I was running laughing behind her. We ran through coconut groves and past an ancient pavilion until the silence of the forest told us that pursuit was far behind.

Finally, exhausted, we rested besides a ruined chapel of brick. At one time it must have been a beautiful temple, with massive laterite columns supporting a roof of wood and tile. Today, the roof had vanished. The central wall at the rear, which had previously sported four ten meter standing buddhas, had been reduced to rubble. The buddha facing us had at one time strode foward, one hand outstretched in the giving protection mudra, the other clutching his gown. At one time he was finished in stucco, painted and adorned with flowers, an object of devotion, surrounded by muscians and dressed in silks. Currently the stucco has been stripped away by a thousand years or rain and warfare, revealing the brick after image of a giant man. Really, it looks like a shadow image after the Horoshima blast. Only bigger. The bricks preserve the rough form of a headless human, the outstretched arm a stump. And then the thought arose, "How transient this world is!"

Since Coolridge it has been popular to comment on the vanity of worldly rulers, and after seeing Sadam's demise it is plain that the mighty are bound to fall. The rulers of Sukethoi embraced buddhism and used its message to forge a nation that only now is beginning to fall under the insiduous allure of consumerism. But what has been lost and what has been gained? For those of us who have committed ourselves to working for the benefit of all beings these ruins are a passing parade. The outward manifestation of brick has decayed, but the feeling of love and compassion in my heart is still fresh. Hopefully, in my next incarnation and all future incarnations, that love and compassion will grow.

Now, enough preaching, start running!!!

2006-12-21T19:41:00.000-08:00

"The nature of all phenomena is impermenance..."

12/22/06
Bangkok

Several weeks ago we took an overnight bus over the southern mountains and down to the Andman Sea. In the morning we found ourselves in Ranong, a multi-cultural fishing town across the straits from Mynamar. In the market you can easily take in dark-skinned sea gypsies, malay women in headscarfs, and burmese women with yellow painted faces. Fish plant workers stump around in rubber boots. For some reason it reminded me of Kodiak Island, in Alaska. But then maybe all fishing towns have the same stink. It was still early, with the air perfumed with the smell of drying fish.

We were planning on returning to Koh Payam , a sleepy backwater Island down the coast. We had visited Koh Payam a month before the tsunami struck, and so we were curious to see if there were, if any, changes.

It is always a joy to leave a tropical fishing town. Typically mud flats and mangroves extend in all directions while a narrow channel threads its way
through the detritus of civilization. Before long we past a little boy, paddeling on a styrofoam raft, and then we were out to sea. I drank a couple of beers and collapsed on the deck in the sun. Finally it felt like our vacation had begun.

From the beginnig Koh Payam felt the same, even busier. Ex-pats and locals gathered around the few small eateries close to the pier, eating noodle soup and drinking beer. It is quite a relaxed scene. But we wanted to return to Kow Kwai Hill, a small resort an hour walk away on the far side of the island, so we gathered up our gear and began the walk.

Koh Payam is biscected by a couple of concrete scooter roads, and numerous dirt paths, but there aren't any cars. That is part of its charm. Before long we were walking along a red dirt path through a grove of flowering cashew trees. Cicadas shrilled somewhere in the distance and the air was heavy. I had a feeling of forboding... we were arriving unannounced; who knows what we would find?

Several dogs greeted us at Kow Kwai Hill and after their cries died out the shriek of the cicadas returned. The grounds were unkept and covered with leaves. Seemingly there was no one around. "Hello?" I shouted, "Is there anybody here?"

A thai women approaced us from a ramshackle hut. In the hammock I could see a white guy lying motionless, sleeping perhaps. At any rate, he didn't even bother getting up. Yes, she said, they were open for business, but the owner wasn't there. She didn't really know what to say. I looked in a couple of bungalows and they all seemed abandoned. Wasps had made their home in some, in others the leaves had blown in through the open doors and filled the broken toilets with black water. It looked grim.

But by the time I had finished my inspection Y. had spoken with the owner and talked him down to 150 bhat per day for the one available bungalow. The kitchen was closed, so basicly we were on our own.

Really, it wans't so bad. We were saving alot of money, and with a year trip still ahead us that was good. We ate once a day, that is, when we walked into town. We were planning on loosing weight anyway. When we tired of shell collecting on the beach we walked... sometimes from one end of the island to the other.

One day we decided to reach a hidden beach on the nothern end of the island. We followed the concrete path until it became dirt, then the jungle closed in around us.
The air was hot and fragrant and giant butterflies crossed and re-crossed the trail ahead of us. We followed a smaller trail over a hill, and in the distance we could hear the surf. We were getting close!

By then the trail had died, and we were confronted with enormous bushes, as big as a giant bamboo groove, seemingly clad in whorls of two inch long spines. It was like razor wire! I was dripping with sweat and bleeding from wounds all over my hands and legs. Y. had slid down a hill and to save herself had grapped one of the razor wires. She had one spine sticking entirely through the fleshy part of her arm, just like one of the hindu penitents in Indonesia. "Lets stop and take a picture!" she cried. All I wanted to do was get out of there.

Back on the trail, we met a pair of women on a scooter who gave us directions to the beach. Fifeteen minutes later we standing on the sand, washing our feet in the surf, and eyeing a small fishing boat thrown onto the rocks above us. Actually, I couldn't tell if it had gone aground and they had pulled it up there to save it from sinking, or if the waves themselves had hurled it up. Two men had it sitting amongst the rocks on log rollers that they had cut from the jungle. The side of the boat was crudely patched and it was plain that soon they intended to have it pulled off the rocks. In our minds our troubles subsided compared to theirs. we bowed before them and wished them luck. Then we fled back up the trail.

However, before too long our own stay in Koh Payam came to a close. It had been a wet fall, and on a daily basis hordes of biting insects descended on us. One night, some sort of bug with a bite like a chain saw got inside my pants. I could stand that once, but after it happened a second time we decided to leave. It was a long two days back to Bangkok, with me franticly scratching my groin while trying to appear nonchalant about it...

I guess in the end we could have gone to a more expensive resort, and had a better time, but who can say? An angry bug can find you anywhere, even in the most antiseptic environment. The only way to have your expectations met is to pay for it, and even then your not always going to be satisfied.

2006-12-10T00:55:00.000-08:00

"The pleasure of the three realms is as fleeting as a dewdrop on the tip of a blade of grass, vanishing in a single moment" - the Thirty Seven Bodhisattva Practices.

Bangkok, 12/10/06

How hard it must be for the saffron robed monks walking in a line down the crowded sidewalk to remember this. Bangkok. Bigger, dirty, noiser, more expensive than several years ago. How could it not be? With fifty percent of the world's population living in urban areas today, and with a predicted seventy five percent by 2050, the prognosis for the future is not particularly good. How much energy do these urban areas consume? Supposedly by 2050 the world's energy consumption will double. How can that be?

Our arrival here was a bit of a let down. We had so many hoops to jump thru before we could leave the states, and our expectations were accordingly great. Now, sleeping restlessly in a sweat soaked bed, with traffic roaring 24/7 in the street
below one wonders if it was all worth it. Certainly it feels like an end of an era.
Perhaps the days of cheap, unencumbered travel is over. Really, in a global economy who has time for it?

Bangkok has been for some time before our arrival in a state of continual excitement. First the coup, then the King's 80'th birthday. Then the King's 60'th anniversery of coronation. Tomorrow will be Constitution Day. Virtually every thai, man and woman, is wearing a yellow shirt -with the king's seal - to commemorate these wonderful events. Just a block away from our guest house is the Chao Phraya River, the commercial and emotional lifeline of Bangkok. You can sit in a park along the river's edge and watch rafts of floating hyacinth, longtail boats, tugs and barges and ferries moving up and down the muddy brown flow. Yesterday, from a small white washed fort that had guarded the river from French and English incursions in the 19th century we could see viewing stands erected on the far side of the river. Accompanied by ear-splitting popular music, teams of dragon boats were training for a race. Popular all over asia, these dragon boats are a tremendous elongate canoe with up to fifty paddlers, the pointed bow and stern, festooned with ribbons and streamers dipped almost to the water. But the screaming! The race announcers, screaming in a staccato tag-team frenzy, was something out of a bad movie. We thought it better to leave Bangkok for awhile so tonght we depart on an overnight bus for a backwater island on the Thai/Burmese border. Two weeks of sun and sand and navel gazing should prepare us for the asian adventures of the future.

2006-10-31T19:31:00.000-08:00

You fly into Delhi at three in the morning on a charter flight of crazy drunk Uzbeks from Tashkent. The airport, that is, what little you can see of it, is swathed in a dense, poisonous fog. A stray black and yellow rickshaw passes in front of the glassed in building, pauses indecisively, then flees.

You have nowhere to go. No room, not taxi, nothing. Its best to just hide somewhere out of sight until dawn. You crouch behind a row of chairs, hugging your pack to your chest. A trio of Indian soldiers armed with sten guns stroll by and you crouch a little lower. A smoldering bidi falls at your feet. Uninterested they turn away, their steps echoing across the marbled hall. Finally you sleep.

The dawn brings more horror. A leaden sky barely obsures the outlines of a crumbling urban area to the south. New Delhi, as it is now called, as opposed to the old Delhi of Babur and the desert caliphates. Now one wonders why thy came at all. Bored, you go downstairs. A desolate city bus tears around a corner of the transportation dock. Smoking, downshifting through terrible gears, it stops and in a flash is mobbed by panicky Indians. Perhaps it is best, you think, to just hang back to avoid the pushing and shoving. You will get into town eventually, don't you worry about that.

Waving, the bus driver calls out to you. "Please be coming!" The open door beckons. With a surely resignation the tide of perspiring men compacts and you push you way aboard. Plainly it is time to go.

To me this is the essence of travel. Not a sanitized package tour to Cabo but a full-on assault on the senses. Traveling isn't a vacation, oftentimes it isn't even 'fun'. Instead it is an intense examination of what it means to be human.
Instead of taking the taxi one takes the bus, and in doing so questions of rank and privilege arise. Who are these people? Dressed in cheap clothing, packed into antiquated buses and trains without a shred of human dignity, this is how a greater proportion of the world lives. In the end one is forced to ask: 'shall i accept my shared humanity or shall I stand apart? This is the crux of it all.

Certainly there are as many ways of perceiving the world as there are individuals in it, and I can hardly recommend my way as being superior. Yet I can attest that an expensive 'multi-sport adventure' followed by a trip to the spa doesn't increase ones knowledge of the world; it only increases the wealth of a limited amount of corporations and the glossy adventure magazines that feed off of them. Traveling, when done alone or with a friend, is tiring, dirty, humiliating, exhilarating, and ultimately liberating.

On November 1st, 2006, my partner and I are departing for a year adventure. On our first stop we will take the pulse of Germany by visiting friends and family in Heidelberg, Berlin, Koln and Goerlitz. Goerlitz?

We fly into Bangkok in early December. Initially we will visit the beaches of western Thailand to chart their recovery from the tsunami. Evidently our favorite spot on the northwestern coast fared well. Hopefully we can bump into some sea gypsies to get their feelings on post-tunami politics. When our Thai visa expires we will journey to Laos to experience the exquisite slow motion torture of the Laotian public transit system. Si Pon Don (the Four Thousand Islands), Vientienne (where we will write about the pleasures of late-night street stands), and Luang Prabang are amongst a few of the destinations we will visit in 'the land of a million elephants.'

In early April we will cross into China and make our way through Kunming to northwestern Yunan. We hope to follow in Joseph Rock's footsteps and attempt a circumambulation of the 6,500m peak Kawra Karpo. Without a map, a working knowledge of Chinese or a description of the passes it is hard to say exactly how that journey will end up.

From northwestern Yunan we will travel by bus to the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, to Kham, where we will circumambulate the sacred lake, Yilung Latso before traversing passes and gorges to visit a number of different monasteries. By now it should be June, the start of the monsoon. We will return to Bangkok and fly to New Delhi. Withen Days, we will be in the foothills of the Himalayas at Manali. In short order we will visit the tribal areas of Kinnaur and Spiti, on the Tibetan border, before beginning a long series of treks through the Himalayas to Zanskar and Ladakh.

While in Ladakh we will return to Nubra to explore the eastern Karakoram, including the 7,500m monster Saser Kangri. In September we will attempt a challenging crossing of the Himalayas via the Umasi La fro Zanskar to the Kristiwar area of Kashir. Everyone is invited to participatae with us, either physically or in the virtual realm!

As the Tibetans would say, 'Ki Ki So So Lag Sa Lo!' May the deities of the high places accept our offerings, and may all beings be happy and at peace.