earthly voyages

February, 2022

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Cow!

The morning we leave Summerland, after we gather the other passengers, the Japanese couple who have been traveling together for nineteen months, another Japanese woman traveling on her own for the last nine months in South and Central America who says a Maasai offered ten cows for her, and the No Way girls, who have softened considerably and are on a fifteen week post college graduation round the world tour.  Titus is moving at a good clip, as all the drivers seem to do, dancing around pot holes, passing on the inside of the road, missing sheep, goats, gazelles, and dogs by inches.  One of the No Way girls asks Titus if he has ever killed anything in the roadway and he says righteously, “Never.”

We cross the equator line from the southern into the northern hemisphere on our way to visit Lake Bogoria, home of the famed pink flamingos who line the shores like a Christo wrapping and who fly off as we approach them like windblown fabric torn into thousands of flapping pink pieces.  We also stop at a hot spring where the water is so hot it is literally boiling, steam rising from the surface, so we can drop in a dozen eggs in a plastic bag tied to the end of a pole and ten minutes later we are peeling and eating hard-boiled eggs.  

On the way back from the lake to Nairobi I tell Titus I’d like to stop to buy some of the local honey that women are selling at the side of the road, where I can see hives made of hollowed out branches about two feet long and the diameter of a big man’s upper arm, hanging in the trees with holes drilled into them that apparently invite local bees to gather within.  And then I’m asleep.

I am awaked by the sound of a loud impact, as I see the van pulling hard to the right off the road.  When the van stops one of the No Way girls says we hit a cow and, when I climb out of the severely dented passenger door, laying off the road on its side is an already very dead, very big, brown and white cow who breathed its last and is leaking.

The van is quite smashed up, the front left grill collapsed in, the left headlight shattered, the door caved in, but all in all still useable.  A crowd gathers quickly.  The focus of conversation is about who is responsible, the driver of the van or the boy guarding the cow as it grazed and who has himself run away.  Did someone say tort lawyer?  I’m on it.  Clearly the pedestrian has the benefit of a rebuttable presumption to the right of way.  But the owner of the cow cannot or refuses to be identified.  And the young cowherd has run away, all of which raises the quite reasonable suspicion/inference that they are afraid of being found responsible for the damage to the van. 

On the other hand, the van clearly hit the cow, there’s a sign at the side of the road right before the accident site reading “Slow, cattle and children crossing,” and Titus saw the cow at some point before impact while moving at a fairly good clip as evidenced by the fresh skid marks in the roadway.  Did someone say accident reconstructionist?  And, of course, no one actually knows what the behavior of the cow was before the fatal impact except Titus, and his story is that the cow burst upon the roadway quite without warning and literally ran in front of the van as Titus tried to brake, turn, and avoid impact, and there are no witnesses to contradict his version of the events. 

The notion that no one knows who owned a creature worth close to $1,000 US dollars seems very odd to me.  Yet everyone in the village denies any knowledge of who the owner might be.  Even when the local police arrive an hour later, alighting from a civilian car they flagged down after they’d walked from the police station to the main road, about ten kilometers away (having no car of their own or police vehicle), no one comes forth to claim ownership of the cow, or to identify the cow’s owner.  Village solidarity is strong; the police effort to crack the wall of silence weak.  Titus is of course quite concerned because it is he who will be responsible for repair of the vehicle.

I propose that, since the owner of the dead cow cannot be identified, Titus take it in compensation for his loses, and when he tells me there is no way he can get the cow in the van (duh), I suggest we call the butcher in Lake Namuku, have him come out and butcher the cow on the spot, and give Titus fair value for the meat.  Titus quite likes this idea, especially the thinking outside the box it represents, and goes to the police to run the idea passed them.  But the senior policeman, who is not the most articulate fellow, says quite augustly, as if quoting familiar statute and verse, “there is no provision in our law for the removal of a dead cow.”   And so we are forced to leave our only source of potential compensation bloating in the sun and to wonder who will claim/harvest the hundreds of pounds and dollars worth of meat when night descends aside from jackals.

Back on the road we stop for lunch at a restaurant that serves freshly cooked meat from its massive outdoor grill, one of three such competing restaurants with massive grills at exactly the same junction on the road, this being the only highway going north from Nairobi for truckers and tourists alike, and this is the one good highway rest stop for hours in each direction. 

It is like a comic scene in a weird movie to see at least a dozen African men, all wearing tall white chefs’ hats, come running into the roadway waving with long forks, trying to direct cars pulling off the road into their respective establishments.  I have no idea how we pick the restaurant we do, but before long a man is standing at our table with a couple of grilled legs of goat, cutting chunks off the legs on a wooden chopping block, then cutting the chunks into bite size pieces using his hands to pull the pieces together in small piles, then leaving them, along with a big pile of salt, on the cutting board, whereupon we all dig in with our hands to the very tough, quite tasty and chewy, pieces of meat, the smoke created by the fat of cooking meat dripping onto the ten foot long grills and into our faces as we consume a good percentage of some goat who met its own fate in its own roadway.

Dancing in Summerland

I am leaving the tent camp at Maasai Mara with two men hitching a ride with us into Narok where we are again going to lunch at the Dreaming Garden Restaurant and where I will wait to switch to another van to go off with its passengers to Lake Nakuru, while Damian and Natalia (the Argentinians) will continue on to Nairobi.  Another two men will ride with us to the point in the road where their cattle transport truck got stuck in the mud and where they have contracted to meet a local tractor owner who will try to pull them out.  As we are waiting to leave camp I’m seated in the passenger seat of the van with the door still open.  Maasai men in traditional garb with thick bracelets around their wrists and ankles are milling about the van, chatting with the drivers, checking out the vehicle, passing time, saying goodbye.  I point to the watch on the wrist of one of the Maasai men shaking hands with me.  The watch has a very unusual and attractive face, and I say casually and totally unconsciously to the man pointing to his wrist, “Nice watch.”  I’ll learn not to do this one of these days, because in a flash he has his watch off and is attaching it to my wrist.  So I take my watch off, one of probably comparable value, a Casio, or Timex, and hand it to him.  He likes my watch.  It has a much nicer Velcro band than his watchband that is plastic.  Another Maasai man comes over to the van; he takes off his watch and places it on my other wrist.  He takes my watch from the first man.  He examines it.  I give his watch to the second man.  A third man comes over, not to be denied a part in the action of trade, and soon watches are being examined and moving from hand to hand.  I end up with all three watches while they admire mine.  I give back two of the watches and keep the one I first admired.  The owner of that watch takes my watch.  We each put our new watches on.  The van driver arrives, says “Twende,” (we go). All of the Maasai men and I shake hands.  I admire my new wristwatch – ascribe it with Maasai meanings, with the pleasures of time and travel, of possessions and value, of good faith and non-attachment.  It acquires significances not associated with my one time watch now adorning the wrist of a Maasai man hundreds of miles away.  I feel myself to be an inordinately happy trader. 
As opposed to my new driver, the loud and sometimes impatient and annoyed Titus, who is definitely not happy with his current six passengers, two of whom are a young Japanese couple, a single man, a single woman, and the two somewhat dour (shy?) young women from Norway who the driver tells me never say yes to anything he asks or suggests and will probably not tip him well, if at all.  I nickname them the “No Way” girls and commit myself to getting a yes out of them by offering cookies I’ve bought, or to buy them sodas.  I even ask if I can help them out of the van, or carry something for them.  By the end of the day I am batting zero in my effort to get them to yes.
Titus is just not my favorite guy.  He is opinionated and believes things I don’t … that Obama hates Kenya, that Tanzanians are lazy, that I should help support his kids.  He is critical and annoyed with other drivers on the road.  The father of three young children, two of whom are in private school, he is also very obviously trying to see what he can get out of me.  Nothing ventured nothing gained. 
When we get to our overnight guesthouse on the far side of Nakuru, a bustling town one hundred miles northwest of Nairobi on the main (only?) Mombasa/Nairobi road that goes to the Somali and Ugandan borders and is filled with big trucks making their runs, Titus takes me aside and asks if I trust him.
“Sure,” I say hesitantly.
“Would you like to stay at a better guesthouse, the one I stay at?” he asks.  “No extra cost.  Nicer rooms.  Better showers.  We’ll have a drink and dinner together.”
“Sure,” I say … hesitantly.
So we drive to a part of town that I would say is definitely seedy.  On the way we pass what I’m sure will forever be my favorite store name in all of Africa, the “Pentagon Butchery.” 
The gate to the guesthouse/motel-like structure we will arrive at is opened by one of the armed twenty-four hour security men on duty.  We are again the only guests I can see and we park inside a gravel courtyard, surrounded on all four sides by the motel, a barricade, a fort.  My room is meager but fine.  I do yoga, have a shower, play with the functions on my new watch, do not use the hair pick left so considerately hanging next to the room mirror.  Titus comes to call me for dinner around seven.  We pass through a small locked gate opened by another security guard on the other side of the courtyard, pass through an open air restaurant with a few customers, pass goat carcasses hanging in the open restaurant kitchen, pass some private dining rooms, and end up seated at a table with a pool hall on one side and a bar with a big dance floor on the other.  Some men are playing pool, but no one else is dining and no one is in the darkened dancehall.  Titus has preordered our dinner, a big single plate of stewed chicken in a light tomato sauce, steamed spinach, which I tell him is kale (which it is), and he insists is spinach, and roasted whole potatoes that are just fabulous dipped in the sauce.  There are no utensils on the table.  A waitress comes over with a plastic pitcher of quite hot water and a basin.  She pours hot water over our hands, which we “wash.”  The meal is shared and eaten with our fingers.  Titus tells me he always sits at this table so he can see people coming from all sides.
“If something is biting you it’s inside your clothing,” he says.

Titus calls his wife in Nairobi.  He puts me on the phone with her.  She is delightful.  He next puts me on the phone with his eleven year old daughter Elizabeth who wants to be a doctor and loves science and who I encourage with all my heart to live her dream.  Then I take my leave, and retire for the evening by eight, falling asleep quickly.
I am up again at midnight, awakened by fabulous throbbing music coming from the dance floor on the other side of the gate. I so want to go and see what is happening, but this exploration seems beyond even my comfort zone and sense of prudence; that I would walk into a bar somewhere in Kenya where I’ll be the only white person and watch people dancing.  I don’t think so.  But I so want to go.  I really do.  I want to see Africa.  Isn’t this what I came for?  So I get dressed.  Then I get undressed.  Then I dress, struggling gaily with myself about the potential risks and potential rewards.  I think I must have taken off and put on my pants three times.  I’m laughing at myself having such a good time not knowing what the hell I’m going to do and enjoying my struggle.  Of course in the end my pants are on and I cannot deny myself the experience of seeing what can be seen.
I leave almost all my money in the room, taking just a little cash, my passport, and one credit card, as I head out into the night, cross the courtyard, am admitted through the small locked gate that separates the motel from the rest of the complex by an armed guard, pass tables filled with people, and enter into a totally transformed environment, the music loud and pulsing, the dance floor, complete with strobe light, in what is a very well designed bar and tables surrounding the dance floor, a night club atmosphere, busy waitresses taking drink orders, and the dance floor filled with sixty or seventy people moving in delight.
I park myself in a corner of the room, but it is not long before a quite attractive woman in a lowcut blouse finds me and asks if I want to dance.  I decline.  She smiles.  She comes near enough to rub her leg against mine.  She has a genuinely lovely smile. 
“Buy me a drink?” she asks. 
“I left my money in my room,” I say. 
“Well let me go to your room and get it with you,” she says. I say no.

A man comes over to introduce himself.  I recognize him as a guide. He says he’s headed to Maasai Mara tomorrow.  We have a pleasant conversation about where I stayed in Mara, who my guide was, what animals I saw.  He tells me again that he is a guide, as if I didn’t get it. 
“You are about to have a real taste of Africa, my friend,” he says smiling and nodding toward the woman, “Just watch your passport and your money, I don’t want to find you crying in the morning.”

The dancers are absolutely wonderful.  Mostly men are dancing with men, or dancing by themselves, or dancing with whoever is next to them.  There are also women dancing, some with women, some with men, some alone.  The movements are subtle, feet often hardly leaving the floor, shoulders and hips so fabulously expressive in such a narrow range.   Some men dance with women whose backs are turned to them, the man’s hands on the woman’s thighs, pulling her into him as she dances and moves.  Some women caress their breasts as they dance.  Older men are dancing alone.  Big men are dancing lithely.  The strobe light magnifies the movements.  The dancers seem so happy, so lost in delight.

“Welcome to Summerland,” the same woman says to me, “I’m Kendin, would you like some company tonight?”
“Well yes and no,” I say.
“Tell me three reasons why no,” Kendin says smiling coyly.
“Well one is that I have a woman at home I really really love,” I say.  “Two is disease.  And three is that I’m just not the kind of guy who goes off with women he meets in bars, women who go off with strangers.”
“You not fear on me,” she says, and I cannot hear if she is saying fear or fair.  But it doesn’t really matter. 
“Come, dance,” I say, and walk onto the dance floor where the music literally doesn’t ever pause or stop, the sound and the Afro pop beat awesome, the dancers in some state of delight, and before long so am I, other women coming near as we dance together, no one paying the slightest attention to me as best as I can tell, except for one slightly drunk man who comes over to bumps fists with me and shake my hand as Kendin leaves the dance floor, and I am alone … with about sixty other people, in a bar, in Africa, dancing in delight.

Later Kendin asks again if we can go to my room.
“We don’t have to do anything,” she says, “Just be friends.  Have company.  Be fear on me.”
She is thirty three, and beautiful, a beautician with a three year old son.  And my answer is still no.  The fact is no.  Fear or fair is no.  And when I say goodnight to Kendin I almost feel badly for her. Later, when the first rooster calls at four in the morning and wakes me in my room, the music is still playing.

Performers of Khmer Music

I have also encountered at least a dozen bands playing classic Khmer music that advertize themselves as being comprised of land mine victims, and indeed all of the musicians have limbs missing, leg prostheses in evidence, holding bows with the stubs of arms, or are blind. Although not widely reported internationally, there is even today a “small” border skirmish going on between Cambodia and Thailand that is the lead story in the local newspapers, and as a result of which casualties are being brought in to the local hospital.

Planning

I am planning on traveling in sub-Saharan Africa and hope to be there for two full months. I intend to begin my journeying there in late November, 2012 going from Johannesburg, SA, where I first arrive and will stay a day or two to recover from the flight, to Meseru, Lesotho. I have a lot of work to do before I depart. And it is not gratuitous to say I’m not as young or fit as I used to be and that my aging spurt since returning from my last voyage requires immense accommodation including carrying a complete pharmacy of daily and emergency medications that take up half my little pack.

I record my “plan” here to see how much comes to pass, leaving boston 11/26 to Joberg, SA and some local travel including Lesotho b4 returning to Joberg and b4 camp Sizanini starts. I plan to fly from joberg to dar es salaam tanzania on the afternoon of 12/19/12 with my sister Sheryl, who will also have been at the camp. in Tanzania we plan to go on safari, and then on to Zanzibar, after which she’ll return home and I’ll go on – inshallah – to Moshi, Arusha, the Serengeti, Olduvai, Ngorogoro, and from there overland to Nairobi –despite state department warnings – and then on by air to Addis and Lalibela in Ethiopia, letting Eritrea go, based on state department warnings, and maybe if there is time to one west African country (Senegal?) … and, if sam is in euro, to come home via a visit w him and a return flight to boston probably around 2/4/13. Man tracht got lacht.

My sister Sheryl plans to rendezvous with me in Joberg in early December before we spend 10 days as international volunteers at Camp Sizanini, http://www.globalcampsafrica.org/programs/, a camp aimed at enhancing the lives of vulnerable South African boys and girls aged 10 to 15 by providing HIV/AIDS prevention education and training through high-impact residential and day camp experiences and continuing education. I trust there will be more to say about Sizanani anon. Camp ends 12/18, after which Sheryl and I fly to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and from there on to a tenting safari deep into the bush. http://www.kwihala.com/ruaha.htm. Christmas morning we fly from Kwihala to Zanzibar, after which Sheryl will return home and I’ll go on – inshallah – to Moshi, Arusha, the Serengeti, Olduvai, Ngorogoro (all inTanz), and from there overland to the Masai Mara and Nairobi, in Kenya – despite U.S. state department warnings – then on to Addis and Lalibela in Ethiopia, (but not Eritrea – in deference to U.S. state department warnings), and maybe, if there is time, to Senegal in west Africa, returning home around 2/2/13. But as I need to say … and as we all know too well … man tracht got lacht. So I’m counting on your good wishes. And the good intentions of the guides.

Random Travel Notes

Random Travel Notes

  1. I’m walking late at night through the somewhat busy streets of Madrid when I approach a very chunky obvious woman of the night in short skirt and tights standing on a street corner with her eyebrows. She catches me looking at her, her excess makeup, her sad alert face, and says to me in Spanish, “Come on. Let’s go.” And I say, “No, thank you.” Yes, I really do say, “thank you,” ever the well trained, polite, courteous if not courtesan older man. And she, of course, says, “Why.” And I can say, in Spanish, which gives me immense pleasure, “Because I have a woman I truly love very much.” And, although I know this is purely my projection, she looks at me admiringly, respectfully, acceptingly, as she smiles and turns away.
  2. I am on the Metro headed for the Madrid airport and my flight home early on Sunday morning. Across from me seated alone on the train is an African woman staring at me. Very odd for an African woman to be starting at me, especially since she is obviously not a “business” woman, and when she sees me looking back at her she points to my shirt, a lovely purple T shirt I bought for three dollars at the Monastery of Debre Libanos in Ethiopia that has Amharic writing on it saying “Debre Libanos,” that I already deeply prize, but has faded with multiple washings very quickly, as has the obviously Ethiopian Orthodox cross on the front of the shirt faded, such that the shirt appears old and well worn.
    “I am Ethiopian,” she says smiling broadly at the mystical and unlikely possibility of connecting with Ethiopia – and an Ethiopian guide – as she heads for church of a Sunday morning on the Metro in Madrid, “and I couldn’t help notice your shirt. Are you from Ethiopia?”
    “No, I bought this shirt when I visited the Monastery at Debre Libanos,” I say laughing and pointing to the lettering on my shirt.
    To which she says, “It must have been a very long time ago.”
    And although at the time, it had been actually less than two weeks, it did already seem like an eternity, and I said, “Yes, it was.”

So much to see

On the next day I have arranged for a guide, a driver, and a car – all for fifty dollars, 9 to 6, gas included. We visit half a dozen outlying villages where we walk around as my guide points out coffee and chocolate trees, cassava, mango, jackfruit, and papaya trees, long beans that are really really long, corn, hot red and green peppers, fish ponds, the biggest spiders you have ever seen, rice paddies, traditional house styles, oxen and baby oxen, butterflies the size of sparrows, and medicinal plants. We talk with people. They want to know where I am from, am I really traveling alone, why, and how old am I? We visit tapioca chip and manioc “factories” that are really just long, hot, dirt floor sheds with squatting workers who earn six dollars a day, a noodle factory, a sawmill. It is all very engaging, very revealing, the architecture unique, the enthusiasm of the people contagious. I am having a grand time.

My Guide

I arrive in Sumatra by air at the provincial capital in Padang (pronounced Padong) and grab a taksi to take me straight to Bukittinggi, a town 100 kilometers north, and one of only two towns

Armando, insists we go on at least one short walk in the jungle. He takes me to Harau and the Harau Valley, which is stunningly beautiful. The jungle he picks is relatively tame, basically running along the base of the steep valley cliffs. Nonetheless the footing is slippery and wet with roots and vines impeding steady progress and the “trail” is very narrow and uneven. Armando is hacking away with a stick at brush and branches much taller than I am. In places the trail disappears and at one point running along the edge of a stream I have to make my way 10 feet above the stream by grasping branches with my hands and placing my feet very cautiously on roots exposed by erosion, as if walking across a narrow ladder.
There are monkeys, of course, and beetles bigger than marshmallows, and red dragonflies. I recall that somewhere on this voyage there might be leeches. Flying leeches I think. I’m hoping this is not that place.
We’ve been out in the jungle nearly two hours as we start to walk out by approaching a knee high clearing on the other side of which is a stream and then rice fields. It is clearly the end of the trail and I’m starting to rejoice when I see racing across the clearing directly towards us a toothless man screaming wildly with a machete raised in the air. The man is running erratically in a zigzag manner. As he draws nearer it is also clear he is laughing hysterically. Armando starts to run away while I stand shocked and still. The man is running hard. He’s yelling, or swearing as he nears me and a then a small striped wild brown pig emerges from the field running straight at me, the man not far behind. The pig zigs. The man zigs. The pig runs past me within inches of my toes and is lost in the jungle. The man reaches me and surrendering the wild pig to the jungle waves hello with his machete, then squats breathlessly, lights a cigarette, and offers me one. I shake my head no and now laughing myself walk to catch up with Armando.
“I’m scared of pigs,” he tells me.
“You knew?” I ask.
“What else could it have been,” says Armando.
What else indeed?
armando leaving me behind

armando leaving me behind
IMG_5013.jpg
waterfall

waterfall
the end of the valley

woman working bellows
In Sumatra
First Impressions
January 15, 2014

Anthropologist

Karl Heider – On the second morning, before I set out to visit even more remote traditional villages, I am chatting with my guesthouse host and casually mention that my interest in visiting Minangkabau villages – more let’s say than waterfalls, which surprises her – grows at least in part from the fact that I was once an anthropologist and that I lived for a time in a Moslem peasant village in Bosnia in the early nineteen sixties. Upon hearing this, a older gentleman sitting nearby gets up and introduces himself to me, saying he couldn’t help overhear my comments and of my interest in the Minangkabau, and that he is a retired anthropology professor emeritus who has studied and written about the Minangkabau for half a century. Okay. I know that most westerners will take this as only a random synchronistic event, no matter how opportune or nice it is. But for me it is a clear example of the further involvement of the guides, no less a sign that a snowy owl or crows my path. I love the guy instantly. His name is Karl Heider. Google him. And not only has Karl studied and written about the Minangkabau, but he has also lived with, filmed, and written about the Dani people who live in the highland valleys of Indonesian New Guinea – you know, the folks you see in National Geographic running around mostly naked raising pigs and yams – and he’s flying from here in Bukittinggi back to the New Guinea highlands – to Wamena explicitly – to see how the Dani are doing. And I’m headed to visit the Dani – in Wamena – in less than a month, although we won’t overlap. And I cannot begin to say how exciting this encounter is for me, how magical and affirming it is to be chatting in a manner I haven’t chatted with anyone since leaving anthropology and the academic world in 1967. I have almost total recall of names, scholars, theories, anthropologists who studied Indonesian peoples, scholars interested in personality, culture, emotion, childrearing practices, all things Karl is interested in and is as knowledgeable about as anyone on the planet. We talk about Mead, Bateson, Kluckholm, and Geertz, all of whom we both admire. We talk about theoretical anthropology versus observational ethnography. I tell Karl how much I love the film about the Dani, “Dead Birds,” which I own a copy of and Karl tells me he was on the expedition that filmed it.
I feel as if I have met an alter ego of mine, a manifestation of the person I might have become had I stayed on the anthropology track. We are both in our seventies. Anthropology excites and informs us. Only Karl is the real deal and I am a “what might have been.” It all intrigues and excites me. I regret I won’t get more time to spend with him. I pepper him with questions. I ask him for a synthesis of his findings and beliefs. We talk about the Dani, the Minangkabau, post-partum sex taboos, even peanut vendors. I ask him the broadest deepest questions I can. And good ethnographer that he is Karl tells me he deals on the micro and not the macro level. (He has published a text on yam planting among the Dani!) And after I can hold Karl no longer I dive into Google seeking all I can about him and about his work.
Later that day I’m out in the field again, visiting villages, thinking about which ones Karl visited living here in the sixties with his wife and three young children, seeing more than I saw the first day, eating even stranger foods, holding babies, having real and deep conversations, or so they seem to me. I’m in fucking Sumatra!! Did I say I was having a good time?

Bukittinggi

I have been drawn to Bukittinggi by what is its reputed astonishing natural beauty, and by the Minangkabau, the matrilineal culture and people who predominate in the Bukittinggi region and are reported to have made the transition into the modern world without losing many of their values and traditions. My first, second, and even third impressions are that I’ve made a serious miscalculation, but by the end of the first full day I’m feeling that the guides have been good to me, and that I’ve been very lucky once again.

Yet in very short order I’m having an amazingly good time here and think I am a travel idiot savant.
One small but significant matter is that the internet at the guesthouse is actually fabulous … and I can stream the Pats versus the Colts game in real time … and the Pats win. Isn’t that why everyone comes to Sumatra?
Secondly I have my own bathroom for the first time in weeks.
On the next day I have arranged for a guide, a driver, and a car – all for fifty dollars, 9 to 6, gas included. We visit half a dozen outlying villages where we walk around as my guide points out coffee and chocolate trees, cassava, mango, jackfruit, and papaya trees, long beans that are really really long, corn, hot red and green peppers, fish ponds, the biggest spiders you have ever seen, rice paddies, traditional house styles, oxen and baby oxen, butterflies the size of sparrows, and medicinal plants. We talk with people. They want to know where I am from, am I really travelling alone, why, and how old am I? We visit tapioca chip and manioc “factories” that are really just long, hot, dirt floor sheds with squatting workers who earn six dollars a day, a noodle factory, a sawmill. It is all very engaging, very revealing, the architecture unique, the enthusiasm of the people contagious.

There is so much to see – an old fort, a sad zoo, the pedestrian bridge across the main thoroughfare, restaurants, street food vendors, funerals, weddings, children playing, motorcycles and scooters which go back and forth in either lane of travel and even on sidewalks. Sidewalks! A clock tower. Parks. One whole block has more than two-dozen peanut vendors competing for business. I mean, how many peanut purchasers can there be in Bukittinggi? And besides, at ten cents for a good-sized bag that you’d pay at least three dollars for at home, what can their margin of profit be?
I eat things I shouldn’t eat. I drink things I shouldn’t drink.
On Sunday the main town square is filled to the brim with bands of roving students from outlying villages and towns here to find tourists, especially English speaking ones, to practice their English on.  To say, “Excuse me sir, may I disturb you?” “May I ask, sir, what is your name?” And “What country is sir from?” The answers to thesequestions they dutifully record in little notebooks and then request I sign my name beneath their entries, which I do, once, twice, a hundred times, two hundred times. I’m not exaggerating. No baseball player leaving any American major league ballpark has ever been more thronged … or more cooperative I expect. Every one of the students wants a picture with me. Two young girls are so charming I invite them for ice cream sundaes outside the square … and when their teachers find them an hour later, it leads to a round of delightful conversation, ending with an invitation from the teachers to visit their village, which I accept, and to sleep over their house, which I decline.

Adventures in India: Day One

January 1, 2013

Chennai to Mamalahpurum

I don’t know what I expected when I chose Chennai as my point of entry into India, but my first impressions of the city are that it is way more and way less than whatever that was. The smell of the city is omnipresent and intense: old urine, onions, car emissions, something cooking that smells tempting, something rotting that smells and is repulsive, a hint of flowers when there are none to be seen, incense, jasmine. &;People sleep in the streets day and night. It is very hot and very muggy. And at the risk of making a gross overgeneralization, the people who are not sleeping in the streets seem very pushy and very aggressive, even by my New York standards. More than just the necessary jostle to get through a crowd there appears to be a sense of wanting to get ahead, to gain an advantage, to be the first. And it is not uncommon for me to be having a conversation with some shopkeeper or hotel receptionist when I am interrupted by someone else who simply wants to get in … now.
I did manage to arrive at the guesthouse I had hoped to stay in without a reservation around 11PM, notwithstanding the harrowing reality that the cab driver I rode with and his fellow Indian terrorist vehicle drivers all have absolutely no regard for the lane of the road they are driving in and I cannot even tell if they drive on the right side or on the left. In fact I think it may change from street to street or as conditions dictate. And when red lights that hold the vehicle terrorists back on occasion indicate by their digital countdown signal that there are less than twenty seconds left before the light changes to green the honking starts, and with about ten seconds left the entire lane of cars is moving forward through the remaining red light. As for crossing the roadway as a pedestrian, although it is accomplished by me by attaching myself to any one of the Indian contortionists who do so with casual regularity, to me it seems like a feat of immense daring and perfect timing.
The guesthouse is locked when I arrive there, but, after much bell ringing, the door is opened by a sleepy old man and an even sleepier younger man. They say everything is closed early because it is “election time,” although I’ve seen open teashops on my way into Chennai and later learn that the election itself is more than a month away. My room at this inn, complete with cold shower, toilet without toilet paper, and terrace surrounded by prison bars, is in an olden Maharaja’s home. After that it’s all down hill. The sheets have burn holes in them and I can scratch my itchy back on their roughly textured weave. The floor is concrete, cracked, dirty – no make that filthy – and has never met a rug or tile. The soles of my feet are dirty – no make that filthy – within a second or two and I have to take them into the bed with me. The walls are cracked, ancient, discolored, moldy, and covered with flaking plaster. Electric wires are hanging everywhere, although there are no electric outlets. Also no hot water, soap, towels, blankets, cabinets, or even wall hooks. There is one old rusty metal folding chair. All in all it feels a bit like a cell. We are definitely talking upgrade.
In the morning I move about the Triplicate neighborhood streets among throngs of people, cars, trucks, rickshaws, horns, mufflers, whistles, and yelling. Eye contact is rare, make that non-existent, notwithstanding that I look at people directly, and stick out as an obvious, tall, white, foreign guy. The sight of green trees able to breathe and grow in the city comforts me. The calling of crows with gray collars that make it look like they too are dirty also helps, although I ’m quite sure that what the kahkahs – which is Tamil for crow – are saying and asking me is, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” And, of course, the crow guides’ question is the absolutely right question, which I don’t really know the answer to (on a spiritual quest? studying yoga?), because all I’ve found so far, at least to my eyes, is a dirty, highly polluted, teeming, and somewhat nondescript, gray city. Besides, what I really want to know first, even before I try to answer the crows, is can my diet for the next five weeks in India really consist of only bananas, cashew nuts, Kit Kat bars, and water?
My favorite moments are when taxi drivers seeking to take me on as a fare as I walk aimlessly – the only obvious foreigner – through the streets ask me, “Where are you going?” And I reply, “I have no idea.” And I really don’t. Over the course of four days in Chennai dozens of people ask me, what I am doing here, which I can’t answer, followed by the even more pointed and revealing question “Okay, but why did you choose Chennai?” And for three days I tell all of them, I really don’t know.