Joe/Dick in Africa/Asia 2008

End note

2008-05-06T04:07:00.002-04:00

Some of you have asked if the cyclone hit here at all. The remnants of it touched northern Thailand, but in Bangkok it's been nothing but hot and sunny. Burma has been devastated, as you know, with very great loss of life. The junta is cruel and stupid, but not so cruel and stupid that it has refused entry to international relief groups. Alhough, the country was such a wreck to begin with that the helpers surely will have a hard time knowing where to begin.
Joe is especially concerned about a Chin village where he spent a night on his last trek. A steep hillside had been cleared for planting. Joe asked his guide if landslides might result during the monsoons. The guide said yes, but the villagers---who lived at the bottom of the hill---didn't understand that.
The regime still plans on holding its sham constitutional referendum on Saturday. It is madness.

Today is our last full day in Thailand. We spent the first part of it slogging around Bangkok in the heat scouting locations for scenes in the tenth Strachey book. I'm on chapter 11, out of about 25. It might be titled "Not How Anybody Wants to Die." Is that lurid enough? (Consumer note: "Death Vows", the ninth Strachey book, about a gay marriage gone wrong, will be out in September.)

Our plan for The Last Supper tonight is tom kah gai, fried morning glory vines in spicy sauce, and duck red curry. Does this represent a failure of imagination?

This is the end of this blog but not the end of Dick and Joe's Endless Cycle of Travel Death and Travel Rebirth. There will be no Travel Nirvana for the likes of us, ho ho.

Pattaya

2008-05-02T00:12:00.006-04:00

It's a Cancun-like Gulf of Thailand seaside-resort city that got going in the Vietnam era---a U.S. base was not far from here---and took off in the age of Southeast Asian industrial tourism that followed. Pattaya has a reputation. Some Thais in Bangkok were surprised, even disgusted, that we were planning to visit here. This reputation has been earned. Some years ago a foreign writer injured high-level Thai sensibilities by describing the country as "as a brothel with temples." In Pattaya, they forgot the temples.

While much of Pattaya is indeed squalid, some of it is bright, clean and more or less wholesome. The distinctions between unwholesome and more or less wholesome Pattaya are sometimes clear and sometimes blurred. They are clearest in Somtien Beach, south of the city, where Fritz, Leonard and Num live. They are the reason we came here.

Fritz Blank is Barbara Wheaton's old foodie buddy from Philadelphia. For a couple of decades, he ran Deux Chiminees, considered by many the city's finest restaurant. (Fritz also has degrees in dairy science and microbiology.) Barbara and Fritz see each other most years at the Oxford Food Symposium and otherwise exchange erudite and marvelously witty e-mails, some of which Joe and I have had a peek at.

Last year, Fritz moved to Thailand full time to be with his boyfriend since the early '70s, who had settled here several years earlier. Leonard Bucki is a former Philadelphia trial lawyer who Fritz says "never lost a case" and retired happily at age 51. Now they live in Somtien Beach, Fritz in a flower-draped hillside townhouse of his own, Len in a gorgeous modern beach house with his Thai boyfriend Num. Fritz also has a Thai friend with whom he seems to be---in the parlance of the '50s---going steady.

Fritz and Len are two warm, bright and delightful men, and we are grateful that we have been able to have breakfast with them every day and dinner on a couple of nights. We also spent a day at the gay beach with Fritz, who is a well-liked fixture there.

It was at this beach where Len met Num seven years ago when he was 23. Num is a lovely man, and Fritz told a lovely story about him. The three men travel together and once spent Christmas in Philadelphia. Num was reluctant to accompany Fritz to an open rehearsal of Beethoven's Ninth. Len---who has educated this former farm-boy-then-beach-boy-masseur---talked Num into tagging along, and said he could always leave during a break in the rehearsals. At the break, Fritz asked Num if he preferred to duck out. Said Num: "Oh no! I stay. It make me feel all funny inside." I've never heard it summed up better.

Joe and I are staying in town at a place called the Hotel Ambiance, and it's got plenty of that.

Tomorrow we return to Bangkok, where Joe will receive a final onceover by his surgeon and physical therapist. The shoulder is doing well, although Joe's metal-slinging activities will be restricted for a couple of months, an inconvenience.

Wednesday we fly to Delhi, then on Thursday toward Newark and on to Boston, landing at Logan Friday morning. We will be happy to be back with our family and friends and our good lives in the Berkshires. And within days, our Great Shlep of 2008 will likely feel as if it never actually happened. But luckily, it did.

Wet again

2008-04-25T22:30:00.004-04:00

The monsoon rains don't arrive until the end of May, but we've had wild, drenching rainstorms for at least part of each of the last four days. Fierce winds have toppled trees in Lumpinee Park, where only a few days earlier Joe had sat on a bench in the sun and watched a three-foot monitor lizard devour a three-foot fish it had dragged out of a canal. Joe said the lizard ate the fish's enormous head in one gulp.

The wind blew over a number of billboards around Bangkok. One man was killed by flying debris, and another billboard crashed down on a Cal-Tex station in our neighborhood. (Photos of some of this should soon appear on the blog.) The city government says there are two-hundred-and-some illegal oversized billboards that it considers hazardous. Has it ordered them to be dismantled? No, the city has advised residents to steer clear of these billboards on stormy days.

We had wondered about drainage in the streets. Now we see that, basically, there isn't much. Many intersections and driveway entrances fill up with water. Some people slip off their shoes or flip-flops and carry them across flooded roads and byways. I saw a Thai man in a business suit, his trouser legs hiked up daintily, completing a footwear portage across a lake that had just formed in front of the Dusit Thani, a five-star hotel.

I spent an hour in the ground-floor shopping and restaurant arcade of an office tower I had ducked into while I waited for one downpour to subside. The marble floor inside a side entrance was an inch lower than the marble terrace outside. So every time the two security guards holding the double doors shut against the wind and rain opened them to let somebody in, a sheet of water cascaded through the opening. Cleaners in blue uniforms soon arrived with galoshes on their feet and broad-brimmed straw hats on their heads. Three of the cleaners wore stacks of three hats each. Wielding brooms, mops and broad window-washing squeegees, the cleaners tried to shove the water back out the doors---though this of course required opening the doors, so it didn't work. Also, every time a door was so much as cracked, the straw hats blew off, and the guards and cleaners collapsed with laughter.

When the rain let up, I plopped a newspaper over my head and hiked with wet feet the two blocks down to the BTS Sala Deng Skytrain station, and rode over to the Siam Paragon Mall and Cinema. I met Joe just in time for the 7:15 showing of "The Hidden Kingdom," a surprisingly enjoyable new Chinese-American kung-fu flick. You know you're not in Cannes anymore when the most interesting actor on the screen is Jackie Chan.

We also sat through 35 minutes of ads and explosion-packed trailers---New Yorkers would have been throwing objects at the screen---and then stood with the rest of the audience for the royal anthem. Sepia-toned snapshots of King Bhumibole floated across the screen, none of them unflattering. At the conclusion of the bombastic ditty, the legend "We love our king" appeared on the screen in Thai and English. Recently, a Thai youth refused to stand for the anthem and will soon stand trial for lese majesty.

It was still raining after the movie and the taxi queue in front of the mall was impossibly long. We walked up the street and found a tuk-tuk, whose young driver agreed to a reasonable fare. He produced a towel to wipe the rainwater off the double seat in the back, and we had a warm, pleasing, semi-soggy ride for the mile or so back to the hotel.

The other time we got wet recently was at a restaurant we like called Northeast. We think the name means the food is mostly Issan, which can be plenty spicy. The waiter asked if we wanted our mixed seafood salad and vegetable stir-fry "Thai-spicy" or "farang-spicy," referring to the number and types of chilis to be included. Sometimes farang-spicy can be too bland, so we said Thai-spicy. As we ate, steam shot out the tops of our heads and we could have used towels to sop it up as hot water streamed down our necks.

Keeping dry in Bangkok can be a chore, but we don't mind. Tomorrow we take the bus to Pattaya for six days. Will we get wet at the seashore? We think so, one way or another.

Visa slog

2008-04-20T22:13:00.003-04:00

Not much fun, but the job got done. We're legal. We never made it to a casino. It was four hours from Bangkok to Aranyaprathet on the Cambodian border and four hours back. The three and a half hours in between consisted of sitting in tourist-trap rest stops ("purgatories," Joe called them) and standing in immigration queues in the pounding heat. Lunch was a bag of rancid peanuts at a 7-Eleven.

Among the other travelers in the 12-passenger Toyota van we rode on ($30 RT) were:
---young Swedish and German backpackers with that overland-from-Cologne-to-Saigon determined look
---a thirtyish American named Chuck who used to scout movie locations in California and now runs two internet cafes in Bangkok. Asked about the U.S. presidential election, Chuck wasn't sure who was running. Joe told him. Iraq? "I can't express an opinion on that, because I don't have all the facts."
---a fifty-three-ish German jewelery dealer living part-time in Bangkok who has a wife in Wurzburg and two Thai girlfriends, "one 23 and one older." He "saved the life" of the older one by buying her a house. The man's wife has taken a younger boyfriend, and he's not happy about that. His name---we saw his business card and could barely contain ourselves---was Herr Schmuck.

Among the several unanticipated costs of this unavoidable excursion were an extra $12 each for expedited "VIP" handling of our documents at the Cambodian checkpost---i.e., backhanders to the Cambodian officials, with a cut for the Thais arranging them. We never got more than a few feet inside Cambodia.

Then, back in Bangkok at 6:30, the driver of the van that had picked us up at our hotel in the morning dumped us and six or seven others along an expressway and cheerfully told us to hail a cab. He had put together a private deal to drive four Koreans to their distant hotel and we were in the way. We'll complain to the travel agent who sold us our tickets. Mai pen rai? Yes and no.

Blog comments

2008-04-20T21:51:00.004-04:00

Thanks to Dennis Drabelle, who wrote that Joe "has invented a new travel genre. Surgical tourism."

Thanks to Barbara Wheaton, whose opinion seemed mixed on Songkran's "folkloric manifestations."

Thanks to blog chief copy editor Bill Ullman, who expounded at persuasive length on the folly of going into surgery minus a wrist-ID---and without a companion to keep an eye on the proceedings. Joe concurs, although at BNH he had made such a big deal of the missing ID band that it became an OR joke, and nobody was about to forget that he was "Mr. Joseph." Joe says he has read that many nurses, when they are hospital patients, bring along a nurse "buddy" to watch out for errors. They know.

An anonymous blog reader asked if we had witnessed the "Olympic torch hubbub" in Bangkok.
We did not. The Thai government warned that it would expel any foreigner protesting unlawfully, so we played it safe and didn't go at all. It came off peacefully. Dully even. A handful of pro-Tibet sign wavers booed the torch brigade, and every Chinese student within a fifty mile radius was rounded up to wave the flag of the Peoples Republic and boo lustily back.

The news

2008-04-20T21:35:00.004-04:00

I promise you and myself not to fill up the blog with The Mysterious East news stories. But this one, from the April 18 Daily Express, a local tabloid, is too good not to reproduce in its entirety. The writing is suspiciously farang-like, but I'll bet the story is true.

"'WIFE SLITHERS OUT OF HOME
"The python-wife of an Udon Thani man has left him. She crawled away sometime this week.
"The 35-year-old Ban Don Yanang villager Satien Kankudlung tearfully says python Sitthida, whom he wed recently, fled the marital home.
"The snake is believed to be his soul mate of more than 600 years. He found her in a local swamp and married her after she would not leave.
"Visitors flocking to witness the bizarre union and hopefully get lucky lottery numbers are being left disappointed.
"Satien believes Sitthida left before spiritual figure Yuan Kongsuwan came to take her away after a deity told him his wife was wanted. A fortune teller told him earlier the reptile would flee after Songkran. Satien says he'll wait for his wife's return, forever."

Good shoulder

2008-04-19T03:00:00.003-04:00

Joe had his stitches out on Thursday and received an excellent report from the surgeon. The doctor did say further daily physical therapy would probably be helpful. So out of what might be an excess of caution, we're postponing our seashore visit and will stay in Bangkok for another week. Also, instead of going to the unspoiled far South, we'll take the bus to Pattaya for six days. This is the well, er, um, somewhat non-unspoiled resort town on the Gulf of Thailand that is sometimes known as Costa del Bangkok. We do not want to miss Pattaya, because Barbara Wheaton's renowned-Philadelphia-chef pal Fritz Blank lives there. We have wanted to meet Fritz for years. Then it's back to Bangkok for a final look-see by Dr. Somsat before heading home via New Delhi May 7, arriving in Becket May 9.

The entire shoulder episode has been gratifying. Joe had a long-standing nagging medical problem expertly taken care of. Bangkok Nursing Home Hospital was friendly and considerate. The only bad moment, he said, was on the day of the surgery. The OR staff decided to remove his wristband ID; it might get in the way of the surgeons, they said. He worried that he might be mixed up with another patient and have the wrong surgery performed. He joked that he particularly did not want sexual reassignment surgery, one of BNH's specialities. That, of course, would not have included shoulder surgery---unless somebody was after that Joan Crawford look.

Tomorrow we go by bus to Cambodia on a visa run. Some of the same Thais, no doubt, who came up with the 30-day-tourist-visa rule, have built casinos just inside Cambodia, where we will be deposited for four hours before returning to Bangkok. Also, the Cambodians charge $45 each for visas, even though we will be in the country for just a few hours. Quite a racket.

Yesterday and the day before, it rained in Bangkok. We had wondered what it was like here during the monsoon rains that start in late May. Now we know. It came down in buckets for about an hour, and it was glorious. It didn't cool it off, though. Whew.

Wet

2008-04-15T03:03:00.004-04:00

The signs posted around our hotel gave notice:

"Dear Value Guests,
"As you may be known that on April 13-15, 2008 is 'Songkran Day' (Thai Traditional New Year). We will celebrate throughout Thailand!
"During this period everywhere throughout Thailand will get WET! As Thais are enjoy with this festival.
"Whenever you decide to go outside! Please keep your Valuable Things i.e. Wallet, Mobile Phone, Money inside the Plastic Bag (or wherever away from water!)
"Happy New Year and Best Wishes to you and your family!
"The Management
The Pinnacle Lumpinee Hotel"

The only factual inaccuracy in the signs was the time period. (With my pathetic six words of Thai, I am not about to correct any Thai's English.) The "Songkran Day" is really about five days, or maybe six. Another sign at the Pinnacle warned that three to four hours might be needed to get to the airport (instead of the normal one hour) on the first and last days of the annual water festival, on acount of "BAD TRAFFIC"---unwelcome news for those fleeing the country.

A significant portion of Thailand's tens of thousands of foreign residents leave during Songkran, viewing it as a good time to, say, fly back to Birmingham and check up on how mum is getting on. Others stay, however, and, between dashes out to the pubs or noodle stalls and back, compose letters to The Bangkok Post. One on April 14 read as follows:

"SPARE US THE POETRY
Once again the Bangkok Post publishes another stomach churning eulogy fron the king of pap, Glen Chatelier, director of the Office of International Affairs, Assumption University (PostBag, April 13).
"Whilst I do value the right to freedom of speech, I also value, and would like to defend, my own right to the freedom to read without puking.
" 'Of sprinkling lustral waters into the hands of elders... Of the harmony of music emanating from simple hearts...' Alternatively read: 'Wet through to my underpants... Four thousand decibels booming from speakers the size of townhouses...'
"Please Glen, the amateur poet lives within us all---and that is exactly where it should stay.
"Hopefully your words don't reflect the teaching content of the Assumption University curriculum. However, if your intent is to ingratiate yourself enough to qualify for that elusive Thai residency visa, it might just work!
"Daniel Cox"

The onslaught, it has to be said, is relentless in some unavoidable locales---hotel entrances, the sidewalks in front of every 7-Eleven, main intersections. And the water-weaponry is impressive---buckets, hoses, waterguns with the thrust of bazookas. Some of these are wielded by kids and young adults with backpack refill tanks. Rummy, eat your heart out! Joe, with his arm in a sling, has been spared on some occasions. I have not. Yesterday I thought I had found a safe route through one area. But the teenaged water-hooligans giddily drenching tuk-tuk passengers as they rode by had unxpectedly split up and opened a second front on my side of the street, and I got it good.

Songkran has its deficiencies, including the occasional over-aggressiveness by both some Thais and some participating foreign tourists. And the drunk-driving rate goes way up, mostly in rural villages. Today's headline in the Post read "Death, injury toll soars above last year's figures."

But overall the highspiritedness is harmless and really quite wonderful. Last evening, Joe and I managed to make it into a taxi un-drenched and rode over to Central World, one of Bangkok's biggest and most chic shopping malls. The vast complex is a marvel of modern design and anything-your-heart-desires consumerist excess, with cinemas and food courts and big atriums for exhibits and performances.

In one atrium, Songkran's origins were on captivating display. Thais were queued up by the dozens to purchase garlands of flowers and colorfully wrapped monks' robes (with the proceeds going to local temples, we think). Four praying monks knelt on a carpeted platform to receive the gifts. Then all the earners of karmic merit moved to another queue, where cups of water scented with hyacinth blossoms were sprinkled on an array of golden Buddha images. This ritual of cleansing, remembrance and appreciation---for the Buddha, his teachings and the monks who preserve his teachings---is what Songkran was before squirt-gun mayhem pretty much took over. And it's probably not a farang's wishful thinking that in most Thai hearts and minds this is what Songkran still is.

We ambled around the mall through the happy crowds. No water was being tossed inside, though plenty of people strolled about blase-ly soaked to the skin. One display had mannequins in fancy gowns made entirely from hundreds of small twisty-balloons. In a performance space, appreciative audiences enjoyed jugglers, and then a brilliantly funny reenactment by three young Thai actors, using music, lighting and frenetic pantomime, of all the fight and chase sequences in a James Bond movie.

On the big outdoor plaza in front of Central world, we stopped to watch a spectacle that struck us as one of the things that makes Thailand Thailand. Thousands of young people had gathered for what the signs said was a "Wet Party Free Concert." The high-decibel music from the onstage band was alternately hip-hop, punk and some local hybrid we didn't quite get. There were the usual rock-concert smoke machines, too, and flashing lights---and water!

Joe and I stood off to the side with the other unwaterlogged wimpsters, but the entire cheering and arm-waving young audience in front of the stage was being sprayed almost nonstop with undulating waves and sheets of water!

It helped, of course, that the air temperature at nine at night was in the high 80s. This type of New Year's celebration wouldn't work in Times Square at the end of December. But it wasn't just the climate that made this succeed. There is a gentle-spiritedness in the Thai people that made it possible for a raucus rock concert to come off with not a single cop or security guard anywhere in sight. There was exuberance with no loss of control.

I hear American voices asking, but then, was this really a rock concert? Rock is ABOUT rebellion, defiance. Minds keener than mine will have to sort that out. But I'm telling you, what we witnessed we thought was very fine and satisfying, and the Thais seemed to think so, too.

I should add that we have no illusions that Thailand is Shangri-la. The political system here is rotten, the cops can be brutal, and the greed and carelessness of the upper classes in this essentially feudal society would make Dick Cheney weep with envy. It's a shizoid society that I know I will never really understand. But every day we see things about Thailand that are deeply lovely, and rarely is that loveliness more vividly on display than during Songkran.

(Footnote: Joe and I wondered if the Burmese water festival might be subdued this year, in the wake of last fall's violent government crackdown on protesters. A wire-service report from Yangon today said the New Year's celebrations there were actually wilder than anyone could remember.)

Joe's first meal after leaving the hospital

2008-04-10T04:24:00.002-04:00

1. Guay Teow Moo. "Assorted noodle in spicy condiment." It's a soup, with roasted pork bits, minced pork meatballs, flat rice noodles, lettuce, bean sprouts, peanuts, scallions, palm sugar, garlic, fish sauce, apple cider vinegar.

2. Larb Moo Nam-tok. Larb is a spicy meat salad. This one had grilled pork with fresh coriander, basil, chilis, scallions, shallots, lime juice, palm sugar, fish sauce, mint. Accompanying it was a side of chilled cabbage leaves for picking up the larb and making a little wrap if we wished to (we did), and fresh, crisp long beans.

Medical update

2008-04-08T05:51:00.002-04:00

The operation was a success. The doctor said it was good Joe had it done now. The cartilage was so badly torn, from repeated poppings-out, that the bone was starting to wear away. Fixing the shoulder later would have been more complex and difficult. He gets out of BNH tomorrow. Each of you has two shoulders. Never take them for granted.

Medical tourism

2008-04-07T07:43:00.003-04:00

This morning, Joe had his shoulder repaired.

As many of you know, he has been bedeviled for several years by a serious shoulder problem. From time to time, his left armbone has popped out of the shoulder socket. He has had to reinsert it with his right hand. That hurts.

Once, he landed in the Berkshire Medical Center emergency department to have the arm put back where it belongs. The unpredictable arm has been painful, disruptive and worrisome. It misbehaved recently during his Burma trek. The arm also slipped out of its socket while Joe was photographing a tribal woman in India. He said he kept grinning, so as not to frighten her. But he is sure his gyrations (and his grin) made her think he was possessed.

Specialists in the Berkshires examined this shoulder more than once but remained vague, inconclusive and unhelpful as to what might be done about it. Before heading off to Burma, Joe had the shoulder looked at at Bangkok Nursing Home Hospital. BNH is the fine medical center that successfully treated my leg last year after an insect bite in Vietnam developed a staph infection. Last week, Joe returned to BNH for more tests, including an MRI.

On saturday, Joe was informed that his problem was a torn cartilage that could be repaired at BNH. When asked when he would like the surgery done, he said as soon as possible. "How about Monday at eight?" asked the doctor.

This morning, Dr. Somsak Kupthiratsaikul performed orthoscopic surgery on Joe's shoulder. Minimally invasive, the operation is done with precision tools and a tiny camera inserted through a relatively small incision. There is no reason to believe the operation was not a success, although Joe won't talk to Dr. Kupthiratsaikul until tomorrow. Joe was groggy afterwards, though not too out of it to keep him from introducing me to a nurse named Lemon.

Joe will remain at BNH for two nights. He requested Thai food and was soon to receive some when I saw him a few hours ago. He is to remain in Bangkok for two weeks of check-ups and physical therapy. His motions will be restricted for a number of months. Full recovery can take 8 or 9 months, although he can be back in his studio this summer. (About 1 percent of these surgeries develop complications. So far, there are no signs of any with Joe's.)

We were to have traveled in southern Thailand in April. We'll still do this for about ten days later in the month. We'll also have to do a "visa run" at some point---probably take a four-hour bus ride to the Cambodian border and back.

This is all fortuitous. Joe gets to have this nagging problem put behind him. Blue Cross-Blue Shield gets to have this operation done for probably a third of the cost in the U.S.

And, we'll be in Bangkok for Songkran! This is the big holiday in Thailand, Burma, Cambodia and Laos that celebrates the lunar new year. Also a pre-monsoon "water festival," Songkran used to center on the bathing of Buddha images and on young people sprinkling water on the hands of elderly monks. Now, however, it's an (often alcohol-fueled) bacchanalia lasting for several days with most of the population giddily dousing anybody who dares to go out in public with hoses, buckets of water and, we have heard, high-powered water guns.

Some foreign residents flee the country during Songkran. Others barricade themselves inside their houses. But we enjoyed being in Yangon last year for the first two days of the festival---it was thrilling to see crowds of happy Burmese---and then we flew to Bangkok on the final day. We arrived just in time to hang our wet clothes over the bathtub and head out for dinner---and get soaked all over again. No one is spared. The trick is to keep your passport in the hotel safe and your money in a plastic bag.

How will Joe keep his camera dry? The Burmese were respectful of the camera---a couple of teenaged girls gigglingly asked if they could "pour" on him and then dumped ice water down his back. (The air temperature is around a hundred this time of year.) We fear the fun-loving Thais may be less polite. Whatever happens, though, we don't think Joe's arm will be constantly threatening to come loose.

Notes on Myanmar and the Myanmar blog

2008-04-03T02:38:00.002-04:00

Why is Joe riding an elephant? Our car had a flat on the mountainous road between Napyidaw and Inle Lake. We had a few hours to kill in the village of Tin Mar Bin while the tire was being repaired. The son of the richest family in town was about to be initiated as a monk novice (something all Buddhist youngsters in Southeast Asia are expected to do at some point for a week or a month), and a celebratory feast for 2000 people was about to commence. An elephant had been hired to lead the ritual procession, and we were offered rides. Joe accepted, warily, and afterwards he paid $5 towards the elephant's sugar cane and the mahout's whisky.

In his caption for a photo of a monk novice in make-up, Joe used the term "ladyboy." This was not derogatory. It's the Thai term for transsexual. The Thai word "katoey" can mean either transsexual or transvestite. A current controversy being reported in The Bangkok Post is over the age at which young "ladyboys" can be safely (voluntarily) castrated in anticipation of later gender reassignment surgery. Two Bangkok hospitals are world centers for this operation.

We mentioned briefly our visit to Themanya Monastery and the remains on display there of a beloved monk who died in 2004. An AP story today (picked up from BurmaNet, the pro-democracy Burmese news service) begins as follows:

"A group of armed men on Wednesday stole the body of one of Myanmar's most revered Buddhist monks, whose corpse has been preserved in a glass coffin since he died more than four years ago.

"Officials said the coffin containing the body of Sayadaw Bhaddanta Vinaya, better known as Themanya Sayadaw, was stolen from the monastery in eastern Myanmar where he preached.

"The officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to release information, said at least nine armed men wearing camouflage clothing carried out the theft. The officials said they had no idea who the thieves were or why they took the body."

Assorted pictures from Mandalay

2008-04-02T08:18:00.007-04:00

We left Mandalay by boat; this was the boat we opted out of.

With what seemed a disaster in the making, we just hoped that it wasn't going to tip over on our boat.

Hats drying on the banks of the Irrawaddy

Arriving in Bagan

At a performance by the anti-government Moustache Brothers in Mandalay (They are only allowed to perform in English in their home for foreign tourists.)

There is not not a level playing field in all of Burma

A market in Mandalay

Pedestrians on an ancient teak footbridge outside of Mandalay.

Old Asia fades, and doesn't

2008-04-02T07:38:00.007-04:00

Is it possible to feel nostalgia for a place or time one has never experienced? I think someone else has written on this subject, but I can't remember who or what. I'll go ahead---Bill Herrick joked that when a writer writes something that feels a little too familiar, but the writer can't recall where he might have seen these words or ideas in print previously, then it isn't plagiarism.

While I never set foot in the city before last year, I am vaguely nostalgic for the Bangkok of the 1960s and earlier. I've read accounts of Rama IV Road, a main thoroughfare half a block from our hotel, when canals ran along either side of it 40 years ago, and herds of cattle were driven down the street to a downtown slaughterhouse. Canals criss-crossed the entire city, in fact, carrying goods and passengers about, and emptying into the Chao Pryha river. No developer has yet figured out how to fill in the river. But the canals are nearly gone, along with most of the gorgeous old teak houses on stilts.

While Bangkok's skyline now looks a little too much like Houston's, it is still very much a Thai, not Texan, city. Houston has no Buddhist temples with gilded spires nestled serenely among the skyscrapers. And there are no "spirit houses" in front of Houston bank towers where passers-by can leave offerings of food and flowers for the natural spirits the structures have inconsiderately displaced.

An apparent real loss, however, is the consistent high level of Thai food. Overall this is still as satisfying a place to dine as anywhere in the world I have ever lifted a fork, or a set of chopsticks, or my right hand. But farangs who have lived in or visited Thailand over several decades claim that it's only the street-stall food that has stayed consistently fresh, zesty and surprising, and a lot of the restaurant food has been "adapted" to Western tastes. It's a result of the dominance of industrial tourism in the Thai economy, a decidedly mixed blessing.

While Joe and I nearly always choose carefully and eat well, we have run into the diluted stuff a few times. One was when our friend Poe Suwatchie arranged a dinner meeting with a gay Thai police official. (The cop turned out to be both fun and helpful with my research for the new Strachey book.) Because, Poe said, it would be quiet, and perhaps because it was what the official expected, we went to a place called Le Siam that was more "Le" than Siam. It had big satin bows on the backs of the chairs, smiling elephants carved in stone, and an Altoona-style cocktail-lounge singer/piano player warbling bad hits of the eighties. The food was like mediocre Chinese-restaurant food in the U.S.--- heavy, monotonous, possibly chemical-laden.

We vowed to avoid joints like Le Siam in the future, but two nights later fate intervened, this time entertainingly. At the departure gate, our Thailand to Myanmar flight was cancelled at the last minute on account of "technical" problems with the Myanmar Airways International aircraft. We and 60 or 70 others were told to come back 22 hours later. Meanwhile, for anybody with nowhere to sleep, MAI would put us up overnight at a place near the Bangkok airport called the Miracle hotel. Joe and I were in no hurry, and this sounded irresistible to us.

After a Long March from one end to the other of the very large Suvarnabhumi Airport (the Thais pronounce it swah-nah-BOOM), Thai Immigration confiscated our passports (technically we had left the country), and 30 or 40 of us were placed in a convoy of vans. (See Joe's blog photo of the young woman leading the Long March.) We soon arrived, minus our passports and our luggage, at what Joe described as "an upmarket penal colony." It was the "Miracle Hometel."

Miraculous indeed was the speed with which the front desk doled out room keys to the glum MAI (and MIA) refugees. (At least there were no screamers in the group---perhaps because, except for us and an Austrian man married to a Burmese woman, they were all Asians, who rarely stamp their feet and holler.)

A miracle, too, was our room, a boutique-hip expanse of muted wood tones and rubbed-back aluminum leaf, with a bed the size of Sumatra. The flat-screen TV had nothing on it we wished to look at, but the bathroom, commodious in every respect, had on offer (new) toothbrushes and toothpaste, which we needed. (Despite rumors to the contrary, we never saw our bags until the next day in Yangon.) Our room listed at $150 a night (MAI surely paid less.) That's nothing in New York, but in Bangkok we pay $37 at the Pinnacle, a pleasant tourist hotel near the city center.

Perhaps the Miracle Hometel will get away with charging those prices because what it offers foreign tourists is safety. Especially safety from---"Earl, are they going to make us eat fried squid on a stick?"---Thai food. The Hometel dining room, whose overall decor resembled an undergraduate dining room at Penn State in 1957, had the legend AMERICAN CUISINE emblazoned across one wall. Nearby had been hung an American flag, and next to that was a five-foot gilded replica of the Statue of Liberty. Would I make this up? Yes, but this time I have not.

Our American-cuisine free meal, courtesy of MAI, consisted of a cream soup of undeterminable origins, boiled vegetables, steamed rice and, cozy under a blanket of tomato sauce my aunts in Pennsylvania in the 1950s could reliably have been assured contained no "seasoning," a slab of what I guess has to be called chicken-fried-steak fish.

The live dining-room music at our Hometel away from home(tel) matched the food. A local Thai band was playing and singing hits by the Carpenters off-key. The man at the table next to ours, a Burmese-American who sells telephone systems to prisons, applauded vigorously after each number.

Okay, okay, the Americanization of wide swaths of the tourism business in Southeast Asia (we saw similar trends in Vietnam last year) is not the worst thing that can happen in this region. Hey, remember Pol Pot? But it is sad nonetheless. It's also still avoidable---we eat wonderful classic Thai food all the time. But care must be taken, we now know firsthand.

We flew to Burma the next morning, by the way. The attentive and resourceful Henry Nyan Htun, of Peace House Travel, got us on a 9 a.m. Air Bagan flight. That's the one where the handle clanked down on an emergency-exit door, and a monk was recruited to go and sit next to it. Reassuringly, this was still Asia.

Along the road from Napyidaw to Inle Lake

2008-04-02T07:33:00.009-04:00

We happened upon a novice initiation ceremony. This woman danced while a man in another oxcart played a small horn. Sure beats a limo.

You'd stick your tongue out too

No, this is not a ladyboy in training. This is the normal get-up for the ceremony. Afterwards he will have his head shaved and be given his robes.

Grinding peanuts for their oil

Working the rice paddies

A typical array of tasty bites

This woman looked skeptical

Pictures from Chin State

2008-04-02T06:03:00.010-04:00

Our intrepid vehicle

A few pictures from Bagan

2008-04-02T05:55:00.003-04:00

child with jasmine and tanaka (bark-powder cosmetic) on face

hermit in market, women selling betal nut leaves

Temples at Bagan

Bagan temple Buddha image

Digs

2008-04-02T00:31:00.007-04:00

Flight to Myanmar cancelled at Bangkok Airport. Unhappy passengers consulting MAI agents

The Long March to our overnight accomodations. (See blog section called "Old Asia Fades, and Doesn't.)

Joe at the Miracle Hometel

On the road from Yangon to Malamyine

2008-04-02T00:22:00.005-04:00

Nuns praying at the Shrine of the Golden Rock

Kyaung Kan Len Rock Monastery

Thamanya Monastery dinner

Thamanya Monastery sayadow in front of school built with donation by Aung San Soo Kyi, and headmaster

Pictures from a day at Ya Da Nar Mynt Monastery, Malamyine

2008-04-01T23:23:00.011-04:00

Assorted pictures from Inle Lake

2008-04-01T23:03:00.008-04:00

Along a canal

Stupas

Ladies going hither and yon

A fisherman with fish net doing the one legged row

Nam Pan market, Inle Lake

Dick peering into cinema, Nam Pan village, Inle Lake. Our guide, Htun Htun, is on left. Films are DVDs, shown on old TV sets, of Burmese films and Hollywood action movies. That day's features are listed on the sign above the children. Admission 10 cents. Most popular movie ever shown in Nam Pan? "Titanic."

Pa-O festival, Kekku

Shrine, Inle Lake

Nam Pan village market

Rice cakes---Nam Pan market, on Inle Lake

Pa-O festival, Kekku

Over 2,000 11th-century stupas at Kekku

Pa-O festival, Kekku

Pa-O National Day festival at Kekku

Updated update

2008-03-29T22:32:00.003-04:00

Joe is back in Yangon from his trek in the wilds of Chin state. He'll be back here in Bangkok late tonight. In an e-mail yesterday, he said the trek was memorable. At a village celebration he witnessed the slaughter of a bullock and a pig and said he may yet become a vegetarian. He has many good pictures, including one of a Chin woman playing a nose flute (but not of a Nose woman playing a chin flute). Photos should appear on the blog later this week.
I'm working on my Strachey book. I've told a couple of people that I now know enough about Thailand to know how little I know. Anyway, I'll just use what it is I know, if only I can figure out what it is I know.
I've gone back over the Myanmar blog and fixed some typos and other minor errors. One was a spelling for Aung San Soo Kye that I think I made up.
I just learned that we will have to do a "visa run." Tourists entering Thailand receive a 30-day visa and cannot have it extended for more than a week. We're not leaving the country until May 4, so we'll have to do what other farangs do---apparently it is a cunning feature of industrial tourism in Southeast Asia---and cross a border and then come right back with a new Thai 30-day visa. Most people take the bus to a Laos border town for the turn-around, so we probably will, too. I've always been curious about that border (last year we flew in and out of Laos). The Laos drive on the right, the Thais on the left. What happens in the middle of the border bridge over the Mekong? Maybe I'll find out. (In 1963 I was in Addis Ababa on the day the Ethiopians switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. People were terrified and traffic moved at a crawl. The problems began several days later.)

Travel update

2008-03-25T01:12:00.002-04:00

Following this are four postings on Myanmar. I'm in Bangkok to work on a book set here. Joe is still in Myanmar on a trek in the wilds of Chin state. He'll be back in Thailand March 31. He has many wonderful pictures taken in Burma but can't post them until he's back in well-infrastructured Thailand. It will be worth the wait. The photos show a lot of Myanmar life and institutions not mentioned in my text or that are indescribable. There is much in Myanmar that is blissful, and Joe's pictures capture that Myanmar beautifully.

Myanmar/Burma

2008-03-24T23:52:00.006-04:00

Joe and I are walking down a dusty side street in Mandalay. Although it's 110 in the shade, the Burmese all around us are toiling away, earning their average dollar a day. One of three sweating young men repairing car engines looks up, waves and asks, "Where you from?" "USA," we say. "Ah, America!" This is good, the land of George W. Bush. He overthrew the tyrant Saddam Hussein and maybe, other Burmese have told us hopefully, Bush will invade Myanmar and overthrow its dictators, too.

The engine repairman indicates an older man squatting nearby and says, "He police." The three repairmen laugh. The older guys says, "No police, he crazy." "No, he police," the first guy says, and all four of them laugh.

Later, in another town, we are telling two Burmese men who are interested in our travels around Myanmar that we had observed long sections of the natural gas pipeline to China running above ground. This vital provider of revenues for the military regime looked dangerously exposed as it cut through villages and across rice paddies. It also appeared vulnerable to sabotage. When I say, "Somebody could bomb it," the two Burmese look at each other. Then they laugh, too.

This place is about as schizoid as a country can get. It is deeply Buddhist and fatalistic and accepting and serene, and its people are among the sweetest-natured on earth. It is also a police state, where spies are busy in every neighborhood and temple (fake monks paid by the government worked as agents provocateurs during last September's uprising), and the elected prime minister, Aung San Soo Kyi, has been under house arrest for most of the last 20 years. The economy has been so devastated by the greedy and blundering generals that most men have only two ways of surviving, as monks or soldiers. Women are even worse off. If they aren't in a position to sell produce in a market (or run a hotel or a silk mill, as was the case with two we met), they do heavy labor on the waterfront or repairing roads.

Of nearly 60 million Burmese, 600,000 are monks. Four hundred twenty thousand are in the military, the second largest army in Asia. Wandering around Yangon our first day there, we stopped by a pagoda and noted that the couple of dozen figures snoozing in the midday heat were not monks but soldiers.

Nobody who's talking knows for sure how many monks and other peaceful demonstrators were killed or hurt last September and October. The number killed was between a few and a few hundred. The two thousand or so political prisoners who are still locked up include the man who pasted up posters around Yangon showing General Than Shwe's head on the body of a dog.

A widespread hope last fall was that the military rank and file would desert the leadership. Except in isolated cases, they did not. The soldiers' livelihoods depend on their staying loyal. (Also, to go against duty and authority in Buddhism is to risk a decent fate in the next life.) While many soldiers behaved cruelly during the demonstrations, many of them suffered, too. On a Yangon street lined with high-rise apartment blocks, residents who were forbidden to feed the monks threw food down from their balconies. When they moved in to drive away the monks, the soldiers were pelted with household objects.

Burmese hold out some hope that this May's referendum will at least further expose the regime as bankrupt. People plan to go out in droves and vote no to the generals' sham constitution. The integrity of the balloting, though, is in doubt. We have been unable to confirm this, but three people told us independently that there will be no secret ballot. Government agents will go door to door and record family members' votes. (A fourth man says this is just a rumor started by the government to intimidate people into voting yes or not at all.)

China could make a real difference in Myanmar. But its morality of fossil fuels at any cost is likely to keep the regime in power for the forseeable future. China dominates the Burmese economy---and even the country's changing appearance. Its oil, gas, gem and (it is said) heroin money have led to a building boom in cities like Mandalay and Taunggyi. Joe says these new Chinese buildings look like overstuffed sofas made out of tile.

There has, however, been no trickle-down effect from this mini-boom. With the labor glut, wages are as depressed as ever. You see people all over hauling sand on their heads or tarring roads for 50 cents a day. Do these people complain? When Joe takes their picture, they look at him and smile. These generals have a good thing going for themselves in Burma; they know it and plan to hang onto it.

Another way to get a Burmese to laugh is to say you are going to visit Napyidow. This is the country's new "capital" (it has no foreign embassies) built over the last three years in a hazy broad valley a couple of hundred miles north of Yangon off the Mandalay Road. Some Burmese say this ghastly zillion-dollar folly built with Chinese money and forced labor was kept isolated by the regime to protect it against the U.S. invasion the generals are said to antcipate. Others say the generals' astrologers told them to do it. (When the late dictator Ne Win's astrologers declared in the 1970s that he must change the country's currency to notes that add up to the lucky number 9---45, 90, etc.---he immediately did so. This system was later abandoned.)

Joe and I spent a night in Napyidow, and we can confirm that it is madness on a monumental scale: eight-lane concrete expressways with barely a car in sight (other Burmese roads are rutted, colonial-era two-lane blacktop); treeless mile after treeless mile of identical concrete apartment blocks for the government employees forced to relocate from Yangon; a locked-up "ceremonial hall" that looks like a Las Vegas dreamed up not by Trump but by Orwell; office blocks even uglier than the dwellings; Florida-style shopping centers with no shoppers (Yangon shop owners were forced to rent space whether they opened a Napyidow shop or not); a "zoological park" (Are there animals in it? "Not so much," someone told us); and two "hotel zones."

We stayed at the Thingaha. The brochure at this "The Eden Group" property described it as a pinnacle of "business chic." It was. Our immense air-conditioned room, done in wood and fabric in muted old Asia colors (no Chinese acryllics here) had two beds about 15 feet apart; a flat-screen TV on an island in the middle of the room; a tile bathroom in three sections, discrete according to function; recessed lighting, including under the couch; terry-cloth robes; an ironing board. The shower handle stuck, and the power went off from time to time, but we bathed nonetheless and had brought along our own flashlights to augment those provided by The Eden Group. There were 12 other guests, we learned, all government officials. Our room rate was $140, four times what we usually pay in Southeast Asia and a third of the annual income for the average Burmese.

In a bare valley below the Thingaha were the tin-roofed mud houses of the construction workers still laboring night and day to finish the several hotels in our zone. With their nightime candles burning for illumination and their smoky cooking fires, these settlements looked like Civil War encampments in 1863. Matthew Bradey was not there to photograph them however, and Joe was not able to do it either. He had been warned by several people to keep his camera in his bag while in Napyidow.

Myanmar index

2008-03-24T22:24:00.008-04:00

Babbling seer

1 dollar: average daily wage in Myanmar.

1 dollar: average daily wage for goverment school teachers in Myanmar.

$80: monthly salary of Ko Htun Htun at a boarding school in Mandalay Division for working 24 hours a day, seven days a week as a teacher and dorm supervisor. (Htun Htun was forced to give up being a tour guide last fall when tourism collapsed in the wake of the uprising.)

$60: Amount Htun Htun sends back each month to his wife and three children a hundred miles away in Taunggyi. (There is no place for them at the boarding school. Htun Htun sleeps in the dorm with the students.)

10 cents: bus fare from the outskirts of the city to downtown Yangon before last fall's price hikes.

20 cents: bus fare after the increase.

$2.50: price for a gallon of gas last August.

Over $5.00: price in September. (Food and other costs went up more or less proportionately.)

50 cents: cost to enter Mahabandoola Garden, a "public" park in downtown Yangon. (When we visited it, about 20 people were relaxing in this three- or four-acre nicely manicured oasis.)

$50 million: estimated value of wedding gifts received by General Than Shwe's daughter a few years ago.

$3 to $5: Daily wage paid to hundreds of thugs hired by the government to beat monks and other demonstrators last September and October. (Each man hired also received a free breakfast and a club.)

Between 11 and several hundred: number of non-violent demonstrators killed by police, military or paid gangs.

4: number of times the power went off for anywhere from one to four hours in Malamyine (Moulmein) on March 11, 2008. (Rolling blackouts are a way for the government to save fuel. No one knows when they're coming, but in many areas the electricity is off about half the time.)

6 miles: distance part way up the mountain from the "base camp" at the Shrine of the Golden Rock in Kayin state, a holy site where a huge gilded boulder is balanced atop a single hair of the Buddha.

$3: Cost to ride in a truck cab up the mountain.

$1: cost to ride on plank seats in the truck bed with 50 other pilgrims. (We rode up in the cab, down on the planks.)

Unrecorded number: the serial number of the truck we rode down on. (After the smoking truck ascending barely made it to the top, our guide checked the serial number of the descending vehicle to see if was a "lucky number." It was.)

$18: cost for a white person to be carried the last, steep mile (no trucks allowed) on a palenquin by four slender, sweating brown people in the 100-degree-plus heat. (I rode, Joe walked.)

10 pm: the time on March 9 when the monk-noviate initiation ceremony at Thamanya monastery in the building next to the one where we were sleeping took a break for the night. The ceremony included powerfully amplified music on percussion instruments that repeated clonk-clonk-clonk-bonk-clonk many times.

3:55 am: the time the ceremony---and the music---resumed.

2004: the year the venerable Thamanya Hill Sayadow (abbot) Bhaddanta Vinaya died. His corpse is on display for pilgrims at a shrine near the monastery, and despite the sayadow's not having been embalmed, he "still has not spoiled."

$3: amount foreigners (but not Burmese) must pay to enter Kaw-Gon Cave, in Kayin state, where over a thousand 18th-century Buddha statues are arrayed. Pilgrims come from all over to pray here. A monk told us many foreigners complain about the fee.

$0: donation to Kaw-Gon monastery made by the Myanmar prime minister during a visit. He admonished the monks over the dirty floors.

2: number of cigarettes smoked simultaneously by a babbling seer and counselor giving Dr. Phil-style marriage and personal advice to pilgrims who queue up inside the cave and pay for this service.

$3,500: cost of roof repairs at Seindon Mibaya pagoda and monastery in Moulmein to keep this ramshackle architectural and spiritual Burmese treasure from crumbling even further. ($500 came from Aung San Soo Kye's brother in New Jersey.)

Hundreds of thousands of dollars: estimated value of wooden carvings and other pieces of the 18th-century pagoda stolen by thieves with police complicity and sold to Westerners in Bangkok antique shops.

1: number of women from Lenox, Massachusetts Joe ran into at Seindon Mibaya on March 11 while spending the day there photographing the monks' daily life. (He thinks her name was Lisa Galvin.)

1: number of times we have heard of anybody's sandals being stolen when left outside a Buddhist temple anywhere in Southeast Asia. The theft victim was a Greek-American geologist living in Bangkok who travels often to Myanmar for "research." He told us, "The government thinks I'm a spy." Is he? "No, those guys approached me in Bangkok, but they don't know anything." Good answer.

Myanmar or Burma?

2008-03-24T22:18:00.004-04:00

The regime calls it Myanmar. Opponents of the regime outside the country call it Burma, the British colonial name. (They also call Yangon Rangoon.) The local people we've met, even though they may hate the regime, say Myanma (without the R at the end) is historically correct. It's more inclusive of the many tribal groupings of the land---Bamar, Shan, Mon, Kachin, Kayin, Chin, etc. But the two names, Myanmar and Burma, are emotionally charged raised banners now, so neither is going away. I go back and forth, depending on who I am addressing.

Notes

2008-03-24T21:53:00.002-04:00

Aviation Note: When the cover popped off the emergency-door handle and the handle itself dropped with a clank on an Air Bagan flight from Bangkok to Yangon, the man seated next to the door---which luckily did not open---asked if he could sit elsewhere. There were no empty seats available, but the cabin crew located a monk who agreed to switch. We were seated nearby and noted that the monk sat looking serene, in that way that they do. He did, however, keep his seatbelt securely fastened throughout the remainder of the flight.

Law-enforcement Note: Every police station in Myanmar has a sign out front in Burmese and English that asks, "May we help you?", not, more fitttingly, "May we hit you over the head?"

Monetary Note: The day we arrived in Yangon, we exchanged U.S. dollars at a rate of about 1100 Myanmar kyats (pronounced "chats") to the dollar. Two weeks later, we received under 1000 kyats per dollar. The kyat is one of the world's pariah currencies. What does this mean?

Myanmar next

2008-03-05T23:02:00.002-05:00

Later today, we fly to Yangon (Rangoon). On our Burmese tour, we'll follow essentially the route we took last year: the Golden Rock shrine (an enormous boulder balanced on a single hair of the Buddha), two monasteries, Malamyine (Moulmein); then Bagan, Mandalay and Inle Lake. We'll have roughly the same mix of guided private tours and time to range around on our own. We'll have the same guides as before; both are people we became fond of. One is now a high-school teacher, and he agreed to come back and serve as our guide for three days. We're doing it this way partly because we want to see who and what has changed.
Our plan is for me to return to Bangkok March 25 to work more on the Strachey book, and for Joe to remain in Myanmar for up to a week longer to do some hill-tribe-area trekking. When we tried to book my MAI (Myanmar Airways International) return to Bangkok, the travel agent said I'd have to do the booking in Myanmar in a week or so for the March 25 flight. MAI doesn't plan that far ahead.
We have received conflicting information on internet in Myanmar. So we might or might not be able to blog from there. If we do it, it will be discreet, maybe to the point of pointlessness. You'll know.

Pictures of Djibouti

2008-03-05T06:52:00.006-05:00

Awaiting the runners in the Djibouti marathon

which went through the central market

Local Djibouti police

Runners in the Djibouti marathon

Enjoying their khat

One of thousands of khat booths

A sign inside the airport

A napping toothbrush seller
(the bundles are sticks people use to brush their teeth)

Pictures of Addis Ababa

2008-03-05T05:58:00.006-05:00

Dinner the first night at the home of Getachew and Kelmwa

Former students: Worku Sharew and Tadessa Beshaw, with their former teacher, Mr. Richard

Getachew and Dick with Addis in the background

A picture Getachew had of him and Dick in 1962

A farm girl at Getachews' farm outside of Addis

With some of the hands at the farm

Addis, the old and the new

Road construction workers

After dinner at the home of Worku and Abeba

Abeba roasting coffee beans (in the living room)

Worku and the girls (Misgana and Betamariam)

Mumbai pictures (a very narow slice of a very big city)

2008-03-05T05:10:00.008-05:00

The meat market

(closed the day I was there)

The porters rested in their baskets

Early Morning market

A hand operated ride

Did you ever wonder where banana chips come from?

Grinding garam marsala

Life in the streets

An alley

Garland makers

The air in Mumbai

Ten reasons we are happy to be back in Thailand

2008-03-02T03:55:00.003-05:00

1. On the way into Bangkok from the airport at six Friday morning, the taxi driver answered a call on his cell phone. His "ring" was a little kid laughing.

2. Our friend Poe Suwatchie phoned us at the Pinnacle Hotel to welcome us "back to paradise." He always says this---and then laughs, because he knows it is both not true at all and entirely true.

3. At the hotel, we had trouble making outgoing calls from our room. We notified the front desk, which placed our calls for us. Also, within minutes a cheerful guy appeared at our door carrying two screw drivers.

4. Soon after we arrived, Joe walked around the corner to use the ATM. He reported back that among the food vendors set up on the sidewalk---selling exquisitely aromatic noodle soups, dumplings, meat on skewers, spicy seafood salads---were two young woman with an espresso machine. He bought a cup and it was excellent.

5. We slept for a few hours Friday morning---after having sat zombie-like on the plane from Bombay through the night---and then called room service and ordered tom yam and tom ka gai. It was the best food we ever ate---until we went out from the hotel later and ate again.

6. The small shop down the street where we use the internet still has---along with seven or eight computers---its own seamstress.

7. Saturday morning we had an appointment to meet Henry Nyan Htun, manager of Peace House Travel, the Burmese agency that is arranging our upcoming visit to Myanmar. It took us a while to get across Bangkok, and we arrived at ten, concerned that we might have kept Henry waiting. He came in at 10:10 and said, "Ah, you're right on time."

8. The "letters" page of The Bangkok Post is as lively and free-wheeling as ever. On Thursday, deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra returned to Thailand to face charges of corruption. A letter on Saturday said, "I wonder if upon his fanfared return Mr. Thaksin took some time out between kissing the ground and getting into his limo to take a look around his great achievement, Suvarnabhumi Airport. I wonder if he noticed the poor acoustics, the meager and filthy restrooms, the stained and cracked floors, the flimsy baggage carts, the endless snaking lines waiting to clear customs...." The new airport, built by cronies of Thaksin, isn't quite that bad. And plainly this letter writer has never been to Bombay or Newark.

9. Today, Sunday, local elections are being held all over Thailand. No alcohol was served in the country yesterday and none will be served today. Also, perhaps coincidentally, a ban on smoking in most public places went into effect yesterday. We saw French and German tourists in the hotel lobby looking anxious.

10. After Africa, and especially India---a nation of Larry Craigs---it's nice to be back in a country where being gay is just fine. I'm setting a Strachey book partly in Bangkok. (We're dining on Tuesday with a gay police official who is a friend of Poe's.) The book begins:
"Mr. Strachey, do you believe in reincarnation?"
"I've never given it much thought."
"So you won't mind my telling you I think the whole idea is perfectly absurd."
"Go ahead."

Djibouti, Au Revoir

2008-02-27T01:47:00.002-05:00

Later today we set out for Bangkok, via Addis Ababa and a 19-hour layover in Bombay. We arrive in Thailand 5:30 Friday morning. Joe rates airplane journeys by the number of takeoffs and landings---the more, the better---so he's going to love this one.

Although four days instead of seven would have been enough in Djibouti, we're glad we came. We pottered around Djibouti City, where Joe got some good market and stoner shots and I soaked up local color for my alleged novel.

We never made it out of town. We wanted to see Lake Assal, which Lonely Planet recommends and the local Tourist Authority brochure calls "an extremely beautiful natural curiosity, in a setting of volcanoes and black lava 153 meters below sea level, bordering with dazzling white floes made of salt and gypsum." But the guide books and authorities don't say how to get there. The taxi drivers, we were told, are (a) swindlers and (b) stoned by early afternoon. And hiring a car and driver through a travel agent to visit the salt pit would have cost $250. Mon dieu! (The Tourist Authority brochure also says of Djibouti, "We invite you to come and discover this country unique at many regards.")

The French influence here extends beyond the language and cuisine. Yesterday we both got haircuts in the same barbershop. The Rudy-style comb-overs were administered by Indians from Gujerat. They knew we weren't French, but we still came out looking like the people who started World War I.

A Djibouti moment of Zen: lying in our room at the Ali Sabieh watching Jon Stewart on Larry King while the call to prayer reverberated across this scorched neighborhood from the mosque down the street.

Djibouti

2008-02-24T03:40:00.011-05:00

It's true that the tiny nation of Djibouti, the former French Somaliland, is sometimes considered a joke. The Ethiopians, in particular, like sitting up on their cool plateau and snickering about their eastern neighbor (and outlet to the sea), where summer temperatures routinely hit 125 degrees. These winter days, the coastal heat doesn't rise much above 90, though, and as torpid backwaters go, I've seen worse. Port Sudan comes to mind.

Djibouti will never be the Riviera of the Horn of Africa, as the local boosters would like to believe. The land and climate are just too harsh. But its strategic location has ensured a certain level of prosperity, and the easy-going Somalis, Afars and a few left-over French go along and get along, and Joe and I are enjoying our one-week visit here. (Joe wants to come back sometime and ride the decrepit train down from Ethiopia; most freight is now hauled by truck.)

We're here to research a spy thriller I plan to write about an intelligence officer at Camp Lemonier, the U.S. military "anti-terrorism" base established in 2002. The 500-acre base is run by the Navy and houses a multi-service task force of 1,500 military and civilian personnel. They gather intelligence and coordinate anti-radical-Islamist operations in East Africa and the Arabian peninsula. We could see the base, next to the airport, when our Ethiopian Airlines flight landed on Wednesday.

We have observed that few Americans ever venture off the self-contained base, and that figures in my plot. In my story, one U.S. intelligence officer, a linguist, connects with some local people, off-base, and his life gets interesting. (We've seen plenty of French Foreign Legionaires in bars and restaurants in Djibouti City---they train near here---but only a handful of Americans.)

It's a good thing that Joe speaks French. English is of limited use here, and my Somali and Afar are poor. It's the French who pretty much keep Djibouti and its 700,000 inhabitants afloat, donating over half the national budget. NATO needs a stable friend to ensure open shipping lanes on the Suez-Red Sea route. And the U.S., which pays an undisclosed amount (thought to be in the tens of millions of dollars) for leasing Camp Lemonier, is now a major underwriter, too.
(Today the request I made last week to the U.S. Embassy for an interview with the political or public affairs officer was politely turned down. I have not been accredited as a journalist with the Djibutian government, and that could take time. Yeah yeah.)

Except during the midday heat, Djibouti City has a pleasant feel to it. The "French Quarter" has a shaded central square with hotels and cafes around it. The buildings are mostly Moorish arcaded structures with louvered windows up above, many of the windows sealed since the (merciful) advent of air-conditioning. On Friday morning, the Muslim sabbath, we walked around the nearly deserted streets and looked at the fall of the sunlight on the whitewashed houses. It was quite beautiful, a kind of Saracenic-Edward Hopper scene. (Hopper:" All I ever wanted in life was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.")

Our hotel, the Ali Sabieh, is a cool and comfortable oasis ($80 a night) a few blocks from the square, with a friendly staff---the night clerk addresses us as "bro"---and a good Italian restaurant on the ground floor. Since nearly everything is imported, Djibouti is a bit expensive. The butter we spread on our morning baguette comes from Normandy. There's a Sheraton out by the city's murky beach on the Arabian Sea where rooms go for $180. We hiked out there to spot Americans and of course to arch a supercilious eyebrow. But the people baking (on astroturf!) around the hotel pool all looked and sounded French. Also, Djibouti City's one "upscale" hotel looked disconcertingly like a $39.95 Days Inn in Orlando.

Djibouti City's productivity index is not what it might be (if the French ever cut them off, these people would be in trouble), chiefly on account of "chat." Or, as it's sometimes spelled, "qat," or "khat," and pronounced with an Arabic guttural. Nearly every Djiboutian male is addicted to this mild narcotic leaf, as are a few women. Every afternoon around one, the chat plane lands from Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. Distribution is swift to hundreds of stalls throughout the city, and male Djibutians settle in for their three or four hours of "grazing" and getting stoned. They are stunningly unselfconscious about it all. Workers do it, taxi drivers do it, cops do it. Walk through the "African Quarter" of the city, and nearly every man's cheek bulges with chat as they chomp and chew and squeeze away, washing it all down with water or Coca Cola.

Many are soon glassy-eyed and then stay that way. Around the main market, by Hamoudi Mosque, men lounge on sheets of cardboard among the dust and flies, and as you pass they look up and grin and say, "Bonjour," or "Heeeyyy!" Joe says "bonjour" or "heeeyyy" back and asks if he can take a picture. Some guys say sure, some waggle a finger nuh-uh. He's got some great, appalling shots, and they will show up on the blog after we get to Bangkok February 29.

Although we always like to sample the local cuisine, we've left chat alone---partly because we've heard that the first time you try it it can give you the trots. Why invite that when inadvertence is just around the corner? Anyway, the chat phenomenon here---as well as in Eastern Ethiopia---is no endless Summer of Love. Men here spend an estimated 20 percent of their incomes on chat, and wives and children sometimes go hungry. It's a terrible social problem, yet any government that tried to do anything about it would face revolt.

Nor have we spent much time visiting what Lonely Planet rather sweetly calls Djibouti's "disheveled nightlife." For reasons of scholarship, we did make a quick Saturday-night tour of two clubs, the Golden and the Marais. My perhaps clouded recollection of after-dark dishevelment up on the plateau in the early sixties is that it was somewhat more elegant than this, more Cole Porter-like---"love that's only slightly spoiled." These Djibouti gals seem to have been coached by Donald Trump. It could be the lower altitude, or maybe we just live in a crasser time. Joe and I did not linger among the blue lights, perfumed air, disco-beat thwump, and six-dollar bottles of beer. Doing so could only have led to disappointment on multiple levels.

Ethiopia

2008-02-23T01:06:00.011-05:00

In May, 1991, Worku Sharew, a pacifist, went looking for a gun. The final battle of Addis Ababa was underway, with the unravelling forces of the Marxist lunatic Mengistu Hailemariam more crazed than ever as they dug in in an attempt to hold the city. Addis was encircled by Tigrayan, Oromo and other rebel forces. Worku told Joe and me that everyone expected "a bloodbath" as the communists went down fighting and many scores would be settled of a non-ideological nature.

Worku headed a household of 16 in his compound in the Ambo Road section, a residential neighborhood near the city's main market. In his house were his new wife Abeba (their two daughters were born later) and 14 siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews. As a free-lance guide and interpreter for the top writers and photographers who visited Ethiopia, including a National Geographic team, Worku was both chief breadwinner and repairer of bad situations---of which there had been many over the 17 years since Emperor Haile Selassie's overthrow and murder. (In Addis, people believe, perhaps correctly, that the emperor was buried under Mengistu's toilet.)

Unable to locate a gun with which to protect his family, Worku supervised the building of barricades. Everyone hunkered down for the weeklong siege. While thousands died in those horrifying days, the worst fighting bypassed Worku's neighborhood and he and his family survived. Worku's friend, the artist Worku Goshu (Worku is a common name in Ethiopia), has a painting in his gallery well-known in Addis, called "To the Light." Semi-abstract, in oil, the painting shows Ethiopian faces, eyes open, floating in darkness toward a bright center, the fall of Mengistu. (Mengistu lives in Zimbabwe now, a guest of fellow-tyrant Robert Mugabe. When Joe and I were in Harare ten years ago, we heard that the crews who haul Mengistu's garbage report that it consists mainly of empty liquor bottles.)

A few days ago, in that same house near the Ambo Road, Joe and I were Worku and Abeba's guests for a traditional Ethiopian feast. The meal included rich and pungent keye (red, spicy) wots (stews) and superb injera (sour, spongy bread to asorb the wot). The meal concluded with the ritual of the coffee: the roasting of the beans over a ceramic brazier; the passing around of the beans to take in their aroma; the grinding of the beans with a mortar and pestle; the placing of the grounds in a black ceramic pot, which was then filled with hot water; the cooking of the pot's contents over the brazier. The Addis power failed during the ritual, so we contentedly drank our coffee by candlelight.

The coffee ritual had to compete for our attention with Betamariam, 9, and Misgana, 6, who attend English-language schools. Worku and Abeba, a lovely and gently self-possessed teacher's assistant, joked that their children spoke better English than they did. Betamariam said she wasn't sure whether she wanted to attend college at Oxford or in America. Worku (a former student of mine whose American education I helped arrange in 1964) bemoans the abandonment of Ethiopian educational institutions by the country's privileged classes. However, my guess is his formidable children will follow his example and not his words.

I recalled another former student, Getachew Birhanu, as being a skinny little kid who was bright but shy, and a little sad. Now he is a portly, jolly, confident wheeler-dealer who seems to steer his Toyota with his knees and shift gears with his teeth as he plunges up and down the Addis hills, a cell phone in each hand, doing petroleum deals and planning a dairy farm. Getachew and his wife Kelmwa also over-fed Joe and me wonderfully. And they, too, recalled the bad years, when Getachew, then a TV journalist, was denounced by somebody for having a casual conversation with an American official, and he had to give up his career in order to save himself and his family.

(Worku Goshu got in hot water with a painting of the Blue Nile falls on exhibit in Germany. A Mengistu official accused him of disclosing the location and configuration of the falls to "the enemy." Worku Sharew, then the Ethiopian Tourist Organization's chief English-language editor, was instructed to tell visiting Israelis who wished to visit the Falashas, Ethiopia's ancient Jewish tribe, that he knew nothing of any such people. He disobeyed---leading the Israelis to the northern Falasha villages, the first intelligence-gathering step of Operation Moses, the mass removal of the Falashas to Israel---and then quit his job.)

Worku and Getachew took turns showing Joe and me around Addis, a city I once knew well but now barely recognize. The post-Mengistu economic expansion has been impressive, even though "these guys"---as the Tigray-dominated government is often referred to in mostly-Amhara Addis---are what Getachew called "communists in camouflage." Anyway, some Ethiopian Robert Moses has gone to work on the city---which when I arrived in 1962 was just a gigantic African village---and it's got a "ring road" and avenues and boulevards going every which way, and a skyline that looks like San Diego's. Someone insisted to us that a rich Arab was planning a 120-story office tower in the Piazza area at the top of Churchill Road. I said that was going to require an awful lot of eucalyptus scaffolding.

Joe and I stayed at the Ras Hotel, a $30 a night Mussolini-era relic. Peace Corps/Ethiopia types may think of this as carrying sentimentality too far. It's good we stayed there, though, for on our first day we walked into the bar and spotted---Peace Corps! They are back, after a ten-year absence. About 40 volunteers are spread around the country doing AIDS education and prevention work in conjunction with established NGOs. The program, as the five young men and women we met described it, sounded a bit vague and wobbly at some of the sites. But the volunteers have been on the job for under two months, and they seemed to us clever and game and, with backgrounds in public health, qualified. So they might end up being useful.

Health note: the Peace Corps Volunteers we met were in Addis on short medical leave, dealing with stomach and breathing problems. Addis is at 8,000 feet, and Joe and I both felt the effects. I'm posting this from Djibouti, at the lower end of the Red Sea. (I'm researching a spy thriller to be set here.) There are no altitude problems here in the former French Somaliland, but breathing in this heat and humidy is like breathing through a wet sock. More on Djibouti later. Joe, of course, finds it enchanting and can't wait to hurry back---despite his opinion that many of the Somalis here and all of the foreigners "look like killers." The small Djibouti section in the Lonely Planet "Africa on a Shoestring" guide refers to the train that runs between Djibouti and Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, as now being "dilapidated and unreliable." That of course piqued Joe's interest, too.

Corrections---Part Deux

2008-02-15T22:50:00.002-05:00

In the Mumbai posting, I described a rat-feeding station. Joe passed it in the daytime and reports that it is in fact a pidgeon-feeding station. But there is a shift-change at sunset, when the rats take over.

The Tata vehicle is a Nano, not Nana.

About Jehangir Patel's great-grandfather: I may have confused two statues near each other in a park. We're checking on this. His great-grandfather may not have been Mahadev Govind Ranade. It may have been Sir Jamshedjee Jejeebhoy.

In an early blog, we said we were in Varanasi. We have since discovered that we were in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Travel note

2008-02-15T11:14:00.002-05:00

Saturday night, late, we fly to Addis Ababa, then on to Djibouti on Wednesday. The Internet situation in both places is iffy. So blog readers may not hear from us for a while. We're not sure. But we arrive in Bangkok February 29, and there Internet is good. If this routing---west to Africa, then back east to Southeast Asia---seems screwy, yep, we know. But there are reasons for this that are too boring to explain. Accept that we are not exactly crazy.

Mumbai

2008-02-15T10:04:00.008-05:00

Actually, let's call it Bombay. Everyone we've spoken with here does. It's true that the Hindu fundamentalists and Marathi supremecists who officially changed the name to "pre-colonial" Mumbai in the 1990s still have enough followers to make trouble. On the day we arrived, Wednesday, small riots broke out in a few neighborhoods when the police arrested a small-bore local pol named Raj Thackeray for "promoting enmity between communities and inciting violence." At yesterday's arraignment of this anti-North-Indian-immigrant gasbag----imagine Tom Tancredo with cadres of thugs---Thackeray's own defense attorney amused spectators by repeatedly referring to "the people of Bombay." And nobody calls the spectacular Victorian gothic railway station near our hotel Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. It is Victoria Terminus, or more often just V.T.

While the city has its zealots, it's still one of the most cosmopolitan places anywhere. When Larry Brown, the ex-Peace Corps guy we met in Munnar, worked in family-planning near here in the '60s, he spoke Marathi, the main language (India has 17 major ones) of Maharashtra state. Our taxi driver the other day was Ali, a Muslim. Last night we shared a cab with Istvan Keul, a German profesor of Eastern religions, who spoke Hindi with the driver. Joe, Istvan and I were on a way to the home of Jehangir and Veera Patel for dinner. They are Parsis---Zoroastrians whose forbears fled Muslim persecution in Persia in the eighth century and eventually found a safe haven in Bombay. The lingua franca of the Patels and other educated Indians is not Hindi but English. English is part of the glue that holds multifarious India together. We hear it everywhere here in India's largest---at 18 million---and most worldly city.

Much about Bombay is not enchanting. Days are oppressively hot and humid. The city's horrendous air and traffic jams are worse then Bangkok's. As you walk around, an occasional whiff of raw sewage reminds you that you're not in Wurzburg anymore. The vast slums we passed on the way in from the airport looked as soul-crushing as any I have ever laid eyes on. Even here in stable, prosperous South Bombay, some people live on the sidewalks. Estimates put Bombay's homeless in the several millions.

Last night we saw what looked like a rat zoo. Behind a decrepit structure that resembled the old Broadway and 72nd Street IRT station, a small fenced yard had been set up apparently as a feeding station for rats, so they would not gnaw at the people sleeping on the sidewalks. A few dozen were hippity-hopping around and helping themselves to pellets that had been scattered for them.

Some of the city's homeless build lean-to's out of sheets of plastic or corrugated metal barriers they filch from roadway construction sites. When you see the squalor India's urban poor must endure, you have to wonder what conditions were like in the rural villages most of these people felt they had to abandon.

That's the harsh Bombay. The Bombay of the non-disposessed can be captivating. The old, planned British part of the city, with its tree-lined avenues, parks, museums, monuments, Victorian-era stone office blocks, high-rise apartment buildings and hotels, restaurants and art deco cinemas is a visual delight to amble around in, especially at night when the temperature drops to 75 or 80. with water on both sides of the city---the Arabian Sea to the west, the harbor on the east---there are glittering long vistas. This is the Bombay its middle and upper classes love. They come out in the evening to shop, hang out, eat samosas and ice creams by the sea wall. It feels like a Latin city then---Barcelona, Palma de Majorca, Rio, South Miami Beach. When they are not underfoot, literally, the city's desperate poor can seem far away.

Bombay is also a city rich in history and culture, and we were lucky to have a first-hand encounter with that Bombay through Veera and Jehangir Patel. We met them thanks to our good friends at home, Don and Ingrid MacGillis. Jehangir and Don were clasmates at Yale in the late '60s, and both became journalists. Don was my editor at The Berkshire Eagle for several years and is now an editorial writer and editor at The Boston Globe. Jehangir puts out a monthly magazine called Parsiana, for and about Bombay's 60,000 or so remaining Parsis. He is the editor-publisher, Veera the marketing director. "I make the money, he spends it," she says.

The magazine is an elegant, literate compendium of Parsi news and opinion. The issues Joe and I read included a piece on the Tata family, India's mightiest industrialists, who are Parsi. They have just introduced the Nana, a $2,500 family car. Charity is central to Zoroastrianism, and the Tatas have set a standard of giving not always observed by other wealthy Indian families.

Jehangir's great-grandfather, Mahadev Govind Ranade, made a fortune in shipping and other businesses in Aden before returning to India. There's a bronze statue of him in a Bombay park and a plaque praising his "services as a scholar, judge, citizen, patriot and social reformer." Veera and Jehangir live in one section of the old family mansion---relatives occupy other apartments---inside a private park, a leafy oasis in raucus central Bombay.

For all their illustrious history, the Patels are a warm and easy-going pair, and like most Parsis, modern and liberal. (Parsi liberalism, in fact, may be its undoing. More Parsis then other Indian religious groups marry outside the faith. ) The Patels' reading and other tastes are small-c catholic. Dinner conversation ranged from U.S. and Indian politics, and from Salman Rushdie to Arundhati Roy to Betty Smith. The Patels aren't so crazy about Bollywood extravaganzas, but they saw and liked both Truman Capote movies. Their daughter is in London doing post-graduate studies in English literature, plainly a source of pride and satisfaction for them.

Jehangir told a funny story about Roy, whose "The God of Small Things" paints a bleak and unforgiving picture of her Kerala hometown, Kovalam. When the book won the 1997 Booker Prize, Kovalam feted Roy. But then some residents actually read the book. (Joe and I are reading it now. Our other best reading in India has been Chitrita Banarji's meaty and flavorsome "Eating India: Exploring a Nation's Cuisine." Because of it, everywhere we went we actually knew what we were eating and why people there ate it.)

Dinner at the Patel's, prepared by their cook, was a luscious spread that included pork vindaloo, chicken curry, several tasty hot vegetable concoctions (Istvan is vegetarian), biryani rice, a vegetable salad, chapatis and some wonderful Parsi spicey chicken patties.

Jehangir generously drove us back to our hotel at 11 o'clock, discoursing in his smart and often witty way about Bombay, as it unfolded and came to life through his eyes all around us.

Yogi

2008-02-11T23:48:00.000-05:00

Ruban A., 25, is from Chennai, over on the east coast. He studied accounting but wants to make a living teaching yoga, which he loves. He is a slight, wiry man with southern Indian angular cheekbones and immense dark eyes. It is those eyes that help make Indians seem so fully "present" when you engage them. Intelligence is also part of that presence, often, and Ruban's comes out in his way of seeking harmony between traditional India---the world of Aryuvedic yoga, meditation and healing---and a modern existence that will include, he hopes, a succesful yoga center to support him and his family comfortably.

Ruban is also modern in the way he relates to his wife of four months, Maraya, who is 24. While theirs was a family-arranged marriage, in the half hour we spent with them together they seemed wonderfully fond of each other. Nor has she taken his family name, as is the old custom. They have combined their names, like the up-to-date youngsters on The New York Times weddings-and-unions page. Maraya's father is an Aryuvedic practitioner in Chennai, Ruban told us, with a "gift from God" for both healing and locating underground water. Members of Ruban's family are all Roman Catholic, which they appear to fold into traditional Indian spirituality with no apparent hitches.

Maraya teaches chemistry in Chennai. Yesterday she was visiting her new husband in his windowless rented room, a five-minute walk from Sevas. A small, genial woman in a sari of many shades of purple and blue, Maraya served Joe and me sliced "chick-oo," a fruit that seemed to be a cross between a date and an overripe plum. While Ruban hopped on his bicycle and checked on a client he was seeing later in the day, Maraya told us about the charms of Chennai (formerly Madras) and invited us for a visit the next time we're in India. Ruban's elderly landlord and landlady poked their heads in, perhaps to see who Maraya's foreign male visitors might be.

The hour-and-fifteen-minute yoga session, our first ever, took place outside on the canopied patio. Cows stood just beyond the palm-frond fencing. Chickens clucked. A grey cat sleeping on a stone opened its eyes from time to time, as the three of us lowered ourselves onto straw mats, Joe and I facing Ruban, obediently and expectantly.

We both liked it. A number of our friends at home do yoga, and now we know why. It's a way of both slowing down and stretching out. It's calming, and yet it heightens awarenes of one's physical self and its best functioning. It also heightens awareness of one's physical limitations. Joe, 49, was much more limber than I was at 69. During one exercise, Joe could wrap his legs around his head four times, just like Ruban. I could only do it once. Also, I don't think you're supposed to get winded doing yoga---not a good sign. I should have quit smoking in 1965 instead of 1985.

We liked Ruban's pleasing manner---the sing-song-y low chant (in Tamil, we think) with which he opened and closed the session, and the long, soothing OMMMMMMMMM we all crooned together.

The yoga sesion cost $13 for the two of us, a good deal. Joe photographed Ruban afterwards; when Ruban saw Joe's camera he asked him for pictures to be used in brochures and on "banners" he is planning, and Joe was happy to help.

Tomorrow we leave sweet Palolem for Mumbai. We're flying up on something called Spice Airways. I have sometimes wondered where I was supposed to place my long legs on these cramped, no-frills airlines. Now I know.

Pictures have been added to Update update (Jan) and Deep South

2008-02-10T06:47:00.000-05:00

Notes on fauna

2008-02-10T03:57:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Joe posted new photos in the Goa section. Some of them are of wandering cows. A viewer of these pictures asked, what about all the manure? In towns, a lot of it is stepped on or driven over, squashed unattractively and left in the roads and lanes. This situation is one of a number of ways in which India could use some sprucing up. However, large numbers of cow pies are collected (by lower-caste women), dried, stored and used for fuel for cooking during the summer monsoons. Also, rural people in some regions---mostly in the North---use cow manure in home construction.

The same reader asked about bugs. We sleep under mosquito netting (and take anti-malaria pills weekly), but generally the insects are not bad this time of year.

I wrote that a bird we hear sounds like the warbling whistler on the late-forties pop hit "Heartaches," by Ted Weems and his orchestra. The blog's head copy editor, Bill Ullman, tracked this down and actually listened to it. He identifies the whistler as Elmo Tanner. Now Bill knows what we hear in the jungles of South India. If you are as clever as Bill is with your PC, you can, too.

I said another "bird" sounds like a squeaky wheel. Last night, Joe heard it. He explained to me that this was someone's cell phone.

Hello to the Queen

2008-02-08T07:12:00.000-05:00

When we were checking out Sevas, our "eco-friendly habitat" on Tuesday, an Australian woman we met assured us the place was wonderfully peaceful---it has been---except for the racket made by the birds. It's true that the birdsong of southern India competes effectively with the roadway hornsong. It's loud, ongoing, sometimes pretty, sometimes not.

Crows squawk all day long. In Periyar National Park, we heard birds that sounded like percussionists in a bassa nova band, and here on the coast there's one that seems to be playing castanets. Another bird sounds like a squeaky wheel in need of grease. One of the more agreeable ones is the bird that sounds like the guy who whistled "Heartaches" with Ted Weems and his orchestra in the late 1940s. It's a pleasant warble. Joe said in Kerala he ran across a crane that snorted like a pig, though I can't confirm this independently. I can report that when I wake up in the morning in our grass hut at Sevas I sometimes hear a bird that sounds like Elaine Stritch clearing her throat.

An Elaine Stritch joke---we must still be gay! You would hardly know it otherwise. The rainbow banner does not fly over India, and we are not about to hoist it. During our houseboat trip, I overheard Joe tell a rural villager who asked him if he had a wife, "Yes, I do."
"And do you have children?"
"Yes."
"How many?"
"Three."

This was not the old shame of a bygone era. It was a small social lie to spare the villager embarrassment or perplexity, and to ease our way through a country where homosexuality is illegal---an unaltered legacy of the British---and is widely considered bizarre and off-putting. Hinduism doesn't seem to be the source of the homophobia. It's more the colonials, the Muslims and the Christians. Homosexuality is also a threat in a place where marriage and family are so central to the entire social structure.

Which is not to say that homosexuality doesn't exist here. Nature goes its merry way in India, as elsewhere. But our impression from limited reading and observation is that lesbianism is largely repressed here, while gay men marry and then sneak around. More liberal attitudes are breaking out, too, in the cities. Mumbai (Bombay) has gay organizations, even an annual Queer Film Festival. Twice we have met Indian men (in social situations where we were unable to learn more) who described themselves as "not the marrying kind." We hope to find out more when we get to Mumbai in a week or so.

India, in this regard, is in disappointing contrast to Buddhist Southeast Asia. Thai gay life is pretty open and easy. We found discreet but lively gay scenes in Cambodia and Vietnam. And even politically repressive Myanmar is tolerant and accepting of its gays. India is chugging into the 21st century economically, but has a long way to go on some basic human rights.

Here in limpid Palolem we've been hiking around---to the little town of Canacona, 3 km south, where Joe can photograph the cows hanging out with the parked motorcycles, and over to the InterContinentalHyattMarriottRegencyFiveStarGrandResort, where we strolled among the topiary, golf course (with sprinklers spraying trucked-in water), manicured lawns, and across the gleaming terrazzo lobby, and then out the back door before we were gunned down or told to return when we were wearing long pants or at least had booked a room for US $375 a night.

We are eating well in Palolem and still not vomiting at all. The best food is always Indian, though we had a superb four-cheese pizza last night at a restaurant up the beach called Magical Italy. Another beachside place called Boom Shankar had a sign outside listing Thai specialties. They turned out to be okay, although Joe pronounced them inauthentic, and recited the ingrediants that were missing: galangal root, lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves. Boom Shankar did serve a luscious dessert made of ice cream, biscuits, chocolate sauce, and a warm banana cooked in a buttery liquid. The menu called this item Hello to the Queen. We bowed gratefully and may well return for another audience.

Goa

2008-02-06T06:29:00.000-05:00

In-road cozy B&B

Who could resist ?

Waterbuffalo strolling through town

Our WC

The much inproved quarters, Sevas at $17 a night

Eating garbage

Not a bad life

Our casual and often unfair disdain for Westerners who come to turbulent, raucus and sometimes crassly materialistic India for spiritual fulfillment is being put to a test. On the south coast of Goa, we're staying at a yoga and meditation center called "Sevas---an eco-friendly habitat." There's lots of spun cotton over pale skin walking around here. But unless these people discover who we are and turn on us, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers---"Get them! They are cheeseburger people! Get the cheeseburger people!"---we plan on spending eight relaxed days in this tranquil garden spot with its cozy palapa huts that are a short walk through the palm groves from a pretty beach.

We turned up at Sevas after a first-night-in-Goa fiasco. A Lonely Planet-listed hotel we had phoned from Cochin was fully booked, and the manager recommended another up the road. But Ojas was not so much up the road as in the road. The motorcycles hurtling by several feet from our beds made for a sleepless night, as did the neighbors' dogs snarling and whining, and the night manager outside our all-too-well-ventilated room har-de-haring on his cell phone. In the morning, when we checked out after one night instead of nine, Raj, the previously cheery manager, tried and failed to extort a "deposit" fee from us. Although, we did overpay for the room---$50 instead of the $30 we thought we had agreed to---just to be able to move on. Mai pen rai, said we, Thai-style. The lovely Sevas is setting us back just $17 a night.

If it sounds as if the spoiled brats are taking a vacation from their vacation, it's true. You don't come to Goa, the former Portuguese enclave between Cochin and Mumbai, for India's cultural riches. It's largely a winter vacationland now for Europeans. Northern Goa has its rave, chug-beer and package-tour scene. Palolem, down here in the South, is uncrowded and mostly tranquil. At lunch yesterday, we sat under thatch by the sea, chatting with the Nepalis---one of them married to a Swiss woman---who run a little open air restaurant, and enjoyed the speciality of the house, yak-cheese sandwiches. The cheese was ripe and flavorsome, like a good aged Parmesan, and not at all woolly.

We flew up to Goa from Cochin on IndiGo, one of the well-run new airlines that have started up since India's economic liberalization of the early '90s. They compete with Indian Airlines, the abysmal state-owned carrier. Here's a story about Indian Airlines. (Some of you have heard it more than once.) In 1966, on a Peace Corps program-evaluation trip, I was to fly from Trivandrum up to Bangalore on the only domestic airline then operating. At the scheduled stop in Cochin, all the passengers were politely instructed to get off the plane. Inside the terminal, we milled about confusedly---and then watched as another group of passengers was led out and up the stairs onto our plane. Which then flew off. We were told to come back the next day. Some of our group of 40 or so were apoplectic. I just thought of it as a day off from work, checked into a pleasant seaside hotel, and sat on the terrace eating Kerala fish curry and smoking Rothman's as the sun sank into the Arabian Sea.

While Indian Airlines may treat people like cattle, it would never treat cattle like people. Cows really are sacred here, as are, to a lesser extent, snakes and monkeys. Cattle and water buffalo are put out each day to roam freely, even in towns and cities. Their owners locate and milk them twice a day and then fetch them home in the evening. These animals forage for vegetation in rural areas and eat garbage in towns. (Garbage is plentiful. Government garbage collectors require bribes, and apparently many people refuse to pay. The trash all over the place is ugly---and smelly, as some people burn garbage in the streets.)

About 40 percent of Indians are vegetarians, but the rest eat chicken, goat, lamb, pork and even beef. When it gained control of the federal government for a few years in the late '90s, the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party, tried unsuccessfully to ban cow slaughter. That and other theocratic and radically nationalistic policies---notably nuclear sabre-rattling with Pakistan---scared the bejesus out of most of multi-cultural, religiously diverse India, and the BJP has been on the wane since then.

Indians are used to sharing the nation's roads and lanes with cows, and by now so are we. Though as we walked to the beach yesterday, a testy water buffalo took a swipe at me, the tip of one horn grazing me as I passed. Joe said the bull may have been provoked by the red stripe on my bathing suit, and he described the incident as "Hemingway-esque." Palolem does sound something like Pamplona.

Deep South

2008-02-02T04:15:00.000-05:00

A fresh panther track on the trek. The only hint of wildlife

These elephants swam in front of our boat across the stream

Tumeric left as an offering inside Periyar National Park

The Communist party struts its stuff

The Christians strut their stuff

Cutting the tea

Dinner the first night with the Dutch and French families

My hike along the ridge overlooking the tea plantations.

Soon we are overtaken by clouds

A tea picker hikes along the road

It all (the tea plantations) looked like a Japanese garden

Cooking demonstration before dinner with Larry (blue) and

Judi (purple)

While Dick napped, these birds made quick work of his banana

It's true, what we heard. Southern India is easier than northern India. It's warm and green and fragrantly ripe. The roads are generally better and the driving a little less lunatic than in the North. The people are more easy-going. That's probably because tropical people in most places tend not to push themselves or others too hard. The region is also better governed than in the North---state governments in India have a lot of autonomy. And better schools, health services and working conditions mean that even the poor aren't living quite so close to the edge.

Delhi Airport was a tumultuous mess when we left---far worse than Newark even---but Kochi (formerly Cochin) International Airport was capacious and efficient. It was like landing in a kind of tropical Amsterdam. Nearly all Indian-government-owned and -run institutions are essentially instruments of political patronage and graft. So they work poorly, when at all. Kochi Airport's exception is explained in Edward Luce's masterly overview of today's India, "In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (Doubleday, 2007).

When V.J. Kurian, the highway chief of Kerala state, was offered a $200,000 bribe to award the construction contract for a new Kochi airport to the second-lowest bidder, he refused and was swiftly reassigned to an obscure post. (Nobody in the Indian administrative services is ever fired.) Kurian was brought back, however, when his successor botched everything and the airport atrophied into a dysfunctional ruin. Under the "eccentric" Kurian, the Kochi Airport has been well run since 1992 and even turns a profit.

One of the services Luce performs with his book, a best-seller in India, is highlighting the good efforts of Kurian and other honest politicians and public servants across the country. With its 7 percent growth rate, India may, in fact, succeed in spite of itself. A colleague of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Luce, "I think we should all be studying the history of how corrupt American politics was in the early twentieth century. It proves you can still rise to become a great power."

Long-ago history is another reason Kerala and its neighboring state to the east, Tamil Nadu, are in relatively good shape. The spice trade---manna for the deprived European palate---regularly exposed southern India to outside ideas from the late 15th century on, and there was occasional contact much earlier. Keralans were visited by Chinese, Arabs, Portuguese, French, Dutch and British trader and missionaries. Vasco da Gama died in Cochin in 1524. We peered down at his former crypt in the Fort Cochin Franciscan church (da Gama's remains were later moved to Lisbon).

Kerala has the highest literacy rate in India, 90 percent, and the most Christians. It aso has the oldest synagogue, established in 1555, and rebuilt in 1664. Only 16 Jews remain in "Jew Town." The rest have drifted away to Mumbai, Europe and Israel.

The local maharajahs were mostly tolerant, perhaps because stability increased their spice-trade wealth. They spread the riches around, too---a trend accelerated by the communist party, which was elected to run the state for a period in the 1950s and still has clout here. Kumily, where I'm posting this, may be the last town on earth with a big billboard on the main street heroically picturing Marx, Engels and Lenin. Be assured tht capitalism is under no threat in Kerala. The privately owned hotels, restaurants and shops catering to visitors to nearby Periyar National Park appear to be thriving, and revolution does not loom, just decent public services.

Our own pleasure in Kerala has been great. In Fort Cochin, a serene enclave on a peninsula by the Arabian Sea, we ambled by the waterfront and watched fishermen operate their clever cantilevered "Chinese" fishing nets, ate dosas (pancakes with spicy stuffing), enjoyed an evening of Kathakali theater (see photos), rode tuk-tuks over to Jew Town, and looked in at a nearby 16th-century palace that had a mural of a multi-limbed Krishna pleasuring six milkmaids simultaneously. Best of all, on each aromatic night we strolled along lanes sheltered by rain trees and under a big friendly moon that was sometimes buttery and other nights almost papaya-colored.

Our best look at Kerala fruits and spices came on a thee-day, two-night houseboat trip---just us and our crew of four!---through the rivers, canals and lakes that make up the Kerala "backwaters." We had a little mat-and-rattan cabin with a tiny bathroom. Mostly we stayed on deck and watched the villages, coconut palms and banana groves glide by. Men on boats made of wild jackfruit, coconut fiber and fish oil raked mussels or dredged sand to sell, pan by pan. Women on shore wshed clothes and cooked. Some spun rope out of coir---coconut fiber. Kids played and yelled "hullo!" When we yelled hello back, they laughed and hopped around.

Our cook, Sambin, was a middle-aged, good-natured man who spoke incomprehensible English with great elan. The food, prepared in a tiny galley behind the cabin, was superb. The snack on our first day out was tapioca root cooked in coconut oil with tumeric, small onion, curry leaves, mustard seed, garlic, green chilis (not native---chilis arrived in India from the Caribbean), shredded coconut and fresh ginger. Lunch consisted of three chutneys (the one with pineapple and cashews was the best), banana-flower salad, mixed-vegatable curry, grilled fish, rice and chapatis. All this was served atop a banana leaf. Sambin urged us to eat with our hands, Indian-style. We did, and looked like a couple of one-year-olds in high chairs. (more often we have eaten daintily with utensils, which are available to foreign tourists in most venues.)

The first night we tied up at Sambin's village. He and Ragesh, an earnest young electrical engineering student who was our guide, led us to the Hindu temple, where a holiday service was underway. As a loudspeaker blasted what sounded to us like a bugle, a kazoo and a set of bongo drums in fervent search for a path to God, worshippers moved from altar to altar in the open-air concrete and metal structure. They prayed to an image of Ganesh, then to Lakshmi, and then to another god whose name we didn't catch, with each image lit by many candles. Others villagers stood aside in the shadows, like us, and perhaps considered their lives, past present and future.

At noon the next day we stopped at the former spice plantation of N.M. Thaha, a retired planter and official of the Congress Party in Kerala. He greeted us carrying a young grandchild and showed us around in the genial manner that has been typical of the (non-tout) Indians we have met. We saw nutmeg, an apricot-like fruit that grows on a small tree. Clove blossoms were scattered on the ground nearby, still green. Sprigs of black pepper grew on vines climbing up another tree. A tamarind tree was heavy with pods. We peeled some bark---the flavorsome part---off a cinnamon tree. We picked a bay leaf. Mr. Thaha also showed us jackfruit, bananas, teak and rosewood. It was a culinary-cultural-economic history of Kerala in one acre.

Up in Munnar, in the Western Ghats, we spent three days on a cardamom plantation. The Olive Brook Guest House served excellent food---some of the best we've had---and a cooking demonstration preceded dinner each night. Joe asked the young chef which cookbooks he used, and he seemed puzzled. He said he had about 200 recipes of Kerala dishes---all in his head.

In Munnar, we visited a tea museum and hiked around the hills above the town. Joe went on a guided trek and watched the tea-leaf collectors in the valley far below flee when an alarm went up. Wild elephants were reported to be on the rampage, though they never materialized. (We're now near Periyar National Park. Joe is off on an all-day trek. Yesterday, riding a tour boat on Periyar Lake, we watched six elephants swim across the lake in front of us. Thrilling.)

Part of the fun of Munnar was meeting Larry Brown and Judi Garfinkel, who were also staying at Olive Brook. They lived near Boston for many years and now have a farm in northern New Hampshire. As soon as I spotted them, I thought Peace Corps. He was---India, 1966-68---and she was honorary Peace Corps, like Joe. He was also assistant director of the Peace Corps in the late '70s, under Carter, and has worked for Oxfam and taught at the Harvard School of Public Health. Judi has done fabric marketing for Chinese woman and PR for a variety of good causes.

With Judi, Larry had gone back to visit his village in Maharashtra for the first time in 40 years. Back then he worked in family planning, and he joked that "apparently it didn't work." Larry was pleased that some villagers remembered him. Last week, he said, "Word spread all around---the guy who wiped his ass with paper is back!"

That's a great Peace Corps story. My son Zack likes to refer to "Dad's twelve stories." Now there's another one.

Update update, slow boat pictures

2008-01-29T07:09:00.000-05:00

Our boat arrives

Repairing the boat. Notice how the boards are sewn together and the seams are packed with fiber caulking that expands when wet. The whole thing is then sealed with fish oil, which darkens the wood in time.

At the entrance to the hospital

Men paddle by

Our chef proudly puts out the first lunch

Various pickles with the meat of water buffalo, served with papadams

A light snack of tapioca root and spiced beef

The toddy collector

His tools. The handle (barely visible) used for cutting the palm to release the sap. The bone is to beat the stalk to encourage the flow (I think) . The vessel is for collecting the liquid that has collected overnight in another container

At the river's edge de-licing

Making twine from coir (coconut fiber)

Sails made from feed sacks

Sunrise from the boat

A late afternoon paddle

The slow boat was splendid. It moved through the canals, lakes and rivers at about the same speed as this Internet connection. We're at a cardomom plantation, 4,500 feet up in the Western Ghats straddling Kerala and Tamil Nadu. We look out on tea plantations and flowering trees lusher than all the flowering vegetation in the entire history of time. We'll get a report onto the blog when the Internet situation improves, in a few days maybe. We're learning Malayalam at the same rate we learned Hindi, but otherwise we're lapping everything up.

Cochin

2008-01-25T23:49:00.001-05:00

Small catches are auctioned as they are caught

Chinese fishing nets tip in and out of the water,

operated by four people

Kathakali

2008-01-25T23:11:00.000-05:00

This traditional Kerala theater---literally "story play"---dramatizes the Hindu epics of good battling evil through drumming, chanting, singing and a highly stylized form of acting. Kathakali goes back at least to the 16th century.

With other tourists, we arrved an hour and a half before the performance to watch the actors sit on the stage and apply their fantastical make-up, created out of coconut oil and local minerals. Then the emcee/singer explained the hand and eye movements as one actor demonstrated them. The one-hour play we saw was about an arrogant archer whose ego makes him treat others badly. The god Krishna disguises himself as a demon---the one with the black face and sprouting nose in Joe's pictures---and defeats the egotist in battle. Then he reveals his true identity, and the impudent archer is chastened.

With the drums, the chanting, the make-up and costumes, the incense, the oil lamps, and the subtlety and grace of the acting, it's yet another example of Indian sensory overload. In this case, it is enchanting.

Update

2008-01-25T23:08:00.000-05:00

New photos are up of Rajasthan and Agra and Getting Around.
Today we head for the backwaters and then the hills of Kerala. So we may be out of touch for several days.

Pictures from Rajasthan

2008-01-25T01:41:00.000-05:00

In their own worlds

Following a wedding procession in Jaipur.

The groom is on the horse with the generator in tow.

Porters resting at the train station in Jaipur

The layers

Our reflection in a large silver urn at the Pallace in Jaipur.

Bamboo scaffolding on the 6th floor.

Street life.

Go Nike

At the amber fort this 17c mosque was on four sides this
beautiful carved marble screen.

Tropical

2008-01-24T05:23:00.000-05:00

Tuesday we flew IndiGo Airlines---cramped, fast, cheap---down to Kochi (Cochin) on the Malabar coast and will have a report soon on this delectable spot near the southern tip of India. Saturday we leave Fort Cochin for two days on a slow boat through the Kerala "backwaters." Joe is trying to get more pix up before we leave Cochin. He's got some beauties.

Delhi

2008-01-24T04:27:00.000-05:00

Delhi is where we got our best look at modern India. That's the India of about 200 million people whose incomes and educational levels place them in the middle class or above. India's other billion or so people still live in poverty, many in isolated rural villages where life has not changed for 2000 years. It's the India Mahatma Gandhi believed to be pure and sacred, and where he spent his days at a spinning wheel when he wasn't busy throwing out the British.

It was unnerving to read that an emerging problem in India is obesity. A lot of the new high-tech jobs are sedantary, and the 200 million eat well. In the Connaught Circle area of central Delhi, where we stayed in another good-enough hotel, the streets are alive at night with shoppers and diners at the almost uniformly excellent restaurants. The garb is mostly Western. We witnessed a mob scene at the Benetton store, which was having a winter sale. (Delhi is chilly this time of year, 60s daytime, 40s at night.)

The best thing we did in Delhi was have lunch with Bela Singh. She's the India director of Cross Cultural Solutions. CCS is an admirable American organization that sends curious and adaptable tourists to countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to do low-level volunteer work for three weeks. These travelers enjoy a cultural immersion denied tourists who just do the Varanasi-Agra-Jaipur circuit (like us). The volunteers pay $2,800 each, plus airfare, a deal. My daughter Sydney was a CCS volunteer in India before working at the organization's headquarters for several years in New Rochelle, and later Hedy, her mom, did CCS/India, too. Both are big boosters of CCS, and when we met Bela we saw why.

An attractive 40-something psychologist, Bela is a modern Indian woman who loves traditional India. Her husband and son live in New Jersey. They visit one another, but she chooses to live in the India she finds deeply, endlessly fascinating. She likes Indians' comfort with their own karma and believes people here are essentially more contented than in many places. She has no illusions about India's harsher realities. It was Bela, in fact, who told us not to give money to beggars in Delhi---they are members of criminal gangs! She knows the ropes, and as we grilled her somewhat relentlessly she laughed and said she was giving us a lot of her standard cultural orientation pitch. Not only were we freeloaders---no $2,800 fee for us---but Bela paid for lunch. We hope to return her hospitality when Bela and her husband travel in the U.S. in August.

Talking with Bela, and by just keeping our eyes open in Delhi, we began to get a better feel for Hinduism. Its idea of many gods is strange to us. One really elusive one seems like plenty. Though as we saw people praying to different gods in a variety of settings---temples, street shrines, the stairwell in our hotel---a kind of prayer-answering division of labor began to make sense.

As we came down for breakfast one morning, the doorman in our hotel, the Jukaso Inn, was chanting and offering garlands of jasmine to a small statue of Ganesh. I don't know what the doorman was praying for, but this elephant-headed figure is the god of good fortune. He is also the patron of scribes---I had a picture of a smiling Ganesh, elephant-tusk pen in hand, over my computer last year when I wrote Death Vows (MLR Press, September 2008) in three and a half months. Go figure.

Hinduism is comfortable with ambiguity, even contradiction. Its multiplicity of deities reflects the complexity of lfe as people actually experience it. These gods make sense as connecters between the multifarious lived-in world and an equally varigated spirit world. As with Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism, behaving decently is what Hindus are supposed to try to do, and for which they will be rewarded later on. Dharma is the righteous pattern of conduct that will lead a Hindu to good karma. But in Hinduism there is no single revealed truth, deviating from which might lead to some zealot shoving a stone wall over on you.

Another nice feature of Delhi was this: we insinuated our way (i.e., walked) into the Imperial Hotel, a five-star neo-Raj gem we could not afford to stay in, and used their business center to upload photos onto the blog. The staff were sweet as could be, even after they asked for our room number. Then we went downstairs and paid New York prices for a tandoori mixed grill (we'd been eating mostly veggie and liking it) that was probably one of the ten tastiest meals either of us has ever eaten. Fitting right in with the 200 million, we're not so svelte ourselves these days.

Pix

2008-01-21T00:57:00.000-05:00

Pics are now up of Bhadohi and Varanasi in those sections of the blog. We're in Delhi and tomorrow fly south to tropical Kerala.

Getting around

2008-01-20T23:27:00.000-05:00

Lal and Dick strategize about finding our way into the center of Delhi

My cyclo driver in Jaipur treats me to his favorite samosa

Passing the endless mustard fields

We flew to India---Boston-Newark-Delhi---on Continental Airlines, which was good preparation for getting around Jaipur by cyclo-rickshaw. There's no need to dwell on the dismal state of U.S. airline service---you know the drill. But I will say that Newark Airport's changing its name after 9/11 to Newark Liberty International Airport---a big knuckle sandwich for Osama bin Laden!---could also be interpreted to mean, "If you don't like it here, you're free to leave at any time." Unless, of course, you're already strapped into an aircraft inert on the tarmac. "Folks, we're number 20 in the queue, so I suggest you sit back, relax...."

The overnight train trip to Bhadohi was both more scenic and more comfortable than traveling on Continental, and the railway's rice biriyani far superior to the airline glop. But the Varanasi-Khajuraho-Agra-Jaipur-Delhi sojourn was too complex to do by train and too expensive to do by air. So we hired a car and driver. (It was $90 a day, breaking the bank. Though our other expenses have been a bit lower than anticipated: good-enough hotels outside Delhi for $25-$40; superb meals from $5 on down to 25 cents. We'll have a hotel and food report one of these days.)

Salil, the owner of Tiwari Tours and Travel in Varanasi, arranged for our car. This agency is up a narrow flight of stairs next to a cheap hotel above Assi Ghat. You leave your shoes in the corridor and sit cross-legged on a cream-colored mat. While we waited for Salil, we eavesdropped on a German tour-group leader explaining to Salil's brother that she needed six adjoining bulkhead seats on a Lufthansa flight.
"Six? Oh, my God!"
"Yes, yes, these people must sit together comfortably! Can you do eet?"
"But what if those seats are taken?"
"Then I weel have to speak to Lufthansa!"
"Oh, my God!"

The brother gets on the horn to Lufthansa and is promptly put on hold. We can hear the perky on-hold ditties from where we are sitting. Indians love to deal with people but not machines posing as people, and Salil's brother is being driven up the wall. "Always, always, it is like this! It hurts me in here! It hurts my mentality!"

Meanwhile, the chai wallah arrives---milky, sweet tea is always served, a lovely ritual---and then Salil himself. He is a trim, bespectacled man in crisp slacks and diamond rings on two fingers. His melancholy is evident right away; he sniffs at the six-bulkhead-seats ongoing drama. As he explains convincingly that a car and driver are best for us and then makes some calls, Salil tells us that he is from bucolic Sikkim and hates Varanasi. He works all the time because if he ever left the office his employees would screw up and they would steal from him. There's a brief moment of relief when Lufthansa comes up with the six bulkhead seats. Everyone is astonished except the German tour leader, who shouts, "I knew you could do eet!"

Salil has a driver he wants us to meet who is now on the way. We ask him how much to tip the driver at the end of the trip. "Whatever you like," he tells us, and then adds, looking glum, "And what do you have for me?"
"What would you like?" I ask.
Gazing off into the middle distance, Salil murmurs, "Do you have love?"
We are puzzled by this and let it go.

We pay by MasterCard, and two days later the driver appears at our hotel (the dump above Salil's) on schedule at 7 a.m. Salil himself is there to see us off in our little Tata sedan. The driver, Lal, is a gap-toothed, cheerfully wily little man with mustard oil in his hair. His English is serviceable, and his driving turns out to be aggressive in the Indian manner but only borderline suicidal. Over eight days, he takes us where we want to go, getting badly lost only once in turbulent Gwalior, and faltering only when we end the trip in Delhi and we learn that Lal is terrified of the corrupt local cops who extort money from commerical drivers.

Along the way, we see the aftermath of some road accidents---several trucks overturned; a Tata like ours that has rolled over so many times it has assumed roughly the size, shape and overall design of a soccer ball. India's roads are mostly dreadful. A network of expressways is being built. But the ones we saw were chockablock with bicycles, pedestrians, sacred cows, herds of goats, and bullock and camel carts. We rented cars and drove ourselves in Zimbabwe and Turkey but wouldn't dream of doing it here.

The road trip with Lal (we're back in Delhi) was the way to go. We had good food at roadside joints---the tastiest aloo chat we ever ate, for under a buck, and delectable samosas. (Bottled water is available everywhere, so safe hydration in not a problem.) The countryside was green with wheat fields under hazy blue skies, and there were miles and miles of mustard fields with their buttercup-yellow flowers. (Mustard oild here is used both for cooking and as a body and hair lotion.) The roads were lined and the fields dotted with eucalyptus, locust and mango trees. We chatted with friendly locals at tea shops. In one village, two farm kids snapped the lids off baskets they were toting and up popped two cobras. Parked by the roadside for some picture-taking, we watched as a naked sadu (holy man) strolled by with his retainer. The aide told Lal he had no cell-phone reception and asked Lal if he could use his, but the sadu sniffed at us, fittingly, and instructed his companion to get moving.

Another good form of transport we've used in towns and cities is cyclo-rickshaws. We did this a lot in Jaiur. That's the capital of Rajasthan, the rocky western state that was ruled by 22 maharajahs until Indira Gandhi shut off their power and their allowances in the 1970s. There's plenty to see in Jaipur: the "pink city" old section of town; turbaned farmers and craftspeole gotten up handsomely in more shades of orange than we could count; camels and elephants traipsing around the city; Arabesque sandstone and marble palaces and forts. Our hotel, the Madhuban, was part of an exquisitely restored princely mansion. It was only $37 a night but still qualified as "our first grown-up hotel," as Joe put it.

In Jaipur, Joe befriended a cyclo driver named Granpat. This skinny guy in a red headband had followed us up the street one day while we were exploring the city on foot. When we grew tired, he was there. He knew. Joe then hired him for some photography excursions. He sent five days in his village, he said, and five in Jaipur. We think he slept in his cyclo. At the end, as Joe tipped Granpat about 700 percent, his face was wet with tears. I photographed Joe and Granpat together, and a well-dressed Indian man walked over and berated us for being seen with a rickshaw driver. Joe explained, "He is my friend." That wasn't true---Joe is not delusional---but it put this pompous buttinsky in his place.

(The most obnoxious Indians we have observed are the very poor and the very rich. Some of the beggars and street kids are ferocious. But the rich snapping and snarling at the lower orders are the worst. During lunch in a tourist-trap restaurant at the Rajput fort at Orccha, we watched a Hogarthian Indian family make the waitstaff jump through flaming hoops. The patriarch used his tongue like a circus trainer's whip. Fittingly, this was at a place called the Hotel Sheesh.)

Near Jaipur is the 16th century Rajasthani capital of Amber, a pink marble and sandstone fort and palace atop a bare mountain. You can hike up or ride in a Jeep, but we chose to climb the half-mile steep slope on elephants. This is one of those tourist experiences often rightly described as "unforgettable," but it is also vaguely unpleasant. The elephants are dolled up in paint and bright satin. A Friend of the Elephants organization looks after their welfare, but elephants in captivity always seem listless and unfortunate.

The mahout sat on the elephant's head, and we were perched on the howdah (seat), Joe's legs dangling down one side, mine the other side, for balance. Off to the left was a stone wall high enough to keep elephants from plunging down the mountainside to the rocks below, but not high enough to contain any rider an elephant might suddenly decide to flip into oblivion. About halfway up, Joe said, unhelpfully, "Oh, look. I see a pile of broken tourists down there."

Agra

2008-01-20T01:25:00.000-05:00

The throngs

From the Red Fort, trrough the everpresent haze

The people were equally dazzling

Agra is tout hell, which in India is saying something. But it's worth fighting your way through the competing camel-cart jockeys and braying doo-dad hucksters to lay eyes on the Taj Mahal. No photo does it justice. I saw it in 1966 and amazed myself by being moved nearly to tears. It was the same this time. You approach it through a maze of outbuildings with heavy security. Then it just floats into view. It looks small, almost like a model, until you realize those many specks at its base are people. The Taj may be the most perfectly conceived structure ever built. I was interested to read that Shah Jahan himself supervised the design and construction, as a memorial to his favorite wife.

How can mere form be so thrilling? Joe has said being an artist is futile in the end because you can't compete with nature. Shah Jahan proved otherwise, setting a wonderful example for Joe and other artists who help make the rest of us want to wake up in the morning and open our eyes.

Khajuraho

2008-01-20T01:14:00.000-05:00

10th century temple at Khajuraho

Nobody knows why artists of the Chandela dynasty carved erotic scenes on Hindu temples. But this went on for roughly a hundred years in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Some scholars think this Kama Sutra in stone is a kind of marriage manual for Brahmin boys. Though the numbers of people involved in some scenes suggests activities beyond marriage. Others think the sculptures are Tantric---cultists who believed that physical as well as spiritual gratification led to Nirvana. The Indians we met just seem to think these lovingly wrought sensual images are kind of cool. As our guide said, people "just come and see and do like that."

At night there's a sound and light show, done in Hindi and then English, that's pretty bad. You sit on plastic chairs in an open field and freeze while trying to decipher whether the flickerings and flashes around you are planned or just another feature of northern India's erratic electrical supply. It's not so romantic.

Update

2008-01-18T07:15:00.000-05:00

We've been to Khadjuraho and Agra, and now we're in Jaipur and head back to Delhi tomorrow. We'll update the blog and try to get some pictures up from there.
Meanwhile, I'll just quote from a note Joe sent his parents. He told them India is "like a big tassle of humanity waving out of control in a vigorous wind."
That's it.

City of Life

2008-01-18T06:39:00.000-05:00

Dusk in Varanasi

Praying, bathing and washing

Garland vendors

The water bufalo cool off

Smoke from the funeral pyres at one of the burning ghats

a holy man

Drying a sari

Setting their candles adrift

Sweeping the steps of a ghat

Pilgrims arrive

In an alley

Varanasi, Joe said, is where you go to have your life flash before you. Other people's, too. Hindus believe that by having your remains placed in the purifying waters of the holy Ganges you might achieve moksha, breaking the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Two of the stone ghats (steps) that line the Ganges for seven kilometers are "burning ghats." Families bring shrouded corpses, which are placed by funerary workers in wood piles, doused with ghee, and the eldest son lights the pyre. Untouchables carry the ashes to the water's edge. The ashes are sifted for jewelery, which is salvaged to help pay for the cremations of the poor. Unincinerated bits of bodies are set adrift in the river, too---food for the fish that contributes to the cycle of life.

From a respectful distance, Joe and I sat on a wall and watched a funeral. The setting is like nothing you've ever seen: the crumbling 18th-century palaces that line the river; the crowds of mourners; the rising smoke and flames; the sizzle and pop. It's Dante, except fo Hindus this is heaven. It's like the City on Fire sequence in Sweeney Todd (dropped from the movie, I've read). It's like some odd end-of-days ritual being enacted around the slag heaps in Nanticoke, PA. Included in this sober, unhurried scene, too, are the thousands of pilgrims who come each day from across India---the variety of colorful costumes is dazzling---to have their souls cleansed by Mother Ganges. Tens of thousands of local people also bathe in the river, adroitly cleansing themselves while maintaining a modest covering. They also brush their teeth in the river using medicinal sticks.

Oh, did I mention that 45,000 whole human corpses are also dumped into the Ganges each year at Varanasi? Plus cows? And tons of raw sewage? The miracle is that anybody in the vicinity is still standing at the end of the month. But they are, somehow. A foundation is working on ways to improve Varanasi's public-health situation.

The best way to view Varanasi is from out on the river in a rowboat at sunrise. A quiet-spoken young boatman named Babu swindled us, we later learned, overcharging us by a factor of four. We had learned to haggle with the aggressive entrepeneurs but not the nice, polite ones.

In the darkness, the river downstream seems to be aswarm with fireflies. As you get closer, you see hundreds of lighted candles, each representing a pilgrim's prayer, afloat in tiny leaf boats. A kid in a reed boat drifted by and we bought and lit two candles and set them afloat. The first light in the sky is dim and grey in the haze but soon turns platinum and rose. Joe said, "Ingres." The sun appears suddenly out of the mist and within minutes acts like it means business. We started out in sweaters and windbreakers and were soon down to T-shirts.

Indians who go to Varanasi say it changes their lives. This reminds me of a friend, now gone, sadly, who used to say that every time he saw a Chekhov play it changed his life. Execpt, his life never changed. And that was so Chekhovian. I think Varanasi is something like that.

Rug sellers

2008-01-17T05:31:00.000-05:00

Village elder in Modh

Patern behind actual carpet

We were a distinct curiosity

Cyclist with wool

Arriving on the train platform in Bhadohi

Indigo wool drying

School visit in Bhadohi

Silver gilt meat in storefront

Aslam and Dick enjoy some sugarcane with villagers looking on

The Ansaris have been in the rug business for 40 years, and for many generations before that they were weavers. While the family once lived on the margins in the town of Bhadohi, on the Gangetic plain of eastern Uttar Pradesh, now they are prosperous enough to be building a third gudam. That's the Hindi word for house, but it can signify much more. The current Ansari gudam is a sprawling three-story concrete structure with three generations of extended family living on the upper floors. Below is the binding and finishing operation for the rugs woven on hand looms in 20 villages spread throughout U.P. Wool is dyed out back in a cement cauldron over a wood fire. Dry petals from the dye-plant flowers flutter among the workers. There's a guest room on the first floor of the gudam next to a small garden. We slept there for two nights, cozy under wool blankets in a bed the size of Rajasthan.

The Ansaris are Muslim, as are most people in Bhadohi, and perhaps for this reason we were not introduced to any female members of the family, except for one of Aslam's daughters on the day we left. And that was just "hello." During our stay, however, we sometimes spotted both boys and girls quietly watching us from the roof garden far above.

The men of the family were open and friendly, especially Aslam. He is a good friend of Jeff Arcari, the Boston rug dealer who sponsored our visit to Bhadohi via the WBUR raffle won by Bob and Barbara Wheaton. Although busy with the everyday operations of the business, Aslam saw to it that younger family members took turns showing us around.

One of Aslam's nephew's, a well-spoken university student who told us happily that he had "no bad habits," showed us some local weaving operations, as well as the original Ansari gudam, built by Aslam's father. The building is now a primary school the family founded and funds. Another school is under construction nearby, this one sponsored by "Mr. Chris," another Boston rug dealer. A second nephew we met, a twenty-something handsome lad with an easy laugh, is getting married in late February---we were invited to the wedding but will have left India by then---and he was so excited he could barely keep his head on straight. He said his bride was a young woman he knew and liked. Several young Indian men we met spoke favorably of arranged marriages, the norm here, and disdained Western marriage customs that result in high divorce rates. Indian women may agree, although we have not met any whose opinions we might ask.

Another nephew, Shadab Ansari, met us in Delhi on our arrival and accompanied us on a day-long guided bus tour of the city---Parliament, India Gate, the Indira Gandhi Museum (with blood-spattered assassination sari), several temples and the Mahatma Gandhi tomb. The tour was conducted entirely in Hindi, but we liked being among Indian tourists in from the hinterlands as they looked over their cultural heritage with satisfaction.

The best part of our visit to Bhadohi was when Aslam drove us out one afternoon to the village of Modh. It's about 7 kilometers out of town amid healthy-looking rice and wheat fields. About 60 families live in Modh in mud houses with home-baked tile roofs. There's a village well and a common diesel pump for irrigating the surrounding rice paddies and vegetable plots. Each house in Modh contains a large hand-built hand loom, on which a gorgeous rug with a Persian design is being woven by a family member. Each family produces a rug a year, on average. The prices are negotiated by elected village leaders---democracy functions in India at all levels---and the rugs are the primary source of cash in the village. The rugs then end up in stores like Landry and Arcari in Boston, and on well-appointed floors from Beacon Hill to Concord.

Our arrival in Modh was an occasion, and the rituals of Indian hospitality were played out gracefully. Aslam was plainly not just respected but liked. He had a nice way with both the village leaders and the weavers and farmers. And because he had brought us to Modh we were treated warmly. After the tour of rugs-in-progress, we sat on charpoys and gnawed on fresh sugar cane as the villagers gathered and Joe took lots of pictures. We got a tour of the banana grove and saw bananas so new out of the flower they were the size of fingernails. Snacks appeared one by one: spicy fried potatoes, freshly fried potato chips, candied fruit, and the inevitable sweet chai.

Aslam and the village leaders talked business and some politics. The government was upbraided for providing electricity to Modh for only a few hours a day even as an enormous privately-owned cell-phone tower rose nearby. Aslam told us later that the villagers received poor educational and health services from the government. Their entire world was their village and what they made of it themselves. He said they knew nothing of the larger world and were barely aware of a place called India. It looked to us though that they valued Aslam and what he represented. And they valued their own artistry and industry, which put beautiful rugs on floors in places the people of Modh could not begin to imagine.

Errata

2008-01-13T07:06:00.000-05:00

We'll be back in Delhi January 19, not 29.

From Khadjuraho---January 13

2008-01-13T07:01:00.000-05:00

We’re on a narrow street in the town of Bhadohi, 350 miles east of New Delhi. We’re stuffed into the back seat of a tiny Mazda Maduri, alongside a member of the Ascari family, our hosts for the WBUR/Landry and Arcari-sponsored early days of our trip. Driving as fast as the law of physics allows is Aslam Ascari, one of three partners in the family rug-producing business. Joe, in the middle of the back seat, has a dead-on view out the windshield at the scene hurtling by: pedestrians by the dozens, rickshaws, bikes, scooters, rattletrap buses, clouds of dust, wandering cows, tractors tugging carts piled high with bundles of died wool---maroon, deep blue, blue-black, mustard-colored. As we lurch this way and that, crashing over the potholes, horn blaring, Joe says to me, “Look at that! I always knew India was for me.”
He meant in part that he is a glutton for overstimulation---nobody with ADD will ever be disappointed in India. He also meant that for anybody who gets up in the morning dying to find out what the great unfolding saga of the human race has to offer next, India is sure to provide surprises, texture, narrative tension, meaning. And it just keeps coming at you. You spend the entire day---and in your dreams on top of that---considering, puzzling, gawking, coping, ducking. I have rarely seen Joe happier.
The other day we fell into the clutches of a holy man. We were in Varanasi---formerly Banaras, originally Kashi, the Hindu “City of Life”---and as we meandered through the byways behind the decaying palaces that line the Ganges, we stuck our noses into a Hindu temple. “Come, come!” cried a small man with betal-stained teeth and a grey stubble of beard. We knew we were in for it; nearly everything that happens to tourists in Varanasi is part of a hustle. But we needed guidance---including what to do with the garland of marigolds a kid sold us on the way in---and there was always the chance that this little man in his threadbare tunic and Nehru hat was more interested in our spiritual lives than our wallets. (Today, outside a temple in Khadjuraho, a man engaged us in casual conversation, wished us happy travels, and then left us. We felt wonderful.)
The temple the small man in Varanasi led us into was a mess. It smelled and the lights didn’t work. We were led from dank stone alcove to dank stone alcove. The man discoursed in an incomprehensible mix of Hindi and English on the images of Shiva we could barely make out in the barred and padlocked recesses. Shiva, the deity with a snake around his neck, is the Hindu god of death and rebirth and is said to have resided in Varanasi. Soon we came to an altar where we were directed to place our necklace atop others and pray to Shiva. We struck meditative poses. Indian men and women, walked in, offered brief prayers and left. In another alcove we were instructed to place our open palms above the flowers on the altar and repeat after the holy man a prayer to Shiva. As we cast our eyes downward, our mentor shut his eyes and began to utter short phrases in Hindi with the rhythms of an incantation. After each phrase, he waited while we mimicked his words. This went on a good deal longer than expected. Joe did not look at me, but I glanced at him once. I saw him staring hard at the altar and sounds were coming out of his mouth. After a while, I coughed. The praying went on---Joe didn’t miss a beat, and his pronunciation seemed to me good---and I picked up where I had left off.
Joe and I are as spiritual as the average cheeseburger. (I once said this to a friend who is in frequent touch with other realms, and she replied, “But a cheeseburger can be VERY spiritual.”) A New York Times science piece last year reported that a researcher had found a “spiritual” center of the human brain---except some people don’t have one. That’s us. In Southeast Asia last year, we developed a warm and respectful feeling for Buddhism, even though we do not share its central beliefs, such as reincarnation. The same may happen with us and Hinduism, though not yet.
Jawaharlal Nehru believed most of India’s 9 million or so wandering ascetics---you see them everywhere in Varanasi, bug-eyed and bearded, in cotton outfits in many shades of orange---were crackpots and scam artists. For all we knew, the little man in the temple may have been sincere in his effort to connect Joe and me with the life-giving spirit of Shiva. Either way, when his praying wound down, he did ask for a donation. When proffered one, he requested a larger amount. On the way out, he asked for a personal donation, which we politely declined to cough up. He also asked me for my ballpoint pen---one of the Paper-Mate cheap jobs I carry everywhere---and when I handed it over, the man asked, wasn’t there a cap that went with it?
For other Westerners, the spiritual pull of India remains great. We see them, in groups or individually, gotten up in the loose cotton traditional local garb, with dabs of paint on their foreheads. It’s not for me to deny or presume to begin to fathom anybody else’s spiritual quests, but there’s something not quite convincing about all this. At least superficially, it’s as if thousands of Indians showed up in Lancaster County, PA and went around dressed up like the Amish. (Yesterday when Joe gave a coin to a beggar, someone rushed up to him and dabbed and orange slash on his forehead. He looked as if he’d just had a run-in with Jesse James.)
If we haven’t gotten with the spiritual program, our connection with secular India has been thoroughgoing. The practical difficulties are considerable---a Swedish backpacker we met on a bus tour of Delhi the day after we arrived in India told us he had given up exploring Delhi’s sights on his own; it was just too time-consuming. The whole place just barely functions. For a nuclear power, India’s infrastructure is surprisingly reminiscent of Cambodia’s. Even our “first class AC sleeper” for the 16-hour rail journey from Delhi to Bhadohi, with its three-tiered open compartments, left us feeling less like passengers and more like cartons of toilet paper racked up at Costco. (Anybody remember the 1940s novelty tune “His Feet’s Too Big for de Bed”?)
And yet…. The people, by and large, are polite and often warmly hospitable. We’ll try to get a blog posting up soon on our amazing three days with the Ascaris, a fascinating family who treated us splendidly. (For a variety of practical reasons, we are now off on our own.) Varanasi was unforgettable. It’s where Hindus wish to die, if they can, cremated on the “burning ghats” along the purifying Ganges. We witnessed this ritual. We’ll try to report on both the Ascaris and Varanasi soon. We’ll also report on the erotic temple sculptures here in Khadjuraho. As our cheerful guide put it this morning, “People see it and then they go and do like that.”
Tomorrow we head to Agra and the Taj Mahal, then to Jaipur, the “pink city.” We’ll be back in Delhi for several days January 29 and will try to get some of Joe’s amazing pictures onto the blog.
We get bits of news from the U.S. After New Hampshire, The Times of India said Hillary was “gasping for breath.” Yesterday, India TV news reported that Bush had “invaded Pakistan.” We’ll have to ask around about that.

Resurfaced

2008-01-12T23:29:00.000-05:00

We only SEEM to have vanished. To you. Not to us.
Apparently this swaggering nuclear power has all kinds of filters on its Internet services, and we have only just now been able to access our own blog. All's well. We are ourselves. India is India.
We're in Khadjuroha and about to set off to peruse the erotic temple sculptures. Later today we'll try to post a wordy blog about our amazing trip. For now, I'll just quote Joe. When I reminded him that lots of people had said to us that traveling in India could take a lot out of you, he said, "Oh no, I disdagree with that. I could stay here forever!"
More soon.
The Poshmos

Test

2008-01-02T22:23:00.000-05:00

This is Dick with a test posting the night before we leave for India.

Welcome to Joe & Dick's 2008 Travel Blog

2007-12-30T09:31:00.000-05:00

Once again, those of us who are stuck at home this winter/spring will be able to live vicariously through the adventures of our globetrotting pals, Joe and Dick. The link is http://jdafricaasia.blogspot.com Safe travels, boys!