Image: NPCA photos

1. Horseshit

Attila had the stove lit early. We ate raw oatmeal and diced apples that we soaked overnight, and had coffee for warmth. The sun rose over the eastern ridge that separated the June Lake loop from Mammoth and it hit camp like the morning bell.

Then we set out. It was blue on all sides, but there was no breeze and that meant the summer sky would draw up moisture from the horseshoe valley of lakes to condense and fall. By mid-afternoon there would be a storm up high. By late afternoon the rain would begin to hit the valley.

“Fucking horseshit.” It laced the trail like brown buttons on a sandy ribbon. “I think I”m allergic to trails that allow horses. These are freshies too. What kind of a fucking—-” Atilla was a bit of an Edward Abbey type. He was the bearded man who always packed in whiskey and never missed an opportunity to illuminate the moral dissipation of America. All that and a topographic eye and razor sharp sense of humor.

We scanned the side of the mountain looking for the horses. Nothing doing. I pushed ahead of him. One foot in front of the other trying to breathe deeply without thinking of it. Three thousand feet in a few miles. And a good thirty five pounds on our back.

On a switchback I saw Atilla resting in the shade of a blue fir below. I went on. The silence was so much better for the both of us if only smudged by the shuffle of two feet instead of four. How could you ever carry along a good thought to its end?

Photo: Uncle Leo

Responsibilities dissolve at some point, save for the inherent finding food and drink, then letting them go. All the rest flies off with the osprey above the lake. Effortless on air. How do they become so involved in existence?

A marmot whistle caught my attention. Then a chipmunk erupting in primal fear across the trail. All hind brain, no frontal lobe. Animals these days. Shouldn’t they be able to cast me as the type that has no taste for meat?

Maybe I need a little more hind brain. Give way to the automaton within: movement, posture, balance, breath. Those are the things that will get you to the top. Not your wistful banter and romanticizing. Though the peak looked idyllic. And there’s no better metaphor than ascent. One foot in front of the other.

2. Damned Lakes

When the sun was high I stopped to rest and wait for Attila at Agnew Lake. Twelve hundred feet above the trailhead. The plan from there was to climb the steep trail up to Gem Lake, a highly touted slice of the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area eight hundred feet higher, and then move on up to Clark Lake and Agnew Pass, where we would make camp. But when we saw Gem Lake we lost faith in that plan.

“Do you think there’s any relationship between the words damned and dammed?” Attila asked. “This lake right here — does it make any difference which word I use?”

“I don’t know Atilla. You might have something there. We’ll have to take a look at the etymologies when we get back to a dictionary.”

“Goddammit we don’t need any dictionaries,” he said. ” That lake there is damned.” A good laugh in the mountains embodies innocence.

Photo: hojaleaf

Our plans changed because the lakes were dammed. The whole series was dammed: Agnew, Gem, and Waugh, all three of the biggest lakes in the canyon.

You go to Chicago to admire something man made. Not the union of the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area and Yosemite National Park.

“Let’s go up a different canyon,” I said. “Isn’t there a different pass over there to the north.”

Attila saw a trail heading up the granite wall on the other side of the lake. We got out the topo and changed the plans. Then we took off our boots and aired out our feet.

3. Whistles

We ate lunch and took off our shirts and put our boots back on. Then we had a swig of water and set off. It was a steep wall of loose granite. Rocks and boulders. I kept an eye and an ear to what was shaking overhead. I imagined death. Better to think of things like death. The leash to my teabag this morning had a quote: “The world is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think.” Not that all is a comedy.

“Wake up.”

Attila had gone ahead up the wall, all spry like a mountain goat. When I caught up to him he was lain out in a meadow in the shade of a cedar, his head resting on his pack.

“Just admiring the smell of the sage,” he said.

“Horseshit.”

“No, we left that behind. Didn’t you notice?”

“I did. They went up to Gem Lake, didn’t they?”

“How are you doing on water?” he asked.

“I could use a bit.”

We pumped from the small creek that ran from the meadow. It looked to be snowmelt as far as we could tell. Then we drank and had an apple and were off.

One foot in front of the other. Where are the dwarf huckleberries? Is it too late? We were climbing. From the meadow a dozen switchbacks took us through a dense grove of pines up another wall. From the clearing on the other side of the grove it looked like we were only a hundred feet below the pass.

Then a marmot sounded a whistle, and then another. Noise is ethereal in the mountains. Eleven or twelve whistles. I looked back and Attila had stopped to listen, fifteen feet down on the switchback below.

“Their whistles correlate with risk,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“The more he whistles, the more danger he thinks he’s in.”

“Maybe we’re between the mom and her pups.”

“Better pups than cubs.”

4. Colors

The top of the wall was a false summit. Another wide meadow and a thin creek that was colder than the last. I iced my hand and held it to the back of my neck. Another ridge to climb, but now the wildflowers are out in numbers. Color is power. The hell with money. Wear red on Fridays because it instills energy. And it’s an international symbol of peace. Pink lupines and white lupines and yellow and red lupines. But sometimes red is so unnatural. Then a purple thistle. Beautiful. Green is the new black. Oh, yeah, everything green; green cheerios, green oil. Super.

Blue skies, thanks to the breeze. One foot in front of the other. Then the bedtime songs start to repeat and that gets annoying. The little guy is three thousand feet below me right now. He must be ready for his nap. I hate how mothers get all the credit for intuition. I bet he’s just now getting tired. I know he is. Father’s intuition.

I dropped my pack at the pass just to the side of the trail so Attila would see it. Yeah, the hell with money. But I would use it for good things. We’ve been so many places where so little would go so far. What if we built a soccer field right up to the sand in that small village just to the north of Playa El Zonte? But then my friends would be mad if I spent it all on soccer fields. No they wouldn’t. Give them all huge birthday gifts. Or just fly them places.

Attila will see my pack, but I know he’s just as proud as I am. He won’t climb this peak today because I’m already going up it. He’ll probably have a drink and set up camp. Hopefully he starts dinner.

I’m not that far from the Pacific Crest Trail now. That would be reality. Mexico to Canada. But I don’t have any thirst for the desert. Maybe here to Canada. I would rather be on the coast.

I can see the Minarets cresting over the ridge like alpine steeples. Fine mountain air. I can see the whole Mono Lake basin, the drainage network; mindsurf the glacier that formed this canyon, down the steep granite wall, over Agnew Lake, and down again, across Silver Lake and the valley into the basin and beyond. A foot here. A foot there.

Then the silence.

Community Connection

If you have a Note from the Road you’d like to submit, please email david [at] matadornetwork.com.

Image h.koppdelaney

As a family we dug in for a fight to the finish that would last 500 long days. Slowly, the disease stole all my father’s faculties until he sat shuddering in a wheelchair, one arm limp around my shoulder as I hoisted him up and carefully walked him to the toilet.

Death hung in the rooms of my childhood like October fog and settled into the creases of our young faces like fine dust. After it was all over I had to get out. Out of the house, out of the state, out of the goddamn hemisphere.

Everyone deals with profound grief differently. There is no right way, but there are plenty of wrong ways. Only one thing occurred to me, Italy.

What I would do in Italy was beyond me, all I knew is that I had to go.

Photo Gret@Lorenz

Italy elated my mind, piqued my imagination and began to sketch for me what it could be to live again. I was twenty.

The stigma of death was never far and often while standing in a cathedral or trying to will myself to sleep, I was keenly aware that I was running. I knew behind my constructed guise of a carefree traveler I was a young man under a curse.

My grieving mind took to the natural wonders and the tumbled vestiges of earlier times with the frenzy of an addict. Each fresco, each statue, each bored Madonna was so far from the stale, malignant rooms I had dwelt in that I nearly worshiped them.

Photo tres.jolie

Verona: I climb the stairs to the height of the first hill and wash my face in the flow of a tiny fountain. Further and further up until I meet the ruined ghost of a castle, survived only by a great perimeter wall. I hoist myself up. I relish the final passages of a book that I had been taking my sweet time with. Reading the last line maybe ten times I shut the cover and look out on the afternoon.

Somewhere far but not too far a bell rings. Something good sneaks into my heart and I feel close to that good, held by that good and a part of the infinite sum of the good. Then, like an inspiration, I think of my father. An undercurrent deep within me stops, and my mind hitches at the change in velocity.

I feel myself stop running.

I stay on the ledge of the old castle wall for a good while. When I do finally leave it is with the unhurried pace of a man who strolls for pleasure, not runs for his life.

It’s hard to know where to begin with MatadorU. Inside the forums and with new students, it almost feels like that same energy that was around at the very beginning of Matador–strangers quickly getting to know one another, stoking off each other’s perspectives, places, and writing.

Thinking back to those early days, it’s almost crazy to realize how far we’ve come in less than 3 years. Ross Borden and Ben Polansky, Matador’s co-founders, started Matador in April of 2006. It was just a small site with little funding. It had no traffic, no revenue.

Today we’ve grown into the most-read independent travel publication online. Last week we were featured at WordPress as one of the top 10 highest rated sites for our design. And we have a dozen other plans right now for new projects and sites we’re still envisioning.

Sill, having an educational component of Matador has always been one of our most important dreams. Half the staff, including myself, have backgrounds in education. Both Ben Polansky and Tim Patterson are currently teaching in addition to their work at Matador. And I think this “educator’s mindset” – always needing to share, include, and build community–has been a key factor from the very beginning of Matador’s development.

Basically what we’ve done at MatadorU is take the blueprint of how we’ve grown Matador (and how individuals have become successful professional travel writers), and break it down into easy to follow lessons.

We’ve designed each chapter to build on the next so that a person with literally no experience can immediately get their blog set up, begin to develop their writing skills, and learn how to network and begin preparing work for publication.

At the same time, experienced writers will find even the early chapters relevant, with assignments that help further their online presence and reinforce the development of their storytelling. Later chapters will focus on skills they may find themselves lacking, such as implementing social media, negotiating contracts, and dealing with ad networks.

Finally, enrollment in the school also includes access to a new, daily-updated list of exclusive market leads. As several editors on staff are multilingual and work with foreign publications, plans are in the works to begin expanding the market leads to other languages as well, beginning with Spanish.

I feel like online courses raise a natural suspicion in people’s minds. I know I think twice about anything that asks me to pay when it comes to writing, even something as small as an entry fee for a writing contest. But we’ve set this course up so that its super-affordable. Over twelve weeks it comes out to $2.60 per day, the cost of a visit to the cafe. And we totally guarantee you’ll love this curriculum, or you can suspend your enrollment after 3 weeks and still get a full refund.

Here is a welcome page for those interested in learning more about MatadorU. We also have a blog recently set up for what people are saying about the school. If you’d like to go directly to the U, please click here.

Photo: CarbonNYC Feature Photo: Cam Vilay

This week’s stories will make you laugh, but they also remind us to pay attention to our surroundings and to the words coming out of our mouths when we’re on the road in unfamiliar cultures–lest we unwittingly plant images of cheeses coated in bodily fluids in the minds of our new friends, or enrage swordfish-wielding Italian chefs.

Thanks to everyone who submitted!

“It started out like any other beginners’ English class. My students were chatting about morning routines when out it slipped.

‘In the morning, I have a big Cock,’ he announced, smiling shyly at his classmates, pleased with himself.

Susana joined in. ‘I don’t like Coca-Cola,’ she said, ‘but I love coffee. I have two cups with milk and then I get dressed and brush my tits.’

–Natasha Young

“We were in Serbia, drinking Turkish coffee with friends one morning, and we started talking about a billboard we saw in Nis the night before. It said (in English): Brain Rules Force Timber Push.

Photo: Nihit

What? The Serbs all started trying to explain — talking at the same time in those loud voices that makes our friend Paul tell his Serb girlfriend, ‘When I learn Serbian – don’t talk to me like you’re mad.’

What they decided was that it was a VERY literal translation of our saying Mind Over Matter. Get it? Pretend the word timber means “large log”. Now do you get it? It took more words than I feel like typing, but trust me — it works.

So what other Serbian gems might we need to know? Here are a few that our friends came up with:

Pomesaj Se Sa Mekinje, Pojesce Te Svinje: If You Mix With Slop, The Pigs Will Eat You. (Choose your friends wisely.)

Ko Sadi Hkve Sa Djavolom O Glavu Mu Se Lupaju: Who Plants Pumpkins With The Devil Will Get Hit In The Head With These Pumpkins (I think this is basically the same, but it’s so very pumpkin-specific that I can’t be sure. Maybe it only applies to farmers, or to Halloween?)

Ili Jare Ili Pare: The Money Or The Goat. (You can’t have your cake and eat it too.) This one is terrific because it sounds so cool when you say it. Our kids hate it already.”

–Bob & Brenna Redpath

“My Medellin apartment was well-suited for a party, and with only two weeks left in Colombia before I had to return home, I decided on a ‘wine and cheese’ theme and began inviting everyone I knew.

A few hours before the party was set to begin, I was returning from a last minute trip to the convenience store when I bumped into the beautiful Carolina. Since I’d failed to manage a date with her on every prior attempt, I was surprised to learn she was interested in attending my party. She went home to get ready, while I prepared the apartment.

As guests began to arrive with offerings of wine and typical Colombian cheeses, I spotted Carolina tasting the ones I provided. The Roquefort on a cracker was met with a grimace, leaving me to finish the last bite, while the port wine cheddar was much more to her liking.

When it came time to try the brie, she commented on how it was completely covered in sperm. I wasn’t sure I heard her right, so I asked her to repeat herself.

Again, she described the cheese as being covered in sperm. Disturbing images of semen-covered soft cheese flashed in my mind, while I stood dumbfounded before this pretty, proper Colombian woman.

Photo: Dotbenjamin

I called for help in the form of my friend, Henry.

‘Henry, why is she saying the cheese is covered in sperm?’ I asked.

Henry let out a laugh, and explained, ‘Sperm in Spanish also means wax…like candles.’ ”

–David Lee

“After enjoying endless plates of delicious fish in Cinque Terre, I decided to press my luck at a Venice restaurant. It is surrounded by water after all.

When my swordfish arrived, I realized the error of my ways and tried to explain to the waiter, in my garbled Italian, that it was undercooked, tasted quite fishy, and I just wasn’t going to eat it. Then I uttered the words I later regretted so badly.

‘It just doesn’t taste fresh,’ I said. The waiter’s face went blank, his eyes cold. He whisked the fish away and retreated to the kitchen.

As my husband and I pondered the implications of his actions, the squat, elderly chef came barreling out of the kitchen, and thrust an entire raw swordfish under my nose.

‘Fresca, fresca!’ she shrieked. I stared at my husband, panicked, as all eyes in the restaurant turned to us.

‘I’m sorry,’ I replied sheepishly. ‘I just didn’t like it.’

She continued to rant in rapid-fire Italian as suddenly, waiters appeared all around us, and began removing the bread, wine and water from our table. As the bill was set down and we fumbled to pay, the chef hovered in the corner giving us a look that would make even the most-hardened member of the Gambino crime family quiver.

We quickly paid and ducked out into the street, feeling the eyes of the chef boring into our backs. ‘Lesson learned,’ said my husband. ‘Never insult the freshness of an Italian chef’s fish.’ ”

–Katie Hammel

“Japan is a paradoxical country when it comes to comfort. On the one hand, as an English-speaking visitor, you’ll find it very easy to get around on the trains, order food, and enjoy museum exhibits without speaking a word of Japanese.

On the other hand, once you do start taking an interest in the local language and try to form a few words,you’ll find reactions will ALWAYS be positive:

Me: Excuse… me… where… train station is?

Japanese bystander: Ohhh! Your Japanese is so honorably skillful!

This was one reason I tended to stick with English in most conversations with my Japanese girlfriend – better to be the stereotypical non-Japanese-speaking foreigner than to accept unwarranted praise.

But even straight English got me in trouble withher a few times. While we were walking down the street one evening after an Italian dinner, making jokes and poking fun at cultural differences, I casually mentioned I thought she was a ’silly girl.’

That certainly stopped her in her tracks. ‘What do you mean? You don’t like me? You think I’m stupid?’ It turned out that she believed ’silly’ to be more ‘foolish’ and undesirable rather than something of a joke. She stayed pretty mad for a few hours until I convinced her, as the ‘authority’ on English in this little town, that I intended no harm. Still, that didn’t stop her from looking up the word on the Internet and in her pocket translator and insisting I was looking down on her.

I was tempted, as I would to women in any country, to simply capitulate and let her believe what she liked. But rather than let this idea of foolishness spread around Japan and eventually destroy all international couples, I set the record straight.”

–Turner Wright

“Once the sun went down, I stumbled out of my hostel room in London after a floor picnic consisting of wine, wine, Cadbury’s chocolate bars, and more wine. I was accompanied by three Swedish girls and two Spanish guys who were at the moment, my best friends in the whole world (I’d known them for three hours).

We were on our way to the closest bar possible. What we found consisted of, among other things, a flat-screen television projecting images of gym-savvy young men in Speedos, and a bouncer at the door named ‘Gloria’ who was adorned with platform shoes, fake eyelashes, and an Adam’s Apple. I may have been drunk and on the other side of the world, but I know a gay bar when I see one.

Photo: greenmelinda

I resigned myself to an evening of great dance music and eye candy that I could look at but not touch. This would be fun. We were all having a good time, but a few martinis into our dance party with Cher on the turntable, Malin, one of my Swedish cohorts, leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘I think this is a gay bar!’

She had been wondering why all the attention had been directed toward Jorge and Ion. I’m not sure if it was the abundance of cheap hostel picnic wine and overpriced cocktails that led to her initial misreading of the bar clientele. That, or I’ll have to give it to Gloria the bouncer; she was rather convincing.”

–Marissa Barker

Community Connection

Want to avoid misunderstandings like these? Check out these five tips for avoiding embarrassing cultural mishaps.

Photo snowking24

Do you hear that?

The clatter of a busy market. Wheels going 60 miles per hour on badly patched highway. Do you hear the whooping laughter 3 blocks distant tittering off into uncontrolled giggling?

If you have your iPod on you don’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I love music. Hans Christian Anderson said “Where words fail, music speaks.” and I couldn’t agree more.But those ear buds are a barrier to the outside world, cutting the listener off from the unique cacophony that flavors each place.

I was late to the iPod party.I purchased my first, an unassuming gray little shuffle, just 2 months ago. And yes, while jogging and cleaning it feels like a godsend to have Bonobo and Led Zeppelin crooning and thumping, feeling the exquisite audiophile euphoria of the iPod user.

Photo Martin Krzywinski

But at what cost?

On a recent cross country early dawn bus ride I rested my forehead against the cool rattling glass. Looking about the bus at the other travelers, most of them napped or stared into the distance with white ear buds dangling.

I was jealous, yeah. I was also conscious that by bringing favorite songs with them across the world they tint the newness of the place with the familiar.

They were in effect cutting themselves off from something both subtle and profound. Something essential to travel. Sound.

How can this effect your travel writing?

You cannot know a place unless you hear it, unless you listen and let it speak to you. Oh, you can see a place, sure. And you may describe it in pithy, incandescent detail. But you cannot fully experience a place unless you actively listen. Not to what you want to listen to,but what you would hear if you were to surrender and sit still.

The creaking, swooshing, chatter of travel is a vital part of the experience and can color your writings.

Try this.

Shut your eyes. Sit and listen for 5 minutes. This may seem like a long time, hopefully after a few moments you will become accustomed to being a listening thing and new layers of sound, new secrets, will reveal themselves.

Let those secrets inform your travel writings.

And when there is nothing to hear…enjoy! Let the emptiness be your playlist. The great French mime Marcel Marceau put it well, “Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.”

What do you think? Am I just a crotchety ol geezer or am I on to something? Do you travel with your iPod?

Community Connection

Well if you are gonna listen to your iPod, you may as well make it good! Check out 10 Music Blogs to Keep Your iPod Stacked with Fresh Beats.

Burning Man may only last a week in the barren Nevada desert but Black Rock TV will broadcast all year with new videos and updates. Pat the Digital Vagabond and I have teamed up capture the magic from the worlds most unique art festival and present it in regular webisodes.

BRTV is also a place for the thousands of hours of Burning Man videos that will be captured by the 50,000 creative souls Black Rock City attracts. The site invites visitors to register and upload there own edited footage or raw videos.

Once registered you can upload from the site or embed from Youtube, Vimeo ect…The intuitive upload application also gives the uploader the option to offer their video to be remixed by other users, creating a database of footage to be utilized by all.

BRTV’s gonzo team of VJ’s ( including myself, Pat the DV and the Roads Scholars ) will shoot the news and events from the playa the week of Burning Man.

Hit us up in the comments if you are going to Burning Man!

[Feature Photo: John Curley]

Community Connection

Interested in becoming a VJ for Black Rock TV?

Already have a video from past a past Burning Man you would like to share?

Photo above by jpereira_net.

Michael, from County Kerry, feeds Runtlin Rimpoche antibiotics through a syringe. The puppy seems unsure whether it’s worth the effort. The steep fan of bones looks bigger than the dog.

We are at the Krishnamurti Center, upriver. Maybe in Benares a dog’s death is also auspicious. When his time comes, Runtlin Rimpoche will not be wrapped in saffron, set down upon logs and ignited. But he already operates in us as part of the death consciousness of Benares.

Sitting up in bed at dawn, I hear the peacocks screeching in the grass. (Krishnamurti is colonized by peacocks.) From the old Shiva temple on the hill across the wall, Vedic chants are gusting into my space.

This is my third time in Benares. I awake to the strange feeling of having been stolen by the timeless from my New York routine of interviews and story deadlines. I open a book by Krishnamurti. He tells me, “In the light of silence, all problems are dissolved.”

The words help. The words don’t help. Judith hides behind the words. Right before I left for India, a cancerous nodule was discovered in her left lung. She never comes with me to India. She has a fear of being disabled by bacteria. An abstract expressionist painter, when she travels, it is Vancouver to photograph the stones and bones on her friend’s island.

Photo by Ahron de Leeuw.

“Sarcomas,” said Dr. Ari Klapholtz, the distinguished pulmonologist who examined her, “are funky.”

This one, like her bone cancer three years ago, originated in Judith’s uterus. An offspring of her leiomyosarcoma, the nomadic cancer that wanders the bloodstream until latching on to a liver, a lung, the bone of a bone-obsessed artist.

I go down the hill to photograph the Ganges. Bathers have gotten there first. The air rings with the sounds of hacking, water slapping. Energy that belies the hour. I am forced to remind myself that the Ganges was once part of the toe of Vishnu, or the brow of Shiva. The accordion of Indian mythology opens lightly around this matter.

The boatmen, gray smudges in the gray light, look up at me from their boats, and ask, “Boat?” I say, “No,” and they ask, “Photo?” “Photo,” I agree, charmed by their deft movement from livelihood to the next best thing.

They pose gravely for me in their worn shawls. They are not interested in my sending them copies of their portraits. Another Indian mystery. Is it possible that just the moment of being photographed is enough for them? That that alone will do? No need to store up and hand down images, maya being maya?

I have given up hoping to turn over a stone and find a spiritual teacher in flower.

That affliction exhausted itself a long time ago. My camera has transformed me from seeker to sought. Boatmen, dhobis, women sculpting dung patties, all call to me, wave me over, want what I have to offer.

Photo by Ahron de Leeuw.

They slow me down. In Benares, foreigners move too quickly, either towards something or away from something, usually the crabbed beggar, the public defecator. Nothing edifying is ever asked of them.

Raising high my Minolta, I catch sadhus with tridents marching past children with cricket sticks. All along the ghats, like roadblocks, are cows the size of boxcars. An Indian magical realist might write: “It took me three days to get around them.”

Obstacles are part of what makes this city holy. Its holiness may be its biggest obstacle. It is harder to get around than the cows. The laurel of Shiva chafes. How much sanctity can one city take?

The heretic in me is pleased when the young man at Nishad Ghat tries to sell me hashish in full view of the Ganges. My first time here, another young man showed me his stash at the Burning Ghat.

“Hashish from Manali,” he entreated. “Best hashish.”

I turned him down. He wasn’t happy.

Photo by jpereira_net.

“No photo allowed here.” He rapped my camera with his knuckles. “This is holy place.”

They are the soul mates of the rickshaw driver, who while trying to cheat me, offers to find me a prostitute, as I am a man alone in Benares. I don’t photograph him, even though he is a souvenir of sorts. A resident of the city who has forgotten its story.

Or if he remembers it, he’s banished it to an island inside his brain, where it is kept in quarantine.

Cutting through a slum by the Malaviya Bridge, the corner of my eye is assaulted by a ferocious ochre glare. A holy man is looking into a mirror, getting himself ready for the day. Dipping his fingers into a bowl of ochre paste, his brow bends to receive its trident.

I want that shot. The mirror is the key. It echoes the fastidious lady in New York, getting herself ready for the day. But my courage fails me. I don’t want the sadhu to think me crass.

The image I leave there on the ground tumbles around inside me like a hungry ghost larger than myself.

I try to stay away from the Burning Ghat, gaudy with death for all its holiness. I used to spend long hours hypnotized by the fires, the circling of families around the fires, lost in the steps of their slow ancient dance. What moved in me as they were moving?

Photo by paolo bosonin.

What dance was I doing? And to what music?

When I find myself, as I do now, amidst the hive of temples, the racks of logs, the acrid plumes of smoke that burn my eyes, I am chastened by the dislocating sameness of the place. Why does nothing here seem to change when change is why this ghat is here?

From the rise above the clearing, a corpse, newly torched, is spitting flames into the living air. It came mummy-wrapped in saffron. Who? I wonder. In India, I always wonder, “Who?” to avoid being sucked into the what of human free-fall.

Judith shakes herself out of a deep sleep to shoot me a cross look from her end of the earth. Are you looking for the meaning of death in red flames leaping like circus acrobats from saffron bundles? Or are you just bored?

I return to Krishnamurti, where the Varuna River empties into the Ganges. India calls holy any confluence of two rivers. Bathers in dhotis are wading out to where the rivers meet. I take a photo and think of Judith. I think of her two rivers.

Community Connection

For more on India, please check here.

The author. Not pictured–sticky notes above map.

My bags were greeted at the airport by two adorable drug dogs. They had taken to treating the carousel like a ride at Disneyworld, sitting on the conveyor belt for minutes at a time, pretending to sniff bags but really just slacking off.

I knew where the dogs were coming from. I went to Chile knowing that this was the moment I would really have to start writing a book, which was a rotten feeling. Little notebooks would have to be purchased, little notes would have to be inserted into them and little me would have to make sense of it all.

With this in mind, I did exactly what all writers do. I came up with distractions to put the process off even longer.

The first came in the form of a physiotherapist from The Netherlands, a man so in shape that I couldn’t even be attracted to him, knowing that if we got naked together I would simply leak fat onto his perfect frame.

Michael told me over a traditional Chilean meal why he was traveling. He had gotten into his career because he wanted to help people, realizing too late that his job would really consist of covering doctor’s asses against malpractice suits and filing paperwork.

Santiago, Chile.

He was taking some time off and trying to figure out how to actually help people, with the possibility of somehow working with war veterans. He threw it my way in plain clothes. “I am too young for this bullshit.”

Next I met up with Robert, a photographer originally from DC, who had started an entertainment-based English website in Santiago.

Robert had also become disillusioned with his job in America, which had something to do with Economics (not exactly a “party” career to begin with). He moved to Santiago and began taking pictures, mostly of student protests. His head was quickly split open by a rock, an event that he talks about the way some people talk about a delicious lasagna.

Cathy, a fellow travel writer, asked me to consume large quantities of beer and French fries with her. I accepted only because it was a foray into the culture of Chile, not because I follow French fries around like a cartoon character that drifts through the air after smelling a cooling pie.

Cathy was rather gorgeous and had men eyeing her from three picnic tables away. I attracted only the attention of those aghast at the amount of potatoes I could consume per minute.

We got to talking about Chileans, and South Americans in general. I brought up how unbelievably attached the couples around town had seemed, hanging from each other and gnashing faces, only seconds after exhaling a shared Marlboro Light. She explained that being attached is en vogue, en masse.

In Santiago, being mounted by a lover in public is a lot like showing off new sneakers or a Beemer.

The more make-outty you can be, the better for your reputation. It is for this reason that people hang out drinking beer until all hours, devouring Someone Special on the white plastic chairs that always adorn the curbs of the bars here.

I cautiously suggested that women seemed to suck face with a bit of buyer’s remorse, sometimes actually gazing at me while kissing their passionate boyfriend. She confirmed that I was not imagining this, explaining that it seems as if the women adorn the men out of some sort of duty. A woman may have somewhere better to be but it is her job as girlfriend to make a spectacle of their relationship.

The second item on my list of customs had been haunting me since Argentina. Never, in my life on this planet, have I seen mothers fawn over their children so much. It hasn’t been uncommon to see a mother kiss their son ten times in five minutes, even if he is fourteen and wants no part of a PDA.

Once I noticed this trait, I began to recognize that it was sort of creepy. The mothers seemed obsessed with their child’s every move.

My philosophy became that the mothers, who seldom seemed to have a husband in tow, have transferred the appalling affection that their husbands formerly gave them, before the zing went out of the thing. Children solve the problem, allowing for endless adoration. Until puberty when, like I said, the whole thing just gets weird.

Cathy’s take was also interesting. She felt that Americans put too much emphasis on “one moment” for affection (a birthday, a goodnight kiss), making that one moment mean everything in the world. The South Americans, she suggested, have completely flipped this premise, choosing a quantitative approach to showing their love.

I headed back to my dorm room, looking for more distractions. The only other inhabitant was a woman who would not stop talking, not for a second. She was about thirty and unable to be in a room with others unless she was chatting, yammering, expounding or cooing.

When others spoke, her eyes grew into saucers of interest, her breath held for the moment that she could pounce into the conversation with trivia about tree sap, Bolivia or meningitis.

Within minutes I was looking for any escape from her conversation flytrap, trying desperately to think of something –anything – that could be important enough to take me away from this lady. It turns out I had the perfect excuse.

I started writing the damned book.

Community Connection

Have a note you’re interested in submitting? Send it to david [at] matadornetwork.com

Photo: wikipedia commons

1. I woke up early the morning of August 29 in my friend Emily’s house, where I’d stayed for a few days while my college in coastal Alabama was evacuated. Sometime that morning, while I was trying to go back to sleep, a thirty-two foot wall of water slammed into the beach front communities of Waveland and Bay St. Louis in Mississippi.

The house my grandparents owned on that beach was where I’d spent summers sailing the sunfish with my dad or reading on the porch next to my mom. It was where I first looked at the water on empty nights, at the blinking lights of fishing boats off the coast.

2. All I knew was that Dad was stuck in the hospital, and the hospital was stuck under several feet of water. I also knew we couldn’t communicate with him directly. We had no idea what it was like for him, what it was like for the hundreds in that hospital and the thousands trapped in New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina.

Photo: wikipedia commons

3. Days passed. Reports of looting, of suicides, crime and complete chaos went on during the long days without electricity at Emily’s home in Florida. School was canceled for a week. Calls to Mom in Houston were curt, hurried. I imagined alligators swimming down our streets.

Our home hadn’t flooded, she’d learned from a neighbor. But all those looters…did that mean someone was in my bedroom, stealing my things?

4. As we sat helplessly in front of televisions or radios for days while the water subsided, black mold crept down through the soggy roof or up the sodden sheetrock. Mud settled and dried on the floors and the tops of whatever furniture hadn’t been tipped over. Wood furniture and floors rotted and peeled.

Huge flies and maggots took up residence in rotting food left in refrigerators during the hasty exodus. Grass, trees and plants died with the infusion of salt water and they, too were covered with gray silt. At night, entire neighborhoods went dark. Bodies rotted in attics.

Photo: wikipedia commons

5. You never think it’s going to happen to you. Each summer, and with each approaching storm, meteorologists remind us on the Gulf Coast that this could be it. This could be “the big one.” But you never think it’s going to be your turn.

You sit through hours of traffic to get out of town, and then you stay in a hotel in Memphis or Houston or Atlanta until it passes.

You go home, clean up the yard, put the plants out again, and forget about it. Or you have a hurricane party—schools and offices are closed and you celebrate. You watch the waves break on the lake and the wind bend the trees but you never think it can happen to you.

6. Dad stood on the roof of the hospital, the place he’d spent his entire professional life. At night he could see more stars than he’d ever seen. In the distance, electrical or gas fires burned in unidentifiable buildings. He could barely see the top of his car under the tea-brown water. His skin was starting to turn raw from using Purell to bathe in and the muggy August heat was almost too much to bear.

Sleep was almost impossible. Patients required round-the-clock care and there were always people coming over in boats from surrounding houses. From the roof of that hospital he could see the bags they’d used when the toilets stopped working and the bodies that had floated out of from the morgue on the first floor. Finally, a few days after the storm, the helicopters came.

7. There are those watershed moments in life when you know nothing will be the same. It was easy to see that first morning in front of the television as images of flooded neighborhoods flashed by, that this was going to change everything. There was no one to lean on, no one to turn to who hadn’t been affected.

Photo: wikipedia commons

No one you could rely on to help you because everyone needed help. Even as reconstruction began, there were setbacks. A new roof meant a nail in the car tire and who knows if there was a shop that was open to fix it. People came back but the broken city meant crime, and crime meant soldiers were walking the streets.

The flood of new contracting jobs sometimes meant work poorly done, half finished, and always there was a waiting list. Years passed before my grandmother could hang a picture on her wall or sit in a chair in her living room.

8. Sometimes I freeze up when I remember. I’m still in shock that at one point, 80 percent of everything I knew was underwater. How do you get along with a memory like that?

Community Connection

For those still haven’t been to New Orleans, here’s Why You Should Visit New Orleans Now. And for more of Megan’s story, what she did after Hurricane Katrina, please read Losing my Travel Virginity: Americorps NCCC.

If you have a note from the road you’d like us to consider, please submit to david [at] matadornetwork.com.

Four busses in a row and none of them the one you want.

I’m lucky. I’ve got a seat. The stop after I get on leaves the majority of the new passengers standing, holding metal bars, bracing their legs to keep from being knocked over by sudden stops.

A woman has taken the vacant seat across from me. Her wardrobe is a demonstration of understated wealth. Flawless lizard skin boots, a stylish ostrich leather purse and an overcoat all in complimentary shades of brown swaddle a soft, round body I can imagine has enjoyed many an expensive restaurant meal.

Perfectly coifed blond hair has been toned and dyed with the attention to the most minor detail. I study the face. The woman looks very German to me and her eyes are unnaturally wide. Though she’s got plenty of wrinkles, I can tell she’s had some plastic surgery. As I’m looking for telltale signs and scars, I notice her hands are large and as I start to wonder if she’s transgendered, the elderly man in the seat next to her’s lets loose a low, rumbling cough without covering his mouth.

The woman’s head snaps to the right in a gesture of confrontation that goes unnoticed by the man whose bald, liver-spotted scalp bounces in time with the rhythm of his coughing. The woman looks around and catches my eye, her permanently astonished expression exaggerated as her eyebrows go up as if to say, “Are you seeing this?”

All photos: Kate Sedgwick

She digs the salt-free crackers from the pocket of her elegant coat and gets one bite in before the man starts to cough again.

She puts the crackers back in her pocket. Then she attempts to locate the back of the copper, metallic scarf that hangs aside her lapels before abandoning decorum to wrap it around her nose, decorative side down. I see her drop the scarf just in time for another coughing fit and see her replace it, exasperated.

Minutes have gone by – ten or more – and the sick man continues to hack and cough, oblivious to the woman on his left whose posture points to a slow, simmering rage she is barely able to contain and yet she says nothing and it does not seem to occur to her that she could just stand up and distance herself from the man who she clearly believes is contagious with Gripe A.

Finally, near my stop she says to him, “Tapa la boca,” and two full grown women towering over us giggle and murmur “Tapa la boca,” to one another. The woman throws her chin back in a defiant gesture that seems to mean that having said this was a sort of victory for her and as I get up to ring the buzzer, she lunges for my seat which she must deem as being a safe distance from the man and settles her rump into its black naugahyde.

Translation: Gripe A is the Swine Flu.

Tapa la boca means cover your mouth.

Photo:ssh

Dust off those travel videos and share them to our YouTube group.

Firstly, grab a YouTube channel if you don’t already have one, it’s free and is like setting up an account on any other social networking site. Think of a snappy name, upload some videos and subscribe to Matador…now you are ready to join our group!

In this video I cruise around our channel on YouTube, show you where our group is and watch a few of the 80+ travel videos that have been shared so far.

NOTE: I took this screen capture with an application called Jing, and the result of screencapping video is a bit jumpy. The videos on YouTube are as smooth as butter on a babies big toe.

Well, whatcha waiting for? Show us what you got and look for more travel videos from Matador.

Recently we looked at 4 Ways to Increase Your Chances of Getting Published. One of the things we focused on was dedicating time to your blog. I wrote:

Simply put, writers who blog well and often are more accessible, relevant, and interesting than writers who don’t. Two examples that come to mind immediately are Sherman Alexie and Dennis Cooper.

This brought up a good question: which blogging platform is best to use?

WordPress

Wordpress is the most sophisticated and powerful blogging system available. It’s an Open Source project, meaning that a worldwide community is continually helping to develop and upgrade its technology and features.

It also means that it’s completely free and infinitely expandable. As new plugins and technologies are created, these can be added right to your blog. You can either have a free blog hosted at WordPress or you can buy your own domain, web hosting service, and then Download and Install WordPress onto the server.

All this said, WordPress isn’t necessarily the best choice for everyone. Even though the tutorials and instructions are written and organized in a very intuitive and user-friendly way, there is a certain level of tech and computer knowledge assumed on the part of the forums / writers. In other words, unless you’re already a savvy computer user you might find yourself completely lost and discouraged in the process of setting up your own site on WordPress.

Secondly, WordPress is available and usable via a pre-made themes. There are thousands of them available, however, unless you have dev skills or know how to play around with CSS, you can’t really customize much yourself.

The best way to see if WP is for you is to go to Wordpress and play around. If you’d like to set up your own site, Craig Martin gives a complete tutorial on How to Set Up a WordPress Travel Blog.

[News update 8/24/09 - Matador was just featured in the WordPress showcase, a collection of the best-designed WordPress sites.]

Blogger

Blogger is Google’s blogging system. Its main advantage is that it’s very simple to use and customize. It’s not as powerful / expandable as WordPress, however, unlike WordPress, you can play with the coding and look of your blog in a preview screen. This is a great option for people without a lot of tech savvy but who may have a certain artistic vision of what they want their blog to look like.

Another advantage of Blogger is that you’re automatically part of a community of people worldwide. The backend of Blogger makes it easy to follow other people’s blogs and vice versa.

Tumblr and Posterous

With everything becoming about speed and mobility, people have gotten tired of having to go through several steps just to post a blog. This has led to new blogging systems set up where you can post just by sending an email (although this feature is also available at WordPress) or by cellphone. Two of the most popular are tumblr and Posterous. Basically they’re just streamlined blogging systems that focus on the content and not any other extra features, which, perhaps inadvertently, leads to an appealing aesthetic, a kind of minimalist style.

The main disadvantage of using tumblr or Posterous is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Posts created through tumblr or Posterous are simply not as visible to Google and people searching for content as blogs set up on WordPress.

The bottom line however, is that as a writer, what should matter most is that you’re writing. As long as you’re consistently adding content and communicating with other writers via social networking, you should be generating a following regardless of the SEO of your blog. In this sense, you should choose your blogging platform based on whichever blog system seems like it will facilitate writing the most.

Matador

For some people, what matters most isn’t the structure of a blogging platform, or the features, but simply the opportunity to blog at a place where you’re more likely to have a captive audience for your work. Using any of the above platforms, the one disadvantage is that you’re just one of millions of other bloggers.

Setting up your blog at a smaller community such as Matador assures that your writing will gain people’s attention.

Ultimate Set-up

Ultimately, if you’re productive enough, you can set up multiple blogs, each of which takes advantage of that blog’s particular features / advantages, and then tie them all together through one main blog. Take developer Lisa Brewster’s blog for example. She has incorporated a tumblr-style ‘log’, plus a porfolio, a twitter feed, and other information, all on one WordPress blog.

The most important step: just pick one blogging platform and get started!

Community Connection

Please reference the original article that prompted this one: 4 Ways to Increase Your Chances of Getting Published.

Editors Note: I’ve known Andy Vernor aka ‘Vern’ since the early days of going to school in Athens, Georgia. Like all good Athens kids we were into music–I was exploring primitive recording / sampling techniques for making beats; he was playing ‘nitro-rock’ in a kickass band called Land Speeder. Seeing them open up for Suicidal Tendencies is still one of my all time show highlights.

Over the years I’ve always been a bit jealous of Vern’s journals. On one page he’ll have random thoughts or song lyrics. The next will be some crazy sketch for a superhero or a tattoo idea or a diagram of some new structure he wants to build.

I’ve been messing around with new blogging technologies lately, checking out posterous, tumblr, and others, and while it’s all really cool and enables you to share links and media really fast, there’s just something about real journals like these that seems so creative and free.

–David Miller

1.‘Alt easter island head and gladiator… fun with lines and geometric shapes’

2.‘Protuberance Man- a quasi-hero who exudes energized protuberances when drawn into conflict; he contributes positively despite his conflicted existence which straddles his pizza flinging reality and the realm of the imagined. Also some song lyrics (later used)’

3.”Autumn leaves in Wisconsin and tatt #3 early design.’

4.Brick= ‘cover songs that would be cool; lyrics ripped from R. Kipling poem used in Land Speeder song + random line sketch.’

5.‘Outdoor ed brainstorm and sketch of wife with care package label… early love.’

6.‘Dog Soldier Society was a proposed name for a prog metal band that never really got off the ground. if you like it you can have it, but please rock righteously. Also fun with collage.’

7.”Song lyrics, plans for upright bass stand, idea for yard statue using discarded televisions + quotes from…Fight Club and other(?)’

8.Self control: mantra and tattoo design–inner right bicep (but red did not make final design).

9.‘Building the eye;’ mantra and self portrait as graphic.

Community Connection

Have journal pages you’d like to share? Please email scans or photos to david [at] matadornetwork.com.

Photo: The Giant Vermin Feature Photo: Lourdes Nightingale