Photo .:: LINUZ ::.

IN NORTHEAST LAOS, on one lane roads, we swoop through foggy forests. The driver of the bus strains forward, breathing a little stain of fog on the windshield. Outside the rain falls on sullen cattle.

The bus pulls aside and while the men step out to liberate their bladders, the glint off the barrel of a large machine gun catches my eye. The weapon is protruding from a young man’s denim coat. I stand and stretch, only now I have an electric current running from my toes to my testicles.

The kid, and he looks all of 16, seems to be trying to be inconspicuous. No one seems to heed him or his alarming semi-automatic secret.

We board the bus and the driver gives the machine gun kid a little nod as he takes his seat among us. My eyes won’t leave the muzzle or the angular protrusion of denim or the way he holds the barrel beside his leg. From the size of the gun it could well be an AK-47.

This is my third day in Laos.

The bus is full of sedate travelers surely carrying cash and cameras and all kinds of expensive gadgetry. We are sitting ducks. Oh God please don’t let me be the guy with a black sack over his face holding a newspaper for the unsteady camera. Of nearly equal gravity is the thought of the machine gun kid tearing through my bag to discover $2,000 cash.

We stop at a string of noodle huts waiting for us. Among the scraggle of hungry tourists there is a big lad in a tee shirt that says Vancouver. I need an ally in this unfortunate knowledge.

“Yeah, right there, um, twelve o’clock. He’s packing heat big time dude! And he doesn’t want anyone to see! See?”

“Holy shit, no way man. Look at him, he’s gonna rob the bus, you hear about it all the time. Why else would he be hiding a machine gun? What do we do?”

“Well I don’t know about you but I’m going to the bathroom and getting creative with my dough. I’m carrying, like, a lot of cash.”

In the bathroom stall I rip into my money stash. I duct tape some bills to the inside cover of my portable Steinbeck, making it a $400 edition. I tear into my travel pillow and stuff a few hundred in. The biggest chunk of change is crammed under my junk. I button my jeans and dozens of Vietnamese notes crunch in my underwear. If this is a full on strip-search-jungle-shake-and-bake, well, at least the money they steal will have touched my nuts.

For the next two hours the kid looks relaxed enough. I am sweating through my shirt. The Canadian fingers a serrated plastic knife.

Finally, the machine gun kid slowly stands and turns toward me. He steps forward, shifts his gun and strides quickly to the front of he bus. The bus slows down, but doesn’t stop as he hops off and waves us on. The driver smiles and slams the bus into gear. A queer disappointment contends with my relief. I was so set on being robbed that I’m…a little bummed.

The big Canadian leans close, “I have a plastic picnic knife.”

“You’re a better man than I. I have a fistful of dollars chaffing my naughty bits.”

“Oh, me too. Of course.”

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Have you had a close call? Or at least worked yourself up into thinking you were having a close call?! I would love to hear your stories of danger, real or perceived, on the road.

Please send to josh at matadornetworkdotcom.

Crappy photos by author, who had had a few cocktail by the time he got to snapping.

THE EXPATRIATES of Buenos Aires all came together at a club called Sugar, for the purpose of seeing Barack Obama sworn in as the 42nd president. The dive-y club in Palermo was having a Moment, having marketed their venue as the only place to see the event live, with superior sound and on a big screen. As it turns out, the operation was really a jerry-rigged computer projector with a herky-jerky picture and intermittent sound.

Classic movie setup in Bs.As.

Anderson Cooper’s normally competent voice came through at intervals. “Arriving in the. And here you can see. For which we have all been waiting.”

Nobody seemed to care that they were watching the event on a setup that rivaled those found in most adult movie emporiums.

The room was filled with people who all had one thing in common; they had fled America, short term or long term. A majority of the permanent residents seemed to have left post-Clinton, none of them imagining then that they would eventually bump into a president who promised to unite the country, if not the world. They were Bush-haters, thrilled to have a big ‘ol target on which to blame their problems.

“America went the way of chain restaurants. It was McAmerica”, explained Bill, a former engineer from Georgia, who was slurping down an ethnic meal consisting of a Budweiser and chicken wings. He then broke into a diatribe I have heard many times. It involved him recalling things that he remembered before The United States had gone tits-up, things that were placed memories, romantic visions that existed for the purpose of justifying his geographic displacement.

Imagine, for a minute, an antique Coca Cola vending machine. The old-fashioned kind that dispensed small, adorable bottles for a nickel. We’ve had this image placed into our brains mostly through advertising, or at least from a film studio’s clever prop department. It is an image that feels incredibly American – an image that reeks of small town comfort.

The truth is that you may have probably only run into a handful of these in your life, most likely in a setting where they are intended to be flashback-y and kitsch. You’re not foolish enough to believe that the world would be transformed if we could still plop down a nickel for a miniature soda.

But I really think that this is the deluded, romantic vision that guys like Bill are holding onto. He needs to think that the Coke machine is still important. He left America in search of things that never even really existed in his life, things that he had convinced himself would make him happy. Bill wants a nickel coke and instead he’s gotten Barrack Obama.

I recently had dinner with a former New Yorker, who is now living in Buenos Aires. He rolled his eyes as he explained that many Expats were thinking of returning to the USA now that Bush was leaving office. As I began talking to more folks at Sugar, it indeed seemed this way.

Barbara left home after her husband cheated on her, leaving her a stockpile of cash awarded by an “asskicking judge”. In Argentina she found that her money went further, that healthcare was cheaper (often free) and that she could make money by fact-checking for a US based company.

Now, she said, things were changing. Inflation was approaching 35% a year and little things were starting to nag at her. “I miss salad dressing. I know that sounds stupid. But they don’t make it here – you cannot find a bottle in the grocery to save your life.” Obama and blue cheese were promise enough for her to consider a move back to Kentucky.

News cameras were present, looking for easy pickup shots that they would use to cut into the nightly news. Several seats were reserved for journalists; men in sandals and jeans who ate nachos with such ferocity that I could only imagine their first below-the-belt encounter with a female.

Behind me sat the two girls that I’ve been trying to avoid for all of my traveling life; sorority sisters from Tennessee. Their voices are always impossible to block. They mix eloquent words from AP English class with idiocy. “This is like, so monumental. All of my African American friends are like, so proud.”

The telecast proceeded mostly as I had anticipated it would. There was hissing when George W Bush was announced for his last puzzled-looking shot as a president. The crowd’s fury turned to pandemonium as Obama made his way to the screen. It felt more like watching Hulk Hogan enter a wrestling wring than it did a president approaching a deus. Then, thankfully, there was silence as he was sworn into office.

The moment did not provide the chills that I had wanted it to and I wondered if this was because I was not in America, surrounded by people who had no choice but to slug through the next four years of turmoil. I was surrounded by people who had made a life outside of The United States, yet still held some kind of buyer’s remorse with this decision.

Their quality of life had improved but they had traded their American soul in return. These were people who were constantly looking to justify their decision and maybe, just maybe, the man on the screen in front of them was going to make America a better place than where they currently sat. Which would make them very wrong about many things.

It felt like they all secretly wished it hadn’t happened.

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Anjuna Traveler w/ Massage Ladies. Img: innacoz

She pointed to a spot in the sand. A spot like any other.

“That’s where they found Scarlett Keeling’s body,” Aimee Ginsburg told me. Ginsburg has lived for almost a decade in Goa. She is the India correspondent of Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest newspaper. I saw her as the all-seeing eye of videshi (foreigner) Goa.

We were walking on the beach in Anjuna. A heavy mist, like rolled iron, was banked over the Arabian Sea. A good day to contemplate young ghosts. Keeling, a fifteen-year-old British tourist, was raped and murdered in March of 2008. It inspired some in the Indian press to inveigh against the perils of hedonistic excess among Westerners who winter here.

I am interested in Goa because of its collection of strange ghosts. Jews were burned at the stake at Campo de Sao Lazaro during the Portuguese Inquisition in the sixteenth century. (Goa was a Portuguese colony until the 1960’s.) I personally am fond of the drug and bliss ghosts of the 60’s. Had I stayed on, I had the potential, I think, to be a good hippie ghost, discharging quiet sighs beneath coconut trees.

I was philosophical about the bare European breasts peering up at me lazily from the warm sand. Seeing them was in a way like seeing saddhus in Benares. They infused the beach with its particular character.

But sometimes the young girl’s shadow would make a noise, jamming my sensual signals. I’d walk on, saying her name under my breath.

Girl in Goa, India. Photo: Steve Weaver

Biting into my Mediterranean sandwich at Baba Au Rum (feta cheese, black olives, sun dried tomatoes spilling from the sides of French bread), I think of the party I went to last night at one of the Yoga centers around Baga.

A dressed-in-white party. No exceptions. Everywhere I looked, bleached figures were floating across the grounds like sleep walkers. It is easy to be cynical about Westerners in Goa.

I joke to Aimee Ginsburg, a Westerner from Israel: “A lot of people looking for the perfect spiritual beach.”

She is not amused. She has reason not to be. Israeli Goans, relative newcomers, are lassoed inside lazy clichés: burnt out cases, exiles from an endless war.

Baga’s winter guests, often heavyset blokes from the UK, here for the warm sun and drinks at the beach shacks, or maybe even visits with the healer Patrick at Nani and Rani’s, sail innocently beneath my radar. What is transitory, like this author eating his Mediterranean sandwich among Baga’s old-timers, does not demand to be taken seriously.

I am happy, momentarily, to be part of the legendary weave of Westerners in India’s smallest state, only recently pried loose from Portugal. (Indian Goans are said to see us more as a fungus than a weave.)

I see myself as exempt from the normal clichés that swirl around the spirit junkies and beach slaves. I have come to Goa for none of the things Lonely Planet can offer me. I admit I say this smugly.

The woman who lives two houses down from me is the reason I am here. Outside her house is her blue motor scooter with its head tilted, as if trying to make up its mind about something.

Community Connection

Please submit notes from the road to david [at] matadornetwork.com

For another interesting perspective on travelers in India, check out this piece at BNT by Rolf Potts.

In the Cambodian border town of Poipet, Bridget and I share a cab ride with an excitable and elderly Frenchmen named Pierre. Triumphantly old and traveling the world alone, he is strenuously hard of hearing and very happy to be in Cambodia. Climbing into the car he looks like a Parisian Mr. Magoo; squinting, holding his camera askew and always stepping accidentally over danger, not into it.

We zoom in a punished old sedan, jumbling about bumping heads on the dirt highway while Pierre shoots photos and shouts, “Extraordinary!”

Pierre, Bridget and myself were all told by the same smiling Cambodian that the bus had broken down. We opted to pay five dollars each for a ride to Siem Reap. Pierre’s camera clicks indiscriminately as the puddles and paddies go by.

“This is really something, huh? Cracker Jack! The quality of light is perfect. Extraordinary!”

I don’t think any of his pictures are going to turn out.

Photo three wolves

On our second day of mountain biking around the temples of Angkor we were stopped on the bike path when Pierre shouts from behind,

“Jason, Bernice! I made it! Isn’t this the something, huh? Extraordinary!”

His knees and the rusty rental bike creak towards us.

“I saw you yesterday but you were a blur Jimmy, to be young again…oh well. Isn’t this extraordinary?”

I couldn’t help but think that Pierre in his shambling persistence to see it all was putting that apocryphal adage ‘Do it while you’re young’ on its head. Might he have something sage-like to impart on the topic?

“Hey Pierre, what would you say to those who tell me to ‘Do it while I’m Young?’”

“Huh?”

“I said, um, in regards to travel, what do you think of the statement ‘Do it while you are Young’?”

“Huh? Wait.Where?”

“People are always telling you to do it while you are young. What do you think?”

“Oh, well, I don’t know Jesse, I don’t think so. You go on ahead though, I should head back. I move pretty slowly you know.”

His face mustering the balance needed mount his bike is all the answer I’m gonna get.

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Photo: wally g

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything crazy.” His eyes told me that he was speaking the truth but it was the white rubber gloves that were scaring me. I’ve never seen a TV show where the guy in the white gloves just gives you a kiss on the cheek and a pat on the ass.

Plus, I’d just been fingerprinted and was standing outside of Heathrow’s lockdown. I was much less concerned with where his fingers were headed and more worried about how I had ended up in the pokey.

I had come from Italy, where I’d taken a train all day, followed by a cheapo flight to the UK. About ten hours of travel. I had, as is custom, walked thirty-nine miles through Heathrow before arriving at the custom’s podium. I was exhausted, melancholy and quite ready to fall into the arms of my boyfriend, who was waiting for me in London.

“How long will you be here?” Oh, this crap. Couldn’t they read the neatly printed “7 days” in the box of the same question? I noticed that his fingernails were manicured, which struck me as bit metro for such a toughguy gig. He thumbed through my passport, which was nearly full of stamps and visas.

Photo: James Cridland

“What are you doing here?” I’m a tourist. “What will you do when you’re here?” I will go see Bruce Springsteen in Hyde Park, see a couple more concerts and visit with friends. “Who are your friends?”

I thought for a second about taking a philosophical approach and asking in return, “Yes, good point. Who are our friends?”

Instead I rattled off a few names, including Lewis’. I hoped that this gentleman wouldn’t ask me about how I’d met Lewis, a story that involves caipirinhas and a make out session on a picnic table in Chile.

“I see here that you’re a writer. What do you write?” I explained that I was a freelance travel writer. Officer Manicure asked if I did anything else, insinuating as everyone does that working in travel couldn’t possibly be a real job. I explained that I didn’t, that I was making my way around the world for a year.

He sucked air through his teeth and made his eyebrows go cross-eyed. “How much money do you have?” I told him about ten grand. That didn’t seem like enough, based on his reaction. He abandoned his podium, directed me to heel and led me to collect my bags.

Along the way he told me that there was probably no issue but the answers I’d given fit a profile, similar to one from people who might disappear into the country. I explained that I was not fond enough of kebabs and greasy chips to stay in the UK. He laughed and assured me that we’d have this settled in no time. “I’m really jealous of what you’re doing, this trip. I wish I could do it.” He had the miserable look of somebody who took holidays on the English seaside.

My bags were searched, specifically for anything that would indicate I’d come to England forever. The good officer told me that often they find cards from going-away parties. He found my Western Europe Lonely Planet. “This is good. I’ll be able to show them this and corroborate that you’re on the trip you claim to be on.” He confiscated all of my notebooks and my collection of receipts. “This is all good. It proves that you are who you say you are.” It was a strange place to have an identity crisis.

I also produced my onward ticket, a flight to Spain. He did the air-sucking thing again and explained that thirty quid flights didn’t stand as any kind of evidence for departure, since cheap flights could be abandoned. He lamented that there might be some issue with my not having a return flight to America, even though I had a ticket out of the country.

Photo: zerian

I spent the better part of the next three hours in an intimidating questioning room. Everything in the 10×10 room was nailed to the floor, making me imagine just what maniac had started swinging chairs and initiated that protocol. I could see the other rooms through glass, both with stressed-looking travelers being questioned for God Knows What. Manicure asked me about ten more questions, then asked if he could contact Lewis to corroborate my story. I agreed, hoping this would settle the entire thing.

My big problem came in the form of a change of the guard. At 7pm I was assigned a new officer because mine was going home. A strange, shaky man, Officer Anxious regretted to tell me that he’d have to start at the beginning and ask me every question. Good cop, nervous cop. He took notes on cheap, ruled paper. His hyper eyes darted between the page and my face. Much less forthcoming than Manicure, he dropped me back in the main customs area and hustled off.

He returned with pursed lips. He regretted to inform me that I had been denied entry to the United Kingdom. He explained that they had spoken to Lewis and found a discrepancy between our stories. Lewis, not really knowing how to explain my history with a band we were gong to see, simply told them that I used to work with them as their manager, which was the truth. Anxious seized upon this and deduced that I was here to work with this band, to “market and promote.”

I denied this over and over, yet I was branded a “doubtful entry” and a liar by the C.I.O (Chief Immigration Officer), which sealed my case. I was told that I should have immediately said I was in The UK to see a band that I formerly managed, straight when I walked into the custom’s area. Because I hadn’t, I had lied. The logic sounded dicey to me too.

I’ve since recreated the behind-the-scenes events that took place, mostly from pieces of information that airport staff would later slip me in hushed voices. It should be said that this is purely conjecture. First, it seems that the C.I.O. went off duty with Manicure. She didn’t feel like dealing with my issues and ordered me to be denied. When I complained to Nervous and asked to see a C.I.O., she was called at home because it was her case and then she really became pissed. “Not happy” is the British way of saying that.

I think, at that point, everyone was told to hang me up on absolutely anything they could. I’ve since learned that the folks at LHR can hang just about anyone up on something. There are just too many rules to pull from.

Eventually, I would hold paperwork that denied me entry because of my failure to indicate that I was working (completely untrue and never documented by anything I’d said), that my funds were insufficient (ten grand for one week) and that I didn’t have a ticket back to America (although I had one out of the country).

Photo: James Cridland

Something happened to Nervous after he delivered the news. He began stuttering when speaking and I noticed that his hands were shaking. I remember thinking that somebody who has a good case wouldn’t act like this.

It was here that I was searched and relieved of my possessions, including everything in my pockets but my phone. I was ushered into a room that contained thirty folding chairs, a TV and a ten foot stretch of bullet-proof glass, behind which I was observed by three officers packing heat. I was in jail.

Over the next eight hours, from 11pm to 7am, I would flip between utter despair and total anger. One security guard, a surprisingly nice man in his mid-fifties who had “seen it all, mate” told me to accept my fate, that he’d only seen three people get themselves out of this situation and they all knew somebody in government. He’d heard about my case and shook his head. He’d explain, after a few hours of conversation about how the whole process worked, that I was probably marked an “easy pull.” He wouldn’t admit that there were quotas to meet but he did tell me that I looked like the kind of guy they “like” to refuse. In other words, I wasn’t going to get physical or spit in anyone’s face.

I phoned an immigration attorney who was absolutely shocked that this happened, and suggested that I petition to see a C.I.O. I did and was denied. They sent Officer Anxious instead, who met me with a determined look. He’d clearly been put in a terrible situation and tried to get stern with me, which just made him shake more. “Lllllllllisten. Just accept it. You’re ggggggggggoing home.”

I wouldn’t accept it and asked to see all my paperwork. I asked them to strike several things that simply weren’t true (they did) but was unable to have stricken that I was in the UK to work with this band. Their interpretation was the hook they’d hung me on and it wasn’t going anywhere, no matter how untrue. Policy was in motion and they had the upper hand.

I was to fly at 8am and made one last appeal, this time with a morning shift officer who looked like Dusty Springfield. Officer Dusty came clean with one piece of new information. While speaking to Lewis, he’d also told him that we were going out. Although not something they were willing to put on my paperwork, it was something that they were holding against me.

Nobody had ever asked me about our relationship and it’s never been my policy to offer that I’m gay to complete strangers; there are just too many closet homophobes in the world. Plus, in my post-Italy dazed state, it never even occurred to me that it would matter. I’d been through Heathrow at least forty times before with not even a second glance.

Dusty claimed that I should have offered this news at the first podium when asked who I was visiting. I said that I had, that I was seeing friends and listed Lewis’ name. “But he’s not just your ‘friend’.” I got angry. “So let me get this straight. I was supposed to walk up to the podium and say that one of the reasons I’m here is to explore a relationship with another man?” She didn’t answer. There was a reason that this was left off the paperwork. She repeated the company line. “Just accept it.”

At 8am I was ‘whisked’ through airport security by two guards. They had heard about my story, which was apparently making the rounds. One of the guards told me that my case wasn’t uncommon and his partner coughed up a more surprising comment. “If I were you, I’d be kicking and screaming right now.”

In perhaps the most embarrassing moment of my life, I was brought onto the plane in advance of all other passengers by security. My passport was handed to the head flight attendant, who was not allowed to give it to me until we landed. All of the other passengers pointed and whispered at me as they filed onto the plane, imagining what I’d done that could have landed me in this situation. Up until this point, I’d never so much as had a detention, let alone any kind of police escort.

I landed at JFK and sailed through customs. Two days later I’d booked a flight to Spain to rejoin my trip, at the cost of $1,400. I attempted to see somebody at the British Embassy in New York to discuss my case, only to be told that the embassy does not see anyone about visa matters.

Photo: Hyougushi

It was suggested that I get a lawyer who could figure out how to cut through the red tape of an appeal. I had a letter from the band’s manager saying that I wasn’t there to work and a lot of questions to ask someone but I couldn’t afford to ask them – a lawyer was beyond my reach, especially after eating over a grand for new flights.

It turns out that I didn’t need a lawyer. Two months later I went back to the United Kingdom, this time through Edinburgh. I was prepared with every kind of evidence that I needed to prove that I was there to visit and attend the Fringe Festival and see Lewis, who I immediately offered was indeed my boyfriend, which made the older Customs Official blush a bit.

Although he did pull me out of line, he was polite, efficient and reasonable. I was an emotional wreck and he helped make me feel like a human again, just by his demeanor and the way he asked the questions. He asked to see my exit flight and bank statement, which contained less money than it had last time.

His eyebrows raised when he came upon my crossed out passport stamp from London. “Oh, Terminal Five.”, as if to say that it all made sense now. He then stamped my passport and welcomed me to the United Kingdom.

I think he knew about the dinks too.

The thought of Dustin and I ascending moonlit scree slopes occupies my mind during the 4-hour drive from Seattle to Mt. St. Helens. I was born the year after Helens blew its top. Just missed it.

When I was a kid the eruption held a sense of monumental awe that folks just couldn’t shake. Every year around the anniversary Old Man Burtchett would point over the ridge of Douglas firs where the ash rose up and circled the earth. He heard it boom.

Who proposed to climb to the rim of the crater in the dead of night, I can’t remember. Dusty had made the relatively easy climb the summer before with no snow and no problems. But now it was February and we had snow shoes and poles if not our best interest in mind.

1:30am. We set off past the fleet of RV’s that hum gently with sleeping snowmobilers. After a few miles the trees break and the face of the volcano begins to pitch upward. Deep gullies slope away and great valleys open up to our headlamps.

Ridges of rock in sporadic slashes. The wind starts to shove. Left then right then up from behind into all the little chinks in my clothing. We hug the ridge now because 5 feet on either side is a sheer drop.

Now the angle of our ascent blocks all view of what lies ahead. It’s all just up. It’s all just dark. In the Big Drop Off little trees grow at absurd drunken angles. My light doesn’t reach the bottom. I have my concerns. I keep thinking that we are going to step right off the edge of the world and not know it. It is all up up up until bang, you’re there, but you don’t see it coming. At least that is what I heard.

I insist we hunker behind a slab of rock and make coco. There is a shy smear of gray to the east, just behind Mt. Adams and I want to sip coco as the sun comes up.

The summit is a tempest. The mountain levels off and then you realize you are standing on a 20 foot cornice that hangs off the edge of the crater. The wind sprays ice. I am so shaken by the wind speeds, the cold and the fact that I am literally hovering about a smoldering lava dome that my footage is scant at best.

Dustin and I crawl to the edge of the volcano like little boys and peer over.

Community Connection

Ever climbed a mountain before? Wanna try… 6 American Mountains to Climb for Big Adventure & 11 Most Dangerous Mountains in the World for Climbers

Juxtapositions in effect at Damascus Gate, Jerusalem.

Image: Chris Yunker

I find myself waking up before dawn at the Faisal to beat the backpackers’ rush to the communal bathroom. The sexagenarian’s need for whatever solitude he can get.

As Lonely Planet says, the Faisal, across from Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, is a magnet for the low-end backpacker and pro-Palestinian zealot. A German journalist, with his own private room, makes the Faisal his permanent home, and eyes the rest of us as guests of dubious merit.

“I want a private room too,” I say to one of the hostel managers, a thickly-mustached Palestinian.

“You don’t need a private room,” he says. “You don’t have a girlfriend.”

A low-end journalist, I sleep with my piles of notes in one of the dorm rooms. The managers, who at night cook pots of rice for their guests, are interested in what I write about.

“Palestinian nonviolence activists,” I say.

They cluck their tongues and shake their heads. They don’t think non-violence will work, and they don’t think violence will work. They think I am naive. A point of view I find almost companionable. It makes me feel right at home.

Shortly before I checked into the Faisal, an Israeli security team descended upon the hotel to whisk away members of the pro-Palestinian ISM (International Solidarity Movement.) The sole remaining ISM member responds to my questions as if he is Tony Soprano and I am the Feds. But I always get a smile and a bow from the Korean Christian pilgrim who sleeps in the bunk beside me with his two small sons.

Community Connection

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It’s a holiday today, the anniversary of the death of some general or another, so the street markets in Saigon have shriveled to a couple dozen hopeful vendors displaying baskets of veggies. The men drink beer and watch soccer. The woman do what ever women do when men drink beer an watch soccer, which typically is everything. I wander a few blocks from my apartment through side streets with my camera.

A woman slicing lettuce sees my camera and holds up a slack jawed, mostly naked baby for my appraisal. I snap a few pictures. She grins.

A man beckons me to photograph him and his limes. He squats and displays a winning smile, an onion in one hand, a lime in the other.

Down the block it goes. Take a picture of me! Now me! Wait- the baby too, look at this puppy, get all of us and the puppy!

I’m grabbed and shown a bulky Australian man as if to say -”Look! One of your own kind!” We shake hands and he asks me to sit for a beer and fried meat.

“They think we know each other. They think all the white people know each other. They’ve shown me four other tourists in the last half hour, your the first one that stopped.”

I want to say I’m not a tourist but instead I raise my camera to take another picture.

Community Connection

Where is your favorite place to wander about and snap pix? Refine your skills with Brave New Travelers Shoot Better Travel Photos With 5 Essential Travel Photo Tips and get some inspiration from Photo Essay: Trekking Langtang in Nepal.

Photo by the Author

I enter the Old City after dawn. Quietly, like I want to steal it. I pass through the Zion Gate and head along the sand-colored walls to the Jewish Quarter. The shops selling sweets and holy books are closed.

Beneath them are Roman columns that rise up from another Jerusalem. I want to say to each column, “Are you talking today? Do I get even one secret? One little Roman secret? Lonely Romans must have talked a blue streak around you.”

Long Jewish shadows flit by me on their way to the Wailing Wall. I find I have less to say to them than to the columns. The shadows I know. The shadows I grew up with.

Down the street, the eternally dark alleys of the Muslim Quarter belly towards distant patches of light. Nothing is really distant in the Old City. But the light, pushed away by the darkness, gives the impression of serious separation.

The shops are shuttered. Soon the tourists will come pouring into Arab Jerusalem through its many gates, and the shutters will lift, and even the Christians hauling their crosses to Calvary will be pressured to buy luggage, floor mats, Arab gowns a block long.

I will not awake the walled-in city from its sleep to remind it it is a contested city, the object of the wet dreams of three religions. I like it the way it is right now, sailing in its sleep beneath all the claims made on its behalf.

Community Connection

Please submit Notes from the Road to david [at] matadornetwork.com for consideration.

I don’t know why I came to Montagnana. Yes I do. It has a hostel. It has a hostel in one of the best preserved medieval walls in all of Europe. In the plains between Venice and Verona, Montagnana is a lush lawn lapping against a rise of brick.

As the restaurant begins to fill and yell and simmer over with bay leaves, mozzarella and garlic, I’m lost in self-pleased, melancholy reverie, sinking back into the wicker chair waiting for the waitress. Why did I come to Montagnana again? Oh, yeah, the wall.

Brown from a lifetime of Montagnana afternoons, she is tall, dark. She moves like a slender tree. The smile that breaks across her face and never fully retreats breaks my heart.

I love you

I want to marry her before she can take my order.

I eat a whole pizza, drink two beers and as the restaurant begins to fold in and clean itself I slowly nurse a third.

Why did I come to Montagnana again?

Oh, yeah, her.

The stars are sharp and low and loud. Her. I imagine her riding out of town with me on a ‘63 Desert Triumph. I see my life in a modest villa with Waitress Girl. I don’t want to leave the restaurant. Should I order another pizza? My beer is going warm.

I pay and force one foot and then another. I want to say something to her, just something to let some of this feeling out into the world.

Do you have a boyfriend, because I think I love you.

She flits in and out of view, carrying plates, pocketing change, looking tired. My foot sneaks forward an inch or two. I grind the gravel with my toes in little circles. She disappears with a load of dirty plates.
I walk away, like I hoped I wouldn’t but knew I would.

Community Connection

Have you been smitten while on the road? Did you have the courage to say something, or did you keep it bottled up? Either way, do you regret your choice?

All photos by author.

September 2003. We cross the border into Poland from Slovakia. Our party bus is pulled aside and a control officer hops on. He glides down the aisle, sucking air and grabbing passports. He must love his job.

He reaches me and pauses, peering down and pinning me to the leather seat with a glassy blue stare. I slip that worn out forest green passport into his long, lean hand. He flips through green tinted pages and studies the unfamiliar document.

“It’s a passport!” my inner voice yells back. It had already screamed twice that day.

Grabbing the foreign item from me, he slides it beneath the stack of blue and red already in hand. For easier access, I tell my seatmate. He grabs her blue passport and places it atop the pile.

He hops off the bus and summons his colleague. Draws his attention to that forest green book. Ten noses press against glass windows like school kids, observing their interaction below.

“Ooh ooh! Lola is in trouble again!” they chant. I smile. They pull me back into the fold but the officers win the tug of war. He signals up to me to get off. This means arriving into Krakow later than anticipated. I need to explain that green book in person.

Krakow is quite sexy beneath the veil of night. I wasn’t expecting her to be. She senses my dejection and steers us underground to Fusion with its labyrinth of lounges carved from rock, its magenta, cyan, and yellow strobe lights.

Hip hop night. I check out the dancing Poles. I feel out their vibe. I proceed to a corner to dance…and dance and dance until he approaches me, covered in black.

Tall. Head shaven. Eyes similar to those that had pinned me to my seat earlier that evening, demanding I explain what I wanted in his country…from his country.

We dance silently for fifteen minutes.

“Mikael,” he finally introduces. I nod weakly. I want nothing to do with him. We dance some more. He studies my face. I turn away.

“Where are you from?” he asks. I tell him about my green passport.

Blue eyes now dyed red from the strobes light up in recognition. He grabs my hand and pulls me forcefully. He drags me through underground caves. We sail through masses of sweaty people.

He plants me squarely in front of a group leaning against a wall.

I study their faces. My countrymen. “These are my friends!” he introduces. I turn to Mikael. The words never come but he hears them anyway.

He grabs my hand and gives it a kiss.

The author looking at old publications / notes with young assistant. Photo: Laura Bernhein

1. Damn. I just built more shelves at my parents’ garage. (There are no basements in Florida.) I don’t want to leave anything here but I’m not sure what to do with my boxes of old notebooks, newspapers, journals, magazines. My first publications. What do other writers do with this stuff?

2. I collected my first crate of this stuff in college. Early journals of creative writing, assignments from Coleman Barks’ class. Later I looked at it and thought ‘I hope nobody ever finds this.’ One day my parents asked if I could take a bunch of stuff to the landfill and I threw those early notebooks in there too. Thinking back now I should’ve burned them.

3. The family and I are heading to Patagonia in a couple months. We have a little piece of land in El Bolsón. We’re totally limited as to what we can bring down there, and for me the gear has to get packed first: tools, snowboard, wetsuits, boots, snowshoes, goggles. Maybe a few books.

4. It’s weird flipping back through some of these old notes and publications though. Some of them have aged better than I would’ve guessed. Others I can’t read. Things like this seem more about remembering where you were and what you were doing around the time you were writing them. How hard you thought it was then. And how much harder it seems now.

5. I don’t think I’d like to burn this batch of writing. Maybe something like shred it, then use as insulation for the cabin.

6. When I was first trying to get published it was like learning how to paddle. I wanted to publish so bad, and then after I finally got my first publication (It was in the Mountain Gazette), I thought, damn–you build it all up in your mind just like a rapid.

Oceana, Tallulah Gorge. Photo: Alex Harvey.

And then finally you just step up and fire that shit and once it’s over, all you want to do is run another one.

7. There was this one rapid, Oceana, on the Tallulah River. The thing dropped like 80 feet. I scouted it and couldn’t see exactly where to go, but I could definitely see where I didn’t want to go. I felt like an ant down there in the bottom of the gorge. People were watching from observation platforms hundreds of feet up the canyon walls.

8. A bro up at the Chattooga had told me “it’s good to go, just lean back when you hit the bottom.” The thing was ugly and beautiful and massive and it was time to run. A few paddle strokes then all white-out, then impact, then I rolled up.

9. You can take a picture or write a story and put it in a box, put the box up on a shelf, then take it back down (or someone else takes it back down) later. It seems anti-flow though. In the end you can’t take anything but the ride itself.

Community Connection

What do you do with all your old notes and contributors copies? Let us know in the comments.

Dudes. Hillary Harrison Photo.

At some point I’d decided I should go to the Lebowski Fest. Actually go and see what it was like, rather than just imagine it and then later look at pictures online and wish I’d gone—and then pretty soon forget about it entirely.

I was in those days balancing my time between writing, thinking about writing, thinking about other things, and trying to kill squirrels with a pellet gun. My wife had suggested on several occasions that maybe I ought to get a job. A real job. Like where you commute back and forth to an office and get a paycheck every two weeks and eventually work your way up to parking and benefits.

You just don’t seem happy, she said.

Of course I’m happy, I said. Why don’t I seem happy?

You don’t even bother to get out of your bathrobe anymore.

Which on some level I resented. Yes it was a bathrobe, but I had shorts on underneath and a clean T-shirt. I was not barefoot. I was wearing flip-flops, and on my eyes, against the glare of the sidelong winter sun, a pair of fine, expensive, protective eyeglasses. It was cold enough in the house, and cold enough outside too, that I wanted to wear a bathrobe. It was more pleasant that way.

The most I was going to do, as far as going out was concerned, was maybe to mow the lawn out front or do some cleanup in the back. I wasn’t planning on going beyond our property line. I wasn’t, for example, planning on driving to Von’s for a quart of half-and-half. Not in my bathrobe, anyway. I wasn’t, after all, Jeff Lebowski.

It’s a housecoat, I said. Not a bathrobe.

Sometimes, on Wednesday nights, before trash day, out on the sidewalk, I’d meet up with my neighbor, the half-Armenian, half-Georgian, ex-Soviet Air Force pilot who had flown hundreds of passenger-jet sorties into Kabul during that particular Afghan war, in the eighties, bringing fresh troops in and taking dead bodies out.

Nowadays, he was working six days a week, two shifts a day, around the clock, by night a uniformed security guard at a hospital downtown, by day a plainclothes detective at a jewelry store in Beverly Hills. Twenty-five dollars an hour plus benefits.

So where’s The Dude?

I work like donkey, he’d say, grinning, as we wrestled our respective bins, me in my housecoat, he with his badge and gun.

I know, I’d say. You’re a good man for it.

And then he’d say: Any news regarding your job?

What job, I’d think to myself, what’s he talking about?

No, I’d say. No news.

I was interested in the idea of a community of fans, a community founded upon the otherwise solitary experience of watching a movie—which is of course not an uncommon phenomenon, especially in America. But this was not Star Trek or Harry Potter or Remington Steele.

This was The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers’ irreverent update of the Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe/mistaken identity tradition, in which Jeff Bridges plays “The Dude,” aka Jeffrey Lebowski—a hapless and amiable bum of the sort one sees often enough around Los Angeles, wandering the aisles of the local grocery franchise in bathrobe and sandals.

The character’s most obvious appeal, it seemed to me, was the way in which he, like Marlowe before him, redefined cool—Jesus-cool, postmodern-style—cool as the ultimate lack of aspiration.

The Dude was quite possibly, as the movie’s narrator puts it, the laziest man in Los Angeles County, “which put him high in the running for laziest worldwide.” That is, until someone peed on his rug and a certain amount of action had to be taken. And a lazy man forced into action is a surprisingly interesting thing to watch.

I wasn’t convinced that as a movie it was as good as, say, Raising Arizona, which had always ranked in my top ten, or even Altman’s The Long Goodbye, from which the Brothers Coen had here drawn inspiration. But I felt I understood the sense of humor behind the thing. So I figured why not check out the nature of the community it had spawned. See if it had anything to do with me. Or the state of the Union.

The audio files were deleted long ago, alas. But here is some of what I’ve been able to glean from the notebook:

9:45 PM, Friday. 7000-something Hollywood Blvd.

Live from the Westbound Pedestrian Detour in front of the Kodak Theater, two nights before the Oscars. Hollywood is closed from Highland. Gangs of production people adorned with all-access passes, bomb-sniffing dogs, clusters of photographers and newsmen trying to sort out how to approach Sunday Night.

Book by Founding Dudes.

I am standing on a spot that will soon feature prominently on TV.

Next door, at the pre-party for Lebowski Fest West, inside some kind of night club, not much going on: only a few people drinking White Russians; nobody, as far as I can tell, smoking pot. I see a few guys trying to be The Dude. But the thing you realize is it’s nothing to do with the costume.

The original Dude, the inspiration for the character, is supposed to be here tonight. I don’t see him yet.

Once I get it in my head that in fact I may be The Dude, everything starts to pick up.

Chris and Danna have been married three times and divorced three times. To each other, it seems. Chris is wearing a trenchcoat, calf-length Indian moccasins and black sunglasses. He is not the original Dude, he says. “It’s just that they made a movie about a guy who’s life mirrors mine in a way that’s crazy.”

I order another White Russian. The bartender explains to me how in this life the best thing to be good at is being poor. Which I am highly practiced at, but not at all good at.

There is some kind of raffle, involving the original Ralph’s checkout girl, who is there with her twin sister. You can tell which is which because one is dressed in a Ralph’s uniform.

They show the movie on a big screen over the dance floor. It’s better than I remember. Then I wake up in the back of my truck in the parking garage.

8:50 PM, Saturday. Cal Bowl, 2500 E. Carson

There are nihilists. There are Sam Elliot look-alikes with pristine white hats and real handlebar mustaches. There are any number of Maudes in red wigs and bathrobes. Most are considerably fleshier than the wispy Julianne Moore version.

There are three Jesuses, and three bars serving White Russians. There are lines to get drinks. Everyone waits with utmost patience.

There is a reporter covering the event for a Japanese magazine, and a crew from Spanish TV.

One woman has come as the ransom note, another as the coffee can that held Larry’s ashes. There is to be a costume contest. There are several Walters. One is pretty convincing. Another has come as Walter’s dirty underwear.

There is a bowling team called The Bums. They wear their gloves on their heads. They lose. I am disappointed this is not the actual bowling alley from the movie.

There are some admittedly dudely fellows in long cardigan sweaters and real beards. The Original Dude, the inspiration, is named Jeff Dowd. Jeff “The Dude” Dowd. He has no beard. He gets up to make a speech, starts out complaining about how hard it has been to get a drink. Then the mic cuts out on him.

Jeff “The Dude” Dowd. Jerry Duvall Photo.

Melinda and Ed are up from San Diego. Some people get it, they say. Some people don’t. They saw the movie together when it first came out, in San Francisco. They bought the VHS, wore it out, now they have it on DVD. Melissa is worried about her car out in the parking lot—in the hood, as she puts it.

I leave the bowling alley and go next door for some soul food. I try the chitterlings, which I’m told are pig’s intestines (”you have to eat them with hot sauce”), then opt for a pork chop and some mac and cheese.

Back in the action, I spot the original Liam. And Chuck E. Cheese, who is in fact, I learn, a marmot. One of the Jesuses walks out into the lanes to retrieve his ball. One of the Maudes bowls a strike. The Original Dude bowls a spare.

Says one onlooker: “This is the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

A Jackie Treehorn recommends I see the Albert Brooks movie Lost in America. He confides that Lebowski Fest Vegas is better than Lebowski Fest LA. Someone else argues for Austin.

Outside the bowling alley, the night winds down ever so slowly with an original Jeff Dowd look-alike (who is not Jeff Bridges) doing an acoustic-guitar workup of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing: hold on to that fee-layee-ya’ang…

And then, soon enough: it goes on and on and on and on…

Community Connection

Also check out Eva Holland on The Meaning of ‘The Big Lebowski,” all these years later.

For more wild and wacky festivals across the globe, check out Matador Nights.

Got your own Lebowski Fest dispatches? Share them below…

Photo: mr. nightshade

Tonight the tents and RVs and camps are empty.

Tonight ice melts in unattended coolers. Filthy lawn chairs hold silent counsel over vacant plots of dust.

Tonight 43,000 burners gather in ever widening, concentric circles. The Man stands with neon and lumber arms stretched toward the sky.

This is what I have been waiting for.

Flicking a cigarette into the desert wind, a veteran burner tells me he could almost skip it. He says it has become a passe spectacle, that the Burning of The Man isn’t the point.

But I wouldn’t miss it.

And from the bursts of fire, a quarter mile distant, comes glimpses of the tens of thousands who wouldn’t miss it either.

Even the jaded old burners, a little bored, a little self important, wait restlessly for the fire.

Photo: william.neuheisel

We stoke the collective need for The Man to Burn with our upturned eyes and raised hands and dancing feet.

Firefighters in haz-mat suits and shiny beetle shell helmets hold a wide perimeter around the Man.

Are the firefighters apart of this?

Are they too feeding the fire, or merely waiting to clock off?

As the call comes through on the walkie talkie does their breath catch? Even a little?

Boooooom!

Ahhhhhhh…*

Red gold green works of fire explode above the Man. Downwind smoldering debris falls.

We scream.

For the joy, the slaked anticipation, for the thing that was built to burn, we scream and scream.

The fireworks conclude in an inferno, a torrent of flame curling in on itself in a roiling plume, breathing heat and light on the upturned (screaming) faces.

For a moment everything is fire.

The Man burns to the ground and we rush in, ignoring the commands of the firefighters to stay back. It’s not time! they shout. They only shout once then look on helplessly, shrugging at each other.

Counterclockwise we circle the fire.The air is warped with heat.

A perfect, naked pixie twirls her lithe frame before the curtain of fire.

Community Connection

Have you had an experience at Burning Man you would like to share? Please hit us up in the comments below.

Get your Burning Man fix all year right here on Matador: The First-Timer’s Guide to Participating at Burning Man, BNT’s Best Of The Week: Burning Man Roundup,13 of the Coolest Art Installations in the History of Burning Man.

Blue Sky. Image released by Dept. of Defense

It’s what we notice that hurts afterward. This year I’ll wake up on September 11 and think, as I have for the past seven years: “The sky was just so blue.”

It was the thought that played in my head all day, a ridiculous refrain. As if perfect blue could ward off what was about to happen. Or as if it would dissipate completely afterward, the sinister plumes powerful enough to blot out blue as far as the eye could see.

It was the sky I was thinking about, driving along the East River on my way to work in Queens, tempted to turn back and go home or anywhere else.

Just months into my new job as a psychotherapist working with mentally ill adults, I knew it wasn’t right. There was nothing therapeutic about a basement office with scuffed walls and no windows, an oppressive stale air hanging perpetually in the space. There was little we could achieve by listening to people tell the stories of their lives over and over again because that’s what Medicaid mandated.

I needed air. Open space to think. That blue sky.

Instead, I was in high heels, pressing gas-brake-gas-brake all the way to work until I found a parking place. You don’t notice time when you don’t need to, when nothing significant is going on. You think: “Coffee. Notebook. Pen. Morning staff meeting.” Having given in to the roteness of your days, you’re on automatic. You look back on these moments and think you should have been more attentive. You should, at least, have made a note of the time.

James was the most psychotic of my clients, constantly besieged by invisible torturers who delighted in making him miserable. “Get the knife out of my back!” he said as I shut my office door and put my keys and ID around my neck. It was too early to practice reality testing. “Sit down, James. We’ll talk about the knife later.”

“Not a knife. Not a knife. I’m telling you, get the planes out of those buildings!”

This was a new one.

James pulled the TV out of a therapy room and into the common room, tuning in to the only channel whose signal could penetrate the basement. The planes were stuck in the buildings. “What are you going to do about it?” James asked me, and I couldn’t decide if his tone was like a child earnestly asking a parent or like the part of him that scared me most– the part that challenged me because it touched a place deep inside where I felt entirely inadequate to help.

“I’m not sure yet,” I answered honestly, and shut the staff room door behind me.

We would evacuate the patients, sending them home to parents or caregivers who’d have to deal with the immediate terror of the attacks. We would be sent home ourselves, wanting to go but wanting to stay, too. Not wanting to go home to our small apartments, where we knew we’d be alone with our televisions, curled up on couches and watching the deliberate speed of the crashes over and over again without learning anything new, wanting to do something—anything—different, but not being able to.

U.S. Navy Photo by Jim Watson. (RELEASED)

The thoughts that occurred to me as the 30 minute commute home to the South Bronx stretched to six hours, most of which were spent sitting motionless on the Queensboro Bridge, where I watched smoke billow into the sky: I will never wear high heels again. I will always keep my cell phone charged (the battery was dead). I will always have gas in my car (the tank was empty and I was broke). The sky is still so blue.

In the weeks that followed, I’d sit in class at NYU and smell death in the air. I’d clean ash from the windowsills of my apartment—more than six miles from the Trade Center—every day. I’d look at posters of the presumed missing, one photograph of a fat man in a suit, standing next to an elephant imprinted in my mind.

I’d sit in meetings where we’d talk about emergency plans, contingencies for disasters that pushed the limits of our imaginations. I’d spend eight hours counseling clients at work. I’d be drafted to counsel colleagues in a strange ethical void of what people were starting to call the “new normal.” I’d be dispatched to counsel people in parks.

And finally—months later—I’d be asked to counsel Spanish speaking immigrant women. Either their partners had died or had been picked up by Immigration and carted off to distant prisons in states whose names they couldn’t pronounce, but either way, it was hell.

“I just can’t stop thinking about the stack of letters,” one woman told me, raising her hand above her head to show how high the bills and official notices piled up. “I understand,” I told her, breaking up inside, thinking, again, about that blue sky.

Community Connection

For another Matadorian’s memories of 9/11, please read 8:46 am, 9/11 Manhattan by Tom Gates.

My tiny digital camera weaves and bobs on the security belt. I am scanned from armpit to ankle. I tingle. Is it because I feel myself threatened, or because I feel myself a threat?

The Israeli policeman waves me through. I am cleared to pray.

The roar of prayer sweeping across the plaza from the Wall makes an angry sea sound. Jerusalem suffers from being a holy city on the bank of no river. It needs water. Water would wean it off words.  Would help wash down the tonnage of scripture that has gone into making this city.

The Wailing Wall sat on our kitchen table in the Bronx. Wrapped around the family charity box, it looked brittle from centuries of being touched and wept upon. It seems to have grown younger, stronger,  with time.

Hasidim quake like black-jacketed exclamation marks who have arrived at last at the end of days. I see a sign visible only  to myself: Only Those Serious About Their Souls May Enter Here.

It is early in the morning, and the other spiritually superficial  tourists are still asleep. I want to say a prayer for my mother who prayed here once, and who died, prayerless, of Alzheimer’s.

I am shy around strangers; it keeps me from talking to God. But here is my chance. The plaza is a landing strip for prayers, the Wall the Ganges of the Jews. It makes me uneasy. It comes wrapped in too much history for me. Wrapped and re-wrapped. A stone chronicle of destruction, lamentation, resurrection.

My prayer, still embryonic, needs a place scrubbed of grandeur.  Some place small. Some place I can whisper into. Smaller even than a charity box on a table long ago destroyed.

Community Connection

Please submit notes to david [at] matadornetwork.com

Interested in visiting Jerusalem? Check out the customs you should know about before going.

Jasper in Joshua Tree National Park, aged 13 mos. Photo by Author.

1. The Plan

When young Jasper, our first, came to that remarkable, frightening, and eminently enviable age of thirteen months, his manual dexterity having nearly reached a par with his appetite—and my wife too frequently finding her blouse unbuttoned (or rather de-buttoned) in public—I took it upon myself to cure the boy of his once-happy relationship with his mother’s glands. Thereby to introduce him to the wide world beyond. And to liberate us all.

Anytime after a year, said the pediatrician.

He’d successfully weathered his first slabs of dark-chocolate cake, had begun to stand on his own stubby feet for seconds on end, had shown a precocious interest in beer bottles and off-width crack climbing. Now seemed as good a time as any. Why drag it out? I remarked to him one evening while changing his diaper. All good things come to an end.

How is a boy to give this up?
Photo: Wikipedia Commons

But how to get it done? The experts are split on the subject. Today’s online chat community will generally recommend doing it gradually—taking away one feeding at a time over the course of weeks, or even months—the idea being: (1) to ease the physical transition for the mother; and (2) to limit emotional stress for both parties.

As for the first part, I can’t claim any expertise (it seems mothers over the centuries have developed ways of dealing either way—ask my wife: I know it wasn’t easy, but somehow she worked it out).

As for the second part, I’m not so sure: how can one gauge the relative stress on all parties resulting from the ongoing power struggles, the screaming child in one room, in the other the mother with her head beneath a pillow?

Versus, say, just cutting it short, using the whole episode as an excuse for the boy’s first real road trip.

The Zulu are said to dispense with weaning their children in a single day. A pair of researchers in 1956 observed 19 Zulu children “before, during, and after” what seemed to them a shockingly abrupt process. They expected all manner of trauma and other nasty Freudian complications. Instead, they found that the children quickly moved on to bigger and better things.

The plan was simple enough: a two- or three-day road trip in the desert, father and son, with plenty of distractions—and a copious supply of organic whole cow’s milk. Death Valley maybe. Or Baja. While Mommy got to stay up late with the breast pump, drink martinis with her friends, and sleep as late as she could.

A friend mentioned the Joshua Tree Music Festival. Perfect, I thought. He loves music. He’d been thoroughly pleasant at Coachella a week earlier. He’d been impressed with Los Amigos Invisibles, had enjoyed picking up cigarette butts in 100+ degree heat and crawling around the polo field amongst the empty plastic cups.

Even when the security forces wouldn’t let him into the beer garden, he’d kept his cool. It wasn’t until the Madonna set that he’d wanted to go home.

I hitched up the old aluminum fuselage: a 1954 Silver Streak Clipper, built by one of the Wright Brothers, and packed the truck with all the necessary safari equipment: canvas awning, solar panel, propane, Afghan rugs, rope, headlamps, firewood, multiple five-gallon jerry cans filled with water, red wagon, jogging stroller, beach towels, buckets, shovels, folding chairs, soccer ball, pack-n-play, sunblock, inflatable pool, beer, milk…

The fuselage in California’s High Desert. Photo by Author.

2. The Road

We snuck out before dawn. It was mid-May. The AC in the Land Cruiser had been out of commission since the latter days of the Reagan era.

The Department of Transportation’s Changeable Message Signs gave no indication of impediments to travel. Instead, they warned of a child abduction in progress: Amber Alert. Someone had made off with an 18-month-old boy and his aunt, who happened to be “the suspect’s estranged wife.”

Strapped into his torture chair, with the blue air of morning gusting through the cab at seventy miles an hour, my own boy slept—like a baby, they say (they who do not know better)—while I set a direct course for sunrise in the Mojave.

At Rancho Cucamonga, just before the 15, we hit a bottleneck. Jasper woke with a start, only to find the breeze stopped dead, the heat coming up faster than the sun. Ever since his inaugural automobile journey—the one from Cedars-Sinai east across town on Beverly—he’s had an aversion to traffic. He wanted to be moving. He wanted out. And he was not pleased to see the last curds of breast milk already long drained from his bottle.

He began to cry (like a baby, they say).

All around us sat suspicious commuters in enormous aerodynamically-shaped vessels worth more than perfectly habitable two-bedroom houses in Oklahoma. He began to scream. People looked. He began to make shrieking noises. One might have imagined I was peeling back his toenails. I rolled up the windows.

Magic Hour at the JTree Music Fest. Photo by Author.

Which was about the moment my wife called to see how we were doing (just fine, I said, over the howling), and to let me know that I’d forgotten the bag she’d packed (oops)—the one with his diapers, wipes, shoes, and all his clothes.

No problem, I said. We’ll work it out.

And so we did. We purchased some distressingly cheap threads from the sale racks at a department store in Yucca Valley, likely the handiwork of recently-weaned children in Malaysia.

We set up our camp along the barbwire fence at the edge of the campground, as far away from the stages as we could manage, and began to ferry water for the wading pool. By the following morning, with the desert heat rising once again, we awoke to find all manner of glass-eyed and benevolent hippies resting weary heads beneath the fringes of our shade.

After three days and three nights of curdling heat, cold pizza and applesauce, gale-force sandstorms, stinking porta-potties, impromptu drum circles, and all-night high-voltage folk-electronica—one cold six-pack from the trailer fridge traded late in the weekend for an extra gallon of 2%—the thing was done.

When his mother showed up on Sunday (her breasts, alas, still sore), Jasper, for his part, was thrilled to see her—no longer merely as a necessary and friendly appendage to those aching glands, but as a person: someone he could clink bottles with (plastic to glass), dance with, travel the world with. Someone who, for years to come, would be willing to cook him hot dogs and pancakes and Bengali lentils, would occasionally use psychological means to cause him to eat asparagus, and often, when conditions were mostly right, serve him ice cream in a cone.

3. Coda

Home on the road. Photo by Author.

Jasper survived the next three years rather admirably, I thought. He seemed as, er, well-adjusted as any of the other small animals I had met from his generation.

He wore underwear, dressed himself, skied without a leash. He knew his letters cold. And could occasionally be convinced to shovel toys onto shelves, or refrain from trying to squash his little brother’s fragile skull, in exchange for a small dose of sugar, or the promise of an extra story at bedtime (or the threat of one less).

Beckett, on the other hand, was just getting started. And so one day young Jasper and I, busy as each of us happened to be that early December, agreed to commit a full week’s time to introduce the little fellow, on the eve of his first birthday, to the wider world beyond the maternal comforts to which he had always been accustomed. And in the meantime give Mommy a chance to do some real skiing.

The plan: a 32-hour boys-only round-trip train journey from California to New Mexico—riding the old rails along Route 66, across the Great American Desert—for an early-winter visit to his grandfather’s garlic farm.

Photo by the Author.

A gray skeletal hulk in the middle of an alleyway in Colaba in Mumbai South, it is a place that will always belong to the past.

Even on this warm Sunday morning in March, with the neighborhood women in their red and gold saris passing Nariman House with mangos and chapattis, this structure belongs to November. The November of last year’s massacre.

I stand outside the house. It is hot. My body is stone cold. It is all those dark spaces inside the Jewish center, the boarded up windows, behind which the story unfolded that everyone knows: the break-in by the four Islamic terrorists, the slaughter of the six Jews by the terrorists, the slaying of the four terrorists by the Indian commandos.

An Indian man says to me sharply in passing: “Why are you looking? What is to see?” I don’t know what to say. I see an elderly Indian policeman sitting in a chair at the entrance to the building. His eyes are half-closed. His rifle is asleep in his lap. I like that policeman. I feel protected by his harmlessness.

Nariman House provides him with a few rupees and some shade. His gun is ornamental. November’s antidote.I consider the first man’s question. Why am I looking? I begin to see what he is driving at. He wants to forget. By looking, I remember. I am an insufferable rememberer. Chalk it up to my Jewish DNA. It’s a birth defect like a cleft palette. Only unlike a cleft palette, you can’t get rid of it.

Other Jews visit Auschwitz and Dachau. They stand very still and listen, as I am listening now. Maybe if they listen hard enough, creatures of rag and bone, yet enormous in their martyrdom, will float out of the barracks and say the things the listeners are listening for. What are those things?

For myself, I would want to hear the six as ordinary galumphing people complaining about in-laws and tight shoes and the hallucinogenic idols of India.

I am fascinated by who they were before they were bound, mutilated and hatched as immortals in the calamitous tree of Jewish memory.

A few blocks away is the Arabian Sea. I could go there and reinvent myself as a normal tourist. Victoria’s Gateway is there. I could board a a boat and head for the caves of Elephanta. But then I’d be crossing the waters the terrorists came out of that night. It wouldn’t be right to pollute the Arabian Sea with my morbidity.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

Bomb crater in Phonsavan, Laos. Photo by author

Phonsavan is a few straight lines in a valley that is fringed with soft green hills. On these few straight lines are a couple hundred concrete cubes; restaurants, guest houses, mechanics dens, pharmacies and vendors that stock sandals and machetes.

Massive artillery shell casings sit rusted on store fronts, home to shrubs and cigarette butts instead of shrapnel and explosives. A missile suspended on a chain, painted crookedly in red: “good, cheap food.”

The skull and crossbones and the hulking shells appeal to my piratical sensibilities and draw me in to the Mine Advisory Group Phonsavan office.

Mine Advisory Group painstakingly cleans up unexploded ordinance (bombs) from conflict zones of wars past. The litter of war that may sit for decades after arms are laid aside.

Lebanon, Gaza, Somalia, Chad, Sudan, Cambodia, Angola…MAG has worked in 35 countries since 1989.

Illustrations depict the mechanics of cluster bombs. 300 baseball-sized explosives fill the weapon. A few hundred feet above the ground the cluster bomb is split in two and its payload fans out to a 100 square meter radius and then destroys everything. Everything that does not die is taken apart to shrieking pieces.

I face pictures of unsmiling armless villagers. Children. Pictures of men digging around the flanks of a half exposed unexploded missile, 30 years dormant.

A little man walks out from the back of the office space.

MAG provides Mine Risk Education to villagers.

He was about to take his dinner, I can smell the broth, but now he stands a few feet from me smiling to himself, looking at the display in polite, mild interest:

Xieng Khonang is one of the most heavily bombed provinces in the most heavily bombed country in the world.

At least two million Tones of ordinance was dropped on Laos between ‘64-’73.

metric tonne= 2205 lb.

2 million metric tonnes= 4,410,000,000 lb.

I just have to stand here for a minute and bite my lip thinking about 4.5 billion lb. of bombs… what that might look like. Some monstrous emotion wraps around my skull and I’m not really reading anymore, just looking forward.

It is estimated that up to 30% of this ordinance did not detonate. Decades later, unexploded ordinance (uxo) still contaminates rural areas in over half the country. 2,000 lb. shells are sold for $60 at the scrap yard. $100 if they still contain the powder. For many people this is worth the risk.

I feel sick. We did this. Facing the wall of pictures and statistics I clench my jaw and focus on the spot directly in front of me. Still I feel faint.

author and bomb crater in the Plain of Jars.

It’s estimated that the United States dropped 1 plane load of bombs on Laos, every 8 minutes for 9 years.

“Excuse me, where you from?” I didn’t really notice him sidle up to me.

“uuuuh, ” I scratch my eye, and look somewhere. I’m really tired.

“Aah, um… Ameri-”

My body would rather sob than say it. He takes a small step forward.

“It’s ok.” he says.

Community Connection

Laos is an amazing place to travel and volunteer. If it is Laos lore you seek I suggest Big Brother Mouse: A Book for Every Child in Laos & Gonzo Traveler: Chasing The Dragon In Laos

Also, please check out the video “Conflict Resolution,” a profile of MAG, Mine Advisory Group.

Photo: Nataliehg Feature Photo: Editor B

The team was getting on my nerves. Actually, everything was. It was the fact that all twelve of us were squeezed into a twelve seat van. It was the van’s smell after five days of driving. It was the Starburst wrappers we’d thrown on the floor. It was the dirt from our shoes that had been ground into the van’s gray carpet.

It was Grant’s choice in music. It was the way my backpack took up my feet room. It was Tim falling asleep and crushing me. It was not knowing where my pillow was when we rearranged ourselves after a bathroom break. It was Tasha’s chattering. It was Jimmy’s and Maggie’s and Brendan’s smoke breaks. It was that huge bucket of sunflower seed packets that Walt wanted to buy that was taking up space in the aisle.

Really, they’re all nice people. Really, my problem was just that we’d been so uncomfortably squeezed into that van and sent on this five day road trip from Sacramento to New Orleans. Under these circumstances, any little thing, coupled with every other little thing, can become just too much to bear.

The annoyances faded as we entered Orleans Parish—still, at that point, something of a ghost town.

Photo: ~MVI~

Our drive took us through entire neighborhoods in ruin, with houses missing windows and doors. The furniture and belongings inside were black with mold and tossed about from the flood.

As we drove down the streets of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, it was easy to see why we were so needed: in many places, little or no progress had been made.

So many streets were still (and are, even now) vacant, their facades crumbling, forlorn and forsaken. Some homes still needed gutting; others were completely abandoned after being stripped of their insides. Everywhere FEMA trailers wedged between these skeleton-homes. Welcome back.

We finally emerged at the end of that trip, exhausted and dirty, at Habitat for Humanity’s Camp Hope outside of New Orleans. I felt relieved to be out of the dirty, cramped van and anxious to unpack in to my new home. Those feelings faded to dread when I later settled into my home for two months: a bunk bed in a converted science classroom, which I shared with thirty other women.

It’s probably fitting that I lost my travel virginity in my own hometown.

Living through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath and fearing becoming trapped in a cubicle after my college graduation, I chose to run away from home while still justifying my existence with meaningful work. I joined the most unconventional organization I could find: AmeriCorps NCCC, a national service program that sends young people on service projects around the country for ten months.

My first project happened to be in the very place I was trying to leave. Later, though, we’d travel to California and Washington, and I’d be moved by the resilience of those we served—people facing problems tougher than any I’d ever experienced.

NCCC prides itself on breaking its members out of their comfort zones and building the kind of flexibility and go-with-the-flow attitude this type of program—traveling service—inherently demands. We’d nearly complete one two-month project before the powers that be “revealed” the next one to us.

Photo: Sundaykofax

For a year of my life I rode in a government-issued van wearing government-issued uniform and living out of the one suitcase I brought with me from home. I experienced a sort of homelessness, carrying only what I needed and leaving my life up to chance. It was freeing and confining, inspiring and heartbreaking.

I slept and showered irregularly, hardly ever did laundry (if I could help it), ate way too much cheap chicken sold in bulk at Sam’s Club, awoke at ungodly hours to work in the pre-dawn cold of some very unappealing places. I cooked, worked, and hung out with the same group of people. I loved it and hated it, usually all at once.

During my year in NCCC, I was forced, for the first time, completely out of my comfort zone, awake to the world waiting to unveil itself on the road ahead—wherever that might be.

The author, snowboarding a late-season snowfield in Rocky Mountain National Park. Detail below.

7 / 20 / 09. 9:30 pm. Light wind. Heat lightning to the East.

Just blew out the candles and writing now by headlamp. Settling in for another night in the dharma shack, the second since the bear ripped the door off the trailer. The bear left this stink like he’d pissed on the floor. I asked Lau if she thought about revenge. “You mean like killing the bear?” she said. “No.”

Earlier I’d driven the truck down the hill with the generator and shop-vac in the back. The sun was setting. I vacuumed the shit out of the place–dog food and oats cycloning up the hose–cursing and stomping around in the bear-stink, the trailer rocking, trying to find every last oat with my headlamp on as it’s quickly turning to night outside.

The Great Wave by Hokusai.

I was so pissed that really there was no calming wind until tonight, a day later, after we’ve moved up here to the shack and now all lie in bed – Layla here nursing with Mamá — where I found this journal (the “Dharma Shack Chronicles”) and started writing.

I’ve always loved the picture on the front cover (“The Great Wave” by Hokusai), the fishermen huddled along the gunwales. Huge waves and spray and Mt. Fuji in the background. If you look at it hard enough you can almost hear it.

Why stay pissed about the bear? Lightning keeps flashing in the East [Denver must be getting hammered] and there are forces that will always be stronger than us. All you can do is bow.

7/26

Six days later and certain things feel settled. A quick trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. Lau + Layla + Tio Will + me. I hiked the board into a high-hanging snowfield on the Northeastern face of Sundance Mtn.

Detail from top photo.

Snow was runnelled and rotten but still a fun run. Will took pictures and I look tiny on the mountainside, which is a good way to feel.

Lau and Layla leave the day after tomorrow, on to Florida where I’ll join in another week. Lau was all broken down about the separation + time alone with my parents but tonight we seemed strong and peaceful.

I think sometimes you just wear all the fighting out of yourself. Whatever it is or was we had a good night tonight visiting our friends in Boulder. Everyone just on their paths and maybe that’s why things, or at least certain things, seemed settled.

7/29

Evening time and intermittent gray cold rain on the Dharma shack roof. The girls have gone back to Florida and I’m lying here smoking a pipe and into my second beer. The first full chunk of pine crackling in the woodstove. Julio at the foot of the bed, his fur drying out.

This is as alone as I’ve been in I don’t know how long, with no cell or wifi or anything else but Segundo up at the casa making dinner (pasta + bratwurst) and Japhy and Kieran down in their room, probably watching Austin Powers again.

The trailer. Photo by Laura Bernhein.

Earlier this afternoon Segundo and I ‘fixed’ the door to the trailer. There was no real framing to tie the door frame into so I ran a bunch of 2 x 4 blocks on the outside and inside of the aluminum shell and then lagged it all together with 5” lag screws. We’ll see if the bear wants in bad enough.

One more rain squall and now it seems to be clearing but it could close back up again any time. Thoughts of Buenos Aires, how in the winter and spring it would rain so hard that the streets would flood and then it would just keep raining, looking down at the swings and benches of Parque Lezama sitting like boats on a harbor.

All this from our 9th story window with Baby Layla only weeks old and mostly asleep except for when she’d wake up and nurse or we’d bathe her singing “Flota float, flota float, baby Layla flota float’ in some innocent melody with roots in old synagogue chants that smoked back through Sunday School all the way to Jerusalem–maybe mixed with some Salsa bass-line that I heard somewhere and which could’ve been the rhythm – her body now moving back and forth in the tub, eyes happy – I first danced with Lau in Mexico, the same rhythm that probably followed us into bed and led to Layla being born in the first place, bathing now, floating, as the rain kept and keeps falling outside.

7/30/09 5:30 pm. Rainy. Low 50s.

This is the rainiest summer I’ve ever seen up here, almost feels like a winter in Western Washington. Still I felt dirty from sitting working on the computer all day and so I take a bag shower, the water 50-something degrees (same as the Dr. Bronner’s –clouded up) as the moisture falls out of the sky and the limbs on the trees where I hang the shower bag.

One of the coldest showers I’ve had and no sun anywhere but then walking up the hill barefoot over the dharma rocks it occurs to me that really I feel better when I’m cold and wet for at least part of the day – it means I’m either kayaking or surfing or hiking through some rained-out mountainside where afterward there might be a fire or at least (unless something is truly off) a warm dry sleeping bag.

Lau thinks there’s a part of me that likes to suffer and maybe she’s right but I think it’s something else that I don’t really know a name for. All I know is that suffering cold wet Dahveed is the first glimpse she got of me—I’d just finished an hours-long afternoon session at Cerritos in Baja.

The big right point was working almost like a wave machine, so good that you stay out until you can’t paddle anymore or you get cold even in that warm water (still colder than your body temp.) so that finally you ride the last wave all the way in and sit there shivering on the sand where this girl notices your face with its content cold happy sadness and wonders “who is this guy; where’s he from?”—all things she told me later.

Photo: Rawheadrex

There were stories before that time for sure, but the time between that day and this has collapsed down and flowed so fast it all just seems like one stream of days which, if the truth be told, has lacked in little but those cold wet feeling moments. Once you get married and have a family you tend to want to keep everyone dry.

Strange though, looking out the dharma shack door: the tiny clear drops clinging to the ends of all the Ponderosa needles.

Community Connection

Have a good selection of travel notes? Send your submission to david [at] matadornetwork.com.

Photo: Bagaball

I had already been to first, second and third base with travel by the time I reached Ghana.

I’d had light dalliances with the West Coast of North America and some superficial, fleeting affairs with the usual places in Western Europe. I’d lived in Ireland for a while, then in London. I did a few backpacker loops through France and Spain and the tiny Benelux countries. A month in then-East Germany, to top it off.

In fact, I’d spent about four years abroad before I finally lost my travel virginity.

Photo: Hiyori13

“I’m going to go stay at my friend Rick’s place in Ghana for January, need to get out of London, ” said my housemate Janet, sometime in late December, a decade ago.

Rick was a fashion designer, had lots of money and lots of time and had built himself a very simple little shack on the coast of Ghana as a retreat from London’s mania. No electricity. Running water only if the big water tanker truck had remembered to refill the tank. Squat loos. Bucket showers.

“Can I join you?” I asked. She shrugged affirmitavely. We went off to Highgate to arrange our complicated visas at the embassy.

When we finally flew in on Balkan Airlines via Sofia, Bulgaria and Tunis, we were already slightly stunned. Our flight had had illegal stowaways that had to be, well, deposited in Tunis. The remaining passengers had brought aboard more carry on baggage than I could fathom, in enormous plaid, plastic shopping bags that filled the overhead bins, the aisles, the nooks and crannies.

In the toilets, there was water pouring down from overhead in a constant waterfall. We were served 10% alcohol Bulgarian beer and a fluorescent pink piece of cake. The seat backs were fixed in a permanently reclined position so all you could do was lie back and stare at the ceiling, drinking your 10% beer and nibbling your fluorescent pink cake.

Upon landing and emerging from the plane, the wall of heat at the top of the stairs was intimidatingly thick and hot and wet. My brain screamed out in panic– Can’t do this for a month! Must go back! Let’s go back! Terrified!

Customs and immigration was everything I’d initially feared before I had started travelling- stern men in military uniforms unzipping your bag and hauling everything out and grilling you about your underpants and paintbrushes- but had never actually experienced in travels around Europe.

Clumsily repacked, we emerged into the chaos of arrivals, thronged by taxi drivers and bag-carriers and wannabe-guides. Noise, dust, heat, crowds. We got a taxi, told him where we wanted to go, negotiated what we later learned was a hilariously high price, and bumped away down red dirt roads to the village of Kokrobite, about an hour from Accra.

Photo: Kashmut

We stayed in that little one-roomed house with one foam mattress for the two of us and squat toilets and bucket showers for a month. We ate fish brought in by the fishermen on the beach, and big plates of tomatoey jollof rice and starchey, gooey fufu dipped in spicy okra soup and sticky fried plantains and endless pineapples.

I woke with the roosters at 4am because I couldn’t do otherwise. I slept at 8pm, because it was dark. A small boy came by every evening with lit kerosene lanterns, placed on front porches and front steps. These weren’t bright enough to keep me awake though.

We rode the overpacked minibuses called trotros into Accra most days. I sat with burlap bags of chickens on my lap, or stood with awkward body parts squashed against another passenger. The road was red and dusty and had many enormous potholes so the trotro had to frequently swerve into the oncoming lane or even further out to the edge of the ditch, dauntingly close to the enormous ant hills, swarming with big, crunchy, angry ants.

In Accra, there was traffic and crowds and noise and dust and heat. The markets spread out for acres. Tarps on the ground covered in chilis and tomatoes and cassava and potatoes and fabrics. Women with baskets balanced on their heads and babies wrapped around their midsections bargained fiercely. Vendors shouted, tugging at my elbow. Children stared at me, wide-eyed. Men followed me, propositioning me. Ten different languages were flung around in incomprehensible conversation around me in breeze-block cafes. I was terrified.

Photo: Sara & Joachim

In my photos from that time, I look relaxed, happy, eyes squinted to the sun, arms browner than I’d ever known them to be. But I remember feeling utterly out of my depth, out of my comfort zone, utterly intimidated.

For the first time in years, I felt shy. I had no idea how to bargain. I had no idea how to find a minibus back to our little village when no minibuses were labelled and the bus yard had no signs, no organization, seemingly no one in charge at all. I had no idea what to order in cafes where there were no menus and where the language spoken was Twi, Ewe, Ga.

I had traveled before, many times. I was well acquainted with hostel dorm and 3rd class trains. I had no fear of the kind-of familiar. I could speak French and understand German, Spanish and Dutch. I had felt quite capable and confident and adaptable.

However, I had never traveled in a way that was so far outside of my realm of understanding and expectation. I was 23 and had been traveling since I was 19. However, Ghana was the turning point for me. After Ghana, I knew I had to readjust my focus towards the scarier, unknown places. It’s much easier now.

Zion National Park. Photo: Wolfgang Staudt

When I first pulled into Springdale, Utah a dusty little tourist trap of a town just outside the southern gate of Zion National Park I have to admit I didn’t really get it.

Maybe it was the overly adorable names of the shops such as the “DeZign Gallery,” or it might have been the 110 degree weather scorching my skin rendered pallid by the inside life of a New Yorker, but I was immediately glad I would be spending two days in town, opposed to a lifetime.

The more people I met, the more I was confounded by how the cast of characters in town–which would seem a better fit for a John Irving novel than a small Utah town–managed to call Springdale home.

Wearing my Yankees hat, I made fast friends with a New Jersey-born, former Alaskan fisherman who now runs an art gallery in town and lives in a trailer behind it. He offered to close down the shop and take me on a hike the next day in the park, an offer I gladly accepted. Then there were my gracious hosts at the small family run B&B where I stayed.

Kyle, stoked in zion.

The lady of the house who ran the day to day operations (while her husband tended to other family businesses in town), treated me to a surreptitious glass of wine out on the back patio while her husband and kids were off about their days.

Having married into a Mormon family, which she acknowledged was a religion with never-endingly amusing contradictions, she is not really supposed to drink openly, though as she informed me, drinking in the closet is a Mormon tradition as prevalent as publicly refusing alcohol.

“You know why you should always take two Mormons with you when you fish?” she asked me with a smirk, “Because if you take one, he’ll drink all your beer.”

Cooking breakfast while his tiny Pomeranian dog dressed in a rhinestone studded pink scarf yapped about his heels, the chef of the house smiled as he told me that he “stuck out in this place like a 6’2 gay man in a small Mormon-owned town.”

As much as I love to shake up the established order of things even I, a white heterosexual male, know better than to flaunt my leftward leanings in hostile (conservative) territory. I asked him why he would choose to live in a town like this; he asked me if I had been into the park yet. I hadn’t.

Getting up bright and early before the afternoon sun could come in to bake me alive, I met up with my hiking guide in front of his closed-for-the-morning gallery to head into Zion for a hike. 3 hours and 5 miles later, standing on top of Angel’s Landing high above the Zion Canyon floor I got it.

Sure, it might be hard to find a good cup of coffee, and you might have to live under the watchful gaze of holier-than-thou polygamists, but damn, you don’t get views like this in Brooklyn.

Community Connection

This is the first dispatch from Kyle Smith, who is the first ever Roads Scholar. To learn more about the Roads Scholarship, please check out Digital Vagabonding. Big up.

Black Bear. Photo: Matt and Bess

1. Japhy and Kieran run into the house breathing hard saying they just the bears. “Two big bears and a cub!”

“So what did you do?” Segundo asks.

Their breathing slows and Japhy says “I just stood there with my jaw dropped. We were following Asia into the woods looking for squirrels. Then she started barking like crazy. This big bear was like 15 feet away. There were these really small tight pine trees. I turned and ran and out.”

“So you did exactly the opposite of what you’re supposed to do?” Segundo says.

“Well my first reaction wasn’t to yell,” says Japhy. “But then I yelled and screamed. Kieran was just up from me on the path and started yelling that there was another bear like 60 feet up.”

2. Japhy is Segundo’s son. He just turned 13. Kieran lives up the hill. He’s 11. They both have slingshots and sheath knives tucked into their belts. Japhy actually has a sheath knife plus a bayonet from and old M1 rifle.

3. “Was the ‘cub’ the juvenile we’ve been seeing?” I ask. They’re not sure. But Kieran says “We had our slingshots out and knives drawn.”

4. Just before the kids came in, Segundo had put on rice and chicken for dinner. Now it’s almost ready. Miles Davis has been playing on low the whole time. Kind of Blue. Like everything Segundo does it’s all about calming down. He’s a fire and rescue volunteer. At any time he could get a call and be first on the scene at, say, a motorcycle vs. car along the Peak to Peak Hwy.

5. The boys keep standing there. Then Segundo says “alright you guys have 10 minutes if you want to go tell Mike what happened. And then dinner’s ready.” They scramble off.

6. An hour later now, writing with the last bit of light. Segundo steps out of the house and tosses out the slop bucket where we’ve just washed our dishes. “I’m going toes up,” he says. “See you in the morning.” Tomorrow we’re fixing the door to the trailer. One of the bears ripped if off while we were all away last weekend.

7. I wonder what Miles Davis would’ve thought if he’d heard the boys telling that story over his music running on solar panels in an off-grid house at 9,200 feet.

8. Will comes back from visiting friends. We light a campfire. It’s dark now and the bears are holed up down in the pines somewhere. We see a flashlight coming from the house. It’s Japhy, come to see Will and tell the story again.

Community Connection

Like animal stories? Yesterday we published a collection of animal tales from the Matador Community. Interested in submitting notes from the road? Submit to david[at]matadornetwork[dot]com.

Photo: YoshimaiFeature Photo: US Department of State

Different people from every walk of life stuffed into a crowded plane for eight hours. Americans, Canadians, Londoners all sitting around me, the different twangs in their voices drifting over to me. I would never see them again once I stepped off the plane.

Walking through Singapore International Airport, watching guards walk past, holding machine guns high in front of their chests. My heart beating a little bit faster; unable to tear my eyes away; getting closer to something.

Getting into a taxi in Beijing, watching the country zoom past, greenery and poverty, elegant buildings next to shacks, people and possessions spilling out into the land. A sprawling college university, a town inside itself, gleaming, still newly built, next to a shanty town. The same people living their lives so completely differently with only a metre wide murky river to separate them. Watching a truck speed by, the doors wide open, people sleeping inside, people sitting there, nothing between them and the concrete dashing past.

A line of gardeners pulling out weeds all working together, their only job for the day in an overcrowded country, the same job one person could have done in an hour with a lawn mower. Five people in every aisle of the grocery store just waiting to help.

Photo: ppz

Getting completely lost in a city with more than three million people, knowing only Ni Hao as a single bit of Mandarin. People working on a three storey construction site with no safety equipment.

Haggling in a strange mix of English and Mandarin was almost at the edge. Pushing onto a crowded bus, now no longer bothering to say sorry in a language that wouldn’t be understood. Eating a meal that would never have been touched at home.

Trying to get a rapid heartbeat under control after climbing step after step, staring out into the distance as the crumbling wall faded into the distance was close.

Calling out a greeting in Mandarin to the guy climbing on the mountain picking up litter.

That was the moment.

I read a “Jonah and the Whale” storybook in poorly pronounced Spanish as two girls in dirty school uniforms squeezed on my lap.

Another child, barefoot and wearing a wraparound morga skirt and a floral-embroidered huipil blouse, braided my hair. She occasionally paused to readjust her baby brother, who she carried slung in a shawl on her back.

We sat outside a dim classroom with a cement floor and a tin roof, filled with rows of scratched up desks. The teachers, a pair of shy women barely out of high school, stared at me.

I was 16, in a very remote, very poor Guatemalan village. I’d come as a volunteer with a group from my high school. Before that my travel experiences were limited to sunbathing at Hilton Head or waiting in line for roller coasters at Six Flags.

Most of those nights I didn’t sleep, unaccustomed to the sounds–dogfights, honking buses, and roosters. I’d wake to morning mist rising over coffee fields and men hunched under towering loads of sticks trudging up the mountains. We washed dishes in the community pila beside women balancing jars of water on their heads.

A week earlier we’d stepped out of the airport into Guatemala City. Our hosts, a Canadian missionary couple, warned us of rampant carjackings and muggings (their housekeeper had experienced the former just that week), pointing out the broken glass and barbed wire atop the walls guarding the houses.

Guatemala City. Photo: vaticanus.

They advised us to avoid the mostly teenaged, machine-gun-toting police force that guarded nearly every public building, including churches.

When we arrived to the tiny village in the Chimaltenango province, they reminded us not to use the flea-infested blankets provided in the hospedaje and to check our shoes for scorpions in the morning.

An ancient peasant woman labored over our meals, mostly involving chicken soup (various bones and unidentifiable parts floating in broth).

We ate the same beans all week, watching them evolve into a new form each day until finally she pureed them and left them out to harden into bean loaf. The other volunteers gagged, but I ate every bite, throwing away my yearlong dedication to vegetarianism.

My adaptation to our circumstances surprised the group – they’d only known me as the shy, studious cheerleader who showed up for class in heels. But I found living without a mirror liberating, ignoring the stench and grime. How could I complain when the tireless elementary students insisted on working along side of us?

When not piling rocks in buckets or stabbing makeshift hoes into the dirt with startling efficiency, the children played in the construction rubble of the new school site, clawing up mounds of dirt or see-sawing on a wooden plank they’d laid on a rock. A hazardous building site that would be blocked off by yellow caution tape in the U.S. served as their playground.

Destinations

Community Connection to Guatemala

On our last afternoon, the principal, Jeremías, announced that the teachers had planned a special snack.

He led us to a circle of desks where they served us corn tortillas piled high with lettuce and beets and topped with a boiled egg.

The American high-schoolers grimaced. The adult leaders were at a loss after their constant preaching that consuming homemade food or produce washed with the parasitic local water would surely lead to miserable illness.

The missionaries “accidentally” spilled their delicacies on the grass. A girl rushed over to replenish their plates. The cooks surrounded us, staring, anxious for our approval. I, ignoring the others, began eating. How could I not?

That trip forced me to consider that while I slept in a carpeted, air-conditioned bedroom with a closet full of clothes and a stereo system, much of the world lived and died in one-room shacks with dirt floors and owned only two changes of clothing.

After sharing a glass bottle of Coke from a dusty corner tienda with a dirty faced little boy in a faded Batman T-shirt, no charter bus tour will ever satisfy me.

Under a westering sun, dozens of fishing boats bob in the waves. I swim towards them. Now a good 100 yards from shore, it is just me and the snacking, napping crews whose vessels dot the horizon.

As I am spotted, a rotund, tattooed fellow stands on deck and waves his arms like a man in desperate need of rescue. All eleven men on the boat are shirtless and bronzed like church bells and rub hairless pot bellies with supreme self satisfaction.

The boat’s hull heaves up and down, crashing with the waves. As it dips low I grab hold of the deck rail and am lifted up and out by the next wave.

I’m dripping sea foam on the aft deck and the crew gawks at me like I just jumped out of cake.

A soggy space is made for me in the tight lunch circle. A tall jolly man who is minus one eye is slap-knee belly-laughing and has been since they saw me in the waves. Rice and fish dribbles out of his mouth and down his chest to collect on his belly.

A yellow two liter fuel container is passed forward and clear fluid is poured into a mug that is polished with a grimy shirt.

The one-eyed laughing man sees the fuel jug and doubles over, turning red. A few ample swallows of rice wine sloshes in the mug.

A fuel jug is apt storage for this evil brew, it burns the gullet like propane.

Grimacing theatrically, pounding my chest and shouting Oh my God! in Vietnamese, I slam the mug down like a satisfied cowboy and they chatter and grin and elbow each other.

A much more ambitious portion of hooch finds its way quickly into my mug and the game is now how much of this nasty juice will the gleefully aquatic American drink. I sniff the mug theatrically and look up in mock worry. They guffaw and rice cascades out of their mouths.

I chant, Mot, Hai, Ba, YO!! (1,2,3,cheers!), and fresh gales of laughter follow. Already feeling the notorious effects of the rice liquor, I pat my belly like Santa Claus and stride to the end of the deck.

Instead of getting too drunk to swim back to shore I want my exit to be as sudden and dramatic as my entrance.

They turn in unison, grinning, bewildered and thrilled at my sudden appearance and exit.

I dive back into the sea as a wave lifts us up and up.

A sour burp stings my nose and my stomach clenches into a fist. Turning back to see the crew all crowding to watch me go I wave and wonder if I should have stayed for one more drink.

Community Connection:

I spent 6 months in Saigon teaching English and so can you.

Have a note from the road you want us to review? Send it to david@matadornetwork.com

My flatmate and I had written this off as seasonal declarations of random excitement, or perhaps a sudden arranged marriage or engagement. The women’s voices below rose and fell, their tongues creating a long, trilling, high-pitched sound like the howl of a wolf.

The neighborhood. Photos by the author.

I would lie in my windowbox bed at night and listen as it trilled off into a horsey whinney, somewhere in a neighbouring flat.

However, one night we discovered that the ululating actually had a reason: one of the local boys was being shipped off for his compulsory military service and the whole neighbourhood was getting quite giddy and garroulous about it.

Boys of all sizes started milling in the streetlamp light at the crosshills in front of our flat around midnight, lighting flares and firing capguns into the sky like a Black Sea wedding gone Kurdish.

Slowly the number of milling boys swelled to include bearded and capped old men, covered and uncovered women in raincoats and black cloaks, galloping children, terrified cats, and one decidedly nunlike grandmother draped in black with white lace pulled up around her jawline, wimple-like.

The boys on the hill spent a few hours just running around randomly and jumping over ledges and shouting, until two cars, decidedly 80s model Sahin sedans, drew up below our flat, draped in the Turkish flag, and the crowd swelled immediately. A mighty roar erupted from the mass, and a hundred men and boys linked arms and shouted and roared and bounced up and down, forming a snaking circle around the quiet, lightly bearded soldier boy.

Boasting and praising bellowed chants ensued, with the hordes raising fists to the air and declaring him to be the greatest soldier ever, the protector of Tophane (our neighbourhood), the hero (so brave!). More gunshots, firecrackers and horsey ululations, and a unified fierce stomping mass, up and down, up and down.

The mass broke into two parts, very West Side Story like, with the Jets backed up against the Christchurch Cathedral and the Sharks crouching down in front of the crappy mean corner shop (who overcharged us regularly on milk and bread).

The Jets shouted something in unison, with arms flying over their heads to point accusingly at the Sharks, and the Sharks retaliated, call and response. For half an hour. Shout and point. Point and shout. Roar roar roar. Then they joined together again, shouted some morale building soldier songs, jumped up and down repeatedly, did a little dance, made a little love, got down, and so on.

The Jets did a few rounds of Allahu Akbar from the edge of the church wall, and the Sharks replied with something in Kurdish: both interesting omens for the boy’s entry into the fiercely secular and nationalist Turkish military.

They picked him up and tossed him around a few times over their heads for good measure. I could see his horizontal form flying up toward our windowsill then disappearing down from sight. Then the digital cameras sprang out and flashes filled the lamplight as soldier posed, with weeping little brothers and apple-faced placid grandma and dozens of random neighbour boys and siblings and cousins.

More jumping and shouting, with a juxtapositional Besiktas-football-team chant thrown in when they ran out of soldier chants. Things only dispersed when the boy very sudenly got stuffed into into one of the flag draped cars at 2 am and freed up the 3- hour traffic jam on our very narrow lane.

Photo:o0karen0o

Popping corn kernels off the cob without benefit of a knife involves more skill than I would’ve guessed—though by now, after a month of trading English classes for cooking classes with Doña Ludy, I should be used to this.

My thumbs hurt—I can’t seem to get the right angle. My 11-year-old niece, Montse, has resorted to pulling off each kernel individually. Meanwhile, Doña Ludy runs her thumb over the cobs and the kernels seem to leap willingly into her cupped palm. I’ve never seen her make a less-than-graceful movement–but then again, I’ve never seen her out of her element.

A corn cob shoots out of my hand and across the table and we all giggle. I’m happy to be the clumsy gringa if it makes Montse laugh—she’s grown so quiet and serious in the past year, but here in Teotitlan she seems more relaxed.

Doña Ludy has a lovely way of using Montse’s name every time she addresses her: How are you, Montse? Would you like some water, Montse? At home she’s always “Negra” or “China” or “¡esa chamaca!” and while I don’t know for certain that it bothers her, I think it has to be a relief to hear her actual name. Just one more reason to be grateful to Doña Ludy.

Photo: r-z

So here we are, I think. For all intents and purposes, each of us is from a different world: Doña Ludy can trace her family back for thirteen generations to this very place. She can speak the language her great-great-grandparents spoke.

Montse is the first generation of her family to be born in the city, and she’s one hundred percent a city girl: cell phone, hair gel, the works.

And me, a patchwork of European heritages from the American suburbs, by some lucky combination of coincidence and choice, making a life here in Oaxaca.

Here we are.

When we’ve finally finished separating all the corn from the cobs, Doña Ludy dumps it into the blender, covers it with water, and hits “puree.” She told me once that her mother-in-law refuses to use a blender, or to allow anyone to use one in her presence: she’s afraid it will explode. She does all her grinding on the metate, and doesn’t speak Spanish. Another world.

The soup heats up on the stove. Soon we’ll eat sopa de elote—corn, squash, and the herbs chepil and chepiche, all grown right here—a dish Doña Ludy’s great-great-grandmothers probably prepared, and their great-great-grandmothers before them.

Sea-Tac. Photo: aturkus

SEA-TAC INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

After the security checkpoint I unsuccessfully tried to get wireless without paying for anything. Eventually I was in a long white hallway, slowly moving toward rap music coming faintly from somewhere. Seeing a person with a gigantic moustache, wearing a red, white and blue headband, skinny jeans, and “boat shoes” seemed to cause me to think “Jesus, god damn bitches.” The airport later forced me to watch CNN, which discussed health care reform, legalized online gambling, and crows attacking pedestrians in downtown San Francisco. The last thing CNN broadcasted before I boarded the airplane was footage of a Texas police officer tasing an elderly woman on the side of the road.

BART – SFO TO OAKLAND

Bart. Photo: blmurch

Things I thought while on BART, looking out the window, on the way to Oakland: “Damn, it’s shitty” “Damn, carpeted floors and carpeted seats, weird,” “Damn, seems really shitty, seems maybe like a ghetto,” “Seems like the movie ‘Friday,’” “All the buildings are the same color. Are all the buildings the same color? There’s a blue thing over there,” “Jesus, a bunch of high school students,” “Are those high school students ‘harder’ than me? Seems like those high school students are ‘harder’ than me.” “Jesus, liquor stores and fried chicken,” “This is taking a pretty long time,” “What is Chelsea’s apartment going to look like?” “Why don’t I see more hipsters?”

SAN FRANCISCO BAR/ OAKLAND “RAGER”

It was dark and the three of us were in San Francisco, walking at an uncomfortable pace toward somewhere. Chelsea needed to pee really hard and it was making me anxious. Bros lined the sidewalk at certain areas, smoking cigarettes and just seeming like bros. There were some older chicks walking around in “skimpy” clothes. Eventually we found the place—a bar called Hemlock—and paid a $6 cover charge to see Chelsea’s friend play, but the show was over when we got in. “Let’s get our money back,” Chelsea said.

We went to the bouncer. He called us a “pain in the ass” as he returned our money. A man approached me. “You get your money back man?” he said. “Yeah,” I said. “What, don’t you think the other bands deserve the money?” “We just came for the one guy.” “You think we don’t deserve your money man, we work hard man.” “We just aren’t seeing the other bands.” I looked at the face of Mike Young. It appeared highly alert.

At the “rager” people were screaming and playing guitar in a room. Someone with long hair outside the room—moving loudly between many different rooms for what appeared to be no concrete reason—was screaming sometimes. He came into the living room and flailed wildly for 20 seconds. He moved into a chair and said “Oh, cocaine cocaine cocaine cocaine, ohhhhh…”

There was confusion about my name, later. This is unrelated to the man on cocaine. “Wait, so what’s you real name?” the girl across a coffee table asked me. “It’s Brandon,” I said. “It’s just Brandon.” A man in the corner fell off a chair for what appeared to be no reason. “I can’t continue this conversation, that was too distracting,” I said. I looked at the girl across the coffee table. “Honestly, I can’t, that was weird.”

We left the “rager” as the person on cocaine was swinging a crowbar around in the kitchen while some men were arm wrestling. The people screaming and playing guitar in the room were still screaming and playing guitar in the room. I had sat in one location during the duration of my time at the party.

OAKLAND/ROCKRIDGE/READING AT BITTERSWEET CAFE

I wanted to have visited a place that would allow me to recognize in itself and its people a unique perspective on the world that I did not have, thus making me feel, I guess, that I was not authentic and was hopeless to attain any semblance of authenticity compared to these Oakland people that were steeped in authenticity. I really had that desire.

The streets in Oakland seemed large, bleak and noisy; delineated, sometimes, by gigantic highway ramps and overpasses, large intersections that made me feel small, and fast food places.

The author feeling embarrassed at reading.

Rockridge, where Bittersweet Cafe was located, seemed to be full of maternity shops, coffee shops, and “fancy” restaurants. The only people at the Bittersweet reading besides our friends were 50 year-old moms with sons in high school that “just happened” to walk in and sit down. I sold a couple books. Afterwards, we partied at a house.

SAN FRANCISCO/ PIRATE CAT RADIO READING

The Pirate Cat radio show was the only reading we had in San Francisco. The DJ was an old short man with dreadlocks. He talked quickly and generally ended up “lost” in metaphor or tangent—in a way I found hard to literally comprehend/find relevant—about oppression, peace, marijuana, or something “hippie-like”.

The cafe in which the studio was located was crowded. I felt as if I was on a variety show. A woman sang with a guitar about generosity. For the last minute or two of her song, she attempted to get everyone to sing along with her. Everyone sang along except for me and the people sitting at the table with me. I felt very embarrassed. I was grateful to Chelsea when, during the middle of it, she said “Which things should I read?” and handed me her book. I stared at the book until the song was over.

Mike, Chelsea and I later “talked shit” on the singer’s ideas about generosity.

OAKLAND HOUSE PARTY WHERE THREE BANDS PLAYED IN THE BACK YARD

We had to find a way to the party by some method other than walking because Chelsea was afraid of getting mugged. It seemed, upon receiving this information, that Oakland was “harder” than Seattle.

This feeling was reinforced inside the house: the walls were very artistic; male genitalia were drawn on the walls in black marker. I felt as if these people who had scribbled private parts in weird places knew some secret about life. Maybe they had, through their highly authentic pasts (i.e. fucked-up moms, living on an Alaskan fishing boat, or growing up on an industrial farm in Iowa), obtained an essence of life which emanated from their beings; physically manifested by the clothes they wore, their vernacular, their hairs. Their shoes. The essence was one of deep authenticity.

In the back yard, hipsters could be observed taking high definition photographs with expensive looking digital cameras with flash. Chelsea immediately began to go insane as her boyfriend’s band began to play, and Chelsea and I began to mosh really hard. I pushed people around. Sometimes Chelsea would punch me in the face or slap me a lot in the face. I sometimes looked at people that were not moshing. Most looked afraid. They whispered to each other, “I think they’re really drunk.”

I reassessed my perceptions regarding the party’s authenticity, feeling slightly alienated from society.

THINGS I THOUGHT ABOUT OAKLAND

Are the people more authentic here? Is this what California is like? Is this like the Beach Boys? Is California like the Beach Boys? Are we in wine country? Is this like the Beach Boys?

PEGASUS READING

It seemed as if a good amount of people came that were not our friends. I started my reading without looking at the audience or making introductory comments about myself. During the Q&A session afterwards, two women who appeared to be in their late 50’s holding notebooks asked us how to use blogs to promote their novels. It seemed as if they felt they were in a class about using blogs to promote themselves. As we answered they took notes. Sometimes one would make a sound and nod, as if something cathartic had just been explained. Another lady, also, it appeared, in her late 50’s, seemed intent on proving to us that the internet caused depression and could not provide “real” human connectivity. She was the one who introduced herself as an “artist”. She said “I’m an artist.”

Later, on the way home, I felt good about not making introductory comments about myself. I have decided to do it like that from now on.

NAPA READING

The bookstore was in an enormous “rich people strip mall” thing, featuring corporations such as Whole Foods and Target. There was a restaurant advertising on its A-frame sidewalk sign free range, organic fried chicken. I excitedly pointed this out to Mike. The bookstore clerks appeared disdainful of our presence. The only people there appeared to be Chelsea’s friends. I think I saw “wine country” on the way there. I referenced the movie “Sideways” to someone.

After the reading we went to Whole Foods. I got a salad. We sat outside in the heat, with Chelsea’s family, and ate the food. We went back to Oakland.

THINGS THAT IMPRESSED ME

I felt impressed when I got off BART at 19th Street Mission and saw a Hispanic man on a microphone, yelling things, I think, about Jesus. There were some men standing around him, looking stoic. I felt impressed by those men. I felt impressed when I saw a person wheeling a large rack of Mexican wrestling masks across an intersection, toward a little outdoor market. I felt impressed by the masks.

BSG “feeling emotional about ppl i met there”

I felt impressed by “826 Valencia” and had a nice conversation with someone in the little room with the aquarium. I felt impressed and good inside the shop “Needles and Pens.” I thought, sometimes, that San Francisco was bigger than Seattle, and kept calling it, to myself, “more metropolitan”, while concurrently believing that it was not “more metropolitan” than Seattle; it was weird. San Francisco seemed different than Seattle in some altered, more dirty, more real kind of context.

THINGS I HAVE NOT MENTIONED YET

Meeting people for the first time that I had known only on the internet caused me to feel very emotional sometimes.

IN CONCLUSION

I would go to the Bay Area again, for business or pleasure.

photos by author

In what seems like less than a decade, Firenze’s famous beauty and charm has gone directly into the crapper.

The city has never been particularly effective at fighting miscreant ink but now it’s turned into a real doghouse. The markings are everywhere, even eye level on the walls around the Duomo. Alleyways and small streets are tagged dozens of times. Many large, wooden doors are blasted with paint. Signs are hardest hit, rendering bus schedules useless at many stops.

It seems like a great time to be a police officer in Florence. There are endless amounts of tourist photos to be taken, plenty of texts to be written and bottomless espressos to be sipped from tiny paper cups.

Cops in the city center socialize in circles, looking as if they might break out a hackysack at any moment. Bus and train station rent-a-cops seem to come standard with headphones and MP3 players. They all love to whistle.

Perhaps the police’s apathy makes Taggers work harder for attention. The words don’t support this theory though. They are banal tags, mostly names and initials.

There is no hint of artistic aspiration, like with the murals of Santiago or the clever Banksy’s that turn up in London. One can only picture 15 year old nimrods doing what 15 year old nimrods do; defacing and running.

It’s a frustrating thing, the lack of purpose involved in all of this. It makes the streets look like the set of a bad 1980’s rap video. There’s no “fuck the police” or political statement, no reason given for the defamation of centuries-old buildings. It’s just a bunch of crap spray painted on a wall.

One person seems obsessed with tagging the word “yogurt”, as many as ten times in a five block radius of The Uffizi. Another person has taken to simply dumping buckets of paints on ATM’s.

There is probably much that I don’t know about the war on graffiti here. Police squads that roam the street at night. Or perhaps a commission has been called.

Maybe the mayor isn’t taking 3 hour lunches and instead sits in his office, pining over how his city is being devalued. Maybe the tourism commission, whose Information Points are even tagged up, are not operating with blinders on.

Maybe there’s a master plan in the works to make Florence beautiful again, to make it look less like the inside of a toilet stall.

Or maybe nobody gives a shit.

All footage shot by Joshua & Dustin Johnson.
Edited and Narrated by Joshua Johnson & Bridget O’Neill

When you look up into the Sky what do you experience? Have you had an encounter with sky that has left you humbled, enlivened or awe struck? Please share your thoughts below.

Community Connection

If you love travel videos then watch part 1 in Matador’s Montana Road Trip video series now. Looking for some inspiration? Read 4 More Reasons to Visit Montana NOW and Roadtripping Montana: The Beartooth Scenic Highway

Photo: Wonderlane

It isn’t easy for someone like me to get accustomed to a place where you can’t find the information you need in writing. I’ve been known to read software manuals cover to cover. When I want to know something, I go on the internet or buy a book. I expect pamphlets, signs, and lots of fine print.

It isn’t like that in Mexico. Lupe, the woman who took care of Casa de Tortuga, explained to me, “él que tiene boca, llega a Roma.” Literally, it means he who has a mouth arrives in Rome. In other words, you gotta ask somebody.

Arriving at the Puerto Vallarta airport, dozens of cabbies descended on us asking where we wanted to go. There were no posted signs, no zone maps, no printed list of cab regulations handed out to tourists. Just, you gotta ask somebody.

Photo: Susi Watson

I even caved and took a tour, mostly because I didn’t want to have to drive to Tequila, Mexico (for obvious reasons). Instead of having my nose in a guidebook for the day, I met some really cool people.

The tour guide and I talked about everything from Orozco murals to how I was going to be the first gringa strawberry picker in Irapuato, Mexico. It was a blast. Contrast that with “tours” in U.S. museums these days. Each of us walks around with our own personal headphones. We move together, but we have no human interaction at all.

I began to realize how much our entire lives are designed to avoid talking to people. Our tours are recorded. Our phones are answered by machines. Our political discussions happen through computers. And I wonder why I’m socially retarded.

Photo: Ricky

By the time I got to Mexico City, I was a new woman. I was talking to everyone. I knew how much cab drivers paid for their gas. I knew how many times the bus driver had tried to get a visa to visit family in the U.S. I knew how much it cost him each time he was refused. I knew so much and none of it required reading.

My hotel in Mexico City was run by American Friends Service Committee volunteers. Most of them were from the United States.

One afternoon I asked the girl at the front desk how to get somewhere.

Without looking up from what she was doing, she pointed at the bookshelf across the room and said, “I usually look it up in one of those guidebooks.”

Photo: Vincepal

We wandered into Rad Brothers. The bar was dimly-lit and packed with inebriated foreign men and Japanese women. This was during the Sapporo Snow Festival. Everyone looked as though they’d just finished a massive snowball fight.

Taka-san ushered us over to seats by the window. Outside were sparkling ice sculptures. I ordered my standard tequila and Coke while Taka drank a Sapporo. All around the room were red-faced foreigners coming off another week of teaching English. Now they attempted to wow Japanese girls looking for an “international liaison.”

Like so many who choose to spend a year in Japan teaching English, I had fallen into the “gaijin circles,” expats who cling to other English speakers, spending most of the time joking about funny Engrish signs, the lack of good Mexican food, samurai, geisha, sushi, and Karate Kid all wrapped into one. I wasn’t a traveler, but an American living in Japan.

I’d landed in Osaka nine months earlier. Now I decided to end my Hokkaido trip with an evening stroll amongst the ice sculptures in the entertainment district, possibly to sing a few songs in one of the ice karaoke booths. Then I got the light tap on the shoulder and “Hey! Hey! Hey!”

Any other time an encounter like this had happened I was somewhat skeptical; it was usually a random Japanese emerging from a bar who felt like practicing his high school English.

That wasn’t the case this time. A middle-aged man met my gaze, along with a teenage kid who averted his eyes, looking from sculpture to sculpture.

Photo: Alfonso Jiménez

Taka-san, as he liked to be called, was very friendly and easygoing, willing to speak Japanese to me in simple words so I could understand and respond confidently.

His son was a little shy, or maybe he just felt nervous about speaking English and being around a stranger for the evening.

When we were all a little warmer from the alcohol, I reviewed the days of the week in English and Japanese with Taka’s son, and I learned a new cultural expression:

“You want to understand Japan?” Taka said, suddenly turning his head away from the path and looking at me with frosted eyebrows:

“Majime. Remember, majime.”

I couldn’t understand the Japanese, and he didn’t have the right English words, but I later found out majime means sincerity, or seriousness. Respecting someone with a bow shows majime. An apology shows majime. The cultural aspects I was describing to him about why I chose Japan (e.g. the kindess of the Japanese people) show majime.

But his next sentence still threw me: “You stay at my house tonight.”

I was still disoriented; we had only been talking for an hour, and this man invited me into his home? With his family? I had not yet been a guest in a Japanese house, but I knew I couldn’t accept his offer: I didn’t want to inconvenience him, and I knew I’d have to leave there pretty early in the morning anyway – I was flying out the next day.

Luckily he didn’t seem too offended, and understood that I already had a hotel room for the night. He gave me his business card – common to exchange when you meet someone – and took his son home in a taxi, encouraging me to contact him if I was ever in Sapporo again.

I talked to a random Japanese person for an hour, and he invited me to enter his home, his life.

It seemed unremarkable at the time, but now, I attribute this moment to losing my travel virginity. A sudden awareness of a different way of life. My mind opened in a new way: if a person in Japan could be so kind for such a simple thing, how would those in other cultures behave?

It started small: researching off-the-beaten-path places near my home base, which took me to Shikoku, small islands in Hiroshima Bay, and quaint towns in Kyushu. When I found a different job available in beautiful Kagoshima, I accepted without hesitation.

Where my mind had previously been occupied with finding employment back in the US once my contract with the English school expired, now there was a hunger to know. To know why the Japanese did things this way or that. To consider why Americans act the way they do. To think… am I an American for these reasons? Have I “turned Japanese”? And if I’m not an American… if I’m not Japanese enough…then where do I belong?

It took me some time to find out. Couchsurfing was already in my vocabulary by the time I made the decision to Amami Oshima, one of the larger southern islands of Japan. Matador was my first destination online before I chose to leave Japan. Taking a two-day ferry, I journeyed to Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong before arriving in Thai Mueang, Thailand.

Unlike in Japan, where I usually stayed in capsule hotels for practicality, I grew into the habit of searching for decent Couchsurfing hosts; instead of buying an air conditioned bus ticket far in advance, I started hitchhiking when I couldn’t even speak Thai.

But most importantly, I came to realize it didn’t matter how I got there, what I did along the way, even what I saw when I arrived: it’s all about perspective, and my mind was open in a way it had never been before.

Community Connection

Can you pinpoint a certain moment in time where you felt like you became a traveler for the first time? Let us know in the comments, or check out our submissions call for stories of losing your travel virginity.

A.T. in Pennsylvania. Photo: Nicholas T

We stop for a water break under a leafless white oak. Up the ridge, Blue Mountain juts through the darkening sky. Somewhere up there is Darlington Shelter, our home for tonight.

“What do you think bro?” I ask.

“’Bout what?”

“Tomorrow.”

“How far is it, like 18 to Boiling Springs?”

“Something like that.”

“You think we’re gonna get hit?” Corey screws the lid back onto his water bottle.

I look up at the roiling gray clouds. “You really gonna ask that?”

Two friends are planning to meet us tomorrow in Boiling Springs, a full-day’s walk away, and we’re faced with a winter storm warning beginning at midnight. A month ago I wouldn’t have worried about the weather, but since entering Pennsylvania we keep getting hit by storms. If we get dumped on it could make an epic day out of those 18 miles.

I put my Nalgene back onto my hip belt. My hands are stinging in the cold. “Why don’t we just wake up at midnight, check the weather?” I say. “If it’s snowing we can just start night-hiking.”

The trail ratchets up Blue Mountain in steep switchbacks. As we climb, I can feel the sweat on my back, under my cap. Out here you’re always either too hot or too cold. I pull off my cap.

Darlington shelter is like a chicken house, 8 X 12 ft, with patches of plywood covering where porcupines have chewed up the sweat-soaked floor. We eat our current favorite dinner–chicken broth with dehydrated vegetables and egg noodles–a meal that doesn’t require any pot scrubbing.

Afterwards we begin the nightly preparations: filling the pots with water, leaving the boots with the tongues stretched out. We sleep maybe four hours when snow sifts into the shelter.

“Should we tarp it off?” Corey’s voice seems to come from underwater. There’s a sloughing sound on the roof, and I wonder how much snow is accumulating. I do a quick mental calculation: the amount of snow drifting into the shelter vs. the effort of getting out of my warm bag and stringing up a tarp.

“I don’t know bro,” I say. I light up my watch. Only a couple hours until we’d planned to hike. “It’s not too bad now.”

Corey shines his headlamp into the night. A gentle yet steady stream of snow falls through the beam. “Ok,” he says. We both slide our Therm-A-Rests to the back of the shelter, then burrow deeper into our bags.

Photo: Paulo Brandão

Winter on the trail has this way of reducing life into three options. You’re either working, (i.e. hiking or gathering firewood), sitting by a fire, or in your bag. Anything else and you start freezing.

Since the daylight hours are short, you end up spending a lot of bag-time, which gives way to strange thoughts and images. You imagine all the other living things hidden away where you can’t see them: mayfly larvae under frozen rocks. Black bears denned up in the crags.

I wake to the beeping alarm. Right away I see the snow has stopped. Dark clouds race past the moon, but strangely, the air at ground level is calm. Each time another cloud passes, moonlight flashes through the woods.

“Should we just go for it anyway?” Corey says.

“Hell, why not? I’m super-awake now.”

“Me too.”

We light our stoves and pull down the food-bags.

“You get hit?” I ask. (This is our standard good-morning greeting, referring to the state of our food bags. The mice are fearless along the A.T.)

“No, looking good. You?”

“Good to go.”

We each dump several packets of oatmeal into the hissing pots. Then we dress and eat breakfast while still in our sleeping bags. This is our daily ritual, getting ready for the cold rush of packing, then throwing on the frozen boots.

We creep 50 yards through the snow with our headlamps on, then switch them off. The moonlit snow makes for super good visibility. We hike for the next several hours in total silence.

The night air becomes darker and denser as we drop into the Cumberland Valley. The land is flat and sectioned off in wide fields. All of it blends into the same damp color, as if we’re walking into a cloud. Across the fields are a few farmhouses and barns with streetlamps glowing above various tractors and farm machinery.

Pennsylvania. Photo: Nicholas T

It feels like dawn is almost upon us, the sun somewhere just below the horizon. I ask Corey, “What color would you say the sky was?”—the first words in several hours, or days, it seems.

“Beats me.”

Our words seem to break something, and then we’re back into silence again.

Two hundred yards across the field is a dark stand of timber. It’s blurry, but we both see a form, almost a shadow. We stop instantly, but it’s not fast enough: the form freezes with its head cocked towards us.

Its color and size are hard to distinguish, but the way it had moved is unmistakably feline, and for some reason, female. Some kind of unspoken communication passes between Corey and I, and we slide off our packs, then begin stalking towards her. She watches us take three slow steps before vanishing into the trees.

For the next half an hour we track her prints through the snow. From the shape of the tracks–the four smooth toes and the fat heel pad–we decide she’s a bobcat. Grinning to each other, we follow her path over logs, around patches of dogbane, then stop at a final launching pad where she had crouched, then jumped over a barbed-wire fence and disappeared.

“She’s up in some tree watching us,” Corey says.

I stare at the forest on the other side of the fence and into the fields beyond.

“Yeah,” I say. “You can feel it.”

We stand there for another minute or two, not saying anything. A light snow begins to fall. Then we go back for the packs.

Community Connection

For those interested in learning more about the Appalachian Trail, please check out this article on the 100 Mile Wilderness.

Have you had any good night hikes? Share it with us in the comments below.

Photo by the author

It had to be 30 degrees. Fog everywhere. A runner passed by on the sidewalk next to me. Lying there wearing all the clothes I had with me; a couple t-shirts, a waffle neck, a button-down collared shirt, and a hoodie, I looked ridiculous.

I was freezing. I was full out shaking. Trying to get my composure as I stood and I looked up, there it was: The Eiffel Tower.

I don’t think it had hit me yet. I was in Paris. Sleeping. Outside. In front of the Eiffel Tower. Who does that?

We were studying Spanish in Salamanca, Spain and had a free weekend. My buddy Landon had found 60€ tickets to Paris and convinced me to go for the weekend. Why not?

At this point in my 21 years of life experience, I had traveled a bit, but there had always been a specific reason (build a house, take Spanish classes, go the beach). I had never just traveled for the sake of traveling. There was always a plan, a purpose, a mission. Something about that morning changed that.

Too cheap for a hotel or even a hostel, we slept in the park in front of the Eiffel Tower. We didn’t have a cell phone, a guide book, or a map and neither of us knew anything in French beyond “bonjour.”

We’d wake up early, try to warm up by walk the Seine until a shop opened up where we could sit down and warm up with a cup of coffee. We spent the next few days simply walking around the city. Taking it all in. There was no schedule. No obligations. No worries.

We ate when we were hungry. We slept when we were tired. We’d go visit the Louvre if we were bored. We saw the sights and sounds of Paris in a unique way. In our way.

There was this new world. It was open. It was vague. It was liberating.

As we packed up our things that morning and placed them in our backpacks, I knew something would never be the same. As the fog began to disperse and the sun came out, I knew there was more. I knew this was just the beginning.

Community Connection

This piece is the latest in our new series Losing Your Travel Virginity. Please see our original submissions call at Matador if you’re interested in submitting your story.

For those wanting to follow in Joel’s footsteps, here’s a guide on How to Move to Paris with No Money.

Photos by Tom Gates.

Gare Austerlitz

Paris Austerlitz Station at dawn. A security guy roams the building on a Segway, thus stripping himself of any authority.

The coffee shop contains one employee breaking open bags of filters, her face giving away the disbelief that she’s pulled this crappy shift. Two late-teen looking girls clutch their bags with a remember-what-dad-said look. The board is lit up with departures but no gate numbers. The hall is train-less.

This is the best time to travel. Back at home, I have a terrifically difficult time pulling myself out of bed before ten. Out here I book morning trains and force myself out of bed. The jump from the top bunk always marks the moment that I am asleep (up there) and the moment I am awake (when my gross motor skills jar to life, in an attempt to save my life as my feet hit the cold floor.)

A conductor is whistling, destroying the quiet vibe of the big, hollow room. The clock strikes six. I yawn and everyone follows suit. The whole thing is more of a mingle than it is a morning rush. I count ten people eating croissants. I am definitely in France.

Paris To Cahors

I board the train, pushing the button that opens the doors with a wheeze. I will push through Chateauroux, Limoges and Brive, at which point I will switch to a second train. Five hours, door to door.

You could not have paid me to fly. I’m a Theroux-ist, falling for these big beasts that rock and sway and creak and arrive where you want to go, not thirty miles away at a deceivingly-named airport. Every promise about plane travel has become a lie, with the exception of the time you make up in the air. The day that I pay extra in an exit row is the day that I invent a time machine and be done with it.

The Eurail Pass made things simple for me. I had imagined agents rolling their eyes at my mangled French and instead got a lightning-fast transaction, my booking complete in seconds. The train was rather gorgeous and “stoked me out”, as my friend Brian likes to say. I fell back into my chair and basked in a tray table that was big enough to simultaneously hold my coffee and laptop, which is all that I want out of life.

We rode through misty fields. Little houses with chimneys and men who looked like Girard Depardieu. Enough goldenrod to make anyone reach for a Zyrtec. Castles that looked too fake to be real. I fell asleep and dreamed about being at the bottom of a well.

Toulouse To Girona

Another station. Rap plays through the speaker of a teenager’s phone. It sounds tinny and I lament the death of fidelity. The artist raps in French and mimics American hip-hop, sounding just as big a clown as ours do. He wants money. He want cars. He wants fame. He demands it. What a goddamned bore.

At the counter. I hand her my Eurail pass and try my French. She laughs and makes my booking in English, trying to teach me how to say things in French at the same time.

She shows me how to talk with phlegm in my syllables. She is more than a booking agent. She is my savior. I will never see her again.

I get on the train and listen to Husker Du really loud and consider losing ten pounds. Then order a croissant from the trolley.

Girona to Parpignon

Another early morning. A flap of skin hangs from the top of my mouth. Nobody told me that tapas could be hot, too.

I’m on board the SCNF, which is wonderful and punctual. I sit across from an elderly couple. The man yells as he talks and the woman hushes him after every fourth word. I don’t need to speak French to know that they’ve been together for years and years. She smiles as she shushes, looking at her man in a way that suggests the kind of toleration that comes with adoration.

The train is magnificent, a real sleek beauty that doesn’t befit my CBGB’s t-shirt. Ruby carpets and black, pinstriped seats. It pulls out exactly on time, rolling past the graffiti that accompanies just about any stretch with concrete walls. Much like the French rappers, any retard with spray paint seems to tag nowadays. I strain to see some genuine art and come up short. Just lots of names and initials and wasted paint.

Parpignon to Montpelier

How did people survive travel before the advent of the walkman/discman/iPod? They are next to me, talking nonstop. Three American girls.

“Like. Like. They like. Ugh. Seriously.” The poor dear can’t even get three words out. “Like, I know Greg. I mean, I KNOW him, you know? Seriously.” I catch the rhythms of their inflection, a sing-songy bastardization of English.

“I am sitting in traffic” (up) “and there is this guy behind me” (up) “ and he is like freaking me out.” (down) “Like, have you ever just been creeped out by someone for like, no reason?” (up) “Seriously” (down).

I have the backwards seat, the solo one that pits my knees against the opposing traveler’s shins. They are two sleepy girls with airline sleepmasks. I can only hope that their eyes are closed by behind the masks, because their mouths are puppy-like and drooling. Their bags lay unattended, passports out in the open. Somewhere, their mothers are worrying, and not needlessly. Their daughters are idiots.

The train is a Talgo. It smells like the sawdust and ammonia that is used to clean the Tilt-a-Whirl after somebody spews a funnel cake.

The girls across the way don’t stop talking for three hours. They’re from a reality show generation. More talking means more screen time. “Dave Matthews. I like, can’t even put him into words.” The earphones are in her ears, the music playing as she talks.

I am certain that they are what keeps me from returning to America. I tell myself that it wasn’t the sinkhole that had become my life. It was these girls. It was their fault.

Community Connection

Need more info about the Eurail? Here are Craig Martin’s Top 10 Tips for Eurail Passes.

These days–since swine flu hit–on a good day, twelve people show up. On a bad day, the guides and ticket takers wait out their shifts without seeing a single tourist. At the nearby artisans’ market, it’s the same story.

Many vendors haven’t even bothered to open their stands lately. Those who do can hope for one or two sales on a good day–for a total of around ten dollars.

This woman and her husband both have clothing stands in the market near the ruins. Other members of their family cut and stitch and embroider the blouses and shirts. The daily earnings from the stands are divided among several people. These days, each person’s cut is enough to keep tortillas on the table, not much else.

Fortunately families here look out for each other, even in hard times. Whoever has a little more spreads it around. But this can’t go on forever.

Mitla’s economy is almost entirely dependent on tourism. Which means that right now, nearly its entire economy is at a standstill.

The few–and mostly national–tourists who do arrive have the ruins to themselves, and get rock bottom prices on clothing and crafts. They are much appreciated.

Everyone here is hoping that by July, for the high season of the Guelaguetza festival, swine flu panic will die down and things will pick up.

Until then, it’s tortillas and beans for dinner.

Cutthroat trout.

My fingertips are bleeding, sliced raw by the sharp little teeth of wild cutthroat trout. The fly I’m using is all chewed-up too, a hopper pattern that’s been reduced to a little yarn and loose thread on the slim shank of a barbless hook. Dew is dry and the mountain sun has climbed high over the rim of the Lamar valley.

Still, the fish keep biting.

Fly-fishing can be an art, but my tactics are industrial. I’ve only got one leader, the thin piece of monofilament to which the fly is tied. That’s not enough line to allow for changing patterns, and with camp still five miles up-trail, there’s no time to bother about fancy casts.

Instead, when the trail curves close to the river I set my pack against a dry pine log, change leather hiking boots for rubber water shoes and pick my way to the middle of the stream.

There’s no one to help if I slip or turn an ankle, so I move carefully across the riverbed, concentrating on each cold braid of current.

All I hear and sense and smell and feel is water and air and the dull musical growl of river rocks tumbling downriver in summer snowmelt from the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.

Lamar River cut.

I’m utterly content and totally alone.

Firm-footed at the head of a riffle, I loosen a loop of line and let it drift downstream so that the fly sinks deep into the pool below.

Two red-tailed hawks wheel overhead.

Three times they cry before I begin my retrieve, stripping line home with smooth pulls, alert to the flash of gold on blue that marks the commencement of frantic communion with pure wild energy, beauty and fear.

The trout hits. Everything tightens. Heavy and confused, it turns in the current, then leaps clear.

I raise the rod-tip, taking in slack as fast as I can until the fish catches sight of me and shoots downstream in a panic once more.

When the fish is played out I hold her for a moment in still water by the riverbank. She’s a handsome cutthroat, nearly 18 inches long, the blood-orange slash under her jaw so vivid it seems to pulse.

Captivated, I unhook the fly and gradually loosen my grip on the fish.

As time shifts back to normal we both hold still, slowly returning to ourselves, recovering in this moment of release.

The trout finds her freedom and darts back into the flow.

I sit in the sun until my feet are dry. Then I put on my socks, lace up my boots, hoist my pack and set off down the trail, yelling “YO!” at intervals to let the bears know I’m coming.

Buffalo by Cache Creek.

The Lamar is a tributary of the Yellowstone River that forms a broad valley in the Northeast corner of the National Park.

A lot of people visit Yellowstone, but few venture far into the backcountry. The Lamar valley is one of the wildest areas of the region, home to herds of buffalo, the Druid wolf pack and several grizzly bears, including one notorious silver-tip known as the Tent Smasher.

Although I never encountered a bear, the presence of Ursus Horribilis permeated the atmosphere of my trip, making me jump each time a manic chipmunk skittered through the underbrush.

While hiking I kept a canister of pepper spray strapped to my belt like a sidearm. At camp I hung my food well away from my tent and lay still for a time before sleep, alert to the noises of the night.

Lamar valley.

The pine forests of this valley went up in smoke during the epic 1988 Yellowstone fire and are now in an early stage of rebirth, making the valley feel like an overgrown Christmas tree farm.

The regenerative landscape is perfect habitat for buffalo and grizzly bears, but mostly, the Lamar valley is perfect habitat for fly-fishermen. I honestly didn’t think trout fishing got this good outside Alaska or New Zealand.

The river is just the right size for fly-fishing, big enough to hold large trout, but small enough so that even novice fishermen will have a pretty good idea where the fish are holding.

The Park Service has set up designated backcountry campsites along the river, each complete with fire-pit and bear-bagging station. These campsites are set far enough from the trail to feel isolated – not that crowds will be a problem.

The only people I met in the backcountry were Park Rangers, who made sure I had the proper permits.

Near Livingston, MT

Notes on fishing the Lamar River:

The most logical way to approach the Lamar is by way of Livingston, Montana. Have a Moose Drool draft in the bar of the Murray Hotel then walk down the block to Dan Bailey’s fly-shop to buy whatever gear you need and pick up a Park fishing license.

The Coffee Crossing in downtown Livingston is the spot for a mean Espresso. I also need to give a shout-out to Mark’s In & Out Beef-Burger Stand, the perfect place to stock up on calories before hitting the backcountry.

From Livingston, drive South through the Paradise Valley to Yellowstone country and the entrance town of Gardiner. This is your last chance to buy any gear you forgot to purchase in Livingston. The entrance fee for the Park is $25 per vehicle.

Park Headquarters are located just down the road from Gardiner in Mammoth. This is the place to pick up your backcountry camping permit.

You’ll need to tell the ranger where you’ll be camping for each night in the backcountry. There are several sites on the Lamar, and when I went mid-week in July most were available.

Permits are free of charge on a first-come, first-served basis, but it’s also possible to reserve a site in advance for a fee of $20.

When you pick up your permit, the ranger will give you the low-down on
bear activity, fire danger and directions to the trailhead. It’s about a 40 minute drive from Mammoth to Soda Butte, where the Lamar trail begins.

Here is a link to Park Service information on fishing in Yellowstone. The fishing season in Yellowstone runs from Memorial Day to early November, but the best time to plan your trip is between July and September.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Matador loves Montana travel.

Check out articles on cycling Montana, hiking Montana, kayaking Montana and the best spots for spring fly-fishing in the Big Sky state.

Photog’s note: “Children hang around the Ghatts selling baskets of small hand-woven leaf bowls. Each bowl contains a candle in a bed of flower petals, an offering to the Ganges.” Photo by: judepics

A long wooden oar dipped below the surface of the river. It disappeared, emerged, disappeared and emerged, slow and steady, past unrecognizable debris.

It avoided contact with floating objects with a precision that marked familiarity, acceptance, and indifference. It was an indifference that my mind could not connect to the froth and parts of buildings floating on the surface of the Ganges River near Varanasi, India.

Photo: snikrap

It was sunrise. The world was thick with smoke heaving off fire pits of cremated loved ones. A woman doused her sari and body in the water carrying an ancestor’s dust downstream.

A family hoisted a platform onto their shoulders. It carried a loved one that would soon return to the earth as smoke and dust.

I pulled a scarf tight around my nose in an attempt to block out reality. That was the difference between me and the woman that continued to scrub her golden sari. She accepted life. I accepted a glamorous paragraph about a boat ride down the Ganges.

The smell from the flames was pungent and frightening. It was “my world” unveiled. It left my small bubble of a world lying in a puddle on the boat’s floor.

Community Connection

Editor’s note: We recently put out a call for stories of “losing your travel virginity,” and I made a few notes about losing my own.

Congrats to new Matador Community member Jackie Poinier for being the first contributor in this new series. Stay tuned for more stories soon.

Photo: A National Acrobat

We’re in the middle of our English lesson when a bright white car pulls into the dirt yard and a woman strides across the yard calling out loudly in fluent but heavily accented Spanish. Don Faustino goes out to meet her.

Her hair is an unnatural shade of orangey-red—not unlike the color Doña Ludi obtains for the yarn by mixing cochineal with lime juice—her pants are blinding white, her blouse is translucent neon pink, her earrings are enormous hunks of neon pink plastic. This is obviously not her natural habitat.

Cochineal. Photo: Ibis Alonso

Don Faustino guides her into the front room, and she makes a beeline for the doña. “Hola, tú!” she cries—a greeting for children and close friends—though Doña Ludi greets her, respectfully, as usted.

She grabs Doña Ludi in a bear hug that the hug-ee clearly finds awkward. Her head is pressed against the woman’s neon pink bosom, for one, and for two, this just isn’t done.

I learned last night, when we ran into Don Faustino’s sister and her children, that the correct Zapotec greeting is a graceful two-handed gesture, something like a handshake, but more like the exchange of an invisible, delicate egg. Barring that, Faustino and Ludi are as in love as any couple I’ve ever known, but I’ve never seen them so much as touch hands. But this woman is hugging away, as though Doña Ludi were a favorite doll.

Photo: Meggers

Then I’m introduced. The woman greets me in Spanish but gives me an odd little wink and half-smile that make me feel somehow dirty. Or do I overreact? Perhaps she just means, “sorry for interrupting your lesson, I’ll be quick.” But I feel something else in that look—a just-between-us-white-people kind of something—that I want no part of.

She gives Don Faustino some money—clearly the last in a series of payments—chattering away about some delicious chocolates that someone brought her from the U.S. and how she’s on her way to give one to Ximena because she already gave one to Juan and one to Chayito. Soon Don Faustino is walking her back out to her car.

Doña Ludi murmurs to me, as we sit down, that she guesses there’s no chocolate for her. I grin—is this Doña Ludi being snarky? She tells me that the woman is a tour guide here in Oaxaca, she’s European, she owed them money for a rug but now she’s paid up.

Doña Ludi and I drift back towards our lesson—we’re working on translating their natural dye demonstration into simple English. They use a bean called huizoche to get an intense black out of brownish-black wool. She repeats the new word, “bean”, several times, getting the feel of it.

Huizoche. Photo: Ibis Alonso

I must sound so silly, she says.

But I tell her, no, that’s how we learn. And then, wanting somehow to give her a gift, I add, honestly, that her pronunciation is amazingly good.

You have an advantage because you’re already bilingual, I tell her. Your ears are already trained to listen for many different sounds, and you already know that the same idea can be expressed in very different ways in different languages, so you don’t resist it.

I guess we do learn to listen, she says. When we meet people from other pueblos, their Zapotec is different from ours. They pronounce the words differently than we do, so we have to pay attention if we want to understand.

Out in the yard, the white car pulls away.

Don Faustino comes back in. They exchange a few soft words in Zapotec. I pay attention, but I don’t understand what they’re saying.

Not yet.

Community Connection

Get some advice on how to avoid those awkward intercultural moments here.

What’s the most embarrassingly, obviously culturally inappropriate act you’ve witnessed (or committed) on the road? Share your experiences in the comments.

All photos: a song under the sugar sugar

The two tassels of my llama-wool hat are blowing wildly across my face, caught in the wind as it whips at us here on the exposed western slopes of Chacaltaya, Bolivia.

Juan, our guide, is darting up and down the line, ensuring both the speeders and the stragglers get to hear his fact-filled script about the glacier that runs upslope parallel to our rocky trail.

“It’s one of the highest in the world,” he points, patiently waiting for me to throw a glance in the direction of the glacier before he zips off to the next hiker.

I stumble, missing a step. A little lightheadedness is all. Maybe I should’ve eaten more for breakfast. And there’s the elevation, of course. I shake my tassels to clear my head. That’s better.

Mild dizziness aside, summiting is a cakewalk. Miners do it—the upper plateaus are littered with ore buckets and little lake-lets are stained blood-red from iron and green from copper.

Die-hard skiers do it. Chacaltaya has held the record of world’s highest ski resort since 1939, when Club Andino Boliviano built an access road, small lodge, and rope-tow lift up the glacier.

And tourists do it. They come in secondhand Asian minibuses that puff black smoke almost as thick as the dust kicked up on the dirt road leading from El Alto. The tour is part of the standard fare hawked in the La Paz traveler’s ghetto of Calle Sagárnaga.

“An easy way to bag a high peak,” reads Lonely Planet’s description. Buses shuttle you to the lodge at 17,300 ft. It’s a simple 30-minute walk from there to the summit.

“Bagging peaks” isn’t why I’m here, though. Sure, puffing foggy breath at 17,700, gazing down the snowy spine of the Cordillera Real and the tops of the clouds covering the rainforest, is exhilarating. But I’ve come to see the glacier.

It’s not what you’d expect—no frozen river winding through a wide mountain pass. Only a thin tongue of powder, long enough maybe for four or five tight turns on your K2s.

Fact is, Chacaltaya is dying. By some accounts, it’s already dead. Like most of the world’s rare tropical glaciers, its growth has failed to keep pace with global climate change.

It’s easy to find accounts of the loss of the world’s highest ski run. People now only come to carve in February, and even then just to say they’ve done it. The rope tow—or what’s left of it—hasn’t worked in a few years. The lodge gives off a Shining vibe.

But what you won’t hear as much about is that Chacaltaya’s glacier is vital to the roughly 1 million inhabitants of El Alto—none of which, I’d reckon, has ever clicked into a ski.

“It’s their only source of water,” Juan tells me as I stand shivering at the summit, taking in the smoggy sprawl of El Alto on the Altiplano far below.

La Paz’s satellite city is growing faster than the glacier is shrinking, coughing up more and more red-brick and adobe huts as campesinos flood in from the countryside, lured by the promise of employment and cheap housing.

“So…when the glacier’s gone, what happens to El Alto?”

I don’t get a straight answer. He tells me about government efforts to promote conservation and responsible use. Seems too late for that, I refrain from saying.

I look across to the peak-perfect form of Wayna Potosí, one of the Cordillera’s most recognizable mountains. Its flanks are thick with snowpack for a good 3,000 feet down from the top.

Is that what Chacaltaya looked like just 60 years ago? Will it look like Chacaltaya in another 30?

These are questions that don’t get answered on the $10 tour.

“Two more minutes, then back to the bus,” he shouts to us over the wind. My tassels nod in acknowledgment.

Community Connection:

For more on the world’s vanishing glaciers, be sure to check out this photo essay on Matador Change.

All photos by Misty Tosh.

Drips of sweat meandered down my grimy face as I slowly repeated the words to my new friend: time-code, close-up, wide-shot, master-shot, b-roll.

Hassan, a devout Muslim, had never heard these alien words in his entire life. He absorbed each one, and then repeated after me, snapping his fingers as each word finally clicked in his head. Snap! That’s what a close-up is. Another snap! So, that’s time-code. I could practically see his brain working overtime.

To me, these boring words made up pieces of the film lingo that I uttered every working day of my life as a TV producer. To him, they sounded exotic, like something so mystical it must be only the chosen that get to whisper them.

I met Hassan the first day I arrived in back in Sembalun, a remote mountain village perched at the base of Mt. Rinjani, the 2nd largest volcano in Indonesia. I was there to commandeer Phase 2 of my recently formed grassroots NGO, 4th World Love, whose aim is to set up community centers in magical villages around the world.

Sembalun was the first spot on the globe we’d taken hold of and the excitement was thick in the air.

I bumped into him at the CDC (Community Development Center) as he broke through the knot of villagers on hand to help me and a few volunteers prep for opening day.

Hassan helped me hang a plastic wall calendar, and quickly made himself stand out more by gallantly sweeping up the layers of grime on the floor and setting up desks for the new computer room. His English was very basic, but what caught my attention was his always-smiling face and his eagerness to jump right into any scenario to assist.

The minute I whipped out the HD camera I’d brought over from the USA, he bravely scooted over to see what the new toy was. I never touched that camera again.

The CDC immediately became exactly like a bustling film production office, with villagers stopping in at all hours. Guitar sessions, digital camera lessons, random sing-a-longs, and Spanish 101’s were slung out to anyone who showed an interest–which was the entire village, it seemed.

The slew of international volunteers taught English and computer classes from dusk ‘til dawn, while me and my bandito crew of newly created “filmmakers” tore around town on motorbikes shooting everything we could. Establishing shots, b-roll, full-on interviews—we were happily capturing tiny snippets of life in a faraway Muslim village.

The more I taught Hassan, the more independent he became. I’d be strolling toward the CDC at the crack of dawn and he’d shoot past on his way to the mosque shouting through the fumes from his moto how he’d just captured a sunrise.

I’d be reviewing his tapes, teaching him how to create a camera log, and I’d see stunning footage of farmers in the scorching fields, old toothless women cooking in outdoor kitchens, and funky insects clamoring along bright green leaves. All stuff he deemed necessary to tell the story of his village.

Within days, he became a champ of every type of shot one needs to tell a good story. You can’t just get a master of someone picking beans. Bor-ing. You must get a close up on the hand picking the bean, the expression of the farmers face in the hot sun, a wide of the entire valley, singles of the individual beans.

These shots came to him naturally after I’d explained their purpose only once. His instinct was golden, his attitude spot on. After looking at how creative his shots had become, it hit me: I’d created a super-star

The day I taught him how to use a shotgun mic was the day he became a director. With very little handholding from me, he started art directing rickety baskets and colorful handmade scarves around Harti, our “talent” who was sharing an old Sembalun semi-urban legend.

If he heard a truck roar by, he’d yell CUT and demand that Harti start over, so we could hear the all-too-important dialogue. Later that night back at the CDC, I watched in wonder as he labeled tapes, recharged batteries, shammied up his lenses and packed away his gear.

We celebrated most nights with some local moonshine and he usually busted out a bit of salsa after acoustically singing a handful of ancient Sasak songs. A renaissance man, that one was.

When it came time for me to leave Semablun, there wasn’t a frosty chance in hell I was dragging that camera home with me. What’s $1,300 bones, really? I can always get a new one. I was bear-hugging Hassan goodbye, while shoving blank tapes and advice his way on what to shoot while I was gone. He nodded his understanding.

When I got an email from him a few weeks later, he laid out his upcoming shooting schedule: his intention was to film the local red rice harvesting ceremony, as well as the yearly bamboo fighting ceremony in a nearby village. He’d also managed to score some footage of the eruption of the baby volcano inside Rinjani a few days earlier. Epic moments.

It snuck up on me after reading his plans that that’s what 4th World Love does—we’re like the middleman that makes dreams come true. However big or small they are, we just spread the love. I can’t wait to bring that kid to the USA.

Community Connection

If you are interested in volunteering with 4th World Love, please check out www.fourthworldlove.org. It’s cheap, it’s life changing, and everyone with a passion to share the laughs is invited to come along for the ride.

For more on volunteering abroad, please check out MatadorChange.com

Doña Ludi carding wool. Photo: Ibis Alonso

Faustino Ruiz’s family has been weaving wool rugs in Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, for sixteen generations.

His grandfather loaded the rugs onto his burro and sold them in the coldest parts of the mountains, where they kept floors warm. Today, Faustino and his wife, Ludivina, sell their rugs to tourists, who hang them on walls.

But it’s been one thing after another for anyone involved in the tourist trade in Oaxaca in the last few years. Don Faustino counts on his fingers: the teachers’ strikes in Oaxaca in 2006 and 2008, the economic downturn in the U.S., the recent overblown media coverage of border drug violence that’s scared tourists away from all of Mexico, and now, swine flu panic.

Teotitlan del Valle is never a wildly busy place, but this week it’s been utterly silent.

Don Faustino giving a demonstration, when business was better. Photo: Ibis Alonso

The baskets of marigolds, indigo, moss, pomegranates, and cochineal that Don Faustino and Doña Ludi use for their natural dye demonstrations are shoved haphazardly under the spinning wheel, instead of artistically arrayed in front of it in anticipation of visitors.

The wooden table where smaller rugs are normally displayed has been sitting naked in the middle of the display room all week. We cleared it off for our first English class on Monday, and it hasn’t been needed for its usual duties since then.

Doña Ludi takes a slightly different view of the waning supply of customers than her husband. She tells me that people simply don’t buy things for beauty anymore, and if they need something to keep the floor warm, they buy a cheap, mass-produced rug at Sam’s Club or Home Depot.

Her sons, at 13 and 17, know how shear the sheep and dye the wool and weave the rugs, but she suspects they’ll have to find a different way to make a living once they finish school.

Don Faustino and Doña Ludi have managed for years to make a living, carry on a generations-old family tradition, create from scratch something beautiful and—at least potentially—useful, and not hurt anyone or anything in the process.

Is that becoming an impossible combination to hope for?

Photo: Ibis Alonso

Doña Ludi tells me that she and her husband will probably never go to the U.S., though some of their relatives have. “I think we’d get lost there,” she says—not self-deprecatingly, but matter-of-factly. But she’s not sure how they’ll manage to go on like this, weaving beautiful rugs that no one buys.

I planned our English classes around their work—they’ve learned to say “sheep,” “rug,” “marigold,” all the relevant vocabulary. Already they’re giving me little tours in English: “This is a sheep!” they tell me, after we hike up the back hill to the pen. “These are bugs!” while holding up the basket of cochineal.

After class, I wave from the dusty edge of the quiet road and hope they’ll be able to use their brand new English with someone other than me before too long. That they’ll find a way to go on.

And anyway, I tell myself, at least we’re having fun—and that should do us all good, in these days when it’s too easy to be sad about all that’s being lost.

Community Connection

What other traditions are in danger of being lost the world over? What can we do about it? Share your observations and ideas in the comments below.

Jerusalem, The Western Wall. Photo: Minamie’s Photo

1. I’d had glimpses. The first was in Israel, my freshman year of college. My Grandparents were taking us on a private tour. One night I met a local girl in Tel Aviv and we broke away. The next year she’d be going into the army. But for now it was just an empty stretch of beach in Tel Aviv at night. The sand cold on our bare feet.

There was flash of possibility then, my first glimpse: here were all these kids going out and drinking and dancing and essentially living their lives in a way that felt familiar but yet was totally different than what I knew. And I could so just stay here for a while and be part of this.

Young Israeli soldiers. They were everywhere. Photo: Or Hiltch

2. I’ve since learned that something is always lost when you get those flashes or instincts but don’t follow them. Our van driver / tour guide Yakov even laid it right out there for me. “Why don’t you just stay here in Israel for a while?” he asked.

3. My mom had already warned my brother and I: “watch out he doesn’t try and proselytize you.” I didn’t quite understand this word meant, but I when Yakov said that, I thought he’s doing it now.

4. Yakov was a gruff man in his late 40s or early 50s who took a smoke break each time we stopped the van for what he called a “coffee in / coffee out.” He’d fought in 5 wars, and stood off to the side when we visited Jerusalem, slipping a worn-looking kipah onto his head and smoking. My grandparents couldn’t say his name right; they called him “Yankel.”

5. While my wife Lau was pregnant in Buenos Aires we went to a parenting class. The teacher / midwife Mirta startled me with this phrase: “the greatest journey any of us take in our lifetimes is the journey we take from the womb to being born.”

Journeys. Photo: kwerfeldein

She talked about how the baby had to make these maneuvers to get through the pelvis and the birth canal. And then when it was over–when the baby was born–that it was exhausted just like the mother.

6. My mom had warned me about ‘prostletyzing’ out of fear. Fear of what she hadn’t experienced herself. I was affected by her fear. Not just her fear but what I interpreted / experienced as a kind of prevailing fear in the suburbs where I grew up. Fear of going off on some other trajectory than the standard do well in school, go to college, get a job.

7. Yakov shared none of the characteristics of the men in my family. He was working class, yet he could speak multiple languages. He was a soldier. He’d spent nights sleeping on the ground. He never seemed to be 100% clean shaven. He was a traveler. But on some deeply entrenched level, I was dismissive of him and anything he might try to offer me.

8. My last year in college I felt like I needed “unbroken wilderness time” to figure out what I wanted to do. I had a half-baked vision of flying up to Maine and “walking home” on the Appalachian Trail. It seemed right. I bought hiking boots and wore them to graduation.

Mcafee Knob, AT. Photo: asafantman

9. After working that summer I flew up to Maine with Lindsay, my girlfriend at the time. We had arranged for a car to take us from the airport in Bangor to Baxter St. Park. We smiled at the driver’s accent and how he kept saying “camps,” as in “We have a camp up there.” Finally I figured out that’s what people in Maine call cabins.

10. We climbed Katadin. Took goofy pictures at the sign / cairn at the top. (One with me pointing to where it said “Northern Terminus of the A.T.”). Then we headed south. In the 100 mile wilderness we kept passing hikers. A few each day. They were thin and tired-looking, less stoked than I would’ve thought. They’d come 2,000 miles from Georgia and were just a few days away from finishing.

11. One day we hung out at a stream with some local kids. We all smoked. There were Gray Jays that kept dive-bombing us. We talked about gear and blistered feet and some of the other groups and kids we’d seen (there were student orientation groups there from Colby College). We were all hungry. Maybe we could sneak up on another Colby group and pilfer their food.

12. After a while we all put our packs back on and kept hiking. But while we’d sat there, there was this moment where Lindsay and I had looked at each other. “This is a total party,” I’d said. I said it in a way to mean that I wasn’t just describing the day but the whole experience of being out here. We were 50 miles from any roads. We had nothing else to do but keep walking.

13. Looking back I think this was the first moment I really saw the world more as a traveler than anything else. A traveler in the sense of someone willing to give him or herself over to whatever experience comes along rather than holding back. It was more on the periphery of my consciousness than something I actually formed thoughts about. It was just a feeling of being inside a place.

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The author’s houseboat, highly flammable

I went to Alleppey in order to scratch the itch of two childhood memories. Cruising the backwaters on a houseboat seemed like some kind of circle-of-life-y thing that I just needed to do.

The first memory is of riding The Jungle Cruise, an attraction that I begged to board during our annual family enema at Disneyworld. My whining would begin in Hall Of The Presidents and would not be snuffed until we’d rounded corner into Fantasyland. I was only happy when our very fake boat made its way down the more fake chlorine river, passing the most fake animals.

My second memory is of watching The African Queen, a film that always seemed to be on our television. I never complained because it seemed to elevate my my father’s mood to the point where he became possible to survive. I saw this movie at least twenty times by the time I was ten, understanding even then that I was always going to be more of a Hepburn than a Bogie.

And so I went out in search of my own river adventure.

Booking a boat in Alleppey was a breeze. With over three hundred in circulation, I had my pick of the litter and decided on one that looked like a fancy bale of hay. It was an old-school model, propelled by a burly man holding a thirty-foot pole.

The newer ones looked a bit too South Beach in comparison, tricked out with motors, satellite dishes and flatscreens.

I figured that if you’re going to float through canals on a piece of wicker, it might as well be on something authentic and flammable.

My hopes for a boozy staff were dashed when I met Captain Sensible, a stern man who obviously did not fancy nonsense. I did manage to get chummy with Chef Bloodbath, who came to me and asked for a band-aid, having chopped a significant portion of his finger into my lunch.

The boat was surprisingly sturdy and was designed for the crew to hang out in the back (talking about the guests) and the passengers to hang out on in the front (wondering what they’re saying). I was the only guest.

My room contained a sun-faded picture of Jesus, the holes in his hands bleeding brown and his Daughtry haircut turned some shade of dark blond. It made what was surely a bad day for him look even worse.

The twenty hour trip did an excellent job of showing off the canals, some quite remote and others meandering through the backyards of local houses. During the first hour we passed concrete walls that were spray-painted with the communist sickle, a bird eating another bird, children screaming, women doing their washing, and agitated roosters.

I grew antsy after a few hours, probably still expecting animitronic hippos to come popping out of the water. I came to realize that this is what they meant by Slow Travel, a term surely invented by the kind of people who walk around with crocheted bags and nylon sandals.

Unable to naturally chill, I popped a Panadol and downshifted into the groove of the river, my ears doing that buzzy thing that happens when paracetemol hits the system. I started to have deep thoughts. Thing like why ducks still swim, despite the fact that they can fly.

Captain Sensible parked the boat at 6pm, at the end of what I guess was a cul-de-sac. A beautiful sunset transpired.

Music began playing from something sounding like a bullhorn.

Mosquitos undertook suicide missions.

Parents sent their children out to purge their pre-bedtime energy, men worked on their motors and curious smells wafted from kitchens.

It could have been a Tuesday night in Connecticut. Except here I was on a river in India.

I spent the night eating a delicious dinner, drinking Kingfisher and watching the lizard-things devour anything that approached the deck’s lone light bulb. My newfound zen-ness relaxed even my thumbs, allowing me to defeat Bowser in a Nintendo DS battle that had been a long time coming.

I listened to Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity on the boat’s bow, doing that thing where a record somehow seems completely new after the 200th listen.

I woke in the morning upon the advice of Bloodbath, who was at my door saying “wake up.” I rubbed my slept-in contact lenses deeper into my cornea and dragged myself towards coffee. The world had already woken up around me, everyone rushing to get to somewhere, either by boat or by path.

The journey ended rather abruptly. We poled our way back towards town, quickly reaching the departure dock. The crew jumped off the boat and scrambled toward the next guests, who were waiting to jump on. It was easy to see that the whole thing was going to be repeated again, as if on an endless loop of of personal fulfillment.

Come to think of it, that’s how things ended on The Jungle Cruise too.

Photo: mrhayata

I was on the rebound with a Chinese clown. My boyfriend, the son of an American diplomat, broke up with me over lunch at the only Western Sizzler in Beijing. The Chinese version of the Sizzler, much like the Chinese Pizza Hut, is considered classy, with white tablecloths, wine goblets and a steady stream of Kenny G.

That afternoon, I told my sob story to the neighborhood clown—a countryside cutie with high cheekbones and a girlish laugh who wore a green and yellow polka-dot cover-all to deliver flower bouquets on his electric blue moped.

“My old boyfriend doesn’t like me,” I stuttered. My Chinese was shaky, and I didn’t know the word for breakup. I improvised. “He says he doesn’t want a girlfriend.”

“Mei shi,” the clown assured me, no problem. “I’m here. I can be your boyfriend now.” It was as easy as that.

We sat outside his flower shop on kindergarten-sized folding chairs. Chinese pop music and the cloying scent of lilies wafted through the humid night air. Two schoolgirls jumped rope on the sidewalk, and a thin man in a Mao suit cycled past, his three-wheeled cart piled high with clouds of Styrofoam.

This wasn’t a first for the clown and I to talk, but it was the first time I hadn’t felt guilty about flirting. That night, I’d accepted his invitation to sit down, and he’d magically produced two big bottles of Tsingdao beer and a package of barbecued chicken feet.

The clown set down his bottle and grabbed my hand. His fingers were thin but strong, skin weathered from a childhood harvesting cotton and corn. I felt the electrifying tingle of a new crush, followed by a hollow disappointment as he let go. “Feng shuo,” he said, break hands. “Ni ming bai ma?” he asked, or literally “you bright white?”

Photo: Katharine Mitchell

“Wo ming bai,” I said. I understand. My hours-earlier boyfriend had never been a hand holder, and in that magical Beijing moment, I understood, clearly and brightly, that he’d already been replaced. I’d traded in a prep-schooled jokester for a countryside clown.

“I like your hat,” I told the clown.

He adjusted the silk rose pinned to his green skullcap then tugged on his plastic nose. In broken English, he slurred, “Thank you…verrrry, verrry much.”

At the time, I was living near the ancient Drum & Bell Tower in downtown Beijing, beside the noisy entertainment district of Houhai, a manmade lake surrounded by hundreds of concrete and plywood bars and old people’s playgrounds.

Our hutong (the traditional living quarters for Beijing families) comprised a concrete maze of alleyways, populated with beer and cigarette stalls, bicycle and shoe repairmen, prostitutes fronting as hairstylists, and generations of families living in courtyard homes, hidden behind formidable, red wooden doors.

Blankets, frilly pushup bras, birdcages, and strings of raw fish, set out to dry, hung from laundry lines crisscrossing the alleyways. Old people sat on the streets wearing pajamas or sleeveless undershirts, playing mahjong on makeshift tables, or fanning their mop-haired dogs. Men and women washed their hair and clothes on the street, pouring hot water from a ticking kettle into a plastic washbasin and chatting with neighbors as they scrubbed.

Amidst this, the clown sold flowers with a twenty-year-old business partner whose Chinese name, Han Shui, sounded like the phrase for “very good looking.” Mr. Very Good Looking arranged the flowers, and the clown delivered, throwing in magic tricks for an extra fee. Weddings, funerals, breakups, love affairs–business was blossoming.

Every day the clown wore two red lipstick circles on his cheekbones, above a big red mouth outlined in white. His suit was half yellow, half green, dappled with multicolored polka dots and a jester’s collar fringed with cherry pom-poms.

The Chinese characters stitched up his thigh advertised, “Clown, Fresh Flowers.” He didn’t wear the buffoon’s long, red lace-up shoes, but he did wear mismatched sneakers—one black All-Star and one red Double Star knock-off.

Alleyways of Houhai. Photo: Zulfipunk

Giddy with this new development with the clown, I wrote home to my American friends for the first time in weeks. I anticipated a slow stream of the usual responses: How’s your Chinese? Are the dumplings amazing? Have you bought a bicycle yet?

But one after another, my friends phoned, texted, or IM-ed after a night of drinking, catching me during my morning coffee. They bombarded me with pie-in-the-face questions about my new crush: Does he have magic fingers? Does his nose squeak? Have you touched it? Can he twist balloons into sex toys?

I responded defensively. “He’s not just a clown. That’s only his day job.” But, actually, the clown worked from 6:00 or 8:00am to 10:00pm every day, and then disappeared into the darkness on his moped. I didn’t really know anything about this fellow. For all I knew, he was a telltale drunk or the victim of some rare, Rudolphian disease.

Over the next few weeks, we continued to spend time together sitting on the sidewalk outside his shop—he cooked for me, taught me Chinese and waved away passers-by who lingered and giggled, spellbound by the sight of a Chinese clown sitting pretty with a pale-skinned foreigner.

He told me childhood stories about slaughtering chickens and sneaking hot peppers into his grandmother’s porridge. He gawked over photos of my tow-headed nieces and nephews, amazed by their fat bellies and white faces. We exchanged cell phone numbers, and then finally, after weeks of flirting, he told me his name.

He gingerly lifted my hand and airbrushed the characters across my sweaty palm, fingertips lightly brushing my love line. Each stroke was a butterfly in my stomach: Song Guang Bin.

Life was a circus. And yet, two things still bothered me. For one, I’d never seen him without his make-up. And second, I wasn’t clear if we were friends who flirted, or if we were dating. Sure he’d cooked me fish and pork dinners and driven me out on errands, me perched sidesaddle on the back of his moped.

Yet we hadn’t actually been out on a date. We’d always socialized during his work hours. And aside from holding hands—if that’s what I’d even call it—we hadn’t made physical contact. I wondered what would happen if he did ever kiss me. Would he remove his nose to smooch? If not, would I just have to work around it—a flashback to kissing with braces and glasses?

Photo: Katharine Mitchell

Even though language and culture were our primary barriers, I questioned if intimacy would be an issue until the day I saw his real nose. My critical self stepped in: Was it really necessary to see a man, absolutely and completely naked, in order to trust him?

Of course not! I’d kissed plenty of people and never even seen their bare feet. So how was a red plastic nose different from a tie or eyeglasses or even flip-flops—they were all accessories, sartorial statements. So what was so irksome about the nose?

It seemed strange that he’d foregone the clown figure of the Beijing opera for the red-nosed wardrobe of the western clown. I tried to think critically about Bakhtin’s scholarship on the carnivalesque in Rabelais’ work, but lofty theories about overthrowing class and social order seemed too complicated to describe a florist, even if he was a clown.

As my curiosity grew, so did my imagination. I considered the Chinese concept of losing face, and too literally imagined that he’d done something so humiliating and dreadful that he’d vowed to forever screen his face from public view. But that, too, was absurd.

Perhaps, I decided, that red bauble cinched to his head with a common rubber band hid something–a hairy mole or a botched nose job. Plastic surgery was gaining popularity among the Chinese, so a knife-slipup didn’t seem too implausible.

But what if…he had a terrifying case of leprosy? Maybe all of his extremities were slowly disintegrating, and he intended to replace all of them–ears, fingers, toes–with red plastic noses! I shuttered at this nightmarish image of Gogol meets Bozo.

I decided I must take action. I implored the assistance of a friend’s younger sister, in China on a Wellesley study-abroad program. Relena was practical and savvy. “Ask him to go swimming,” she told over a plate of spicy eggplant. “He can’t go swimming in that get-up. He might lose his nose.”

Photo: d’n'c

The only near-by, feasible option for swimming was Houhai—the greasiest of greasy lakes. Among foreigners, Houhai is looked upon as a septic tank.

Beneath its green film lurked pollutants, rumors of dead things, and the possibility of the even deadlier Chinese snail—a vicious variety of crustacean that carries an aggressive disease that can literally eat away the human nervous system.

(During the Cultural Revolution, troops of workers waded out into lakes across China, acting as the pied pipers of snails. More recently, there was an outbreak in a rural village.) Yet I refused to be spooked by slime—or snails.

Song Guang Bin was quick to accept my invitation, and we agreed to meet by the lake one night at 10:30pm. “I’ll find you,” he said, in Chinese. “You won’t recognize me without my clown clothes.”

Sure enough, I was startled when a skinny bald man dressed in a drab blue T-shirt and baggy shorts grabbed my elbow. In the milky-green light of a dying streetlight, I held my breath as Song Guang Bin stripped. I went from only having seen him zipped inside a polka-dotted coverall to beholding his reed thin body, swaddled only in snakeskin Speedos.

I beheld his smooth head, angular hips and lovely toes that descended in perfect order. I gazed at his jumbled teeth, gaunt cheeks and delicate earlobes, now evident without the makeup. And last, but not least, I stared at his nose. Not too long, not too slim, pocked with a few blackheads, his nose was as common and ordinary as a doll’s. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about it—except, of course, that it was his.

I followed Song Guang Bin into the lake. We plunged through a school of old men bound in saggy pairs of waist-high tighty-whiteys. We raced to an unmarked destination, and fought off giggles as we treaded the deep black water.

The night was beautiful. A few stars shone through the pervasive pallor of Beijing smog, laughing couples scuttled by on paddle boats, firecrackers exploded on the other shore, and the music and lights from fringing bars blurred into the tinkle of ice in a highball.

Song Guang Bin asked if I could go under. I took a deep breath and plunged. The water was warm and soothing and I wondered why I hadn’t asked him to go swimming before now. I came up for air, hair sticking to my face, and he reached out and brushed back a clump of wet strands from my forehead.

I asked him to go under and he disappeared. Ten seconds passed, twenty. Thirty, and I started to worry. And then his arms were around me, and he was lifting me out of the water. He kissed me—short and intense. I shook my long black hair and felt as lucky as Brook Shields in Blue Lagoon.

As I raised one hand out of the water, it felt heavy and disconnected from my arm. Yet when I squeezed his nose, ever so gently, I felt the shudder throughout my body. The nose, our relationship…all of it was real.

Don’t try this in downtown San Jose. Photo: Ed Yourdon

[Editor's note: This note is an excerpt from the first chapter of Wanderjahr, an in-the-works narrative recounting the story of a young traveler's explorations of place, people, and self during a research year abroad in Central and South America. At this point in the story, the narrator has recently landed in San Jose.]

As often happens to me in cities, especially when just getting oriented, I wandered around aimlessly stringing together small acts of consumption. I bought a topographic map of the country from a newsstand near the Parque Central, bitter espresso from the café in the National Theatre, and some of the best pineapple I’d ever tasted from a bald man with a blue cart welded to the front of a bicycle.

I even bought a sleek pack of John Player Specials, a fine English smoke that cost a third of what they would have in the States. I hadn’t really enjoyed cigarettes since Ecuador, but they went with the city life, and I figured they might help me blend in with the Costa Ricans, who seemed to approach smoking as a national pastime.

Yet, looking around it was obvious, cigarette or no, that I blended in about as much as an orangutan would have.

By mid-afternoon, I was beginning to feel savvier. I’d already found a hardware store with bencina blanca, as white gas is locally known, and my tongue was remembering how to roll with the language. The Tica Linda was too depressing to hang out in, so I chose a vacant bench in the Plaza and stretched out to do some reading.

No sooner had I reclined with my book then a policeman loomed over me tapping my feet with his polished nightstick. I stared at him for a second, wondering what he wanted—his cleanly-shaven, round jaw and pursed lips, a ridiculously tasseled green uniform and cop cap, a chrome gym whistle hanging from his neck, and an outdated single-action revolver holstered at his side.

“Get your feet down,” he commanded, informing me of my crime. I swung them to the ground, and he grunted and walked off in the direction of a couple engaged in some heavy petting across the way.

Looking around I saw another officer in the same silly regalia, watching over the scene from beside the Theatre. Plaza pigs, protecting the public good from horizontal lounging and other acts of gross indecency.

I made the decision to quit smoking days before I boarded to boat for Uruguay to renew my tourist visa. A couple kilometers from shore, the smog that shrouds the city is a visible line. The city is a pint of Guiness, sky of foam, city of stout.

View of Buenos Aires from Rio de la Plata

In Buenos Aires it’s invisible. Above it’s blue, the eye not perceptive enough to pick up on the color of the tainted air so obvious from Rio de la Plata.

This is the last day of smoking for me. I’ve made up my mind to change a lifetime habit in a city where it would be easy to justify it. What difference could it possibly make to a set of lungs exposed daily to a smog so thick it obscures buildings in broad daylight?

Dissecting the impulses one by one: I congratulate myself for completing a task, I smoke. I finish dinner, I smoke. I go outside, I smoke. I’m frustrated, I just woke up, I need something to do with my hands, I smoke.

Is it a choice? In the end, if I develop lung cancer from my dependency on Buenos Aires, I might have to admit that it was worth it. The advantages to choosing this city would at least give me something to look back on fondly when compared to huddling outside on a freezing winter day among a stinking pack of exiled smokers or the emotionally bereft imagery of curled, yellow extinguished butts in a filthy ashtray.

Here, there’s a beauty to the small things and the details of this lung damaging environment that wrap me in nostalgia even as I walk through the streets. I miss it and want it and I’m still here.

Goodbye, cigarettes. I’ll miss you, but this is about priorities.

Moynak is a depressing place. There’s no other way to say it and no reason to hide it. Everyone knows what has happened to this once well-off community.

Moynak used to lie on the southern shores of the Soviet Union’s great Aral Sea, today part of Uzbekistan. Since 1960, the sea has shrunk to 10% of its original size and is now nearly 100 kilometers from Moynak. The town’s once thriving fishing industry is entirely shot.

The local climate, once kept stable by the sea, has grown hotter and drier in the summer and colder in the winter. Now winds pick up residue from salt, pesticides, and fertilizer from the dry seabed that surrounds the town, contributing to the severe decline of the local population’s health.

Once in Moynak, our driver dodged herds of bony cattle most of the way through town, taking us to the WWII memorial up on a hill.

“The water used to come up to the bottom here,” our driver commented. “Now you can’t even see it.”

Just then a local with a war tattoo and sun-darkened skin approached me with a limp.

“Why did you come here?” he asked me accusatorily. I fidgeted trying to come up with an answer that wouldn’t offend him.

Why did I come here? Perched on this cliff, overlooking what used to be the Aral Sea, in one of the most remote places in Central Asia. What was I doing here? I knew I couldn’t tell him the truth. I came to see one of the biggest environmental and ecological disasters that the earth has ever seen—the destruction of the once fourth-largest inland sea.

But he knows why I came. He knows his livelihood and that of almost everyone else in his once prosperous town has been taken, unjustly destroyed by the previous government’s mismanagement of natural resources.

“You’re young now…you don’t really understand the concept of history.” he continued in accented Russian, “Thirty years ago when you came to this monument you could see the water.” His squinting eyes and wrinkled face radiated seriousness and frustration.

So we looked out with somber expressions—the barren desert speckled with few waning shrubs and rusting ship skeletons far in the distance.

We left the monument preserving the memory of these local soldiers and drove across the sea bed to get a closer look at the ship graveyard. These decaying vessels, stripped of nearly all usable scrap metal, haven’t seen water in years. We climbed over them as if we were children at a playground.

It was hard for me to justify why I had come to visit these people’s misfortune as a tourist attraction. An awkward feeling weighed me down the whole day. But I validated my trip hoping that educating the outside world would perhaps bring attention and thus aid their cause.

On the way out of town, we stopped at the museum, which contained many remnants of what once made Moynak proud—fishnets, a boat, preserved fish, and a photo album of the old fish cannery. We moseyed through the gallery. On the walls, children’s artwork depicted the rusty skeletons.

Salina Cruz, Oaxaca

This morning’s spectacle put Doña Charo in a melancholy mood.

We stood out on the water tank earlier and watched some poor, sweaty guy carry a cross up the steep road, while Roman

Photo: Andresg. Feature photo: Jesse Millan

soldiers in shiny golden helmets whipped him and yelled insults. Behind them, a good sized crowd sang, “God, forgive your people” over and over, and Doña Charo blinked back tears.

Now, in the blessed cool of the evening, my mother-in-law and I are rocking in the hammocks, talking about–what else?–The Baby. “Having a baby is the most wonderful thing that can happen to a woman,” she tells me. “Es lo maximo para una mujer.”

I’m not sure about that, not yet anyway, but I keep quiet, and she continues, “I keep hearing about these girls who abandon their babies. They just have them and leave them in a trash can or on the street. I can’t understand it.”

I put my hands on my barely-round belly and wonder how far to go. Doña Charo is the best person in the world, but she’s also on a Catholic guilt-bender today, and you never know.

Finally I tell her, “I think most of those girls didn’t want to be pregnant in the first place, and they don’t see it as a baby. Just as a…thing that’s causing them problems, and they want it to go away. And probably they didn’t have the kind of lives that taught them to be nurturing.”

We swing for a while. You can’t see the ocean from here, but you can smell it if you concentrate. I concentrate.

“Maybe so. But couldn’t they leave them somewhere safe? Those poor babies.”

I imagine the mango-sized baby inside me, plashing in a private ocean. I want this baby. But I think, “Those poor girls.”

Tuxtla-Gutiérrez, Chiapas

Ibis is at his interview, and I sit in a plaza, hoping. We live in a city that we hate; we want to come live here. There’s more riding on this day that either of us is willing to articulate, and I’m trying not be annoyed that there’s nothing I can do about it but wait.

So I watch the people.

A young woman walks by with maybe her grandmother. The old woman is bent and slow moving, but the younger woman leans heavily on her shoulder—her heels are so high, she can hardly walk.

A chubby baby, following the balloon man with the staggery, determined walk of the newly ambulatory, with each step stabbing her foot into the ground as though she means to plant it there.

Photo: Kojotomoto

One little girl, maybe four years old, is chasing pigeons. She shrieks with laughter, running around and around the basin of a dry fountain. Each time she grabs at a pigeon and it flutters away, she screams with surprise and delight. She is perfect.

After a while she climbs out of the fountain and careens across the plaza. She crashes into a man’s legs and almost falls, but he grabs her arm without even looking at her and keeps her on her feet.

At a government building across the street, elderly people are lined up in the hundreds, a sea of beige cowboy hats and grey braids. The men wiry and impossibly thin, the women thick and slumped from too much childbearing and too much work. They each clutch a manila folder. It’s so hot, and some of them look so frail. They inch forward. I wonder what’s going on in there to inspire such patience.

I turn back around and the little girl is a streak of yellow shorts and flopping black hair, far across the plaza, scattering pigeons like confetti.

Somewhere in Tlaxcala

It’s going on two o’clock in the morning, and we’ve been driving since two o’clock in the afternoon. Almost halfway across Mexico, the long way. We have to be in Pachuca tomorrow, and we’re buoyed mainly by the fact that Ibis’s interview went well, though there are still no promises.

We pass through a corridor of strip clubs—The Moon Night Club, Top Hat Men’s Club, Peaches, Tahiti. (One of the many enduring mysteries of Mexico is why nearly all the strip clubs have English names.) It’s quincena, payday, and the parking lots are all full.

Photo: Iamagenious

Just past the night club lights, on the side of the highway, two pale apparitions of bare legs and long hair, waiting for business. Such a lonely sight. I wonder if their families know where they are. I try to imagine the anticipation and dread, standing there: Will this one stop? Will he pay up? Will he hurt me?

Long after we’ve passed them, they flicker behind my eyelids every time I start to fall asleep.

Pachuca, Hidalgo

We just miss the first rain of the wet season. We left behind a city as dry and cracked as a chapped lip, earth so dry it made you thirsty to look at it. Now, at three in the morning, our tires hiss over wet asphalt.

We’re greeted, as always, by a larger-than-life Iran Castillo, TV star and erstwhile nudie model, who is the face and body of a massive campaign to bring more tourism to Hidalgo. She stretches on across billboards all over the city, smiling seductively, with Hidalgo’s natural wonders superimposed over her naked body.

Photo: Coloboxp

I would feel better about this, I think, if she were quoted somewhere: “I went to Hidalgo, and it was beautiful!” If it had anything at all to do with her as a person, if it even pretended to. But no.

And then–is it a quirk of the plastic she’s printed on? An exhuastion-induced hallucination? Headlight glare plus wet? Does she wink?

We drive through our silent neighborhood, bump into the driveway, stumble out of the car, past the damp magenta bougainvilleas, and into the house. My last conscious act of the night is to open the bedroom window, to let in the smell of rain, the promise of life.

Photo: Joanne O’Sullivan

On a sticky-hot August evening in Salina Cruz, my friend Joanne and I step into Doña Teo’s living room.

Lately the meeting place for a prayer group, it’s now decorated in my honor, with red-and-white foam cutouts of lingerie and hearts, and an impressively realistic pantyhose penis, complete with pubic hair, resting on top of a cake.

Of course I’m not supposed to know, or let on that I know, just how realistic it is. The ostensible idea behind the Mexican despedida de soltera, or “farewell to the single girl”, is that the bride-to-be is an innocent virgin who requires a non-threatening introduction to the male anatomy, lest she be terrified on her wedding night.

The thirty or so women who brave the heat to attend the party don’t much care about that, though. I only know six of them personally; the rest aren’t here so much to ease my transition into married life as to spend an evening laughing their asses off about the organ, and the act, that may or may not be cause for laughter in the privacy of their own homes.

Doña Teo pushes margaritas into our hands and Joanne as I concentrate on getting as drunk as possible. One of Doña Teo’s wild daughters pins a sequin-adorned scrub-pad to my shirt, which marks me as the bride-(and dish scrubber)-to-be. My soon-to-be mother-in-law, Doña Charo, is working away in the kitchen, but waves at us encouragingly now and then.

Photo: gorriti

The games kick off with a banana-eating contest. The banana must be consumed both sensuously and quickly. There are five contestants. A skinny woman in an embroidered blouse dances around a pillar in the middle of the room, shaking her hips.

My sister-in-law-to-be is embarrassed at first, then gets into it—she’s not married and I’m vaguely surprised that she’s chosen to participate. (A few months later, the first family crisis of my marriage will involve her surprise pregnancy.)

The inflate-the-condom-without-popping-it game is next, and then a confusing word game which Joanne and I manage to win without really understanding what’s going on. At the end of each game, I am required to stand up, scrub-pad dangling from my chest, and present the winner with her prize: an elaborately wrapped Tupperware container.

Just as Doña Charo begins dishing up the food, Doña Teo’s daughters pull me out of my chair and usher me upstairs, where women in various stages of undress are complaining about the heat and putting on costumes. Another pantyhose penis, this one as long as my arm, sits on the bed.

Before I know it, I’m stripped to my underwear and a wedding dress is pulled over my head. It won’t button up in back but ni modo.

One large woman, dressed as a priest, is painting a beard on her face. Doña Teo’s daughter Mari is wearing a suit jacket and is strapping the huge penis to her waist. Her other daughter is doing something painful to my hair, trying to get the veil to stay on. Another woman stuffs a pregnant pillow-belly under her dress.

Suddenly the wedding march is playing and we’re descending the stairs. Mari waves her penis about wildly to the cheers and whistles of the guests. The priest chants dirty blessings. At frequently intervals I’m required to hold or stroke the penis.

Photo: mexikids

The woman with the pregnant belly rushes in and accuses the groom of knocking her up. Mari swears to me that she’s never seen this woman before, then turns around and winks at the crowd, shakes her hips to make the penis wag. “Do you believe me?” she asks. I’m at a loss, but: “Sí, mi amor,” I tell her, making a simpering face.

When the “ceremony” is over, Mari and I dance, while the rest of the women call out instructions: “Kiss it! Hold it! Touch it!” they yell, and I oblige. When they cut in to dance with me, they bear a tequila-filled clay penis which they hold to my mouth, tipping my head back until my neck aches.

After I cut the cake (and, of course, pay appropriate attention to the penis that adorns it), the ladies begin saying goodbye. I open the presents: a tiny red thong, an electric mixer, two sets of juice glasses, sequined teal pajamas, a ceramic duck with a rather obvious seam down the middle where it broke and was super-glued back together.

Doña Teo tells us about her wedding night: how frightened she was, even though she married for love, how her mother-in-law pounded on the bedroom door until they were able to pass her the blood-stained sheet, the proof of virginity.

Photo: Joanne O’Sullivan

As Doña Charo herds Joanne and I home through the warm, salty night, I think fuzzily how I’ve been introduced to more than the male anatomy tonight.

Through a tequila haze, I picture myself married, wearing nothing but a red thong, mixing cake batter with one hand and stroking a man-sized, disembodied penis with the other, while dirty Tupperware spawns in the sink and pregnant, barefoot women bang on the windows, demanding paternity tests.

Rocinha. Feature photo and photo above: Fabbio.

So I found the sickest view yet of Rio.

I was just going to take the combi from Leblon to São Conrado to just check it. See if I was missing surf spots. Beautiful of course. Some surf. Then I look up and see the favela looming above.

I asked some kid. He said that was Rocinha. I said, “I cant go up there can I?” He said, sure, tudo tranquilo.

So I was just going to walk to the edge of it and look in. Then I see the horrible jeep tours with dumb tourists sitting in the back, so I figure it can’t be that bad.

I just walked in, found a restaurant and ate something, sort of hid in a corner with a view and drew a little sketch. The moto taxis flying buy at breakneck speed. I saw combis with signs for Gavea so I figured the street must pass through. I was going to just take a combi and ride through it.

Sketch of Rocinha. David Johnson.

But then the mototaxis were flying by for 2 reais to the top. I was like, ‘if I am going to go up, I want to go on the mototaxi’.

So this kid carries me to the top. The road up is just a series of cutbacks to the top. Favela is pretty normal. Restaurants and stores and papelarias and street vendors. It just happens to be built on a hill as steep as anything in San Francisco, all sorts of little alleys and passages and smells.

The favela is huge though and wraps over and around this huge morro. Sick views abound.

This kid dropped me off close to the top. I wanted to get one little sketch. I got good at five minute sketches.

I drew a couple and passed the top where it starts to drop back to Gavea and I see the bend that keeps on going up.

It’s like I just peer around the corner and everything looks normal. Nobody was staring at me too much. People walked by looking at the drawings and all are like, shit que massa. I only had ten reais to be stolen if anything.

Then this kid walks up and looks and tells me there is a sweet view just around the corner looking towards Rio. He was like 14 or 15, talking about soccer and asking about the drawings. He seemed alright, so I was like cool, I want to see it.

Hill is super super steep and it sort of winds back and forth. Sick views towards Barra. Then we come around the corner. A parked car with its doors wide open, joints being smoked in full view, the hip hop blasting, and about five guys armed with m16s, in full view, and radios talking back and forth.

My friend Charles was right: there are hills that the cops just do not go up in Rio. I had fully crossed the line.

I sort of paused but it was too late. They saw me and the kid and were like, ven aqui ven aqui. At this point I thought it sort of unwise to just shine them and turn my back. I had nothing to hide, and the view that they were sitting at…..

So i just walk up. I was sort of shaking. It was cool, but I was still sort of shaking. Really only the second time I had seen guns flashed like that, but it was sort of heavy to see.

Fica vontade loco, fiqa tranquilo, não pasa nada. Voce está em casa.

They asked me what I was doing and I said desinando. Showed them my sketchbook and before I knew it they were flipping through telling me that they are very good sketches. One guy is asking me something about me drawing him for a tattoo for his girlfriend.

5 minute sketch of Rio. David Johnson.

It was cool, but just didnt think it was exactly the spot I needed to sit back and kick it at. I wanted to draw something, but i dont think i could have held my hand still. But something about my face and just walking up and looking them in the eye smiling and saying tudo bom. tudo tranquilo. And its all cool.

Views. David Johnson.

I sat for a minute and looked out across Rio. Wah, you could see the lagoa and all the morros and Corcovado all the way to parts of Niteroi, like looking down the line of a sick wave or something. They were radioing up and down the hill. The beeps of walkie talkies. Then i just turned and said:

Muito obrigado irmãos, mais con tudo respecto eu acho que e melhor si eu vou por embaixo.

They smiled, we exchanged the Brazilian international sign of tudo bom, the thumbs up, and I walked back.

The moto-taxi kid apologized, said he didn’t know they were there, that he wouldn’t have taken me there if he had known it.

I was actually glad he took me up there just to see it.

Those guys had the sickest view of Rio I have seen yet.

The realization came at a guesthouse in remote Laos, the kind of place that miraculously hovers inches above the ground on six concrete blocks. I was coming home from a night of desolation drinking. The generators had long since expired and I had only a flashlight to guide me.

A sleepless night on an inch thick mattress awaited. The fan clanked with a unique beat, as if trying to keep up with some arcane drum ‘n bass song that the big-pants people liked in the late 90’s. I wasn’t expecting to see the snake, curled up next to my bed.

“SNAKE! DO YOU SEE THIS? SNAKE! IS ANYBODY ELSE SEEING THIS?”

No one came running. No concierge, no guest-relations expert, no complimentary upgrade or oh-my-gosh-sir. I bravely threw Three Cups Of Tea at the snake, pissing it off enough to do that thing where it revealed, yes, it could stand up too.

That night I slept in the unlocked room next door and decided, well, that’s that. No more of this reptiles-under-the-bed nonsense. I would have to swallow my pride and become a…ugh. Flashpacker.

And so it went for the past year. I hunted online for mid-range deals, becoming an expert at finding better accommodation for twenty bucks more, happy to spend the extra dough in order to avoid the poop-smeared toilets at Hostel Incontin-ental. Guesthouses and teepees only became a viable option when everything else was sold out.

Then my day job went bye-bye, my 401k stopped growing and we all started loudly cursing airport taxes.

I was resigned to travel the world for 2009. That extra $20 per day had suddenly become more important for the survival kitty. Flashpacking went right out the window. I moved back to rooms with lime green paint jobs, roosters under the floorboards and showers with pervy peekholes.

I’m not alone. I’ve been away for three months and it’s startling to see the adjustment that has taken place since I was away in early 2008. Mid-level guesthouses, some only open a few months, look positively grim at night. There’s no hiding it when only two rooms have lights on.

You’d think that this would encourage a shift in pricing but it’s been my experience that they’re holding onto that +$20 rate, playing a game that probably won’t pan out in the long run.

On the other hand, cheapies are packed to the rafters and I’ve bumped into quite a few of my fellow former-midscalers along the way. We’re all bargaining out here, quite happy to remind the owner that his “eco-tourist property” is really just a series of termite-ridden huts, and that his nightly solar-powered electricity will last only about as long as a good lay. We’re politely elbowing for the room that faces the garden and violently face-masking for the bulkhead on flights.

I’ve opted out of guide books in most countries. This week in Laos I splurged for a $5 PDF of the always-dependable Travelfish guide, somehow feeling better about giving money to the little guy and content that I pocketed the extra twenty bucks.

I use hostel booking sites that don’t require fees, rather than Expedia or Hotels.com. I find myself pillaging Kayak and Cheapflights for the best airfaires, then booking directly with the airlines so as to avoid their racking fees too.

I call airline reservation lines until I get the right agent, usually a wrinkled warhorse in Houston or Chicago. She will sometimes hit magical F keys and, after a pause that makes my heart pound, will come back with a “Well, would you look at that?”.

These women (and lispy men named Charles) have been pulling backroom shenanigans for years and are often thrilled to speak with a system-scammer. We reminisce about the days of back-to-back Supersavers and how it used to be glamorous to working the counter at LAX, and now it’s just a goddamned mess. A goddamned mess, I’m telling you.

I know which airline websites will charge me for baggage at the last click and which of their competitors won’t. I’ve turned back towards train travel, knowing at least that I won’t end up 30 miles from town and swallowing an unexpected $20 cab ride. I’m also reading all of the fine print, like when I discovered this week that my Eurail pass would snag me a £100 discount on the Eurostar.

This thriftiness has also made me savvy about things like travel insurance. I’ve spent hours comparing policies on insuremytrip.com and reading about other policies on message boards. I’ve pondered just how much my limbs are worth, since every policy tends to pay out per limb lost (multiple amputations often yield three cherries and a bigger payout).

I’ve opted for a more expensive policy than the one I’ve used in the past because, after really getting into the nitty-gritty, it smells about as good as a post-sauerkraut fart. I’d rather splurge a bit up front than get hit with a thousand dollar morphine drip later.

You know what else? The cheapies are thrilled to see me again. They may not have painted the joint since Carter was president but they sure appreciate the business. Gone are the dour faces and the year of entitlement that follows a rave Lonely Planet review. Conversely, the mid-level employees seem pissed off and resentful, angry that I might ask them to bring down their prices, or that I used two towels.

This isn’t to say that bargains aren’t to be had. I recently caved and spent $100 for three nights in a Bangkok five-star. I locked myself in the room for days, thrilled to spend my CNN time with sheets over 200 count. Checking into a guesthouse the night after, I felt ridiculous for having spent the money, but not for spending so much time being seduced by Anderson Cooper’s dreamy eyes.

Truth be told, I’m having a better time traveling now than I have in years. I’m writing this article from a ‘splurge’, a riverside residence that sits just north of budget. A travel agent in Vientiane tried to sell me two nights here for $100, “breakfast included!”. I pondered plunking down my Visa, and then walked outside to call the hotel directly.

I got it for $10 a night.

Albina. Photo: Teresa Ponikvar

The mist is creeping through the banana trees and Albina drags us outside to show us her world.

She introduces us to the fat-bellied puppies first. The mother dog is thin and exhausted. She lifts her head just long enough to decide that we are no threat, then lets it flop back into the dirt.

Tugging at our hands and chattering about a “chancha”—whatever that is—Albina guides us around to the back of the house. She gestures proudly at a good-sized, mottled white-and-gray pig, sleeping with its back pressed against the weathered boards of the house, and that’s how I learn that “chancha” is Nicaraguan for pig.

“Tomorrow we’re going to kill the chancha,” she tells us. I wonder if I’ve understood her correctly, and doubtfully relay this information to Jessie, who looks concerned. Albina picks up a stick and scratches the pig’s side idly.

In the morning Doña Adela, rapidly patting out tortillas, confirms that the chancha’s number is indeed up. Various uncles and male cousins are already arriving, preparing for the slaughter, or just standing around manfully, dreaming of pork.

Jessie organizes the younger boys into a game of Frisbee. Albina tries to join them, but when the Frisbee conks her on the head and the boys laugh, she picks up a huge stick and shakes it at them furiously. She stalks into the house, and comes back out with the child-sized plastic lawn chair that is clearly her prize possession.

I wave her over to me, offer my notebook and a handful of colored pencils. She brightens at this and proceeds to fill page after page with rows and rows of flowers, all precisely the same size. I sit there wishing I could buy her a book, knowing it’s not my place.

Later, Doña Adela sets up plastic chairs for Jessie and me, front row seats to the chancha’s demise. It takes several uncles to hold the pig (who seems to know what’s coming) still enough for its throat to be slit. Norbin, thirteen years old, is in charge of catching the spurting blood in a bucket, a task he handles with what strikes me as amazing aplomb.

The pig screams and screams, bleeds and bleeds. Jessie snaps pictures while I sit transfixed. Albina turns her back but doesn’t say anything. When the pig is finally quiet, she looks at me with wide eyes.

“I felt sorry for the chancha,” she tells me in a whisper. “Me, too,” I whisper back, and squeeze her shoulder, knowing that we will both eat the meat anyway.

Later, the skinny mother dog snaps down the discarded pig entrails, glancing around warily with her one blue eye and one brown. The whole family feasts on pork nixtamales in the darkness of the house, and to a scratchy radio station, I dance with Albina, and Jessie dances with Norbin, the aunts dance with the uncles, and the cousins bust their moves solo.

Doña Adela smiles out from the smoky kitchen. She hasn’t stopped working for one moment since we met her.

Photos by the author.

The train began to move and my friends ran along. They were almost jogging and I watched as the train overtook them, watched my mom stand and watch me go.

Soon they were all out of sight and so was the station platform. I got back into the compartment and took my seat. There was an elderly couple next to me.

I was traveling from Mumbai to Northern India, a 30 hour journey. By evening my iPod battery gave up on me and I took a break to look at things.

I fidgeted a little and caught the attention of the lady next to me, she said in Hindi “Where does a young girl like you travel alone to?” I told her to volunteer with an NGO.

She snorted and said “At your age, child, I was ripe with my third born.” (I’m 21).

Soon we were chit chatting like old friends and her husband joined in. I learnt they were Sindhi’s from Sind which now politically falls under Pakistan. When India was partitioned they didn’t want to be part of Pakistan so gave up their home, land and family, crossed the border onto India on foot.

They told me about their life thereafter and what a disappointment India had been. I felt angry and defensive but I didn’t say anything.

Night came and I retired to my bunk. I don’t remember when I dozed off but was awoken sometime in the night by loud fighting and shouting. The police were conducting a random check on the train and someone had been caught with alcohol. We were in a religious section of the country where alcohol was prohibited, besides you’re not allowed to travel with any booze on you.

The police moved down the train and I could hear them approaching me. When you see the cops you feel like you’re in danger rather than safe and secure.

My heart began thumping even though I knew I had nothing on me and there was no reason for them to pick on me. The curtains of my berth were drawn and I heard the policeman ask the conductor:

“Who’s in here?”

The conductor responded “it’s a girl, from Mumbai, she’s only a child”

And I heard the policeman walk away.

On inquiring from the conductor I found out we were in the middle of the Rajasthan desert. That was a scary thought. The train began to move and the next thing I remember is loud shrill voices screaming “chai” (Tea) and light flooding in from somewhere. Then I was dreaming that I was swimming and I couldn’t figure out which side was up because there was light in every direction and some annoying voice was saying something about tea.

I woke up then and found that I was in Delhi, still had a few hours to get to Haryana. I bought some chai for 5 rupees and settled down. I went off to relieve myself and stare at the ground through the small hole through which I was expected to dump. It felt weird but I did what I had to do.

The elderly couple had gotten off at Delhi and I was alone in the compartment now.

Tom, hanging with ‘the creature’.

21/3/09

Patterson:

3 days ago I projectile vomited from an auto rickshaw in Varanasi, India, on the way to the train station. This was after a week of flights from Vermont to Chicago to Colorado to New York to Brussels to New Delhi to Kathmandu.

The night train from Varanasi to Calcutta was only mildly miserable, and I found a cheap room off Sudder Street with peeling yellow wallpaper.

The next morning I flew to Bangkok, landed mid-afternoon, took a cab to the massive computer center in Panthip, bought a replacement AC adaptor for my laptop, caught another cab to the bus station, bought a ticket to the Laos border and waited for the night-bus with my head in my hands, feeling the fever come on.

Tim, ‘recovering’ with ‘the creature’.

All night, I alternated between curling against the bus window and lurching down the aisle to spray liquid yellow shit into the can.

Crossing into Laos, I got caught in a rainstorm. I sheltered in a café, asked to use the bathroom, then promptly shit my pants. Disposing of my boxers in the bathroom garbage can, I free-balled through the rain to the guesthouse Tom had chosen, Lani Guesthouse, a lovely inn tucked down a back-lane next to a quiet temple.

I knocked on the door. Tom was at the desk, typing. He jumped up and gave me a big hug, then instantly recoiled. “You’re soaking wet,” he said. “You don’t even know the half of it,” I replied.

That night I slept for a solid 12 hours. At some point Tom took the photo of the creature on me. Now, thanks to antibiotics, I’m back on my feet, and this little adventure can properly begin.

Gates:

Patterson and I immediately set up a domestic partnership. It was simple. First he needed confirmation that his hair had gone Play-Doh Barbershop out of control. 5’9” whiteboys from Vermont don’t need fro’s – no hesitation in telling him yes to that.

Second, he needed a Manny, on account of his shitting sickness. I did my best, hunting around town for foods that bind. Third, he needed somebody who would sit silently near him, completely ignoring his presence and typing on this laptop. This was gonna be perfect.

22/03/09

Gates:

We did the sunset on the Mekong thing again, which is always pretty amazing. We sat at tables at the end of river bend, watching kids play soccer and eating cashews that had been fried up in oil, then coated with salt (I had to ask that they be placed on the other side of the table, lest I would eat them all in two handfuls).

We gave another bar a shot but it pretty much sucked. I ordered a Full Moon Rising cocktail, which looked exactly like water that’s had different color paintbrushes dipped in it.

For dinner, I made us go to a place called Sticky Fingers and I ordered nachos and yes, I’m That Guy.

But. Full redemption. I stumbled upon the best cocktail I’ve ever had, called Tom Yum Martini. It’s vodka that has been soaked in chili, added to fruit juice that’s been mulled in lemongrass and ginger, added to sugar water. Fuck me with a chainsaw, that was good. I had two.

My lips were fiery and had a freshly colagen’d look to them but heavens to Betsy, was I happy. We had a bizarre dinner with two interesting dudes, both 19 year+ expats in Laos. We listened as they debated the issues of the day with gusto and an American accent that I missed. “Oh, that fucking place…” “What a pile of horse shit that was..”.

The other side of these guys was all heart – each of them have been doing things for this country that could only help it, for no other reason than to just do it. They were equal parts Clint Eastwood and Jimmy Buffett. Then Tim bailed, probably to drop his innards into our toilet again.

I hung back and talked to a 24 year old from Washington. He grew up on a weed farm. I came home to a room that smelled like farts. Well not exactly like farts. More like cashews.

22/03/09

Patterson:

Note to Tom: was this the rat shit?

The other day Tom got his ass stuck on the toilet. We had moved from lovely Lani Guesthouse to a cheaper backpacker joint by the river and, while this new room is perfectly serviceable, according to Tom there’s rat shit in the bathroom and the toilet seat is cracked.

This crack is what pinched Tom’s butt-cheek. “I thought something had reached up and grabbed me,” he said.

For those who are concerned about my wellbeing, thanks. I’m on Azythro and although I haven’t enjoyed a solid yet, I can now fart without worrying about the dreaded accidental shart.

I admit the room smelled like farts when Tom got home last night, but I deny bailing from Sticky Fingers. We were both on our way out the door when Tom spotted a hot guy alone at the bar and got the same look on his face that he gets when he’s about to order a Beer Lao.

I wasn’t about to stick around.

Gates:

First: Mouse shit. There’s mouse shit on the bathroom floor. Second, I’m so excited that Tim is coming along so quickly, able to spot hot guys with ease. I’d suggest that he liked dudes if he didn’t stop hitting on Japanese girls.

I had to admit, that’s a cool move. To be a granola-looking Vermont kid, to walk up to a Japanese chick and start talking in their language. Rapidly. Then be able to drop “Oh I lived there for a couple of years.”

[Editor's note: where are those pictures?]

They melt every time, no matter how obvious a come-on it is. Patterson’s got a passion for these girls that rivals Rivers Cuomo. These Japanese girls do it to him every time.

We’ve taken to holing up in Joma Café, which has Wifi, aircon and incredible home-made soup. We sit there like an elderly couple, locking up tables for hours on one order of lemon shakes. I’ve been downloading Battlestar Galactica episodes, which is surely why everyone in the place wonders why the Wifi is So Damned Slow Here.

Vientiane is coming up faster than I thought it was. I was here just one year ago and found it to be somewhat sleepy. It’s now growing at a positively Vietnamese pace, with guesthouses going up on every corner. One afternoon I watched an entire storefront went up on a 7-Eleven knockoff, then went inside and bought a bottle of water that was priced 10 cents more than the other, non-flashy 7-11 knockoff next door.

They’re getting it – increase the price if it’s perty-er. We’ll go to the perty-er one, no question.

Patterson:

Yeah, Vientiane is a heck of a lot fancier than I expected. It’s not a tourist boutique like parts of Luang Prabang, but there are plenty of foreigners here, some shops selling golf clubs and a handful of upscale cafes that cater to WiFi addicts from Connecticut. (Both Tom and I are actually from Connecticut. In fact, our fathers are from the same town, Durham).

But yeah – people are doing a brisk business in the capital of Laos these days. When I arrived a new ATM was going in on the corner by our guesthouse and yesterday two Swedish girls were already withdrawing kip.

I love the riverfront – ramshackle restaurants and beer gardens with fresh chicken and beef, live shrimp and fish and glum frogs all displayed out front.

The sunsets here make me want to paint watercolors, something I haven’t done in years. Around 7 pm the river is painted pink with a blood-orange streak where the sun is falling and kids are running around on the sandbar, playing soccer or going for a swim.

We found a great little bar for the sunset yesterday, pretty much the very last one if you walk west along the river out of town. There were just a few tables and not much on the menu besides warm cashew nuts and Beer Lao. An adorable puppy was playing under our table. I tried to be its friend but it didn’t like cashews.

Feature photo by Kr. B. Photo above by austinevan.

This has not been my proudest moment. We’d only been traveling for a week but that was more than enough. My issue with her wasn’t a mild irritation but a complete dislike; so I’ve taken the easy option – I’ve ran, packed my bags and jumped on the first train out of town, out of Poland.

I can see the other passengers’ bemused glances. In my guilty state I convince myself they know my betrayal. I keep my head down.

Having backpacked across Eastern Europe for several months, I’ve learnt the advantages of a companion. You meet people heading in the same direction and team up. You endure mild oddities for the comfort of knowing someone is watching your back.

We’d met in a Warsaw hostel two weeks earlier and decided to travel together. Pretty soon it dawned on me that the only thing we had in common was speaking English.

It was hard to pinpoint what I disliked but it was probably a combination of an over-the-top personality, a room-filling voice and an attitude that said ‘I know everything about everything’.

I try and console myself. We’ve only just met, we didn’t sign any contracts, I was a free agent to come and go as I pleased. But it’s no use. Guilt. I’m starting to feel pretty low. Of course I’ve over-reacted. There are far worse scenarios than travelling with someone who is a little overbearing.

Photo by arekolek.

I glance over at a group of older Germans across the isle; their rosy drunk faces, eyes shining from laughter. While not understanding the conversation, it’s obvious they’re having a good time.

The adrenaline of making the train (three-kilometre run to the station in the middle of the night) has worn off. The interior lights dim. The Germans continue their conversation.

The seats with their deep metallic armrests are not meant to accommodate sleeping. I tilt my head at various angles to find one that’s not too uncomfortable. I keep going over scenarios. I envisage the scene when Hannah finally realises I have left her. Or maybe I’m giving myself more credit than I’m worth. Would she even care?

I dwell on the randomness of travelling. People come in and out of your life in a second but leave a lasting impression. I’m positive the Germans next to me will forget me soon after the trip ends if they even noticed me at all. However, I am quite certain I’ll remember them. I tuck my jacket under my head to act as a makeshift pillow. I’m in for a long night.

3:30 am.

We’re dancing to Cumbia Villera. The Indian masks on the walls seem to be scowling over the dance floor.

Cumbia villera is the rhythm of the cartonero clopping down the street with his horse.

It’s the music of the streets. Like hip-hop, the words don’t hold anything back. They talk about life in la villa.

And here, just like there, it is the music of the poor that moves the children of the middle-class.

Photo: irrezolut.

5:00 am.

I help the dj load his gear into his truck, and–what the hell—someone has broken in, stolen his toolbox. He just shakes his head and says, “What can you do? Aqui te roban, aqui te matan.” (Here they rob you and kill you.)

5:30 am.

Almost dawn and only four of us left—Gabi, me, DJ, Gustavo. The dining room / dance-floor is covered with this nasty black resin. We can’t figure out what it is at first, then we realize that everyone tracked in ashes from the burnt tires in front of the house.

Now the four of us are sprawled on couches and armchairs in the living room. A small fire still burns in the fireplace and 40 empty beer cups line the table.

We’re listening to some heavy techno music, a show called metro dance, which is broadcast live from a club in Buenos Aires. It feels like the four of us here are connected somehow to everyone else listening to this station. I’m imagining groups of friends gathered in front of other fires, inside other houses, and all the locos still dancing between the booming walls of the clubs.

5:45 am.

Gustavo and DJ passed out now, but Gabi keeps rubbing her blackened feet on them. She’s asking me why why why does DJ want a girlfriend who is Latina. I keep telling her, baby I don’t know—everyone has his or her gusto, and anyway you’re drunk. you need to go to sleep.

She tells me, no, no, everyone else needs to stay awake and talk to me, and I say, “Nena, you’re finished. If I start telling you a bedtime story you’ll be asleep in 5 seconds.”

“Try it,” she says. And so I start telling her a story about a girl who hears drumbeats in the rain, and she’s asleep in 5 seconds.

I check the fire, cut off the lights, the stereo, leave my friends there snoring in their chairs. I walk upstairs, feeling something I can’t quite define. Maybe it’s a twisted pride: for once the gringo put everyone to bed. Whatever it is, it’s something peaceful. I get into bed next to Lau and just before I close my eyes I hear a rooster crowing.

One of the interns at Random House emailed me the other day to confirm my mailing address. She was sending out my contributor’s copy of Fodor’s Patagonia. I’d almost forgotten about this, honestly. I turned in my ‘chapter’ over a year ago. That’s how it works with book publication.

I haven’t had time to flip through this book. You check your name, bio, scan your words. Yep. They got everything right. “Atlantic Patagonia is where the low windswept pampas meet the ocean.”

Shadow of our car on pampas. Bring extra water and gear.

But for a couple minutes I was re-transported to that place.

We’d flown from Buenos Aires to Puerto Madryn, then rented this econo-box ford.

We took the coastal road more than 50 miles from Camarones to Bahia Bustamante. The ruts and sand in the washouts were deeper than the tires.

It was like 4-wheeling in a golf-cart.

Layla was only two-months old then and I felt nervous the whole time. The pampas went on forever. The ocean went on forever. There was nobody around anywhere. I kept thinking ‘if we had my van and camping gear and surfboards this would be all-time.’

But I wasn’t there on a surf mission. I was there to tour this place and write. I was there to check the beds and food and scene and shopping. I was over it almost as soon as the first hotel manager showed me a ‘typical room.’

Mainly I was a young dad and didn’t know where the hell we were going after this.

Standing there with the book, all of this came back and I felt almost nostalgic. Maybe not quite nostalgia, but a certain cariño. A kind of tenderness. Some feelings are easier to describe in Spanish.

I flipped through just a bit more to look at what hermano Tim Patterson had written. I felt kind of proud both of us had contributed to this book.

For a second I had this weird delusion like somehow in the future this volume would be referred to as some kind of literary travel writing masterpiece. Generations of young travel writers would be studying our words.

I love Patagonia in a different way than any other place. It’s just wide open. Tim had written a special section called “Into the Wild” that conveys the feeling perfectly: “Patagonia will shatter your sense of scale.”

I feel the need to be shattered again. And yeah, I’d take this book.

Los Cerritos, Baja. Late 90s, back when it was ‘free.’ Photo by Laura Bernhein

Writing a good travel narrative (or the shortened form I like to call a travel “note”) is not as easy as it sounds. It takes the right mix of characters, observations, and a sense of the place having some kind of effect on the traveler, whether it be connection, alienation, inspiration, or whatever.

For several months we’ve taken a break from reading travel narrative submissions at Matador, however we’ve just started again, for the “notes for the road” section here at the notebook. If you’re interested in sending a note, here’s a quick guide:

What to send

• Stories that are between 400 – 800 words
• Stories that are actually stories (They have a beginning, middle, and end).
• Stories that have characters
• Stories that are funny
• Stories that are sad
• Stories that are honest
• Stories that are real
• Stories about connecting (or being unable to connect) with people (physically, spiritually, whatever) and places
• Stories that have dialogue
• Stories written in your voice, not copying anyone else

What not to send

• Stories over 800 words
• Stories with the words / phrases ‘nestled’, ‘a paradise for nature lovers’, ‘the heart of’, ’snowcapped’, ‘a must-do’
• Stories that end with tidy conclusions
• Stories that are just the narrator pontificating / judging without interacting

Submission process

Please send your work directly to david[at]matadornetwork[dot]com with the text pasted into the email. Bios and cover letters are not necessary. Please put “notes for the road” in the subject line, plus the title.

Response times are generally within a week. If you do not hear back from us within a week it means that your narrative did not fit our specific editorial vision. Please do not take this as a judgment of your skills or talent, but simply a question of the type of stories we’re trying to publish.

Payment is the same as a regular matador network article. $25 via paypal.

Final note: pieces previously published on the internet or print are not accepted, however if you’d like to rework something you’ve already published at your matador blog, that’s fine.

We look forward to reading your submissions. Suerte,

david

Photo by libertinus

Riding home from Palermo on the creaking subte during rush hour madness. People elbowing me in the back. The heat of so many bodies. Everyone keeping his or her head down. Looks ranging from disgust to all-out despair on the faces. Nobody saying a word.

“Viste lo que es?” my friend Gustavo asks. You see what this is?

I nod and and think about it for a second and then say, “People get used to anything after a while.” The verb acostumbrar: to become accustomed to.

The train rocks through the curves and we all lean into one another, then recoil, pretending we never felt or smelt each others’ bodies.

“This is us,” Gusavo says. We push our way out through a dozen people–”permiso. . . con permiso. . .perdón,” nearly falling into the station where a guy wearing a scarf is playing a somber and perfect melody on the cello. Gustavo flips a coin into his open instrument case. We climb the filthy stairs to the cold and miraculous air outside.

“Those poor people,” Gustavo says. “They have to do this every day.”

“That many people, traveling every day. . . you’d think there’d be enough revenue to improve the transit system.” As soon as this is of my mouth–even though it was in flawless Spanish–I realize how much of a Gringo-sounding statement I’ve just made.

Watch where you step. Photo: Kai Hendry

“Yeah, but it all ends up in the impresarios’ pockets,” Gustavo says. “It’s a país de mierda.” A shit country.

“Cuidado!” I step over a huge pile of dogshit. Then I say: “So these people get on a train de mierda, go to jobs de mierda, and then on their way home, actually step in mierda?”

“Exactemente,” Gustavo says, laughing. “Es todo mierda.”

Gustavo and I have had this same conversation–how Buenos Aires is una mierda–off and on for the last five years. He was born here and lives here but every few months just can’t take it anymore and ends up cooking or managing some restaurant in Mar del Plata or Miami or Costa Rica.

Anyone who is used to clean streets and orderly public transportation will see immediately how Buenos Aires is a city de mierda. But at the same time there’s something lovable and unbreakable about this place.

At the bottom of it all are the street dogs–some with unspeakable wounds and scars and deformities–trotting the concrete, tougher than any army. There’s the guy playing cello. Adding just the right soundtrack to the madness of the subway.

And then there are the capos, those doing whatever it is under whatever circumstances–whether it’s playing soccer or delivering babies–as well as it can be done.

Photo by Loco085

Capos are rare, but you meet them here from time to time, like today in the Cafe Ocho Rincones, on the corner of Forest and Alvarez Thomas. Lau and I walked in and sat down, and there he was, immediately nodding at us that he’d noted our entry and would be right over.

A waiter from the old-school with pomade-slicked hair and an immaculate bow tie. And even though he’d probably arrived here this morning off a train or bus de mierda, you’d never know it from his eyes, which said ‘as long as you’re here, whatever it is you need, I’m going to take care of you.’ He approached our table.

“Madame,” he said, bowing slightly to Lau, then “Caballero,” turning to me, “Welcome.”

Photos by Julie Schwietert

Brazil seems far away this morning.

It could be the six inches of snow on the ground.

Or maybe it’s the fact I never really connected with anyone or anything there the way I always do when I travel.

But still, there are some things I can’t get out of my head, some things that will only begin to make sense if I write about them, some images that stick with me more than costumes and dancing and music:

Rough hands gripping a white rope.

Kids picking up discarded beer cans.

The facial expressions of revelers compared to vendors.

“There’s not a race problem in Brazil,” an American colleague tells me authoritatively. “It’s a class problem.”

Tired from flights and still feeling everyone out, I refrain from pointing out what I consider to be the obvious: Race and class have almost always been linked, especially in the Americas.

I notice it the first night of Carnaval in Salvador, on the circuit near the waterfront.

The people accompanying the floats, those who have paid for the privilege of wearing a shirt that permits them special access inside the ropes, close to the float, are mostly white, mostly young.

The guys look like American frat boys: they wear sunglasses at night, they have a beer in each hand (bought from mostly black vendors), they slap each others’ backs or curl their arms around each others’ necks in a headlock… the strange intimacy of men.

The women are the perfect weight, many with blond highlights, their t-shirts trimmed into deep V’s or tied with a mid-riff knot.

They’re all smiling, rows of nice white teeth. They’re happy. This is Carnaval!

Unless you’re on the ropes.

The smiling bright crowd, pumped on music and beer and just the idea of being here, moves forward with the floats, and they’re all reined in by ropes.

Held by the hands of hundreds, the ropes keep payers in, riffraff out, and set the pace for the moving mass.

Most people holding the rope are not smiling. They’re concentrating on their work. They’re tired.

When the float stops, unable to advance, the people holding the rope sink to the pavement for a moment’s rest, oblivious to the rivulets of beer and urine left behind in the revelers’ wake.

It’s then that kids dart up and down the street, collecting cans. The kids are black, as are the people holding the ropes. They have shirts, too… only they didn’t pay hundreds of dollars to wear them, charging it to their credit card and paying it off for the rest of the year (so goes the rumor).

Instead, the people who hold the rope are paid to wear shirts, are paid to hold the rope, for hours.

I can’t stop thinking about them, this morning, early in New York, as the snow keeps falling.

[Editor's note: this was remixed from Julie's Blog at Matador. She also notes: "I should mention that each city where Carnaval is celebrated in Brazil is distinctly different. In Pelourinho, a suburb of Salvador, the feel is definitely much more "by the people, for the people"-- and I felt a tremendous difference there as a spectator as a result."]

A few minutes earlier I had let her cut in front of me at the ticket counter because I felt uncomfortable with her standing so close. In Chile you have to stand on top of the person in front of you or others think you’re not really standing in line, just sort of checking it out.

My body felt weak and unstable teetering under the weight of my backpack. I was recovering from carbon-monoxide poisoning in Castro.

Now she was standing beside my bus. She radiated exotic, South American sensuality—golden skin, lustrous black hair and dark eyes. They were pointed in my direction

Photo by hyperscholar

I wasn’t sure if she could really see me inside the bus through the tinted windows, but I tried not to stare back too intently just in case.

She wasn’t actually climbing aboard. She just watched it as if trying to decide if she really wanted this one. I wanted her to choose this one.

The idea of her getting on also sent a tremor through my body.

The chance that this bus was hers seemed to dwindle the longer it sat in its slot and she didn’t board. And still she watched me. The engine turned over and rumbled to life. Before the doors closed, the woman ran to the bus, up the steps and into the aisle.

She tossed her Planet Hollywood bag into the overhead near the front of the bus then turned, setting her dark-eyed gaze on me and began walking. I sat, like a Huemul in the headlights as she approached. Flashing me a smile like we were old friends, she sat down in the seat next to me.

I’d come to Chile for the summer to bartend at a little hosteria in Villarrica for an American ex-pat friend of mine named Glen. He knew that I had just finished my first round of college and had nothing better to do than pick up and see a different part of the world.

I was grossly unprepared. After months of trying to learn Spanish out of books, I had a solid foundation of six words: yes, no, foot, shoe, beer and wine.

I could smell the warm leather of her jacket and hear the quiet groan of it when she moved her hand up to brush the hair out of her face. I could see the lines on her lips. Glen told me before I arrived in Chile: “Learn as much Spanish as you can before you come. You’ll get more out of the experience.”

She began talking to me as if that was the only reason she had gotten on this bus.

“¿De donde es usted?” she asked rapid-fire.

It was a simple question, but it came too fast for me to understand.

I shrugged and said my well-rehearsed line, “No comprendo. Lo siento.” I don’t understand. I’m sorry. I could already feel this conversation going nowhere.

Her smile grew larger. “Where are you from?” she asked in heavily accented English.

“From Montana en Norte Americano,” I said.

Before I got here I assumed there were bus-loads of Americans in bright T-shirts and shorts clogging up every open air market and artisan stand in the country. I was amazed at how few Americans the average Chilean ever saw. In a broken mix of English and Spanish she said she was from Argentina.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

How does any traveler answer this question? Did I really come here to work at a bar in a little hotel? I could do that back in the US. I would be able to speak to the locals and make a lot more than the ten dollars a day I earned here.

When confronted with the idea of telling her that the reason I was here is to find myself having the most beautiful woman in the city get on the same bus as me and begin talking as if drawn together by something bigger than the two of us, I found that I couldn’t possibly do it justice with the scant vocabulary we shared in each others’ languages.

So I stuck with bartending in a hotel in Villarrica.

Volcán Villarica. Photo by author.

Of course, this interested her. I got the feeling that I could have said that I had come to Chile to learn how to sweep floors (something they do differently in Chile than the US, by the way) and she would have been interested to hear about it.

Her apparent interest in me was a little unnerving but exciting in a surreal way, as if I’d stepped onto the set of one of those ridiculous romantic comedies where the storyline relies on the most implausible scenario coming to life.

She said that she was there to visit her mother. She rolled her eyes and said a few things in Spanish I didn’t catch, and didn’t quite know how to phrase a question for her to explain.

She saved me by asking if I’d made it into Argentina while in South America. I was sad to say I only spent one day in Argentina, barely going far enough in to get my passport stamped and have a picnic by a lake under the volcano Lanin.

A frown of disappointment clouded her face for a brief instant before becoming a smile again.“You will have to come visit me in Buenos Aires,” she said, pronouncing each consonant and vowel of the city’s name, making it sound like singing, rather than the muddled way we say it in America. “Es muy bonito.”

Her eyes said I could stay as long as I wanted. Whether it was my lack of understanding the subtleties of Argentine nuance or not, I wasn’t getting the sense that she was trying to pick me up for a one-nighter, but really wanted me to explore her country and come to love it.

She wondered, if I hadn’t gone to Argentina, then what have I done since I arrived in Chile?

“I climbed the Volcán Villarrica,” I said, not really knowing how to get the rest of the adventure out. “I could see into Argentina from the top,” I said finally. What I couldn’t communicate was that I had experiences both frightening and beautiful on the sides of that mountain, forever changing the way I look at danger and exploration.

We spoke for several more minutes but I could feel my ability to carry on the conversation waning, having exhausted my Spanish. I didn’t want her to go, but I didn’t know how I was going to communicate for the next few hours. She may have thought the same thing, since once the bus lurched out onto the highway, she said goodbye and moved back to her seat near the front of the bus.

I should move up and keep talking to her, I kept thinking as I stared at the back of her head, her smooth, dark hair swaying with the movement of the road. I imagined three outcomes if the encounter continued:

• We’d fall in love and I’d miss my plane back to the US to travel around Chile and Argentina with a partner (something I wished I had every time over the last three months I’d found myself in a position of making a fool of myself.)
• We’d have a short-term romantic interlude before I headed back to the States—something I didn’t have much experience with, but had always sounded interesting.
• We’d have a fun, platonic time exploring her destination. I’d finally have someone to travel with, if only for a day or two.

All of the options sounded more fulfilling than traveling the last few days of my trip alone. Every time the bus slowed I sat up a little straighter as if to move forward but I stayed where I was. Each option sounded just as terrifying as exciting.

I’d always looked up to the people who deviated from the course of life so as to live in the excitement of the moment. I was so close to being one of those people, all I had to do was get up and go.

Castro, Chile. Where the author got carbon monoxide poisoning.

As the busy tourist season had wound down and my pisco sours were no longer in such high demand, I decided it was time to finally leave Villarrica and explore more of the country. I made my way south to Castro on the Isle of Chiloe, home of the palafitos or stilt houses built out into the water along the coast so fishermen could park their boats under their houses.

After staying in the much cheaper hospedajes, or empty rooms a families rent out to travelers, I chose to stay in a tiny hotel room on the third floor of Hotel Azul overlooking a busy street and the main sea lane busy with boats of all sizes chugging in and out of the harbor.

I made a preliminary trek around the city the night before and at sunrise I woke up to find a beautiful day. I opened the window of the tiny hotel room, grabbed my camera and went out to capture the palafitos in the morning light.

When I returned to the hotel, I knew I’d gotten the best photos of my entire time in Chile and decided to take a short nap before trying to find something to eat and my next destination. It was the biggest mistake of the trip.

I awoke feeling like I had the worst hangover of my life. I hoped that going back to sleep might help it go away. I felt too horrible to even drift back into unconsciousness. Eventually, I smelled it. A mixture of diesel and gasoline exhaust coming in the open window from the road and boats outside. I shut the window, but too late. My journey southward was finished.

The next couple of days involved eating almost nothing and stumbling from bus station to bus station, finally arriving back in Puerto Montt. On the morning of the third day I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to die out in the Chilean countryside, but had squandered enough days that I decided to make my way back to Villarrica.

That’s how I came to stare at the beautiful Argentine girl near the front of the bus.

Photo by Milesdeelite.

As we closed in on Osorno, I couldn’t guess where a relationship with this girl could go, but that’s not the nature of relationships even when you can speak the language.

It’s not the nature of travel, either. The nature of travel is to remain flexible, break plans and see what happens. If I didn’t make a move, I would probably regret it.

When the bus stopped in Osorno, I thought this is the last chance I’m going to get to know this person.

Before I could get myself to take the chance, she stood, pulled her bag from the overhead, and walked to the back of the bus.

I hoped she would drop again into the seat beside me, but instead she handed me a sealed envelope.

She asked me what my name was, told me hers, said a quick, sweet goodbye and went to the exit. She kissed her palm and blew it to me before stepped down the stairs. She did not look back as she went to the terminal.

I held the envelope until after we’d begun moving again. Safely at speed I cut open the envelope and pulled out a photograph of the woman and a note half in Spanish, half English:

You broke my heart. I’m giving you this photo so that you remember on the other side of the world someone awaits you.

It gave me an address and said not to forget to come visit her when I make it to Argentina. I tucked the note back into the envelope and stared out the window, wondering why I hadn’t opened it before the bus left Orono and chased after her.

You know the feeling. You’re walking to the market, to the store, to meet a friend, all caught up in the plodding forward of your day…and then suddenly, you take notice of where you are. The light on a wall, the expressions on people’s faces, the feeling of the weather. A distinct sense of place creeps over you, and for a moment you feel like a traveler.

I love this feeling. It is a relief to me; ah, I haven’t forgotten what I learned on the road. How to be fully present in a place.

But it’s rare at home. We tend to get used to our surroundings pretty quickly, especially if they’re surroundings we’ve grown up in or lived in for years. And this familiarity isn’t all bad—our brains, freed up from paying acute attention to the unknown, can focus on other things—writing, school, relationships, work, projects.

And yet sometimes, the desire (Overwhelming! Insatiable! Get me on a freaking bus to Belize!) for that novelty and spark of travel is overwhelming. Sometimes a sense of sadness creeps into the everyday—why can’t I see and feel this place like I’ve seen and felt so many other places traveling?

So this is a guide to traveling at home–taking “home” to be a place you’ve stuck around for a while and grown accustomed to. A guide to seeing it through a traveler’s eyes and bringing it back to life again.

Photo by sanjibm

Walk.

As simple as strolling out the front door into the great beyond. Pay attention to detail as you go. The way the light hits buildings, the noises and conversations drifting out of restaurants, the sky, the view.

Roam without concern for routes and take advantage of the fact that you know this place’s geography well. Wander into neighborhoods you don’t usually explore and examine them as if you were stumbling across them for the first time.

See a city from different angles—how does it look from the top of a hill? From the bottom? Walking from the west, or east? Sometimes, when I feel my senses have been numbed by walking the same old routes around Oaxaca, I cross the city and go way out east, where the city starts dipping into the valley.

Then I turn around and start walking back, this time with a view of the narrow parallel streets stretching before me, and the arched back of a purple mountain in the distance. It feels like a different city.

Sometimes all you need is a fresh point of view.

Be a tourist.

Even if you are living in a village buried deep in the Nepali highlands or in, say, Columbus, Ohio, there are places a tourist (even if he or she just happened to get stranded overnight there) would go in your area. Investigate as if you were planning a trip—where would you go, where would the tourist lit take you?

Go as if you know nothing about your hometown at all. Imagine the tourist destinations were your first impression of it. What would they reveal to you? How would you interpret them? What would you write home about them?

Duck into a restaurant nearby, order a local delicacy (buffalo wings? Wisconsin cheese curd? Spaghetti and meatballs? Chilaquiles?), and eat it as if the flavors were a revelation, an odd local phenomenon. Imagine all of it is giving you new information about where you are and what this place is like.

Photo by Humanoide

Be a host and a guide.

Sometimes the best way to yank yourself out of your own stale vision is to exploit the viewpoint of a novice. Perhaps “exploit” is a tad harsh: offer a couch, a good meal, a ride, a long conversation, local insight, and in exchange throw yourself behind the fresh perspective of your guest.

Couchsurfing is an excellent way to travel at home. The rush of traveling rubs off, and having to think like a traveler and act like a guide illuminates your hometown as you don’t usually see it. You may, like me, end up surprised at how much you take the local for granted once you actually get to show it off.

Having family or friends pop in for a visit can make you appreciate all the little things you love about your home, the little things that are so etched into the everyday that you no longer notice them. And it can bring the big things—the local attractions, the feel and vibe of your hometown—back into focus.

Look for new perspectives.

Unless you’re living in a tent buried deep somewhere in the Andes, there are bound to be at least a few people from a few different places in your area. Hit up Chinatown if you’re in a major city, practice your Spanish at a Mexican restaurant, volunteer at a shelter for refugees, or work with immigrants.

Hearing about the experiences of a foreigner or an immigrant in your hometown paints it in a whole different light. You may be surprised, as I was roaming through a Mexican grocery store in Columbus, at just how different the place you think you know so well looks from this perspective.

Photo by Geoff LMV

Love your public transport.

One thing I do when I need a sense of escape is hop on a bus. And then another. And another. No, I’m not fleeing to Guatemala, I’m just riding around. One public bus after another, bumping and jostling ‘round Oaxaca.

Maybe this is intense nostalgia for all the buses I took crossing South America, or maybe I’m just a big baby who loves the gentle rocking motions of moving vehicles, but I’m willing to guess that many travelers find something soothing about being in motion.

The familiar feeling of looking out the window, trying to put the pieces together, absorbing the scenery. The bus transports me out of my neurotic consciousness, my obsession with whatever I need to do that day and the next, and makes me feel like I’m traveling.

Travel, I think, should not merely be the act of getting way the hell out there into the Himalayas or hitchhiking your way across Borneo. It can be that—but it can, and I would argue should, also be a way of seeing.

Thinking of travel as a particular type of vision frees you from the obligation to go fleeing from one destination to another, and liberates you to rediscover the places you think you know so well.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Need some more advice about planning an in-town vacation. Check out these seven steps!

We’re heading towards the home of Baltazar Ushca, the last of the icemen of Chimborazo. The mountain is the highest peak in Ecuador at 6,310 meters, about 20,565 feet. Horses had been arranged for my friend and I because the altitude often takes a toll on foreigners, even though we’ve been living at altitude for months.

And Baltazar doesn’t wait around for followers, so once you get left behind you’re on your own. Now it’s near 8 a.m. and we’re way behind schedule, but that’s just something you have to get used to in Ecuador.

The Last Iceman of Chimborazo from Matador Network on Vimeo.

The clear sky that had started the morning is now gone and the low cloud cover blocks out the peak. It seems as though we’re riding straight into the sky.

Here in the páramo, it’s easy to see why Baltazar still loves the tradition. There is no noise, no pollution, and no one else around to bother him. Only the sound of the wind blowing through the short stalks of grass and the grunts of the donkeys.

Occasionally Baltazar will yell what sounds like, “Burro, Carajo!” The temperature drops and the sun gets more powerful, but the tranquility of the land is contagious, and for the next few hours up the trail we can’t help but feel at ease, moving in silence.

Each journey up and down can take 8 hours. Going up with only three donkeys, Baltazar will stop for about an hour to cut up grass which he makes into knots and packaging. This helps to preserve the ice before it goes on to the market every Saturday. Because of this, he only goes up on Thursday and Friday, using the other days of the week to tend to his farm and animals.

Cutting up grass in preparation for the ascent to the glacier

Cutting up the thick grass and weaving the rope, the short man makes it look so simple that a child could do it, but it’s clearly a precious skill.

Once the grass is prepared, we continue up above the point where anything can grow, and though the trail is steep and slippery, the air cold. We finally arrive at the spot of the hieleros, about 16,000 feet above sea level.

It’s nearly four hours since we left his house, and we can just see the valley over the crest of the boulder strewn earth and below a storm front that is quickly advancing.

For centuries, indigenous men have been climbing up here to chop out ice from the glacier and sell at the market in town. Because of the invention of the refrigerator, however, the need for this pure, Chimborazo ice has dropped off, and now Baltazar is the last man to continue this tradition.

I’d heard about this all from my friends Casey and Lara, who just happened to stumble upon it while on a trip in Ríobamba. The next chance I got I headed to the city, checked in at Hotel Los Shyris, and asked for Joel Quinllin. 10 minutes later we had worked out a deal for the following day, and he headed off to the village where Baltazar lives, Cuatro Esquinas, to set it all up.

An inactive volcano topped entirely with glaciers, Chimbazo provides water for the region

Baltazar isn’t a tour guide, and he speaks only rudimentary Spanish (his first language is Quechua). That didn’t matter when we met however, as we were greeted with a smile and firm handshake, welcoming us to a day in the life of a hielero.

It’s now officially freezing, but the silent indigenous man has the sleeves of his fleece rolled up and is working hard chopping away at the ice. The glacier, which is covered in dirt and slowly dripping mud, would go unnoticed to someone who wasn’t looking for it, and I realize that I’m standing on a giant glacier just a few feet below the soil.

He’s using a large ice pick to create a giant cube, which then falls down to be chopped in half. Throughout the entire process, he doesn’t say one word.

The arduous task of chopping blocks of ice

I offer him some nuts and he gladly takes them, then immediately gets back to work. Once the ice is out of the glacier, the clock is ticking. As we stand there not sure what to do, my feet start to go numb through the two pairs of socks and thin rubber boots.

I’m worrying about frost bite, and suddenly Baltazar takes off his boot to smack his chopping tool and I can see he’s not even wearing socks. His feet are muddy and calloused, but he shows no sign of being cold.

Finally six blocks of ice, roughly 60 pounds each are cut out, and once the dirt around them has been chiseled off, they are prepared one by one in the grass and wrapped up tightly. Each block takes about 10 minutes to wrap and load on the donkeys, so as we sit there being pelted by sleet and freezing, I start losing my patience.

One by one the donkeys are sent packing, and finally he tells us it’s time to go. I want to get back on the horse, but the trail is now too slick and muddy because of the snow, and the horses refuse to move. We must drag the horses down the entire trail, slipping and falling occasionally, aware that the horses are close to sliding right into us.

Baltazar, however, is far ahead of us and doesn’t slow down, as this is normal for him. He must continually run after the donkeys to make sure they don’t get stuck in the muddy trail. Below the clouds again, we can see that it snowed far down the mountain.

The sun comes back out and we can see over the entire valley, the nearby towns, and the two other volcanoes in the distance surrounding Ríobamba. By the time we get back to the flat trails it’s near 5 p.m. and Joel is waiting to meet us with the president of the village. They’re both beaming and want to know how the day went.

Wrapping the ice for the descent back to town

For all of this work, Baltazar will only make $2 per each block of ice, and of that he has to pay 50 cents per block to transport it in a bus or truck to the market. That means for a gain of $12, he has to pay $3 in taxes, or 25% of his haul that day.

Living in extreme poverty on a farm with his entire family, this 64 year old man continues on a tradition which long ago stopped being profitable. Yet he does so without complaint.

A few years ago some tour companies tried to profit off of this, and would charge tourists close to $200 to go on the hike with Baltazar. Only making about $5 per trip, Baltazar decided he didn’t want to take tourists up anymore, and as a result, not many people are aware of this part of the culture.

And it wouldn’t be right for the trail to be packed with tourists either. Just two people up there could be enough to get in his way, and it would be wrong to make the whole process seem like a Disney Land attraction.

But once Baltazar dies, the tradition will go with him. He is the last hielero, and though it is clearly an impractical way to get ice, it is a part of a culture which has been around since the Spanish arrived centuries ago. His children and grandchildren have no interest in continuing the tradition, and though the town of Cuatro Esquinas wants to somehow continue it, no one has stepped up as an apprentice yet.

Balthazar’s grandchildren on the farm with Chimbazo peering over

As often happens, the hardest working people are the poorest and most downtrodden. On the outskirts of the city, at the foot of the mountain, they live in a poor village with dirt roads and more animals than people. Life is different here, and the older customs continue strong and proud.

But in a world where uncertainty is the safe bet, how long will it be before those other customs too go the way of the dodo? But here, for Baltazar, it’s not enough to take him away from his mountain. And like every other Thursday and Friday since he was 15, he will go up the mountain again, alone, and live his life as he sees fit.

Community Connection

For more information on Baltazar Ushca, contact Joel Quinllin at:

w-wafer.q@hotmail.com or

joelquinllin@hotmail.com