The End my Friend the End

A number of people have commented to me that returning home after a long absence must feel weird. I see their point but in these last days of the trip I feel an almost magnetic pull drawing me back. One of the reasons I took this trip was to sort out my feelings of home. I cannot say that I have succeeded completely in that respect, but I definitely have new insights.

What defines "home"?
People? Place? Routine?

People- The world is filled with amazing, loving people. Good people are a dime a dozen and that is a wonderful thing. Any of you who orient towards the xenophobic should really get out there and travel. Love and cooperation is the common denominator everywhere and if we all realized that there would be a lot less conflict.  None the less I miss my family and friends. I confess I did not miss anyone much at first: the excitement of our adventure eclipsed a lot. But as, the adventure morphed into the ordinary, I started feeling pangs of absence. Long ties create deep channels. To lose connection with people you are close to is giving up a part of yourself. My loss was mitigated greatly because I was with Beth, my best friend and always companion.

Place- Everywhere I go I find reassurance from the familiar. I am now in Roanoke Virginia and I might as well be in Albany: the streets are snowed in and the 1920 bungalows are familiar. So are the rolling  hills surrounding the city and the vast expanse of woods and farms which stretch  on for miles. The same holds true for the most exotic locales we have visited. The beaches of Portugual evoke Cape Cod in Summer and the Sri  Lankan jungle feels familiar and much safer than I would have ever anticipated. That said I long for my 3 acres of lawn and woods which have imprinted on me for so many years. It's not because it's special, it's because I have absorbed it.

Routine-  This may be the way our trip has affected me most. Traveling as we did forces you to be adaptable and that in turn makes one philosophical. After a while you realize that, except in rare cases, all stress is illusionary. You can take almost any circumstance and decide it is a terrible plight or that it's not so bad and maybe even a good thing when placed in proper perspective. Waiting in lines, stuck in traffic, lost in a strange city are all times which afford you great opportunity to look around and feel the pulse of life. Often the situation that evokes a stress response is also the one that, if taken lightly, grants entrance into being fully present, fully engaged and truly living.  It is those accentuated moments in life that stand out in our memories and carry the most weight in our definition of self. The ironic thing is that you do not need to travel to experience the benefits of pushing your limits. It's just much harder to do at home because we all trend towards the comfortable. My lesson from this trip is to try to avoid complacency. To put that philosophy to practice we are going to Pennsylvania tommorow to buy two farm dogs ( puppies) from an Amish family.  It should make the five hour trip back interesting and help us from becoming bored when we are finally home. Thanks for reading. ~p

A Haiku for U

 We are back in the States now, well Vancouver anyways which feels like the the States to me (apologies to Canadian readers). I've been wanting to write about the last foreign leg of our trip, Japan, but my thoughts have not coalesced and I still feel very ambiguous about my experience. Therefore I have reached deep into my creative well to fish for meaning and what better way to try to crack this particular nut then with a few haiku. As some of you probably remember from 6th grade, a haiku is a 3 stance poem with a 5-7-5 syllable structure. It should have two images which are connected by a "cutting" verse. It also should have some, usually oblique, reference to one of the four seasons. Ok here goes....

 On the long hot train

 A crowd of people stare at phones

Alone in wanting

Light on wet pavement 

 Inside the itame waits 

 Sake warms the heart

Behind her face mask

The geishas young daughter sits

 Safe from all evil

Alone in the street

 He waits for the changing light

 Wind blown dry leaves dance

OK that was embarrassing! I hope I have not diminished my audience too much. Actually it felt good to write the poems and somehow I feel a bit closer to my thoughts now. Thanks for your patience.

Backwards...... Today we are leaving Vietnam and it's feeling like the end of the trip. We are still going to Japan then flying to Vancouver and road tripping home but that all seems a bit proforma, like a weekend getaway. You might be thinking Japan, proforma? I am anticipating that I will like much of Japan and also will be surprised by some of its aspects, but I also know it will be safe, polite, modern, and, dare I say, a bit pasteurized the way all first world countries have become.

Hopping from country to country, culture to culture, in a short time span has clarified some things that previously my mind had flitted around but never grasped. Early on, when I was learning to read, I had a primer that described a happy village. A care free boy on a perfect summer's day greeting the milk man and the garage mechanic as he bopped about town. This book instilled in me an image of the way life should be which I still hold dear. On this trip I have seen that my vision was not just childish romanticism. My happy village is out there in the jungle, on the edge of the desert and high in hidden mountain valleys.

The rubes, hicks and yokels of the world know something we don't. Their hands are leathered and their backs bent, but at the end of work they squat at the side of the road, immersed in wordless comradary and drink in the world around them in silent peace. They rarely take for granted the sounds of their children, the simple roof over their bed or the rice they nutured and grew. In the west we have so many idioms to disparage these people. Well I can tell you, these stone age basket weavers are far ahead of us and our cult-of-self in many ways.

There are a number of ways these people are different from us. They do not easily take affront to things and people. They laugh readily and tend to accent the positive. They want things but when things do not work out they easily shrug it off. Perhaps most importantly they spend about a tenth of the time thinking about themselves that most "modern" men do. Concepts of self actualization and existential angst are unknown to them. I think this is because, to them, the line between self and village is a blurry one. Whether due to their inter-dependence or their long cultural legacy, the "simple" people of the world have achieved a grace of living rarely seen in the globalized world.

Wait you say, these people suffer, they lack access to modern medicine and good schools for their children. They work long hard hours with little to show for it and then, the final indignity, they die young. All true to an extent but as they live their shorter lives there is a qualitative difference. They know the score from an early age. That is why their children work hard and happily for the family and rarely sucomb to sullen isolation. It is also why they are not haunted by death. When your father dies you miss him but it is natural. Death, like the monsoons, is just a part of everything. The casual acceptance of death frees the mind to the present. It opens you to feeling the rain in the breeze and the smell of the wood fire which beckons you home.

Channeling my Inner Prude in Bangkok

I've seen a lot in this trip and as it all percolates down connections form and impressions are made. Probably the biggest conclusion I've drawn thus far is that despite gigantic differences in culture and equally large differences in wealth, people everywhere are essentially similar and most people are good (see Beth's blog "Same Same Different Different" sixmonthtrip.blogspot.com).  The City of Bangkok however has challenged me.

For those who don't know much about Bangkok it is a sprawling city of over 8 million.  A major economic hub with a big tourism industry, it's a sleek, modern, city most famous for it's temples, street food and sex trade.  It's the sex part that has given me pause.

With a few exceptions (the Taj Mahal) comes to mind) we have not seen many westerners since we left Turkey. That is until we hit Bangkok where "we" are everywhere.  My peer cohort is well represented- older white couples seeing the world because they can.  This tourist segment is generally well heeled if a bit clumsy navigating the hoards of pedestrians on the sidewalks and a bit confused figuring out the local Metro system.  Then there is the dominant western tourist archetype. This is the white guy aged 20 to 60 who is escorted by a lovely Thai "girl friend". Often the older men are with a girl half their age. I saw one overweight and apparently mentally challenged young man with a petite shy girl who seemed somewhat mortified. He was wearing a tee shirt that proclaimed in big letters "FUCK HARD and MAKE A LOT OF NOISE".  Another white guy on the subway,who gave off a definite Ted Kaczynski vibe, kept his hand between his girl's legs way up high under her short skirt for the whole ride. They did not talk and she was walking the fine line between total disgust and appeasing her client.  Every day we see at least 20 of these couples in various permutations.

I have steadfastly tried not to jump to conclusion on this trip about people or customs. Researching the sex trade in Thailand I found out that most of the girls work solo without pimps. They often come from poor families in rural areas and many support their aging parents and relatives. Prostitution is a long established trade here preceding tourism by centuries. There is a kind of see no evil precept adhered to by both the police and the working girl's families. And money is hard to come by for the uneducated. It takes about $300 a month to support a small family.  The minimum wage is 300 baht a day ($10).

Then there are the johns, brazen and insensitive as they seem, they also give off an air of silent desperation, of being caught in the eddies of an isolating society all the while being pummeled with porn and endless sex oriented media.  Often the men are victims also. Emotionally famished they fall in love easily and, once their gold is depleted, are abandoned by the girl who, after all, is only in it for the money. Self delusion or, conversely, totally callousness are the hallmarks of the john.

Despite all my liberal tendencies my visceral reaction to the trade is disgust and cultural embarrassment. I cannot see how, despite the apparently symbiotic relationship between the parties, that there is any long term redeeming quality to these arrangements. It cheapens a beautiful culture and has to cause hate and resentment of the influence of the western dollar and, in turn, of westerners in general.

There is a difference between cultural assimilation and the reckless imposition of culture. I suppose this force is what the anarchists don't like about globalization. It can be seen on the subways and streets of all major cities where people have become cocooned and indifferent to the people around them. A far cry from the world's small villages where strangers are embraced and love is the glue that holds each day together. 

Beth and I are planning this trip as we go. When we land in a place with a good internet connection we sort out the next leg, bouncing ideas off one another, scrutinizing maps and web sites. Most often we end up renting private apartments which becomes our base camp from where we conduct excursions exploring the area. This has worked out really well. We meet our local host who almost always helps us unravel the mystery of a place much faster than if we relied on biased or indifferent hotel clerks.

Arriving at a foreign place, be it an apartment or a country, is usually intimidating. Us humans come preprogrammed with a negativity bias.  During the course of our evolution, this bias has helped keep us out of harm but also confounds modern man with anxiety based upon threats that are not real.  Injecting yourself into an unknown culture in an unfamiliar place heightens this protective but paranoic mechanism. This is why hotels worldwide have a comfortable uniformity of experience. Little islands of familiarity in a dark sea of menacing mystery.

We realized that we would have to book the weeks around the holidays well in advance. We choose Sri Lanka first because it is a mostly Buddhist country that  largely ignores Christmas and, secondly, because we anticipated needing a vacation after our  sojourn through India.  We could kick back for a couple weeks with a more relaxed schedule, reading, napping and staring at the ocean.  We booked an "Aruyvedic farm house" in a rural village about 5 kilometers from the Indian Ocean.

Our new host, Hetti, came to Columbo with a driver and we drove several hours south to our new digs. Hetti, about my age, spent many years traveling the world as a sailor. His English is good and he was brought up in the tiny village of Uruvitiya where the farmhouse is located. The house is substantial by local standards. It is a two story concrete building with lots of rooms and many decks and patios. However several things set off alarm bells when we arrived. The kitchen was primitive and filled with old bottles containing unknown liquids, pastes and herbs. There is an open fire pit with ancient looking cooking tools and many many clay pots. The house, situated in the jungle with interspersed rice paddies seemed like a mosquito's wet dream. There are no screens on the many windows and mosquito netting above the beds. And then there was Hetti, by all appearances  a kind and gentle soul but it appeared he came with the house, something we had not anticipated and were anxious about. Finally it was hot and muggy, being just 5 degrees north of the equator and surrounded by water.

That first night we slept poorly worrying that our vacation retreat was instead an incarceration.  The next morning I woke to the distant sound of Buddhist monks chanting. I stepped out onto the upper deck as   the first tentative light appeared and looked out. Acres of green rice paddies fed by gently flowing streams, lush tropical foliage including coconut palms, mango and banana trees. Egrets and storks plying the paddies as small flocks of Ring Necked Parakeets flew from tree to tree quarreling. Then the loud squawk of a peacock roosting on top of the highest palm declaring his sovereignty.  A tiny primitive road cut through the scene, and as the light grew the village around us awoke.

During the course of our stay, looking out over the village has become a favorite pastime. Old men feeding fish left over rice out of pure  Buddhist charity.  A young boy whose charge it was to keep the birds out of his family rice plot by waving his arms and shouting,  throwing pebbles and the occasional firecracker. He took his work very seriously and with great joy leaping barefooted lithely along the dykes his toddler brother in his arms at times.  And everywhere people stopping on the road to chat.

Whenever we walk down any of the myriad roads and paths that crisscross the jungle, we are always greeted with beaming excited smiles and salutations. We are the only white people here and most of the locals know only a few English phrases: hello hello, where you from, Ok Ok good. This does not in anyway limit the clear message that these are happy people who are sincerely glad to see us. Their eyes beam and they have this irresistible head-shoulder wiggle that is perhaps the most disarming and open gesture that I have ever experienced.

And then there is Hetti. He has taken us under-wing a great protector and guide in addition to being a warm loving man. His stories of sea travel include being captured by Somolian   pirates and harrowing failed  attempts to round the Horn of South Africa in raging storms. His success was hard earned, leaving home at a tender age, penniless and alone, traveling overland  through Afghanistan and Iran to dubious prospects in Great Britain. There he worked the docks until his incredible work ethic was noticed by a Greek captain and his career was launched. Now Hetti and I cook for each other and sip Arrack in the evenings together.

And so what at first seemed unsettling is now completely comfortable. Our stay here is almost done and it will seem, once again, like leaving home when we depart. It's bittersweet but one of the best things about traveling is the way strangeness converts to comfort. If you take the effort to learn a place and its people, it lives in your heart forever- you own it and it owns a piece if you.

Things that could have gone wrong but didn't. One of my suppositions for this trip was that, contrary to what mass media would have you believe, the world is largely a safe place filled with nice people. I have unintentionally tested that theory by letting my guard down occasionally. Yesterday we were exploring Columbo, the capital city of Sri Lanka. It's a bustling modern city with crowded side walks and few westerners. I stopped at an ATM kiosk, withdrew some cash and started walking away. Suddenly a man tapped me on my shoulder and handed me my bank card which I had left in the machine. Here, the ATM screen displays your bank balance at the end of a transaction and asks if you'd like to make another transaction. My balance was an obscene amount far exceeding the per capita annual income of the country. Kindness knows no national boundaries.

In Munnar India our driver talked us into getting an Aruyvedic massage. I cannot tell you how many times we've read never to take this kind of advice. The internet is full of reported scams involving kick-backs, robberies and even kidnapping. Well we really liked Santosh, our driver, and although we had just met, he really wanted us to do this- our experience would not be complete without it. So OK, wtf, we agreed. Our appointment was for 6:30pm and we went for the deluxe package, one hour of full body massage followed by half an hour of hot oil dripped on our foreheads. Jealous? Driving there we left the paved road at the outskirts of town and bumped our way along to a ramshackle building on the jungle's edge. It was dark when we arrived but not so dark that we missed the ripped threadbare rugs and stained walls. We were ushered into private rooms and the procedure commenced. Stripped naked except for a 5 square inch loin cloth I lay on the table trying to ignore the slightly cloying smell. The massage was interesting and I relaxed as he withdrew demons from me and realigned my shakras. After an hour the hot oil drip commenced and I discovered the source of the smell. This was also strangely relaxing even when half was through I realized this was recycled magical oil. I mused about how old it could be and how many foreheads had this oil dripped off of? Then the biologist in me turned to the bacteriological host properties of warm oil. Soon it was over and we waited the prerequisite hour before showering. Actually it took two showers to fully degrease. At no time did I feel I had put myself in harm's way until,calling home, my son Dan noted "sounds like a good way to wake up missing a kidney".

 Madurai is one of those Indian Cities which attracts few western tourists. It has an amazing living Hindu temple but otherwise is a seemingly endless working city, crowded and frenetic. As was often the case our hotel was fine but seemed misplaced by western standards. In the evening, waiting for Beth to shower I decided to check out the street scene. Stepping out the door I entered a cacophony of sound and motion. A scrap metal dealer next to a store selling milk jugs and a guy selling betel nuts on and on down the street forever. Tuk-tuks are three wheeled open air taxis that are everywhere. In some places they are metered and reliable and in others they prey upon tourists. It is not uncommon for some hapless schmuck to be driven to some unknown location and held up for a higher fee or worse. Standing on the street in front of the hotel a driver struck up a conversation. We talked about New York, our trip etc. I was curious about his life and started asking questions about his business. How long had he driven? Did he own the Tuk-tuk? How much did they cost... Soon he, smiling and nodding insisted on taking me on a ride. I laughed and showed him my empty pockets having left my wallet in the room. No problem sir, you are my guest! Maybe it was the two beers in my belly but I agreed and hopped aboard. Off we flew, my new best friend excited about demonstrating his skills as we careened down the crowded roads horn honking and swerving. It was quite exciting and my laughter egged him on and he also started laughing (somewhat maniacally) as he careened through the streets the fastest driver in Madurai. After about 14 blocks, all of which to me seemed exactly the same, I realized here I was, no wallet, no phone, lost in a city I could not spell and staying at a hotel whose name I never bothered to notice. I am proud to say I did not panic. I dug down and retrieved my what will be will be mantra and was calm when we pulled back up to the hotel. Later that night he took Beth and me for another ride, for pay this time, and we learned more about him. A grandfather who had just lost his daughter to suicide and left the care of her two young kids to him. How sad this world can be and yet how amazingly kind people remain.

It's hard to write about India without sounding like a travelogue. The land of contrasts, deep historical roots astounding art and riches and heart wrenching poverty. Making eye contact here ensures an interaction be it a hard sales pitch, a desperate plea for help or, just as often, a warm loving smile behind which lies thousands of years of cultural spiritual practices emphasizing that all there is is love.

The filth and grime of so much of the subcontinent takes a lot of getting use to and there are many westerners who could never see beyond it. Garbage is everywhere and it is burned in small fires on the roads. In cities the air is always hazy and usually smells. It is the dustiest place I have ever been. Open sewers, animal shit and men pissing road side are omnipresent. In the train stations are many rats, and young beggars no older than 5 do acrobatics on the dirty platforms their skin so steeped in grime I wonder if they could ever be clean again. And then there is the traffic. Cars, busses and trucks, tuk-tuks, horse carts, rickshaws, bikes and motorcycles, oxen, camels, water buffalo, Brahman cattle, goats, cows, and pedestrians all vying for the space just ahead in a confusing but efficient dance where no one gets hurt and no one gets angry.

Sounds terrible, and there were a few times when it got to me and became a hellish visage, but for the most part we are loving this part of our trip beyond any expectations. For one thing, despite the dust and noise and poverty, everywhere you see contentment. The children, whether dressed in adorable school uniforms or mostly naked clothed only in dust, are full of energy, laughing and playing, open and joyful. Then there are the woman. Rich or poor they adorn themselves with amazing clothes and jewelry, the colors perfectly matched. The men, be it emaculately dressed Sieks, or bone thin holy men with matted hair and beards, all carry themselves with a calm composure signifying inner peace. The Indians I have met are among the most earnest and optimistic people ever. They seem to uniformly love their history and their country. They have great tolerance for other cultures and religions. This does not imply naievity. Even the taxi can drivers seem to have a deep knowledge of national and international affairs far exceeding the typical insular American's.

Because there are so many beggars I sometimes, as instructed by locals, act as though they do not exist; no talking, no eye contact. This is a difficult exercise for me and my bleeding heart. Yesterday approached by two boys around 7 or 8 years old, instead of ignoring them I faced them and, putting on my best demonic face I snarled at them which sent the screeching and laughing away. Maybe it's true what a local told me, that I look like a Bollywood villain.

I cannot even begin to describe my experiences here. As you drive you see a million vignettes: old men sleeping on bamboo cots in the shade, woman shelling beans, holy men crawling on knees in pilgrimage, a naked toddler splashing happily at the village well. It all feels right and according to some ancient plan. I mostly feel so fortunate to have been able to come here. Namaste.