Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Closing argument.


"Searching for patterns in static,
They start to make sense
The longer I'm at it." - Death Cab for Cutie

"This is me with the world on the tip of my tongue." - Taking Back Sunday

"They say they never really miss you 'til you dead or you gone,
So on that note I'm leaving after this song
." - Jay-Z



There is a shot from the BBC series Planet Earth of a hurricane raging above America's Gulf Coast. It is especially memorable to the viewer because the camera that captured it was in space, high above the carnage on the ground, where the true scope and scale of the hurricane itself can be observed rather than the individual winds that comprise it. With our feet on the ground we normally measure the hurricane's effects, the devastation left in places like the Lower Ninth Ward or Galveston. We listen to interviews of those whose lives have been forever changed by circumstance, if we bother to listen at all. We pay little attention to the hurricane itself, to all the ignored miles of ocean that it encompasses. We break it down to the parts that we can quantify and comprehend, the Saffir-Simpson scale, property damages in the hundreds of millions. This approach casts the hurricane as something random, incomprehensible. That shot reminds us that there is a poetry to its grandeur.

The most beautiful quality of traveling for so long is that you see more than a list of cities, or an enumeration of monuments. The phrase "see the world" is used pretty casually, has lost basically all its meaning. But because I was in so many different countries, I saw more than similarities between a few of them. For this small period of time in my life, I really feel like I saw the world. Its true scope, its true scale. Not merely similarities or parallels between one city and another, but how these parallels themselves were part of something greater. More than lines on a map. Something closer to the lines of sheet music.

It started with Rembrandt. Going to museums nearly every day, in every new city, I was seeing a large number of his ninety-some self-portraits. The Louvre and Musee d'Orsay in Paris, the National Galleries of London and Edinburgh, Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam, the Uffizi in Florence. Even when this began, I didn't just walk up to his portrait and move on. Early on I was struck by the differences between them. The darker shading creeping in at the ages when he was poorer, more depressed. The fluctuating number of lines in his face, whether or not his eyes held a glint or its more-telling absence. I remember one of the portraits I saw towards the latter part of my time in Europe was bittersweet. In it Rembrandt was young, proud and self-assured. I felt oddly happy to see him like this, the simple joy as when you visit an old friend you have been out of contact with for a while, one who is doing better than expected. But I grew somewhat mournful because I had already seen what he could not- the pain that he would go through later in his life, the darker pigments that would inch closer from the edges of the canvas.

At the British Museum in London, I saw an exhibit on dogu, small carved figures from ancient Japan. When I visited Tokyo three months later, the same traveling exhibit was about to open at its National Museum in Ueno Park. The Tokyo Tower is modeled after the Eiffel in Paris, more colorful, far more utilitarian, but the resemblance is clear. I walked by restaurants in Estonia and Cambodia that share names. At the Sony headquarters in Tokyo's Ginza district, there are large Lego sculptures of the Coliseum in Rome, the floating torii at Miyajima, and Angkor Wat. I couldn't help but beam at the sight. I had not only been to each of them; I'd been to each within the past two months.

This pattern and repetition goes beyond arts and sights. When less specific, it grows more acute. I've been attracted to street art for years, but in Europe it became something more, especially after Berlin. Leaving Europe for the Middle East and then Southeast Asia, the street art doesn't just change. For the most part it disappears altogether. I can't remember seeing any at all in India or Cambodia. Because graffiti is an indication of disposable income. If people are doing everything they can just to afford food, the idea of purchasing spray paint merely for self-expression is absurd. This holds true for smoking as well. In my two weeks in India and Cambodia, I saw two locals smoking on the streets. And weirdly enough, they both had the exact same unnerving posture: crouched low to the ground, like a gargoyle, their bent knees at eye level, hunched shoulders and arms inside of these. Two people of different nationalities that will never meet, almost assuredly don't have the money to ever leave the borders of their own country, yet identical in that telling stance. After watching the first one in India for a few minutes, I knew what I would see in the second on the streets of Battambang. They were both silently aggressive, not towards me but others, both native and foreign, who walked by. A belligerence that was inappropriate given their situation. Something like prey trying desperately to be a predator.

It started with Rembrandt. It continued with us all. The main park in Riga, Latvia contains a small bridge covered in locks with the names of couples. On their wedding day, these lovers clasp the lock around the wrought iron and throw the key in to the river below. Eternal love manifest. Similar sunken keys can be found hundreds of miles away at the bottom of the Arno River in Florence, Italy, beneath the picturesque Ponte Vecchio. Here the same tradition is carried out. It's not important which came first. Chronology is inconsequential; commonality alone is essential. A few kilometers away from the Ponte Vecchio, on a side street I came across graffiti of a potted flower, its stem making up the last "i" of the accompanying word "imagini." I'd seen this a month and a half earlier in Barcelona, on another side street nowhere near any of the tourist attractions. Comparing the pictures on my laptop, I saw that the flowers and the penmanship were different. It was not the same artist, but the same concept, the same emotion. My emotion. Our emotion.

In these twenty-one weeks that have just come to a close, I have been privileged to have the perspective of that camera watching the hurricane rage. I've seen life on the ground, as we all do, but I have managed to also see life from above. In this time, I have watched the Earth swirl, and I have watched the Earth dance. And I have seen the symmetry in the choreography. The intrinsic rhythms we follow, unknowingly, movements merging into the one grand symphony.

That I enjoyed this perspective deeply might make it sound like I have a God complex. I don't think that's true. What I do have is a Prodigal Son complex. What I do have is the desire to leave, experience, and return. I know that I am not the same person that left five months ago, but I also don't think I'm a different one. Hopefully just deeper. Hopefully my change is due to growth. Roots stretching lower, firmer, from the lessons that have come by watching those winds, by listening to their melody. On this trip there is only one lesson left to share. The one that helped me the most on my travels.

Florence. Piazza Di Santa Croce. Still part of that makeshift study abroad phase I wrote about earlier. I have no idea why this lesson came here specifically, and it wasn't inspired by anything that happened to me or that I observed. Maybe when you're in the city of Dante and in the square that holds his majestic statue, you're prone for hyperbole. But I don't think that's what this is. It's a sentence that just arrived in my head, too curious to let go. Like a truth so simple you're positive you can disprove it, but you can't.... you know, like that no word rhymes with "silver" or "month."

You are immortal every day of your life except for one.

Immortal. Not invulnerable, we still must suffer the same pains, the same frailties. But there's only one morning you will see that won't be followed by a night. Maybe this is closer to that God complex, but I still would disagree. It's just the definition of being human. I think we live down to our expectations so much, we forget our limitations are a little bit elastic. We are capable of so much more. We can go a little farther, accomplish a little bit more than we did yesterday. And we can let those yesterdays add up for the rest of our lives. When I woke up in the morning, in Doha, in Wadi Musa, in Chiang-Mai, in Phnom Penh, in Pakse, in Kyoto, in Los Angeles, in Linesville, Pennsylvania, and a few weeks from now in Brooklyn, this thought was, is, and will be somewhere on my mind. It's the thought that got me out of danger in Egypt, through the severe stomach pains and solitude in Istanbul, and pushed me farther on the rock trails of Petra, the pounding rains of the Kyoto streets, the one in my head every time I took the stairs instead of the escalator, when I went running today for the first time since July, snow cascading down from a 22 degree white sky.

It is the thought on my mind as I officially end this journey.

And it will be the thought on my mind when I begin my next one.

___________________________

(post-script) Thank you so much for reading this, whether it is your first post, or you've been with me the whole way. In some ways this was a lifeline to everyone back home, and your support has been phenomenal. This will be the last post I write on this blog..... for now. I'm sure that that Prodigal Son complex will kick in again, even if it's just for a week or two, and when that happens, I'll probably be spilling my brains out about it here. As for the time til then, I've fallen back in love with writing, but I'm still unsure if this will translate into an actual separate blog. There was something very special about these last 5 months of my life, and I don't want to water that down. We'll see.

Thank you again for the company.

Joshua

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

You only live twice.


"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
" - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five


The first time I lived Monday, December 14, 2009, it began somewhere in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. My eyes absorbed the snaked neon of incomprehensible characters that comprised the world above and around me. Standing on the pavement and looking straight up, the buildings were so tall as to appear curved, like a serpent's teeth from the perspective of inside its jaws. The view of someone who can't escape. In so many ways, after over four months on the road, I didn't want to.

I can't tell you exactly where I began Monday, December 14, 2009 the second time I lived it. It was somewhere between cans of Kirin, 34,000 feet above the seemingly interminable Pacific Ocean. It was either during conversation or a well deserved sleep, not just after staying out all night and all day to close out my time in Tokyo, but after 146 days of distance between myself and Los Angeles. 146 sunrises away from home.

At 10 a.m. I was sitting next to Corey Irwin, driving back from the airport, inhaling some of my first breaths of Los Angeles air. But four hours later, at 2 p.m., I was thinking about how I had not seen anyone I knew (other than Kelly and Cory Santos) for nearly five full months. I was still anticipating how those first few handshakes and hugs would go, even though they had somehow already happened.

At noon I was eating a burger with Jenn at The Counter in Santa Monica, but at the same time I was also eating phenomenal sushi in the basement of the Seibu building in Tokyo. I was enjoying medium-rare beef, sweet potato fries, sweet shrimp nigiri, the greatest slice of raw toro I could imagine, washing all of this down with a Sprite Zero, with a crisp glass of Suntory Malts draft, exchanging glances with LA models, exchanging glances with Japanese cougars.

At 9 p.m. I was cramped in seat 41E talking to Vinnie, a sailor in the U.S. Navy who was going back home to Palm Springs to spend his two-week leave with his family. We were ordering more rounds of Kirin while talking about our various experiences in Tokyo, his time in Singapore, mine in Egypt. At 9 p.m. I was lounging in a leather chair at South, surrounded by friends I've known for months, years, and decades, sharing some of the same stories, but with a bigger smile on my face this time around.

Flux. The name for this paradox is flux. For 21 weeks I have lived a life that seemed impossible. So why not break the laws of physics, be in two places at the same time, and live forty-two hours on Monday, December 14, 2009 that embodied that surrealism.

At 9 a.m. I was standing in a queue at LAX, waiting to go through customs. I was filling out a landing card that asked me to list the countries I had been to on this visit and that provided two small lines of empty space for a response. All I wrote was "29."


At 9 a.m. I was standing on the grounds of the Zozo-ji Temple by Tokyo Tower, looking at rows of tiny memorial statues, lovingly tended to and dedicated to mizuko. I was meditating in front of the larger statue of Jizo, the Bodhisattva and protector of travelers. With emotions building, with gentle tears in my eyes for having to give up this life I had led for the past few months, I was doing the one last symbolic act I felt compelled to do to end my time not merely in Tokyo, or Japan, but on this trip entire.

In the theoretically complex modern-age-crossing of the international date line, he wasn't just about to safely guide me home. Even though I was standing on pebbles and blades of grass in Tokyo, he somehow already had.

And at 9 a.m. I was thanking him.


Tokyo:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2119845&id=35804394&l=9cd01795b6

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

There is a light that never goes out.


"I can't fix something this complex any more than I could build a rose." -
Jakob Dylan


As if I wasn't crying enough already, she handed me a paper crane.

Something between a Japanese fairy tale and an idiom, it is said that a person that folds one thousand paper cranes will have their dreams come true. I know of this, like most people that do, because of Sadako Sasaki. Sadako was two years old on August 6, 1945, when at 8:15 in the morning the sky exploded above Hiroshima, Japan. She was in her home, a mile from the hypocenter near the Aioi-bashi Bridge. She did not die right away, was quite healthy for a number of years actually. But at the age of nine, she developed a series of skin conditions, radical ones, that were diagnosed to be leukemia, one of the lingering legacies of the nuclear fallout. Sadako began folding. Knowing this legend, she strove to assemble this grand flock of paper cranes so that her deepest wish could come true: survival. Sadako died before she came close to reaching her goal, but her friends and classmates decided to finish the rest for her after she had already left them. In Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park, there is a statue in Sadako's memory, one with a bell, the clapper (that hanging part that actually strikes the side and makes the noise) is a gold origami-style crane. What makes this monument stand out above the several hundred that I have seen but not written about is not the main part, but the glass sheds that surround the statue. From far away, even from as close as eight or ten feet, the multi-colored interiors look like ribbons, crafted signs urging world peace. You need to get up very close to appreciate the artistry. The meticulous detail of the folds. Because they aren't ribbons or normal signs but rows and rows of tiny origami strung together, pasted to a board. An infinite flock of cranes made by schoolchildren throughout Japan, constantly being donated and rotated as they have been for the past half century, all in honor and memory of Sadako Sasaki.

I was privileged enough to see a few dozen of Sadako's actual cranes. I was struck by how tiny they were, how much attention and love she put in to each one of them. She didn't race through them emptily, rush urgently to reach her target of one thousand. She couldn't. These cranes were not destined to be an empty statistic, each one was not merely a fraction of a goal. Each single crane had to be strong, the wings of each one had to bear the weight of their creator, the weight of a city itself. Each had to support the burden of the past and carry an entire people in to the light of the future.

I saw these cranes inside the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima, which held a large number of artifacts from everyday citizens (not soldiers, citizens) killed by the blast. There are photographs all throughout the exhibits of the maimed as they lie in hospital beds. But the worst photographs aren't there. They don't exist. There's no celluloid to capture the immediate aftermath, the atmosphere of the half-dead victims wandering the rubble-strewn ground, so they've turned to other means.
You know those really cheesy life-sized dioramas at museums of people frozen forever in some endless task? They're a lot less funny when their skin is dripping off them. The Japanese school girl next to me audibly retched at the sight of them as she and I both rounded the corner. I looked down, shrank still further in to the shell of my embarrassment, my shame at being American in the city of our second worst transgression (more on that below).

Unlike Sadako, I do not know the older woman's name. I don't know her personal history enough to tell if at the very beginning of her sixty-odd years she endured the morning of Hiroshima from a vantage point of safe distance or of frightening proximity. All I know is what she did for ten seconds today. What she said to me as I walked through the exhibits, nearly biting through my bottom lip in an obviously vain attempt to keep the tears from falling openly.

"Thank you for coming here." She handed me a postcard and two tiny cranes, one green, one purple. The postcard I will keep for its sentiment ("Change all bombs on earth in to fireworks"). The cranes I will treasure, like few objects I own in this life. My tears flowed uncontrollably after she gave them to me. Especially at the tender way she emphasized the one word in the sentence that changed its entire complexity. Most people would stress the "thank you," believing it would underscore the gratitude. She emphasized "here." She emphasized that this was a choice that I made, not to just come to this museum but to this city. By saying that in the way she did, she did more than emphasize, she conveyed her recognition that for me this was much less of a visitation than a confrontation. Hiroshima is not Omaha Beach, not Auschwitz, not S-21. On these grounds, I was not an heir, not a victim, not a bystander. In Hiroshima I, an American, was something I haven't had to be before in any of my travels. A culprit. A perpetrator. You can make your own decision on whether or not the ends justified the means, but whatever you think in your head, in your conscience, understand that it does not change the fact that we did this. In the photographs all throughout the museum, it is we that turned caramel skin in to white wastelands of cells, or worse yet, a liquid. We that made dying little boys so thirsty they tried to suck the puss from their own open boils.

You can think what you want. But understand, about not merely Hirsohima but all events in our nations past, present, and (sadly) future, that the question was not "Do we drop the bomb or not..." It is "Even if we do take this step, is there a way to go about it somewhat humanely...." (In the case of Hiroshima that is. To repeat the same display, the same atrocity three days later in Nagasaki is flat out reprehensible. We as a nation gained unequivocally nothing by it.) To flesh this argument out fully would take too much time, space, deviate from the core of this writing, the central themes of what I felt today and last night as well. Its something that, if you want, we can discuss in person....

After being sequestered and thoroughly searched for half an hour in customs at the Hiroshima airport, I didn't arrive to my hostel until nearly 11pm. But neither my exhaustion of traveling for more than 24 hours straight, nor the freezing weather could keep me away from visiting Hiroshima's Atomic Bomb Dome right away. A building some two hundred meters from the hypocenter of the blast, the Atomic Bomb Dome (formerly the Industrial Promotion Hall since being built in 1915) was not leveled like almost everything else that morning; it was damaged pretty severely, but it still stands, part shell, part concrete tatters. Last night I took photos of it from across the Motoyasu-gawa River. But I never crossed to the other bank to get close to it. I wasn't ready yet. Tonight, after visiting the museums and various related sights in the morning, and heading out to the famous floating O-Torii at Miyajima in the afternoon, I had an overwhelming impulse to return. To complete my confrontation. Tonight I looked at the ruins up close. Tonight I crossed the river.

I saw the building from close up this morning as well, but to see the frame floodlit at night is the true way to experience it. It is in this stark illumination that it looks most like a skeleton. It is in this light that the emotions it evoked from me were strongest. It's silly to cry over twisted metal, steel girders contorted off their axes. That's not what I cried over, and that's not why the decision was made sixty years ago to keep this ruined building standing. The generations of visitors who have looked at the ruins of the Atomic Bomb Dome are looking at the embodiment of that morning, at the corpses of the dead and the shells of the living. The bent off-shoots I saw tonight were not steel girders. They were the black fingernails that grew perpendicular to the hands of survivors. The grid structure of the dome was the checkered pattern of the kimono that had been branded in to the skin of a female blast victim.

The ruins of the dome embody Hiroshima the event. Not Hiroshima the city. For that you cross back to the island of the Peace Memorial Park, to its very center. There burns the Flame of Peace. It burns day and night, sun, rain, or snow, and will burn in this place, ceaselessly until the last nuclear bomb on earth is destroyed.

I write these words on the day of my visit. Twenty-three thousand, five hundred days exactly after the era of nuclear aggression began. Twenty-three thousand, five hundred days exactly after Hiroshima. And I know that I will never live to see that flame extinguished, nor will anyone else in any generation to come. Since 1960, after every single test of a nuclear bomb anywhere in the world, the mayor of Hiroshima has written a letter of objection to the appropriate test-conducting country's ambassador, or even head of state. Each one has known that these petitions will not be acted upon. But that does not stop them, as it should not stop any one of us. Even in the face of the insurmountable, one must continue to do that which is just. Because it is also that which is necessary. In matters of such importance, fatalism is not just suicide. It is genocide.

Through it all, the flame burns in protest. But it also burns as a starter, something which we can each visit, physically or metaphysically, and use to ignite the fight for what is just that we intend to wage ourselves. Even if it is in simple, everyday ways. It's not that your actions need to accomplish something in themselves. If they can inspire others to join you in this fight, that is enough. That is something that can build, grow stronger, swell in to something so bright that it cannot be ignored.

I think before, back in Liverpool, I compared myself to fire. I think that's necessary now. I think that's what we all need to be.

http://www.facebook.com/cnduk?ref=ts&v=wall


Hiroshima
: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2117765&id=35804394&l=4fd1e09e69

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Cult of personality.


"I tend to think of myself as a one man wolf pack. But when my sister brought Doug home, I knew he was one of my own. And my wolf pack, it grew by one. So there.... there was two of us in the wolf pack. I was alone first in the pack and then Doug joined in later."
- The Hangover


This post could have been written from Poland, back in late August. But back then it was too vague to be even a theory, just an educated hunch.
These words nearly came from Jordan, when in my five days I experienced this pretty strongly, and my beliefs were solidified.
I am writing this in my last few hours of three weeks in Southeast Asia, just before I walk down to the Mekong River in Vientiene and wash down some phenomenal laap with a Beerlao. I am writing it now because that cloudy theorem of months ago has proven undeniable.

I spent six days in Estonia. Far longer than I probably should have, far longer than the glorified village of Tallinn probably warranted. But while I was trying to get my stomach right again from the parasites, I met some people that weren't merely fun to be around, but that I clicked with surprisingly quickly. Same sense of humor, similar personalities even though we came from different backgrounds and opposite pinpoints on the globe. Leaving for Riga, Latvia was the first time I had to surrender friends at the border. It would become a pattern.

I met Ricardo and Paul in Lithuania, but we didn't hang out until two cities later, when we found ourselves once again in the same hostel (Ricardo and I even again in the same dorm room) in Krakow, Poland. Something like four days together and we three experienced Krakow's Old Town, the leaden grounds of Auschwitz, and the quirky salt mines of Wieleczka in a rotating 30 foot bubble of conversation. Not to mention the bars, restaurants, and clubs. To find people you've just met that you can be around all day, discuss heavy issues in Twentieth Century history, politics, and religion with, then still want to hang out with later for seemingly endless glasses of vodka is rare. Unless you know where to look.

The theorem that shed its mist, the central social lesson of my travels: Certain types of places draw certain types of people. As a traveler, when I've deviated from the commonplace, I have felt the most camaraderie. I have felt most at home.

In my first few hours in Amman, Jordan, I met Cindie from Vancouver and Til from Hamburg. This was when our hostel owner Ali was trying to get us to pay something like $80 each to take the sightseeing route (the King's Highway) from Amman to Petra. Together we found a separate way that only cost us a quarter of that. We traversed night markets together, stocking up on food and supplies for the next day, tackling everything together with a recurring sense of collaboration. It felt at times like we were solving a riddle that individually may have stumped each of us, leading to higher prices, shadier travel options, but together was different entirely. The Voltron approach to travel. We made it down to Petra, did the same shopping around and negotiated an equally good deal back up to Amman, where we parted ways once again, Cindie to Istanbul, Til to Damascus, and I to Qatar. We clicked instantly, not always perfectly and we're not in constant contact now, but we each still talk, each pass along travel advice for our next destinations. Because we're still unified, still feel that precious overlapping of our Venn diagrams that is shaped like the Jordanian border.

The moment these thoughts became granite was two days ago, in Champasak. It's one thing to go to Laos, let alone a tiny village in the remote South, so of the seven other backpackers of all ages on my cramped sawngethaew that held another 15 Lao locals, I had seven easy conversations, seven faces that looked back at me with the identical determination and small but still present sense of adventure that fewer and fewer places on this Earth are capable of giving you.


For all the grandeur and impossibly complex historical tapestry that is Western Europe, I'm in no rush to go back. I did meet some awesome people there, in Scotland and in Berlin especially, but the vast majority of other people at my hostels were weekenders or permanently attached to their copy of Lonely Planet. You can be somewhere for just a few days and not be a tourist. Then again you can travel around the world and still not see a thing. The experience can easily change you, alter your perceptions- if you're open to it. And that seems to be the dividing issue. One that cuts across the European continent like the Maginot Line.

If you've traveled a good deal, seen various parts of the world and Western Europe is still for you- awesome. That's you. I loved what I got to see while I was there, the life lessons I came across in Barcelona and Naples are no less profound, but Europe is domesticated to the point that I'm in no rush to go back. It will always be there, and be more or less like it is now. Places like Laos are disappearing. In the few hours I've spent on the patio outside my hostel in Vientiene, I've seen maybe 30 groups of backpackers get turned away because there's no room. I've seen the same groups an hour or so later still wandering hopelessly with their backpacks still on because the entire town, which has a large number of hostels and homestays, is full. The older travelers I've met that were here a decade, even two years ago, speak of how vastly it has changed, how modern and touristy it is now leaning. So far this is just some of the northern cities; in the south you still run in to incidents like my forced hitchhiking in Ban Mueng. As shitty as it was at the time, I'll take that over a stamp on my Eurail pass any day.

It takes certain personality traits to look at a map and say "Lithuania. I want to see what's there." Or Jordan, Phnom Penh, rural Laos. The night before I left Los Angeles, my best friend told me that I had a something of a gift, a strange mixture of stupidity, balls, and guile. Maybe this is what he was seeing. This personality trait, this product of curiosity and desire for adventure, it is probably the most unifying single social characteristic I have ever come across. Even though we've only known one another for days at most, sometimes as short as the span of shared tuk-tuk ride, these people that I have met and clicked with understand an aspect of my personality that people I have known for years have never approached. Because it is burning within them as well.
Paris is beautiful, but keep it. We'll take Petra. We want to see places other people didn't even know existed, let alone thought of going to. I don't know what it is in the others that catalyzes this quality. For me it is a sense of discovery, the awakening of the frontier spirit that quickens the beating of my American heart.

That's the feeling I get when I think about the next places I want to go to next. Syria. Bhutan. Tibet. Nepal. The Trans-Siberian in reverse. I read an article that a British company is doing small guerrilla style tours of Iraq. Something with six or seven people that is less like a tour group and more like a cadre. How could I turn down a chance to go to Babylon? And of course my last continent: South America.

When I started this trip I was a little annoyed that traveling in the E.U. you don't get new passport stamps at the border. Now I'm grateful for that. Because each box I do have stamped in there is something that I feel I've earned, its pages are like a table of contents for the short stories that have comprised the last four plus months of my life. This little beaten blue and gold book in my pocket is more than a government identification for me now. Its obvious heavy use, that it is now noticeably heavier with ink and stamps- this is my badge of honor. One that I plan on always keeping in close range, always at the ready for the next adventure.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

One for the grandkids.


"Me and my friends are like
The drums on 'Lust for Life.'
We pound it out on floor toms.
Our psalms are sing-along songs."
- The Hold Steady


The moral of the story probably isn't Try Hitch-hiking in Communist Countries. Probably.

There's a difference between stupidity and desperation, in cause but not effect. I've been vigilant to the point of being wary for almost four months straight. I've had to be. People might know what city I'm in from status updates or email, but when it comes to being more specific than that, I'm the only person in the world who knows where I am at any given point of the day. And with a useless phone-turned-digital watch in my pocket, if anything goes wrong, it's pretty much going to stay that way. Before yesterday, I had slipped up twice, and only one of those was really avoidable. What happened yesterday wasn't exactly preventable either. Aside from maybe me putting even less faith in Lonely Planet next time.

I took a day trip to Champasak, a tiny town in the southern Laos countryside. One that buses don't reach (even though the guidebooks claim they do). To get there, you either drop a pretty large amount of money on taking a tuk-tuk (in Laos' case basically a motorcycle with a wheeled-bench sidecar) for the forty bumpiest kilometers of your life, or you negotiate a ride with the owner of a sawngthaew, a pick-up truck with two benches in a covered truck bed. I did the latter. So did 22 other people (7 of them fellow backpackers). It was easy enough getting out to Champasak, even if we were crammed in to an impossibly small space, and had to wait a good while for the auto ferry to carry us over to the tiny village that held the ruins of an 11th Century Khmer temple. But by the time I was ready to get back to the biggish city of Pakse, all these drivers' runs were evidently done for the day, even though it was only two o'clock. I was supposed to have another hour and a half of breathing room, but maybe because it was a Friday afternoon, or maybe because it's me and I do things the near-impossible way, there wasn't a ride to be had.

After some brokenly communicated negotiations with a shopkeeper in town, for a little over two dollars she offered to have her husband drive me to a crossroads only five miles from Pakse, a distance I could then easily get a cheap tuk-tuk from. I hopped in the back of another sawngthaew, this one smaller, this one solo, and got ready for the thirty kilometer ride. We got less than three. We hit a larger road, at which point her husband demanded more money. An absurdly larger amount more. Considering it's Laos, this was still fairly affordable, but on both principle and logistics (if he dicked me over once, why wouldn't he do it again another mile down the road...) I got out. 31 kilometers away from where I needed to be, I started walking. Eighty cars must have passed going in the opposite direction. Going my way, in four minutes I was able to futilely outstretch a thumb at only one motobiker that sped past. I plodded on a little farther and turned back around to see a mini-bus surrounded by the town-children way back at the crossroads I had hopped out at. Assuming it had to be one of the promised but never delivered tourist buses back to Pakse, I sprinted back as much as my exhaustion would allow and ran up to the driver side panting. Getting a peek inside as I rounded the windshield, I knew it wasn't a tourist bus, but tried to explain my situation to the Lao driver nonetheless. I didn't ask for a ride back the full way, just partially, whatever would fit in their travel plans. Hesitantly, very hesitantly, he agreed.

Entering the side door to youthful screams of excitement, it was the matching shirts I noticed first. A flood of stark Fruit-of-the-Loom white with an orange bubble on each. I got distracted by the raw vegetables they were all snacking on before I was able to read what those bubbles, and the increasingly familiar logo said. "United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.... We Combat Human Trafficking." I had managed to flag down a van of Lao UN students. I was given a screaming welcome of confusion as well as some raw vegetables of my own (turned out to be really good jicama) before they resumed their singing and makeshift percussion that must have been going on for their whole trip. I was asked by their nine smiling faces and waving arms to join in, which I managed to in the form of clapping but not singing. That wasn't good enough. They urged me (though none of them spoke any English) to sing something of my own. But the shock of the entire situation, coupled with nine high-pitched early-teenage voices screaming playfully for me to start, as well as the thumping of sandals on a small bongo drum as the one boy did interminably, and I blanked. I couldn't think of a single song, let alone the lyrics for it.

It did come though. Halfway through one more round of their chanting, I was able to think of it. I have no clue why this song specifically came to mind. With my ipod being stranded in London, I haven't heard it in months, and even before then it wasn't one of my most played, but as soon as it popped in to my head out of absolutely nowhere, I knew it couldn't be any other song. That it couldn't be other way. I charaded an apology for my bad singing voice and started in:

"Hey Jude, don't make it bad.
Take a sad song, and make it better.
Remember to let her under your skin,

Then you'll begin to make it better,

Better, better, better, BETTER,

Na.... na na, Na Na Na Na.... NA NA NA NAAAAAAA..... Hey Jude....

Na... na na....."

We pulled in to the bus station in Pakse two minutes later. If I had waited another round or two of their traditional Lao sing-alongs, I probably would have saved myself a good deal of embarrassment. But that right song at the right time doesn't always come around just for observation. Sometimes it's about expression. Declaration. It doesn't come around for just you. Sometimes it's not about the memories you take back for yourself, it's about the memories you make for others.

"For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder..."




Laos:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2116554&id=35804394&l=beadba0ff1

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

This is why i don't do christmas.


"All are punish-ed." -
Romeo and Juliet. Act IV, Scene iii.

I don't get to tell you about watching the sun rise over Angkor Wat, that that was how I began my December. I don't get to discuss my musings from the back of a moto outside Battambang or sailing down the Tonle Sap to Siem Reap while listening to "The End" by The Doors. Not yet. Because first I'm forced to talk about trying to do the right thing and looking like an idiot in the process.

I woke up at 3:45 AM to get to Angkor Wat in time for sunrise. For the next eleven and a half hours I wandered throughout the most gorgeous thousand-year-old buildings on Earth, spread out over a 26-kilometer area. I took over twelve hundred photos. That's more in a single day than my first three weeks on the road. I bought my bus ticket for tomorrow afternoon after shopping around for the best deal, found the Cambodian history book I've been searching everywhere for at an equally cheap price, and completed all the other errands I set for myself today. Felt like I'd accomplished a good deal, so I figured I'd treat myself to some ice cream at a place my friend Whitney had recommended to visit while I was in town. I was lazily strolling along the riverside from the Old Market back to my hostel, enjoying a scoop of ginger and black sesame, about a third of the way back when a girl of maybe five ran up to me. She begged and pleaded for two blocks for a dollar, which broke my heart not to give her. Then she asked for the rest of my ice cream cone, which I gave her immediately, but felt a little guilty that it was such a quirky flavor, one that a child definitely would not enjoy, and even if she did there wasn't much left of it anyway. I don't really know why, but after I left her, I turned back around, walked back to her and, crouching down so she was almost as tall as me, I told her that I still couldn't give her a dollar, but I would buy her a real ice cream cone, not my seconds, in any flavor she wanted. There was another place just 20 meters back and I walked out with a blueberry cobbler cone for me to replace the less-than-satisfying one I'd given away, and a large chocolate peanut butter one for her (she didn't understand when I tried to ask her what she wanted, so that was my best guess that any kid would like). It still cost me a dollar, but this way it felt a little more personable than empty charity, that in giving one to her I was saying thank you to the hundreds of beaming Cambodian children that had waved as my boat, or tuk-tuk, or moto passed them. It took all of two minutes to get the cones, but when I came back outside she was gone. I walked a good distance in both directions and couldn't find her. Asked the tuk-tuk driver she was sitting with when I met her but to no avail.

And there I was. Lugging a shopping bag around my wrist, craning my weather-beaten and sunburnt face in all directions with a defeated look upon it, and holding an ice cream cone in each hand. Not even one two-scoop cone, that would have been somewhat socially acceptable, but double-fisting fattening dairy like it was about to be outlawed. I looked like the fat German kid from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. And I don't even think there was a fat German kid in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but you'd pretty much have to invent a simile to describe how stupid I looked. Walking again towards my hostel, I didn't see another Cambodian child that I could give her cone to, but I did pass a tourist bus stop full of backpackers who looked from one of my hands to the other, then at my face with an almost insulted look of disgust.

That's it. No deeper moral lesson. No waxing poetic on what this says about me, or my trip, or the world around me. Not even going back over this one to proofread it. Too embarassed. Just me looking stupid. And gluttonous. And feeling like no good deed goes unpunished.

And not wanting to eat ice cream again in the forseeable future.

*****************************
(post-script) For those that read my last post about not giving money to the probable Khmer Rouge victim outside S-21, here in Siem Reap I found another victim of their torture. The Khmer Rouge cleaved off both his hands at the mid-forearm, but he still manages to operate a steet cart selling bootlegged Xerox copies of books and Lonely Planet guides, so I bought one that I didn't really need for Laos. Still nothing to assuage the pain he has suffered, but it's reassuring that there are alternative ways to be constructive than simple handouts.

The ruins of Angkor:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2115132&id=35804394&l=123eb2365f