BACK HOME IN THE LAND OF GOOD AIR

“Clear skies with unlimited visibility,” the pilot said as the plane descends for a landing in Buenos Aires. When’s the last time you heard that? I don’t think I have for, uh, most of my life, maybe since I was a child, and I’m from a rural state. So right away you know you’re in for something a little bit different here. I guess that’s how it got its name. Okay, so what B.A. gains is Santiago’s loss on the other side of that Cordillera in the smog department, so self-congratulatory pats on the back are probably not in order. But still the analogy holds. South America is the one continent that has yet to be ‘done’, or overdone that is, of those that are ‘doable’ of course, so that rules out Antarctica, and Australia is a single country no bigger than mainland US, so that doesn’t really count. But South America is big and beautiful and rich in resources and culture(s), and yet is still relatively under-populated, an empty continent, thick only around the edges, a half-baked pizza, the southern European counterpart to Uncle Sam’s predominantly northern European refugees. And so Buenos Aires patterns itself, an island of European civility in a sea of seeds and cattle, the biggest city in one of the world’s biggest countries, one of the few that could make some reasonable claim to self-sufficiency.

Of course that unlimited visibility is not without some testing by Bonairenses. The tradition of smoking is very much alive and well, thank you, with a passion and a vengeance. People don’t just smoke, they SMOKE, complete with nasty butts flicked to the floor as is the custom in the mother country of old, a world with many bars, and I don’t mean cell-phone signals. Oh sure, they put up signs and cordon off sections, but you know how that works. They put up ‘wi-fi’ signs everywhere too, in cafes especially, even when there is none. It’s just a fashion statement. All the US cafes have them, so it must be cool. The plate glass for cafes comes that way, pre-engraved, Visa and MC too, smokers’ section also. That’s a cruel hoax for us wi-fi users, all plugged in and no place to go. Where’s the consumer protection?

The food sucks; read: ‘too similar to American food’, at least pre-Chinese America. The Chinese don’t seem to have gotten here yet, not in any significant numbers at least, and the ones that have seem to run the inner-city ‘supermarkets’. If there were more, there’d be more Chinese restaurants, long established farther north and west as chifas, and long incorporated into the Peruvian national cuisine, not to mention the business culture, as common members of the Pacific Rim. That’s too bad. Looking for a Chinese restaurant is usually the first thing I do when I enter a new country or city. As it is the food, particularly fast food, is pretty boring, basically variations on starch starch and starch, with a little meat thrown in for flavor in the ubiquitous pizza, hamburgers, and ‘panchos’ (hot dogs) that line the walls of perception. At least they still have empanadas, so I can remember what continent I’m in. The more expensive meals seem to merely shift the meat: starch proportions upward. They have tango and tenors, too, singing and dancing for tips in the pedestrian malls, along with the obligatory hippies peddling their hippie accoutrements. There but for the grace of God…

But it’s a little cold this early in the October springtime, barely hitting 20C if at all (that’s pretty low for a high, Homie; trust me). People crowd the north-facing slopes (it’s the southern hemisphere, remember) at midday like turtles on logs to soak up what they can get for free. At least space heaters are not an unknown item in Argentina, so that helps. Still I’ve got four countries to see in six weeks, so maybe I should head on up to Paraguay where temps will soon be scorching souls and soles. By the time I get back B.A. will only be warmer as summer approaches (they give the running countdown on TV). Paraguay is the trip’s main wild card also, a place where the unexpected might happen. On paper of course it’s the nowhere country, nowhere nothing never no how, the only landlocked country in South America besides Bolivia. But Bolivia of course has some spectacular Andean culture. Does Paraguay have something comparable? They DO have the co-official state language of Guarani’, the only Amerindian language to have crossed over to its conquerors and survived to the present day. I better check it out. Best to play wild cards early in case they take wings. A new law is being proposed in Argentina also which would require visas for Americans. I should make tracks before that goes into effect.

So I do. Fortunately the B.A. bus station is conveniently located, so connections are easy. I like cities with central stations. I’ll just catch an overnighter north to Corrientes and get my visa there, continuing on to Asuncion or Iguazu, whichever works best, then circle back through the other. You’d think in this day and age, visa requirements would be decreasing, but that’s not necessarily so. Part of the problem is ‘reciprocity’, in which countries want to require visas of those countries which require visas of its own citizens, even to the point of charging exactly the same fee. This usually hits US travelers hardest, and then Canada and UK, as these are the strictest countries for entry and the most popular for illegal immigration, not coincidentally. I understand their point but they may be shooting themselves in the foot, as some travelers DO make decisions based on such considerations, like yours truly.

And then of course some of the consequences can be a bit bizarre. While my generally well-funded ex-pat buddies in Thailand sweat and scramble to deal with new toughened immigration requirements there, a little known fact is that citizens from several South American countries can get far more favorable terms of entry there than they, all for free, including those of Peru, one of this continent’s poorest countries. The irony of course is that there are few or no South American tourists there, nor vice versa any Thais here. Thais love to travel, and visas are a hassle, but still South America is hardly at the top of their list, not pretentious enough. In the case of Paraguay though, US citizens are almost alone in the visa requirement, but if I want to visit every country in the world, then that’s the deal. If it’s getting worse before it’s getting better, then I’ll have to hurry.

I get a front row seat on a double-decker bus and head off into the Argentine night. Any thought of missing the scenery is probably misplaced. Argentina rolls under the bus like Nebraska and her mother-in-law, just going on and on about nothing, vast plains dotted with towns and cows. It’s big and it’s beautiful, but in that subtle American way, vast and brooding. It resembles both the US and Mexico in fact, almost equally, Spanish in culture, American in agriculture. Occasionally you can even see a real live gaucho, like a European dandy compared to his US counterpart, but they look cool. I vaguely remember a river passing under us, so that must have been the Parana’ but I couldn’t swear to it. Bumps in the road become minor collisions in my semi-lucid dreams, but at least the Burmese didn’t attack. That’s only happens when I take sleeping pills.

NOMAD BY TRADE

Transient! The word rolls off downward-curled lips in a sneer usually reserved for such lower-castes as prostitutes, shit sweepers, backpackers, and attorneys. Some people seem to think that to live a mobile lifestyle is to be a shiftless lazy no-good bum. Maybe they’re right. Certainly the pan-handlers on the street don’t advance the cause. I’m referring to the people that you tend to smell first, like it or not, before you even realize that what they’re selling is guilt. Thank God for the sense of smell. Bio-molecular scuttlebutt is that half our genes are devoted to it, apparently to know what’s good to eat. It was probably more important in the old days when such things were not written down in cookbooks and therefore much more crucial for survival. Now it tends to have a more negative connotation, i.e. if ‘it smells,’ then it smells bad, at least in most languages, though not Thai. Thai has separate distinct verbs for ‘to smell good,’ ‘to smell bad,’ to simply have a smell at all, and of course the act of sniffing itself. The same verb for ‘to smell good’ also doubles for the act of pressing cheeks with your lover, which in Thailand takes on special importance, judging from the impression Tang’s bony skull leaves in the side of my face every morning. Thais are certainly the most olfactory people I’ve ever seen, addicted as they are to those stupid inhalants which occupy the remote corners of the shopping aisles in most countries, but pay big ad bucks in Thailand, along with multiple products to lighten female skin in six weeks. Where would we be without that? We might be fooled into thinking our spouses live healthy outdoor lifestyles, like all the Western women using products to darken their skin. Nevertheless Tang sniffed me up long before she ever kissed me, so I guess I passed the smell test. Don’t try that with the junkies in Vancouver’s Gas Town.

I can remember when there were still real hoboes, long before beatniks, hippies, or hitchhikers without a cause, hoboes who grew up with the railroad, like Chinese using it as a rite of passage into the country, getting a foot in the door and a leg up the ladder long after anyone worried about Chinese junks landing on the shores and long before anyone worried about Chinese junk landing in the stores. I saw them as a child of the 60’s wandering up the hill below my grandparents’ house in Fort Worth, but I’ve never seen them since. I guess they’ve been supplanted by ‘the homeless’ as the romance of the rails fades. You don’t see many hitch-hikers any more either, but you see plenty of homeless, and the romance is long gone. They’ve moved downtown, too, no longer relegated to the trackside or ‘under the bridge.’ I guess hitchhikers were the cultural link between the two, as I can remember some from my 70’s adventures who had actually ridden rails, though I never really did myself, nothing more than jumping on then jumping off just to prove I could. Though that was probably the heyday of mobile society, there were quickly signs that the bloom was off the rose as those same people frequently succumbed to alcohol and drug excess, replacing TV with cheap thrills at a fairly poor exchange rate I’d say. I know my own wake-up call came when I saw people drinking Sterno ‘canned heat’ to get a buzz rather than buy a six-pack of beer. For those of you who don’t know, Sterno was the jellied alcohol in a can that you simply opened and lit a match to for heat in your little portable stove. It’s worth mentioning but little compensation that the beer then wasn’t much good, either, long before micro-brews and their pubs. In those days I’d drive back from the West to Mississippi with a trunk full of Coors for the Homies, a beer that I would generously compare to piss now.

But I didn’t freak out and go sell real estate or anything. I just decided there must be some way to travel and make money, too. They said it couldn’t be done, and they were right. It can’t… any more. It’s funny that I made my living most of my life doing something that hadn’t been done before and probably won’t be done again on any large scale, dealing folk art and ethnic handicrafts. The process of tourism promoting handicrafts promoting cottage industry promoting import/exports has pretty much run its course and left native cultures more or less where they started, usually with improved local economies. That’s all they wanted after all. It’s the northern Europeans and their cousins who have the wanderlust. It’s in our Indo-Aryan speaking blood. We stayed out there on the steppes long after our southern cousins started hanging out with the Semites down on Club Med, learning how to be civilized and corrupt in towns and cities, climbing society’s ladders and jockeying for positions. They act like city people are smarter but anyone knows that’s cow poop. City people are just weaker. They’re servants and store clerks huddling together for safety against the ghosts and fears of their own pathetic imaginations, that they use to substitute for the real lives that they lost long ago, replaced by pictures on walls and silly love songs stuck in the head. The real poetry comes with the wind by the campfire; the real pictures are painted on the sky at sunset, lasting but a moment before the lights turn to darkness and souls take their rest. People of the steppes are hunters and herders, moving with the seasons and changing for their own reasons. They only need cities to prey on, to take what they need and leave the rest. A city of hunters only happens where a campsite becomes permanent and only then by convenience and circumstance, never necessity, for while a hunter may be IN the city, he is never OF the city. He’ll still have a little plot and a few animals, a view of the sky and a view of the future, ready to pack his bags at the slightest provocation, a roadmap etched in permanent memory.

The new landscape includes the web, of course, threatening to catch anything and everything in its sticky filaments. It’s hard to believe now that a computer was ever anything other than an Internet machine. Spreadsheets and databases gave way to e-mail and spam gave way to e-bay and e-banks gave way to MySpace and FaceBook. Now Second Life looks to take up where dreams leave off, a world inside the box, complete with land and money, milk and honey. For the conspiracy-minded this conjures up visions of bio-pods attached to TV screens by wires and tubes, getting their dreams and visions spoon–fed with oatmeal to produce fart-forced bio-gas for the cars in the real world upstairs. This should be where you look for losers and hustlers, a drug-like life for those who have none, hardly the place you find real men, the hunters and horsemen recently arrived from the steppes, right? The Next Big Thing may be fun and fashionable, good for Hollywood and Bollywood, maybe, but not much else, right? Business is done in tall towers; ‘firm’ people wear suits, right? Wrong. This is exactly where you find the hunters, along the borders, the frontiers where fear and boredom stop and Nature and creativity start, a line that crawls along the outskirts of towns and through the subconscious of individuals, fluid and flowing, shifting and re-shaping, to fit circumstance and forge the future. The Way is the main thing, not the bottom line, but the process and the progress. That is the American dream, civilization without cities.

If Tails Toulouse I Won’t; If Heads Marseille I Will

So I left Barcelona in the middle of the night. The rains had already started by then. I thought maybe I’d get lucky and ride out of it, but no such luck. By the time I got to Marseille, it was worse, God taking a dump on us, rain falling in sheets and wind blowing up a storm. We pulled in at six in the morning, I oblivious to most of the trip, though somewhere we changed drivers, probably at the Spain/France border. If Customs or immigration did anything, I’m not aware of it. They did upon arrival at the bus station in Marseille, running a sniffing-dog through the bus, regardless of the fact that people have already gotten off en route. The French police like to make a show of things, especially in Paris at the terminus of the route from Amsterdam. France is not sympathetic to any loosening of recreational drug laws. Alcohol is the drug of choice by tradition. You just don’t smoke joints by candle light and whisper “Je t’aime” in a breathy swoon. I guess it’s just not romantic. I don’t know why not. They don’t have any problem doing the same with cigarettes. I read today that France is the last country in Western Europe to outlaw smoking in public places. Four years ago the thought that any of them could do that was unthinkable. Ireland was the first, believe it or not, they of pub culture exported world-wide. So now cigarette smokers seek out open doorways in the train station like wi-fi scum looking for a signal. When they find them, they stand right in them, as though an open door were not a passage but an invitation to congregate. This was a conceptual problem already that smokers have co-opted for themselves.

Marseille has some of the cheapest rooms I’ve seen in a developed country in a long time, unheard-of prices like fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five dollars a night. Every room seems to have its own particular price, I guess based on square footage. That doesn’t mean they’ll have a shower, though, and if they do, you might have to pay extra for it. Thus the reputation of Frenchmen is confirmed by the system. We all knew they seem to carry a heavier bacterial load than most Westerners, we just didn’t know why. In France bathing is optional. Smells from laboratories sell well. When the first cheap hotel I inquired about told me there were no showers, I thought she meant there were no showers in the room, i.e. down the hall. She meant none, period. The rooms have sinks, though, so I guess you can take a whore’s bath, whatever that is, in addition to whatever else a guy might do with a sink, considering the crapper’s down the hall. I could use some help here, not being French, so I’ve considered offering a whore money to let me watch her bathe, but I don’t know if she’d do it. It’s probably too kinky. Those rooms don’t even have an electrical outlet, much less TV, or curtains on the window. Now if there’s something scarier than the fact that there are thousands of Frenchmen walking the streets in various stages of un-wash, which we already knew, it’s that they might be giving themselves a mop-job and whatever else over a sink by an open window while God and the whole world looks on. Better leave the kids home on that European vacation.

In North America rooms this cheap would have long been overrun by junkies or closed by order of the local government. Junkies don’t need showers either. That’s the way it is in Vancouver, BC, Canada. You can smell them coming. Apparently half our genes are devoted to smell. Now you know why. That leaves room for a lot of creativity in Evolution by the way. But the junkies in Van City don’t care about that; they have another concern. They also have their own district between the upscale part of Gastown and Chinatown. They roost like vultures, gravitating to the sunlight and surveying the terrain for easy pickings. Zoologists probably go there to study their feeding and mating habits, if they still have any. Marseille just has winos, good old fashioned bums begging coins for booze. I don’t know where they sleep, probably on the street. The cheapest hotels close their doors at ten, eleven or midnight latest. That’ll keep the riffraff out. This is a part of Europe scarcely known or acknowledged anymore, the old Europe, mostly southern and eastern, of poverty and degeneracy and petty crime, far from the tourists and modern development, wherever unemployment is rife and competition for scarce resources is fierce. A tourist concentrating on these areas could see Europe almost as cheap as anywhere in the world, certainly as cheap, or cheaper, than West Africa. This includes much of Portugal, southernmost Spain, southern France west of the Riviera and Italy from Naples south, in addition to most of the East European countries. Conversely the New Europe of budget airlines and capitalistic fervor hasn’t even scratched the surface here yet. There is no bus to Paris and the cheapest one-hour flight is four hundred bucks. So I’ll take the TGV. There’s no choice. International buses have cheap rates and traverse the country, but they don’t serve local routes. Welcome to France. Enter Sarkozy.

So I opted to go a half-notch upscale. For forty bucks and change net, I get some old European style with rough beams in the ceiling (including fake adze marks), a large bed, six stations of French TV, a sink, and… a bidet. I’ve got a bidet in my room, but no bath. Crapper and shower are down the hall, five euros to bathe. While I contemplate the ceiling beam right over the bidet and the multiple uses to which a nylon rain poncho might be put, I remember the scene in Tropic of Cancer (or was it Capricorn?) where Henry Miller’s American friend used the bidet to lighten his intestinal load to the chagrin of… well, everybody, but especially… the whores taking their whore’s bath. Now I’m getting the picture. Hey, I want my five Euros back! Even funnier was my architecture professor at Jackson State trying to explain the concept to the down home bloods who’d probably used outhouses during childhood. When he could get a word out at all between stifling his grins and muffling his guffaws, he called them ‘bidgets.’ I’d read Henry Miller so I knew what he was talking about, despite the bad French, but the rest of the class was lost. So we shared a bond there, derriere la scene, united in our imaginary knowledge of the ways of the world, while the peasants wallowed in their ignorance.

Marseille is a fast food paradise. That’s good considering that sit-down meals would be about the same price as the cheap rooms. I’m in the shawarma part of town, little Africa. If you want bouillabaisse, then that’s another quarter. Moroccans here seem right at home, sipping mint tea in sidewalk cafes, while their wives stay at home and do all the work, just like good little Tangerines back home, ‘the other TJ’. There are Asians here, but they seem fairly Frenchified, offering lunch specials with wine. The Vietnamese restaurants don’t even have pho’, the national dish, good old rice-noodle soup. Pizza is ubiquitous, and good. Kebabs and frites line every corner. The bakeries are to die for, of course. Me, I try to limit myself to fast food no more than once per day, not because of restaurant fatigue, but high carbs and boredom. So I cook noodles in my room and make sandwiches to order. The space between my window and the outside shutters makes a fine fridge, thank you. They have a combination cranberry/mango juice here, so all is right with the world. Kidney stones are in remission and I’m taking the TGV to Paris Sunday. I’ve got a wi-fi signal in my room, just by accident. Plan C just might salvage this trip yet. I’ve had visions of Marseilles for a long time. I don’t want to sound spooky like I had a premonition or something, because after all, I could’ve gone to Toulouse, but I think I always thought Marseille might be a part of France I’d like. It’s hard to learn the language of a place you don’t really like, after all. For me to enjoy a place is to internalize it, know it’s insides until I feel like a local. What cathedral? What statue? Show me the produce section.

Abortion in Africa! Blame it on the Stones!

You gotta’ have a good headline. Pain! Misery! Anxiety! Get it right here! The good news is that readership’s up. Apparently people can appreciate my misery more than my metaphysical meanderings. At least it’s nice to know that if I lay dying, blogging it for the public, I might achieve in death what has always eluded me in life. Maybe I should do a webcam? Death can be a good career move. There are other disadvantages of course. So as I sit on the cusp of a severely mutated trip, praying for divine intervention, I guess it’s time to pause and reflect. What went wrong? In a word, everything. There’s probably a reason I’ve avoided Africa so long, especially the heartland, even if I couldn’t verbalize it. I still can’t, because I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the African reputation for aggressiveness and violence. But I’ve seen nothing like that, just maybe a little excessive aggression from the sales teams. Maybe it’s because I don’t especially like rap music, and extrapolate that into a general avoidance of modern black culture. That ignores the fact that there are many other genres of African-derived music that I DO like, especially the ones that they themselves tend to like at the source. I hear more rap in Thailand than I did in Africa. Maybe it’s all too close to home, home being Mississippi, Mississippi being the heart of the old South plantation slave system, that being one of the more disgusting periods of human history, in direction contradiction to the general trend of things gradually improving over time throughout history. Now I’ve never disavowed my connection to and affection for Mississippi and never will, nothing personal to it, and that’s the whole point. An entire era got wrapped up in something it couldn’t move past, and the more hopeless it became, the tighter they held to the old ways. We all know people like that, don’t we? Countries are no different. South Africa certainly wasn’t. That is what God invented 2x4’s for, beating some sense into the intransigent.

That is why democracy is good, because small units are better suited for evolution. Does that make sense? The dinosaurs are all gone and will never come back, beneficiaries of a sparsely inhabited world that is not likely to return. The largest mammal during that time was scarcely the size of a rat. They weren’t more powerful. They were more adaptable. Obviously democracy is slow and cumbersome, “the worst of good systems, the best of the bad ones,” a mighty dictator being able to accomplish in one sweep of the pen what a democracy might take years debating. But who knows whether that dictatorial edict will be ultimately good or bad? Aren’t a bunch of little mistakes ultimately better than one colossal one? Sometimes the best offense is a good defense. That’s usually the way I work, gradually insinuating myself into situations while always leaving multiple exit options. The one-trick pony is at a career disadvantage. All this is by way of saying that you have to remain flexible, adaptable, even if it means foregoing life’s biggest prizes. I don’t know what role fame plays in human evolution, natural or cultural. I do know that when somebody posts photos of himself in battle fatigues and then proceeds to systematically slaughter innocent people just because it’s there to be done for the sake of the evening news and Warhol’s dictum, then something is wrong. The problem is that I can’t just write them all off as crazy. The problem is that I DO understand them, as they stand on the brink of being and nothingness and decide to take the big plunge. This is a human condition, but particularly an American one, it seems. This is the price of individualism. This is the price of ‘believing in oneself’ to the exclusion of everything else. Religion is about believing in something bigger, whatever it might be, father figures optional. This is the price of fame. People get hurt.

So I bit the bullet. I split. I just got on the plane and split. I bit the same bullet I had just dodged, pain. I had just gotten over the bout of gout, when the kidney stones struck, screaming for attention. You don’t take this lightly. I’ve passed a kidney stone or two before, and it’s no fun. Even if it’s just a warning call, not the real thing, you don’t take chances. You certainly don’t plan a butt-breaking two-day overland trek back to the most primitive part of the world. The flight back to Mali would be $300 and still commit me to an unchangeable Air France flight back to Europe, or I could just pay $500 and catch a flight to Europe immediately, booked and paid online from the privacy of my own computer, and then take it from there, Europe, next day. So I did. Like the old saying goes, “better Expedia today than AirEvac tomorrow. That’s what my mother always said; didn’t yours? Okay, that’s not true. No, I had a mother, but she never said that. She said lots of other things, though. We used to keep a running greatest hits collection of her prophesies and witticisms. She used to say, “A dollar is a dollar.” I remember that one. She didn’t know Jack, at least not Jack Free. She didn’t need to. She knew everything else. Mothers are like that. They offer love at low interest with multiple repayment options. Now I have a Thai mother-in-law. She makes me spicy food that comes back to haunt me.

So I booked a flight on Iberia and left within a day, just one-wayed it outta’ there. I considered Algerian airlines, change planes in Algiers, just to put another country under my belt, but thought better of that idea. You don’t take chances with health. So I bought a ticket to Paris, and hopped off in Madrid. This is the privilege of traveling without baggage, jumping ship when you like, as long as no flight segments remain. The airlines don’t like it. I don’t like some things they do, or the trains either. The Eurail pass is an outright rip-off. I’ll tell you how to cheat that if you want. The Dakar airport has all the charm of Guatemala City’s and the Air France food was better, aubergines and potatoes braised with chicken in a light Dijon sauce, but Iberia was okay, the milk run to Africa through the Canaries. Sunny Spain sounds better than cold rainy Paris any day, and my Spanish is much better than my French if I need to negotiate my existence with some doctor who looks like Billy Bob Thornton with a Bolivian miner’s light on his forehead in a lesser-known Cohen Brothers’ movie. I know, I feel like a wimp, but when it hurts to fart, and I almost passed out from pain after a sneeze, then we need to hedge bets. Let’s make this clear: it’s not the fear, but the pain, that I succumb to. At fifty-three years old and counting, time is the greatest asset. So now I sit in a hotel in Barcelona, to which I immediately came from Madrid. You’ve got to have priorities, and I’ve already seen Madrid. My main regrets are that I really haven’t seen the entire scope of Mali, and I didn’t eat the mumbo gumbo in Senegal. I was working up to it, eating the local baguette sandwiches regularly, not the tourist ones, but not the goop over rice. The Senegal sandwiches were certainly better than the Spanish bocadillos, rather dry crusty affairs. I ate a lot of cheese sandwiches in Senegal, too, dodging the bacteria, but that’s not what I go to Africa for. I go for the goop.

Then I got hit by the calcium deposits. I even drank all the icy stuff on the train coming across and never got sick. Maybe I’ll return to Mali some day as conquering hero of the music industry. Who knows, maybe next year? The visa’s still good. But for now I’m just trying to salvage a trip, so guess I’ll check out the north of Spain and south of France. If I can’t afford it in February, then when can I? The stones have stopped hurting so much by now, so I’ll deal with them later. A doctor might say something I don’t want to hear. I’ve got a trip to salvage after all! I’m even missing the French language, like I was finally ‘getting it’ after all these years, though it’s nice to be in a country whose language I can speak, when in pain. I never minded the Francophony in Africa, anyway, just the cacophony. At least Africa doesn’t seem so exorbitantly expensive now, compared with Europe, as it did compared with America. We’re still not back up to fifty channels on TV, though certainly better than the one or two we were down to in Africa. You can drink the water! Hopefully cranberry juice will cost less than five bucks a liter. That’s more than gas, I think. Now I know what’s wrong with Africa. It’s just too bloody expensive for what you get. That’s a bullet that’s hard to bite.

The Accidental American… Somewhere in Africa

I wouldn’t say anything as clichéd as “this is the life” or anything like that, both because it’s not that great here, and clichés are to be avoided like the, uh, peste, by any writer worth his, uh, paper (dodging clichés can be difficult). Of course I hear people refer to Thailand as ‘paradise’ and I don’t know what they mean. I guess it can be an ego booster for someone with low self-esteem, though perhaps the opposite for someone truly talented. There’s certainly an element of village communism present there and in most small communities, jealousy and resentment, the great equalizer. I usually relegate such platitudes to the ‘superficial impressions’ folder. Nevertheless, it’s always nice to find a place worth hanging, time to wash the clothes, buy some bread, and make some tea, especially after a week or two of rough travel. This is the way I like to travel, like serial monogamy, never exactly settled down, though hardly extreme adventure. I guess it’s a backpacker style, or maybe an American one, but probably my own. That’s the way I do everything, never totally committed to any one thing, but unwilling to ever totally dump anything or anyone, almost. In addition I’m a terrible tourist, often preferring to riffle through postcards rather than actually get up at dawn to get the best light for that sublime view of some God-forsaken ruin. Where I differ from the typical backpacker is that they tend to congregate with ‘their own kind’ whereas I tend to eschew such. A modern-day backpacker can travel throughout Southeast Asia from one safe haven to another and never really see anything else. While not wishing to be judgmental, the disservice seems to be that he might think that what he’s seeing is the totality of the landscape. This plays into frightening ‘artificial reality’ scenarios, a la ‘Matrix’, ‘Vanilla Sky’, ‘Truman Show’, ‘Pleasantville’, or many others (most of which I like), in which the Berkeleyan dictum esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) gets carried to absurd, if plausible, extremes. After all, if we just followed common sense perception, we’d still be worshipping the Sun god on his daily rounds, and far from even considering multi-flavored quarks for Mr. Mark that sit and spin to a regularity that somehow underlies the very fabric of our physical reality.

I was in Mexico so many times when somebody saw an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe in his tortilla soup that I swore they were running that tape for me every time I crossed the border. Twice I was there during the worst pollution ever recorded, the second being worse than the first. They found a mutated rat about a meter long. I hope there’s nothing like that here. By some quirk of fate, or some butterfly that happened to flutter by, I find myself in Dakar, Senegal. This is how most of life works really, isn’t it? Is natural evolution really anything other than a series of brilliant mistakes? Is cultural evolution any different? Conscious decision-making and pompous philosophy usually come only after a big meal. Hunger can speak any language. So here I am, the accidental American on a busman’s holiday. But for a few quirks of fate I would be thinking about Quiche’ Indians right now instead of the price of quiche downtown. But for another quirk or two I would’ve lived the last ten years in Bolivia freezing my buns and learning Aymara’ instead of steaming them and learning Indo-Aryan. This is more than just ‘funny how life plays out’; no, this is indeed at the very core of our being. It’s almost as if the Lord said, “Go forth and divide,” and the rest is history.

In my research of mail-order brides, I learned a very interesting statistic. Do you know how most couples meet? Chance encounter, pure dumb luck and fortuitous circumstance. That makes Internet encounters seem relatively inspired and calculating now, doesn’t it? Downright rational, I might add. Should we re-think planned marriages? Maybe Mom does indeed know best. Now there’s a scary thought. Enter the dumb tourist into this lively mix, whether in Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts, or backpack and dreadlocks, or me. We’re here to test the tourist uncertainty principle by accident or design; it makes no difference. That means that our experience is not only limited to our perceptions of that experience, not the thing itself, but that nevertheless the thing itself will be altered in the very act of being perceived. This is a lively ground for interaction, in direct proportion to the distance from the original source. Like lightning drawing a spark up from the ground to meet it in mid-air, travelers draw out the most susceptible locals from the teeming masses, those just dying to meet us. Hard things on both sides will be seeking out soft spots in the other simply to test their resilience and because they are there. Beware three-body problems. They’re unsolvable.

So the signs all say ‘Dakar’ and so it must be. If they all said ‘Abidjan’, I wouldn’t know the difference. What there is here is a street scene that has to be seen to be believed. Think something between Khaosan Road and a Dead show. Apply pigment. It seems like everybody is selling something, especially cell phone SIM and top-up cards. You Americans have been spared most of this hysteria, with your two-year plans and two-page contracts. One guy’s got shirts draped over his arms, the next guy’s got pants, then there’s shoes displayed on the pavement every block or so, so I guess you could outfit yourself on the way to a party without having to go home and change. The problem is that it can be hard to walk down the street having to dodge vendors. Fortunately my cell phone’s got a radio, so not only can I listen to the local tunes, but I’ve also got plausible deniability, in case someone is offended at his entreaties being ignored. “Hey! Chill, dude! I didn’t hear you!” I’ve taken to using earphones even with the radio off. They’re too much hassle, the constant sales pitches and general hangings on and followings along. I guess it’s part of African culture or at least big-city African culture. It wasn’t like that on the train or in Mali, and to be honest, it’s no worse than Kuta Beach in Bali. I’ve caught at least one guy secretly following me for an hour or two, pacing his steps to match mine, always managing to be right there every time I changed my mind and turn around. The important thing is that I haven’t felt physically threatened once, only annoyed, and that’s good, ‘cause these are some big brothers. My wife asks, “Aren’t you scared?” Yes I am, and frequently, but not from aggression, not yet, at least. I’m scared to eat the gumbo, and I really want to, ‘cause it looks pretty good, but the last thing I need here is to get the runs or stomach distress. This is a calculated fear, logically inferred from premises, not merely fear itself. Fear itself is transcendent. Unlike Mali, at least there are options for eating here, though I’m not likely to get restaurant fatigue any time soon. I’m considering a boredom diet. It works.

I’m not the first who’s washed up here in the path of least resistance. If Americans wash up on the beach in Mexico and Brits tend to wash up in Thailand, then this is where more than a few Frenchies find themselves when the euros run low. I suppose they’ve got a few stories to tell. The Europeans used to always rag on us Americans back on the Gringo Trail. “You Americans only want to work,” they’d accuse. Hey, we got no gap year or continental grand tour or month-long paid vacation every year before we go back to our predictable life in the same town where our great-great-great-grandfather was born. We’re immigrants by nature, always on the look for something better. My g-g-grandaddy got on a boat, in steerage I presume, because it couldn’t be any worse than ‘back home’. Much of northern Europe did the same, looking for liebensraum. We need it. We’re not the romantic type; we’re the Germanic type. We’re not looking for each other; we’re looking for the other. We’re not looking for style; we’re looking for substance. Civilization is not limited to cities, and we’ll invent computers and cell phones and rocket ships to prove it, if that’s what it takes. It just takes space, and time, and lots of edible purple berries until the first crops come to harvest. This is our mission, mission impossible. It’s a way of life. Still the French implant their patisseries and boulangeries on the cuisine and their breathy ‘je t’aime’s and syrupy love songs on the airwaves without the slightest trace of self-consciousness or irony at the juxtaposition of such fluff in deepest darkest in-yo-face Africa. It takes all kinds. I wish they’d implant some of it in Mali.

Less Miserable… Dakar d’accord

No, I haven’t taken to writing way-off-off-off-Broadway plays. I’d only end up blogging them for release to the public. No, sometimes when it’s fourth and ten and you’ve got linebackers rushing the punt, you just gotta’ grab the ball and do an end run. So I reverted to plan B. You’ve got to have a plan B. This is an axiom of free-style travel, especially if you’re going to a region for the first time, especially if the travel guides steer you wrong, as they sometimes do. I’m still pissed off. I respect my readers more than that, both of you. I’ll tell you the truth, even if it hurts (sales). I won’t play up to false political correctness that does you no good when you’re standing on the side of the tracks on the edge of town at five in the morning without a clue, without a brew, all strung out on her or him. No, I’ll tell you the truth, even if it causes you to re-think a certain portion of a certain trip. The truth is that the ethnologist in me found Mali awesome; the traveler in me found it awful. Words fall short of the reality. Still I try to be positive and put the best face on things. I have to, because I have to go back. This happened once before, in Haiti. Plan B was the Dominican Republic.

I’ll tell you straight up that even though Mali is probably one of the most incredible places in the world, sometimes the most incredible places are locked in some of the most impossible situations, e.g. Burma, Cuba, etc. In Mali that situation is not political so much as simple under-development. I just can’t afford to really like Mali whole-heartedly. It’s not practical. It would mean I’m slumming, watching poverty from the safety and superior vantage point of my tour-bus window, enjoying the spectacle. Poverty in the countryside can still have dignity and status, that of tradition and homeland. In the city it just plain sucks, though it still speaks volumes. You can see the history of West Africa laid out right before your eyes on the streets of Bamako, likely part of the larger area where black Africa became black Africa, in a large population pool from which the Bantu speakers spread out to dominate the rest and populate the continent, displacing the aboriginal ancestors of the modern Khoisan speakers. They arrived at the cape not long after the Dutch. Of course many Africans from this area wound up in the American South from the slave diaspora. I think I see some familiar faces. Still, Bamako is hardly a city, more like a hundred villages in search of one, a dozen tribes in search of a nation.

Mali is like the Guatemala or Cambodia of Africa, picturesque and inspiring, but cumbersome for travel. But cost-wise it was starting to look more like Bhutan. I don’t mind some culture shock. This was sticker shock! Guatemala and Cambodia are cheap. Do the math; the numbers just don’t work for Mali. So I booked a train to Dakar, Senegal. If Senegal doesn’t get the same marks for authenticity, it at least gets higher marks for ‘livability,’ at least for West Africa. “The roads are bad,” they say, so I booked a seat on the train, thirty-five hours, but at least maybe I can get some sleep, train tracks not being so bumpy, usually, by definition. The train leaves in the evening, so I’ll arrive in the morning, and what I save on two nights’ hotels will pay for the trip. Well, the travel writers blew it again. They don’t tell you that this is the train from Hell. One look at that sorry caravan made me quickly regret that I had contracted for thirty-five hours of such abuse. It gets worse. Apparently that thirty-five hours refers to only the actual travel time, not including the interminable delays and waiting time on the tracks, nor the meal and pee-pee stops at least three times a day. The bathrooms were unspeakable, of course, so I held my own for the whole time, which only works if you don’t eat much. I didn’t, surviving mostly on something like rose hips and the kindness of strangers. Times like these are when you do that long-postponed fast, when you finally shut off the caffeine to your free-wifi-with-coffee-addled brain and concentrate simply on being and nothingness, staying awake, thinking outwardly, no internal dialog, pure perception without the curse of consciousness that language brings in its wake. There were some magic moments, too, like when the whole car breaks into song at one extroverted lady’s instigation. Bunuel’s Subida al Cielo (Mexican Bus Ride) has got nothing on this. Then there were the endless expanses of baobab trees, looking nothing so much like little African baby dolls rising from the landscape with thick trunks gradually tapering to tufted hair and stubby limbs. It was like a dream and a nightmare handing off the baton through the night.

When the train finally rolled into the station, almost sixty hours had passed, or would have, anyway, if it had actually rolled into the station. It didn’t. The train dropped us off at the edge of town at five in the morning, we final travelers looking and feeling like compost after being squeezed together for the better part of three nights. What to do now? Bite the bullet. Find a hotel and hope it’s late enough that I’ll only be charged for one day if I leave the next morning, a small consolation prize. No such luck; they hit me for two nights and I didn’t even have a key for the door since it’s mostly for short-term use, if you know what I mean. There was a condom on the floor, if you know what I mean, mute testimony to some disembodied desire at least filled full, if not exactly fulfilled. On top of that, the taxi driver over-charged me. On top of that, I got a signal on my cell phone but I couldn’t get a message out to my wife ‘out there,’ might as well be the moon. Worst of all, my feet were so squeezed on that train that I got a case of swollen-foot thrombo-phlebitic ‘economy class disease,’ and feel a screaming bout of gout coming on. There’s some pills left over from last year, but they won’t last long. I’m traveling in a foreign country and now I can’t walk? That’s usually almost all that I do. I could use some inspiration. Still I never lost my faith in my fellow men, and that’s what sustains me, the basic goodness of men and women, cultivated through religion and honed through practice. These are ‘people of the book,’ too, the Qur’an, and it shows. I was never offered so much food and drink as on that train, even by Thais, and they’re good at that, and including Deep Southerners, ditto. This, too, will pass.

The whorehouse wasn’t that bad, really, right next to a honky-tonk that I could look right into from my window. I wasn’t going anywhere fast anyway after sixty hours on a train and an attack of gout. If you don’t know what gout feels like, count your blessings. The pain is excruciating, only slightly mitigated by the fact that it can go away as fast as it comes on. That doesn’t mean that it will, of course. So when the Senegalais band started playing around midnight and went on until four or five in the morning, that was fine with me. I got a free concert. I’d only be drifting in and out of consciousness otherwise anyway. The next day will be better. It has to be. I get an early start and start walking. The foot is serviceable. I pick up some speed, and then a sudden realization hits me. I have no idea where I’m going. I had expected to be let off at a train station, which usually confers a certain centrality to its location. Why that train dumped us on the edge of town I’ll never know. There’s a ‘cyber café’ open, so I check my e-mail and look for maps online, spurning the advances of a little baobab doll of a teenager looking for a ride to the US. I couldn’t understand much of what she said anyway, since they’ll never speak their language the way they expect you to speak yours when English has to be reverted to. It’s the white man’s curse. Anyway, the maps are junk, so bid the little girl good-bye and revert to instinct, in no certain order. She’s cute, but it would’ve never worked. I flag a taxi and ask to go to the train station. There has to be a real one somewhere, and I’m betting that it’s close to the center. It is, and the taxi driver didn’t even rip me off. My French must be improving. At least French actually gets used here between locals, which I never heard in Bamako. There’s an obvious Arab middle class here, probably Moroccans in addition to peripatetic Lebanese, so that must be the difference. Still there are no hotels in sight. This is a breach of logic, a traveler’s last line of defense. Anywhere else, Asia or Latin America at least, and there’d be bunches. It’s time for the sixth sense, a kind of traveler’s radar, to flush out the elusive goal, a cheap but good hotel.

Fortunately I travel light, rule number one. Like an ant following familiar smells where no lines are drawn, I gravitate toward the dense part of town. It shouldn’t be far. It’s not, and there’s an auberge sign pointing up above a commercial courtyard. They size me up quickly and show me a room back by the staff’s kitchen, my kind of place. The price is right. We’re in, and right in the center of the city. Dense commercial area? Hmmm… I wonder. I flip the lid on my laptop and look for a wi-fi signal. It hems and haws, then locks on, Skype and all. We’re really in! I need a line! Quick, Trinity, give me a number! The Skype rate to Thailand from Senegal is the same as from the US! The phone is ringing! In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit… A voice comes on the line. Could it possibly be? “Sawatdi kha.” It’s a miracle.

4th and 10… and Surrounded by Mali’s Middlemen

Fortunately for me, Timbuktu is just a metaphor, right? It represents the ends of the Earth, right? We all knew that somehow somewhere deep down in our subconscious, right? I mean, if I ever actually got there, then what would I call the blog then? So the moral of the story, of course, is “be careful what you ask for; you might just get it.” Now that’s appropriately vague enough to fit most circumstances, and I’m not sure exactly what I expected, but certainly Mali gets raves as ‘the real thing’ so I guess that’s what I wanted, I being a strict aficionado of authenticity in all its multifarious manifestations. Oh, it’s real all right. We hear much of ‘developing countries’ and ‘under-developed countries’ and ‘least-developed countries.’ That last category must be Mali’s. There’s nothing there; okay, there’s hardly anything, hotels, stores, restaurants, anything, and what there is, is hard to find. Well, nyaa nyaa, bitch bitch, precious little American fell down and can’t find his beer; what a pity! No, I’m serious; there’s nothing, and that’s not the worst of it! To find what there is, you almost have to resort to the free-lance guides that prey on you while you pray to them. This is anathema to independent travel, to resort to the hybrid multi-cultis that comprise the interface between tourist and foreign country. Feeling sorry for me yet? No, it gets even worse. It’s expensive, even exorbitant! This is definitely anathema to independent (read ‘budget’) travel. When the cheapest backpacker hovel is $25 a night, then we got a problem. They never heard of credit cards of course, and ATM’s are not ubiquitous.

Travel writers are not doing their job here. Maybe when they specialize in a country they become accustomed to it and lose their objectivity. I’ve been to over fifty countries and researched this trip extensively and no one ever mentioned the high prices, only that Timbuktu seemed high. If that means Bamako is comparatively low, then maybe I’ll pass on Timbuktu. They also said there isn’t much in Timbuktu! That’s what I’d say about Bamako. Let me clarify this. A fifty dollar hotel in the US is better than a fifty dollar hotel in Mali, by far. That the fifty bucks is easier to come by in the US should go without saying. Lonely Planet is in on the collusion, too. They don’t tell you actual prices, unless you’re actually booking through them, only rating them $, $$, or $$$. Well, that doesn’t mean much when a $ in Mali is $25 and a $ in Chiang Mai is $5. I’m thinking of filing a lawsuit. Lives are at stake here, not just psyches. Sure, we love that roller-coaster empty feeling in the pit of our stomach, but the epiphany is in transcending it. Much has been written of the ‘instant illiteracy’ you feel upon first arriving in China. Mali’s worse, and it’s not about the letters. Though I haven’t mastered French, I can certainly get by, especially if reading. The first Phoenicians arrived close to where I’m sitting right now more than two thousand years ago and conducted trade by mute barter. Many mixed couples in Thailand do this as a way of life. It works. That’s not the problem. The problem is the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness you get when confronted with untenable situations. There’s next to nothing there, and what little there is, is expensive and poorly organized. So what do you do? I did the unthinkable. I played parasite-host with a free-lance guide, even staying in his hovel apartment with his so-called ‘family’, while buying myself some time to re-think my plans. That was an eye-opener to be sure, the Mali equivalent of a slum project, full of color, to say the least. Well, Mohamed and I parted company a bit not so amicably after a couple days, he scamming up my rent steadily, but still I bought a little time and some vivid images for the mind’s eye, so basically a successful maneuver. Never say never.

How can a place so poverty-stricken and undeveloped be so expensive? What’s wrong with Mali is what’s wrong with Africa, just more so. We Americans chastise ‘developers’ with our choicest curses, preferring to save a solitary tree than stoop to WalMart’s central dogma. In Bamako I dreamed of Whataburgers and greasy chicken legs when confronted with the choice of very expensive restaurant food or street food of an uncertain sanitary nature. That’s the problem in Africa, that huge gap between rich and poor, no entrepreneurial middle class. They could use some Chinese businessmen here, and I suspect they’re on the way, given China’s infrastructure investments on the continent. The Lebanese only go so far, doing what those same ancestor Phoenicians were doing two thousand years ago. They’re in Thailand, too. But Chinese represent a modern production capacity and global distribution capability unlike anything the world has seen since Britain’s head-start on the Industrial Revolution and America’s mop-up of WWII. Chinese study their history and learn their lessons well while just doing what comes naturally in monopolizing trade and working within extensive family-based networks. What Zheng He could never accomplish six hundred years ago with his ‘treasure fleets’ of Chinese sailing junks, modern Chinese conquer every day with their container loads of inexpensive Chinese junk. Of course, while a ‘conspiracy person’ might see a pattern to all of this, in actuality it’s mostly just a situation of individual Chinese trying to feed their families and willing to give up citizenship in order to do so. After all overseas Chinese still count and are counted by a country that worships its blood line.

So why is Africa so far behind in the first place? Certainly business acumen is not the same as rocket science, basically just common sense- buy low and sell high, but old habits and fears are hard to break, and complex organization can be difficult to establish. Is it simply a trait of ‘negritude’, or of Africa, or maybe of French cultural overlay? I suspect ‘all of the above.’ After all, the closest out-of-Africa analogy in my experience would be to Haiti, similarly impoverished, over-priced, and very interesting, ultimately. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t say “there is no there there.” That’s Oakland. There’s plenty there in Mali; it’s just not economic development. It’s music, and tradition. Street names are replete with names like Diabate, Keita, and Toure’. You can watch Amadou and Mariam on the evening news and hear Salif Keita coming from cassettes (yes, cassettes). Malian musicians are a regular feature at music festivals world-wide and no less respected back home. I stopped to rest from a long walk at the same time and place as an itinerant cassette vendor, and a magic hour transpired, just listening to Malian pop music blaring from a car battery-powered ghetto blaster. I watched the top 15 music video Friday countdown, and I’d never heard of any of the musicians, but it was all good. Comparisons could be made to ‘60’s Cambodia, where an entire era of music was bigger and better than any of its individual stars, and widespread poverty was not an overriding obstacle to cultural excellence. The comparison is interesting, because modern Cambodia is a beehive of industry and development, quickly moving out of the ranks of ‘least-developed countries’ with the help of its neighbors and cultural cousins Japan, China, and Thailand, etc. They’ll expect a return on their investment of course. This is old news, as most of Southeast Asia would be developmentally retarded without their Chinese immigrant merchant class well established. Who’s going to help Mali, and some thirty other sub-Saharan African countries? Do they really need it? Do they even want it?

Thai Food: a Survival Guide

I have old-hand friends in Thailand whose first introduction to Thais and Thai culture was along the canals in Amsterdam. For me, though, it was along the canals of Venice, Beach that is, LA, CA, USA. There I discovered my first Thai restaurant back in 1984. If it seems hard for some of you kids born since then to realize that there was ever a time when there were no Thai restaurants in the US, then believe it. It’s true; I’ve got witnesses. Though I wasn’t long in LA, so won’t swear that that little place along Robertson Blvd. was the first, it was the same in the Bay Area the next year, where I stayed for several, one Thai restaurant amongst a sea of Chinese and Mexican and Italian, back when that was considered ‘ethnic’. I remember it like it was yesterday, a little family-run place along San Pablo Ave. just outside the Berkeley city limits in Oakland, BYOB. Those creamy curries were like heaven for someone raised on soul food, enlightened by Mexican, and surviving on Chinese, colors and flavors mixing and mingling on the palate and palette in a playful synesthesia of the gods. The smart money was on the continued success of Thai food in America, and sure enough, they multiplied like Mississippi mushrooms in cow shit, like Farang bars along Sukhumvit in Bangkok. It’s nice to be right. A quick Google search of ‘Thai Restaurants—Los Angeles’ at this juncture is still going strong after a hundred pages, and that says nothing of the multifarious locations around the country and the world. Nothing succeeds like success. If you don’t have any new ideas, then copy someone else’s. You can’t get any more Thai than that. It’s nice to be safe. It’s nice to be in Thailand. It’s warm.

The reality here at ground zero is a bit different of course. For one thing, those creamy curries are not necessarily the most representative food of Thailand, and indeed can be hard to find for a first-time tourist. For another thing, those curries should probably not properly be considered ‘Thai’ in the first place. If their scarcity in the northern and eastern provinces is the first clue to this, then their presence in Malaysia and close similarity to the ‘Padang’ (Sumatra) curries of Indonesia is the next, presumably adapted from Indian curries by the same people who adopted and adapted Indian culture and religion. The Malay language was full of Sanskrit loan-words long before it was full of Arabic ones, after all. But Thais are the ones who introduced wet curries to the US and the world, so such food will forever be ‘Thai.’

Perhaps most importantly, those curries are not especially healthy, despite the universal tendency of ‘health-food’ counters and eateries in the US to include some mock-Thai dishes to lend some mock-cachet and currency to their selection. In addition to the excessive use of oils, frequently palm oil of lubrication fame, and the unnecessary use of sugar, which the Malays fortunately tend to avoid, the ingredient that makes those curries creamy is coconut, in a form known as ‘ka-ti’ in Thailand, the water/milk recombined with the meat into a thick creamy paste. Well, this is some tasty sauce that goes down easy, but there’s only one problem- it stays there. That leftover curry in the fridge next day has a crust on top, a breakable crust. “What kind of oil are you using?” I scream at my wife. But it’s not the oil; it’s the ka-ti. Like nitroglycerine, ka-ti apparently freezes at about 55F/13C degrees. Unlike nitroglycerin, it’s bad for your heart. So say the posters on the wall of Thai hospitals. The posters in the US would probably say the same if the product were widely used there. My HIV friend says that coconut in any form is strictly proscribed for him.

The Thai food available in Thai restaurants overseas is central Thai food. Maybe the best representative of this style is tom yam goong or tom kha gai, right tasty dishes if you don’t mind pulling weeds out of your mouth while you eat. Except for lahp, which is starting to be found more in the US, almost no dishes come from the north or northeast, which are more influenced by Burma and Laos, respectively, than the Malaysian-inspired dishes of the south. Some popular dishes in US restaurants, like pat thai and kaow pat, are street food in Thailand, and quite different from the stylized US restaurant versions. The curries and soups, on the other hand, might be difficult to find in street stalls in Thailand. They are usually found only at stalls specializing in curries, and not usually tourist oriented, though those dishes may be simulated in fancy restaurants. Spring rolls are also nearly impossible to find. That’s Vietnam. Probably the single most popular street food in Thailand, noodle soup, also originally from Vietnam, would be hard to find in a US-based Thai restaurant.

Then there’s the dark side. Northern Thailand has its own food, most famous of which is probably kaow soi, though more typical would be nam ngieow, a hot murky tomato-based concoction served over khanom jeen or rice noodles, and which people here in Chiang Rai go ape-shit over. Actually kaow soi in Laos or Xishuangbanna is closer to nam ngieow than it is to the standard kaow soi islam to be found here, a kati-based concoction brought from Burma. Then there’s gaeng awm, something like lahp that apparently got lost and then rescued a few days later, older but wilder. They also go ape-shit over som tam, which is shredded unripe papaya salad mixed with peanuts, tomatoes, crab, hot peppers, and only God knows what else. He ain’t tellin’. If you’re eating papayas to help promote bowel movements, this’ll get you there in a hurry. Naturally it’s eaten with sticky rice to help repair the damage. Does raw papaya sound strange? Thais also typically eat their mangoes green. Go figure. By the time they get ripe, supermarkets are discounting the price and I’m stocking up. Some varieties are actually quite tasty green, but I can’t help feel they’re missing the boat on this one, ripe mango being one of the finer flavors in the world. So, if you like green mangoes, hot spicy raw papaya salad, and gut-slashing spicy noodles, then northern Thailand might be just the ticket for you, especially if you like Mexican food already. Mexicans in LA are some of the best customers for Thai food in the not-so-fancy restaurants.

Let me clarify something for you people overseas or too down-country or up-scale to know or care. Sticky rice is not rice that somebody decided to ‘stickify’ for reasons culinary or esthetic. Sticky rice is properly called ‘glutinous rice’, because of its higher gluten, or protein, content. This makes it a staple food among the protein-poor country folk, who may eat it with little or nothing besides chili paste. It calms the stomach excellently, though you may pay for that with subsequent constipation. They don’t call it ‘sticky’ for nothing. At least is has some nutritional benefit. ‘Polished’ white rice has little or none. Nevertheless, the main problems plaguing Thai food are simply the indiscriminate use of salt, sugar, and hot peppers. If the food’s too hot or salty, Thais will add sugar. The inverse is also true. If the food is too sweet, then they’ll add salt or peppers. This totally misses the point, which is that the minimum of any these would be preferable, especially for health considerations. Thais tend to maximize for ‘intensity’ of flavor. Anybody who puts sugar in noodle soup needs a psychiatric examination, in my opinion, but there it is, every time. Sometimes the soup seems but a base for the combination of condiments within it. I’m finished eating while some Thais are still taste-tasting and stirring. Nearly every dish has sugar in it, and nearly every elder in Thailand has diabetes. Fortunately this is the type that comes and goes from one medical exam to the next. Huh? That’s the rap. When an American dies there is usually a single cause of death, of course. When a Thai dies, there are usually four, I’ve noticed. One of them is typically diabetes.

The over-dependency of Thai food on superficial condiments and less reliance on freshness and originality is what keeps it from becoming one of the world’s great cuisines. Though much is made of balancing the ‘five food groups,’ judging from the results, you might assume that these would be peppers, sugar, salt, and oil. And oh yeah, rice. A master chef could change all that, and indeed, some of the less-authentic ‘Thai’ dishes in the US are indeed tastier, and almost certainly healthier, than the home-grown varieties. My solution is to eat it with brown rice, which is becoming increasingly available, and eat it at home, reducing all measurements of oil, sugar, and spice by half. Not only do you increase the nutritional value, but now you can actually taste the flavors, since your tongue doesn’t have to run for cover. I swear by it. And oh yeah, beware of curries sitting out all day in stalls. Thais think that a ‘pie-safe’ will keep food safe. It’s paradise for bacteria. Curries are best mid-day. You’ve been forewarned.