#13 Sri Lanka and the Maldives, Chennai, Bengaluru SRI LANKA: Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians, Oh My! (and Tamils, too; they're Hindu) Maybe the nicest part of the Indian sub-continent is not India at all, but that southern neighbor composed of erstwhile immigrants, coming from both north and south, back in times erst, looking for liebensraum or maybe just a living room, or a kitchen, looking for turf or maybe just booty, and instead found bounty, like the latter-day Portuguese or maybe their nemeses doubly Dutch, twice removed, once by the Portuguese and then by the Brits, on one of their infamous booty-calls that turned out historic... A stepping stone placed by Ganesha, it is said, perched cock-eyed cattywampus off India's southern coast, like Taiwan to India's China, an afterthought to continents, and just a stone's throw across the old strait and narrow, lies the nation, Sri Lanka, by some accident of history and fate, geological and psychological, the migrations of peoples part of what it means to be human, part of what it means to be mortal part of what it means to be a creature of the dust on Planeta Tierra... They all came from India, both north and south, but I don't know but what I like it better than the mother country itself, a version of India that finally gets it right kinda sorta maybe more or less on a good day, without all the clutter and the cowsh*t, without all the badgering and the bullsh*t, a country with radio, sidewalks, grocery stores, ATM's that work, and power that doesn't go out, people eating with utensils (usually), and you can even drink the (tap) water, just like any civilized country in the world, and maybe more so than most... Southeast Asia starts here: a Buddhist country, where people smile for no special reason, are friendly for no special cause, a certain passivity nice for a change, passivity without the passion, passivity without even the prostitution, not much anyway, hell of a concept I figure: passivity as a way of life, the cradle of Buddhism, old-school Theravada, from which it spread to all of Southeast Asia—food religion script and canonical language conquering hearts where warriors rarely succeeded in claiming turf... Colombo is bigger, massive and sprawling, but Kandy is sweeter, perched up on one of the middle rungs of the highlands, centered around a lake of its own design, the better for good views, the better for the good news, that the civil war is long over, and the country is ripe for tourism, but the war never really ends here, between immigrant locals and southern Indian interlopers, bad for bizniz bad for bucks bad for banks... And then there's the accoms: I don't usually fall in love with my room, more likely to take a cheap dig at my cheap digs, but this one's the exception, ten dollars here worth a thousand to me elsewhere, for no other reason than esthetics, straight out of a Van Gogh painting, just waiting for a signature, straight out of the 1850's and the Dutch incursions, straight out of a woodworker's daydream, hardwood polished by decades and jackboots, walls of ship-lap clinker-built and whitewashed, anterooms from broad suites partitioned off for modern-day backpackers and flashpackers, characters wanted and welcomed at the Olde Empire... European women firmly but gently fellate slim-line Gauloises Blondes cigs on the upstairs balcony with pooched-out lips—no tongues—careful not to smear lipstick and hardly even a hand-job lest a rogue nicotine stain find its way on to pearly white digits (what are long fingernails for, anyway?), while their men chew on Marlboros and pose for tourist photos in cowboy boots and Stetson hats and bad-guy bad-ass looks straight out of Universal City halfway to north Hollywood on the metro red line, hundred-dollar ticket good for a year... Net-workers shoot up in the WiFi'd resto-bar down below, playing at FaceBook and drinking overpriced coffee, while men in skirts akin to kilts lungyis and sarongs do the bidding for not-so-rich foreign tourists in this enclave of accommodation, lost in space and time and the vicissitudes of trade-winds, old-fashioned backpackers with more books than bookings, maintaining the old ways, walk-in only, lost in this day and age of online everything and digital download dance moves just fill in the blanks and go... The old ways are dying but not here in Sri Lanka, even the English language is from another era likely Victorian where hotels are restaurants and hostels are dormitories and egg rolls even have egg, where gods reside in ancient ruins at Polonnaruwa and Anuradhapura and Sigiriya, beckoning tourists in waves and droves, with cameras and sport-cams, waiting for the time to be right to make their return on to the main stage, saving up money from over-priced entry fees the ultimate revenge on latter-day cash-cows wearing Bermuda shorts and push-up brassieres, Russians and Chinese and other commies first in line... SRI LANKA, part 2: In Search of a City in Search of a Beach Sunday finally comes and I haven't been to church since February 2012, in Majuro FSM, back when I figured I might be dying pick a cancer any cancer must've worked 'cause I certainly don't feel like I'm dying now never felt more alive in fact, death now on back burner status indefinite hiatus waiting for a call-back and options on future rights plus a more prominent role in the sequel, agents negotiating furiously... So I figure now's a good time, put on my best Muslim shirt—white muslin—and go look for a Christian church, Baptist is too small don't wanna' be noticed, Methodist too hot there on the sunny side of the street, so today I'm Catholic with high arches and cool temps and the canonical language mostly in English, God knowing I'm glad to be Buddhist so that I can do whatever I want as long as it hurts nobody and even quaff a brew or mount racy steed if I have a thirst and a need and fertile soil begging seed, no matter what any guy with a book or a beard has to say about it... The pubs in Kandy are for locals, sounds like a missed opportunity to me, or maybe zoning strictures, putting all the pubs on the warehouse side of town shorter walk for the stevedores I suppose, but hardly known to the tourists, buck a brew and men lining walls in various stages of consciousness or lack thereof, sometimes you just want a drink, but try to tell that to the hash dealers up by the lake getting the tourists 'what they want' as if anybody really knows what tourists want I certainly don't... Cherry blossoms are fine, but the big draw for most tourists is the Beach, and lakes won't do for that, so you have to go southbound to Galle or thereabouts, Hikkaduwa or something such, purpose-built for foreign tastes and tours, I suppose, don't really know haven't been there, where beaches are for bikinis and cocktails not Muslim mocktails or Hindu coattails and the water is pure and pristine enough to swim in... I wouldn't recommend that in Colombo north or south, Negombo or Mt. Lavinia, the beaches too close to the city to trust the water, last time I did that had to get an expensive shot and take antibiotics for a week to keep my genitals from rotting and falling off, still a beach is a beach if you just want the sand and the scenery... There's Negombo with its cheap 50's motels and the smell of rotting fruit and drying fish, or Mt. Lavinia with its murky B&B's and the smell of musty old wealth, and strangest thing of all: a railroad runs through it, so every time you try to get romantic a train whistle blows, could be new grist for the Pavlovian mill, but no matter, I don't need to get all romantic I always get lucky alone... Colombo itself is a case unto itself, monster with tentacles spreading, cut from the same Madras cloth as Kolkata, washed and left to dry under hot blazing relentless Indian sun, people breeding like mice going forth and multiplying, the ghosts of previous foreign masters left to ponder the results of their handiwork, the English and their business instincts the Dutch and their government the Portuguese and their bastard offspring, all gathered together under the flag of Christianity, the cross and the sword, the book and the word... And then there's Puttalam, Jaffna, Trincomalee, Batticaloa, and Matara, on the coast; Matale, Kegalla, Ratnapura, Badulla, and Kurunegalla in the interior; names on the map, people of the four corners all awaiting further exploration: Buddhists, Christians, Muslim, Hindus, and others all sharing the same space, 20 million in all, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder... Sure it's congested, and the drivers are maniacs, but cool heads and cool hearts tend to prevail. A country inoculated with Buddhism will ultimately be vaccinated by Buddhism, regardless of who's on the morning loudspeaker. It's the people who make the place, mate, feels like home to me, so C U there. #Male' #Maldives: Caffeine in the Clubs, Muslims on the Beach The Maldives are a string of pearls posing as islands floating gracefully over the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, 1192 nuggets—1000 of them unpopulated—not simply strewn higgeldy-piggledy atoll, but arranged in a double helix and organized into garlands and necklaces and defined by water level as footprints over the ocean surface, any higher the water and they cease to exist as a landmass, demoted like Pluto by science, thereafter to live their life as a mere underwater ridge threatening ships and subs, number three on the international extinction list in fact highest point not much higher than an NBA starting center... The Maldives must sound like a dream to anyone in Central Asia: Muslims—or me—high up on the hills in the 'stans or the Kush on the steppes in the bush—cold barren steps to righteousness rewards guaranteed only in Heaven and I'd hedge my bets on that if I were you, where virgins must be bound and chained to maintain ritual purity and you need sheesha, shawarma and shish-kebabs to stay warm, curries lacking punch and pungency for lack of spices, so might as well forget them altogether, get your bellyful of gusto from a goat slowly roasting over charcoal and incense... The Maldives must have been the Islamic paradigm for paradise, pristine waters warm and wonderful, perfectly azure going to like them, gently throbbing surf and all the fish you can eat, French fries and hush-puppies optional, palms gently swaying coconuts bananas and mango for the picking, and a handsome gentle populace, smiles free and willing and a warm island welcome for the tired weary traveler, like Ibn Battutah, the Muslim Marco Polo, way back in the 1300's, he and his four local wives, not counting slaves, blogging it for the future and trying to civilize the natives, trying to get the women to wear clothes... That's no problem today boohoo many wearing full burqa head to toe, others toeing the line of holy writ with fashion scarves and pseudo-veils still others naked-faced and unafraid sucking face in parks with boyfriends just like back home, but some even wearing full burqa in the surf as custom permits if hubby requires it rules and regulations getting tougher all the time... No one would take a second glance but me and any lifeguard forced to rescue such dead textile weight from the surf, I wonder if they even remove the burqa to copulate and populate, got an eye slit up top should have a pink slit down under for those intimate moments when nothing else will do, most men in the world having never seen their wives naked in the first place, could easily fake it with silicone and lipstick who'd know the difference anyway... But the modern nation is a beachy sun-bleachy 'Muslim Lite' to be sure, for the most part, thinly veiled women allowed to ride motorbikes and move freely on road and beach, while thinly veiled Rasta-men, cigs dangling from tender lips sip caffeinated drinks in the pubs and clubs, Red Bull instead of Red Hook, the better to stay awake during prayers, yeah right, uh huh, fortunately the Rastas have other sacraments, too, I bet, the better to transmit the DNA of island culture from Caribbean to South Pacific all the way to here, God's little GMO people half-African half-Indian half-Arabian... Still though she may sell seashells in the Seychelles, he is more likely to be selling them here, managing the women by managing the money, too bad, hawking the same cheap 50's curio crap that used to be sold in a million souvenir shops, as they're still called here, from Daytona to Durban to Copacabana to Capetown to here, a guaranteed catch for lackadaisical beachcombers with fewer hairs to comb even than beaches, more tall tales to tell than true travels... Most tourists go to the fancy resorts, of course, couple hundred bucks a night and up, sipping the pricey drinks that are forbidden to locals, prices so high already no one knows the difference, but I don't do any of that, I content to be a vulcha in search of kulcha, settling for rice and noodles greased up in the same island way that passes for local in the Caribbean and Pacific, the better to weigh you down in the hot sun and steamy skies, tuna this tuna that fresh from the boat nothing Star-Kist on these starry starry nights, sorry Charlie, we want tuna that tastes good... You can circumnavigate the entire main island in an hour or so, walking at a moderate pace with time for sight-seeing, the pint-sized capital of Male' is that small, dodging motorbike maniacs, cafes and boutiques lining streets called 'magu' with a distinct nasal accent in my mind's ear, enterprises ranging from distinct downscale but trending up... One hour of walking and you're drenched must shower and start all over again, temps almost constant all day all year no more than 5c/10f variation from low to high, but the night is a different world come alive with heavy metal playing in the park, halogen and benzene, motorbikes backed out into the street like Ramadan at midnight waiting to fill and before the sun comes up... It almost reminds me of Montego or Bali planes surfing in low onto airstrip promontories, here the airstrip bigger than the big city itself and rickety ferries take you to fragile landmasses still it's all good fun and unique if not always cheap but that's all relative, isn't it? If we can't be family, then at least we can be friends, that's the island way, mon, but it's truly strange to think that some day not long from now this could all be gone, submerged, covered with water and left for future archeologists to pick up the pieces, try to make sense of it all... 2024 Fast forward a decade and I’m back in the region, but not as a tourist, or even a traveler or adventurer. I’m here as a writer, looking to get my book published in India, since it’s partially about India, as well as China and environs. It’s called ‘My Travels with Fa Hien (Fa Xian),’ and it’s for sale you-know-where. So when an Indian friend suggested that I do it there, I went for it. That meant meeting the publisher in Chennai, and then meeting my friend’s brother in Bangalore (Bangaluru), to do some map illustrations for the book. Thus began and ended my so-far only foray into the far southeast of India, so close to Sri Lanka, hence the reason for its inclusion here, as a possible trip comprising both regions. And it was a revelation, too, if only for the glimpse of India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ tech district, which is what Bangalore represents. So, if India once represented a dichotomy between the spirituality of its northern realms and the simultaneous slumminess of the same areas, then now I can add to it the lighter brighter tech feel of the far south. But Chennai is the more traditional of the two, formerly known as Madras and once famous for a certain style of plaid cloth which mad the name famous back in the nineteen sixties, right before paisley and bell bottoms gave it the old heave-ho. So, I played up that theme by staying in the venerable Broadlands guest house and dive in Trincomale before moving on to the central railway station a couple nights later. This is after I had to fight with my airport taxi at midnight because they wanted to drop me far from my guesthouse rather than navigate some narrow alleys due to road work, as if I could walk to my destination where I’d never been before—at midnight. Welcome to India. I refused to get out of the car. The area is not bad, though, and walkable to the beach, I think, if you’re so inclined. The train station is more central, though, so I tentatively made my deal with my publisher, and then moved on. But Bangalore is the brighter later envisaged by the tech industry and something of a true revelation for a country known for its Vedic roots up north and its Goa-inspired chill scene along the west coast. I stayed at Jayanagar to start, and then moved to Indiranagar for the long wait, of which both were quite nice, if Jayanagar the more techie and Indiranagar the more central. If nothing else, it’s nice to finally be somewhere in India where the WiFi always works and the temps are a tad bit cooler than the hot sweaty coast. Check it out. A flight from Chennai to Sri Lanka is only a little more than $100usd.

El Viejo Viajero Goes to Baguio City, Philippines

Baguio is the only bump in a long ride up the coast from Manila to the far reaches of north Luzon Island. I’m sure there’s a route that hugs the coast the entire way, but I wanted to stop at Baguio first, before continuing on. Manila is only 150mi/250km away from Baguio, but after a seven-hour bus ride, seems much farther. That’s because the going is so slow through town after congested town full of motorbikes and three-wheelers putt-putting around and clogging up the main road, that it’s almost impossible to travel more than 40m/60k per hour. Factor in rest stops and it’s a slow go. It’s worth it, though. I was skeptical up until the last hour that Baguio was truly a “mountain” town, but sure enough, we finally start climbing, and the scenery immediately becomes more interesting and the roadsides full of wood-carvings and furniture made from the local forests. This region is called the “Cordillera (mountain range),” sure, but without any real connection to the Spanish language other than through the past, terms are subject to change over time. It’s been noted over and again that language proceeds exactly like biological evolution, for some strange reason, some innate law that has yet to be firmly and finally articulated. Baguio’s cool, and I don’t just mean the weather, though that’s significant at this altitude of some 1400 meters, around 4500 feet. It’s a nice place also, a true garden city in every sense of the term, complete with “orchidarium,” a term I was heretofore unfamiliar with. The markets are replete with broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beans, and all kinds of greens, a fact reflected in the local cuisine, too, with quite a few more vegetarian options than seemed readily available in Manila, or even Vigan, ironically. Baguio is the “summer capital” of the Philippines, where all the wealthy lowlanders come when the sweltering and sweat become too much to bear. It’s the kind of place that I like, too, as a traveler, a mid-size city, something like Montego Bay to Jamaica’s Kingston, big enough to allow for plenty of diversity, without being so big that it’s overwhelming and crime-ridden. Sure, there’s some petty crime, but here it’s mostly good clean fun, bars with more guitars than girls, song-and-dance shows instead of dog-and-pony shows. Long walks are the order of the day, and the scenery is nothing short of splendid. All in all, it’s pretty darn delightful. By some quirk of fate, I seem to be staying in one of the town’s leading hotels, its ads plastered all over the roadside on the way up. In fact, it’s about the only place I could book online through my normal sites, same as Vigan. This is not a situation I normally find myself in. That says something important about the reasonable prices in Philippines, and also about my desire for Wi-Fi, whenever and wherever possible. Of course, the room sucks. I can’t stay in a room without a window. Why do they do this to me, unless they want to see claw marks in plaster? That little patch of blue is my wormhole to another dimension! Okay, I guess translucent glass bricks are better than nothing, but not much. I’ve already booked a different place for the return from Vigan. And room discounting is heavy here as well as Manila, special rates by the hour, by the half day, after midnight, walk-in only, locals only, you name it. I’ve never seen anything like it. Those reasonable prices can be downright dirt cheap when you walk in unannounced. If the best hotel in town is only $40-50 to begin with, then maybe it’s as little as half that without a res. The amazing thing is that I seem to be almost the only tourist wherever I go, only Western tourist at least. Thailand—with nothing more than this on offer—has Westerners they can’t get rid of! There they’re already in the blood lines like an infection that’ll just have to run its course. So on my return to Baguio I’ve booked a room for less than thirty bucks US, with similar amenities. It can’t be any worse than the first place. I stayed there two nights, and on the second night they called at 10 p.m. and asked if I needed my room made up, 10 p.m., mind you. The predominant local folk art here, as elsewhere in the Philippines, are the colorful jeepneys—local transport—adorned and styled to taste. Smaller cities such as Vigan may be the exception, with their smaller three-wheelers similarly adorned and dominating local transport need … or that may just be Vigan. Other towns along the road tend to limit their creativity to color selection, to which they all conform within each town, so that scattered along the way there are green towns, yellow towns, pink towns, and so forth. You don’t see that every day! The kids loved it. But my big project for the return to Baguio is to continue my investigation into the culinary genome of chop suey. It’s a familiar dish in the US’s old-timey Chinese restaurants that date from the railroad era—but not the new ones—and there are various similar names and versions that I’ve seen and tried in such varied places as Chile and Indonesia. Now here it is in the Philippines, spelled the same way as the US version. Now the Philippines get most of their Chinese references straight from the source, not from the US. They don’t eat spring rolls; they eat lumpia. They don’t eat “Chinese hamburgers;” they eat sio pao. So this could be the definitive test. After hearing on TV yesterday that some Jewish guy in San Francisco invented egg fu yung, this exercise takes on renewed importance, especially since I know there’s a dish in Indonesia called fu yung hai, served on all the same menus that include cap cai. Sundays are not to be believed here, not that everyone is in church, mind you, quite the opposite. No, they’re everywhere, filling the streets and filling the parks, making the smallest stroll difficult, if you’re in a hurry. It seems everybody’s got a babe in arms, if not a couple in tow, if not a little tribe of pot-bellied poopers spread out following in wing formation like ducks on a pond. This seems like nothing so much as a nation of teenagers, learning their multiplication tables in bed at night under cover of darkness. Baguio is the city we built, we Americans, that is. So I’m staying right across from Burnham Park, which includes a lake with paddle boats and kiddie playgrounds, the whole amusement park feel. It’s been a long time since Clark Air Force base closed, of course, and longer still since the colonial days. But the American influence lives on here. I guess that’s why it took me so long to come. It was always too closely associated with America in my mind, so not exotic. Too bad that influence never crossed over to the supermarkets, which look like a Chinese Ma and Pa store got bigger without getting any better. They’re pretty shabby, and no brown rice either. That’s too bad. Otherwise, Filipino food is pretty good, and the breakfasts are the stuff of Filipino lumberjack legend. I don’t even want to know what’s in the mystery meat. My hotel left a newspaper outside my door this morning. Don’t they know I’m a backpacker? I’m not used to treatment like this. Abuse me! Insult me! Question my native intelligence or I might develop an ego complex! Or worse even still, I might lose street cred with you, my faithful readers. I don’t want that. I need you. So, when the day dawns cloudy and gray, I decide to stay another day. But I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t need any surgery, or any dental work, or computer repairs, so I get some passport photos made. They’ll come in handy. Then I go to the big new mall up the hill. They still have mall rats here! Does anyone still go to the malls in the US? It’s certainly not the paradigm that it used to be. Internet is. The rainy day depresses me, and the windowless cubicle doesn’t help. Fortunately the Net’s up at least half the time, like flickering consciousness, so that has to suffice as my little patch of blue on a day like today. Hopefully the sun will be out tomorrow, so I can get out and see some landscape. That’s my porn, and my Bible, and most everything in-between. 2026 Update This was all written thirteen years ago, and it’s interesting to see what’s changed. Answer: not much. Bottom line: there really isn’t all that much to do in Baguio City, though it’s certainly nice enough, especially its mile high perch over the lowlands. They’re fighting for their lives to keep the developers at bay, and their market free and funky, but their efforts may or may not bear fruit. So I occupy my time with brisk walks through confusing maps, with little hope of finding a pattern in it all. I did stay on the opposite side of town this time, near the bus station, so that’s totally different. For one thing, it’s far from the main business district. That makes it cheaper and in many ways better, even if more distant. Enjoy.

Hypertravel with Hardie #12: Western India

Hi all: Welcome to my Hypertravel with Hardie video series, in which we’ll travel the world through my eyes and my pictures, all of which were taken more than ten years ago, in this case. If we usually go around several countries, this time it’ll only be one, India, and only part of that one. Last time we did North India, so this time we’ll do the west. This was all originally part of one continuous trip in the year 2014, which started in Kolkata and went all across north India and Rajasthan before crossing the border from Amritsar to Lahore, Pakistan, in the far Northwest of India. I stayed in Pakistan about a week, meanwhile getting an Afghan visa, but ultimately bailing out due to a lingering cold, in the weather and in my body. I couldn’t talk. I could open my mouth and form the words, but nothing would come out. I got my Afghan visa, though, with plenty of time to enter the country, so I came back to India to weather the winter. Now I’m in Mumbai, and the weather is nice. I like west India, also, so far, at least, it quite a bit different from the North. Because, if the north of India has the high and mighty holier than thou rep for its spiritual traditions of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, along with the (Aryan) Brahmin caste that conceived them, it’s also to a large degree stuck in that glorious past, and the poverty that it sustains. But Mumbai is maybe not the best measure of that with its mafia and slums that would defy Delhi, but it will get better down the coast. For me the best analogy is that in the north you’ll rarely see a modern supermarket, but in the west, you’ll see plenty, and probably more traditional marketplaces, too, since the north has few of either, believe it or not. What Brits and others would call the CBD, Indians would call the Bazaar, i.e. market, or chowk, stalls lined chock-a-block up and down the street with no design or deliberation, just dedication. Mumbai is something of a mix of the two traditions. It starts off bad, near the airport, with a room without windows, but improves when I move into the center. I only wish that I had read Shantaram before I visited, so that I could’ve compared notes with the manuscript, but now it may be too late, since they’ve apparently black-listed me. We’ll see. I never used Lonely Planet much, and it seemed out-of-date by 2014, even, so I reverted to my transportation hub instincts, and that means the railway station, a vast improvement. From there you’ll quickly find Colaba, which includes the Leopold Cafe, dating from 1871, if you’re so inclined and well-endowed. I’m usually broke, haha, or so it seemed back then. But the weather feels good, if nothing else, and the seaside strolls always make for some smiles, so I enjoyed my stay, next stop Poona. For better or worse, Poona comes to me with excess baggage, as the home of OSHO, who I once knew as Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh back in my Oregon days in the early 80’s, when we both lived there almost simultaneously, albeit in separate neighborhoods of the state. To make a long story short: it wasn’t pretty, and many conflicts and lawsuits ensued, while Rajneesh/OSHO counted the Rolls Royces amid his spiritual splendor. They say his teachings were heavily Tantric, ahem. I’d probably prefer the term Vajrayana. When the dust cleared, Rajneesh high-tailed it out of town with that tail between his legs on a beeline for Poona, after being denied entry to twenty or so other countries. The spiritual center that he established in his five years there still exists there, and elsewhere, with an abundance of adepts long after OSHO’s departure, but not much for the average tourist, for better or worse. In fact it’s almost refreshingly boring. If he transplanted northern wisdom to western circumstance, that would seem to be embodied in the sacred cow(s), which are almost everywhere. Alas and alack, I’m not a disciple. Next stop is Goa. Goa is something of the jewel in the crown of west Indian tourism, or indeed all Indian tourism, above and beyond the spirituality and drugs of the north or the mafia, prostitution and drugs of Mumbai. Because Goa has something infinitely more powerful than all that: alcohol. Quick! Tell the Europeans! But they already know, because they are at the heart of it, the Portuguese here long before any other European foreigners. Indeed, they were not only here, but Indonesia (Timor), China (Macau), Malaysia (Malacca), Thailand (Ayutthaya), the Philippines (Cebu), Taiwan (Formosa), and elsewhere, too. And they not only had wine everywhere they went, but they had tables (mesa), and they had soap (sabao), and some variation of those words is in the native language of almost every language in the region. So, remind the locals of that every time they claim that Europeans smell bad. Goa is a strange member of the Indian group, also, without much in the way of cities, but very much in the persistence of culture. Because, while the Portuguese haven’t been gone for very long, their Europeanness still persists, and all in general harmony with the others. That means good parties, famous throughout the region. But for me, it only gets better the further south you go, because there is still a touch of inauthenticity to Goa that gives me pause, while further south there is none of that, the presence of Syrian Christians altogether a different breed, and era, than that of the Portuguese Christians. That means Kerala, domain of those India fanatics in the serious know, with beaches and cities, in addition to whatever substances you may need to put some spice on your daily omelet. The capital of Kerala is Trivunanthapuram (or something like that) better known to many of us as Trivandrum. Now the city may not mean much to anyone else, but to me it’s famous for its supermarkets, something so rare as to seem illegal up north, anywhere up north. Here they’re de rigueur. And if that fails to inspire you, then go to the beach. There are plenty of them. The first one on my list is Varkala, which may or may not be the best. The state of Kerala, way down south, is where those beach-combing backpackers-in-the-know go when Mumbai leaves them feeling cold and Goa leaves them feeling guilty. Here you're back in the 'real India', at least, both good and bad. The good is that you're actually in a foreign country, not just a tourist colony. The bad, depending on your tastes, is that alcohol once again is a precious commodity. That's no problem for me, but it is for some people. But the worst part is that the banks don't work. You never really know until you enter a country or a province whether your ATM card is going to work or not. But, no luck here. Welcome to India. Power isn’t much better, ditto the Net. The beaches here aren't bad, though; better than Goa, or what I saw there, anyway. And the cliffs are pretty spectacular. That's even something of a focus for the locus of the social scene here, along the little backpackers' 'miracle mile' that meanders along the top of the cliff. Of course, there's rarely a railing there, so caveat viator. There are temples and other sites of religious significance, this being a minor pilgrimage location and all. But the main object of adoration seems to be the sun itself, here fully tropical and without the atmospheric fogs and particulates that plague other areas of India. Here you'll go to the beach to cool off, not to warm up. Here you'll have to ritually douse yourself with cool water after every foray into the sun and humidity, three or four times a day at last count. Might as well wash your clothes at the same time, since they'll already be soaked. Next stop is Alleppey. Alleppey, aka Alapuzzha, doesn't look like much at first glance, another decrepit little city in southern India, hot and humid, funky and fuming. That viewpoint, however, ignores Alleppey's position on the edge of a vast system of inland backwaters that connect much of the region—and also underlie the region's tourist industry. There's even a ferry to neighboring villages and towns. No, the electricity grid and WiFi are no better here than in Varkala, but here you'd expect that. In Varkala, or especially Goa, it seems negligent and downright insulting to the hundreds and thousands of tourists who expect and deserve more and better. After all, many people fly in directly from Europe on pricey flights, expecting a seaside honeymoon, not a sweltering survival course. It's no big deal for me. I don't need to get all romantic with myself; I usually get lucky anyway. So Alleppey is fine—but not enough to hold me. I found a bank to take my ATM card. I got wings. C U in Kochi. Kochi's worth it, maybe not for the beach, though I don't really know, but for the historic city itself, based around the old fort and port. This was an old stronghold for the Portuguese and an entrepot for many over the centuries, including ancient Christian sects and Jews expelled from the Roman burning of the temple at Jerusalem in 70 AD. The fact that it was so easily reachable from the early Roman world even adds fuel to the fire as to whether Jesus himself might not have wintered over here in his formative years, doing something similar to what the Beatles would do some two thousand years later. Add to that reasonable prices and quality of rooms, a power grid that generally stays on and a WiFi that generally stays up, and you've got a pretty nice place to hang. I only wish I'd known sooner. But things like that are hard to predict. And I'm sure there are decent beaches to be had here, too, even if maybe not exactly surfers' paradise. It's not like I'm looking to lie in the sun on a rock somewhere. Nextstop is Kovalam. Kovalam is the kind of place that Lonely Planet writers like to disparage as having sold out to commercial interests long ago, with their chock-a-block cafes and resto--bars and boutiques a la Kuta, while noting how Varkala up the road manages to maintain its wild and rustic more authentic nature. I beg to differ. For one thing, Kovalam ain't that bad. For another thing, Varkala ain't that good. These are basically your two beach options within an hour's ride of the Keralan capital Trivandrum, aka Thiruvananthapuram. True, Kovalam is a fairly homogenized and pasteurized version of an Indian beach town, leaning toward European models and menus, with paved sidewalks and handrails to boot, all clean and neat and ready for biz. Is that such a bad thing? LP makes it sound like Kuta Beach in Bali, sprawling for miles down a previously pristine coast, serving banana pancakes in what were once temples, and drinking wine from monkey skulls. Nothing could be further from the truth. This trip is over. I’ll fly back north and continue to Afghanistan, as already reported. From there I’ll catch a flight back south to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, which will be the next episode that I’ll narrate here.

El Viejo Viajero Goes to Manila, PH: #2

Manila Manila reminds me of nothing so much as Bangkok, Thailand, where I’ve also spent much time and energy. And if the bars and prostitution are the starkest reminder of that, then the signs are also much in evidence elsewhere: the street food and the street scene most notably. The biggest differences lie in Manila’s relatively less development and the lower tourist numbers to match. Part of that could be the Philippines more remote location, and then there’s the greater poverty. There’s also the relative difference in their response to the Chinese presence, but be sure that they both have Chinatowns, Jake. Then there’s Makati, Ermita, old town Intramuros and still more, but they’re all crowded, as the inflated family sizes would indicate, one of the largest outside Africa. But this is the first time I’ve been in Manila in more than a decade, and it doesn’t seem to have changed very much, which is good, I suppose, but I’m not sure. I see parts of Thailand transforming before my eyes, but that’s harder to find in the Philippines. But I’ve hardly seen it all. Ermita is about all I remember of Manila from my previous 2013 visit, and none of that was very complimentary. So, this time I resolved to do some things differently. Firstly, and mostly, that means checking out some new neighborhoods. Halfway interested in seeing a Manila version of Cebu’s Sinulog, I kept my eyes and ears open to that possibility. But, alas and alack, I never really found much there, so I moved on to other things. Since I was staying in Pasay, near the airport, a side trip to Makati was easy enough, and I’d never been there, so that’s where I went, to see the Weekend Market, which is well established enough to have some very positive feedback. And it’s a long walk, BUT... It’s probably worth it, even if the headlines are not spectacular and the balls of my feet are plotting revenge. Pasay, where I'm staying, is little more than a glorified bus terminal in close proximity to a rather shambolic airport best left forgotten. But Makati is more than that, I’m happy to report. If the Philippines comes across as shabby sometimes, at best, and sleazy other times, at worst, that’s not the full picture. And Makati is full proof of that, as the Weekend Market shows. Because this is something that would be right at home at any of my previous adopted centers of chosen existence in the US, whether Boulder, Portland, Berkeley, Flagstaff, Tucson, or Hollywood, whether in the simple fact that they have a hipster market, or in the chosen manifestations of such. Because here do you not only have smoothies and tofu, but you also have tacos and Thai food. And while that’s not totally unusual, it’s not very common, either. But wait, you say. No tacos in the Philippines? Weren’t they a Spanish colony for three hundred years? Yes, they were and probably much closer in many ways to Mexico than to Spain itself. But Mexican food is rare here, and good Mexican food even rarer. I blame it on the beans—and rice, the first of which they don’t love, and the second of which they do. Reverse those relative percentages, and the results might be very different. That’s my theory, anyway. Fried chicken is very popular, haha. Arab and Turkish ‘wraps’ are popular now, too, so the door is wide open for burritos, hint hint. Tortilla chips do have some presence in the marketplace, too, but not corn tortillas, only flour. Chinatown is a disappointment, but that says as much for the name as the reality. Because when you name a neighborhood ‘chinatown’, that means that there is a local Chinese community, but they haven’t really been assimilated. And that’s the reason that that name is more common outside of Asia than within. And so they typically respond with souvenir shops in that case, and half-breed restaurants, but not much else. So, you find them in Mexico City, Lima, Havana, even Guatemala, but not Phnom Penh, KL, Hanoi, or even Bangkok, unless you count Yaowarat, which has only recently picked up that name as a marketing blurb after decades, even centuries, doing just fine without it. Indonesia has laws against anything Chinese. They ain’t Malaysia, hint hint. But the fact that somebody decided in 1954 to make the neighborhood of Binondo in Manila the world’s first Chinatown speaks volumes. For better or worse, today it doesn't look very Chinese-y at all, which is good, if that really means ‘cheesy’, all too often the case where it’s gift shop cliches. Intramuros is where most of the real historic drama of the Philippines took place, the Spanish conquest and eventual loss to America. Because even if Magellan did his thing in Cebu, Manila has long been the dominant city in the Philippines and the Tagalog-speaking region which has always ruled. So, that means there was Intramuros, ‘inside the walls’, and ‘extra muros’, what lies outside the walls. And the two don’t really mix. So, if you want to see the Intramuros, then that will take special effort. You don’t casually wander into Intramuros. For one thing, there’s no motorized transportation there. And for another thing, it’s enclosed by walls, right? But once inside, it’s a colonial gem that likes of which even Lima or Mexico City would have trouble competing with. That means there’s Manila Cathedral, Fort Santiago, San Agustin Church, Baluarte (bulwark) de San Diego, Casa Manila, Museo de Intramuros, and more, all from the comfort of your bamboo bike or muscle-powered trike, as the case may be, all with no motors. You can walk it, but that will be a full day, even though the entrance is not so far from the MRT. Manila is sprawling and shambolic in the Asian fashion, centrality not the operative concept, shared transportation terminals the stuff of travelers’ dreams. As it is, individual terminals are scattered about and around, and so are the other functions of the city. Intramuros is the ancient Spanish heart, the area long enclosed by its eponymous walls and something of a museum at present. It’s pretty nice. Ditto for Chinatown, laid out sprawling across the river with not much more than a few red lanterns to define its presence. Just a guess, but I don’t think the Filipinos—and Filipinas—need a red lantern to tell them where and how to do business. I think they’ve probably got a natural instinct for it. Still “the Chinese” have always specialized in doing Asia’s business, and it’s no different here. Here the difference is that they maintain their separateness from the local population, something not the case in Thailand, where after a generation or two, they’ve somehow “become Thai, so that’s okay,” and Chinatowns as such don’t really exist. Sure, they’ll take you to Yaowarat Road in Bangkok, but if there’s a “friendship arch” by now and epicanthic roof line eye-folds, it’s strictly for tourist consumption. Any urban core in Thailand could pass for Chinatown in the Philippines, that being about the only other difference between the two cultures. Genetically I’d wager they’re darn near identical, along with the other half-dozen or so countries that comprise SE Asia, a region that includes as many languages and every major religion in the world. So Manila is pieced and patched together without much order or too many ordinances, the law of survival pretty much the operative concept. It transforms itself at night, when the antique shops fade into the background and entertainment takes center stage. The bright lights come on—no brownouts, guaranteed, indeed—and young girls in Catholic-girl-school uniform (that’s not fair!) line the entrances to what lies inside. I can guess. At this point in my life I don’t even want to look at the four-color brochures of the touts and taxistas, letting my fingers do the walking and talking to inform them of my intent. One guy on a perch simulates eating a banana air-guitar-style for my benefit—he looks like a monkey—but I ignore the suggestion. I get it, but I’m not hungry. Sex in these parts has been variously described as a commodity on a shelf ripe for selection, or maybe a catalog item available for order, but I’m here to tell you that those reports are false. It’s more like fast food, actually, eat-in or takeout, billing options negotiable. Would you like fries with that? How about something to drink? Don’t forget your condiments! Still it all seems so sanitary and pre-packaged that it must be intended for high-brow Japanese and Korean consumption, an emotion seconded by the food selections available in the neighborhood. So I take another turn down a darker street, like tractor beam GPS honing in on the familiar. I finally find it, three dingy GI bars strung together with raucous blaring music, full of Western foreigners and bar-girls in T-shirts and blue jeans! Any comment would be superfluous. Tomorrow I go to Baguio.

Hypertravel with Hardie #11: Northern India

#11 North India Hi all; Welcome to my Hypertravel with Hardie video series, in which we’ll travel the world through my eyes and my pictures, all of which were taken more than ten years ago, in this case. If we usually go around several countries, this time it’ll only be one, India, and only part of that one. And, if that seems strange, consider the population of India and maybe it makes more sense. What IS strange, though, is that I only went to India after some forty years of previous travel, when it is often the first place for many boomers like me, especially those with inclinations toward spirituality and certain hard-to-find herbal remedies, haha. But that was the 1970’s and I had no money, okay, so maybe $538, but that won’t get you to India from Mississippi, but it would get you to Guatemala, so that’s where I went, for a few months. When I finally got $5000 I started a business that would keep me going and coming for a long while, there and South America, too. I finally got to Bali in 1989, Thailand in 1992, and Nepal in 1994, still doing that same business, handicrafts, but somehow never got captured by India. Maybe Nepal counts, but, then again, maybe not. I didn’t even get to Europe until 1996. By the time I finally arrived in Kolkata on December 31, 2013, I was seriously past my original business phase of life, and a second phase, too, and even considering Buddhism as a thing I’d like to know more about. Kolkata is probably not the usual place to start in India, but the flight from Thailand, where i often lived, was only $100, so hard pass up, with a double entry visa that I planned to use for a side trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan, if all went well. Kolkata is nobody’s pleasure dome, of course, but not so bad on New Year’s Day with the Christmas decorations still up in a Hindu country only slightly Anglicized. Everybody celebrates New year, though, so I saw some of that on my midnight flight, if only from a distance. The main goal was to find my hotel, without the usual street addresses so common in the rest of the world, but not India. That’s my first surprise. What’s the nearest landmark? How would I know? Fortunately they spoke English, since I did little research for my advance booking, or I would’ve gone straight to Sudder Street, the Freak Street of Kolkata. I found it soon enough, though, even with Wifi, which India was the world’s slowest in getting, surprise number two. And it hasn’t improved much, YBH, but a tiny bit, yes, maybe. I knew nothing of Bodh Gaya then, either, or even Patna, but I did know of Varanasi, aka Benares, so that was my next destination, all by train, of course, the India standard. And if Modern China is somehow defined by its universal bullet trains, then India is defined by its old clunkers, slower even by night, if that’s possible, with cows lined up on the platforms as if waiting for a train themselves, surprise number three. This cow shit is real. But Benares was the real deal, not just some faded colonial capital like Kolkata, but a real river with real carcasses being cremated for inclusion into the holy waters on display here, cows holding court over dozens of cremation sites up and down the riverbanks. The food is good, too, and the weather is not bad, not for January, even a bit chilly at night on the train. There are ashrams and retreat centers all around, but that will be a later phase in my life. If China is known for its future, then India is known for its past. Next I'll going to Agra to see the Taj. The Taj is everything that its host city Agra is not: beautiful and stately, a monument to the beauty to be found in this world. But the city itself is much the opposite. So, I make quick tracks to Jaipur. This route bypasses New Delhi, but I’ll go there later on the way back. My schedule is off track now that my train was late, causing problems at my hotel but my new Japanese friend Yoshi can help. This is the so-called Pink City, but the city’s layout is uninspiring, with nothing too convenient. Jodhpur is better, the Blue City. But it’s all Rajasthan, complete with camels and gentleman with maybe more than a little Mogul blood stirring in their veins. Women wear burkhas and speak Urdu, not Hindi, salaam aleikum not namaste. Yoshi drives a hard bargain on the room but splurges on meals. There are a couple of prime tourist sites that make excellent day trips, such as the massive Mehrangarh Fort and the Jaswant Thada wedding-cake-like hilltop retreat. I don’t know why. Bikaner is the next stop, home of the eponymous camel festival. Wifi is better now than at the start of the trip, but that breaks down in more remote Bikaner. The problem is that no one is up front about it, pretending it’s down temporarily or something, rather than admit that they’re too cheap to provide it. Sometimes I call their bluff, though, refusing to honor my hotel booking unless they honor their wifi commitment. So here I got a free dongle in lieu of real Wifi, which is something I’d only used once or twice, it a relic of a bygone era, between the era of desktop computers and the modern smartphone. The Bikaner camel festival was something incredible, though, men and women dressed to the hilt and in their finest, engaging in feats of strength and displays of beard length, camels dressed similarly and ready for action. The locals are friendly and inquisitive, silly and corny and endearing all at the same time. Next stop is Delhi. The bus from Bikaner drops me off in Delhi in the middle of the night, or so it seems, but it’s really only 6 a.m. and I’m in the middle of nowhere with no idea where to go. That’s what taxis are for, and so soon we’re in the middle of Pahar Ganj, just like it’s the 70’s all over again. Delhi wakes up slowly, but it looks no better by the light of day, not in the thick fog and muddy streets, not even in the backpacker quarter of Pahar Ganj. Some raised sidewalks would help, as would some Valium. Fortunately I'm accustomed to it by now. It looks like Freak Street, Kathmandu, c.1974, about the time High Times printed its first issue. Some of these old-timers look like they've been here since then. But the real Freak Street scene in Katmandu long ago moved to upscale Thamel byt the time I went in 1994. This place never changed. Hashish must be cheap. That’s okay. It'll do until something better comes along, another stop in the road or blip on the screen. From Delhi you can take some decent side trips, too, which I did a couple months later on the way back up and out. The first of those was Mathura, which I had read was a good place to see the Holi festival. Maybe my expectations were too high, or my standards too low, but this place is quickly not working for me, getting off the bus on the edge of town, and from there it only gets worse, dodging turds on the sidewalk where cows walk until a rickshaw finally overcharges me on a ride to town. The hotel is no better, usually a haven, but here cretinous counter clerk just clucks when I ask for the WiFi password, yeah right, no serious, I give you later, no you give me now, whenever you're ready, I'm ready NOW, withholding my money and passport until they prove they can produce the slippery stuff of dreams and deliverance, the other dimension that threatens to render biology superfluous, room itself a miserable mass of misanthropic mosquitoes and miasma, it takes a raucous ventilator, rogue renegade from World War II war-plane wreckage propellers to keep them at bay and keep me at peace, diving for cover under the covers. The mosquitoes are intent on invading the thinly guarded and thinly screened room, of course, and I can’t blame them, but I can try to avoid them. I complain to the desk, but the desk has no remedy, only bug spray. Holi never happened much here, either, just piles of cheap dyes in sidewalk stalls for later to celebrate the rites of spring and new beginnings, somewhere somehow. But I never quite saw it, not really. And it was no different in Delhi, just kids playing with the colors on the street while the adults in the room took a much needed holiday break from the trials and tribs of the working life. I think Holi gets its rep from the rave fest out on the edge of town which is something like a Burning Man for Indians, probably equal parts groping and griping about the high price of entry. So, I took a ride up to Rishikesh instead, the famous site of the Beatles’ and other famous rockers’ entry to India back in the 60’s when they all went to get high and holy with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the Transcendental Meditation backup singers, including Donovan, a Beach Boy or two, and assorted Hollywood celebrities, not Bollywood, not yet. And there was probably still some of that when I went, but it wasn’t Buddhist, so not focused enough for me, maybe later. But still it was nice, small by India standards, and perched upon a lazy Ganges river high enough in elevation to make at least a little bit of difference in the heat. Yoga is still its raison d’etre. But all that was later, and I needed to go to Pakistan first, and maybe Afghanistan, too, so that meant going to Amritsar, the largest city near the Pakistan border in far northern India. It’s something of a sister city to Lahore in Pakistan, or WAS, but now it’s mostly just the political and religious capital of India’s Sikh populace and region. That means vast pools for bathing, true, but it also means vast rains for gathering in those pools. It’s dreary. But I persevere, digging the diffs between here and normal India, haha, waxing philosophical and trying to stay warm. It’s time for Pakistan, and maybe Afghanistan, if the 2000mt/7000ft heights don’t freeze me out. We’ll see. This trip is entering a new phase tomorrow. Good-bye India, hello Pakistan.

Hypertravel with Hardie #1: Far South America

Hi y’all. I’m Hardie and I welcome you to the first installment of my new YouTube Channel called Hypertravel with Hardie, all about the trips I’ve taken in my life, and especially the last seventeen years or so, which were the most intense. ‘Hypertravel’ is the same name I used for my previous travel journal called Hypertravel: 100 Countries in Two Years, which I wrote and published in the year 2012, and which will serve as a template for at least the first few videos of this project. Because this will be a little bit different from most “vlogs”, in that they will consist of my previous trips from that Hypertravel era but told mostly from the photographs that I took then and there and which number in the thousands. I will narrate those trips and regions to the best of my memory as we go, the goal being to inspire you to visit that city or country if you think you might find it interesting. So, some of these videos will be organized by the trip and others by region. Times for a specific region might be continuous or spread out over several different years, making it something like ‘time travel’. But my main interests are geography, language, culture, and music, so that’s what I’ll concentrate on mostly. I still travel overseas at least once a year, as I have for fifty years, and just returned from a three-week trip that included Japan, Thailand, Bhutan, and Hong Kong. Welcome to my world. This first video will concentrate on the first leg of that Hypertravel phase in the year 2008 when I was 54 years old and decided that it was time to get serious about travel. I’d spent most of my life traveling around the world to buy and sell handicrafts from the traditional peoples that I encountered, but at that point it still totaled only about 50 or so countries. Now it’s 155 countries. Are you still with me? Let’s go! This first trip was to the region of southernmost South America, which I’d never visited, even though I did business in Bolivia for many years, buying and selling alpaca wool products, even after doing business in Mexico and Guatemala. And it’s no accident that these are the Latin American countries with the greatest percentage of indigenous population. So, in late 2008 I booked a free flight to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and took it from there, figuring to do a literal round trip to Paraguay, Uruguay, through Argentinian Patagonia, and over to Chile, then up that long narrow country before crossing back to Argentina, overland, Bolivia optional, and flying back out before the Christmas rush. So, that’s what I did, the trickiest part first. That meant scooting up to Paraguay, before I got too bogged down in other things. But the trip started in Buenos Aires, Argentina. And Buenos Aires was okay, but Chile would be better for my American tastes, further down the road. Buenos Aires is more European, late breakfast meaning coffee and a hot sticky bun, if you’re lucky, and don’t forget the butter. Paraguay was very different, and worth it for the novelty, if nothing else, Latinos speaking Guarani’ just because they like it, I guess, since most of them aren’t really indigenous in any way, though the original Tupi tribes certainly were. The big thrill was catching a taxi from the Paraguay-Brazil border and going all the way to the Brazil-Argentina border without ever getting out of the car, much less officially entering the country of Brazil. I’d never done that before–or since. I guess it’s some kind of ‘free zone’, but I’m not sure. The driver even offered to take me to Iguazu’ Falls, for a price, but I politely declined. You can do that on the Argentine side, also, and all on public transportation. But the Argentine town on the other border was nice, Puerto Iguazu’, so I stayed there a few days, before hoofing it back down to BA. Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay, are almost twin cities, so that’s an easy hop, or river cruise, as the case may be. I liked it, too, if for no special reason other than its sentiment and charm, certainly nothing too exciting, unless you’re a tango fanatic. I didn’t see much of the country either, but that’s okay. I DID see a percussion festival, and Patagonia was calling me further south, as the weather warmed up for the coming South American summer. I didn’t make it to Antarctica, unfortunately, but that’s not because I didn’t want to. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of thinking that Puntarenas, Chile, would be an easy alternative jumping-off point to Ushuaia, Argentina, but that is not the case. Actually, more boats probably leave from Buenos Aires to Antarcticta, but that’s a longer discussion. Suffice it to say that if you want to catch a trip to Antarctica at the last minute, then Ushuaia is probably the better bet, even if it means crossing more borders. Puntarenas is nice, though, even if it’s no farther south than Edmonton, Canada, is north, so not too exotic, and neither is Ushuaia, for that matter. But that’s the closest connection to Antarctica, if that’s your goal. Puntarenas is something of a dead end, also, since from there, you either go through the fjords by boat to the north or hop over it all by plane. I lucked out with a cheap flight north to Valdivia and loved it there. I even caught a concert there, so very cool. Unfortunately, a puppy dog fell in love with me down by the seal docks, but I couldn’t take him with me, so that was sad. But the seals were cool, hanging by the riverside and smelling to high heaven. Santiago the capital was an anticlimax, even if I was staying in a whorehouse, haha, but Valparaiso was better. To some extent, the price of the room heavily dictates the nature of the experience. Vina del Mar would be better on the way back, also, but there were the desert cities of La Serena, Antofogasta, and Iquique up ahead on the road to the north, all of which were nice, but not too exciting, unless Gypsies excite you, so far from their traditional homes down there (up there?) in Iquique, while looking and acting so much like Gypsies, too. The smell of curry added to the drama, but I hadn’t studied enough Hindi at the time to make any broad predictions. And then there’s Calama, celebrated entry to the high desert. It’s high and cool, true, but too cool for my school, so I beat a hasty retreat. That’s the way to Bolivia or North Argentina, also, but I’ve got a date down south at Vina del Mar, with a film festival soon to start. Vina’s okay, too, much more famous than Calama, but not nearly so pretentious by my standards. Or maybe I just don’t like to be reminded of my hippie roots. I’d rather be reminded of my film school roots. That doesn’t last long, though, and soon I’m on the midnight run, over the Andes back to Argentina. Mendoza was okay, too, and the Buenos Aires Chinatown is certainly worth mentioning, but my allocated six weeks were almost up. Other events of note were some indigenous dances somewhere in Chile and a music festival in Argentina, but I can’t remember the locations exactly, so I’ll leave them with a bare mention. Unfortunately I was just warming up as a still photographer, so the number of photos is a bit scant. These photos from Colombia and Peru were later, and separate, but serve to fill out the feel of South America, especially Peru, where I spent several months in 2022-3 and which is my favorite country in all of South America. Colombia was only a brief stopover from Portugal back to Mexico, in 2022, if you can believe that, the cheapest route, if not the shortest, especially during a pandemic and the sometimes onerous regulations associated with airline travel in that era. Asia was locked down tight for two to three years, and that’s been my main stomping grounds for the last thirty years, after much time in Latin America. So South America was a nostalgia trip, and a welcome revisit, long after the Hypertravel era. If you liked the pictures, then consider the book, available from Amazon. The next installment will visit the Caribbean, including Cuba. Stay tuned. And don’t forget to like and subscribe. It will help with my ultimate goal, which is to convert all this to VR, Virtual Reality. It’s a different world there. Thanks for watching.

Hypertravel with Hardie #10, Central Asia: Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan...

Central Asia was—and is—something of a logical extension of the original Hypertravel inspiration, to “see it all,’’ with the only real difference being the much larger scale of the endeavor over a plot of land that is as difficult to define as it is to navigate. I only knew that however it was ultimately defined, Uzbekistan would be at the heart of it, and so that would be my starting point when the possibility finally presented itself in 2013. It wouldn’t be the BIG trip, of course, since that’s almost unfathomable, beginning in India and winding up through Pakistan and Afghanistan, then Central Asia proper, i.e. Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, before detouring into China for the rebound tour through Xinjiang and Kashgar before finally diving back down the Karakoram highway to Pakistan and India, with an option to return instead through Tibet and Nepal, then India. Whew! I schemed and scammed on that idea for years before finally settling on a quick trip to solitary Uzbekistan in 2013. All those countries required visas back then, and often obtainable only in the home country, or maybe a visa on arrival at the airport only, in a random country or two. But overland travel has its own reward, so I figured to revisit the trip in 2014 with an extension from India into Pakistan, first, then Afghanistan, then who knows? But the inspiration for Uzbekistan in 2013 was the Sharq Taronalari music festival in Samarkand. That was in my world music days, and I was always a culture vulture, so it all fit together nicely, especially when wedged in and around Thailand, as usual, my sometimes and often home and refuge. But first I flew from LA to Frankfurt, with a layover there, before continuing to Tashkent. And Tashkent is nothing special, but proof of the Russian connection, big and boring. Samarkand IS special, with the same typical architecture that you can still find in much of Central Asia, the Indo-European part, before the massive Turkic immigration. And that’s what the classic cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva are, Tajikistan maybe even more so. The music festival is good, too, even if slightly high-cultured and not some wild-ass hippie event. My guesthouse owner is a character named Firkat, that I call Fur Cat, who puts out a breakfast spread that must be seen to be believed, shades of Istanbul, with serving plates stacked skyward for three-dimensional effect, it seems. The food is good, too, whether it’s ultimately Turkish or Iranian, I don’t care. The architecture shows more affinity with Kashgar and Tehran than Istanbul, and both Bukhara and Khiva would be similar. Bukhara is next stop down the road and into the encroaching desert, and it’s nice, too, with variations on that same Iranian central Asian theme. But it’s a little bit smaller, so more compact and less famous, and apparently a favorite of itinerant Russians looking for excitement in the Central Asian outback. But what it lacks in fame, it makes up in authenticity. That means suzani ikat weavings, old-fashioned markets, and a babushka half my age who’s giving dirty looks at my dirty boots. From there it’s a long haul due west across the desert to Khiva, and once again it’s the shared taxis who carry much of the load for people like me, too rich for scuzzy buses and too poor for private cars. But it works, even if it keeps the bus system slow and funky. We’re in a different part of the region now, though, almost Turkmenistan and probably proud of it. They’re stricter here, and you can feel the difference, Mullah Abdullah and his minions with breath that smells like onions. In short, Bukhara is more like India, while Khiva is more like Iran. But the first thing I did in Khiva was to buy a train ticket back to Samarkand, and I had no regrets about that. Because Khiva is less attractive to me, and that is simply a fact. The catchy pop music is here replaced by long dreary dirges, and the people are less friendly to match. For some reason the French people like it, though, and that may be because they (we) are literally inhabiting a UNESCO World Heritage site. Is that even legal? Overcharging is a problem, also, especially the kind that comes with racial and facial distinctions. Given the dependence on taxis for transportation, this is no small issue. So, Samarkand is a welcome redux, even if it starts to feel slightly boring. The once exciting weddings that produce so many babies now seem excessive, as if people are getting married just for the parties! Since bars as such are certainly not publicly tolerated. But they are privately tolerated, and a troop of girls touring from nearby Tajikistan show how the local dances are done, smiling like visiting American dignitaries without the slightest hint of a hijab. But all good things must come to an end, of course, and Russian-era Tashkent is no match for the more traditional sites of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva. Either way, it’s Muslim Lite and Turkic Lite. Speaking Russian is still your best defense against overcharging, even though the local languages are Indo-Aryan and Turkic. And that’s a subject that fascinates me immensely. So, this 2013 excursion is just a teaser for the really big Indo-Euro show that will get picked up in 2014 with a full-fledged introduction to India proper, with side-trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan, respectively. Neither of those will connect to Uzbekistan, but it could have. I made the choice to return to southern India, first, for a month or two, after Pakistan, and then Sri Lanka and the Maldives Islands after Afghanistan. Fortunately, I had a double-entry visa from the Indian consulate in Bangkok, so that worked fine. Now it’s even easier, just do it all online and stamp it all up at the border. So, after a couple months of travel in the north of India, I exited the country in the farthest NW corner of the country, into Pakistan, one of the weirdest border crossings in the world, and, given the fact that the people are genetically very similar speaking languages that are very similar, one of the strangely least traveled. The big drama the first day was finding my hostel in Lahore. Considering the relatively good English language skills of neighboring India, the skills for Pakistani taxi drivers was low, which made arrival to my destination difficult. But we finally found it, of course, and the next challenge was to enjoy an evening of Sufi dancing here, at its place of origin. As with all of Pakistan that I saw, women were nowhere to be found, but that’s just Islam at its core. But the policemen were the big surprise, as they beat the unruly crowd, including me, with sticks, that and the unruliness itself, which I presumed to be prohibited in Islam. But it’s not, quite the contrary. This is all in the midst of hashish incense that perfectly matches the level of the policeman’s incense. I never got hit upside the head, but I did feel the breeze, and I felt my own level of incense toward our trusted leader Hassan, I think his name was. But Lahore was good enough, and I knew nothing of the Indus Valley Civilization at the time, so the only other destination was the capital of Islamabad, after I canceled Peshawar due to illness. So, I got my Afghan visa in the capital, with three months to enter, which it turns out that I would sorely need, pun intended, after I lost my voice as the reward for a never-ending bout of cold and diarrhea. Islamabad was weird, too, deliberately erect in contrast to Lahore’s grimy grottoes and lurid exteriors, but both with no women showing their faces or even their burqas, victims of the thorough he-job that is fundamentally Islam. And this is the Lite version. So, I beat a not-so-hasty retreat to Mumbai to weather the winter and wait for the spring, trolling the west coast of India before returning to New Delhi. #Kabul #Afghanistan: Jihad for Dummies vs. Spring Hopes Eternal This trip got reignited a month or two later after a full tour of southwest India from Mumbai to Kerala state and all points in between, one of India’s nicest areas. Then I’m back in New Delhi with a flight to Afghanistan. The queue for Safi Air flight #248 from Delhi to Kabul looks like something of a loya jirga in itself, businessmen and diplomats, village traders of lapis lazuli, scammers and schemers, all going back to the homeland for one reason or another, all with excess baggage—fridges toasters and microwaves, dreams hopes and expectation, with strange tongues and whispering strange sighs, body odors wafting from overcoats whose histories likely date back to eras unspecified and improperly documented. Any one of these guys could be a Taliban terrorist, al-Qaeda conniver or Saudi Salafist, down on his luck and up on his religion, out of his rightful mind and into the only one that's left, high-tailing it or in-boxing it or tweeting it or snap-chatting architectural blueprints for any one of 1000's of memorials and buildings and airports freely available on Internet and suitable for bombing. That's probably what they're saying about me, too, CIA or worse, agent provocateur. The flight itself is no big deal, endless klicks over uncharted desert, over the border somewhere that divides India from Pakistan, Hinduism from Islam, vegetarians from carnivores, and divine hierarchies from an abstract figurehead, the latter looking to the Arabian desert for inspiration, the former to themselves and their past, mutated in direct proportion to the distance from the source, in time and space, the twin gods of physical existence. Afghanistan is the kind of place—Papua New Guinea is another—where it's easier to feel comfortable in crowds, the clusterf*ck itself some measure of security, a bulwark against bullsh*t, where white skin is the target, the whiter the better, since our distant-cousin Afghans themselves have no lack of light skin blue eyes and blue genes, vestige of some point in time and space back when back where on steppes balustrades and genetic ladders blazing a trail out of Africa and heading for greener pastures and broader vistas, all suitable for us featherless bipeds walking around semi-erect. This is fortress Kabul, never so beautiful in the first place, now reduced to concrete bunkers and abstract considerations, cold steel construction under mostly sunny skies, kids and old ladies begging for food, a burqa to hide the shame, a war of words and mutually exclusive concepts, consumerism and religious fundamentalism fight it out in the streets and villages, the only decorations for today's New Year celebrations the loops and swirls of concertina wire gracing fences and railings of any importance, Checkpoint Charlies at the most important military installations and warehouses of consumer goods. Nothing helped the Serena Hotel last night, Kabul's finest, cobbled together from those same hopes dreams and big ideas, and ultimate killing field, if for only a moment, in the battle to harvest souls for slaughter, always easier than conversion, multiple casualties and unspecified damages, the strategy of most journalists diplomats and businessmen being that the more layers of protection the better, thicker stronger and longer the path an enemy projectile must penetrate. I prefer to hide in plain sight, wearing nothing for protection, playing with children and scrounging for food, hanging with locals, something most foreigners would never do, go figure, so maybe that's part of the problem, the foreign intervention, the imposition of order from the outside, rather than from its own internal logic and familial bonds, that fortress mentality that only feels good on the inside, if you're one of the lucky few... and not claustrophobic. I like (ex)war zones—Belfast, Bosnia, Beirut, Belgrade. The challenge is to get the timing right. Show me a former war zone and I'll show you a travel bargain. But nobody wants to dodge bullets, not really. Sure, it makes good copy, but... naah. Kabul may have to wait another season. Some people chase tornadoes for kicks. Man, those folks are crazy. Me, I prefer half-crazed maniacs with machine guns. But this is no accident, no random occurrence. This is the afterlife. This is World War III. This is the war to end all wars. This is the beginning of the long dark nod. The Great Migrations have already begun. This is love during wartime, baby. Could you hold me just a little bit tighter, please, even though you're ten thousand miles away and we've barely even met? Thank you. I appreciate that. Election Day in #Kabul #Afghanistan Tomorrow is election day in Afghanistan, and all fingers are crossed, all eyes watching. Regardless of who wins, the future is not so bright. The Taliban vows to punish anyone who votes. And they aren't known for making idle promises. Of course the real challenge begins when the US pulls out later this year, and questions remain what sort of contingency will live on here. The smart money would probably bet on smart money, with few soldiers. That would probably be the best move. Of course the widely predicted civil war won't necessarily occur when the US pulls out, and if it does, that doesn't mean that the Taliban will win again. Another possibility is that the country might be partitioned de facto into a Taliban-controlled south and a more liberal—less conservative, that is—'Muslim lite' north, where women can walk the streets without a burqa and men can eventually learn to appreciate that, and their equality. Isn't that the real problem anyway: ignorant a**hole macho men who'd rather beat women down than lift themselves up? Old ways die hard, I guess... Partitioning is problematic, though, and symptomatic of possibly THE biggest problem in Afghanistan, its fragmented landscape. The fastest land route between Kabul in the central east, and Herat, in the central west, is through Taliban-infested Kandahar in the south, 'only' two days. The 'straight' route over hill and dale takes three days, with no guarantees. A flight only takes an hour or so, of course. You get the pic. I personally have no special interest in Afghanistan, no more than any other region of the world, anyway. My main reason for being there now—last week, that is—is two-fold: it's on the land route from India up through Central Asia and back through China, which I originally planned to do, AND... Afghanistan may be entering a dark time in which travel will be impossible. In other words, it may be now or never. Once there only then did I begin to see the country in a different light, full of real people in a very real situation—a very good metaphor for the modern world itself—mostly gone wrong, I might add. Volumes have been written about Afghanistan's lack of hospitality, but I didn't find that, just the opposite, in fact. And once people realized that I was NOT 'up to no good', harmless as a church mouse, in fact, they opened right up, pictorially, at least. I took no picture of a person that I was not invited to take, and I took every one that I was invited to take. The multiplicity of hired gunmen did not fit that list, unfortunately. EXIT Still, the writing is on the wall, and all bets are off, so I have no choice but to hedge them. That means catching the first flight out of the region, so that I won’t be any further inconvenienced. Because it’s already inconvenience enough just trying to get to the airport through the massive security on display. And since I have no remaining visa for India, then i must go elsewhere, in this case Sri Lanka, from which I’ll do a side trip to makdives. Hey, going to 150 countries is not easy, so I catch them when I can. C U there

#9 China, Mongolia, and North Korea: Beijing, Ulan Bator, and Pyongyang Hi y’all: Welcome to the ninth, count ‘em, ninth episode of my travel series Hypertravel with Hardie, about all the trips I’ve taken, as told by the pictures. Beginning in the year 2008, with my Hypertravel Book, which I published in the year 2012. This time we’re going to China, Mongolia, and North Korea, so something not so simple, but rewarding. It’s not the longest trip, but one of the more interesting. Are you ready? Let’s go. The oppressive heat and humidity ruled in China, but at least Beijing seemed a bit drier than my brief stopover in Shanghai, if no cooler. I took a liking to the city right away, its hutong alleyways a link to the past that’d be hard to find almost anywhere else in China, even in places much smaller and more socially backward. Still the first main order of business was preparing for North Korea. That’s a traveler’s Iron Curtain; you don’t just wander in, whether on a bus, train, or plane. It not only takes planning, but it takes guides; that’s the law. Still it can be done, with a fistful of dollars, and then a few dollars more… AND a lotta’ red tape. The whole thing seemed so sketchy and uncertain and bureaucratic that I felt obligated to check out the Beijing operation in advance, while I still might have some control over the monies involved, all this before I’d even gone to Mongolia, mind you, so something of an anomaly for me logistically. I managed to find their office, so I knew they actually existed, over in the Sanlitun “bar district” of Beijing nonetheless. It’s calm over there by Thai standards btw. So, I went to see the Great Wall with the time remaining. Now it’s time for Mongolia. That was enough to placate my concerns for the moment, so I felt free to turn my attention to Mongolia. I figured that’s where the real action is. I was mostly right. Mongolia is an unwashed traveler’s gem, waiting to be polished, and maybe one of the last great frontiers in the world. This is an area the size of Alaska perched between China and Russia at the latitude of the US-Canada border, and busy playing one off the other since time immemorial, or at least since China invented gunpowder and managed to keep the wolves at bay… for a while. The capital at Ulan Bator is just a hint of what lies in the countryside. The last vestiges of communism have mostly disappeared, and capitalism just pops up all around seemingly at random, a shopping complex here and a karaoke bar there, by some economic law of psychological value. This is especially evident with motorized vehicles, where seemingly everybody got the idea to buy a car and carry passengers for hire right at about the same time. So welcome to the world’s biggest traffic jams. Allow plenty of time to catch your flight. Outside of Ulan Bator, the cityscape quickly devolves into the vastness of a northern plain that was likely one of the original marshalling yards for modern evolution in the inter-glacial ages when large herds of large animals would make their way across the Bering Strait and begin the long trek downward, all the while dodging the spears and arrows of the freakiest albino apes that the planet’s ever seen. Through a process of elimination I somehow decided that Tsetserleg (Hot) would be the focus of my journey, mostly just because of logistics; I had five days in Mongolia, and there just wasn’t any more time to travel than a day out, a day there and a day back, with an extra day for snafus, but much more time than I wanted to spend in Ulan Bator itself. Tsetserleg has a rep as one of the nicer provincial capitals… but that probably isn’t saying much. It also has something rather anomalous for the vast outback of northern Asia, a British B&B. I figure that was reason enough right there for the trip. The terrain reminded me a lot of Alaska or the Yukon—except for the massive amounts of livestock—so that’s good. Travel on public transportation is a bit difficult, but not overly so. And then just when you think you’re the last lonely traveler at the end of a long lonely road, a pack of bikers on Harleys will pull up and fill the house with beer and laughter and tales of tire-wear… just like they do in Whitehorse. Tsetserleg itself was a bit disappointing, Stalinist architecture and all, but that’s no reflection on Mongolia as a whole, which is much greater than the sum of its individual parts. Still, it was a pleasant sojourn, at least until the ride back. It rained the whole night before, so the ground was fairly soaked, and the road is not so good. So, when the driver took the bus off into a pasture to avoid potholes, slipping and slopping and spinning up mud, there was more than a little anxiety to deal with, a pretty wild ride, actually. We made it, though. We usually do. The main tourist attraction in Mongolia is nature, and that doesn’t convert easily to cities. So, you have to get out into the outback for the full effect of Mongolia, the gers (yurts) and the cowboys and the livestock and the nomadic way of life. Still, Ulan Bator is not at all bad. There are even encampments of gers there. And there are rock bands playing in the parks, too. And there are supermarkets. And then there’s Buddhism, something like a crucial link in the Mongolian historical dialectic of tribalism> empire> subservience> Buddhism> communism> independence. And it’s the Tibetan style, too, which must really bug the Chinese. Watching monks chant their chants in a replica of the temple at Lhasa was truly inspiring. I think I felt something move. North Korea is something else entirely. If Ulan Bator is the wild wild West, then Pyongyang is the exact opposite, something so controlled and coordinated as to be almost devoid of instinct or logic. Getting there is the hardest part, though. After all the runaround and the red tape and the rigmarole and the razzmatazz, the actual being there was somewhat tame… after the Customs inspection, that is. There they confiscated all the cell phones, with almost religious fervor, as if they were the epitome of capitalist evil. Anything with GPS is strictly forbidden, so maybe that’s the deal; they don’t want anyone calling in an airstrike I guess. That makes sense. Laptops are okay in North Korea, but you’re back in the pre-Internet era with them. Most people probably don’t even realize there WAS a pre-Internet era of computers, as if that’s why they exist. And don’t even think about Wi-Fi. Like Cuba, there is none. If you look for a connection, there is simply nothing there. Unlike Cuba, you’re not likely to be able to talk to anyone about it. None of the guides ever mentioned it. Few tourists speak Korean. In Cuba, I talked with many Cubans about many things, the most memorable quote being, “I’m fifty-five years old, and you’re the first American I’ve ever talked to.” The second most memorable was, “Why do you need Internet?” (Gulp). After spending the first evening at the Arirang Mass Games, the next day was a whirlwind of monuments and memorials and assorted minglings with the masses, in the markets and the metro. And there aren’t much in the way of markets, really, just stuffy old state-run souvenir stores and book stores full of Kim-style Communist propaganda. But the restaurants were good, if uninspiring in atmosphere. Everything felt sterile and regimented, institutional. There were even fewer vehicles, mostly mass transit and a few private vehicles for government and diplomatic personnel. And there’s the epiphany right there. If the whole regimented system reeks of mind-control and brainwash, then the functionality of a city without private cars borders on true inspiration. These are cities truly intended to live in, something that cities rarely are. More often than not, a city is intended for commerce, and often little else, people scurrying home to fairytale suburbs at the end of the workday for the actual living of life. In Pyongyang the tallest buildings are full of apartments not offices. It’s actually quite inspiring, a city with no pollution or traffic jams, quite the contrast to Ulan Bator. Indeed Pyongyang is probably the quietest cleanest city I’ve ever been in, and something of a revelation that that would even be possible. A few days after I left, typhoon Bolaven hit, same time as Hurricane Isaac in the US, some of my tourist buddies still there. I hope they’re okay. We also went to the USS Pueblo. Don’t ask. Back in Beijing there wasn’t much left to do locally, since I’d already visited the Great Wall, and I was saving the Forbidden City for the last day. So I went to Chengde, now only a few hours away after the completion of the new four-lane highway. We beg for high-speed Internet; they still beg for high-speed highways. Hotels in China didn’t have Wi-Fi in the year 2012 btw; they had ETHERNET (slow-ass hard-wire data ports). Chengde is on the UN World Heritage list for its Qing-era summer palace and Buddhist temples, but I’ll confess to not seeing much of them. The pollution was so bad on the day I was there I decided not to press my luck too much. I’ve still got a cough. It’s nice to see a smaller city, though, at a half million people Chengde being something of a village by Chinese standards. Back in Beijing I went to see the Forbidden City almost as an afterthought, that and to spend the hotel deposit that they refund at the end of your stay and which would all be eaten up in charges if you tried to exchange it. And it was way cool, like a magic Chinese box full of smaller nested boxes. All in all it was a good trip, if a bit wet and unusually muggy, at least in the southern climes.

Hi y’all: Welcome to the 8th episode of my Hypertravel with Hardie video series of all the trips I've taken over the last twenty years. This coincides with the travel journal that I wrote called Hypertravel: 100 Countries in two years, and many more that came after. So, in effect, these first eight episodes are a pictorial version of the same book, and more, since this episode contains events and pictures that came after. And there is much more to come, with maybe even a Hypertravel II book to match, if all goes well. But this episode is about the South Pacific, including the major countries of the Philippines and Australia. So, let’s start there, then. Are you ready? Let’s go! Sydney is the largest city in Australia, by far, even if not the capital, and that’s where much of the action of the country takes place. Unfortunately for me, Australia was in the midst of its China boom, when they were investing like crazy and driving the value of the Australian dollar to a level higher than that of the US dollar, with resulting high prices. So, there’s not much time to waste chilling, but there is some time to sight-see. So, after the obligatory tourist stops of the opera House and the bridge or whatever, I’m on my way to Melbourne, to check things out there. It’s far to the south and so colder there in the southern hemisphere, appropriate for this Christmas season. The only ethnic neighborhoods in either city, though, are the various Chinatowns, since anyone besides ‘good Asians’ are subject to thorough scrutiny and likely denial of long-term entry. That means that there are many short-time helpers, mostly students and travelers like myself who come for a year to do the work that most Australians aren’t interested in. That means that there are also many low-budget hostels for short-time stays for me and them, too, because by this time I’m a confirmed hostel customer. Does Santa Claus surf? I don’t know, but by this time I’ve got to go, next stop New zealand, little brother to the land of OZ. New Zealand has been on my radar for a long time, though, thanks to its reputation as an ecotopia, just like the ecotopia of Oregon where I was living in the 1980’s. If the capital and largest city of New zealand, Auckland, was analogous to Seattle of the Pacific NW, then I suppose that Wellington would be analogous to Portland where I once lived. But I didn’t make it to Wellington due to time constraints and a previous earthquake in Christchurch, which destroyed much infrastructure in that city, New Zealand’s third largest. I did go to Fangarei, though, spelled Whangerei, at the entrance to Maori territory. So that was nice. And I moved downtown when I got back to Auckland town, in a high-rise hostel that was something like Latino central for the city. I did go to the nearby islands of Waheke and Rangitoto, too, both lovely and I had some good convos with some locals, that made me remember why I’m here and where I came from. Like Oregon, within a minute of meeting these people we’re finishing each others’ sentences and talking about old times the minute before. It’s New Year’s Eve, too, so it’s festive downtown and I’m hanging out with the Hare Krishnas. They always have good parties. Happy New Year! Fiji’s the next stop, but that’s a working concept as the hub of Pacific hub-and-spoke travel, so I’ll be in and out a few times within the next month. So, I stay a day and then head straight to the Solomons Islands, famous for the Battle of Guadalcanal in WWII. That means that if the sea level were to fall a few meters then a battlefield would present itself in the surrounding waters like naval ghosts from Christmases past rising from the ashes like zombies. But I’m just trying to get comfortable, and the rasta-flavored GH where I’m staying on the outskirts of town is just not working for me, so help me, Carmelita, before I sink down. So, even though there’s an ex-pat Britpub in the neighborhood, I bargain for a week in downtown Honiara, knowing the plane only comes once a week, so that’s okay. And I roam around the Chinatown, bruised and battered since the locals tried to shut them down after a fit of spite or jealousy, I suppose, but they always come back like perennials that they are. I consider the nearby islands, even one called Tulagi like my favorite bar in Boulder CO, back in the 1970’s, but spend most of my time studying Melanesian Pidgin language and trying to find similarities between it and the other languages I know like Spanish and Mississippi English. I spend more time in Fiji on the rebound. Nadi is not the largest town, but it/s near the international airport, so that’s convenient. All the groovers go out to the Yasawa Islands, so it’s only the backpackers here on Wailoaloa Beach. But it’s okay, especially on Wednesday night, which is Kava night, featuring the Kavaholics on folk instruments and the rest of us on the slightly tipsy brew called Kava. Then there are the fire dancers, unsure of what kind of music to dance to. But the kava seems to be ubiquitous in the Melanesia region, and if the Solomons are the ‘real thing’, then Fiji is Melanesia lite, literally, the product of many eggs scrambling over many years to get the mix of features that we call Fiji. But If I imagined it as a tourism monster, then that is not true. And neither is it for me, either, better as a centerpoint to all than a destination in its own right. The town of Nadi is nothing special and I assume the capital of Suva to be not much more, but still interesting for its social structure, if nothing else. At one point the Indians almost equalled the locals in number until the Fijian army sent them packing. They run the military and the Indians run the businesses. They share the government, while the Chinese wait in the wings. The food is killer, Indian or Chinese, vegetarian optional. Next stop is Samoa. Samoa is comprised of west and east, of course, Apia and Pago Pago, independent or American, Sunday or Saturday, since the two capitals straddle the international date line with all the confusion that entails, i.e. they’re separate, as the two airports for the two different regions in Apia would suggest. This is no longer Melanesia, though, but Polynesia, descendants of all the Austronesians that left the Asian continent to Taiwan, all within the last few 1000’s of years, and then spread out from there with excellent navigation skills. Melanesians came much earlier, mostly by land. But this is the cradle of Polynesian culture. There are churches everywhere, so on Sunday I go church-hopping, just follow the music. I don’t want to stay in Apia the whole time, though, so I scout out the outer islands and eventually settle on the most unlikely one, US Samoa, centered on Pago Pago, in the US outlying territories, complete with not only Kmart and KFC, but Napa Auto Parts and the US Post Office. Apia is much cheaper, though, and the people are huge in both. It must be genetic, or diet, or both. The westerners still wear lavalavas, while the easterners have spiked hair and other punk fashion statements. Pago Pago has a beautiful harbor, too. Many of the American Samoans are long gone to America proper, though, so many westerners come over to fill the job corps, just one big happy family. Next stop is Tonga. If you’re saving the best for last, then this is not a bad choice. We beat the rain out of Samoa, but Tonga is not much better, and I’ve got flu-like symptoms, so I’m being cautious. I do the Sunday church scene with a Finnish guy, and we even get to sit in on a traditional wedding ceremony and feast. The city of Nuku’alofa is nothing special, but the graveyards are incredible, folk art of the highest order. They don’t wear lavalavas, either, but real grass skirts. Storms are threatening again, but we manage to make it out on time, just a stop back in Fiji, then on to Honolulu, with a stop in Kiribati, then on to LA. So this trip over, but the narrative is not, because i neglected to mention the trip’s very first stop, in Papua New Guinea. It’s a weird place, so I didn’t want to set the wrong tone for the rest of the trip. How weird? Let’s just say that these are some of the nicest people in one of the world’s most dangerous places. Not weird enough? How’s this, then? Until the advent of airline travel, no one even knew that there were tribes in the interior of PNG, much less the full 800 languages. That’s less than 100 years ago. It’s travel policy for me to do the weirdest things first, so I went straight from Thailand to Brisbane in northern Australia, and from there to PNG. There are no roads out of Port Moresby, so I went to Lae on the northern coast with the idea to continue by road to Goroka, heart of the tribal highlands. The trip got off to a bad start, though, and I missed my ride from the airport to my pre-booked hostel at the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the infamous tribal translators. Nobody knew the place, so I ended up elsewhere, with resulting disruptions to my schedule. Oh, well, that’s life. So, I stayed in Lae, mostly cowering in fear, from the reputation of the place and the looks on people’s faces. I got an earlier flight back to Port Moresby and stayed with the Christian missionaries there, with plenty of stories amongst them, including one who said he was robbed four times on the very road that I wanted to be on in Goroka. So, I satisfied myself with the Port Moresby streetside crafts market to satisfy my vision quest for the interior. That’s all for this particular trip, but there’s another waiting to do, in the North and Central Pacific. 2012 This trip got reignited a year or so later, with a trip to the Philippines and nearby environs. The Philippines is one of the more popular destinations in the Pacific, but at the same time one of the more difficult to get to traditionally, though that is changing now with the advent of budget airlines, of which the Philippines has a few. But at this time, 2011-12, the big boys still largely controlled the skies and so prices were equally high. Which is good, in a way, because otherwise I might not have bothered with Guam, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia, which are also in my month-long itinerary of January 2012. But the Philippines are the largest peach in this pie, and that’s where the trip starts. Manila reminds me of nothing so much as Bangkok, Thailand, where I’ve also spent much time and energy. And if the bars and prostitution are the starkest reminder of that, then the signs are also much in evidence elsewhere: the street food and the street scene most notably. The biggest differences lie in Manila’s relatively less development and the lower tourist numbers to match. Part of that could be the Philippines more remote location, and then there’s the greater poverty. There’s also the relative difference in their response to the Chinese presence, but be sure that they both have Chinatowns, Jake. Then there’s Makati, Ermita, old town Intramuros and still more, but they’re all crowded, as the inflated family sizes would indicate, one of the largest outside Africa. This trip will only cover the main island of Luzon, though, so I’m immediately drawn to the north. That’s where you’ll find one of the rarest places in all the country, Baguio City, onetime hill station for the resident Americans who controlled the country. Call me American and count me in. The Philippines is generally hot and sweaty, even for a Mississippian, so Baguio is a welcome relief, at almost a mile high. That elevation is nice anywhere in the tropics I find. At only 150mi/250km from the capital, that is convenient, also. The going is slow on the roads in the Cordillera, though, and that’s Spanish FYI, which is one of my hobbies here, mixing and mashing Spanish with the Tagalog equivalents which are many, usually distinguished more by spelling than meaning, which are often absent as the many women named Corazon can easily attest to. They have no idea what it means. Language evolves like DNA, almost exactly. So, I go to the most Spanish of Filipino towns, which is Vigan, but nobody speaks Spanish. The architecture is nice, though. But my main interests are the tribal areas, and that requires a backtrack to Baguio before traveling into the interior. The rice terraces are beautiful there, down the road in Banaue. But first there is Sagada, the hippie capital of the north. That means banana pancakes and more, of course, like reggae bars and yogurt parlors. But the drive is the real thrill, through beautiful scenery and winding roads. I’ve finally got a window in my room, too, so I’m happy about that. Banaue is nice, too, though notable for its differences, in price and custom. It likes to shut down early at night. There are tribal people, though, and not shy about it, so that’s nice, even if they are looking for tips. Given my limited time, this is a nice little taste, but it will have to do for the time being. Next stop is Guam. Guam shares much of the same history as the Philippines, first with Spain, and then with the USA. The big difference, of course, is that they never got independence, whether they ever wanted it or not. It feels Japanese, though, even if the culture is technically Micronesian, as distinct from the Melanesian and Polynesian of the south Pacific. The restaurants are Asian. The bars are American. But if this is the crossroads of culture, then Pohnpeio, FSM, is the Micronesian ‘real thing’ and almost the opposite of Guam. Because they have the historic ruins of Nan Madol, second only to Easter Island is terms of Pacific island archeology. They also have ‘sakau’, their version of kava, no ceremony required. It’s stronger, also. But the power is off much of the time, taking much of the shine off of what would otherwise be a splendid place. Then there’s Majuro, major city of the Marshall Islands. These are atolls, not volcanoes, so when the sea levels rise, then they will be the first to go. The Chinese are there in full force, too, likely as a stepping stone to the USA, of which it is a part. They are most famous for their nuclear tests, though, so that is a dubious distinction. Do you remember the song, “No Bikini Atoll?” That’s here. Again, like Pohnpei, FSM, there are few tourists, so that’s enormous potential being wasted. There are good churches, though, flowery shirts and all. I feel right at home. You gotta’ believe in something. This island is the perfect metaphor, a long narrow chain of livability surrounded by doubts and uncertainties. Did mention that you can walk down the only road looking to separate and different oceans on either side. This trip is over. C U in Honolulu. If you like these pictures and this story then please LIKE and SUBSCRIBE. It goes a long way. Thanks! C U next time, I hope.