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Back To FranceWorld

2011-05-02T14:45:00.002-06:00

Tuesday was our last day in Madagascar. It was a strange country to reflect upon.

For instance, our hotel in Tana was really well put together and very clean. The staff were super friendly. In general, the places we had stayed at were good to excellent by third world standards. In general, all the Malagasy we dealt with were pleasant to super friendly. In certain aspects the country is quite civilized.

On the other hand, it's one of the poorest places on Earth. If you tip someone 50 cents it's a huge deal to them. It's probably the last place on the planet that still has human powered rickshaws. What with the complete lack of any discernible industry, one wonders how anyone can make ends meet.

But there are no teeming slums. The beggars who beg are way less aggressive than in many other countries. It appears that most everyone gets at least something to eat.

Geographically it's not the most amazing place ever. At the same time there is a sort of originality about the place, what with its almost feudal European houses, undending rice paddies and terraces, and intensely tropical pastel landscapes. There really is an end of the world feeling as you drive along.

And then there are the lemurs. Yes, there are the endemic plants and trees and chamelons, but unless you are a botanist or zoologist you could see most of the island without noticing too much that was different. The lemurs, though--even if you only see a few of them--, are easily worth the price of admission. A lemur island back in the States would be a huge draw.

Anyway, today was for unwinding a bit. About the only thing on the agenda was to buy some souvenirs. So in the afternoon we took a cab about 5 miles out of town to where the handcrafts stalls were. Several hundred handcraft stalls. For about maybe 30 tourists a day. It was kind of uncomfortable knowing that no matter what we bought we would be disappointing about 99% of them. Especially since we had hardly any space left in our luggage for anything.

At 9 pm we were on our way out to the airport. At 10 pm we were at the end of a long, snaking line waiting to check in. At 11 pm we were waiting to board the Air Italy plane that was sitting right outside. At 1 am we were still waiting. At 1:45, two hours late, we were finally in the air. I popped some pills and knocked myself out for a few hours as we flew north towards the Sudanese desert.

Back To Tana

2011-04-26T08:57:00.002-06:00

Saturday morning around 10 am we were gassed up (@ $5 a gallon) and heading north again. Most tourists fly back to Tana. But I was paying for Hasina's time and his gas already, and anyway I always prefer to see the scenery go by.

Go by it did. Slowly upward past the decrepit little shacks and settlements until we reached the haut plateau. Then through the sapphire towns and back to the Isalo National Park, where we had lunch at the only decent restaurant for anywhere in every direction. As night was falling we were still about an hour away from our destination of Ambalao, the scene of the zebu market three days earlier. Then the oil light came on.

Let's just say that when I know more about cars than some other guy, it's a pretty pathetic situation. But Hasina had already demonstrated a lack of automotive knowledge that was very disturbing for someone with a car in a third world country. In the gathering gloam he pulled out the dipstick. Nothing on it. When he undid the oil cap the level of gunkly sludge that he exposed made me almost gasp in astonishment. How did the engine get us even this far?

The tropics don't do twilight. Within a few minutes it was pitch dark. Some locals who had ambled over told Hasina that there was a small town about 10 km further along. I convinced him that if the light had just come on he probably had enough oil left to go 10 km. Besides, what were his other options. Off we went.

When we got to the remnants of a town he talked to a lady at a little food stall, who called her husband on his cell phone, who came over and assured Hasina that he had some oil. It took him about 20 minutes to produce it, and then about 10 more to pour it into the car.

In the meantime Maureen and I were able to gaze at the night sky. Finally, no moon. So that even with the occasional cloud passing over, it was the clearest so far on the trip. As a very occasional astronomy geek, I had been aware that the southern hemisphere had all the brightest stars. Now I could experience that. It also has by far the brightest part of the Milky Way backing up those brightest stars. Way cool. Especially because the Southern Cross was smack dab in the middle of it all.

When we finally made it to Ambalao we were glad that the hotel still had plenty of rooms. We were also glad that we had hit upon the idea of ordering some grated cheese to put upon the otherwise tasteless spaghetti and/or noodles which is served everywhere. It was also so cool outside that for once Maureen didn't have to hyperventilate over mosquitos.

Sunday morning was Easter. So when we got to Fiana, Hasina's home town, I had him take us to the 10 am Mass. Reflecting the national character, all the hymns were happy. People held hands. I reflected upon the fact that the main reason most people go to church every Sunday was for a small chance at personal and communal purity. Why are people who are so against organized religion so offended by the hope of purity?

Business in Madagascar shuts up pretty tight on Sundays. We were lucky to find a little pastry shop right before it closed. Then we were up the road for a couple of hours, where we stopped for a small picnic of bread and little triangles of processed cheese. Around 4 we made it to Ambasatavo, the woodworking town where we had stopped on Monday night. This time the nice hotel in town had one room available for us.

The reason that space was tight was that tomorrow was the day of the big zebu fights. Hasina had noticed that they were being held here on the way down south, and he was eager to have us see them. He was also eager to see them himself.

He had told us to be ready at 9 am for a chance at some good seats. But when we got to the arena entrance, it turned out that they didn't open until after 10. When we came back and entered at 10:20 there were still many, many seats in the amphitheater. Just not that many in the small sliver of shaded area. We went over and snagged some pretty good seats.

In front of us was a circular paddock about 30 feet in diameter. After about 30 minutes they opened a gate and two very confused zebu came out and stood in the hot sun. And that was about it for the longest time as the stands filled.

To the right of us a band went through endless sound checks on a stage. Hasina explained that they were the 4th best band in Madagascar. When pressed on the specificity, he said that there was a complicated point system based on crowd popularity, airplay, etc., etc. Last year they had been the 2nd best band. His band, by the way, of which he is the manager, was #2 this year. But had been #1 last year.

At 12:20, after much impatient whistling from the crowd, the master of ceremonies came out and introduced all of this year's zebu fighters. There were about 25 of them, each in a numbered sackcloth tunic. Then they all trooped off the stage and over to the paddock, where they climbed to the highest rung and waited.

Now the band started up. Pretty tight, actually. Good harmonies from the three singers, good drumming and a very loud, throbbing bass. Malagasy acoustic music is very plinky and Appalachian sounding. But their 'rock' is very Latin/African. And repetitive. Finally, as the pulse got really pulsing, out came the trio of Lemur Gold Dancers, who frugged away with energetic African step dancing.

The zebu were now extremely confused.

Back at the paddock one of the zebu fighters stepped into the ring, away from the zebus, and quickly walked across. Then another did in a different direction. It quickly got more and more intense until all 25 of them were in the ring, dancing right in front of the zebus, running in 25 different directions. Said zebus did a few futile lunges. Then at some point one of the fighters grabbed on to one of the zebu's hump and held on for dear life. If the fighter was successful, after about 15 seconds the zebu gave up and stopped trying to buck him off. At this point the other paddock door was opened and the zebu was let out.

Meanwhile the band kept throbbing, the singers kept singing, and the dancers kept swaying and high stepping in unison. After 5 minutes or so another zebu was let in and the whole zebu fighting process was repeated. And so forth and so on. So far as I could tell, no zebus were harmed in the process.

Although most of them were probably eaten shortly thereafter.

After about an hour or so of this Maureen started getting nervous about getting back to Tana that night. Especially since now we knew that Easter Monday was one of the biggest holidays in Madagascar. And since Hasina had told us that, what with everyone going out to the country for the weekend, the traffic tonight would be horrendous.

Before the fights had actually started, we, being honored guests, had been moved to actual front row seats. As in actual chairs. Hasina had scored even better, and was right up at the paddock looking in. With rapt wonder. When we finally got his attention, he expressed bittersweet disappointment, since the fights would go on until 6 pm. But leave we had to.

Several towns that we drove through were jam packed with joyful throngs attending the local events. When we got to the city of Antsirabe there were even carnival rides going on. We hadn't eaten all day, so we had to stop 45 minutes for pizza.

It's usually 3 hours back to Tana. About 40 minutes along we came upon the unusual sight of snow in the tropics. A freak storm had just passed through, and there were significant piles of hail or whatever all around. Still, traffic and weather were relatively normal for about the next hour.

Then the traffic stalled to a dead stop. Then the rain started coming down in cold torrents. Then Hasina's window started to fog up. But if you opened the window you got drenched. Then the traffic started up a little. Then it came to a dead stop again. Brilliant lightning flashes split the sky. And it continued to pour.

Hasina's band was playing in Tana tonight, and we had been hoping to be able to see it. But it took at least three hours to cover the last hour. When we reached the Chalet des Roses Hotel it was 9:40 and still raining profusely. Happily, they had reserved one of their best rooms for us. One with a high tech shower and an actual French bathtub.

We settled up with Hasina and settled in for a very comfortable last night in Madagascar.

Au Bout De Bout De Monde

2011-04-25T12:43:00.004-06:00

Tuesday afternoon and we were heading south out of Fiana. I realized that what was so distinctive about the Madagascar green grass and blue skies is that they are somewhat pastelish, but with a tropical intensity. And I had forgotten to mention that the cute little rectangular tall houses was that most of them also had little French type balconies on their second floors.

It was only about an hour or so to Ambalatoa, our stop for the night. The LP said that its houses and balconies were full of character, but that was only in the context of Madagascar's poverty and dirt. Being a stop on the tourist circuit, there was one half decent hotel with its coterie of about a dozen or so tourists.

They were here because Wednesday is market day. So the next morning we were down in the market area, walking in the narrow rows between all the people with their merchandise piled on the ground or in little makeshift stalls. I almost always there on other than market days in third world countries. Nor do I care that much, since all that is for sale is really cheap stuff for really poor people. But it was cute to finally catch one of them.

Then it was off to the other side of town, where it was the weekly zebu market. Here on a dusty hillside were hundreds of men and even more hundreds of zebus milling around. Not that we were in the market to buy one.

On the road again. But only about ten kilometers. Now it was a private lemur reserve, run for and by a small village. Here they didn't feed them bananas, but the little ring tailed guys were so acclimated to people that they would just hang out a few feet away. This species lives in groups of twenty or more, and they all take a nap just after noon. Lucky for us that we were there right then, because all of a sudden the group coagulated all around us, and then took off en masse to the nearby tree which they had decided to nap in. Ridiculously cute little things. Kind of a cross between a cat and a monkey, but not really like either.

We were now entering Madagascar's south. The rice fields were ending, and in their stead were massive rocky outcrops and great grassy horizons. Kind of like a tropical Wyoming. The one and a half lane national highway twisted around some of the mountains and soon we were on the high plateau. Now it was like the western Great Plains before settlement. After 50 kilometers or so of this we saw a sandstone ridge approaching. This was Isalo?

The wonderment and disappointment was because for many, many years I had read about the end of the world geological wonderland that was Isalo National Park. And seeing it had been one of my major goals in coming to Madagascar. But it clearly looked like it was somewhat less amazing than about a hundred different areas within a couple of hundred miles of my home in Albuquerque. Why does the National Geographic pretend that some place is really special when it isn't? It's not like their writers haven't been to New Mexico or Utah.

The 'town' consisted of two okay hotels and a couple of small markets. But here we were, and next morning we drove a few kilometers on a bad dirt road to a trailhead. Here our guide (you always have to pay for a guide) led us a half a click or so to a campground, and then another half a click up the canyon and up a couple of hundred steps to a small waterfall. It was okay, but, again, there are several hundred canyons in the Southwest which are as good or better. At this point Maureen retreated to the campground, and the guide led me a km up the level creek to a couple of very small waterfall/pools. For this he got $37, which is way more than the average Malagasy makes in a month.

Then back to the campground. And more thoroughly acclimated ringtail lemurs sitting in trees, chewing on leaves, and hoping for food to be left out. Plus 5 or 10 brown woolly lemurs, which are usually nocturnal, but which had learned to adjust due to that possibility of food being left out. We spent about an hour just hanging out with lemurs, lemurs everywhere.

Back to 'town' for lunch and then the four hour drive south to the coast. For about five miles the sandstone ridge was semi-dramatic and interesting. Then we were back to flat endless dirt and brownish grass. And, another five miles on, the first--and major--sapphire town.

About ten years ago somebody discovered sapphires in the dirt around here. Almost immediately a Wild West mining town sprang up, although it was hard to imagine any Malagasy being wild or dangerous. Supposedly the drug gangsters from Israel and Russia and India were. There were rundown store after rundown store of sapphire and ruby dealers and a level of poverty and ramshackle that were finally approaching African levels. Hasina was too nervous to stop.

As we continued there were two or three other such much smaller towns about fifteen miles apart. After that the few settlements which appeared were totally African, with sloppily made wooden shacks and the first unhappy looking Malagasy we had seen so far. Hasina made it be known that he didn't like anything about the South: not the heat, not the food, not their attitudes, nothing. It didn't look quite that bad to me.

Soon we were on a long downhill slope, and then there was the line of the ocean on the distant horizon. Not that there were any beaches in our immediate future; I knew that the destination at the end of the road, Tulear, fronted on a mangrove swamp.

When we got to Tulear it wasn't terribly hot and it wasn't terribly humid. But it was terrible, exhibiting the same post Apocalyptic look that so many African burghs do. Still, Hasina knew all the right places to go in these places, and soon we were esconced in a pretty nice hotel room, complete with a/c, for $30 a night. That seems to be the average rate for middle class comfort in Madagascar. Also, as with the other places we stayed, most all the bathroom fixtures were not only semi-modern, but they worked. After about an hour of our first decadent cooling off of the trip, Hasina took us to a pretty decent restaurant, considering how crappy the rest of the town was.

Friday was the day to go to the beach. Ivato, that is. Since his car wouldn't make it up the sandy coastal road, Hasina had hired another guy with his car. For a little more than an hour we jounced along the 27 km. Now we were at what was billed as one of Madagascar's premier beach experiences.

But first we had to walk around the baobob forest. Although Africa, particularly West Africa, is famous for the very weirdly shaped baobob tree, they only have one species. Madagascar, however, is the home of the baobob, which, along with a host of other strangely shaped desert plants, inhabits the very dry areas. (In case you aren't familiar with baobobs, they have a very large, round tubular white base, and then at their very tops a few straggly small branches flailing away.)

Baobobs usually live quite apart from each other, so it was pretty cool to see hundreds in a relatively small area. Although, this being a desert, you wouldn't exactly call it a forest. Still, it was pretty cool.

It was rather hot work, though, tramping through the deep sand, so we were really looking forward to the beach. But when the driver dropped us off at one of the better hotels, said hotel didn't look so good. And when I walked out to the beach it wasn't all that impressive. Worse, I could see little boys standing and playing about 500 yards out.

Nonetheless, we dutifully took our stuff down there, stripped off to our bathing togs, and bravely entered the water. The bottom alternated between mud and rocks. If I put my flip flops on, the mud dragged me down. If I took them off the rocks jabbed at my diabetic feet. After fifteen minutes the water was barely up to my knees. I gave up and turned around.

Once again a victim of dishonest advertising. As I looked up and down the thin strand of beach sand, it was clear that every hotel in the area fronted on the same mess. We went back and sat on our beach chairs to dry out. And now we were surrounded by a bunch of young girl hawkers.

I must say that the Malagasy are very polite, even when they are begging. Tell them no, and they go away almost apologetically. These girls were slightly more persistent, especially once they found out that Maureen was interested in the cheap beach scarves they were selling. I helped negotiate a price for four of them. Now the girls started bringing out small wooden lemurs and the like. When one pulled out a couple of stunning seashells for fifty cents each, I went 'wha?' Now each of them produced shell after shell of amazing quality. We ended up buying 10 for $5

At 1:30 we were jouncing back towards Tulear, wondering if we were ever going to be able to leave Madagascar. Because last night Hasina had informed us that for safety reasons the continent of Europe had banned Air Madagascar from ever landing there again. And that hundreds of people were not camped out at the main airport. When we had made it over to the only internet place in town the story had been confirmed. But there was also a note that for at least the next week or so Air Italy, the charter company that had ended up flying us down, would also be flying people back. Whew. Sort of.

When we got back to Tulear Hasina said that he had gone out to the Tulear airport and confirmed for us that our flight was actually leaving on Tuesday night. Whew. Sort of. Now all we had to do for the rest of the day was hang out in our a/c hotel room, walk around town, and have another meal at that really good restaurant.

Meandering Through Madagascar

2011-04-19T06:34:00.000-06:00

By Saturday morning we were more than ready to leave our not-so-hot bungalow accommodations. We loaded up Hasina's car and headed back up the highway towards Tana.

We hadn't been able to see much coming down in the dark on Thursday, so this was our first chance to really peruse the Madagascar countryside. Somewhat reddish soil, small rice paddies everywhere anyone could put them, light to dark green grass otherwise. Madagascar is famously deforested, and there was all sorts of charcoal making activity in evidence, but they mostly use fast growing eucalyptus trees for that. And the country actually looks pretty darn verdant.

And then there are the Malagasy living quarters. In most poor, backward countries the people live in shacks or badly constructed cinder block shanties. Here there are all the various slight variations of tall, thin, rectangular red or brown brick/clay houses. That's right, houses. Substantial looking rectangular ones. Well, maybe not so substantial. But real houses, like you might see in eastern Europe. And, set amongst the verdancy, quite striking in giving Madagascar its Madagascariness.

By 12:30 we were back in Tana, and Hasina dropped us off at our previous hotel/restaurant, while he went to try and fix whatever it was that had stalled the car out earlier. Good food and a touch of wifi as we waited for him. By 3 we were heading out of town again, this time pretty much due south.

But first we stopped at a shopping center on the outskirts of the city. Most African countries are way too poor to have such a thing, so it was kind of comforting to see that there was enough of a middle class to support a modern supermarket and a large batch of small other stores. There are also a surprising number of French expats living here, either working or retired. Turns out that $20,000 will buy you a decent modern house here. Suck on that, House Hunters International. Now if I could only do something about that 36 hour plane ride to and fro...

Then we were out of town. This was the heartland of the Merina tribe, Madagascar's largest and most dominant one. Pleusieur de rice paddies, distinctive red brick houses, red soil, green moderate hill/mountains. I certainly don't want to give the impression that the economics of the country are wealthy, or even passable. But there was no overt air of desperation. So far we had not met a Malagasy who expressed a discouraging word or gesture. Even the beggars begged in a modest, unassuming way.

As with other tropical countries, when the sun went down: boom, it was dark. There was still over an hour to get to our destination, Antsirabe. The road was smooth, the traffic was not all that intense. There weren't any potholes. Except, craack!, that one. To be fair to Hasina, who was a very careful driver, it was a trick one. Nonetheless, it had blown out his tire.

Pull over. Wait for him to put on the spare. Except that the lug nuts were impossible to budge, even with me jumping up and down on the lug wrench. I told him that he was going to have to drive into town on it; he didn't want to. Instead he found someone to drive us all the 10 km into Antsirabe, where he dropped us off at a half decent hotel. Nearby there was a half decent pizza place.

The next morning he showed up at around 9:30, having slept in his car all night, and having been unable to loosen a single lug nut. Time for a Plan B again. But he told us to wait while he went back to the car and rolled it into town. Several hours passed while we waited in the hotel lobby, then walked a bit around town. Antsirabe is the pousse-pousse capital of the country, if not the world. Motor rickshaws are ubiquitous in India and Thailand. Bicycle rickshaws can also be found there. Madagascar still relies primarily on human rickshaws. Most of whom are trotting around barefoot. Just begging for business from extra large white people. We didn't bite.

Finally Hasina came back with the old tire off and the spare on. Then he took off to ditch the ruined one. No spare for a few days. We now drove off for 7 km to see a famous lake outside of town.

The lake itself wasn't that special. But it was Palm Sunday, and beaucoup de locals were walking to and from church. We returned to town where there was a big gathering for the ersatz Palm Sunday motorcycle races in the main square. Then back to that pizza restaurant for lunch. Then on the road again.

Madagascar isn't mind blowingly different. But it is at least pleasantly exotic, what with the red soil and the rice paddies and those strange tiny tall houses. The capital, Tana, had felt like a small provincial city. Out here it was like a quiet Sunday in the back of beyond. Except that it was the main national highway.

We made it to the next main city/town, Ambositra, before dark. The nice hotel in town was fully booked with tour groups (!) So we found a halfway decent one out by the rice paddies and had a beautiful sunset. Then it was back to the nice place, where we were serenaded by Malagasy folk instruments.

Monday morning it was back on the back road that was the main highway. Everything was green, with many, many small brown people carrying on their daily business. Beautiful blue sky with varying combinations of white fluffy clouds. Kind of timeless and poor. But nobody seemed scared or too desperate.

We turned off the main road and were climbing up into the forest. Actual mountain rainforest, with all the attendant underbrush and small settlements. We were heading for Ramanofana National Park for more lemurmania.

The only decent hotel was relatively expensive, but more than decent. As we settled in the humidity got higher and higher. Dark clouds were accumulating. Around 5:30 the torrents of rain started. Well, what else would you expect in a rainforest? But so much for our scheduled night lemur walk. Which we had blown off in Perinet since we figured we would do it here. Oh well. They're only tiny mouse lemurs anyway.

Tuesday morning we were ready for our daylight lemur walk. Maureen had been complaining, since the forest would be wet and slippery. And hadn't we already seen lemurs? Really good ones? Nonetheless she was a good sport as we went down and down and then up and up and up some more. Which wouldn't have been that bad if my knees and my back weren't killing me. And if we had seen any actual lemurs at the end of it all. But all I had done was pay some hefty entrance and guide fees. Not even spiders or frogs. Just a dumb forest with a couple of lemurs 30 feet up that just sat there. Sloth watching is more exciting.

Of course, I should have been suspicious with anything labeled 'rainforest'. I know it's not PC to say this, but there is nothing absolutely magical or mystical about a rainforest per se. It is just a forest where it rains a lot. The forest a few miles from your house is usually just as interesting. Sorry, but it is.

Back to the car, back to the semi-luxury hotel for a quick shower and meal. Then back up and over through the rainforest to the national highway, where we were again with the rice paddies and the strange, cute houses and the many, many people. On to Fiana, Hasina's hometown and the second or third or fourth largest city in the country.

Just a poor little dump, though. Hasina dropped us off at a very slow internet place while he went around town trying to find a new tire.

But one of the reasons I travel is in the hopes that I'll come up with new ideas. And I'm pleased to say that I have. A new business to start, in fact. The advertising jingle I've come up with says it all:

Five kinds of lemur from Lemur Land
Make Folz Lemur Sauce taste grand!

Leaping Lemurs

2011-04-16T04:57:00.003-06:00

Hasina didn't show up until after 4:30. Then within two blocks his car stalled. Some locals standing by push started him. Not an auspicious start. It was a three and a half hour drive the mountain, most of it in the pitch dark. Road surface was decent, traffic not too scary for the fourth world. We pulled into the best non-luxury hotel by the national park. Once again, the LP had raved about it, but in reality it was a large bunch of crappy bungalows, way overpriced at $27. No competition. After eating that night and the next morning, Hasina drove us over to the park entrance. In the sort of early morning daylight, now that the mist had lifted, we were surrounded by a dense, but hardly threatening, forest. Humid, but not really hot and sweaty. Everyone had to purchase a guide, and shortly Abraham was leading us along the 3 hour trail. Flat, then up a smallish hill. Then Abraham told us to wait while he searched for lemurs. Soon we were stumbling through a patch of forest and there, hanging from a tree about ten feet up, were two orange/yellow sifakas. Besides saying that they were brightly colored and unbelievably cute, you'll have to look up lemur pictures to see what it is we were seeing. Worth the price of admission right there. Then Abraham went and away and soon led us through denser forest to where we saw our first indri. Although Madagascar has 47 species of lemur up and down its length, this was the only place were the indri, the largest lemurs, live. They're about three feet long, except when they're stretched out, when they're at least twice that. They're also brilliantly white and black, and they make weird hooting noises. It's hard to take pictures of them, though, since they're almost always hunched up holding on to a tree about 20 feet up. Except when they jump from tree to tree. All lemurs seem to freeze in mid air and levitate from tree to tree, never reaching out to grab anything, but just jumping the exact amount of distance to get there. The indri can go about 30 feet between jumps, and all of them can complete 5 jumps in around 3 seconds. After we were amazed seeing 3 indri about 30 feet up, a few minutes later we came upon a larger group of them in various adjacent trees less than 10 feet above us. Apparently we were very fortunate to see so many so close up. Sometimes they hold on to each other; sometimes they hop off to hold on to a tree by themselves. We saw a few of the common brown lemurs, and a nocturnal woolly lemur, who was sleeping about 30 feet up and was totally indistinguishable. Then we finished our hike and were driven back to our bungalow. For the afternoon we were taken to the grounds of the luxury hotel, which didn't strike me as all that luxurious. They had a little zoo area with a crocodile farm and a few foussa, who are smallish elongated cats and Madagascar's largest carnivores. But the main draw was lemur island, a fifteen foot canoe ride from the 'mainland'. When we walked into the forest 100 yards from the landing, hanging on to a tree almost at eye level, calmly gazing at us, was one of those adorable yellow/orange and white sifakas. Pretty damn cute. But less than a minute later, knowing that humans meant bananas, a troop of at least ten brown lemurs came hopping and bounding through the trees and forest floor at us. Maureen almost freaked as they immediately jumped on our shoulders and sat on our heads. Their paws were clawless and their attitude was really gentle. Each of them was happy with just the smallest bite of banana. They were also content to sit on your shoulders for minutes at a time, although they might just as soon bound off to a branch 10 feet away. They were about the size of a large squirrel, although of course they are primates (and precursors to monkeys). Besides the orange sifakas, there were some black and white ones (which were not indri, since indri can not be kept in captivity.) Both were about midsize between the brown ones and the indri. Each species has its own personality. The brown ringtails will jump all over you, but don't like to be touched. You can actually pet the orange ones. All of them will eat out of your hands. Then there was a fourth species, the bamboo lemurs. These were small and brown, and way more appealing than koalas. Gentle eyes and a gentle round nose, they were timid and humble. Like the others, though (and like the rest of us primates), they really liked those bananas. One of my best animal experiences ever. Not quite up there with the gorillas in the mist, but getting close. Even Maureen was glad that she hadn't followed her first instincts and run screaming back to the canoe when first 'attached' by the bounding ringtail extroverts.

Day One

2011-04-14T02:49:00.002-06:00

We woke up and looked out our window at the street around us. The guidebooks had consistently said that Antananrivo (Tana for short) was congested, smoggy and dirty. It looked not a bit like that. The books also said that the houses and buildings were colorful and unique. They weren't that, either. Finally, the city was supposed to be crazily hilly. I've been in far steeper places.

Once we were able to switch our room to one a little less toxic, we went out for a late morning walk. I immediately noticed that the city was also a lot smaller than advertised. Places that were made to seem on the other side of town were actually a couple of blocks apart.

And where were the beggars and touts who were supposed to be constantly hectoring us? A few showed up, but they were also way too polite and gave up way too easily. The first impression was that almost all the Malagasy were really shy and friendly people. Not great for economic development a la New York City, but way pleasanter to be around.

We always need to compare things. The closest I could come right off the bat was that Madagascar was sort of like a really laid back Indonesia. In case you don't know, the Malagasy did not come from Africa, as you might expect, but from, indeed, Indonesia.

My Tajikistan friend Eric's parents were Indian, but were born in Madagascar. So when we found the Shalimar restaurant we were expecting real Indian food. But only about 10% of the menu was even quasi-Indian. Half decent, nonetheless.

Then we took a taxi to the highest point in town, the Rova, which was the home of all the 19th Century queens who ran central Madagascar. (They were kind of nuts, though, so the French marched in around 1885 and took over the place.) The grounds were closed and the building, not all that amazing to begin with, was just a husk of its former self, since it had burned down in 1995. Being on the top of everything, we did get some good views over the city and the close-in countryside. The geography was not quite like anywhere else: Rice paddies, reddish brown houses, light green rolling hills, reddish brown soil. At least today the sky had a clear luminescent, almost mystical quality like some of the skies in South Africa.

We walked back downhill into Haut-Ville, the older, higher part of Tana. Then down some stairs to Basse-Ville, the newer, crappier area of town. We cruised the open air market, where tiny stalls sold tiny bras, tiny shoes, avocados and tomatoes, and seemingly drugged chickens and ducks calmly waiting to be purchased and eaten.

Then along the wide Avenue de l'Independence. I was kind of expecting to find some modern buildings and economic activity here, but uh uh. Viantianne, Laos, had always been at the top of my list of sleepy, nothing happening capitals. But at least they have a phony Arc de Triumphe there. Here in Tana all there was was a presidential palace at the end of a very long block. And as I've already intimated, nobody is quite sure who the president is these days, so it's better for everyone to stay away from there.

Back to our hotel, which was beginning to look like the classiest place in town. Then dinner in their classy little restaurant. Then to sleep in our large, classy bed.

Thursday morning our guide and driver for the rest of the trip, Hasina, showed up, being a little tired from having just driven up the length of the island for the past two days. He showed me his air conditioned Audi, which will be our home for the next two weeks. We finalized the price: $50 a day for him and his car, plus gas, which is about $6 a gallon. We already know from our research that he is the best in the country, and knows everyone and everywhere. His English is much better than advertised, and he seems really friendly.

So at three this afternoon we're heading down to lemurland. Internet may or may not be happening in the rest of the country. Hopefully it is.

That's Why They Call It Mad Air

2011-04-13T10:51:00.002-06:00

So now that we were leaving at 9 pm on Sunday, that morning we headed out to the Pere Lachaise graveyard, the place where everyone famous from Moliere to Edith Piaf is buried. Maureen had been upset with me for 11 years because I hadn't taken a picture of her at Jim Morrison's grave back in 2000. So now we had to find it again. For my part, I got my picture taken at Rossini's grave (Chopin would have been too obvious). Walking along through the streets of Paris for our last afternoon, it was hard to imagine that the next day we would be in Madagascar. Around four we moseyed back to the hotel to collect our baggage, with Maureen freaking out that we would be late for the airport. I kept telling that I had done this beaucoup times, and sure enough we were dropped off at Terminal 2A at ten to seven. I strolled in to find the Air Madagascar check in line. Once again CDG proved maddeningly opaque; there were no obvious signs for which line was which. And even when I asked each line what they were waiting for, Air Mad was never one of them. Finally someone directed us to a knot of people standing around. Strange. Then I was found a little Air Mad sign in a concealed office. A befuddled girl who was standing there smiled lamely and said that there was no plane. Oh. Now what? She didn't have a clue. Oh. Another airline that serves Madagascar, Air Austral, was nearby. They didn't have a spare seat for at least the next week. Oh. About 20 minutes later a young Croatian guy named Adrian, who seemed to be a lot more on the ball, came in and started furiously pecking away at a keyboard, trying to figure out what was going in. It turned out that our plane was in Guangzhou, China, for some reason and had blown out a tire. But since Madagascar hasn't had any sort of recognized government for the past two years, Air Madagascar, owned by the state, couldn't just get a new one. So the plane was stuck in China. Oh, and by the way, Europe's two week Spring vacation started tomorrow, which meant that flights and hotels everywhere were fully booked. Never to mind. We would be put up at an airport hotel while they sorted this out. Which couldn't possibly happen before Tuesday. And then maybe not, either. So off we went on the shuttle service to Terminal 3, where an Ibis hotel sat. Ibis is owned by the same company that owns Motel 6, and it was a slight upgrade from that. At $150 a night if we had been paying. Plus we got meal tickets. I have always assumed that the French cannot make bad food, but when we got to the buffet I was proven wrong. Then up to our sterile bed in our sterile room, where we used the free wifi which was only vaguely, barely usable. The next morning, after another great buffet, we ambled back over to Terminal 2A to see if Adrian had come up with anything. He wasn't there, so I left Mo to wait for him whilst I trundled down to Europcar to see if I could rearrange the rental that I had already booked for our return. If Madagascar fell through, Plan B was to drive to Switzerland, then to Portugal, and then back. In the midst of Spring Break. Never to mind. When I got back to Mo, she informed me that Adrian had informed her that Air Mad had chartered a plane from no name Air Italy, and we would be leaving at 10 am tomorrow. Hopefully. Back to the Ibis and more meaningless buffet meals. At dinner I happened upon an acquaintance from the night before, who offhandedly told me that the flight was acually leaving at 9 am. So at 7 am we were back at Terminal 2A, at the long end of a line of passengers. When we got to the front, the girl looked at Maureen's passport, saw that there were fewer than 6 months on it, and said that she had to get approval. A long, anxious wait. Just as I was getting up for the Swiss Alps, they said it was okay. The plane was in the air at 9:40. We had to skirt Libya because of some no fly zone. Then it was south through Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya. I must admit that it was pretty cool to look down upon the Sahara, Lake Aswan, the Nile around Khartoum, etc. When we went past Nairobi I was really looking forward to seeing Kilamanjaro from the air, but it turned out that the plane through smack dab right over it, so we never saw anything. Night had fallen when we reached the Tana airport. It was pleasantly chaotic. For some reason they had done away with charging for visas. Maybe they're hoping that this will increase tourism, since nobody ever comes any more due to that pesky lack of government. I had booked a certain hotel ahead of time. One that the LP had raved about. But since Saturday I had sent them three emails without a response. So on Monday night I had gotten on Trip Advisor and found an alternative. They had emailed back immediately saying that they had exactly one room and that they would hold it for me. Great. And now that we had cleared Customs all I needed to do was to change some money and negotiate with one of the ravenous cab drivers. But while I was looking for the bank office in the middle of a field over there, Maureen noticed that there was a guy standing there holding a sign saying, 'Michael Folz'. Damn. I had been waiting for that to happen my whole life, and I had missed it. Turns out that the cab driver the first hotel had contracted for had kept coming out to the airport every time the plane was supposed to arrive. A really nice guy, too. So we had him take us into town, to the first hotel. But when we got there at 10:30 pm, it was a horrible dump. Not that I haven't stayed in worse, but now I had a lady to impress. So I called an audible and had the cab driver take us to the new, second hotel. Sure enough, our room was waiting. Yes, it smelled like crap since they had just varnished it two days ago. But it was clean and modern, with all kinds of cool bathroom fixtures. With Maureen continuing to worry that we would be bitten by a malarial mosquito on the first night, we went to bed.

April In Paris

2011-04-09T13:15:00.003-06:00

Started out with a small contretemps with Homeland Security at the ABQ airport. Turns out they get mad at you when you tell them that they're stupid and incompetent. Then when you try to explain to them that if they made an effort to become smarter and more competent then no one would need to tell them that they were stupid and incompetent, they just get angrier. But the larger problem had to do with the plane being delayed by two hours. Which meant that under the best of circumstances we would be getting into Dallas 30 minutes before the flight to Paris. No sweat, the airline told us. Nonetheless we were sweating. We got off of the plane with 20 minutes to spare, and made it, panting, to the next one in 10. Then it sat at the gate for another 50 minutes. Apparently not that many people commute between Dallas and Paris, since the plane was half empty. Which meant that we could stretch out, which was good because the only movies available were a couple of children's ones at 3 am over Greenland. Charles de Gaulle airport is almost at a third world level. No ATMs worked, and the only 'bank' available ripped me off for $20 in changing a $100. The dirty train going into town passed endless graffiti filled walls. Then we lugged our luggage through the Metro. When we walked up the stairs into the sunlight we were at the oldest, quaintest bridge that bridges the Seine. And we were surrounded by the wide streets and endless ornate stone 19th century buildings which define Paris. Yes, it was still pretty special, even to my cyncial jetlagged eyes. Occasionally hours and hours and hours of research on the internet pay off. I had found this incredibly quaint hotel at the very pointy tip of Ile de la Cite, basically across the street from the Louvre and a couple of blocks from Notre Dame. 60 Euro a night, which was about one fifth the price of any other hotel within several miles. The only drawback was that I had to carry our incredibly heavy bags up six flights of stairs. On the other hand, once you got up there you had a balcony overlooking an amazingly quaint courtyard/park. Once I had recovered from my sherpa ordeal we set out in earnest on our five days of sightseeing and hanging out in the middle of Paris. I won't bore you with all the minutiae, especially since you probably know a lot more about Paris than I do. Suffice it to say that each and every day our poor, ragged, ancient feet gave out long before the rest of us did. And that all the obvious and semi-obvious places were gone to, even if we had also done it 11 years ago when we were last here. We did not spend the $20 each to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower, both because it was unclear whether we could go all the way up, and because there was a 2 hour wait. In fact, by that point late on Friday afternoon Paris was getting a little tedious, since the endless crowds of tourists--at least half of whom seemed to be feckless college students from everywhere--were turning the place into a giant theme park. Just to show you how much tourism has overwhelmed the touristic part of the city: The French now all speak English. We were not able to book our absurdly quaint hotel for Saturday night, which meant that we had to lug all our stuff out to a hotel in an honorably working class district. It's impossible not to notice how stress free and outdoor cafe driven French lives are. It was even the case in our new environs. And whereas in the center of Paris we could only longingly and despairingly look at the way too expensive meals that even regular people can afford there, here we could buy food that was only 50-100% more than in the States. What had made it even worse was that the French are almost perverse in putting meat into every single dish on every single menu in the country. But after chowing down on some veggie Turkish fare, we hopped the Metro back to the Arc de Triumphe and joined the claustrophobic crowds along the Champs Elysee. When we returned to the hotel I checked my email. Air Madagascar had just decided to totally change the flight that we were booked on for Sunday afternoon. So now we had to quickly rejigger our schedule and tell the hotel in Antanarivo not to send the car to pick us up at 3 am, because now we were coming in at 9. Oh, and I had to do this first blog post.

Islamabad / Lahore / Peshawar

2010-10-15T15:52:00.001-06:00

Truth to tell, I would have just as soon have this flight be the one back home. But the demise of the Chitral and Nanga Parbat options meant that I now had five empty days to fill. Nor could I have stayed in Skardu longer. The possibility of two days of canceled flights followed by that 24 hour bus ride precluded that.

On the plus side, I could always look at this as an Extra Added Bonus Feature. Why not check out Pakistan Today by visiting three of its major cities? So first off I would be touching down in Islamabad, its capital city.

Well, not quite, since the airport was in Rawalpindi, the older, crappier city that pre-existed Islamabad's creation in 1967. And I couldn't see that much descending, since although the cloud cover vanished once we got out of the mountains, it was replaced by an almost as severe smog cover.

But anyone familiar with the intense chaos that permeates India would be pleasantly surprised by the relatively orderly nature of Pakistan. There was only one taxi driver who hassled me as I exited, and the traffic police made sure that he wasn't bothering me and that he was charging the right price.

That turned out to be less than $4 for the 20 km plus drive to Islamabad. Like other 'planned' third world capitals, the city wasn't exactly a city at all. Rather it was more like a few several block square commercial centers surrounded by mostly emptiness. The first hotel I was taken to was charging three times what the LP said it would. So I found my way to another hotel in another of the centers a couple of miles away and made my deal.

By now it was around 4, I was feeling hot and sweaty and polluted, and also very hungry. So I took a cab to the Pizza Hut, several miles away at yet another commercial center, for some middle class munching.

Here at the capital, the country's most progressive enclave, 95% of the people walking around were still men. And of the few women visible, about 95% of them wore at least head coverings. No full burkas, but a fair number of face coverings, too. Which in sum total seemed pretty odd, because I'd been noticing that all of the women portrayed in TV shows and commercials wore stylish modern Pakistani clothes with uncovered heads. Maybe when they go home...

After I stuffed myself I went around the corner to a fully functioning ATM. Then a short cab ride to the Blue Area, Islamabad's fancy shop zone. Well, it wasn't that fancy at all, but it at least was bearable for my walk of about a mile and a half. Then as the sky got dark it was time to go back to the hotel.

And that was about all that Islamabad had that was worth seeing.

Friday morning I took a long taxi ride that went past Rawalpindi and to the Daewoo Bus station. This company is Pakistan's premier non-air travel option. They even have a website that functions. For $10 I bought a ticket on the half hourly deluxe VIP service to Lahore.

I usually get very annoyed by stupid security procedures, but Pakistan is one country where you appreciate such things. Everyone was frisked before getting on the bus; they would also be frisked after rest stops. A guy got on right before the bus took off and videotaped each passenger. I couldn't tell if this was done so that after the explosion they could identify who it was who set off the bomb, or so that they could more readily notify the next of kin.

In a few minutes we were on the open road. And do I mean open. It was a brand new six lane freeway, with no bullock carts, no bicycles, no trucks spewing massive amounts of diesel smoke at 10 mph. In fact, there wasn't that much traffic at all. Again, anyone familiar with India would be flabbergasted at such a smooth, comfortable state of affairs. Not only that, but the a/c worked, and the attendant kept bringing little snacks. After we snaked down a 1000 foot or so drop the rest of the journey was alongside flat, green fields. We could have easily been on an Interstate in Indiana.

After four hours or so we entered Lahore, once one of India's major cities, now (with 9 million people) Pakistan's second largest. I had expected to finally be seeing crazily intense roads such as in India, but again it was relatively orderly and subdued. And I was back in the land of the autorickshaw. I took one to an area of town where the LP had reviewed five different hotels.

They all sucked, especially with the electricity off and their elevators (when they had one) not working. So I took another autorickshaw a couple of miles to another of those LP 'favorite picks'. One that they just went on and on about. I couldn't believe what a piece of junk it was. All in all, this was proving to be by far the worst LP guide ever. I went back to the original grouping and settled on the National. At least they had a generator that would run the lights and fan, if not the lift and a/c.

It was getting dark now, but I decided to try and find a half decent restaurant. I had expected Pakistan to serve up some of my north Indian favorites, such as mutter paneer. But 99% of the menu listings invariably had meat in them, and I was getting tired of 'simple begetables'. Nor, Pizza Hut notwithstanding, were there any restaurants with any class or western dishes. So I walked about a mile to a couple of rave LP listings, which of course turned out to be dirty and shoddy. Then back through the dark on the sidewalkless street dodging cars, autorickshaws, and horse and burro carts. And lame vegetables and rice and naan at the National.

Saturday morning it was time to see the sights, so off I went to the Lahore Fort. Most every large city in northern India has a gigantic fort built by at least one of the Moghul emperors in the 1600s. Unfortunately for Lahore, Delhi's and Agra's are much more impressive. I was still standing out like a sore thumb in this, Pakistan's most cosmopolitan city. At one point of my tour a trio of obvious fundamentalists scowled at me. But then a minute later a large middle class family, including the decked out womenfolk, were so excited to see a foreigner visiting their country that they literally gushed at me.

Next to the fort (again typical) was a huge mosque dating back to the same era. I thought it one of the nicest, most understated, and most serene huge mosques I've ever seen.

Then I had to take a long walk around the outside of the fort to get to Lahore's old city. It certainly was an authentic old city, with narrow, congested, but certainly not scary, lanes and alleys. Since this was where most of the serious shopping got done, there were substantially more women visible. And it was a pleasant walk for a mile or so, but as usual for these places the tiny stores and cheap items for sale were always just more of the same. Generally speaking, you can't find any good tourist goods if there aren't any tourists.

Unfortunately for Pakistan, even without the bad press, outside of the mountains it didn't look like there was much that was of any genuine interest here in the flats. After returning to my hotel I then took a two mile stroll towards The Mall, Lahore's 'vibrant downtown'. But once again it was just dirty and boring. And no usable sidewalks, so I was constantly dodging traffic. Plus no usable restaurants. Oh well, back to the National. But just as I was leaving I saw out of the corner of my eye, rather incongruously, a Subway(!). The subsequent sandwich wasn't all that good, but at least it wasn't rice and vegetables.

I had been planning on two days in Lahore, but I had run out of anything halfway exciting halfway through the first day. On top of that the city was hot and polluted. Plus that night I was lying on the mattress in the hotel room when I noticed that my body was getting covered with all sorts of bites from some kind of invisible insect. So I sprayed down the bed and made plans to leave the next morning.

Thus on Sunday morning it was back to the Daewoo terminal for the 10:15 to Peshawar. For this I would be backtracking to Islamabad, and then going over two hours further, which would take up most of the day. The good news was that I could look forward to about seven hours of air conditioned hassle free travel. The bad news was that, since my flight left Wednesday, that would give me Monday and Tuesday in one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

I am not an adrenaline junkie. It's just that Air Arabia, the cheap airline that would fly me back to Dubai, only flies out of Karachi and Peshawar. And Karachi might be even more dangerous. Plus it was a 21 hour bus ride from Lahore. Plus the roads were ruined after the flooding. Plus I already had my ticket from Peshawar.

Anyway, I had been communicating with a couple of other people who had just been there, and they said that everything had been copasetic. Not to mention that the media are always over-hyping how scary terrorist centers are. Although I must admit to a little trepidation when we pulled into the Peshawar terminal and I was deposited out on the street.

My first impressions were of more crowds and more poverty. And awful, awful pollution. Some of the worst pollution I'd ever experienced. On a Sunday afternoon in a city with no industry. I got an autorickshaw easily enough and was soon at Green's Hotel, an LP 'midrange' pick. Prices were twice what LP said, but the armed guard and the iron gate outside, plus reliable wifi, cable, and a/c even when on generator all made it worth it. Especially since the power kept going on and off every hour or so.

That night I was lying in bed, thinking 'Geez, it would be such great terrorist PR to kill an American. And I sure look like one. And the longer I stay here the more people will know about me.' It was kind of unnerving to think that life could be so uncertain. Then I realized that this is exactly what we did to millions of innocent Iraqis with our invasion. I got up and took another sleeping pill.

Monday morning I went out on the street. Didn't feel that dangerous. Maybe I should walk all the way to my destination. But the pollution was so bad that I gave up on that idea and took an autorickshaw over to Khyber Bazaar. Then down that street for a while and a right turn into Peshawar's famous old city.

More twisting little alleys and lanes. Like Lahore, lots of people but overall calm and easy. Again, though, no tourists and therefore nothing all that interesting to look at, let alone buy. Even without the threat of being blown up, one would think that Peshawar should be pretty exotic. And it had seemed that way the last time I was here, in 1970, on my way from Afghanistan to India. But maybe I've seen too much by now. Or maybe the world—especially the poor world—has just gotten too damn homogenized. Or maybe the pollution was just too unbreathable. Within a couple of hours I was through the maze and back out on the slightly wider commercial streets of slightly newer Peshawar.

Was I in danger? It was hard to say. Like the rest of Pakistan, there were any number of people who would stop me on the street, shake my hand, and warmly say, 'Welcome to Pakistan'. For the rest, I could imagine them thinking, 'Dead man walking'. Or maybe, 'That dude is one brave MF'. Probably both. With so many people passing by, and with me so clearly not one of them, all it would take would be one or two Taliban sympathizers...

Of course, I could just be imagining everything. Except for the fact that Peshawar has had several waves of deadly bombings over the past couple of years. So that even if my life wasn't specifically in danger, the fear and tension must just be below the surface of every mind walking past me.

Back to the clean air and a/c of my hotel room. The TV was even flat screen and with at least five English speaking channels. Free, courteous room service. Armed guard outside. Streets constantly patrolled by soldiers and police. Ahhh.

And, save for a couple more forays out to do some last minute shopping, that was about it for my stay in Peshawar. After around 50 days of intensity, it was kind of anticlimactic to be sitting around wasting time until my flight to Dubai.

Pakistan had turned out to be surprising, in that the people displayed a civility and a gentility that harkened back to an earlier time. It was easily a more pleasant environment to be in than India. Too bad everybody thinks of it as a failed state. And too bad it really is too poor and too overpopulated and the government is totally dysfunctional and it doesn't have anywhere (outside of the mountains) to visit that isn't totally lackluster.

Well, I made it safely to the airport. And I made it safely to Dubai. And 38 hours after I woke up on Wednesday morning I made it back home. And I was immediately caught up in the whirl of fixing old problems and making new money.

And as the kaleidoscope of the last couple of months settled down, I started thinking, 'Whoa, I was walking around Khiva'. And, 'Damn, the Pamir Highway really was out there'.

But here's the reason why I continually keep going to these strange and distant land:
As I was finishing up walking through the old city in Peshawar, I looked down and happened to see a small head. It had a small mustache and beard, and was attached to s small round torso. He would have been a midget, except that there were no legs. Clearly somebody brought him here every day, and he 'stood' there implicitly begging. He couldn't even theoretically escape if a new bomb went off. I gave him 50 rupees (What the hell is the proper amount to give in such a circumstance?). He looked at it and tucked it into the pocket of the kurta that draped over him.

And I went back to my comfortable life. Except that I'm well aware that he is still there.

Unto the Last Mountain

2010-10-04T20:18:00.002-06:00

So I was standing on the little street/road outside of the Hill Top, waiting for a Suzuki to come by and take me back down to Aliabad. And waiting. But there was no traffic whatsoever.

Then Sherzad came by and said that this was because the area had run out of petrol. My only hope would be to hire a diesel powered jeep for 500 rupees (the Suzuki cost 20). As I was mulling that over a guy came by who had a diesel powered Suzuki for 300. So down the mountain I started.

It was a little too quiet being the only vehicle on the road, but as we approached wretched little Aliabad it perked up a bit. A full minibus was just taking off for Gilgit, which meant that I got the first seat on the next one. By paying for two seats (still less than $5) I wound up with the front all to myself. All I had to do was wait an hour while they sold the rest of the seats.

The sky had been clouding over again, and now was verging on ominous, That, combined with the totally torn up nature of the KKH, made for a less than inspiring start. On top of that, compared with where I had just been, the canyon here was kind of blah. Maybe I was just suffering from adventure fatigue.

I hoped that the driver was more alert than I. Because whenever there was more than 50 meters of actual blacktop he would speed up to the max. And the passenger side all too often looked down on 500 foot vertical falls. Then it started to rain.

But in about four and a half hours we were in Gilgit, the largest town in Pakistan's mountains. Almost a city. Actually I was left off about 3 km beyond downtown Gilgit, and had to flag down a Suzuki to get back in. Then, without being able to see outside, I had to guess where to get off. Luckily I picked the right spot, and was only half a block from my intended destination, the Medina Hotel.

But what was this all around me? After the relative peace and quiet of the last week, I was taken aback, almost shocked, by the ugliness and intensity of the Pakistani urban experience. Not that anyone was hassling me in particular, as would have been happening had this been India. Still I was grateful when I walked into the gate of the Medina, Gilgit's backpacker haven.

Kind of tatty and rundown, with basic rooms with bath going for $7. Youseb the owner was in the midst of preparing stew from a goat that a backpacker had slaughtered in celebration of his last night here. I declined an invitation to the free meal, and went back out to the street to see what else I could find.

Not much. The sun had gone down and shutters were being drawn quickly. I finally found a greasy spoon place where I had 'simple begetables', rice and naan. Actually quite tasty and very reminiscent of Yemen. Then the electricity went off and I fumbled my way back to Medina.

The next morning Ronald the gay Dutch guy had shown up. He was sitting at the table talking to a chain smoking hyper-thin Euroswish who was saying, 'This trip I've just got to be getting to Karachi. I hear it's just crazy.' Backpacking sure ain't what it used to be.

I had been having trouble deciding where I was to get going next. The original schedule had been supposed to end with a two day trip to Chitral, then staying a few days there before heading south to Peshawar. But the Chitral district had been really affected by the floods. And a Belgian NGO worker had been captured by the Taliban this summer. Which meant that if I went there I would immediately be assigned a soldier for 24 hour a day protection. Seemed kind of limiting. So Chitral was now out.

I had also been planning to take my Himalayan mini-trek up to the base camp for Nanga Parbat, a 26,000 foot high peak, and probably the biggest thrust of naked rock on the planet. But I had just realized that even though the hike was 'easy', it was also at 12,000 feet. And I was out of Diamox. PlusI had just experienced how cold 7500 feet could be when it rained. Plus I would have to hire a jeep and a porter while being the only tourist around, which would get complicated. Plus what would be the point of getting there if cloud cover obscured the view anyway? So Nanga Parbat was also out. Damn, I had really wanted to see it.

That left Skardu and Baltistan, a mountainous, arid region downriver from Ladakh. That took 7 hours to reach by minibus. Well, since there was nothing in Gilgit holding my interest or me, I'd better get going. I packed up, went out to the street, and hopped a Suzuki going the 5 km out to the general bus stand.

By now I had noticed something odd. 99% of the people walking around were men. The women in Hunza hadn't exactly been forthcoming, but at least they were visible. And it wasn't like Gilgit was Taliban country; everyone, even the guys with the ferocious beards, was polite and friendly to me. I mean, I'm totally in favor of keeping women in their place and all, but this was going a little too far even for me.

Anyway, I once again bought the two front seats, and at around 11 we took off. The morning had started out mostly sunny, but—guess what?--now it started to cloud over. For the first hour we continued south on the totally torn up and under construction KKH, but then we made a left turn, went down to river level, crossed a bridge, and started east up the Indus River canyon.

And do I mean canyon. For over four hours we snaked along the deep cleft, thankfully for my nerves on the inside lane. As usual the road was little more than one vehicle wide, which always made for a delicate maneuver whenever there was an oncoming truck. As usual the driver would floor it at the slightest sign of open blacktop. And as usual whenever there was a temporary widening of the canyon a little agricultural activity ensued.

At around the 100 km mark the canyon finally opened up to around half a mile wide for good. Then at around 135 km it opened up a whole lot and we were in Baltistan. The distinguishing geographic feature was that the river bed broadened out to a five mile wide plain, consisting mostly of gravel and yellowish grey sand. Really quite eerie and awesome. Of course with rugged dead mountains rising straight up from that.

It was dark as we entered Skardu, which seemed to consist of a two mile long main street of poor, bedraggled shops and chaos. When we were finally discharged in a back alley I was happy to know that I was very close to my new intended destination, the Dewan-e-khas Hotel. Given a rave review by the LP, I was a little let down to find it pretty drab. But it would do

Tuesday morning I was having a hard time figuring out what I was going to do next. For one thing, I was still a little freaked out by the almost African level of poverty. More important, even though all the signs were in English, almost nobody spoke more than three words of it. Which made it difficult to find out anything from anyone.

There was also the matter of getting out of here. The bus ride to Islamabad took 24 hours, the first 6 of which were along the route I had just come. And my body was now at the bus ride saturation point. So I would need to take the flight. Which the hotel guy had said might take a week of waiting.

After several vain attempts, I finally found the PIA building and walked in. There was a scrum at the ticket window. I sat for several minutes watching it, then walked over to an empty window. The clerk came over to help the foreigner. He said that if I came back tomorrow morning at 8 he could sell me a ticket for Thursday.

Thus assured I now set out to take care of my final assault on the mountains. There were two little valleys that were upriver from Skardu, Shigar and Khaplu. The hotel guy had a taxi that would take me there for 4000 rupees. I thought that I could do better. But how could I find someone when I didn't speak any Urdu? Hmm. Then a bright idea.. I would walk into the couple of tourist oriented businesses I had seen and ask them.

The first one was a little climbing equipment shop run by a kid from Hunza named Abdul. One thing led to another, and within a half hour not only did I have a trusted driver with a Toyota jeep, but Abdul and another shopkeeper were coming along with me. After all, both of them were bored out of their wits by the total lack of tourist customers.

So now my future had a plan. First thing Wednesday morning the PIA office sold me an overpriced ticket. Then I met up with Abdul, who pointed out that just because I had bought a ticket didn't mean I had a confirmed seat. Because if there were any hint of bad weather they canceled the flight, which meant that everyone from today's flight went on tomorrow's flight, and everyone from tomorrow's flight... And as you may recall, the weather for the past while hadn't been all that great. He called the PIA operator, gave her my info, and then gave her his number so she could call if and when I finally got confirmed.

The jeep driver was here now, and we took off. As soon as we were out of town I was at another end of the world. It was 105 very slow, twisty kilometers to Khaplu, and I was like a little kid in the front seat craning my neck. For the last half the valley was wide enough to support fields and villages. Khaplu itself was in the center of a big swash of green amidst the grey mountains.

Up the valley to the left and around a corner was K2, the second highest mountain in the world. The only way I would ever see that would be to take an extensive trek to its base camp. But the peaks between it and me were some of the steepest undifferentiated slabs yet. The driver took us up to the top of Khaplu, where its 700 year fort was being modernized into a fancy boutique hotel. (Now all they would need are tourists.)

After tea it was back the way we had come. 10 km short of Skardu we made a right turn, climbed over a spur, and looked down on a spectacular view of the wide, flat river plain filled with those yellowish grey sand dunes and wasteland. And, as always, with huge dead mountains all around. We then worked our way up this new valley a little until we got to Shigar and a 700 year old fort that had already been made into a fancy boutique hotel. Very impressive. As the sun was sinking I made a mental note to come back here sometime with the missus.

At around the same time PIA had called Abdul and confirmed my seat. (The locals were really surprised that it had been so easy for me, but I suspect that foreigners get precedence.) Even better, Thursday morning dawned with perfectly clear blue sky. Oh boy, I might get out of here. At 10:30 I took a taxi the 15 km out to the airport. It seemed like slow going for the long line of hopefuls to be processed, but it was only 40 minutes before I was in the departure lounge. Then at 12:15 we all got on buses that drove a half a km to where the plane was waiting in the midst of towering sand dunes. Strange.

With a window seat on the right you got to see K2; on the left would be Nanga Parbat. I was assigned the right, but it ended up not mattering, since by takeoff the sky was completely clouded over. As we rose through the narrow canyon, with rugged cliffs just a few thousand feet away, I could understand why an overcast morning would have canceled the incoming flight.

Seeing K2 would have been a great ending to my high mountain orgy. But, as so often happens when traveling, the weather just wouldn't co-operate. On the other hand, as we made our turn and headed south, through a tiny window on the other side of the plane, there was about a two second space where I could just glimpse the tippy top of giant Nanga Parbat sticking up through the clouds.

The Lonely Streets of Paradise

2010-09-25T19:02:00.000-06:00

The Lonely Streets of Paradise

In the haggling with the jeep driver at the lake, my being dropped off at Karimabad had been dropped, and now I found myself on the KKH in Aliabad, an ugly scraggle of dusty decrepitude that totally drowned out the rural beauty and quiet that I had just been going through. I slowly made my way through the chaos, asking 'Karimiabad?' of people and usually getting little response, except 'Suzuki' and a vague motion thataway.

After a few hundred meters there was a spot where a little Suzuki pickup waited, with two narrow wooden seats in back and an awning on top. I and my bags somehow got in, along with nine other people, and off we went. Back the way I had just come. For it seemed like thirty minutes.

What was going on? I knew that Karimabad, the Hunza tourist town, was only a few km uphill from Aliabad. But it turned out that we had to go all the way back to Ganish on the KKH before we backtracked up. I think the direct route would have been too steep for a tiny pickup with a heavy load.

It was hard to see outside. A kid next to me asked which hotel I was going to, and I said 'Hilltop'.. When he tapped me and I got out, I expected to be in the middle of a fairly developed area, much like backpacker type towns in India such as Menali or Dharmsala. Instead I was on a little more than one lane little straggly road with no other traffic. To my right was a small line of shuttered stall/stores. To my left was a moderately modest hotel saying 'Hilltop'. The LP map said that I was now supposed to be smack dab in the center of the action.

The friendly young manager, named Sherzad, showed me to a room. Nice beds, clean and modern bathroom. Then he took me out to its small balcony. To my left was what I would later find out is Rakaposhi, as majestic a 25,500 foot peak as you could imagine. 180 degrees to my right was Ultar, only 24,500 feet high, but with its stark, icy summit less than five miles away. In between, both slightly above me and mostly below me, were the verdant sloping mini-orchards and fields of the Hunza vale. Hey, Alps! You really suck!

He wanted $10 a night for the room, but I got him down to $9.

Then he kind of sheepishly added, 'There's no electricity'. Not just in the hotel, but in this entire side of town. Seems like the turbine burned out after the floods and it had been down in Islamabad for the last few weeks getting repaired. Never mind, however, since they'd be running the generator between 7 and 10.

It was kind of obvious from the totally dead nature of the Hill Top's lobby that I was their only guest. When I went out to walk up the only real street in town it quickly became clear that I was about the only tourist in town. In a town that totally depended on tourism. Those shuttered stall/stores across the street were the norm. Further up the hill a few craft/gift stores were open, but I was pretending that I was invisible as I walked by, so that I would not be providing them with pitiful false hope.

The sky was still basically blue, the weather was t-shirt warm, but a few small clouds were beginning to gather around Rakaposhi and Ultar. But I hadn't taken any pictures yet, since my camera's battery was just about dead. And now it wasn't going to be recharged until the generator ran this evening. Hmmm.

Not much to do once I reached the top of the town except to turn around and go down less than a km back past the hotel to the bottom. No freestanding restaurants or tea houses or coffee houses open, but I roused the manager at the nicest hotel restaurant in town, and soon I was sitting there—the only customer—at a fine wooden table and classy tablecloth, with a gold tunic liveried waiter hovering nearby, slurping my soup.

Not much to do except go back to my room and wait for nightfall and the generator. Clouds starting to get a little fuller, but still such a lovely, peaceful view from my room.

By Thursday morning the clouds had gathered a little more, now mostly obscuring the higher peaks. I sat in the Hill Top's empty restaurant with my porridge, Hunza bread and jam, and 'milk tea'. Then it was up a steep cobblestone hill at the top of the town to Baltit Fort. Overlooking the whole vale, it is not really a fort at all but rather the old residence of the Mir of Hunza.

The oldest part goes back 700 years, but most of it is relatively modern. And all of it was only recently restored by the Aga Khan Foundation. Turns out that the Hunzas, like the Pamiris, are also mostly Ismaili. As the guide showed me the various rooms, I was taken aback at how simple, small and poor the Mir's life had been. Imagine the poverty of his followers.

The guide confirmed that before the KKH came through in the '70s life had been pretty tough. In general, the Hunzans really liked the benefits of progress. But this year had been the pits. Tourism had already been down because of 9/11. Then in the past few years terrorism and Taliban was all that Pakistan was known for. And now the floods of the past summer had deterred even fellow Pakistanis from visiting. As I left the Fort he sat there patiently waiting to see if anyone else might show up today at Karimabad's main attraction.

Back down on the main street to try to find an internet place that was supposed to be somewhere in the part of town that still had electricity. But when I found it the electricity was off for the day. Back to the room for a rest. Maybe the day would clear up.

But when I looked out at around one pm threatening grey clouds were filling the sky just a thousand or so feet above me. I quickly had to put on all my layers of clothing and cover myself with a blanket. No more activities for today. Not that it mattered, but Sherzad confirmed that this weather wasn't supposed to be here for another month.

The next couple of days would be schizophrenic. Friday dawned still cold and gloomy, but then the clouds started to break up a bit, and it started to get warm. Oh boy. But then the clouds returned. In the afternoon it was sunny enough for me to take a walk along the irrigation ditch that circled the vale. Peace and beauty galore, including a family knocking the walnuts off its tree and gathering them. But as the walk ended so did the warmth and sunshine.

One thing I had been looking forward to was the chance to go 1500 feet higher, where a fancy hotel called the Eagle's Nest had an incredible view of the surrounding mountains. But it only made sense to go there if it was going to be a perfectly clear day. Saturday started out with that possibility; just a few clouds hanging on to the peaks. One of the Hill Top's owners was going up there and asked if I wanted a lift. I almost said yes, but in the end decided to wait an hour or two to make sure that it would be clear. Two hours later the valley had filled with storm clouds again and I was glad that I was down at lower elevation and out of the major storm above me.

But in the afternoon it had cleared up again. So Sharzad, who was way more bored than I, given his utter lack of business, electricity, and therefore internet, was only too glad to come along for a walk along the upper irrigation canal. He had been filling me in on the (for Pakistan) liberal Hunza lifestyle. For instance, this was the only place in the country where (Chinese) beer was openly sold. The women wore scarves, but otherwise were just as integrated into normal life as the Ismaili women in the Pamir. Except that they didn't want their pictures taken. Seems like repressed boys from other areas of Pakistan had come and delighted in taking pictures of them, so that now they were so creeped out that Westerners weren't allowed to photograph, either.

The sky was gradually clearing, and as the sun went down it was finally back to the bright, limitless blue it had been right when I had arrived. Rakaposhi and Ultar and the others all stood there in their splendor. Soon a just past full moon would be shining down upon them.

Sunday dawned just as bright and clear, and I sat there on the roof of the hotel taking in the greenery beneath and around me, the rugged, brown mountains rising behind that, and the snowcapped giant peaks behind them. The Eagle's Nest was still a possibility, but at around 8 am a few wispy clouds started appearing in the corner of the sky that was supposed to announce impending weather. I decided to blow it off. Anyway, Hunza time was over now..

...'Cause I feel like I gotta travel on.

On To Hunza

2010-09-25T18:31:00.003-06:00

On To Hunza

Monday morning I woke up really refreshed. In fact, I was feeling fewer aches and pains than before I had started on this exhausting journey. Maybe travel really was rejuvenating. Not only that, but so far I hadn't even gotten sick. Although I didn't want to get too jubilant, since I knew that I could always get laid to waste at any time.

But I was glad to have my energy today, because this morning I'd be heading down south on the Karakoram Highway. Finished in 1974, it goes over the top of the Himalaya/Karakoram mangle of mountains, and connects Kashgar with Islamabad in Pakistan. That's right, Pakistan. As in, Are you nuts? Don't you know that you're going to get blown up? Or worse?

But I had done my research, and I knew that the inhabitants of the mountains of northern Pakistan weren't Pashtuns. They weren't even Punjabis. In fact, they were some of the most hospitable people in the world. And the mountains themselves were supposed to be beyond superlatives. So I was really looking forward to tackling the KKH.

The weather was finally starting to co-operate, with the cloud cover beginning to break apart. (Ironic that according to the LP, Kashgar gets 1 inch of rain a year. And September is the driest month.) I closed up my bags, settled up with reception, went outside, hailed a cab, and said 'Tashkurgan beeket'. Like all Chinese cabs it was painted green and white, and like all Chinese cabbies the guy was honest and used his meter.

When he pulled up to the entrance of the bus station there was a driver with an almost full Pajero who was charging just a little more than the bus fare. I hopped in and off we went towards Tashkurgan, the only town between here and the border, and the location of the Chinese immigration post.

Kashgar was in a flat area at about 4000 feet, and for the first 50 km or so we drove along on an American quality paved road past prosperous looking agricultural land. Within a few minutes the other passengers were all asleep, as they invariably are everywhere you go in the world. It's one thing to see it in Japan or Korea, where everyone is working 16 hour days. But in the third world? My theory is that the one thing that scares all humanity the most is to be alone with one's own thoughts. And even with pop music blaring to make that almost impossible, everyone still needs to conk out.

I was wide awake though, enjoying the view. By now the skies had completely cleared to a wonderful shade of blue, and up ahead of me stretched the first actual range of mountains that I had so far seen. Kind of like the Front Range in Colorado. Only bigger. As we neared them, a particular 23,500 foot peak presented itself.

Then a police check, and then we started going up, up, up a red sandstone canyon. I couldn't put my finger on it, but somehow these mountains were a lot more exciting than the ones in Central Asia had been. A decent road, the great weather, and my rested condition all factored into it, I'm sure. But there was still something else. These mountains had zazz.

And switchbacks. So it felt like you were actually going up something difficult. Finally we got to the top of the pass, at around 14,000 feet. Wild and rugged. Then down a bit and past a large mudflat area that could have been a turquoise gem lake if it had had water. The driver stopped for something and I got out to take pictures. Now here was a view that was truly Spectacular. Snow capped mountains all around a dead empty plain and an achingly blue sky.

Some really poor Tajik girls came over to try to sell me stone eggs. They were great stone eggs, but that's something that I already have plenty of. Then they pulled out the most stunning oval matte jade that I could ever imagine seeing. For $5. The rest of the necklace was pretty hokey, so I was hesitant, but then I thought: You idiot! That's an amazing piece of jade for $5! I started to open the door again but the driver was taking off. So I sat there realizing that now I would hate myself forever.

Twenty minutes later we came upon China's Karakul Lake. Now here on this sunny day was an incredible turquoise gem, with an arc of magnificent snowcapped peaks, anchored by two 24,000 foot giants. One of the most astounding sights I have ever seen. Too bad the driver didn't stop.

All too soon we arrived at Tashkurgan, a town of basically two and a half cross streets. Next to the small bus depot was the Traffic Hotel, where I secured an okay basic room. It was still not much past 1 pm, so I took it upon myself to walk around the town. Not much to see.

In the town, that is. The stark beauty around the town was something else. Nothing specifically mindblowing, except for the 24,500 foot Murtagh Aga peak that we had passed at Karakul Lake and that still was quite visible the southern skyline. I was back at 10,400 feet, but it wasn't too cold; much like an October afternoon. All in all, this was an end of the world that was bleak yet strangely energetic.

I walked all the way down to the end of a tree lined road to where there were some 700 year old ruins of massive stone walls. But by now I had seen some much, much better ones. On the way back I stopped at what I took to be a school to take a picture of the Chinese flag flapping against a background of Murtagh Aga. A minute later three Chinese soldiers came running after me and demanded that I delete the photos. The place was actually a barracks. They were very polite about it, though.

Not so polite were all of the other Han Chinese around. Although much of the population was still Central Asian, the Han dominated. Most of the talking that I heard was singsong Mandarin. And I was once again being reminded just how absurdly rude and unfriendly the Chinese were.

I had first run into this on my first major trip to China in 1986. The people were so inhospitable that it ended up being almost funny. And I had assumed that their attitude must have been a function of ancient Chinese culture. But then I went over to Taiwan and these were literally some of the nicest people on Earth. So then I decided that it was one of Communism's dreary effects. And a few years ago when I went to Shanghai and Beijing I was pleasantly surprised at how pleasant the people there were now becoming.

But not here. Once again you had to stop yourself from laughing at how you'd walk into a shop and ask something, and the person there would spit out some monosyllabic unpleasantry without even looking up. In a singsong fashion.

So I was thinking these thoughts when I walked back into the Traffic Hotel, and a nice Chinese lady sitting there immediately invited me over for a slice of melon. Just goes to show how wrong you can be. Well, not really. The nice lady was actually from Korea.

As the afternoon was fading I decided to continue an earlier attempt to find the one internet place in town. The nice Korean lady got the Chinese hoteliers to make a series of gestures to show where it was. I had already walked along there and hadn't seen anything, but I thought I would try again.

Nope, just a row of clothing stalls. Wait, internet places are often on unused second floors. After much searching I found a staircase leading upstairs. And there it was. Over 20 kids playing video games. The young Chinese guy managing it just looked up and rudely shouted, 'Passport copy!' So back to the hotel I had to trudge.

My piddly communication needs taken care of, I now tried in vain to find something edible. Back to the Traffic Hotel for my Chinese snackables. But I was already getting sick of them. Ah well, there's always glorious sleep to look forward to...

Early next morning I was bright eyed and bushy tailed under a perfectly blue sky walking the mile or so down the road to the Chinese border post. Hoping to see at least a fresh naan bakery, but coming up empty. Still, just strolling along, expecting to come upon the unmistakable barriers across the road that announce a border. Just as in every other border post I've ever crossed.

But all I could see in front of me was an unfettered KKH all the way to the horizon. What gave? As I got near to where the LP map showed the post to be, off to the side was large building after large building. But all the signs were in Chinese, which didn't make sense for an international border. When I got to the last large building there were some cars stopped in the middle of the road. I went up to the soldier who had stopped them and said, 'Passport???' He had no idea what I was saying. But finally one of the people stopped and used his six word English vocabulary to figure out the situation. In the end a very nice soldier led me back four large buildings to where, again, there was absolutely no indication in anything other than Chinese ideograms that this was the border post.

But there were a few other foreigners waiting around for the bus ticket booth to open. I talked for a few minutes to a personable enough Dutch fellow who lived in Bangkok. He said that he was still looking for a place in the world for him and his boyfriend to settle down in. Then the booth opened and we all bought tickets and changed our yuan into rupees.

Being processed out of China was just as professional and courteous as being processed in. Then we waited while the Pakistani bus was brought around. There were six of us traveling: Me, the Dutch guy, a French cycling couple, a Japanese solo tourist, and a Pakistani returning home. You would have thought that we'd have a big bus all to ourselves. But you'd be wrong.

First of all, the bus was only half size. Second, although it had about 20 seats, they were only supposed to be big enough for Pakistanis. And most of them, along with the roof, were already stuffed with all sorts of sacks and boxes heading south. So there was just barely enough extra room for us.

We were supposed to leave at around 10 am real time. But it was 10:40 before we got final clearance. Then 20 km further along there was a checkpoint where a Chinese soldier got on and, like at least five other Chinese officials before him, obsessively counted and recounted the six of us to make sure that we lined up with the manifest. He would accompany us the rest of the way until we got to the real border.

I tried to look through the dirty windows, but the outside didn't appear nearly as interesting as the scenery yesterday. We were traversing a wide flat, mostly stony plain, with occasional cows browsing. Where the hell were the yaks? But I'd already discovered from other travels that all the neat, exotic domesticated animals are being pushed aside by totally uninteresting cattle. I guess that they're just too damn cost effective.

The mountain ridges way off to the side weren't that exciting, either. I shifted my attention to the two people sitting in front of me, and idly thought, So I guess this is what the world has come down to: Chinese soldiers and gay Dutch guys. And I had absolutely no idea as to which side would win out.

When we stopped for a stretch break I saw that, once I was outside of dirty windows, the scenery and atmosphere were actually pretty intense. Or maybe it was because the plain was narrowing and the ridges were getting higher. Whatever, soon we were at the head of the valley and starting up switchbacks. The bus slowed down as the grade got steeper, and now I could open my window and gaze out.

Whoa. This stuff was of the jaw dropping caliber. Pale blue endless sky, giant snowcapped rugged peaks, and a sweeping gap that we were climbing to the top of. Hey, Alps! You suck! Astonishing, really. Just then the Chinese soldier opened his window and tossed a large plastic bottle out into the pristine wilderness.

As we neared the summit we reached the Chinese border station and the soldier got off. A Pakistani soldier, all cool looking in his shades, khaki pants, black sweater and beret, and silver belt, got on. A km later, right at the tippy top, was a stone pagoda arch, and then we were in Pakistan. The road immediately changed from high quality blacktop to low quality gravel.

A couple of hundred meters further and we were at the Pakistani border station. The vibe was instantly way more relaxed. We all got out and walked around for ten minutes, taking pictures and enjoying where we were. This was Khunjerab Pass, at 15,700 feet the highest automotive pass in the world. Beautiful empty thwumps and clumps of mountain and snow and ice everywhere. And not too chilly, either.

It was all downhill from here. Which is what I had been looking forward to. Because I had this conviction that this time something was finally going to live up its hype. Nor was I disappointed. First there were the peaks and canyons of shiny black karakoram rock. Then peaks and canyons of brown and of red. All the while with a perfectly blue sky and a happily gurgling river. You just couldn't ask more of Nature. To top it off, the Pakistani road crews we passed all happily waved. The air was a lot warmer this side of the pass. And the signs were all in English.

I liked this place.

Even before this summer's floods, the KKH had been all torn up by the Chinese trying to upgrade it for their Pakistani friends. Of course, it was also in their self interest to get a good road connecting them to the Arabian Sea. So they had already been here with their equipment when the floods came, which meant that they had already capably repaired the washed out bridges, etc.. And the road, while slow, wasn't that terrible or rough.

Around 5 we arrived at the Pakistani border post at Sost. Once again, strangely, no barrier on the road. We stopped beside a modest building and went in. Generally speaking, Pakistani visas are a pain in the ass to obtain. Plus they're super expensive, Plus now, since they're scared of a possible tourist beheading, the authorities are actively discouraging tourism and you need a letter of support and who knows what else. BUT if you show up at the KKH post at Sost you can still get a visa on arrival. Just like that And once I had found that out, it had sealed the deal. I had to come.

It was still expensive for Americans, $150. But it was so pleasant to be treated with a dignified civilized courtesy reminiscent of the British Raj They would have bought out a cup of tea if I had requested it. Then, after the visa was hand pasted into my passport, the government officials were all eager to offer their individual money changing services.

I got some rupees and walked out to the street. Not much to the village of Sost, but due south along the KKH was the 23,000 foot massif of Qarun Koh. The China giants I had seen had been more like massive lumps. This here was large and dramatic and craggy. Plus I was now lower down in altitude so that the differential was greater. Pretty darn neat.

The better hotels (still not saying much) were all filled with Chinese engineers. I went into the best cheapie and the guy said that he didn't have a single; I would have to pay for all three beds. That set me back $7.50. Then some dahl and chapatti, which sounded pretty good about now. Then the electricity went off and I had to find my way back to my room.

I was up and ready to go at 5:30 the next morning; the LP said that the first transport left at 6. But when I hit the street at 5:50 I was the only person there. Twenty meters ahead, though, a couple of guys in a side alley were putting sacks on the roof of a minibus. Ah! Being the first customer of the day, I snagged the front seat.

More and more people appeared, and by 6:30 it was determined that we were fully loaded. So off we went, that giant massif getting hit by the first rays of sunlight. As the driver kept stopping and jamming ever more humans into the back I was glad in my only slightly crowded front that I had risen early. I also had the best views.

The sky was once again perfectly clear, and we passed through canyons and occasional open areas which contained little stone houses and little orchards and fields. After an hour and a half we reached the Passu district, which was a relatively wide plain. On its northeast side was another gargantuan craggy massif. At its south end we went over a hill and came down to the northernmost reach of the landslide lake.

It was only on January 8 of this year that a massive landslide had occurred some 30 km south of here. Apparently the Chinese had offered to use their equipment to bore a hole through it so that water wouldn't accumulate. But the Pakistanis had said, Never mind, we can handle this. So the result was that this giant 500 foot deep lake now lapped at my feet.

Earlier in the spring, when it was uncertain whether the landslide dam would collapse, the Pakistani army had been helicoptering people over it. But the helicopters had been needed for the horrible floods this summer, and it became obvious that the rocks weren't going anywhere, so now there was a thriving traffic of little boats ferrying people and goods up and down the lake. (It would be interesting to know where the boats had come from, since they certainly didn't have new paint jobs.)

It was a little confusing as to which boats were cargo and which were passenger, but a guy from the government came by to get my passport number in case I drowned, and he pointed me to the right one. When I slid down the dirt hill with my gear they were just in the process of getting a jeep to drive up a couple of narrow planks and balance astride the 8 foot wide boat, with only rocks under the tires holding it in place.

That kind of obstructed the view a bit, but only a bit. Other than that it was one of the mellowest lake rides of my life. Warm air, incredibly blue sky, crystalline clear water. Giant massif in the background. Mostly traveling through steep brown rock canyon, although I also knew that beneath us were the ruins of many orchards and little stone houses.

When we got to where the landslide was I could see that almost 2000 vertical feet of the mountainside had slid down. The little boat reached the little boat area, and I and my bags had to balance onto another rickety boat and then onto the shore. Which was a steep side of crumbly dirt. A porter put my pack on his back and carried it straight up about a quarter of the way up the giant landslide hill, to where a jeep was stationed alongside the jeep track that had been created. Some of the other boat's passengers were already dickering with the driver. He asked an absurdly large amount from me; I got him down to half that. I was still paying the lion's share, but in exchange I did get the front seat.

The others sat on wood benches in the back as he churned through the thick dust up towards the top of the hill. It was a mighty impressive pile of rock that had fallen down, and short of a medium sized thermonuclear device that landslide and lake are here to stay. As he maneuvered down the other side to the previous road level I was glad that I hadn't had to walk it. Especially with my pack.

Then it was about a half an hour through an increasingly verdant and wider canyon, and then before us stretched a (for here) large tableland of green terraced fields and orchards sitting a couple hundred feet above the river, at least five miles long and two miles wide, until bumping up against the surrounding mountains.

We had arrived at Hunza.

The Quest for Civilization

2010-09-23T11:36:00.002-06:00

The Quest For Civilization

Now I'm a man of generally simple tastes. Motel 6 is usually just fine by me. I don't need no extravagant restaurants or fancy cars. Bread and peanut butter in my '92 Aerostar will do the trick.

But I'm getting too old to squat. On the nice porcelain ones I can just barely balance. But I can no longer position myself on wooden slats while my feet are trying to dodge the excrement. So it becomes a cycle of immodium before the long journey followed by dulcolax afterwards.

But that was just the first of my many complaints. It was getting colder than I had planned/hoped for. It would be nice to have some heat not generated by my body. It would be nice to have some electricity. Come to think of it, it would be nice to have running water. In fact, it would be nice to be somewhere where everything at least attempted to work.

For after a month in Central Asia, it was no longer cute (if it ever was) that you couldn't ever assume that something was going to be available. Or work properly if it was. Even in Almaty the decay was at best papered over. And most other places they didn't even make that attempt.

So it was time to try and find some sort of civilization.

I knew going into this journey that Murgab to Sary Tash would be the most expensive part of the journey. Vans and SUVs went between Khorog and Murgab, but there was no commerce or traffic between Murgab and Sary Tash, especially inasmuch as Sary Tash was in Kyrgyzstan. And the small amount of European summer adventurers had thinned out by now, so there was little likelihood of me finding people to share expenses with.

This meant that I had to pop for $1 a kilometer for the 235 km trip, since the driver Turok had no chance of getting a return fare. Ouch. Well, at least I would have the rattling old Land Rover to myself.

Except this tall, skinny Ukrainian hitchhiker had shown up the night before. And he had $30 to his name. And around here you were supposed to help people out. Then the driver met a friend who needed to get to the Tajik border. So now there were four of us. Well, at least I still got to call the shots.

Which meant that for the first time on my journey there would be no Russian or Tajik or Uzbek or Turkmen pop music being played. Now I know that you're probably thinking that it would be exotic and interesting to hear the sounds of foreign countries. It definitely is not. I can think of only two times in my life (in Burma and Lesotho) when I ever heard anything that was different and beautiful. The rest of it is ALWAYS idiotic endlessly repeated five note melodies backed by a horrible canned beat. You should thank God that you live in a land where they play Elton John and Air Supply.

Anyway, we started out around 10 for the seven hour journey. The landscape continued to look Western/Mohave/Nevada/high altitude (only, uh, bigger), with some interesting large slabs of rock. For a while we were only a few yards away from the barbed wire of the Chinese border, which made sense considering that the Russians built the Pamir Highway so as to patrol their side.

We climbed higher and higher, once again never needing switchbacks or the like. Near the summit we came upon a French bicycling couple that I had met in Murgab on Tuesday night and who had started from there yesterday. They were pushing their bikes, not just because of uphill slope but also because at 15,000 feet it was kind of hard to breathe. On Tuesday they had said that their goal was to bicycle across India, as suicidal an idea as I have ever heard. Now they reported that I had convinced them not to try it, so I was glad that I had saved another couple of French lives.

The summit was 15,500 feet, definitely a personal best. And I can report to Eric that there wasn't an obvious extra 1000 feet that he could have easily climbed. Even without altitude sickness. But off to the side, mostly covered in clouds, was 23,000 foot high Lenin Peak. And I can attest that, my world weary blasé notwithstanding, it was all pretty neat.

After a couple of semi-warm minutes the wind started to pick up, so back we went into the Land Rover. And down the slope we went. Almost my entire trip except for Bishkek had been bright and sunny, but now as we neared Kyrgyzstan the sky once again became overcast and threatening. The mountains were pretty much the same as before, but without the sheen of sunshine. The next great sight was supposed to be Lake Karakul, a turquoise gem set in an otherworldly setting.

Well, maybe on a sunny day. On a cloudy one it was just a medium sized mountain lake. Turok wanted to stop for lunch, but I had my own bread and cheese, so I had him drop me and Alexei the Ukrainian off at the lakeside while he went to a tiny settlement a half mile away for Tajiki fare. I told him to come back in 15 minutes.

Not smart on my part. For now there was a constant, bitterly cold 30-40 mile an hour wind whipping in from the lake. I hurriedly ate my cheese while being buffeted by the tempest, then I balanced over rocks to the water. Little oil slicks were everywhere. So much for turquoise gems.

By now it had been 15 minutes and even Alexei was a little freaked about the cold, and he was from the Ukraine. I decided to head on over to the settlement. It took about 20 minutes of seemingly wilderness trekking to make it. When we found Turok he was just getting it together to come out for us.

The Tajik border was the next fun part. I've seen a lot of strange borders in my time, but this one just about tops it. Tajikistan, being next to Afghanistan, has one of the worst drug smuggling problems in the world, but the Customs narco control post was just a shack. A guy came out and had Alexei take most of the stuff out of his pack. Then he got cold and tired of it and gave me a free pass.

But the Immigration post was the best. It was literally an old cylindrical tank like an oil truck might carry, with a door cut out of one end and a small window cut into the side. Turok was nice enough to stand there in the wind with our passports waiting for the Immigration guy to take forever just to put the stupid exit stamp in.

Then it was about 30 km of no man's land, still jouncing downwards. And I mean jouncing, since...it being no man's land...neither country upkept it. For almost the first time on my trip some short naturally growing grass now greened the previously empty rock, and that certainly perked things up. All in all one of the prettiest parts of the Pamir Highway.

The Kyrghyz border post was housed in an actual building. A heated building. Again, no problems. Their narco customs squad couldn't have cared less about checking us. Then it was 23 km into Sary Tash, a town of about 100 houses scattered about.

Turok dropped us off at the Aida 'cafe and hotel',actually just another house with a room for backpackers. When Alexei found that it would be $8 for a room, dinner, and breakfast, he decided that he would try to continue on to Osh. Even though it was freezing, night was fast descending, and there was absolutely no traffic. Nor did he ever thank me for his free ride.

Aida turned out to be run by two really friendly Kyrghyz sisters. When they led me around the back to the room I opened the door and... An electric space heater! Glowing merrily away. Also already sitting there, kind of looking like he was in shock, was an Austrian cyclist named Harry. The sister took my order for potatoes and left, and I stood warming myself by the 'fire' and chatting with Harry.

After the requisite small talk, Harry hesitantly let on that today had been the weirdest day of his whole life. Here was his story:

He had camped last night in the cold in no man's land, then had cycled up to the Kyrgyz border post. After being entered, the guy asked him if he'd like a shot of vodka. Harry usually didn't drink on the road, but the guy was persuasive. By the time it was over Harry had ended up sharing lunch and downing a whole bottle of vodka with the immigration guy.

By now totally drunk, he was wobbling on the road into Sary Tash when he was stopped by a guy with a horse and cart. The guy unshackled the saddled horse and begged Harry to get on said horse so that the guy could take a souvenir picture of him. Harry, who had never ridden a horse, obliged, at which point the horse started galloping headlong out of control down the road. With Harry, stone drunk, literally hanging on for dear life. About 4 km along the horse finally slowed, Harry got off, and walked it back to the guy.

Who was still standing there with Harry's bike and all of Harry's money and possessions. Harry later found that the guy had tried to ride the bicycle and had indeed stolen the first thing he found, which was a (useless to him) water filtration bottle. So the question now arose, was the guy a really incompetent thief or just a total nut job? Whatever the case, Harry was pretty lucky to still have his possessions and his body this evening. My moral of the story was, Don't get drunk in strange countries. Harry's was that he had gotten overly naïve having just spent a month in friendly, innocent Tajikistan.

I could sympathize. Maybe it was their lousy weather, maybe it was because they had just killed 1000 Uzbeks for no good reason, but I just didn't trust the Kyrghyz. Or maybe it was because, far more than any other of the Central Asians, they looked so much like the Mongolians. And although most of the Mongolians are really nice, some of them would knife you and leave you to die without even thinking twice.

Once again, not much to do after the food was eaten, so I went to sleep. I was awake at 5:30 the next morning, listening in the dark as a couple of trucks rumbled by. I was eager to get going, but I didn't want to disturb anyone. Anyway, the sisters had said that 7:30 was a great time to start hitching a ride with one of the Chinese trucks going over the Irkeshtam Pass into China. They said that there would be 'no problem'. 'Lots and lots of trucks'.

So when I walked up the 100 m to the little gas station at the Y I wasn't too concerned that the weather had now turned really, really bad. With the basic houses scattered about and the short grass and the wind and the cold grey it reminded me a bit of Labrador. Unlike Labrador, though, none of the few people walking to and fro said 'hi'.

In my mind I had been prepared for the dry, cloudless cold of Murgab. But they only get a few inches of precipitation a year in almost all of Central Asia, and this was still only September, so it had never occurred to me that I might get stuck in something like this. Namely, a constant wet wind, the sky getting more threatening all the time, and a few spare snowflakes drifting down. While I was wearing my thin thermal, a long sleeve tee, a light 'explorer' shirt, and a spring windbreaker.

Oh, and no trucks. None. No traffic whatsoever. Except maybe every ten minutes a local jeep would wander by. After a half hour or so I motioned to the guy at the gas station whether I could wait with him inside. He said no. I stood there in the wind trying to compare this with my other freezing hitchhiking moments. But I was twenty back then and I didn't have to worry about possibly dying from my misadventures. And back then I at least had gloves.

By 8:30 I was pretty damn frigid, and I was weighing my options. Maybe I could go back to the sisters and arrange to hire a jeep. Other than that I was stuck in Sary Tash for the weekend, given that this was Friday and the border was closed on Saturday and Sunday. I gave myself until 9 to stand there before I gave up.

I probably couldn't have made it. Because when the first Chinese truck came by and stopped at 8:35 and I went to get in, I noticed that my toes were completely froze. The driver was a friendly Uigher (pronounced 'weeger'), the Central Asian people who occupy western China, and he immediately refused payment, had his son scurry to the little bed behind the seats, and got me comfortably inside.
Off we went.

The LP had said that the road to the border was in terrible condition. But the Chinese had been here since, and most of it was in mint paved condition. When we got to where the Chinese road crew were efficiently constructing away, it was the first time that I had seen anything that was even remotely together since that Turkish shopping center in Ashgabat.

Then a stretch of rough road where they were starting the construction, then back to pavement. Once again, this wasn't a real 'pass'. The road went up and up in a straight line on a stony plain with mediocre mountains on either side. Then about 20 km before the border it started to go down, now starting to look like we were going through southern Utah. When the truck got to the Kyrgyz border post the driver pulled into a lot filled with other trucks, and I figured out why traffic had been so sparse today. There was no way he was going to be processed before Monday.

I, however, should have an easier time of it. I made my way to Customs and Immigration, where they courteously stamped me out. Then they put me on the next truck through for the 6 km ride to the Chinese side.

Except that after my truck had gone about 2 km he was stopped behind a line of other trucks at a gate. So I got out and lugged my stuff to the head of the line, where I was put on the next truck through. Except that he was stopped a little further by a longer line of trucks waiting to go through the actual border. So I got out and walked up hill to the front of that line.

Through the Chinese gate and a quick look at my documentation. Then they put me on another truck going to their official border post. Which ended up at the end of another long line. I walked past 31 trucks and entered the building.

Everyone was super polite. All in all I was pretty lucky, because they should have been closed for lunch. But they were just finishing up a Spanish tour group, so I was an add on At 11:45 I was officially into China.

Ah, Civilization. Now there would be warm weather and people eagerly swarming around me, offering to change money, take me to Kashgar on a smooth paved road, you name it. After all, the LP had said so. But as I stepped outside all I was met by was a cold, cold drizzle. I walked over to the Spanish tour bus to see if they had a spare seat I could buy. Nope.

What was going on? Or rather, not going on? Even the border people were gone now, finally off to lunch. And the weather was just getting worse. I walked around, trying to find anyone doing anything. A pickup went by. I said 'Kashgar?' to the girls inside, but they drove off. Then they stopped and pointed back to a car parked over there. It was a taxi. I went up and asked.

The regular fare is 60 yuan. The guy wanted 100. But I would be his last passenger, and I just wanted to get out of there, so I agreed. Then one of the other passengers pointed down a row of shuttered shops to one that was open and said, 'money change'. I went over to got some yuan for my dollars.

When I got back to the taxi five minutes later the driver had sold my seat to somebody else. And by now the drizzle was changing to a hard, cold rain. So I stood there for a couple of minutes, knowing that the driver would be conflicted because he'd be making more money from me. Sure, someone else would then have to be standing outside in the rain. But, hey, I was here first.

Just then someone called from another vehicle, asking if I wanted to go to Kashgar. This driver wanted 150, but I bluffed him down to 120, and soon I was squeezed into the back seat of a Grand Tiger pickup, next to a woman and baby and various other packages.

Down the road we went. Yes, it was paved, but it was in pretty bad condition. The area continued to look vaguely southern Utah, though not that I could see anything with the constantly fogged windows. We kept on dropping lower, but the cold rain kept on coming. After about an hour and a half we stopped at a poor roadside Uigher village where the rest of them had noodles and meat. The temperature was starting to rise and the rain was ceasing to fall.

Another half hour or so and we were out of the mountains and in an agricultural area. For the first time on my trip there were clumps of naturally growing trees. Chinese trees, to be sure, which look different from European and North American trees. But trees nonetheless.

The driver had to get off the road to transact a little business in the county seat. As we drove down the fully functioning wide main boulevard, with fully functioning new buildings lining the way, I was almost astonished. Virtually anyone living in Central Asia would do anything to live in a place like this. Socialist town planning like the Soviets could only dream of. What couldn't these Chinese do?

When we were back on the main road, it was clear that they hadn't yet gotten around to fixing up the rest of the county. The Uigher towns were basic, funky and poor. But I did get an ethnic treat, in that the driver needed to drop some things off at his home village, which was almost as quaint as the Pamiri one in the Wakhan. The Uigher house, also, was similar in structure to a Pamiri one. I sat and dipped bread in tea for around 15 minutes and noted the various differences.

About 30 km short of Kashgar the driver 'sold' me to a cab driver, who took me the rest of the way. The last 15 km were on a new limited access freeway, and the markers showed that we were about 1400 km from Urumqi, which is generally regarded as China's far, far west.

I was dropped off at the Chini Bagh hotel complex, long the traveler's favorite. But its cheapest rooms, at 180 yuan ($30), were depressing. And what's worse they had those awful thin mattresses. So I walked over to a nice new looking hotel next door, the Eden, just to see what I could get there. A really friendly Uigher English speaking manager showed me a snazzy room with a giant bed and a fully functioning bathroom for 188 yuan. Plus they would put some more comforters on the mattress to make it more comfortable.

Civilization, I have found you!

The High Pamir

2010-09-19T10:37:00.004-06:00

The High Pamir

Tuesday morning was back to sunny with clouds, and once again felt rather Alaska-y (Alasky?). Friends and family gathered to see off Zarina and Eric. I felt privileged to have had happenstance allow me to have taken part in the festivities. But now it was time to leave this sweet world behind.

The new driver was a little bit of a jerk, but Eric and I got him down to 60 cents a kilometer. Gilu had missed the morning weekly bus to Khorog, so Eric was bringing him along to Murgab, and then taking him back with him from Murgab to Khorog. Then the driver had a couple of friends get in the back. For free. That's how they did it around here.

We continued up the Wakhan Corridor. Same flat bottomed valley with steep Afghan mountains on the other side. At one point we saw a gleaming new white building over there. American base. While the Afghans are even poorer than the Tajiks over on this side. At Langar we were at the head of the valley.

Well, not really. What happened was that the border turned left. The Wakhan kept going up into the misty distance, only now completely in Afghanistan. We would now begin our ascent to the high Pamir.

There weren't any switchbacks or death defying cliffs. The gravel road just kept going up and up through a dusty, rocky landscape. Kind of like in a Western movie, only of course bigger. We stopped for a little lunch at a little stream and Eric ran around, trying to get his red blood count higher. When we reached the summit, at around 14,400, it topped by a little my previous best, which was the Mt Evans road in Colorado. But there really wasn't a summit. It was more like the road stopped going up and started going down. Eric was talking to someone and never even noticed.

Not too much time later we reached the main Pamir Highway that went directly from Khorog to Murgab. It was paved. Sort of. A Chinese semi whizzed by. Then it was quiet. And empty. Too empty.

The LP had said that the mountains up here were rounded, so I was expecting humps and lumps. But they were more like the reddish mountains in southern Arizona. Or the blackish mountains in the Mohave. Big enough but, like all the other mountains so far, not majestic or awesome like the Alps or the Canadian Rockies.

It also felt like northern Alaska or northern Yukon. Real top of the world and end of the world stuff. But much, much drier. In fact, everywhere I had been so far had been pretty much bone dry. The ski resort at Chimbulak had been the only place with naturally occurring trees. Here at around 13,000 feet it was bone, bone dry. And no highway in America had ever been this lonely.

But maybe I've been to too many ends of the world by now. Because so far I wasn't as blown away as I thought I would be. On the other hand, I figured that with this kind of sky the pictures I was taking would blow me away when I saw them. (They did.)

We made pretty good time on the ribbon of (barely) asphalt, and as the sun was sinking in the west the white buildings of Murgab came into view. Our first police check of the day and then we were in the town.

What town? Take the driest, emptiest part of central Nevada and then make it drier and emptier. Take the poorest Mexican town at the end of the poorest Mexican road and then make it poorer. That would approximate Murgab. Not having made reservations, we were expecting to see 'guesthouse' or 'homestay' signs, like in every poor village in the Wakhan. Nada.

We were directed to one place. Awful filth and the lady wanted $20 a person. Absurd. Then the driver had a friend who had equally squalid conditions. Then we stopped at the Murgab Hotel. The price was right, at $2 per, but the facilities consisted of solid wood mattresses surrounded by dirt.

We finally got it in the driver's head to ask for Ibrahim's Guest House (as recommended by the LP), and right down the hill from the Murgab there it was. It did have a foot powered shower and an actual toilet seat perched over the pit, but the 'nice location' was a greasy courtyard where Ibrahim was taking apart engines.

Since there seemed to be no electricity in town, the advertised generator would have come in handy, but right now Ibrahim also had that apart and was working on it. Still, this was by far the best place in town, at $15 a night including meals, so we took it.

By now it was cold. Damn cold. I went to my new room and quickly put on my thermal underwear, a long sleeve t-shirt, a regular one, a long sleeved shirt, and my light windbreaker jacket. On my feet went cotton socks covered by my one pair of woolen socks. That was my entire arsenal. No more had been allotted. As it was, I could hardly close my pack.

I was still freezing. So I huddled under their thick blankets until the dinner of my potatoes and their spaghetti was ready. Then, without much to do with no electricity, we all went to sleep.

I was awakened about an hour later. First, the electricity had somehow gone on, my light bulb was lit, and no mattered how hard I looked there seemed to be no switch. Finally I had the bright idea of unscrewing the barely functioning and thus barely warm bulb.

But the larger problem was the Gilu was yakking away through the paper thin walls in the next room. Why didn't Eric shut him up? Did he have some kind of sleep disorder? Was this sort of behavior acceptable in Pamiri culture? I put my ear plugs in and kind of drifted off.

Forty minutes later I was re-awoken. Gilu was still talking loudly. I got up, opened the door, and said, 'Could you please stop that?' Acutely embarrassed, he immediately did. It turned out that he had been talking on his cell phone to his girlfriend and Eric had been too exhausted to say anything.

The next morning the sky was achingly clear blue and I had bread and jam and chai for breakfast. Eric hadn't just been physically exhausted; he had been having trouble breathing. Personally, one of my biggest fears for this trip had been the possibility of altitude sickness. In my younger years I had gotten it pretty bad both in Bolivia and Tibet, and if it weren't for an oxygen tube I might have died in Lhasa. But I live now at 7700 feet, and I had been taking Diamox as a precaution. Here at 11,700 it was so far, so good, although little twinges in my neck had me reaching for the Diamox.

Eric was into the outdoors. And he had been acclimatizing in Khorog. But altitude sickness can strike anyone, anytime, no matter their level of fitness. When he let me call Maureen on the iPhone I joked to her in his presence that I was fine but that he might die.

Eric had talked to his parents in Montreal, and they finally had the not married form. Now he thought that if he could have it emailed here and printed out he could somehow get his marriage registered today. So while he hassled with that I went off on a walk around town.

There wasn't much. The place did indeed have atmosphere, as in hardly any air and therefore crazy sharp light. And a few 'blocks' away was about the most bizarre bazaar I have ever seen. Facing each other down an impromptu 'avenue' were old truck shipping containers of various sizes. And at each a little door and window had been cut out, and in each was a tiny little store selling tiny little amounts of things. This was downtown Murgab.

I ducked into a bunch of the places, got to the end of the row, and turned back toward Ibrahim's. When I got there I was surprisingly totally exhausted, and I had to take an hour long nap. When I awoke I wondered where everyone else was. I went outside and sat on a rock for a while. Then I went back to my room and got out my notebook to finally try to write something important in it.

At that moment Gilu burst in and said, 'Quick. You must come to the hospital. Eric might die.'

I rushed around trying to find any conceivable item that might be of help. Then we had to wait for the jerk driver to show up. It seems that Eric had been walking with Zarina and Gilu when all of a sudden he blacked out and collapsed. They had gotten him to the hospital, where the doctor, an uncle of Gilu's, had given him a couple of injections. He was there now, lying wasted in a bed.

When I got there I at least gave him the emotional support of a fellow Westerner who could yell and scream if he wasn't being taken care of properly. But the people there had it under control. And it had already arranged for the driver to take him post haste back to the lower elevation of Khorog. As I cheerily told him as he lay there in desperation, 'When I was planning this trip, I realized that it usually takes at least 12 hours to die of altitude sickness. But it's only 8 hours back to Khorog.'

Somewhat relieved, he still wanted to get that Quebec form printed out. So he sent me off with the driver to try and find some internet. But the Yak House had closed down, and that had been the only internet in town. Nor did they ever have a printer. I went back and pointed out to Eric that tomorrow morning he could do all that in Khorog, then in the afternoon go down to Ishkashim and register there if need be. Resigned to that fate, he was now ready to go.

He could barely stand, and had to be helped down the stairs to the mini SUV. We went back to Ibrahim's, where Zarina and Gilu got all the gear together and he used his Russian to help me finalize my deal for getting driven to Sary Tash tomorrow. Then they were gone. Out of town, down the road, and hopefully soon down to where Eric could successfully breathe.

Eric's Wedding

2010-09-19T10:33:00.002-06:00

Eric's Wedding

I woke up around 9:30, my spirits refreshed and my body only partially so. I stumbled over to the barely functioning communal bathroom. Then I returned to my room, collected my gear, paid the lady her $10, and was ready to face the day.

It had been quite the accomplishment. Wednesday morning in Khiva, Friday night here. Well over 1200 miles. And them weren't no Interstates. I looked around me at what there was of Khorog. About 6900 feet in altitude, a town of less than 30,000straggling along the sides of a cheerily bubbling mountain river. The mountains hemming us in were reddish and pert, but nothing spectacular.

The LP had recommended the Pamir Lodge, which was supposed to be nothing more than a glorified homestay. (A homestay is where they stack one or two small Pamiri mattresses on the floor, they serve you meals, and you get to use the squat outhouse.) But a homestay had to be better than this, so I went looking for it. I hopped onto the only marshrutka route in town, the #3, and I got off a couple of kms later where I guessed the Lodge to be. It was the right spot, but people motioned that it was up and around a hill. I started lugging luggage upwards.

About halfway to the top I put the pack to the side of the road and continued on alone. Who knew if it were up here anyhow? When I got to a school grounds (an LP landmark) I saw a sign saying 'Homestay'. I went up to see if it were the Pamir Lodge.

It wasn't. But the guy at the door was a Canadian from Montreal named Eric. 'I'm leaving here in a couple of hours to the Wakhan Corridor to get married. Do you want to come along?'

It turned out that Eric wasn't exactly a Quebecois. His parents were East Indians who had been born in Madagascar. He himself had been born in France and had lived there off and on growing up. He was 36, had studied IT at Harvard, and had just gotten an MBA from Cornell. But off and on in between he had been living in Bishkek and Dushanbe teaching French.

It also turned out that Eric was a member of the Ismaili sect of Shiites, a group dating back to the 12th Century that is kind of like a Muslin version of Quakers. They don't believe in mosques or mullahs, and the women don't even cover their heads. They are best known for their leader, the Aga Khan, and for the huge charity that he operates around the world. Needless to say, they are not too popular with fundamentalist regimes, such as those in Iran or Saudi.

But the Pamiris are all Ismailis. And Eric had just met this innocent Pamiri 22 year old college student a month ago. And last week he had impulsively decided to marry her before his Tajik visa expired on the 22nd. Problem was, he didn't want his mother, a retired judge and headstrong feminist, to show up at a small Pamiri village and freak everyone out. So his mother in retaliation made sure that no one else from his family would come. Which left me as a last minute replacement for the representation of Western Civilization.

To top off the offer, Eric said that he would be continuing on to Murgab, the next major stop on the Pamir Highway. So, hmm. Take part in a genuine ethnic wedding, see the famed remote Wakhan Corridor, then have the continuation to Murgab taken care of... I went and retrieved my pack, which was still patiently sitting there.

I had hastily packed in ABQ, and when I got to KZ I noted that I had brought along a pair of pants which were way too nice for where I was going. Why in the world would I have done that? Now I knew why. With my loose, flowing cotton shirt from Indonesia I actually looked quarter decent.

At 1 the Land Cruiser that Eric had contracted for arrived, along with several other guests, and we packed it and took off, heading down a narrow canyon south from Khorog. The mountains were reddish brown and dead dry, but along the riverbank on each side were green trees and occasional small fields. The sun shining on them and on the gurgling river was quite something.

Even more special was the fact that the land on the other side, which only had a donkey track to parallel our gravel road, was Afghanistan. That's right, Afghanistan. The most remote northeast corner of. Even more amazing to think about was that twenty short years ago this was about the most heavily guarded border of the Soviet Union. Definite shoot to kill territory. And now here I was bouncing along to a wedding.

We stopped for lunch and around 5 made it to Ishkashim, the site of the only bridge over to AFG. A small, poor town hardly worthy of its location Then we turned left and were in the Wakhan Corridor. Arguably the most end of the world location there is. For those of you who follow trends in over the top cool destinations to get to, you'll already know that all those Discovery Channel adventure hosts would pee their pants for the chance to get here. But here little old me was.

The valley had broadened out quite a bit, flat and maybe 5 miles wide. Huge slabs of mountain rose on each side, and I would get tiny glimpses of the snow capped 22,000 and higher Hindu Kush peaks behind them. There were many breaks between the slabs where giant deltas of rockfall spread towards the river. When we got out to stretch, especially with the nip in the air, it reminded me strongly of Alaska in September. Except much bigger. And Alaska is pretty big to begin with.

We arrived at the village of a couple hundred souls just as it was getting dark. Eric and I were immediately taken to his fiancee Zarina's family's main room, where there was already a party going on. Like at a high school dance, the women were all on one side, the men on another. The men were wearing shabby western clothes, the women their best Pamiri gown/dresses and scarves. Two or three men and/or women would get up at a time and sort of move their arms and sway to the music. The music was atonal caterwauling from centuries ago, except that the guys doing it were wearing t-shirts and baseball caps and were holding the microphones like hip hop artists.

The Pamiri room, like all Pamiri rooms, was a giant squarish rectangle held up by many wooden upright beams. There was a small square area in the center which was at ground level, then on each side a raised platform about two feet higher. People sat cross-legged on those sides. The walls were made of stuccoed earth, and I would become flummoxed as to how a room could get so warm with just my body heat. Especially since each room has a poorly constructed skylight, which any Bob Villa fan can tell you is horrible for conserving warmth.

Eric, as a good Ismaili, had been afraid that there would be a lot of drinking going on. But from what I could see it was all pretty tame; indeed, this was one habit that most Central Asians hadn't picked up from their Russian brothers. At around 10 I took off for the little homestay that had been arranged for me. Eric the bridegroom had to hang out until 11.

Sunday morning I awoke early and picked my way along the rocky scree about a third of a mile down to the river. Whoa. Afghanistan everywhere I looked. The river itself had been pretty narrow at Ishkashim, but somehow had broadened out greatly upstream. In the morning light the Alaska analogy held. Except that instead of herds of caribou there were goats and cows and fields and villagers. And by now I was about 8800 feet up.

I worked my way back up to the village, being stopped by everyone for a courteous 'salaam al alekaam'. 20 year old girls in their go to wedding clothes would shyly try out their English on me. With the little lanes fronted by stone/plaster buildings, it looked and felt like a fairy tale world. When I got back to the main house they told me that breakfast was waiting, and I was ushered in to where Eric and Zarina were enjoying chai and farina. I joined in.

The driver and the friends from Khorog were taking the Land Cruiser up to some scenic hot springs and were waiting for me. But when I got back from re-dressing for the occasion, they had given up and taken off. Just as well, since a few minutes later a procession of ladies in their finest were escorting Zarina down the road a bit to where they gathered at another house's main room. Some other men were there, so no one minded that I was a witness to the ceremonial washing of the hair. (At the same time Eric was enduring the ceremonial shaving of the face.)

Then there was some more music (canned this time) and swaying/dancing. Then a hubbub as Eric was brought in. Crap! The ceremony was about to start and I was still in my going to the hot springs clothes. I rushed back to the homestay to change.

They were just starting when I returned, and I snuck around to the side. Zarina was demure and fetching all dolled up in her Pamiri wedding ensemble of makeup and jewelry and wedding tunic/pants and more jewelry. Eric was wearing a $40 Tajik suit that he had just bought. Lucky for him that he was a pretty small guy, so that they had a size to fit. Zarina was even smaller. As were the other villagers. I felt like Hulk Hogan at Brigadoon..

One of the reasons Eric had wanted me to come along was to take pictures for him. No need to worry on that score. Someone had been taking video of every minute transpired so far. Cameras were clicking constantly. The ceremony and the peoples' lives might have been from hundreds of years ago. They might not have running water or indoor plumbing. But everyone knew how to download onto flash drives and zip locks and thirdrunks. And of course everyone had cell phones. In fact, Eric had earlier let me call Maureen on his iPhone. We live 12 miles east of ABQ and we don't have cell phone reception. They have it here.

But back to the ceremony. It was beautiful but brief. Towards the end a confused villager gave me Eric's camera, since he couldn't get the video to work. I managed to get the last part of them leaving the room.

Now everyone headed back up to Zarina's family's place, where the wedding meal would take place. Here's how meals in Central Asia seem to work: First there is a spread of candies, raisins, etc., that nobody ever seems to eat. Sometimes salad and fresh fruit. Then after a while soup is brought around. Then a while after that the main dish, usually pilau with meat attached, gets served. As a vegetarian, I usually get potatoes and bread, although sometimes they can get creative.

In between all this there was more music and dancing. At some point there was a small ceremony where a local official civilly wed them and they signed the proper documents. Then a few statements. When the microphone was handed to me I offered up a verse of 'I Give To You And You Give To Me (True Love)'. After that people started to drift away.

Except for Zarina. By local tradition she had to sit there in the room until nighttime. I think Eric was supposed to, too, but they gave him a pass. At least Zarina's mother and a couple of other ladies waited it out with her.

But Eric was free. And he and I and his former student Gilu, who was Zarina's next door neighbor and who had introduced the couple, decided to climb the hill behind us for a wedding afternoon stroll. It was pretty steep, and out of consideration for me they stopped about 600 feet above the village. A fine panorama, but not the full Hindu Kush treatment. On the other hand, it looked like clouds might be obscuring them anyway.

The next morning I awoke at the crack of dawn and went outside. What? There was a strange dust in the air and the sky was overcast and drizzling. This wasn't supposed to happen. Paradise was always supposed to be bright and sunny. Ah well. Up to breakfast with Zarina/farina.

Afterward Eric and I got to talking about what to do next. I had already decided that, more than a Canadian, more than an East Indian, more than an Ismaili, Eric was first and foremost a crazy Frenchman. And he had this fixation that he needed to get to Murgab and then get to the pass that was 4600 meters high, then climb up to 5000 meters (16,500 feet) and take a picture.

Which was all the more surprising given the bureaucratic hassles he was now facing. His Tajik visa expired next Wednesday, which meant that he had to get out of the country then. Unless he got a husband visa. But that meant getting paperwork approved. And even if it was, he would probably have to leave and re-enter.

Then there was the paperwork involved in getting Zarina a Canadian and/or French visa. But before that could be done the wedding had to be officially registered with the government. And to do that he had to have a form from Canada saying that he wasn't already married. His parents were working on that, but perhaps the only government in the world more incompetent than Tajikistan's was Quebec's.

Okay. He already had a ticket to Paris. Why not go there, wait a few weeks until the bureaucratic dust settled, then come back and get her? Well, then I would have to stay with my aunt, and she is such a blab that everyone in the family would know that I was married. So what's wrong with that? Well, then my girlfriend living in my apartment back in Montreal would find out. And she would kill me.

What??? It seems that Eric already had a Filipino girlfriend, a Christian, but that her family had told her that there was no way that she could marry a Muslim. Besides which, she always argued with him. But Eric was convinced that if he found a sweet, young innocent thing like Zarina then she would always be loving and adorable and never argumentative.

Talk about crazy Frenchmen!

Anyway, Eric said that he would deal with the crazy Filipina when he got to Montreal. In the meantime, the afghani—the dusty cloud that had settled on the area—would ground the flights to Dushanbe for a few days. And his parents still hadn't gotten that form. And he really wanted to go to Murgab...

So Murgab it would be. And he made the proper arrangements with the locals to procure an overpriced 4 wheel drive for the adventure. Good. I did have to get out of here. The overcast weather was actually getting annoyingly cold.

National Tajikistan Day

2010-09-18T20:00:00.002-06:00

National Tajikistan Day

After Uzbek Customs I was afraid that the Tajikistan side would be a hassle, considering that TJ is considered the most corrupt of the Stans. But it was another breeze. For the first time on my trip the soldier at the last gate didn't even ask to see my passport for that final redundant check. I walked through and was officially in Tajikistan. Which meant that I now had been to all fifteen former Soviet Republics. Including Transdniester.

Not that I'm bragging or anything.

Things were slow here in Tajikistan at around 4:30 in the afternoon. After all, it was National Tajikistan Day, and everything was shut down. I had been aware of that when I had started out today, and had even been unsure whether the border would be open. Now that it was and I was through it, it was clear that I had been about their only customer. Which meant that there was no one else around to share a share taxi with.

There were a few drivers. But if they didn't get a fare they would just sleep in their cars tonight. So I had to pay a young guy $20 to go into Dushanbe. At least I got a 65 km drive out of it. And he dropped me off at the door of the Dushanbe Hotel.

Ex-Soviet hotels are renowned for their shabby exteriors, even shabbier interiors, surly clerks, long, long hallways, and large rooms with awfully painted walls, uncomfortable beds, and nothing that works. The surly desk clerk lady sent me upstairs to the much surlier floor lady who took me down a long, long corridor and showed me the room. The good news was that it was only $25. The bad news was that I would have to share it with whoever else showed up that night.

I went back downstairs. The desk clerk proved to be kind of friendly, actually, and I got the feeling that she would try to steer the other customers away. I paid her the money. Which I got from the first actual working ATM machine (owned by 'Responsible Bank') since the Bishkek airport. I went up to my room.

But I couldn't relax. Because I hadn't eaten all day, it was 6:30, and I had the feeling that Dushanbe was going to prove an even bigger dump than Bishkek. I went back downstairs, crossed the street, and found a cab to take me up to the Delhi Durbar, written up in the LP as having really good Indian food.

Usually in these fourth world capitals, the few 'exotic' restaurants that exist cater to the few people who can afford them, and they endeavor to have at least a touch of class. Not here. This would have been a crappy restaurant even in a small Indian city, and you can imagine how low their standards are. I ordered a bunch of standard Indian items and waited, watching the incessant Indian music videos and TV ads from the satellite TV .

The food was overpriced and barely edible. When I finished the last greasy bite it was now around 8. I looked at my map. It was only a couple of miles back to the hotel along the main drag. Maybe I could walk off a little of this grease.

The street was barely lit. All the stores were shut tight. Should I have my guard up? The Tajiks seemed to be notably small people. But there might be a lot of them. Desperately poor Tajiks with knives. There seemed to be a large police presence. But they might look the other way... I continued walking.

While driving up I was confused as to why the taxi guy would be taking all kinds of back alleys instead of the main drag. After a mile of walking I found out why. Blocking the road was a barricade of giant old buses, with heavily armed police every five feet. Pedestrians were being shunted off to the side. What was going on here? I got shunted off with the rest.

Down a dark little back alley and then a return to the now traffic-less wide, main street. Many more heavily armed police. Great. I was finally in a real police state! I walked along with the others through the gauntlet of cops.

In the distance I heard loud noise. As I got closer there was a final line of police. They patted me down. Then I was past them and at the edge of a medium sized crowd of people. Up in the front there was a stage. Behind the stage was a huge Orwellian kitsch statue. And behind that was an even more Orwellian kitsch arch. It was as if the crowd was taking part in some strange totalitarian science fiction ritual.

But it wasn't really. What it really was was a popular Tajik musical act performing at the National Tajikistan Day festival. Oh. And up there on the fuzzy jumbotron it wasn't a thundering speech by some Big Brother but a group of Tajik dancers on stage. Oh again. As I relaxed a bit I realized that these were just a bunch of Tajiks out for some fun on their national holiday. And I recalled being in Indianapolis on the 4th of July a few years ago, and how much far scarier the police presence had been then.

So I hung out for a while and grooved on the music. Persian music. And I remembered from the last time I was in Iran, in 1970, how much better Persian pop music is than Arabic pop music or Indian pop music. Still quite discordant to our ears. But much more complex.

After about a half hour I realized I had to get back to the hotel. The next stage of my journey, getting from Dushanbe to Khorog some 550 km away, had been hanging on me ever since I started planning the trip. The choice was between going to the airport and trying to get on a flight that usually didn't leave, or taking a seat on an overstuffed vehicle for a 20 hour journey on a terrible road. This afternoon as I was nearing Dushanbe I had pretty much decided to just go for it the next day and get it over with. Now that I had seen the best that Dushanbe had to offer, my resolve strengthened.

But I still had the problem of getting some food for the road. Namely little processed cheese triangles. Like I had lived off of in West Africa. Which, once again in retrospect, seemed more together than here. So far I hadn't even seen an open market.

But a half block from the hotel one magically appeared. I stocked up on the triangles and some fruit juice and some sugar coated peanuts. Yum.

By now it was ten and I was so exhausted that I didn't know how I would get up in the morning. Just dead dog tired. But I awoke kind of refreshed before five, then lay there until six, then got up and did my stretching and slowly put all my stuff together. At seven thirty I was out of the hotel and headed up the road.

But uncertain. Both the airport and the share taxi lot were in the same direction, but I still hadn't decided which to try.. I finally walked up to a cab and told him to take me to the airport.

Dushanbe airport has to be the world's dinkiest international airport. I knew that people would be milling around waiting to see if the flight was going today, but I had expected that to be inside the terminal. But it didn't look like more than 25 could fit inside the terminal. Instead there were at least 100 milling around outside. For a plane that carries 17.

A nice Tajik girl told me that I could try and get a ticket at the ticket office, which was about a half a mile away. A taxi took me there, but the office wasn't open. Okay. I had the taxi take me to the share taxi lot. He dropped me off outside it.

I walked in. I had expected to see people milling around haggling about Khorog prices, but instead there was a big empty asphalt area fronted by little storage/warehouse rooms. What?? A single man finally materialized and pointed towards the back. When I got there it opened up on the right and there indeed were a few people milling around. And a lot of empty vehicles in various states of being. A driver immediately tried to talk me into being one of his last passengers in a beat up old van. I don't think so.

Then another guy approached. He had a Mitsubishi Pajero, a smaller, cheaper version of a Land Cruiser. And he was offering me the front seat. At a discounted price. Sold.

By now it was 8:15 and he still had a couple of places to fill. By 9:15 he had done it and we were on the road heading out of Dushanbe. Until the first police check. And the second police check. And the third police check. Usually in these situations all the police care about are the locals and I get a free pass. Here all they cared about was me and my passport. Further on they would have to enter all my details in a ledger. In all there would be 19 stops.

For now, though, we were out of the city and into the mountains. Except that we first had to stop to fill up. Which meant somebody dipping a bucket into a barrel of gasoline and then funneling into the fuel tank. Again and again.

Yesterday the flat irrigated area around Bukhara had changed back to flat desert. Then it had changed to light brown, rounded, dead hills. Then the hills had gotten higher. Then for a brief period it had started to get wild and woolly. Then it had changed to flat, lush agricultural land surrounding Denau. And it had basically stayed that way to Dushanbe. Now finally, and for the first time, we were headed up into real mountains. Dry light brown mountains. Usually with a frothily flowing river beside us.

Since today just happened to be Eid, the end of Ramadan, everything was going to be closed down until Monday, making it National Tajikistan Weekend. But this being the former Soviet Union, the only real manifestation of Eid would be a few small groups of country females wearing their nicest dresses going to or from the mosque.

As the day progressed we kept going up and around and up some more, the mountains getting more rugged as we rose. The road was mostly paved, sometimes gravel, but always at least as good as a half decent forestry road. Albeit a 550 km long forestry road. But having snagged shotgun, it wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as I had feared.

We stopped for lunch, where I had bread and little processed cheese triangles. Then up and up some more for about 200 km. Kind of like a dry Colorado, only bigger. We finally reached the summit near sunset, got out for the police check, and admired the wide, wide view. On the horizon were snow capped summits, which means that they were at least 16,500. Then it was steeply downhill on one of those roads where most people would get really nervous looking over the side. As the light was fading.

We stopped at 7 for dinner. Ten hours so far, and if the journey had ended then it would have been no big deal. And the road never got worse. It's just that it started to get cramped and tiring as each hour went past. I had kind of computed from when we passed all the vehicles that had started out from Khorog that morning that it would be about 15 hours total. It clocked in at just under 15 and a half.

Now it was 1 am and we were being disgorged by the tiny empty bus lot in Khorog. Where to stay??? The driver pointed out a hotel next to us, but it looked pretty funky. Fortunately an English speaking Khorog resident just happened to be standing around. He went with me up to the place, and we determined that a room without bath was $10. Problem was that it was one of those super thin mattresses, which would have destroyed my back far more than today's drive. What to do?

Fortunately the mattress was really wide, so that I could fold it in half. Then fold the super thick blanket on top of that. Then close the window to make sure the room stayed warm. Then put in my earplugs, put on my eyeshades, and hope I can sleep through the dawning.

Khiva & Out

2010-09-18T19:46:00.001-06:00

Khiva & Out

Small border. Easy out, easy in. Except that the Uzbek Customs guy wanted to spend ten minutes playing with my netbook. In perfect passive aggressive form, Mark and David had snuck off without saying goodbye, presumably thinking that I'd be stuck in the middle of nowhere with nobody to translate Russian. But it was a quick taxi to the nearest town, a share taxi to the city of Nukus. another share taxi to the city of Urgench, then a final share taxi to the north gate of Khva. No more than a three minute wait at each stop, and I was probably there before they got to Nukus.

Khiva is the third jewel on the UZ tourist circuit. If Samarkand is Large and Bukhara is Medium, then Khiva is Small, a restored adobe sort of walled town from a couple of hundred years ago measuring only about 300 yards by 900 yards. The LP acted like the Soviets had restored it to a squeaky clean Disney version of itself, but hardly. The northern and southern sections were primitve, lived in, barely electrified, with cobblestone alleys. Most of the tourist sites were on the east/west axis, and consisted of some pretty basic adobe 'palaces' and medressas and minarets. The minarets looked somewhat like lighthouses, although lighthouses with intricate bands of blue/green and white tiles, were the main draw. That and the jumbled, closed in nature of the various light brown mud buildings and alleys, all penned in by the light brown mud city walls.

The Khivans, like the rest of the Uzbekis were pretty darn nice, and looked really guilty even in their mild attempts to overcharge the tourists. Strangely, what they mostly had to sell were cheap little manufactured trinkets and lady care items like bobby pins and lipstick. And lots and lots of nearly identical woolen socks and mittens which the women must knit all year. Unfortunately for them it was presently 92 degrees.

Unfortunately for me, there were lots and lots of busloads of retiree European tourists out too. Even more so than in Bukhara, probably because Khiva was so much smaller. Also, September is probably the big tourist month, because July & August are even hotter.

I had the opportunity to climb Uzbekistan's tallest minaret, but the prospect of 102 steps for 165 feet of height was way too much for my poor knees to contemplate. Ah, the diminishing horizons of age. Instead I went into the adjoining medressa, which was now a small museum. Really old looking wooden doors, etc., were labeled 'XX Century'. It was really something to realize that less than 100 years ago the Emir of Khiva was still carrying on in his craven barbaric ways. Then there were the 70 years of the Soviet Union. Now there was literally a busload of Belgian tourists parked outside.

Back out on the streets I was a little startled to hear somebody talking in an American accent to their guide. This was the first actual other individual American tourist that I had seen, so I stopped to say hello. He wasn't all that friendly. Somehow I always naively think that when you meet another traveler at the end of the world they will be overjoyed in having found someone else who shares their end of the world passion. But I have noted that a fair number seem to possess a sense of self importance and superiority from having gotten there, and that therefore they act annoyed and offended when they are reminded that they aren't all that unique.

Either that or they're just jerks. Who knows. Who cares.

And speaking of jerks, there I was in the hot afternoon strolling along the main dusty cobblestones downing a bottle of chai when who should I see but Mark and David. I mean, if you're going to be cowardly rude, you should at least be smart enough not to do it to somebody who you know that you'll have a fair chance of seeing the next day. I glared at them and they probably went back to their hotel room and hid for the next 24 hours.

Khiva was indeed really cute. But you can only walk back and forth on that east/west axis so many times, stopping so many times to admire all the rustic and exotic angles. So when the next morning at breakfast at my simple but adequate hotel a couple at the next table asked me if I wanted to share the cost of a car to Bukhara today, I said, how much? When I found out that my share would only be $5 more than the price of taking share taxis, but without any of the hassle, I said, what time?

By ten I had taken one last stroll around Khiva and my bag was packed and ready to go. The taxi pulled up to the hotel door and I and my two new friends climbed in.

John was Belgian and his girlfriend Judit was Hungarian. And they soon restored my faith in fellow travelers. The LP said that it was four and a half hours to Bukhara, but even with our own car it took seven, mostly through more light brown sandy flat monotonous desert with temperatures reaching 100. But we all had a great time trading travel stories and observations. Judit had even been to both Madagascar and Ethiopia, two of the last great unchecked off destinations on my list.

The driver took us right to the door of the hotel in Bukhara which I had stayed in a week before. Kamil was there to greet me, and offered me the same great rate, this time with free wifi. The others went off to a slightly cheaper place, but we met up again at 6:30, and I took them to La Bella Italia, where I had perhaps my last good meal until at least China.

The next morning Kamil had arranged for the same driver who had taken me to the TM border last week to show up at 8, and take me this time to the share taxi lot for points southeast. My goal for today was to make it to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. But it was unclear how, or whether or not, I would make it. The LP said that share taxis went directly to Denau, the UZ town near the border. David at Stantours had declared that I would first have to go all the way down to the creepy city of Termez, on the Afghan border, and then work my way back. I had decided to first try to get to Qarshi, about two hours away, and see what developed from that particular node on the map.

So when the share taxi driver at the Bukhara lot said that he could take me directly to Denau I was so delighted that I agreed to his price. It was only when I was in his car and on the way that I realized that I was paying him too much, and that he would just 'sell' me to another driver when we got to Qarshi. Which is what happened. Still, I was so glad not to have to be going to Termez that it was worth it.

We got to Denau around 2 and it was chaotic and hot. Needless to say, no one spoke English. And all the drivers acted like the border was still way far away. I could see that no other passengers were going there. So I finally agreed to $15. It turned out to be only about ten minutes away.

It was pretty dead at the border. No lines. But the UZ Customs guy decided that he wanted to look through every conceivable nook and cranny of my pack. Even though I was leaving the country. So I stood and waited while he probed, unzipped, felt up every piece of clothing, looked through every bottle of medicine, etc., etc. I don't think he was crooked and/or trying to entrap me; he was careful not to handle my money. And in the end of it all he had found my prescription bottle of Zolpiden, which was on his list of banned substances. But I was patient and told him repeatedly that the little brown bottle with the nice Walgreen's label meant that I was all legal, and finally he gave up and let me keep them.

Note to Self: When packing in future, put the friggin' Ambien in a bottle labeled Tylenol.

Turkmenistan a Bust

2010-09-07T02:57:00.007-06:00

It was a 17 minute walk in the 98 degree sun at 9 in the morning from the Uzbekistan side to the Turkmen. A minute later the Brits came walking up. A minute later the minivan that no one had told us about followed. The Turkmen guards told us to wait for the minivan from their side. We did.

Our tour guide was waiting for us across an invisible line. When they let us cross it she helped with the rest of the entry process. And then we were on the road.

Today was the first day of school in Uzbekistan, and all the little girls were wearing identical blue and white dresses. It was also the first day of school in Turkmenistan, and all the little girls here were wearing identical green and white dresses. Otherwise it looked pretty much the same, pretty flat, the irrigated areas supporting crops and the rest of it sandy brown desert dirt with various weeds a'growin'.

After forty km or so we arrived at Turkmenabat, a city of around 150,000. More so than anywhere else so far this looked like a town straight out of the last years of the Soviet Union, except 20 more years of decrepitude. A strange mixture of nameless, faceless four story cement apartment blocks, occasional rundown grassy areas, and spread throughout it all railroad tracks, small cement plants and the like, and dormant or belching smokestacks. Since the Soviets idolized heavy industry as much as we idolize consumerism, it all makes a loopy kind of sense.

We slowly made our way through it and emerged on the other side. A few km more and Angela, our Armenian (who ended up stuck in TM after the breakup) guide directed the driver to pull over at a small restaurant. I had potatoes for lunch, along with old style Russian soda.

Then it was across much the same landscape for around 240 km. Joseph Stalin had had a vision of an irrigation ditch connecting the Oxus River with the Caspian Sea, and the 850 mile long Kara Kum canal was completed in the 50s. Now thanks to far sighted Joe most of what we were going through was cotton fields and the like. The dry area had now turned into flat, light brown sandy desert. Kind of like on the Arabian peninsula. Hardly inspiring.

After a few hours we pulled off the road to the site of the ancient city of Merv, in the Middle Ages one of the great cities of the world. But Jenghiz Khan leveled it to the ground around 1330, so now all it was was a site. With only a couple of foundations of buildings left. In 108 degree heat. Hardly inspiring. Angela said that last week it was really hot in Ashgabat. 135 degrees. 140 in the desert.

We got to the city of Mary, a virtual carbon copy of Turkmenabat, around 6. Our hotel was actually kind of a shabby motel next to a truck stop on the edge of town. Remember, I paid top dollar for this tour. At least the a/c worked when you got up on top of the tv stand to adjust it.

The restaurant downstairs was actually a very dark bar with very loud music and a few sundry prostitutes waiting for Iranian truckdrivers to show up. Angela took us across the street to a little place where the nice Turkmen lady made up plates and plates of vegetables for almost nothing.

The next morning we were over there again for breakfast. Then we started out on the 360 km drive to Ashgabat.

The road was technically paved, but it was so buckled by the heat and those Iranian trucks that we jounced uncomfortably the whole way. Around 3:30 we stopped at another totally forgettable ruin, and a few minutes later we turned the corner and beheld the capital city.

Even miles away the eyes were dazzled by all the sparkling white buildings being erected. The level of building was reminiscent of Dubai, although here the recession certainly hadn't been felt. TM sits on a huge supply of gas and oil, and it doesn't have many people to spend it on. We worked our way around to the south end of town.

A little background: Up until four years ago TM was ruled by a former Soviet bureaucrat who renamed himself Turkmenbashi the Great and set about trying to build a personality cult around himself. He renamed the months of the year after himself. He built a collossal 'Arch of Neutrality' with a 120 foot high golden statue of himself which rotated to always face the sun. He built this mile long strip of empty white marble hotels south of town called Berzengi. Any of the rest of the world which paid attention justifiably mocked it all.

Then he died. A successor with a name about 27 letters long took over. Turkmenbashi was no longer so great. In fact, we had just found out that last week they had taken down the golden statue, which is of course one of the main reasons you would want to come to TM.

But the building continued. In overdrive. Now Berzengi was dwarfed by giant marble buildings on the other side of the road. And giant marble government buildings and apartment buildings were finishing construction all the several miles back into town.

Our hotel was already tiny and faded. The room was okay, but hardly grand. My first order of business after settling in was to go out to the Turkmenbashi Tramway a few km away that went up the side of the brown dead mountains a few km away. Sorry, it was closed.

Okay, how about rustling up some food? The staff explained in pidgin English that there was a Turkish superarket that any cab could take me to. As in KZ or UZ you just stand out in the street and every third or fourth private car going by is cruising for fares.

When I entered the Yimpash Center it seemed like I was in the midst of a wondrous futuristic hypermarket. After a few minutes I realized that it wasn't that big or overly modern, it was that the commerce I had been in since Almaty had been so small and poor.

On the third floor was a large Turkish restaurant. After chancing upon a fluent English speaking Turkmen we concluded that the one thing I could eat was... pizza. Pretty damn good pizza, though.

The next morning was Saturday, so of course I wanted to head out bright and early to the giant Tulgushka Market, five miles north of town, and according to the LP one of the most amazing sights I would ever see. Unfortunately, whatever camel trading or old Turkmen jewelry trading that had ever gone on had been closed down by the authorities, and now all that was left was a gargantuan dusty lot of temporary flea market stalls selling toothbrushes and ladies' underwear. Still, it was interesting to look at all the shoppers, mostly women. In town about half were wearing Turkmen garb; here they almost all were. It consists of a long, floor length shift/dress made of cotton bedspread material, often complemented by a matching turban. Though not amazingly exotic, the look was still quite pleasant.

Then back to the Yimpash Center for lunch and internet. And then for a walk 'downtown' in the afternoon sun. It was only in the 90s, which was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the 100s. Oh yeah, and my allergies were horrible.

There was plenty of traffic zipping around, but I was about the only pedestrian, which made the following experience all the more surreal. Because all around me were what could only be described as giant marble government palaces, often domed in gold. It was kind of hard to know what to make of it.

TM has been described as 'Las Vegas meets North Korea', but that is unfair, since Las Vegas is far, far tackier. And the North Korea comparison is way off the mark. After all, the Soviets had a very good educational system that actually created sharp minds. Just about every apartment in the country gets satellite tv. The Turkmen cab drivers are blasting Eminem on their stereos. It's unlikely that a single Turkment bought the Turkmenbashi the Great bit for one minute. Every one I talked to thought the man to be totally insane.

It would be far more accurate to say that TM is 'former Soviet Republic meets Gulf Oil state'. Which is what it is. And in that context Ashgabat is far less jagged and chaotic than Dubai; it is far more pleasant than Kuwait. But as a Soviet Republic it was naturally attracted to broad meaningless roads and gigantic megalomaniac buildings. And of course there is virtually no commerce going on; outside of Yimpash it was hard to even find a Coke for sale.

Construction fences blocked most of the sidewalks, so I ducked inside one and walked along for about a quarter of a mile, nobody stopping me. Why is it, I wondered, that we always presume that dictators have atrocious taste? If you ever check out Hitler's water colors, you'll find that he was a half decent artist. If someone built one of Stalin's neo-Gothic skyscrapers today, they'd be hailed as a post-post-modernist genius.

So it was hard for me to judge the Presidential Palace, People's Hall, etc.,etc., that I was slowly strolling past. A little too much marble and gold for my taste perhaps, but you had to admit that there definitely was a unity of design here. If these buildings were being put up in Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi--and very similar ones are--nobody would be describing them as the result of a power mad fool.

When I got to the Ministry of Defense building a soldier made sure that I didn't take pictures. But they do that in just about every Third World country. Across the street was the Orwellian named Ministry of Fairness, but the statue in front was the same as in front of any Ministry of Justice anywhere.

Which made me start thinking, 'Who's being Orwellian here?' Any other country, the Western press would have translated it into "ministry of Justice', but somehow the story line has stuck that this is a horrilbe police state.

But nobody had looked over their shoulder when talking to me. Nobody had looked or acted any different than people anywhere else. Nobody had stopped me from clicking away at all the other sights. They had asked for a passport or identity card when I had used the internet at Yimposh, but for all I knew that was so that people didn't go away without paying.

It's true that they don't allow political parties. But what good are political parties doing for us in the US these days? Anyway, I judge a police state by how scared people are that the police will catch them without their seat belts on. And in that regard TM beats US hands down. Not to mention that the US has by far the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. Or try to write 'Osama bin Laden' 100 times in an email and see what happens.

Anyway, I was walking for block after long block past one monumental building after another, and I was getting tired of it. I went past the naked Arch of Neutrality, now covered in scaffolding as they were dismantling it. At its base was a free museum about the 1948 earthquake which killed 200,000 people here. But it was closed and empty. I walked a couple of more blocks to where the Museum of Turkmen Weaving held the world's largest handwoven carpet. But it was closed and empty. I gave up and headed back to the hotel. .Turkmenistan a Bust

On Sunday we were supposed to leave at around 1, so that left only the morning. I would have liked to go to the 18 km long set of steps that Turkmnbashi had carved into the side of the mountain, but the LP never said what it was called or where it was. So instead I opted for a trip to the national museum.

It was only less than a mile away, here in Beshengi, amongst the line of buildings on the other side of the ultra wide highway that bisected the district. At first I walked into the wrong monumental building, which turned out to be the national theater/opera house. A guy took it upon himself to show me the stage, dressing rooms, etc..

The national museum next door was humungously humungous, with the plaza in front of it at least an eighth of a mile wide. I went to the ticket window. It was $30 to see the museum, a third of which was devoted to gifts given to Turkmenbashi. Plus $20 if I wanted to take pictures. I passed.

I went back out to the base of the flagpole which held the world's largest flag flapping above me and looked at the colossal museum, which was probably bigger than the National Museum of Greece and the Cairo Museum combined. And the Turkmen had been a nomadic people with no real history!

It dawned on me that this was no Police State. This was an Idiot State. Why lavish all this expense to show yourself off and then price it so that nobody would ever want to see it??? And all the buildings around me: Dubai had been founded on the premise of 'Build it and they will come'. But Turkmenistan doesn't want anyone to come. And there's absolutely no way they will be able to use all these hundreds of marble monstrosities. I walked back to the hotel.

Where I was informed that Ilyas, our new guide, wouldn't be coming until 3. The sand would be too hot until then. But wouldn't the sand be too hot every day? What's the use. Even though I wasn't all that hungry, I went back to the Turkish supermarket complex to have a last meal.

At 3 we started out. Same boring desert, only now with even fewer weeds. If only there were someone interesting to talk to. For Mark and David, my traveling companions, had shown themselves to be quintessential passive aggressive British twits. Unfailingly polite but never friendly. David in particular was constantly annoying. All of 25, and with a newly minted Master's degree in Economics, he would sit there and didactically pontificate, coming up with such gems as, 'Only rich people benefit from National Health', and 'The poor invest just as much money as the rich'.

So we're going along and Ilyas, a former English and History teacher, had asked me a question, which I was endeavoring to answer. In the middle of my reply David interrupted to announce that I was totally wrong. Up to now I had been doing my best to be unfailingly polite, but I finally snapped. 'Have you ever had a single experience in actually buying or selling any kind of anything in any actual real marketplace!?' Silence.

It was kind of depressing to realize that we in the West had done far better than the Soviets in coming up with a generation of brainwashed atheists. Plus it had never even occurred to the Bolsheviks to include total self absorption.

Some actual sand dunes briefly appeared. Then a woebegone settlement of former nomads where we stopped for three minutes to take pictures. A bunch of camels and motorbikes up against rundown yurts and wooden shacks.

Then the Darvasa gas crater. It was only 7 km off the road, on a dirt track that a passenger car probably could make. All the breathless reports that I had read made it seem that an enormous flame would be shooting 200 feet into the air. Uh uh. There was only a tiny faint glow below the surface of the crater as we reached it in twilight.

Mark and David acted helpful and unoffended as we were setting up camp. Looking around me I realized that this was one of the most unexciting deserts that I had seen. Dull grey brown. Almost flat surface. As the sky darkened the glow from the crater got a little brighter.

When we had eaten and it was fully dark I walked down to the crater. Here's what it was: About 100 yards across, it had straight walls that went down about twenty feet, then a talus of rocks which made an inverted cone which came to an almost point about 200 feet down Amongst all the rocks were hundreds of places where natural gas was seeping out. On fire. Most of the flames were about 10 feet high. A few were 20 or 30 feet high. Sort of impressive if you weren't expecting something impressive.

I went to the edge to look down into it. Then I circled the pit in the silent darkness. Kind of neat. When I got to my tent I realized that I hadn't slept on the ground for many, many years. And once I tried it my bones were, uh, not happy campers. But I hit upon the idea of taking twice as many sleeping pills as usual, and soon I was dead to the world.

In the morning it was back to the road and north across the stinking desert. To the city of Konye-Urgench. Or rather the faint traces of remains of ruins on the outskirts of said city. It seems that in the Middle Ages Konye-Urgench had been right up there with Merv. And that Jenghiz Khan totally flattened it just like Merv. So that now there were a few mauseleums and the remains of the world's tallest minaret scattered across the wasteland.

Sad to say, but Medieval mausaleums and minarets were all starting to look the same.

There were two possible exit points from Turkmenistan, Dashogus and Konye-Urgench. Dashogus would have been a lot more convenient for Khiva, but Mark and David decided that they preferred the one here. So my time in TM was at an end.

Like the Galapagos, Turkmenistan had turned out to be somewhat interesting, but hardly worth the money. What's more, most of the fun/bizarre sights for which I had come had been closed down. And even most of the police state controls had been dismantled. All that was left was the building spree at Ashgabat and the miles and miles of empty light brown dirt and weed desert.

Like I said, kind of a disappointment. But now that I've done it, at least you don't have to.

Bukhara

2010-08-31T22:43:00.007-06:00

John had convinced me to take the train to Bukhara instead of a share taxi. And the LP had agreed: Comfortable aircraft type seating, a/c, sipping a refreshing drink as the irrigated fields and unirrigated desert slipped by. I went to the large, Soviet semi-futuristic train station and plopped down $10 for a first class ticket for the 11:55.

Lug my stuff down the stairs and then back up to Track 2. Then stand and wait in the hot sun. And wait. And wait. Fuming more and more at what an idiot I was not to just go get a share taxi. Finally the 'Sharq' express train arrived an hour late. I found my way to the assigned car.

It was divided up into creepy compartments. Mine had drawn shades and had two Uzbek men in undershirts wiping their eyes awake. No a/c and sweltering. I sat there in a corner, feeling and looking pretty grumpy.

I guess they could somehow sense it. After a little while the shade got opened. Then some questions in Russian about America. Then I was offered the seat by the window so that I could properly touristfy. Finally one of them opened the window so that it wasn't so sweltering. Fields and desert rolled by.

We pulled into the station around 4, two hours after I would have arrived via share taxi. And the station was still 15 km from Bukhara. I ignored all the pestering taxi drivers with their wildly inflated tourist prices and found one who gave me the real price. He dropped me off at Bukhara tourist central.

Which is Lyubi Haus, a shady square around a shady square pool dating back centuries. More modern were all the little open air poolside restaurants. A couple of hotel touts were actually well mannered and respectful, and directed me to the hotel I was looking for. Left at the small domed marketplace and about 400 meters down a dusty street lined with dusty brown houses.

Komil's B&B was in a tastefully upkept old Bokhara house, replete with wood carved rooms, tapesries, old wooden chests, etc. Also with a/c, a fridge, modern antique bathroom, and a tv where I could watch Uzbek music videos. (At least half of all programming on third world stations are music videos. Extremely cheap to broadcast.)

After a little relaxing I set out to find eats. A couple of people had noted how they had gotten violently ill here; David at Stantours (my Turkmen tour agent) had laughed and assured me that everyone gets violently ill in these parts. But after a km or so of walking I found 'La Bella Italia', about as upscale place as I could reasonably hope to find.

To show you how incredibly cheap Uzbekistan is: A meal of a decent, large potato and beet salad, a very large bowl of soup, a pretty large and pretty good pizza, and a 1.5 liter of fizzy water set me back $6.

Back to the Lyubi Haus to hang out a bit. Back to the room. Breakfast of crepes and figs in the morning. Then a late start on walking around town.

Samarkand has grand, 'modernized' monuments . set down in the middle of a pleasant, though active, city. Bukhara has smaller, more numerous, but nonetheless still pretty damn exotic arcades and medressas in a kind of deliberately preserved 'old town' atmosphere. Since I knew beforehand that I wasn't stumbling upon an undiscovered city, the quasi 19th century atmosphere was fine by me.

Bukhara had been one of the most important Silk Road cities for around 1000 years. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Emir of Bukhara controlled most of Central Asia. Then the Russians took over. Then the Bolsheviks. Who created 'Uzbeks' and 'Uzbekistan' from a bunch of people who considered themselves Turks or Persians.

But before all that, in around 1100, some Khorezms built this 200 foot high massive Kalon Tower that I was now staring at. Very alien looking architecturally, but at the same time very amazing aesthetically. Apparently Jenghiz Khan was so blown away by it that this was the one thing in Central Asia that he didn't level to the ground. The rest of the 'square' was occupied by two large medressas a la the Registan, though not quite the scale. Still the effect was stunning. And I would have stayed longer if not for the heat--my thermometer would top out at 106.

A little further on was The Ark, which isn't an ark at all, but the remains of the fortress/castle formerly occupied by the Emir. Only parts of the walls and buildings remained, since the Bolsheviks had bombed it to hell in 1920. (They also bombed that tower, but, nice guys that they were, they then repaired it.) Walk up the ramp, pay my entrance fee, walk up some more in the hot sun and walk through a couple of small museums.

Then back out to circumnavigate the thing in the even hotter sun. Stop to visit the dungeorn and see the infamous 20 foot deep 'bug pit' where a couple of famous British adventurers were kept for three years before being beheaded. Then back to the tower area and thr rest of old town Bukhara.

My allergies had been pretty bad back in Almaty. Since then they had been relatively slight. Including at Samarkand. But this morning within 3 minutes of leaving my a/c room I was consumed with violent sneezing fits. So all day I had been popping antihistamines like M&Ms (actually, I wouldn't eat that many M&Ms at once), and still keeping it barely at bay. So now I found myself an Uzbek pharmacy to buy even more Russian pills.

Back to the B&B for a specially prepared vegetarian Uzbek meal. It was okay, but there wasn't that much of it. I was glad that I had a hunk of high priced cheese stashed in the fridge.

Maureen is glad that there is Skype. Now when I sit down and eat a meal we can chat away, me talking to a netbook and the netbook answering back.

On Wednesday I woke up bright and early and for the first time on the trip didn't feel any significant pain. Gloriously. I put my things on and headed on over to hang out with the Kalon Tower for a while in the early morning light. As I wandered back for breakfast I ran into the morning's first busload of French tourists. Seems like European tour companies book giant bus tours of Central Asia. And they all stop here in Bukhara.

And I am always amazed at how incredibly slobby all European tourists are. They invariably wear clothes that the fattest trailer park person in Missouri would be ashamed to be seen in. Since they would never dress like this at home, it's almost as if they are deliberately disrespecting the third world countries they go to. Especially since it's very important in these countries for middle class people to try and look decent.

Especially because today was their biggest holiday, National Uzbekistan Day. After breakfast I went back towards the tower, and then veered off towards Bukhara's main public park. Many, many Uzbeks were also headed there, the women all decked out in their finest tunic/dresses.

In the middle of the park was a small amusement park, complete with the oversized ferris wheel which virtually every settlement in the former Soviet Union seems to have. A ways off to the side was a 9th century mausaleum (okay, I guess Jenghiz Khan spared that too). And then in the back of the park were a few remains of the old city walls. It was still pretty neat to realize that here I was strolling around in a place that about 150 years ago was more exotic and remote than Timbuktu.

It wasn't so hot today. The temperature barely hit 103. I kept swigging water and goggling at the stone spires and domes. I didn't even mind all the French tourists. Actually, there wasn't much of anything happening on the streets. Even the vendors were giving up and closing up due to the holiday emptiness. I went back to my room, turned up the a/c, and blogged away.

In the evening I met up with the two young British chaps who would be joining me on my Turkmenistan tour and we had dinner together. I had already arranged for a car to take us the 100 km to the border tomorrow. Now I just had to pay my hotel bill, pack up, and inform Maureen that internet might not be happening for the next five days.

I'm all excited. Turkmenistan awaits.

Samarkand

2010-08-29T23:04:00.006-06:00

John (his American name) had lived in the States for about seven years when the recession hit in South Florida. Then his uncle (shades of Rugby) convinced him to come back home to get in on the ground floor of the new booming tourist industry here in Samarkand. Uncle then conveniently had an old gutted out house that John could buy and completely modernize.

Now he had a B&B just minutes from the Registan. He led me down the side street to the place. The room was pretty nice; all the bathroom stuff seemed to work and the a/c certainly did. We agreed on a price of $85 for four nights, and I settled in.

By now it was dark, and I returned to the main drag to find some food. There was a semi-decent looking place with nice owners and only okay food. By the time the young girl came out all decked out in Uzbek finery and doing a five minute graceful dance, I was her only audience. When that non-hubbub died down, I noticed a larger hubbub starting across the street.

I went out and there was the most godawful sound and light show going on. With horrible poetry in English. And I was probably the only English speaking person who was in its range. I crossed the street to the Registan.

Let me explain the Registan, which is Samarkand's greatest claim to fame. There are three rather large courtyards fronted by three enormous facades facing each other on three sides of a square. Viewed from the fourth side, even at night and with horrible lighting, it was pretty awe inspiring. I sat there for all fifty minutes of horrible poetry.

Then I sauntered over to a small open air ice cream stand, where I bought three scoops for 40 cents. Uzbekistan is incredibly inexpensive. Then I crossed the street to the supermarket, bought some cheese and bread, and headed back to the room.

The next morning John and his Uzbek ladies served up an incredibly large breakfast. I would need to be fortified for a day of sightseeing in the heat. Off to the Registan I went.

In the daylight the buildings were of course that much more spectacular. Not quite Moghul, not quite Persian, totally exotic. With their blue tiled domes and facades and minarets, just about everywhere I looked there were perfectly framed pictures. My camera went click and click and click. The courtyards inside weren't as monumental as the false front exteriors, but they were very aesthetically balanced. Most of the small rooms were occupied by small tourist shops womaned by small Uzbekis. I walked a bit, sat and contemplated, walked a bit more, sat some more. I am not easily impressed. But I was very impressed.

Finally it was time to head on out, and I proceeded to the next major site, a large mosque from the same era. I strode along a pleasant, wide, white concrete pedestrian way with upscale (for Uzbekistan) stores fronting it. Some have criticized President Karimov for prettifying the area too much, but--although I certainly enjoy old, rundown buildings--I happened to find it all tastefully done. After all, the original builders certainly intended their places to look clean and snazzy. And it's kind of culturally imperialistic for us in the West to tell the Uzbeks how they're supposed to like their national monuments.

Many Uzbek women walked by in their Friday go-to-mosque finest. I paid my entrance fee to this mosque, (not a working one), oohed and ahhed, and snapped some more pictures. After I exited, close by was a pretty huge bazaar area, which was bustling with a lot of Friday shoppers.

Then it was about a km to the third major site/sight, a lineup of about fifteen mausaleums at the edge of a giant cemetary that Karimov had just finished refinishing. The effect of the light brown stone, extravagant blue tiles, and bright sunlight was dazzling.

I walked back to the Registan marveling at what a world class tourist experience this was. Right up there with the Taj Mahal and St Sophia's in Istanbul. And President Karimove had worked so hard on it. But the irony was that it's almost impossible to get here. And it's even more almost impossible to get a visa. So for now you can eat your hearts out, Decadent Yuppie Tourist Scum.

Uzbekistan is so inexpensive that I still hadn't used up the $80 in sum that I had gotten at thoe border. But now I had to change some more money. The official rate is 1600 to the dollar, but
everyone changes on the 'black market', which is basically any hotel, restaurant or business. I went to last night's restaurant, where I traded one crisp new 100 for 210 1000s.

I couple of hours later I was back at the restaurant. This time there were no dancing girls, and I had to endure a truly dreadful attempt at a pizza.

John not only served up one of the world's best B&B breakfasts, he also had wifi. So in the morning I could not only dawdle around eating blintzes and burfee, but I could Skype the wife. See if the Phillies won. Check out how freaked out Paul Krugman was. All the important stuff.

Around 11 am I got it together to go do some more sightseeing. When I got to the Registan I turned left and went about half a km to see the fourth major attraction, Timur's mausaleum. (For those of you not buffed on your Central Asian history, Timur (or Timurlane) was a local boy from the 1400s whose capital was Samarkand and who conquered everywhere from Delhi to Istanbul.) Once again a large area in front of it had recently become a beflowered and befountained plaza. Once again I was not offended, but found it rather pleasant.

This was the last major historical monument. I continued walking into the 'Russian', modern, part of town. Samarkand is actually a city of almost half a million, and like every other Soviet creation consists of broad tree lined boulevards, long, wide, four or five story buildings, and a surprising amount of greenery that nonetheless always ends up looking and feeling pointless and boring. But I actually kind of liked the whole place.

And I got real excited when I found an honest to good honest and good Italian restaurant. For the first time so far on the trip there was some truly yummo food.

Then a meander back to the B&B. Turn up the a/c. Take a quick shower. When I went back outside twilight was a'coming. And John asked me if I wanted to join him and his family for dinner. I was glad to accept.

The Uzbeks are all Muslim, and most of them seem proud of that. But 80 years of Communism had eroded a lot of their traditions. For instance, even though they don't drink nearly as much as Russians, beer and spirits are sold everywhere. And almost nobody observes the Ramadan fast. But they do still enjoy the big overdone nighttime meals which are a large part of the Ramadan ritual.

And when John had said 'family' he hadn't just meant mom and dad and the wife and kids. There were well over a dozen men seated crosslegged around a low table. That was for the chai and appetizer part. Then we all moved over to regular tables, where there was bread and soup and more chai. The Uzbeks are like Turks in that they come across as shy, but are actually pretty warm and eager to please. Seated next to me was one of John's young cousins, who had actually just won the lottery. The green card lottery, that is. In a few days he was flying to Florida to move in with John's brother. He was pretty excited, yet still shy.

The Uzbeks, like so many third world people around the world, just absolutely love America. Granted, it is a vision of America that isn't necessarily grounded in reality. But the first question they invariably ask a foreigner is if they are from America. 99% or them aren't. So when I tell them that I am, they are so damn delighted. Of course, then I have the responsibility of patiently enduring all their questions. When I don't speak Russian or Uzbek and then don't speak English.

In John's cousin's case, he did have a basic English grounding. But it was mostly book learning. So now I had the responsibility to talk as much as possible with him so that he could practice English in the real world.

I was happy to accommodate. But I had been careful to fill myself up on soup and bread, knowing that there would be little vegetarian gnoshing when the main courses came in an hour. So right before that I excused myself and retired to my room.

(The women, by the way, were having their own party in another area. I know that the fact that traditional societies tend to do that is always presented as odious and somehow oppressive. But here's how it works: Men tend to be very devoted to their wives and children. But the plain fact is that at get togethers in every culture men usually like talking politics and sports with other men; women like talking children and men with other women. Traditional societies just don't pretend otherwise.)

In my younger days (say, three years ago) I would lead as action packed a travel life as possible. This is not because I couldn't stop and enjoy myself. It was that I was enjoying myself so much that I couldn't stop. But now that my fast descending decrepitude is asserting itself, the trick is to hold back so as not to overextend. So I had planned to sit around Sunday and do nothing. But at 10:45 I decided to go on that day trip to Shakhrizabh, about two hours away. I walked up to the Registan, where hopeful share taxis were waiting, and a guy snagged me. He still had two more seats to fill, and I gave him until 11:30. At 11:29 he had found them and we took off.

We passed a flat landscape of fields and vineyards and orchards for a while, and then started climbing over the sort of brown, slightly bushy hill/mountain that you would see in Sonoma or Napa County. A lot drier and rockier on the other side. And then we were there.

This was Timur's hometown, and is where he had his giant palace. All that was left of it now was a 130 foot tower. Intimations of mortality again as I was spiralling up the 104 high stone steps. Even worse when I was coming down. I realized that my only hope was that Medicare will still exist in a few years so I can get that knee replacement surgery.

I then wobbled along on my damaged knees about a km to where there was another blue domed, blue tiled mosque and mausaleum. My thermometer read 100 degrees, but it's always a couple of degrees high. Sunday market day was happening all around me.

It was actually a fun small Uzbek town experience, but now I had to return. I stopped a marshrutka that said 'Kitob' (in Cyrillic) and rode the 10 km back to that small city. Where I quickly got a share taxi back to Samarkand.

There was nothing to do now except, eat, sleep, stuff all my crap back into my bag, and go.

Kazakhstan Can Two / Tashkent

2010-08-28T07:33:00.008-06:00

Immigration was again a snap. I trundled on through and got back on the marshrutka. Truth to tell, the environs looked about the same as we continued along the wide valley floor towards Taraz: Nondescript fields, scattered trees lining the road, brown hazy mountains in the distance.

We got to Taraz around 3:30. The climate had returned to being reasonably hot. A waiting marshutra had one seat to fill. I was it, and we immediately took off. Now the agriculture thinned out and it the landscape was similar to what it was a lot further east going towards Charyn Canyon: Mostly flattish brown dirt with hints of green and scattered scrub. No real towns for the next couple of hours.

We pulled into Shymkent just before 6. A young, friendly, honest cab driver immediately offered to take me to the Olenbazy Hotel for not much money. Shymkent turned out to be surprisingly big, around 500,000. In normal terms it wasn't incredibly prosperous, but compared to Bishkek it could have been South Florida. The Olenbazy was in front of giant Olenbazy Square. It was refreshing to see how much nicer greenery and fountains and giant statues were when they were taken care of.

For $20 I could get a stuffy, really crappy room. For $33 I could get a much nicer room with a/c. I splurged. Then I lay down in the a/c for a while. Then I had to attend to my never ending need to find edible food.

About 200 meters down a clean, nice modern street I found a clean, nice modern Turkish restaurant. The Turks and, surprisingly, the Korean businesspeople are the ones taking over Central Asia. The extremely friendly restaurant people served my up gut busting portions of dolma, pide, and baklava for less than I paid at 'Fat Boys' yesterday.

That was the high point of my evening. When I got back to the hotel room I discovered that for all its clean tiled facade, there was still much of the old Soviet in it. The toilet seat fell off of the toilet. Remember those old jokes about Soviet sandpaper toilet paper? They were/are true. I went downstairs to the 'internet center', got off a few emails, and the connection died. Well, at least the a/c was still working. I went to bed.

These days when I wake up in the morning my mind is alert. And my body feels like it was just worked over by a bunch of drunken Hells Angels. I lay there and went over my options for the day. I could take a day trip to a mausaleum in the city of Turkistan and come back. I could hang out in Shymkent. I could go to Tashkent. Or I could be really ambitious and try to get to Samarkand. I went down to check the internet. Still out. That conveniently collapsed my options down to Tashkent.

My 'free breakfast' included a bowl of cream of wheat, two tiny pancakes with an imaginery wisp of sour cream, and a cup of black instant coffee, no milk.

I got my things and went outside, immediately getting a cab to go to where the share taxis left for the border. There wasn't much business this morning, so I had to pay a lot more than the going rate to get the share taxi moving. Now the land we were going through was dry, slightly green, grassy hills, kind of like central California north of San Luis Obispo. Pretty much empty.

The border here was a pretty elaborate setup. But taking pictures of borders in these countries is an even bigger no no than taking pictures of airports. The cab driver directed me to his sister (!) who had a little money changing booth. I pulled out my $80 worth of Tenge. Now it got interesting, since the largest denomination bill in Uzbekistan is 1000 Som, which is worth about 45 cents. So in exchange I got two giant wads of 500s and 1000s. Feeling like a successful drug dealer, I stashed them in my backpack. And headed for the first gate.

Painless again. Even Uzbekistan, which I had been a little worried about, seeing as how it's supposed to be a police state and all. But I was out the other side and dickering with cab drivers in little more than an hour.

Uzbekistan wasn't at well off as Kazakhstan, but it was much better off than Kyrgyzstan. And it had an immediate air of permanent semi-slapdashness. A slight hang looseness not in keeping with honored Soviet tradition. Moreover, Uzbek used the American alphabet! (By the way, the Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uzbek and Turkmen are all variations of Turks and the Turkish language. Tajiks speak Persian.) Well, okay, many of the signs were still in Russian, but this was all getting too easy.

I got a guy to take me to a Metro stop in Tashkent for under $3. Then I took the Metro to the southeast corner of town for 25 cents. Then another couple of bucks to take me to the guesthouse door. I rang the bell.

Nobody answered. Hmmm. A went over to a step and sat down, pondering my position. Try to get to Samarkand? Ten minutes went by. Then people showed up, opened the gate, and profusely apologized for not having been there. Considering that my reservation wasn't until a couple of days from now, I couldn't really blame them. And I was glad that they would have a room available at 4 pm.

When I made the online reservation, it came with a note that there was 'No Harlotry Allowed'. Then I later noticed that the guesthouse was run by an evangelical Christian group. So I was half dreading an attempt at proselytazation. But these turned out to be people who were actually trying to act Christian instead of just talk Christian. They were very friendly and refreshing.

And they had internet! And Uzbekistan didn't block Blogger! Although while here I could only use it from 9 to 5 during office hours. Still, I was finally able to communicate a little. Then they directed me to where there was, what else?, a Turkish restaurant about ten minutes away, I left my bags with them, and went and had a pizza.

I came back, moved into my room, turned on the a/c (everywhere in Tashkent seemed to have a/c), then headed out to see what I could see before it got dark. The impromptu taxis here were even more ubiquitous. And cheaper. A couple of dollars would get you just about everywhere. And Tashkent, like all Soviet cities, was incredibly spread out, with endless boulevards and parky areas and fountains and...

You had to hand it to the Soviets. They really tried to be grand. But all of their green spaces and quasi-modern triumphant sculpture and such are almost invariably uninspiring. Of course, trying to make atheism inspiring was always going to be a tough sell.

But that's what you need to know about the Soviet Unioners. They were an odd mix of atheism and utopianism. Which made for so much of the bizarrity of their manifestations. But it's also important to remember that many of them, including the bureaucrats, were motivated by a sort of selfless idealism.

Anyway, Karimov, the present and future ruler, is keen to bring Uzbekistan into the modern world. So many of the avenues are lined with spanking new construction. There's no oil money here, but somehow he's coming up with the cash. And there are a lot of nice snazzy new apartment buildings going up, too, so at least some people are doing well. On the other hand, the fact that you can get every other car to stop and take you to the other side of town for two bucks means that a lot of people aren't.

I went to the Chorsu area, the old part of town, but didn't get much past the giant bazaar. Which like most bazaars in most poor countries, isn't about exotic spices or antiques, but concerned with selling lots of fruits and vegetables and cheap plastic crap to the locals. There were a couple of old tiled mosques and a smattering of people in colorful Uzbek garb.

Next I took the Metro. Since taking pictures on the Metro was even more verboten than taking them at the airport or the border, I was expecting the stations to be really fancy and artistic, like the ones in Moscow. Uh uh. Really blah. And blah train cars. And it was about the least populated Metro ever. I got off at the Oybek stop, where I started walking around looking for the Tandoori Indian Restaurant, which the LP said was 'an enduring Tashkent favorite'. But the LP has a habit of touting luscious sounding restaurants which turn out not to have existed for at least ten years. I finally found the address, which was currently occupied by a giant hole in the ground.

I stuck out my hand and took a car back to that Turkish restaurant. But I wasn't going to have another pizza. No, I would have them direct me to an internet place. Which they did, but it was closing in 5 minutes. So I bought a little bread and cheese and went back to my room in the dark.

An hour later I was regretting not getting that second pizza, and I was ravenously devouring my meager rations. I had also noticed a slight problem with my accommodations. My 'mattress' was about an inch thick, and it rested upon an incredibly hard slab of thick unyielding particleboard. Even when young and with a good back it would have been unbelievably painful. Fortunately there were two other beds in the room, and by piling up all three 'mattresses' it became barely tolerable.

Other than that, it was a really nice little setup. The next morning 4 Chinese ladies--excuse me, Hong Kong ladies (they were insulted to be lumped in with China)--told me about a great place in Samarkand.

But first I had to wait for the nice Christian people to show up at their office, and check my email. Then I felt the need to see a little more of Tashkent. After all, although it was supposed to be foreboding and boring, so far I had found it kind of pleasant and boring. And you call this a police state? Sure there were cops on just about every corner, but the biggest one was about 5'6" tops, and they seemed intent on doing as little as possible. Anyway, so long as you avoid eye contact and always look like you know what you're doing, even in real police states they'll usually leave you alone.

But after going to the main park and walking around some, I had run out of things to do in the big city (population 2.5 million). So I took a car back to the Turkish restaurant and had another pizza for the road.

Then back to the guesthouse, pack up my belongings, and take a car out to where the share taxis left for Samarkand. As usual, pretty aggressive guys, but once one has snagged you they all quiet down. I stood around waiting for about a half an hour until my guy had snagged his full allotment.

These included a man who spoke basic English and his university bound son who was actually pretty good. He of course was eager to get some real practice in, and I was happy to oblige. The next four hours included a lot of, 'Sir, which is your favorite country? For beauty? Where do you find the nicest people?'

Also included was a stop at a roadside melon market, where everyone got out and bought beaucoup de melons. Maybe the vendors don't need to take any home at night. The rest of the scenery alternated between irrigated farmland and semi-barren to barren waste. I looked out the window and absorbed the reality that here I was in the middle of friggin' Uzbekistan.

The roads so far had been paved, but not up to an incredibly high standard. Usually four laned, although nobody abided by lanes that much. Traffic was never too heavy, was more chaotic than the States, but a lot less so than Mexico.

As we got near Samarkand, the kid's father took out his mobile and called the B&B the Hong Kong ladies had raved about. The guy said that he would meet me at the supermarket in front of the Registan. The cab driver had become really friendly and was more than eager to take me there. I shook hands all around and walked across the street into the Samarkand about-to-twilight.

Kyrgyzstan Can't

2010-08-27T10:55:00.004-06:00

It would have cost me $160 to get a Kyrgyz visa in the States. And I would have had to wait for three weeks. If I was lucky. But flying in on a $70 ticket I could get a $70 visa at the airport. Okay, $100 for two entries. And I had to wait in line behind a bunch of Korean businessmen.

But after that the rest of immigration was a snap. And my driver was actually there. We drove in on a deserted road for about 30 km.

The inskirts of the city looked pretty desultory in the late night. He pulled into the guesthouse carport and showed me to my room. There was a creepy little bed and a light that didn't work. The communal toilet had no seat and no toilet paper. It was just before 4 am and little Mikey had had a long day. I fell asleep.

I awoke at around 11:30. Bishkek was supposed to have the same climate as Almaty, but outside it was grey, cold, and rainy. I went back to bed.

By 12:30 I realized that I had to get up and see what I had gotten myself into. I had been communicating with Gulnara, who had seemed friendly enough. A Kyrgyz relative said that Gulnara was in Japan. No one else in the family spoke any English.

Well, I guessed I had to walk into town. Which was several miles away. Through the rain. I put on a shirt and a jacket I had brought along for the high Pamir, and started out.

The main road I walked along was just as dreary as the weather. When I got to a major intersection I sat down on a step outside the rain. A chirpy female German backpacker came by and cheerily told me about the nice coffee shops, etc., that I would find on the main drag. That sounded good, because besides being cold and wet I was hungry.

Walking towards the center I passed more Soviet parks and monuments, but they were all woebegone and ragged. It looked like twenty years ago Bishkek and Almaty were roughly the same, but they had been going in opposite directions ever since.

When I got to Chuy, the main street, things didn't improve. Nor was there anything approaching a nice coffee shop. I walked past the monument to independence, the presidential palace, etc., etc. There weren't even that many other people walking by. It was that poor.

I found an Italian restaurant, but it was empty, creepy, and overpriced. I walked into a place that advertised cheese samosa/pierogies. 'Vegetarian' is the same word in Russian, so it was easy for the girl there to tell me that she didn't have anything I could eat. The cold rain had devolved into a cold drizzle. I walked back into it.

Finally I found 'Fat Boys', the supposedly expats' favorite. I ordered some soup, some spaghetti, and some roast potatoes. It was high priced, barely edible, and very greasy. I finished it and started my long walk back to the guesthouse.

The guesthouse had advertised that they had internet. Of course they had lied. And John's internet had been off and on for three days. Mostly off. So far I had had better luck in West Africa.

My leg muscles were holding up pretty well so far. But the joints connecting them weren't. Right now where my thigh bones were connected to my hip bones it was feeling pretty brutal after eight miles of pounding the pavement. It was 7 pm, I was freezing, and I went to sleep.

And didn't wake up until 7 am. In the morning the weather had turned to partly cloudy. I had penciled in a couple of days to take a little trip into the mountains, but if it was this bad at 2,000 feet I could only imagine what it was like at 10,000 feet. Cold and muddy and no infrastructure. And the Kyrgyz people weren't seeming all that warm and friendly either. I knew that times were super tough, but sometimes times get tough because the people are jerks.

I didn't want to make snap judgments about the Kyrgyz. On the other hand, I didn't want to hang around and find out. Moreover, another German backpacker I met at 'breakfast' regaled me with his miserable tale of trying to get out of the mountains yesterday. What was I to do? Walk around Bishkek some more? It seemed crazy that I would go to this effort to get to Kyrgyzstan and then stay only 24 hours, but I didn't see any point in staying. If I was going to be doing nothing I'd rather be doing it somewhere exotic like Samarkand.

The border with Uzbekistan was closed, seeing as how about a month ago the Kyrgyz in Osh had just massacred 1000 Uzbeks. The guesthouse driver guy taxied me to the West bus station, and I found an oversized marshutra (Russian for 'minibus') that was heading for Taraz in Kazakhstan. I grabbed a quite comfortable seat and waited around for an hour or so while he rounded up more passengers.

Whilst sitting I could ponder the absurdity of the West's portrayal of Central Asia being run by brutal dictatorships, except for the bright shining beacon of Kyrgyzstan's democracy. At least as compared to Kazakhstan, what insane twaddle. Any Kyrgyz would give anything to be living in Almaty.

Generalizing: To the extent that anyone in countries such as this care at all about Free And Fair Elections, it's down around #47 on the list. And the few intellectuals who do care have this sweet, idealized vision of democracy that has absolutely nothing to do with the degraded mess that we have sunk to. Consider: Putin has approval ratings of 80%. So do the Chinese leaders. Virtually no Western leader is above 30. Talk about the Emperor's New Clothes! Because we're still strutting around tut-tutting about how obviously superior OUR 'democracy' is.

Well, enough fulminating. Because the marshutra was filled up. And we were headed down the nondescript agricultural road due west towards Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan Can

2010-08-26T00:08:00.003-06:00

Friday morning saw me at the bus stop across the street from the Kazakhstan Hotel. Waiting. Finally at 10 am the special bus pulled up and all of us with our daypacks slung over our shoulders scrambled to get a seat. Fifty Tenge and forty minutes later we were up the foothills to Medeu, a pretty huge skating rink in the pines.

Nobody else seemed to be going any further, so I had to pay 1500 Tenge for a taxi ride up, up, up the 7 km or so to the Chimbulak ski lodge. Construction was going on all around for the upcoming Asian winter games in January. I followed a group of hikers around through some construction, and found out that the ski lifts were still working. I paid my money and hopped on board.

There is nothing more peaceful and quiet than riding a ski lift in the summertime. You're going away from the lodge, and surrounded by trees and hills and grass silently sailing by. What's more, the sky was a perfect blue, and even here at around 9,000 feet it was t-shirt weather.

At the top around half of the people were hanging around near the lift, and we others drifted off walking further up. Man, it was steep for bad, old knees. Above me was the craggy rocky top of Communism Peak. About a half mile and about 250 meters up I made it up to its cwm (great Scrabble word), the bowl-like depression at its base. I sat in the grass for a while and then headed back down.

By now many more Russians had made it to the top of the lift, and they were gabbing and gabbing away. I'd hate to be here on the weekend. I rode the lift down, and now it was the opposite experience, heading back towards civilization. The taxis were adamant about 1000 Tenge per seat to get to Medeu. I was tired of paying extortionate amounts, and decided to walk.

Big mistake. The road was super steep, there was construction all around, and my knees were getting beyond shot. After around 800 meters I gave up and hailed a cab and paid him his money.

Now the wait for the bus. When it arrived there was a mad dash with too many people and too few seats. I was pushing aside little old ladies (and they were pushing back pretty hard). I wasn't proud of myself, but there was no way that I was going to stand for the next 40 minutes.

We arrived back next to where John teaches, so I stopped off to see him at his office. Then it was down a few blocks to a place I had noticed on my walk yesterday. Pizza Hut. It was overpriced and not very good. But now I could add Kazakhstan to Yemen, Nicaragua, Andorra, Luxembourg, and the 20 other countries that I've had Pizza Hut in.

Saturday was supposed to be one of my rare 'off' days where I had no adventures planned. But Ilya the Ukranian had showed up last night to Couchsurf, and he informed us at 8 am that he had hired a car and driver to take him 30 miles away so that he could photograph some old apple trees by the side of the road. We were invited along, so we pulled on some clothes and went.

We wound up in an area you wouldn't expect to find in Kazakhstan. It kind of looked almost tropical, or like the mountains down South, with a hazy atmosphere, lush overgrown vegetation, and valleys and steep hills on the horizon. Of course, this was the summertime. In winter it would be frigid and impossible to reach. But now it was dotted with all kinds of claptrap structures, neglected farmhouses which were the summer dachas of any number of city folk.

One of them was Nina, a 60 year old Russian who came to ask why John was taking pictures of the construction of old tires she used for a retaining wall. When she determined that nothing sinister was going on, she invited all of us, John, me Ilya, and the driver, in for tea, bread, jam, homemade cheese, etc..

Nina loved to talk. And talk. John had an appointment at 2, but was too polite to break in. I would have had no trouble being rude, but couldn't speak Russian. Finally the situation was brought to Nina's attention; she was a little upset that son Sasha wouldn't be able to take us to the Russian saint shrine somewhere off in the hills. But Ilya was game to stay. Don't worry, he'd find a way back. I joked that this was the last we'd see of him. He was one of those people who had too much friendliness and too little smarts.

For the last few days I had had a lot of fun deciphering all the Russian signs. It turns out that most of the modern words, such as 'supermarket', 'hot dog', and 'bowling', are pretty much the same once you transliterate the Cyrillic. Which means that you can actually figure out alot of things. But now at 4 pm John and I had to figure out what the Russian was for 'antihistamine'. Although one of the reasons I had left New Mexico was to escape my allergies, they had followed me here with a vengeance, and I was going through at least 8 Benadryl a day.

They didn't have Benadryl in Almaty. But 'antihistamine' in Russian is 'antigystamine;, and they did have several types of those. At very high prices. I chose the cheapest one and hoped that it would do the trick.

Next we took a bus to a hypermarket and got a few provisions. Then back to the apartment, freshen up, and John and I went down to meet his Kazakhi fiancee at the vegetarian restaurant. Govinda's. Run by the Kazakhi Hare Krishnas. And just as we arrived so did around 30 of them, all decked out in saris and robes and chanting away.

The food was underly spiced and overly greasy, but what the hey. How many vegetarian restaurants were there in Central Asia? To John's knowledge, this was it. We walked back through the hot, muggy night. It had been pretty damn hot the last few days. John said that it was about the worst he had seen so far.

The next morning I was up at 6 and out the door for my big bus excursion. It started three miles away, so I just held out my hand. The first car stopped, I told him my destination, offered 300 Tenge and off we went. The way it works around these parts is that virtually every other car is an informal taxi, and as opposed to the formal ones, most of these guys are really nice and reasonably priced.

There were two bus loads of us going out to Charyn Canyon. Almost all working middle class Russians and Kazakhs. About three hours on the road, and then 45 minutes to go 6 miles on a gravel road. It started out flat and agricultural, and then morphed into slightly rolling brown wasteland. When we got to the end we all got out and started walking downhill through the canyon.

It would have made a nice state park in Arizona or Utah. The canyon itself was only a few hundred feet high, but the main attraction was strangely eroded rock formations along the ridges. After about three miles of down, down, down, we arrived at a moderately wide river with shady trees alongside.

I couldn't rest all that well, since I didn't know the particulars on how and when we were supposed to get back. But finally someone told me that the bus left at 4. It was 2:20 and I am the world's slowest walker, so I started back.

It's not that it was horribly steep. But it was 95 degrees. And the two liters of water I had brought along weren't enough. I arrived at the top wiped out and dehydrated.

The bus didn't leave until 4:30 because of dawdlers. As we rode back I noticed once again all the impromptu fruit stands by the side of the road. There were many giant piles of hundreds of watermelons. I wondered how they thought they could sell them all. Then I saw someone putting 10 watermelons in the trunk of his car. Then I realized that the seller would have to take all of his unsold watermelons home with him at night. And then bring them back the next day.

We were back in Almaty at 8:30 and I was at John's apartment at 9. Ilya was there with a giant swollen foot. Sasha had talked him into trying a motorcycle, he had crashed, and had spent the entire day at the hospital. A couple of other Couchsurfers had also arrived.

I took about the 9th shower I had taken since arrival, and bustled about getting my things together. A taxi came at 11 and took me to the airport. There is exactly one flight a day between Almaty and Bishkek, a small prop plane, and it leaves at 1:30 am.

At the airport I was annoyed that taking pictures at airports is verboten, and the police there wore ridiculously oversized green Soviet army hats on their small Kazakh heads. Also that I hadn't taken a shot of one of the Presidential billboards. Nazarov (?) seems to be still completely bought into the Soviet ideal, and his picture is inveriably comically stiff and pasty, standing there as if he has just successfully concluded another five year plan.

Ah well. Stare at the walls for awhile. Then board the plane.

From There To Here

2010-08-24T08:50:00.002-06:00

Just to remind me from the start that small mistakes can be very costly, I realized as I was emptying my pockets at the airport that for the first time ever I had forgotten to bring along my little bottle of headache and allergy pills. Buying the smallest box of each at the airport newsstand set me back $18.

I've learned my other lessons, though, and slotted three hours for between planes. The Atlanta airport was filled with miserable people who hadn't done that and who had missed their connections due to thunderstorms in the area.

As the crowd coalesced for the Dubai flight I started talking to a military contractor who was going over to Afghanistan to fix helicopters. He pointed out that at least a third of the flight were other military contractors. A lot of Type A personalities who were constantly surrounded by really loud machines spitting out lots of firepower. Given those parameters, I understood how, even with the best of intentions, it would be nearly impossible for peace to somehow emerge from such a situation.

Every seat in the 777 was full. For fourteen hours. Two years ago when I took a fancy Emirates flight to Dubai I was amazed by the 100 movies on demand at my personal seat video. Now the deal was old hat even on a crappy airline like Delta. I alternated between choosing movies and trying to sleep in my locked and upright position.

We flew right over Baghdad, but the dust and haze was such that you couldn't see anything. It was dark again when we landed. A zip through customs and then the culture shock of being in Dubai.

The main part of which was in how happy everybody was. After all, over 80% of the population is from India, Pakistan, or the Philippines, and to them a life where things were neat and clean and stuff actually worked was pretty much Heaven on Earth.

An official airport taxi to Sharjah (about a half hour away) would have cost over $50. So I paid $1 to take the spanking new automated Dubai Metro to its next stop, got off, and then got a regular taxi for $17.

The 4 star hotel turned out to be only about 2.7 stars. But it was the size of an apartment, complete with a full kitchen and a washing machine. To sleep at 11 and then up at 6:30 and my free 10 mile lift to the Sharjah airport for the 9 am discount flight to Almaty. Surrounded by new freeways and buildings and all, I concluded that even with the economic downturn it was still impressive as hell what the UAE had accomplished from absolutely nothing in the middle of a flat, brown, ugly sand desert. And all of this without the slightest hint of democracy.

At 2:30 local time, surrounded by a bunch of Russians and Kazakhs, I deplaned onto the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. Immigration was a breeze. And then I was surrounded by a bunch of predatory taxi drivers wanting absurd amounts of money to go into town. Even though I knew the rate should be 1500 Tenge, I told them I would pay 2000 (about $12). One guy went for it, so I went to his car.

Big mistake. It turned out that he had no idea where the (pretty obvious) address I had given him was. For the next hour and a half he drove around and around and around. He didn't speak a word of English. He wasn't very bright. And he was probably the only person left in the entire world who didn't have a cell phone. Around and around and around. Then when he finally found it he wanted 4000 Tenge. I told him not a chance. But I didn't have 2000 Tenge to throw in his face. Because the ATM at the airport had only spit out one 10,000 Tenge note. So now I had to find someone on the empty street to have change. Which would be like getting a stranger to change a $300 bill in the States. But I finally found a guy, changed the bill, and gave him the choice of 2000 or nothing. He took the 2000.

Now I had to find a mobile phone so that I could call my new Couchsurfer friend John, an American guy my age who teaches at a university here in Almaty. I got a hold of him and he directed me to his apartment, where a Hungarian backpacking couple who were already staying with him let me in. As I somehow knew it would be, his apartment was up six long flights of stairs. A little later he showed up, and we walked around Almaty a bit. I could immediately tell that it was one of the better examples of a Soviet city, with relatively decent stone buildings of four or five floors and lots and lots of trees.

The next morning I woke myself up so that I could seriously walk around Almaty. The city of over a million is at the base of a semi-impressive mountain range, so it slopes from south to north from up to down. I headed up south. A quiet tree lined street up to the usual semi-Soviet independence monument, then over to an overpriced cable car up to a little park overlooking the city. In several directions there were a smattering of new fancy, schmancy office and apartment towers. Kazakhstan has lots and lots of oil, so it has done about the best of all the former Soviet republics. The President is somewhat of a benevolent despot, and is well respected for what he has accomplished. This is by no means a police state. In fact, you rarely see any signs of authority.

Back down the cable car, and then wandering north down the hill to Prokofiev Park, the city's main green space. The big attraction here was the 1908 Russian cathedral, brightly painted and domed like St. Basil's in Moscow. Then west along the main shopping street to find the office where I could buy my ticket for the Charyn Canyon tour. By now it was four and I hadn't eaten yet, so I found a Turkish joint where I got an ersatz pizza. After that it was back up the hill towards John's apartment.

John is an ex-hippie and a Quaker, and when he found out about the Couchsurfer thing earlier this year he got really into the idea of providing a place for people to stay. So he's turned almost no one away, and at one point he had 16 people crashing on his floor. Last night it was 7, but today it was back down to 3.

Present day backpackers are considerate and polite. But they also need to be checking their email four hours a day, and they need to go to a bar or disco every night until the wee hours. A new academic year was starting for John at the university, so he was working really long hours. Still he found time to hand out with me for a while in the evening.

Then it can time for me to go online and post this blog. But apparently blogger.com is blocked by the authorities here in Kasakhstan. What??!! I mean, I certainly approve of censoring other people's thoughts. After all, they're almost always wrong. But MY thoughts? Now that's pretty creepy.

Nevertheless, I finally realized that if I send this as an attachment to wife Maureen, and she remembers how to cut and paste, this all important blog post can still get published in a timely manner.

The gong of freedom will not go silent! Stifle me they shall not!

Turkmenistan or Bust

2010-08-14T15:31:00.003-06:00

This trip started some nine years ago, when I first got it into my head to go to the five former Soviet Republic Central Asian countries. The 'Stans. The idea was to land in Turkey, go overland through the Caucausus, take the rustbucket ferry across the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan, loop around Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrghyzstan to Kazakhstan, and out through China, ending up around the world and back home.

Only problem was that you can't go through Turkmenistan without prepaying a tour and having a guide with you the whole way. Yes, you can do it with a transit visa, but for that you'd have to go to the Turkmenistan embassy in a neighboring country and wait up to two weeks while they processed it. And at the time they didn't even have an embassy in Baku.

So I gave up in '04 and just went to Turkey and the Caucausus. But every year I've kept re-examining the situation, looking for some way to get around the damn Turkmenistan problem. And it always ended up being intractably impossible. So this year I finally cried 'uncle' and contacted a Canadian guy in Kazakhstan who specializes in 'tours'. And in exchange for a whole lot of money he booked me with two other guys for a five day, four night Turkmenaganza. Starting September 2 (in sh'allah) I'll get to see the almost non-existent ruins of the grand city of Merv, the truly bizarre (North Korea meets Las Vegas) capital of Ashgabat, and a giant hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere that spouts an even more giant spume of natural gas permanently on fire.

But that's not all. Because I've also signed up for the other four 'Stans. And since I've waited so long, the visa process for the other four--which used to be an insanely complicated Soviet process of letters of introduction, prepaid this and that, and embassies which never answer their telephones--is now modernized to the extent of only being really annoying and time consuming.

But I've done the work and gotten the dang things, so on Monday, August 16, I take a cheapo flight to Dubai, and then an even cheaper flight to Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan. After a few days there I go to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrghyzstan, and from there... Well, I was going to go over the mountains to Osh, and from there to Uzbekistan. But a couple of month ago Osh had riots that killed a thousand or so Uzbeks, so the border between the two countries is closed. Which means that I'll have to go back to Kazakhstan and from there to Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan.

Then it's to the fabled cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, with giant turquoise mosques courtesy of Timurlane, grandson or so of Genghiz Khan. Who was the guy who a hundred years before had totally destroyed all the fabled cities which used to be in the area. And then on into Turkmenistan and out again in northern Uzbekistan, where there there is the fabled city of Khiva. Plus the ecological ruins of the Aral Sea, which used to be the fifth largest lake in the world, but is now almost totally dried up because of the irrigation plans of the former Soviet Union.

Down south and east again towards Tajikistan. Here it gets a little hazy, since there are three different ways to go. The wife doesn't want me to take the Afghanistan option. But the idea is to somehow get to the Pamir Highway, which goes along at 12,000 foot for several hundred miles.

Then it's back into a corner of Kyrghyzstan, and hitchhiking bright and early on a Chinese truck that is going over Ishketran Pass into extreme southwestern China and the city of Kashgar. And a couple of days later I take the bus that goes down the Karakoram Highway (or KKH) over and through the Karakorams, the Hindu Kush, and the Himalayas on into Pakistan. Which is supposed to be the most majesticest mountain scenery in the world.

Although here it gets tricky. First of all, there was a massive landslide in January in Hunzaland, creating a twenty mile long lake. On good days there are little boats ferrying people and stuff back and forth, and for a while the Pakistani army was giving free helicopter rides across. But they're not there any more.

Because for the last couple of weeks Pakistan has had its worst floods in history. And said floods and rains have pretty much wiped out the KKH at too many places. So right now the people of Hunza and their mountain neighbors are completely cut off from the rest of the world.

Now you would think that would mean that in five weeks time (when I was hoping to arrive) they could get some sort of road happening, especially with their Chinese freinds sending down road crews. But China has been having landslides of its own. And the Pakistani government, which is pretty much dysfunctional in the best of times, is having to deal with literally millions of washed out people downstream.

So I probably won't know until two days before I head over to China whether I can even do it or not. And if I can't, then that entails hanging out in Tajikistan and Kyghyzstan that much longer. Which would be great, except that this entails getting a new round of visas. Which is so friggin' complicated that I won't even try to get into it here.

And even if I do make it into Pakistan, I still have to find my way to Peshawar. Which probably isn't the smartest city to be flying from. But that's the only place in Pakistan from which to get back to Dubai cheaply.

Unless I went to Karachi. But that's probably even more dangerous. And flooded.

Whoa. Just writing down the short form is exhausting me.

And now I have to go and do it.

So off I go.

Surinam & French Guiana

2009-10-15T18:59:00.001-06:00

Welcome to the place in South America where everybody speaks Dutch.
The Fatman’s Surinamese associate had come over on the ferry to meet me. My bag was already stowed in his minivan and I was at the end of a long single file being processed into the country. Finally my passport was stamped and I was on the bus. It was 1 pm and I was heading towards Paramaribo (pronounced ParaMARibo).
The road across Guyana had basically been a strip development of cane fields and stilt houses surrounded by forest. Here in Surinam it was pretty much uninhabited bush. As with the Amazon basin next door there was actually absolutely nothing inspiring about this ‘rainforest’. It was just endless, rather spindly and boring trees (and I generally really like trees) growing upon rather poor soil. When you consider it, the Dutch were colonizing here in 1650. If there were any natural resources to exploit, they would have done so. And today the place would be populated and rich.
Around 5:30 we had made it into the country’s only city. It was substantively cleaner and better off than Georgetown, although still simple and poor. Surprisingly there were few blacks, although there was every kind of brown, from Indonesian to Indian to Amerindian, with a fair chunk of Chinese thrown in. When we got to the small, cute, old Dutch colonial center of town, the driver dropped me off at my guesthouse.
But when I got inside, exhausted after over twelve hours of traveling, I found that they had lost my reservation. And were full up. The girl was, however, nice enough to call around and find me another place. And then called a taxi to take me the few blocks so that I didn’t get lost in the darkening city.
I had gained an hour, so it was after eight when I finally had my stuff in the room. And I hadn’t eaten all day. So my guesthouse people told me where I could find a place around a twenty minute walk away. Off I went.
When I got to the area I was shocked to see white people walking around. Guyana’s official population profile has less than 200 native born white people. And I had just been bouncing through the almost trackless jungle. But here I was, exhausted and famished, sitting at a restaurant surrounded by pasty, clueless middle aged people who looked like they had just gotten off the plane from Amsterdam.
They had. It turned out that Surinam had become a semi-trendy eco-destination for Europeans, and this here was what passed for the fancy hotel district. Such as it was. At least the food, when it finally arrived, was pretty good.
Back to the guesthouse. Just checked in was Rick, another 100 country backpacker type whom I had briefly met on the ferry from Guyana. Looked like this was the only place in town not fully booked. By now it was after ten, and I turned in for the evening.
Since the country was totally flat and completely forested outside of town, and therefore nothing else to independently do in Surinam, Thursday had been set aside for touring Paramaribo. There wasn’t all that much to tour, here, either, but Rick came along as we walked around the colonial part with the strange Dutch wooden buildings, passed the few government buildings, and entered the old fort/museum. And to stretch the time out we regaled each other with our travel stories.
By early afternoon I was pretty hungry, and we both were reliving the common travel story of not being able to find anywhere to eat. An Indian guy took us for block after block to find an ‘Indian restaurant’, but when we entered the grungy snack bar they were just closing up. Aggh! I was about to get a severe headache.
What to do? Where to go? Then we turned a corner, and there, very incongruously, was a Burger King. With BK Veggies! Not that I’m very likely to go there when I’m home, but anyone familiar with trying to find edible food in the Third World will understand the paroxysms of joy that I experienced.
Satiated, we wandered back to the guesthouse, still trading travel stories. Not much else to do in Paramaribo.
Friday was the day for my mad dash to French Guiana and back. I had thought that I would have to leave at four in the morning, but Yayo, my guesthouse host, also had a restaurant in St. Laurent, the French side’s border town. And he reassured me that it was only a two and a half hour ride. Nor did I have to worry about catching no stinkin’ ferry.
So I was at the Albina (Surinam’s border town) taxi/bus depot area a little before 8, and immediately I was the final passenger in a share taxi. Soon we were jolting crazily along a poorly maintained road on the 120 mile journey. It was a long 120 miles.
Yayo had pointed out that most people in the area didn’t bother with no stinkin’ border formalities, either. But being an old, conservative guy who didn’t want to entertain the possibility of spending days in a Surinamese jail, I had the cab take me the little distance upriver where I could legally exit. Passport stamped, I quickly found a pirogue--a long, canoe-ish outboard motor boat--to take me on the five minute journey across one more wide, brown river. Then I was legally stamped into French Guiana.
The population surrounding me had become overwhelmingly black again. Even though I was once again in an integral part of France, this was about as poor as France could get. Although that was still a bit richer than Surinam and a hell of a lot better off than Guyana.
Still, pretty funky. I walked for about a mile on the main drag parallel the river, the town straggling along with myriads of groceries and other small businesses.
When I got to a small, distinctively worn out and decayed Colonial era wooden church I turned left. And then a few hundred meters along, right before the river, was the prison camp that had been the processing center for the prisoners going to Devil’s Island off shore. I don’t know if they used these very buildings for the Papillon movie, but if they didn’t, then they copied them exactly. As it was, even with cars parked nearby, the grungy beat up buildings evoked the era perfectly. I walked around to my heart’s content, then meandered down to the river and sat and contemplated it all briefly.
So far the climate in the Guianas hadn’t seemed nearly as bad as I had feared. In fact I had been thinking that Steve McQueen was a total wuss. Then the full sun came out for a few minutes. It gets real intense when you’re smack dab on the equator. Now as I was walking back through town there was the first actual burst of rain on my entire trip. Thundering drops on tin roofs. I stood under one of them until the rain stopped as suddenly as it had started. Then I strolled down to the tiny French immigration booth and had myself stamped out. I went over to the river bank. It almost felt like Africa, with pirogue guys yelling good naturedly, ’Hey! Big Man! Over here!’
I got in one pirogue, but it was pretty small and dicey. And I didn’t fancy flailing around in the muddy water. So I got off and chose another, more substantial one. In a few minutes I was legally back in Surinam.
I liked being back in Surinam. The people were all very nice. And honest. After being such an object of commerce in the Caribbean, and then having made it through somewhat dangerous Guyana, it was calm and refreshing to be in a simple, safe haven.
But it was slow in the mid afternoon, and it took about an hour before there was a full taxi load for Paramaribo. On the way back I was reminded of how stupid I am to continue doing this. My driver was careening along doing 80 passing some other guy who wasn’t paying attention to anything. And who swerved towards us and came close enough to collapse my guy’s side view mirror. With me just on the other side. Fortunately, though, once again it was just a close call.
I was back in Paramaribo before 5, and was dropped off at the Burger King. But the line there was about forty minutes long, so I walked back to the guesthouse, found Rick, and went over to the restaurant I had gone to on Wednesday.
Since I had thought that French Guiana would be a lot more grueling than it was, I had slotted Saturday for rest and recovery. Just as well, since I was feeling old and tired and like everything was difficult. Rick and I wandered around a little more, took a taxi to an actual Indian restaurant in somebody’s home, and got ridiculously overfed.
Back to the guesthouse. Pack for tomorrow. Ponder this strange, flat area of the world, this appendage to nowhere. I hadn’t thought of the place as all that humid. But my passport was curled up like a wet, dead leaf. My American dollars were so thin and limp that they could have been turned into spitballs. I re-thought my position.
And concluded that in actuality I was one incredible, tough dude.

Guyana

2009-10-09T17:59:00.001-06:00

Into the Heart of Darkness.
Actually, that was the Congo. But the Guianas aren’t too far behind in the imagination. Hot, swampy, and flat. Only a few scattered deranged inhabitants. No roads connecting them to the rest of the world.
Actually, Brazil is in the middle of constructing one. But if there are still any ends of the earth, these geographical entities would fit the bill. And after all these years contemplating the possibility, here I finally was flying into one of them.
Island hopping was pretty much over. When we stopped to transfer planes in Barbados, that had been the 17th one I had been on since the trip began. Now we were approaching a continent. A long unbroken and flat line of green vegetation approached on the horizon. Soon below me were wide brown rivers and endless bush. And then we were on the ground. In a few minutes I was through Immigration and delighted to see that my bag had made it, too. Yay! All those Liat flights and not a single screw up! (Although Winair had been two for two.)
Minibus 42 was circling around, and soon I was squashed in it along with about 10 others and we were bouncing our way the 20 miles or so into Georgetown. All along the road were small wooden slat houses on stilts, some of them poor but honest, others looking like rundown 1945 beach houses that had been left to rot for another twenty years. Tiny little businesses and hole in the wall Chinese restaurants. On the other side of them the wide brown Demarara River. Traffic and more standing water.
At some point everything got slightly more urban, and then we were at a junction of several large, almost immense, certainly distinctive, rundown baroque slatted wooden buildings that was basically the center of Guyana’s capital city. The driver didn’t want to go any further due to ‘traffic’. On the other hand, it had only been $3 for me and my baggage. So I started walking in the direction of my reserved guesthouse. After a few directional errors in the hot, humid sun, and a little more than a half an hour later, I had found it.
The Rima Guesthouse advertised itself as ‘The Cleanest Guesthouse In Georgetown’. Well, it wasn’t a total dump. And from what I had seen so far on my6 walk through town, they may well have been correct. Anyway, for $28 I got a bed and a fan. And a common room with lacy doilies on the 1920s furniture.
I walked around a bit to reconnoiteur. Found something to eat. Then the sun was down and I retreated to the guesthouse.
Guyana has a reputation as one of the most dangerous countries in the world. And although such reputations are often overblown, and although everybody and everything was peaceable enough in the sunlight, I definitely didn’t want to test it after dark. Instead I lay on my bed and let the strong breeze--a pleasant surprise in these parts--come through the open window and waft over me.
Next morning I was at a little place having some awful Guyanese pastries, and then on my quest to find a camera store. Amazingly enough I found one that repaired Canons. I showed the guy my problem and he told me to come back in a couple of hours.
Okay, what to do in downtown Georgetown, a place where no building was more than two stories high, no business sold anything but the most tawdry of junk, and the whole infrastructure looked like it was being held together by dirt and dampness? I looked on my handy map and saw that at the end of Regent St. was the zoo. I started off in that direction.
It was well over a mile in the hot sun before I got there. Again, it didn’t feel dangerous in the sunlight, but I wouldn’t want to be strolling around with a big wad of bills at night. At least the walk was flat. Nobody was selling tickets to the zoo so I just strolled in.
A few cages of parrots, macaws, toucans, and a really large and exhausted looking harpy eagle. Then some tapirs and the first truly unhappy otter I had ever seen. I mean, I have been to some bad zoos in my life, but…
Ah, up ahead were the monkeys. That would cheer me up. But when I got there only one cage held any, and holding on to the bars were three insane spider monkeys.
What do I mean by that? Well, spider monkeys are pretty strange looking to begin with. They are over five feet tall standing up. They have long black hair. And tiny little naked faces with beady little eyes. And these guys’ eyes were both vacant and intense, staring both at me and past me. Totally silent, they had been trapped in steel and concrete and stripped of all meaningful society. And besides jerky random gestures the two males at least were constantly vibrating. After a while I realized that what they were doing was frantically masturbating.
Wow, what a great metaphor for post modern life! Here in a place that was post Apocalyptic before Apocalyptic was post!
Suitably disturbed, I retraced my steps back to Georgetown’s main drag and back to the camera store. The guy told me that the display screen was busted. If I had had a 560 he could have replaced it, but as it was with a 540 I was out of luck. On the other hand, theoretically if I used the little old visual finder it would still take pictures. Just no visual token of what I had taken and no reassuring click to let me know that anything had actually happened.
Well, at least I probably still had all the shots from the first three weeks.
Anyway, my useful labors in Georgetown finished, I slowly made it back to the guesthouse. Went across the street for vegetable burger and fries and wifi. Then back for an early beddy bye at 8.
Up at 4. At 5:15 the Fatman came by and honked his horn. Then he took me and his other pre-booked passengers back to the minibus staging area and tried to pick up some more. At 6:15 we were on the road.
Pretty much more of the same scene as from the ride from the airport. Although now we were heading east towards Surinam. A few areas of sugar cane cultivation, more of a constant stream of small stilt houses, some okay, some terrible. That’s pretty much of what Guyana is.
We made it to the ferry crossing just before 10. I bought my ticket, checked myself out of the country. Waited with about fifteen vehicles and fifty other passengers until 11 or so, when the ferry boarded. The river was just as brown as the rest of all the water had been, but a lot wider than it had appeared. Total endless flatness everywhere. What with going upstream a little it took over a half an hour to reach the other side.

Grenada

2009-10-06T16:17:00.003-06:00

5:30 wake up. 6:30 ferry. 7:30 taxi to the airport. In Grenada by 10.
It was kind of hard to decide whether or not to rent a car, since it was $45 a day for the cheapest available. But then I found out that it was a $20 cab ride each way into town. And that everything was shut down tomorrow on Sunday. So a few minutes later I was driving along in a slightly larger Suzuki jeepster than the one I had in Dominica.
Ah, Grenada (pronounced Grenayda). The island so nice they named it Spice. Last year in the Middle East Oman had been my Goldilocks country: Not too poor and not too rich. Here Grenada seemed to fit the bill of not too underdeveloped and not too overdeveloped. Still genuinely Caribbean in feel and texture, but with slightly wider and better roads, larger and better stocked markets, actual goods and services (although still relatively simple) available. Even the inevitable medical college had a pretty snazzy campus.
My research had said that the Lazy Lagoon was where to go. Enrique, a Cuban here on a work visa (didn’t they have Grenadans who could do this?) showed me a room. It was pretty basic backpacker for $40, but what the hey. He told me to come back in an hour when he had one cleaned up.
By 1:30 I had eaten, come back, rested, etc., and was ready to tour the island. I went the mile or so into St. George’s, the inevitably tiny capital, turned around, and drove the three miles or so to the south of the island. Then a meandering 15 miles up the east coast to a woebegone town of Grenville, and back across the mountainous spine, reaching an elevation of 1908 feet. Once again, the thrill of the scenic rainforest was dampened by the constant twisting and turning and dodging of all the other traffic twisting and turning.
But by 5 I was back at the Lazy Lagoon. A well stocked market was next door, so I got some groceries for tonight and tomorrow. Then I went back over to my room.
Enrique was in the process of roasting a giant pig on a spit for the full moon party tonight. I was expecting to be kept up to all hours with the ensuing noise. But there wasn’t any.
Sunday morning I sat around on my little porch for a bit, and then hit the nearly deserted road. Back up into St. George’s, only this time I kept going north. Today I was going to circumnavigate the island clockwise. Around and about, up and down hills, squeezing by the oncoming vehicles. Just like I had been doing day after day on all the other islands. I realized that it was too bad that Grenada got me last, since it really seemed like a pretty place with nice people. But, unsurprisingly, I was getting pretty burned out on Caribbean adventures.
I did find a beach on the northeastern tip that was pretty amazing, what with blue skies and pleasant hills and little islets offshore. I sat there for a while, decided that this would be the best place I’d seen to build my fantasy vacation home, and then noticed that the land was for sale. I jotted down the number.
Then squiggling on down the east coast until I got to Grenville again. And continuing on the coastal road I had taken yesterday. I made it to Grenada’s ‘best’ beach, Grand Anse, and was going to take a swim, but once I was there it wasn’t all that grand. I then decided to end my island journeys with one last visit to a waterfall back up in the hills, but, fittingly, in best Caribbean tradition, the signposts petered out long before I reached it.
And I had to give up and turn around in futility.

St Vincent and a Grenadine

2009-10-05T17:52:00.000-06:00

A brief stop in St. Lucia (which, along with Antigua, Barbados, and Trinidad, I had ‘done’ in ‘82), and then on to St. Vincent, one of the least visited of the Caribbean Isles.
It looked nice enough as we were coming in. More green, jungled, jumbled hillsides dotted with multitudes of varying qualities of housing units. A tiny Immigrations, and then a $10 taxi ride the one and a half miles into the capital, Kingstown.
The driver did know where to take me though, Leslie’s Guest House, at $24 a night. The next cheapest I had been able to find had been $95. For the lower price I got a typical old school Caribbean guest house room: Decent, simple bed, a fan that worked, a bathroom down the short hall, and that was it. Leslie did, however, have an outasight balcony view over downtown Kingstown and its harbor, what with the flowers and the water and the hills and the tropics and all that.
From above Kingstown looked like a bustling metropolis compared with Dominica’s capital Roseau. Still in all, it looked like even a tubercular wolf could blow the thing down. Anyhow, once I had rested a bit I decided to head on down the steep hill to it.
Not much happening once I made it. Hot and humid. (At least Leslie had a nice breeze going.) I made my way to the informal minibus terminal and found one headed for Rassa at the end of the line. Being the first on board I got shotgun, and then waited the few minutes until they had crammed many, many more in back.
It was about forty minutes up the west coast, the driving as maniacal as I had read it would be. When it ended I was the last one off, and was only a couple hundred yards from the entrance to Wallabou Bay, the famed ‘set’ of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’.
When I got to the waterfront and the fake buildings and cannons I realized that it, like Johnny Depp himself, was a lot smaller in person. Still, it deserved a few pictures. I got out my trusty camera and… What The …!!! The camera was broken. Kaput. Frozen. No matter how I jabbed every conceivable button, all that was there was some weird Kirelian photo of a leaf.
Not only couldn’t I take any more pictures on the trip, I had also probably lost all the ones I had already taken. This was a severe existential crisis. After all, how did my life have meaning if I didn’t have hundreds of photographs documenting it? I was numb. You would think that if you gave Canon a few hundred dollars they wouldn’t sell you a complete piece of garbage. That’s what Americans were supposed to do!
But I had to carry on. Back up the steep hill. Catch a minibus as it started back to Kingstown. Get dropped off on the north side to visit the famous botanical gardens which were actually really boring. Walk into town, then up the hill to Leslie’s. Lie in bed as the little floor fan goes whirr, whirr, whirr.
Well, that was about all there was to do on St. Vincent. So the next morning I took my baggage down the hill and walked to the ferry terminal, where I boarded the 10:30 for Bequia (pronounced Beckway). The largest of the Grenadines. Which are a string of islets stretching between St Vincent and Grenada. This was the first boat I’d been on that actually carried vehicles, about 20 or 30 if there had been any business.
But this was the slowest of the slow season here, too. And when we docked less than an hour later, I was one of the few passengers getting off.
For some reason I had thought that Caribbean islands, especially the small ones, would be sandy and flat, with a few palm trees scattered about. But in my ignorance I had been thinking of Pacific atolls. Almost all Caribbean islands are insanely hilly and jungle covered; the smaller ones, catching fewer clouds and less rain, are still verdant but rather less intensely a-jungled.
The Grenadines are a particular favorite with the yachting crowd. And Bequia is regarded as an ‘undiscovered’ version of the slightly larger and much, much more developed St. Barts. For me this meant a small, funky infrastructure coupled with yacht club prices.
At least I didn’t have far to go in the tiny non-town of Port Elizabeth. Julie’s Guesthouse was basically across the street from the ferry. For $38 I could have had a Leslie kind of room. For $49 I could get a/c, a fridge, hot water, and cable tv. A few minutes later I was luxuriating in coolness and watching MSNBC.
It’s kind of obvious, but age really does slow you down. In every infuriating way possible. So in my planning I had wisely slotted in a few extra days so I could rest up, and now my incredibly creaking joints and tired muscles were thanking me for it. And except for a small wander around the small town, and a couple of trips downstairs to the store next door, that’s pretty much all I did for the rest of the day.
And most of the next. Oh, around noon I started out on an expedition towards the other end of the island. But after walking up another giant hill in the middle of the stinking heat I said ‘screw it’, stopped the next passing minibus, and rode it on out the two miles further. Then I walked around a bit, admiring the picturesque houses, the calm blue seas, and various other Grenadines marching around offshore. And took another minibus back to Port Elizabeth.
It was Friday, and Friday night is when everyone in the Caribbean is/goes lime-in’. Someone had set up a pulsing PA system on the other side of the ferry landing, and pretty soon it was pumping. Around eight I ventured out from my room, but I couldn’t make it closer than a hundred yards or so from the center of the action. Why is it that ‘party’, ie having a good time, has come to mean subjecting yourself to extremely unpleasant music at such an unpleasantly loud volume that even if in some sense it did originally have some meaning then it absolutely didn’t have any now? The islanders seemed to at least intuitively catch my drift, since they were all wandering around kind of silently and numbly.
I went back to my room, caught a movie on Starz, and turned in early so as to be able to wake up even earlier still.

Martinique

2009-10-02T08:39:00.001-06:00

Guadeloupe had had a vaguely urban area surrounding the airport. Cruising into the small bay that housed Martinique’s capital of Fort de France, though, was somewhat like approaching Marseilles. Well, maybe not that urban, but it was still somewhat shocking to see so much of a city buildup, even including high rise apartments. Not anyone’s idea of a Caribbean vacation.
As I may have already mentioned, Couchsurfing is a new phenomenon whereby people sign up to host and/or be hosted by people all over the world who might have a couch you can stay on for a night or two. I had been curious to try it, though obviously not with some 23 year old. But I had found older ladies on both Guadeloupe and Martinique. We saw how Guadeloupe had worked out.
Annie, however, was waiting for me when I made it off the ferry. She was really pissed that the ferry had been late. As she helped me put my stuff in her white van she somehow was also blaming me for its tardiness.
We drove about fifteen miles to the semi-lowbrow apartment she lived in a semi-lowbrow suburb. By now it was three in the afternoon on a Sunday, so not much to do except squoosh myself into the tiny shower, and then lay down on the unventilated bed in the guestroom.
After a little rest I got up to hang with Annie. Her back was to me as she stared at her computer screen. She would basically not move from there my whole stay. Sitting near her was Albert, a small African man from the Ivory Coast who apparently lived with her. He was friendly, but basically spent every minute staring at his computer. I went out for a short walk to their town, but it was closed up tight for Sunday. When I came back it turned out that they had wifi. So at least I could go into my room and stare at my computer, too
The next morning I was ready to roll. Annie made her living from renting out cars, but since I needed one, the quid pro quo worked out for both of us. Soon I was on the freeway heading back to and through Fort de France so as to get up north. Yes, this was just like France. If you left out the cathedrals, quaint villages, and Monet countryside. Also, the weather was crappy, with low hanging grey clouds. Just like France, too.
I guess that this is as good a time as any to point out that there are 51 Folzes in France. And that until about a year ago one of them, J.M. Folz, born in the same year as I, was CEO of Peugeot-Citroen. Now you would think that when apprised of this situation he would have generously offered me a new car. Or at least invited me over to his villa for a couple of weeks. But No-o-o-o. Not that I was that offended. But, just for the record, the cars he made are total crap. The Citroen in Guadeloupe wouldn’t go into reverse. This Peugeot from Annie kept chugging and choking.
I took the ‘rainforest’ route through the mountains. But in typical French fashion, the road was so narrow and twisting that it was hard to enjoy anything. Maybe it would be better to do it like the Americans. just bulldoze a road through, and then build scenic pullouts. Actually, that probably wouldn’t have helped, either. There wasn’t much there.
But I finally made it to St. Pierre, a town I had been wanting to see ever since I was 10. Because that was when I first read about how, on May 8, 1902, an eruption from nearby Mt. Pelee instantly wiped out all 30,000 citizens of this former capital of Martinique, the Paris of the Caribbean.
Present day St Pierre is just a town of 5,000, and only a few of the stone ruins of the original buildings remain. But that, along with a small museum, is enough to give a sense of the disaster. And it was pretty neat to walk around, look out at the small bay, then back up towards the hills, and imagine.
When done with reliving the past, and also eating a bad pizza, I drove up to the northern end of the road. Hung out a bit. Then came back and went over towards the Atlantic side. What with all the built up areas, I wasn’t enjoying this island all that much. The grey weather didn’t help with that, either. On the other hand, for all the rain that the Caribbean gets, this was only the first day on my trip that wasn’t blue and sunny.
By late afternoon I was out at the end of a small peninsula looking for the ruins of an old chateau. Closed for September. I wended my way back to urban Annie’s, past the corner with all the young toughs hanging out (the first of my trip), and parked the car.
I had noticed that Annie didn’t believe in using the a/c in her car. She also didn’t believe in using it, or fans, in her apartment. So although a breeze came up in the evening, it was still pretty stuffy. And nothing to do except use the wifi. Which would go on and off.
Next morning was back to being blue sky and cheery, and I turned south to get the other half of the island. This was only hilly, not mountainous. Plus it was where there were a few beach resorts. So I wasn’t expecting to be overwhelmed.
The resorts were predictably depressing. Why does anyone think that being crammed into overpriced, fake, hyper-commercial junk districts is fun? And another thing. All the ‘beaches’ in the Caribbean are skinny and tiny and usually have drab, brown sand. I mean, I’m no fan of Floriday, but the worst beach there is ten times better than the best beach I’d seen so far in the Caribbean.
Besides having 30,000 of its citizens asphyxiated and burned within two minutes, Martinique’s other claim to fame is as the birthplace of Napoleon’s Josephine. So I went to the site to see a museum and some of the old buildings. Closed for September. As had happened a couple of other times here on the island, I had less than a fleeting glimpse of a colonial life that must have been fascinating, and then it was back to the golf courses and apartments.
But once I made it to the extreme south of the island, I did find a few genuinely rural areas, and that was calming. I also stopped at Martinique’s ‘best’ beach and hung out in the water for an hour or so. Then a teeny tiny road twisting over some back hills, and a return to Annie’s.
Wednesday morning Annie was in a bad mood. Why hadn’t I parked the car where she had suggested? Because that space was occupied. No, it wasn’t. Well, I did park a few spaces over, next to your white van. How did you know that was my van??? You picked me up at the ferry with it. No, I didn’t. I picked you up in a small car. Oh-kay….
As she drove me to the airport I tried to diplomatically thank her for having hosted me. But you didn’t spend any time with me! You just went out and visited the island! I kept quiet and tried to mentally put a positive spin on my couch surfing experience. At least I had gotten to know another culture: That of the unhappy, neurotic older French woman.

In the end I can’t say whether or not I like Guadeloupe and Martinique. They are not just France in the Caribbean, but workaday France in the Caribbean. The people aren’t terrible. Once you get used to the prices (Try pretending that there are 30 Euros to the dollar. As in, Wow, I just rented a car for $1.05!), the rest of it isn’t that hard to maneuver around. And some of the few natural areas that are left really are beautiful.
I guess it all just seemed a little weird.

Dominica

2009-09-29T18:15:00.000-06:00

As I was driving back towards the airport area and trying to read the directional signs against the rising sun’s intense glare, I was thinking about the Guadeloupans. As opposed to the rest of the Caribbean, where virtually every non-tourist person was black, here about 30% of the population was French. And that went to over 90% at the beaches and national parks. But the blacks here seemed to be well integrated citizens of France. The downside was that, while friendly, they lacked the ‘hey, mon’ sensibilities of other Caribbeans.
The upside was that they had a European work ethic. Which meant that the car lot guy was there early at seven, as planned. And he efficiently finished my paperwork and then drove me down to the ferry dock. Where I bought my ticket and boarded the boat.
The other ferries I had been on had been pretty small and in various states of repair. But this was a medium sized, commercial catamaran with 300 seats on two levels. I watched Guadeloupe sail by, the mountains re-cloaked in clouds, and about an hour later we reached the north end of Dominica with its green, rugged mountain spine. Ah, goodbye to Froggieland for a while, and back to the easy life of the English speaking Caribbean.
When we reached Roseau there was somewhat of a scrum to even get through the doors. So far immigration had involved a quick, perfunctory stamp. Here, however, each passenger seemed to get at least the second degree. And there were only two lines for all the people. So it took about twenty minutes for my turn. The guy asked me if I knew the name of the person who owned the hotel I would be staying at.
But I got my stamp. Then I went into the next small room to retrieve my pack. And there it became about as third world as possible. It turned out that many lowlife Dominica women go over to Guadeloupe to buy crap, then bring it back, all wrapped up in heavy bundles, to re-sell. Every single one of which the customs agent had to then open and check. And these were rude, pushy women. Which was very shocking here in the Caribbean, where heretofore everyone had been unfailingly polite.
All this in the hot humidity of a small confined room, waiting forever to reach the front of the line. There was a nine month pregnant woman in front of me, and people kept pushing in front of her. Finally I had had enough, and called one woman out and told her this other lady was first. Anger ensued, but I won. The pregnant lady had her turn, then I had mine.
Whew. At least that was over.
Hot and exhausted, I was deposited out on the street, my shirt already completely soaked in sweat. And, Oh Boy! In front of me was a truly behemoth cruise ship, 400 feet long, 100 feet high, easily larger and more substantial than the whole rest of the town that it was moored next to. And hundreds of its soft, fat customers were out on the street being hustled by every taxi driver and tour operator on Dominica.
Well, at least the men weren’t being totally rude, but, again, I hadn’t run into anything like this so far on my trip. Besides, had I mentioned that it was extremely hot and humid? And I hadn’t arranged for my car rental beforehand, stupidly thinking that in such a small town it wouldn’t be a problem. Who woulda thunk of a behemoth cruise ship being there?
I headed the three short blocks along the waterfront to the other end of town to find a restaurant that the LP recommended, the plan being to rest and reconnoiter. I knew that I had the right area, but person after person had never heard of said restaurant. Meanwhile there’s all the chaos of the cruise ship passengers. And it’s really hot. Finally someone did know of it. It was thirty feet away. And closed for September.
Two other two places in the LP were just closed, period. I lugged my bags up and back a few blocks to find the last one. Closed, too. By now my brain and body were totally fried. I asked a woman if I could use her cell phone to call one of the companies I had listed. No, but she did explain my problem to another man. He said that there was a car rental company just down there and to the left. The Chinese store owner across the street from it didn’t know where it was. But I finally found it. It was actually one of the companies that I had been looking for from the internet. And I was back to being a short block from the ferry. They hadn’t mentioned that feature of their location on their website.
But at least I finally had a car. With a/c. And now I was ready to get out of town.
Which was about as small and dinky as any capital city could possibly be and still exist. Not one noteworthy or substantial building. The whole place was about three blocks square. In a minute I was in the ‘suburbs’ and headed up towards the interior.
Dominica is known as a natural paradise. That’s another way of saying that there is not a single flat space on the entire island, meaning that it was never any good for agriculture, meaning that its entirety is one big overgrown rain forest. And I had to admit, curving around on the poorly maintained one lane road, that it did spectacularly live up to its billing. Simply beautiful flowers, trees overhanging with vines, wonderfully misshaped hills and mountains as I wended my way up to, er, a famous waterfall.
Once again, though, the Dominican people were lacking in that famous Caribbean charm once I got there. ‘Guides’. A peddler hitting me up for spare change. $1 to use the bathroom. And this was in a national park.
Waterfall seen, I headed back down to Roseau, then turned north on the island’s one and a half lane main highway. What with a couple of detours and stops, I finally reached, down a long, rough passage, my lodgings for the evening. Stonedge. Run by a crazy Belgian French guy.
Didier immediately offered me a welcome drink. Then informed me that he was having water problems, so that I would need to use a bucket for the toilet. I looked around at his establishment. Self-made funky, wooden hippie building done in the early Seventies style. Overlooking the ocean. Could have been worse. Anyway, it brought back old times. And it was only $25 a night. I trundled upstairs to my room.
After a short nap, I was out on the verandah appreciating the sunset over the sea. Then Didier set about whipping up a little dinner. Around me was the gobble, gobble, gobble of the other guests all speaking in French. Amazingly enough, I was starting to understand it. (Dominica is kind of in a French sandwich, and most of its visitors are from Guadeloupe or Martinique, getting off on the super cheap $2 a can Cokes.) But they were nice enough folks, and even deigned to hang out with me and use English.
I went upstairs to sleep in my room. There were no screens on the open windows. They wouldn’t have helped anyway, since there were so many chinks in the building. Nonetheless I was mosquito free.
The next morning I was out on the road, free from the tyranny of manual transmission and seat belt laws. But--to remind myself--I had to keep singing my little calypso song. Which consisted of one line: ’Drive on de left, interminably…’ Which was repeated interminably.
After fifteen minutes I turned off and drove up a tiny little snaking road to a trail to a parrot viewing area. There were no parrots. But it was another excuse to walk through the rainforest. I got back to my Suzuki jeep and drove back down the hill, then up the ‘main road’ to Plymouth, Dominica’s second largest ‘town’ with a population of perhaps a thousand. But there were also 1200 American students at the Caribbean’s largest medical ‘college’, where people pay $100,000 for the first two years of med school. An incongruous KFC in the middle of the wilderness, but I did partake of some corn and biscuits.
Back on the road. And what a road it was across the northern tip of the island. Better and far steeper (and narrower) than a roller coaster, with green hills everywhere and ocean in the background. I was glad I wouldn’t have to come back on it.
About two miles before it re-connected with the main road, though, they had decided to close it for repairs this afternoon. As I turned around a guy standing there asked me if I could take him to Plymouth. Sure, okay. Then as we started off, we passed another guy. ‘Can you take him, too?’ he said Well… ‘Don’t worry, man. He’s a teacher. It’s cool.’ Until then I hadn’t thought to be paranoid.
Back west to Plymouth, then back east to the Atlantic coast. This constant twisting and turning was getting to me. And I’ve driven enough in the rest of the world to know that everyone doesn’t share Americans’ sense of personal driving space, but some of these drivers were dangerous and downright rude.
It wasn’t like everyone was unfriendly. But even the friendly ones were hardly Caribbean effusive. I stopped to stretch my legs. A woman was scowling. I smiled at her. She continued to scowl. Hmmm, when I’m the one trying to cheer people up…
However, the natural environment continued to be stupendous. And these islands aren’t very large (Guadeloupe’s the biggest at 500 square miles), but their convoluted hilly nature and tiny roads means that they seem a lot bigger. I wasn’t going to be able to complete my circumnavigation.
But I got close. Then I turned back inland, twisted and curved a bunch more, stopped for my last walk through the rainforest to a waterfall, came back down the leeward side, and made it back to Stonedge. I was exhausted, but--now that it was over--had thoroughly enjoyed the drive.
The next morning was a Sunday, and after my breakfast of toaste francaise I slowly meandered my way back to Roseau. Here perhaps was a clue to Dominica’s relative unhappiness: No one was going to church. The rest of the (English) Caribbean is about the most Sunday Go To Meeting culture in the entire world. Even the commercial radio stations are always playing religious music. Here on Dominica the only jobs involved depressingly catering to either ‘rich’ French foreigners or cruise ship passengers. These guys needed to get involved in something uplifting.
Well, church or no, Roseau was just as dead and deserted as any other Caribbean town on Sunday. The rental guy never even made it to the office. I wedged the key under his door and walked on over in the hot, empty stillness to the ferry.

Guadeloupe

2009-09-26T18:46:00.000-06:00

Up at five. Tiny airstrip at six. Flight at seven fifteen. A half full tiny airplane isn’t nearly as claustrophobic as a full one. Although the sound of an angry rubber band engine as you’re traversing the ocean might not be for the squeamish.
Amazingly enough, the bag arrived and the connection was successfully made. The four days in Montserrat had refreshed me, and I was able to look forward to Guadeloupe with some energy. I would need to.
So far, all the islands, whatever their putative ownership, had been totally Americanized. In a good way. The products were all familiar. TV channels were an exact replica. Everyone had most of their families already living in the States.
At the same time, whatever the putative ownership, the Caribbean culture was far more important. And unitary. Virtually everyone I met was originally from some other island than the one they were working on.
I was now going to be entering a foreign world. One controlled by France. Actually, Guadeloupe was treated as an equivalent of one of our states. Everyone said that going there was like going to France.
After the eighteen minute flight I began to find out for myself. Oui, the airport was pretty European, although in a small, tropical kind of way. I made my way over to the row of rental car companies and made my deal.
I was soon taken to a tiny, silver Citroen. My bag barely fit in the back. No trunk. At least they drove on the right here. I slowly made my way out into traffic. This was all way more developed than the English Caribbean, but not overwhelmingly so.
My first order of business was coming up with a hotel room for under $100. All my research on the internet had produced one possibility. No website, but a recent review was from a few months ago, so as long as they were still in business… I headed the ten miles or so to the beach resort area.
It wasn’t much of one. And I was already getting tired of shifting gears on the narrow, congested French roads. At least they had signposts. If not street signs. Now if I could just find the rue that the place was on. Ah, there’s an advert for another business, and it’s the right road! Not too long of a one, either. I turned onto it.
And couldn’t find the hotel Les Flamboyants. Of course, being French, the street was so narrow that it was almost impossible to turn around and extricate myself. Okay, back to the turnoff. Find someone somewhere and ask. Although I haven’t spoken French in years and they all go gobble, gobble, gobble.
Okay, back to that street. Still can’t find it. Turn around. Repeat. Repeat. Finally, after forty five minutes a nice gentleman explained slowly that Les Flamboyants was no longer in existence.
Screw it. I didn’t like this town anyway. I would just start my drive around the island, and figure out lodging later.
Guadeloupe is shaped like a butterfly. The eastern wing, Grand Terre, is actually flat and relatively uninteresting. The other side, Basse Terre (Low Land), is heavily mountainous. Go figure. I was already on Grand Terre, so I continued on along the coast.
The climate was overbearing. 95 and horrible sticky humid, like Louisiana in July. The a/c was laboring away to not much effect. Lots of traffic, and twisting and turning on a two lane road. I didn’t remember this many billboards in France. In my grumpiness I concluded that Guadeloupe was a lot more like Louisiana than France, down to the cheesy roadside stands and white gravel on the shoulders.
I pulled into a gas station mini mart for a cold drink. $3.50 for a can of coke! All right, I had known that this was going to be expensive, but now I really went ‘eep’.
I was a little frazzled from the congestion, so I turned off inland on a side road. It immediately became more rural and pleasant. At a town ten miles along they had a sandwich special for $5. A little refreshed, I kept going towards the northeast.
Pleasantly kind of flat, with fields of sugar cane and other peaceful scenes. A couple of turnoffs to not special but still okay beaches. Always deathly humid, however, whenever I got out of the car.
But I had gotten as far away from civilization as possible, and now I had to turn back towards the airport/capital complex. And I had to start dealing with my little accommodations problem.
I had been hoping that I would have seen cheerful little signs for gites (a cross of cabins/guesthouse) on my drive. Nothing. Well, why would there be any over here on the side that tourists wouldn’t want to go to? Better head over to Basse Terre.
By now it was around five. There is a famous cross-mountain road that cuts across the middle of the wing, so I headed up it. A short stop at an obligatory waterfall (why the hell do we always stop at waterfalls when they all basically look the same?). Then continuing on to the west coast.
On my internet search in Montserrat, I had run across a gite that had gotten rave reviews. And its website made it look idyllic. It was $90 a night (double eep), but, hell, at least I could kick back there with folks who spoke at least a little English. All I needed to do was find it.
Once again, this proved nearly impossible. Their location was just the name of a town, and it had a big environs. Not to mention that no commercial establishment seemed to have a directional sign taller than six inches.
Just as the last light was fading I finally found it way up a steep hill. The lady took me to a cabin from 1945, and opened a door to an oven. No, no a/c. It was immediately obvious that the glowing reviews had been faked by the owners, and of course the website had been a complete lie. And now I was supposed to find another gite in the dark. And on top of that even if I found one it would probably be closed here in September.
To cut the story short, around eight thirty I was back on the east side of Basse Terre trying to find a small hotel recommended by the LP. Why wasn’t it here? I went into a pharmacie and asked. The lady said, mais oui, this pharmacie used to be that hotel! When she saw how exhausted I looked, she helpfully added that there was a gite about a mile or so down the road over here.
Amazingly, it was where she said it was. And they had a room. For $90. But it was clean and modern in a rustic way, and the a/c worked. Moreover, they had a little restaurant, and could sell me a veggie pizza for only $16.
An hour later I was relaxing in cool comfort chomping on my pizza. At least these French knew how to make really tasty food.
The next morning my only problem was finding out about the ferry.
There are two companies that go to Dominica and on to Martinique. Company 1 was shutting down service on Sunday for a month, which had totally affected the whole rest of my trip schedule. Company 2 implied that they had continuing service, but they never answered my email. Company 1 had a ferry at 8 am Friday, which would mean getting up at five again. Company 2 supposedly had one at 1. But I needed my hotel person to call them and confirm.
They never answered the phone.
I had finally steeled myself to drive all the way into the capital and hassle with trying to find their office. But if they hadn’t answered their phone, what if they weren’t open? Just as I was leaving I noticed that the gite owner was now here, and he tried calling them again. No answer. So he tried Company 1 and confirmed the 8 am sailing. Now all I had to do was get up at five again. But at least it was taken care of.
And now I could get into some serious touristing. I was now in the center of the east side of the west wing (look on a map), and was heading south to faire un circuit of the entire Basse Terre. The four lane road didn’t last that long, but traffic wasn’t bad. And I was also in great luck. The mountains at the southern end were completely free of cloud cover, something that hardly ever happens in a place with 300 inches of rain a year.
I took a one lane road up into the mountains towards, you guessed it, some waterfalls. The trip, though, was quite a trip. The lower levels were banana palms and tropical flowers. And all that rain creates about as dense a jungle as there is in the world.
When I got to the top there were two, count ’em, 400 foot waterfalls. But the national park guide said that if I walked to the closer one I wouldn’t be able to see it, since they were working on something. So I looked from a distance and then descended.
About fifteen miles further on there was another one lane road turnoff. This went twisting and turning up and up to the base of Guadeloupe’s active volcano, which last exploded in 1976. On the way there was a spectacular view of the cloud free summit, looking very ominous and volcano-y. When I got to the end of the road, the sign said that there was an ‘easy’ 25 minute trail. It went step by step up and up and up. At its top there was an even better closeup view of the volcano. But the first clouds were coming in, so I was free from any obligation to keep climbing on the next ’difficult’ trail.
Then it was a drive back down the mountain. And now I was squarely on the west coast of the west wing. A road that truly twisted and turned along the crooked seacoast. With the brilliant green tall endless mountains to the east of me. It was all rather special.
By late afternoon I was on the north side, at a relatively empty and relatively large beach, maybe Guadeloupe’s finest. And regretting that I had forgotten to bring along my swim trunks this morning. Oh well, I just would have ended up wet and sticky.
And then I continued along the north shore, back amongst the traffic and the sugar cane fields. A cut across on a back road, and as the light faded I was back at my gite. Turn on the a/c and order that pizza…

Montserrat

2009-09-23T07:06:00.001-06:00

The island of Montserrat is 37 square miles. All right, 39 square miles because of the volcano. Then again, two thirds of those 39 square miles are off limits because of said volcano.
Montserrat was a happy little island of 11,000 souls until 1995, when its previously long dormant volcano decided to erupt. And completely wiped out the main town of Plymouth, along with most other places where most of those people lived. Not to mention the airport.
We landed at the new little airstrip in the north of the island. This was the third time today David had driven over to pick me up. On the way to his place we stopped at a little East Indian run market to buy cheese and bread and stuff.
David and Clover and family are semi-ex-hippies who moved here in 1980. In 1995 when the eruptions began David fell into a career as a video chronicler of events, which he then sold to all the news organizations which showed up. That kind of morphed into them building a little guesthouse for researchers, etc., to stay in. I was booked into the ‘backpacker’ room, with bathroom, fan, fridge, and microwave.
As soon I was settled in, the first order of business was showing me the composite DVD of all the explosions and pyroclastic flows and Plymouth being covered in thirty feet of volcanic mud. It was really bittersweet (if you can use that word in the Caribbean) to see their little ingrown society all silly and content, and then watching them all turn into jobless refugees.
News accounts at the time had made Montserrat seem like a semi-barren, backward isle, but the reality it is a ’chain’ of several tall mountains clothed in dense jungle. The areas where people live are verdant and tropical, with flowers and fruit trees. And the houses are usually around 800 feet above sea level, so that you’re always looking out over the endless warm blue ocean.
Saturday morning I decided to get in the spirit of things and go barefoot. Almost immediately I slipped on wet grass and fell downhill onto the concrete driveway, badly scraping my foot. I limped back into my room.
In the afternoon I went out to the road that circles what’s left of the island, and got a ride south with an engineer from Guyana who didn’t have anything else to do. So he drove me up to the (closed) volcano observatory, where we watched the Soufriere volcano smoldering away. Unfortunately, as with most mountains in most places, the top was somewhat cloud covered, so it was difficult to separate the volcano smoke from the clouds. But there it was anyway. Off in the distance I could see the grey emptiness that had used to be the town of Plymouth.
Since the guy was from around here, he was convinced that we couldn’t drive any further south. Turned out that we could, but no matter. He took me back to Gingerbread Hill.
Sunday I lay around some more. Then I walked the two miles or so in the hot sun down to the nearest black sand beach, where I toodled in the water for a while. David was supposed to pick me up at sunset. I had just given up on him and was starting up the long, long hill when he showed up. Good.
My expedition Monday was to get to Jack Boy Hill as far on the eastern end as I could get. First I stopped at an Indian grocery for six greasy samosas; ramen in the room is readily tiring. Which I ate at a beach. Then I stuck out my thumb, and eventually got a ride with one of the gravel dump trucks going back and forth to Jack Boy Hill.
They were about the only vehicles available, since nobody lives on that side of the island, it being all hilly forest jungle. When I got there I could see the former airport runway all covered in grey ash and mud, and that was about it, the volcano being totally cloud wrapped now. I thanked the driver, and got out to walk around.
I didn’t make it far. My toe, which had been constantly sore for the last two days, now made walking impossible. I barely made it back to the guy’s truck, and he drove me back to the civilized part of Montserrat.
By now I had gotten a pretty good feel for the culture, etc. It was really kind of sad how such a close-knit, idyllic life had been shattered. And it was clear that the northern part wasn’t nearly as ‘sweet’ as the southern part had been. And that the people who remained were doing it almost solely as a stubborn rejection of their fate.
That, and Where else did they have to go? Cold, rainy Britain???
I stopped at a grocery for more supplies and made it back to my room, looking forward to the joy of lying under my whirring fan and munching on some of my microwaved popcorn. Maybe check the email. When I went to switch the fan on, it turned out that the power was off on the whole island. Which it would continue to be until around seven.
Oh well. Since my main purpose on Montserrat was to relax my aged body for a few days, sitting around at the guest house and watching the sun set over the Caribbean wasn’t a bad way of accomplishing that.
And now with my bung foot, I had every more opportunity to do that. I therefore didn’t try to go anywhere or do anything on Tuesday. Just sat around.
In the late afternoon a 68 year old lady checked in who was going to paddleboard the 25 miles over to Nevis on the horizon. I asked her if she did it for the physical challenge or for the tranquility of being alone in the ocean. She got real intense and said, ‘No! It’s because I’m the first one to do it!!’
Nothing left for me to do except hobble up the driveway and pay the bill with David and Clover, hobble back down to my room, and pack everything for tomorrow.

Antigua Airport

2009-09-22T17:50:00.001-06:00

Up at six am for the flight to Antigua. At least this was the last time for a while that I’d need to get up that early. $10 two minute taxi to the airport. Liat flight on time. Seats for thirty, and all filled up, even in this low season. A wonder what monopolies can achieve.
Soon over the gently rolling island, beautifully indented coast of Antigua. From the air it looked like the fancy country club gentility that I had kind of expected on St Martin. I had ’done’ Antigua in 1982, and I preferred to remember it with the lazy, slapdash St Kitts vibe it had back then. The kind of place with an overgrown town park where two idiotic schoolgirls passed their time sticking sticks into a hornet’s nest.
We landed, I retrieved my bag, and headed over to the WinnAir counter for the flight to Montserrat.
Hmmm, nobody there. I asked around and was directed to a girl who worked for WinnAir. She said, we don’t start check in until after one. I said, my flight is at noon. She said, we don’t have that flight. I said, but you sold it to me on your website. See, here’s the printout. She said, but we don’t have that flight.
It turned out that they had re-booked me for the 3:15 flight. Without notifying me through email or any other way. Not only that, but now I was scheduled to come back from Montserrat at seven in the morning on Monday. But my connecting flight to Guadeloupe didn’t leave until five in the evening.
Not only that, but I had arranged to stay with this lady in Guadeloupe. But I had kept emailing her before I left trying to confirm everything. And she had never responded. Until yesterday when she wrote and said, gee, it had been so hot that she had up and booked a flight to Montreal. Sorry.
And Guadeloupe is probably the most expensive island in this most expensive of seas.
So I found my way to the ’office’ of WinnAir, where the manager lady was actually apologetic about the incompetence of her airline. And she could rebook my return flight on Wednesday.
Because that was the next available Guadeloupe flight on Liat. Which they then changed for me at the cost of $60. (The original flight, about 30 miles, had been $100.) Now I had an extra two days on Montserrat, and only two days to fill in Guadeloupe.
But for now here I was stuck at the airport for the next six hours or so. And everything about Antigua was exceedingly upscale, except for this 1960s un-air conditioned airport with nothing to do and nowhere to sit.
Okay, there was one tiny restaurant upstairs, where I had a colossally overpriced short stack of pancakes. And sat and sat in the booth and played with the wifi.
At around one-thirty I went over to the WinnAir counter and checked in. She said that boarding was at four-thirty. I said, but the flight was for 3:15. She shrugged her shoulders.
It was really hot and sticky. A taxi into town would have been $30. But I was really getting antsy, so I decided to at least walk out of the airport and to the main road.
The airport itself may have been total crap, but the landscaping around it was just fabulous. Every kind of exotic fancy palm tree imaginable. And right at the airport entrance was this giant neo-classical/country club type bank building. I looked at its name: Stanford International. As in Allen Stanford. The $10 billion Ponzi scheme guy who had just been nailed a few weeks earlier.
And there across the street, with ornate columns and all, was the Stanford Cricket Field. And next to that was the Stanford-owned Antigua National Bank. Where all those Antiguans had lined up a few weeks ago trying to get out their non-existent deposits.
Standing there in the hot sun, it was hard to know whether one was supposed to laugh or cry. This guy had been more moronic than those girls with the hornet’s nest, but the world had gladly ponied up $10 billion for him.
I walked into The Sticky Wicket, a shrine to cricket cum bar and restaurant fronting the cricket pitch. A hamburger cost $18. The receptionist was taking down reservations. Looked like the Stanford empire was continuing apace.
You can’t make this stuff up. Oh yeah, you can. And he did.
Back to the airport. Through security. Nothing to eat except some overpriced cookies. Finally we boarded the small plane. Twenty passengers squeezed into about a quarter of the space of the Liat plane. At 5:10 we finally took off, buffeted around in the air over the deep blue sea.

St Kitts & Nevis

2009-09-22T09:46:00.001-06:00

I was deposited in St. Kitts at around nine thirty at night. The one and a half mile taxi ride into town cost $10.
Glimbaro’s Guest House was small and dark. Outside everything was small and darker. As I was checking in a prostitute kept coming downstairs and asking for a different room for her ‘boyfriend’. I went upstairs to my room, a small cubicle with a fan that didn’t work, an a/c that barely did, a sheet that didn’t fit on the tiny slat bed, and no hot water. I fell asleep.
The next morning the outside was laid back and funky, thrown together wooden like the Caribbean should be. I went out looking for new accommodations.
I found them down by the waterfront. Glimbaro’s had been $41. For $55 at the Seaview I got a room as nice as the one I had had in St Martin. Clean and big and cable TV.
I needed some comfort, since today, September 16, was Heroes Day, a holiday not covered in any book or on any website. This as distinguished from September 19 in three days, which was Independence Day. At any rate, everything in town was closed up tighter than Sunday in Marigot. No restaurants or grocery stores open. No minibuses running anywhere. Hmmm. Well, at least there was a KFC next door, so worst case scenario I could always have some biscuits…
I strolled around downtown Basseterre, the capital. There were several nicely slatted buildings, but everything was slightly, or not so slightly, ramshackle, low, low key Caribbean. The few people on the street were very slow and friendly. Nothin’ goin’ on.
Since I couldn’t get around St Kitts today, I decided to take the ferry over to Nevis, the smaller island in this two island country. Not many ferries running, either, but at one I boarded a little funky one, and in less than an hour I was disgorged in Charlestown, the capital of Nevis.
Basseterre had been a bustling metropolis compared to here. Especially on a closed down, shuttered up holiday. I walked from one end to the other and back again. One of the only cars on the street, a beat up taxi with a beat up guy inside, stopped. The guy charmingly noted that I was a stranger in town, and started mentioning places he could take me, seeing as I was obviously just there for a couple of hours. I blew him off, but then asked him how much to circumnavigate Nevis. I got him down to $20, and off we went.
Chattering away, he took me to every sight to possibly see, and in little more than an hour, including a stop for ice cream, we were back at the ferry. Plenty of time for the four o’clock sailing back to St. Kitts.
For dinner I had the option of KFC, Subway, or Domino’s. Those were the only three places open in the entire town. A basic Subway sandwich was $12. Everything is expensive in the Caribbean. Even for locals. But Domino’s had a large mushroom special for $10. I took it back to my room, where it was surprisingly delicious.
Thursday morning I wandered over to the car rental place. $55 for one day. Plus $25 for a local drivers license. Plus taxes. Plus gas. I got on a minibus and went a third of the way around the island for $1.
The one reason to rent a car would be to drive all the way to the volcanic plug on which sits St Kitts biggest tourist attraction. I figured, what the hell, I could walk.
It was a long, hot, steep walk, only partially shaded. When I paid my entrance fee and emerged at the top, I was at the ramparts of the Brimstone Hill Fortress, once the Gibraltar of the Caribbean.
It was still kind of impressive, what with all the requisite rusty cannons and such. It was even nicer looking out over the placid greenery of St Kitts below me. All bucolic and yesteryear-y I was pretty much by myself for the next hour or two, with only the occasional tourist minibus pulling up with a couple of tourists inside.
As I started to finally walk down, one of those minibuses stopped and asked if I wanted a ride to the bottom. I turned them down, thinking that I would instead be taking a leisurely descending stroll. Big mistake. As on Saba, the steepness was extremely painful on my thighs. And you wouldn’t think that the 1 pm heat would be that much greater than the 10 am heat, but it was. I kept turning back, looking upwards, and wondering how I had ever walked up.
I finally made it down to the main road, got a large Gatorade at a small gas station, and downed it in one and a half gulps. Then I stood there waiting for one of the informal minibuses to drive by and continue my clockwise tour of the island. A couple of bus rides and not much more than an hour or so later I had completed the circuit and was back in Basseterre. I made it back to my room and took a quick air conditioned nap.
After that there wasn’t much to do except walk around the little park, walk along the little waterfront. Downtown Basseterre isn’t really even one good square block. But I was quite enjoying St. Kitts. Absolutely nothing seemed to be happening. Absolutely nobody seemed to care. And I was totally fine with that.

Saba

2009-09-19T16:35:00.000-06:00

I awoke at six and was ready for the guesthouse guy to call a cab at six thirty. Nobody answered at the only taxi company in town. Welcome to the Caribbean. Finally he gave up in disgust and offered to taxi me to the airport himself. Even though St Martin seemed completely overdeveloped, most of the locals had been really friendly.

I was about the only person in the big airport. American and the other big airlines appeared to have stopped flights for the rest of the month. At the far end was a little counter for WinnAir. I checked in and walked all the way to the other end and up to departures.

At eight the other two passengers and I boarded the little plane that was going over to Saba. Then the propellers started twirling and off we went over the ocean.

Within fifteen minutes, the giant five square mile rock that is Saba was no longer a lump on the horizon but real and steep. In a few seconds we had landed on the 1200 foot runway, famous as the Shortest Runway In The World.

We squeezed out of the plane and over to the tiny terminal. There it turned out that my luggage had been lost. Really. Welcome to the Caribbean.

This was interesting because I had spent quite a lot of time on my luggage problem before I had started the trip. Because this was a day excursion, and I later had an evening flight on Liat, I had asked them if I could check in for it this morning. No way. Okay, then I had asked WinnAir if they could hold my bag in St Martin for the day. Impossible. All right. So I had gotten permission for the terminal manager in Saba to bring it over there and leave it with them all day.

But now it hadn’t arrived. They called and determined that it was probably back at SXM. And they told me to have a nice day on Saba.

Hitchhiking is actually the law on Saba, a Dutch island where everyone is either Scot or Black. But now everyone from the flight had left, so my only option was to start walking. Straight up and up and up. So that I did, past many, many pink oleander bushes and looking out over cliffs and blue sea.

I got lucky in that someone was coming out of the driveway at one of the first houses that I reached. And she took me twisting and turning the two or three miles to just about the far side of the island. From there I walked down the old footpath to The Bottom, one of the only two ‘towns’ on this place of about 1500 inhabitants.
It’s of course an understatement to say that Saba is quaint. Even though I did walk past one of those ubiquitous Caribbean medical colleges with its couple of hundred students. In the town itself were a couple of old churches, a guesthouse or so, and a corner store. Everybody talked in a strange Caribbean/Dutch accent. Needless to say, it’s always warm but never hot, everybody always seems to have minor business to attend to, and no one ever even thinks of locking doors.
Even at The Bottom I was still around 600 feet above sea level. Since any kinds of roads in this vertiginous place are of very recent vintage, one wondered how it ever occurred to anyone that they could live here. And then how they went to the trouble of finding an anchorage, finding a place flat enough to squat upon, transporting all their gunk up top, etc.
I hitched back up the hill to the little restaurant that my first ride operated, and was her first customer of the day. Then I hitched another ride all the way back to the top and Windwardside, elevation around 1200, population around 400, the ’capital’ of Saba. Not a heck of a lot going on as I strolled from one end to the other.
By now I had done everything there was to do on Saba short of walking up to its 3000 foot summit. And the trail was far too steep and slippery for my old bones. So instead I decided to walk back to the airport.
There were some uphill portions, but basically it was down, down, down. Very steeply so. So steeply that my legs were soon aching. And the further down I went the hotter it became. Poor me.
But how many times does a person get to be on Saba? The greenery, the flowers, the deep blue sea, not to mention the palpable do-dee-do friendliness, all made for an extremely pleasant afternoon.
Except of course for the constant strain on the muscles of walking down, down, down.
When I reached the terminal they told me that they had confirmed that my bag was over at SXM. So all I needed to do was have a Malta or two and wait for the 5 pm flight.
When we returned to St Martin I did as I was told and asked the Control officer about my bag. He said, ‘I don’t know anything, sir. Frankly, I would not trust anything they told you.’ Hmm.
So I went through Immigration and walked all the way to the end of the airport, where I asked the WinnAir person about my bag. He went back to check, and was then gone for twenty minutes.
So I was a little nervous when he reappeared empty handed. Not to worry, though. Someone else was getting it. And, sure enough, soon it was back in my grubby little hands.
Just in time to take it over to Liat to check in for St. Kitt’s.

St. Martin & Friends

2009-09-17T19:38:00.000-06:00

A night spent in an el cheapo motel near the Miami airport. At least they had a breakfast bar and a shuttle service. Then an easy 11 am Saturday departure and three hours over the blue Caribbean. I didn’t quite know what to expect from St. Martin. But of course I would soon find out.
I walked out of the midsize terminal and Micky was there to meet me from the rental company. He led me to the car and told me to turn right, turn right again, go over the bridge, turn right at the Hollywood Casino, and the office is opposite the Atrium Hotel. The area surrounding the airport was completely built up with Subways and McDonalds and cheesy casinos and rental offices and such, the Hollywood Casino wasn’t lableled as such, so of course I got lost.
About forty minutes later I had everything sorted out, papers all signed, and was ready to tour the island. Although by now it was four in the afternoon. Fortunately there wasn’t a hell of a lot to see.
Sint Maartn/St Martin is divided in half between Holland and France. Not that there is any border beyond a sign saying that you are entering one or the other. It soon became obvious that the Dutch side is 100% American, whereas the French side is… about 92% American.
And although there is an interior of surprisingly nice lumpy tropical hills, you can’t really get there. Whereas the road around the island is pretty much one extended condo development. With Subways and McDonalds and many, many large building supply stores thrown in between. So it was immediately hard for me to see what the purpose of the place was.
Nevertheless I started counter-clockwise through the Dutch section. The pretty dreary ‘capital’ of Philipsburg was six or seven blocks of (mostly) jewelry stores, with all kinds of high priced names but relatively tacky in appearance. I still wasn’t getting it, and the fact that this was the lowest of the low season, and during a recession to boot, didn’t make ithe pretending of zazz any easier. I strolled around for about ten minutes.
(I suppose the reason I wasn’t ‘getting it’ was because upon boarding the plane in Miami I was handed a 300 page magazine on St. Martin’s, 290 pages of which were glossy upscale ads. So excuse me for thinking that I’d be getting at least a small dose of Monaco glitz. But I guess that’s the world of today. The ads portray a world that’s fancier and fancier, and the retarded customers are all slobbier and slobbier.)
Anyway, then it was back on the road, and within about ten minutes I was on the French side. This was slightly more rural, that is there were tiny breaks between the endless development. But if you were expecting classy and continental, forget it. Just a bunch of small restaurants in wooden shacks with classy, continental prices.
I took a side road over a hill and all the way out to ’Cul de Sac’, but it wasn’t that much of a wowzer. At Grand Case I took a left and went up the highest point on the island, all 1400 feet high of it, and got a mildly nice viewpoint. But by now it was getting dark, so back down the hill I went.
I pulled into Marigot, the French ’capital’, which was somewhat less commercial than Philipsburg, and found my way to my guest house. The hallway was narrow, but the room was nice, the a/c worked, the hot water was hot, and the TV got all 75 American channels. I relaxed for a bit, and then drove two miles over to the Dutch side and the Burger King there.
Sunday morning I had my refreshing shower and drove my car over to the ferry dock in downtown Marigot. $30 a day and they’ll pick it up wherever. I then went through the rigamarole to catch the ferry to Anguilla.
It’s about ten miles and a half hour ferry ride to this smallest of British protectorates. And as opposed to the mountainous St. Martin, Anguilla is lowlying ten mile long, two mile wide limestone sandbar. And instead of tropical foliage it is covered in scrubby scrub.
It is famously backward and low key in a black British Caribbean sort of way. Although there’s enough going on for the taxis to charge absurd amounts to take you anywhere. And though a car rental is only $30, you also have to pay $20 for a local driving license. Which seemed like a lot to me for such a small island. Anyway I could always walk. So I did.
It was pretty nice sauntering along on a Sunday morning, passing the occasional church with the singing emanating. But it was also pretty damn hot in this scrubland. And being basically flat didn’t mean that there weren’t long, uphill stretches. So after a couple of miles I decided to see what would happen if I stuck out my thumb. Not much.
But then I got to a main road, and a guy with a flatbed truck stopped. His name was Michael, he was originally from St Vincent, and he had a small construction company. He also lived at the east end of Anguilla, and he decided to take me there and have me hang out with his family.
So I did for the next few hours. Which was good, because the island is little else but hot and scrubby, and I don’t know what else I would have done once I had gotten the basic idea down. They fed me a little lunch, and then he had to go to work. But his wife and some relatives took me briefly to a beach (nice, but not really all that amazing), then drove me over to the west end of the island before depositing me back at the ferry.
I guess the best way to sum up Anguilla is that regular building lots are about $20,000. Seafront ones are a half a million. The island’s economy is building houses for those rich idiots who want to pay that kind of money for oceanfront scrubland. And the recession is cutting down on those numbers.
I bought a watermelon soda while waiting for the ferry. Then the ride back.
When I got back to Marigot it was a Sunday afternoon in the slow season and absolutely everything was closed. Even the Subway a few doors down from my guest house. So the guest house owner was nice enough to drive me over to the Burger King on the Dutch side, and I brought my BK Veggie back to eat on the guest house patio overlooking the sun going down over the marina in front of me.
Then I retired to my room where I watched a Phillies game on ESPN.
The next morning it was back to the ferry dock where I bought my ticket for St Bart’s. Anguilla had been $30 round trip. St Bart’s was $80. On the way to the docks I had looked in the window of the Marigot ReMax office. A four bedroom villa was priced to sell at 1.6 million euros.
It took almost an hour and a half to get to St. Bart’s, which is only about seven miles long. But it does have a pleasingly jagged mountainous outline. And its main town of Gustavia is red-roofed and pleasingly pleasant.
But the island is famous for being expensive, and it was. $6 for a cup of coffee. In St. Martin all the prices are in euros, but they only add 10% for dollars. Here they charged full exchange. In St Martin only the government officials spoke French. Here on St Bart’s it was like being in La France herself. Hardly any blacks. Lots and lots of French people.
And the low season scooter rate was over $50, so once again I decided to walk. Although here the hills were much more pronounced.
As I think I’ve intimated, in St Martin the traffic was relentless. And this was the slowest of the slow season. Here on St Bart’s it was almost as intense, especially considering that the roads were so narrow. For some reason I would have thought that a place that was so expensive and so ’exclusive’ wouldn’t be so annoying.
The hitching here wasn’t all that bad though, so after a couple of short rides I was almost at the end of the island and Orient Bay. There was a beach right past a picturesque graveyard, so I went to it, pulled out my towel, and stripped down to my bathing trunks.
It was a nice little sandy beach, but not something you would go halfway around the world for. I tried to ignore the 55 year old matrons toplessly sunbathing. And my diabetic feet were going, ouch, ouch, with all the rocks in the water.
Once I was out there in the mild ocean and looking back at the villas dotting the verdant hills, the scene looked inviting enough. And I suppose that if you were Oprah or Leonardo it might be nice to be somewhere where nobody cared if you were Oprah or Leonardo. But, really, if you have that kind of money you can find anonymity anywhere, can’t you? And if your mind tended towards anything resembling modesty, why the hell would you be going to St. Bart’s?
So I still wasn’t getting any of this.
After a couple of hours of hanging at the beach in St Bart’s, I decided it was time to head back. I got a ride to the small airport, which was only about a mile from Gustavia. So I decided to walk the rest of the way.
It was kind of tiring walking along, and I realized that I was getting old. Then I also realized that it was 88 degrees and 88 percent humidity, and I was going up a really steep hill. So it wasn’t really my age, what was going on was my senility in doing something so stupid.
When I got to the top I was looking down at the teeny tiny short runway and wondering how anybody landed there. Just then a small plane came in not ten feet above my head on its way in. Oh, so that’s how.
I had thought it would be a scenic walk down into the harbor. But it wasn’t. Just steep and hot. Then I was so tired that all I could do is sit around and wait for the ferry. There was a glossy catalog of hundreds of villas for sale. Not a single price was listed. I suppose that if you have to ask you can’t afford it.
But I did have a revenge of sorts on snooty St Bart’s. I only spent a total of one euro while I was there.

Galapagosh A Rooney

2009-01-28T16:55:00.003-07:00

The plane flies over the open Pacific for an hour or two. Then islands appear below, not tiny ones. We land on a flat scrub and cactus covered spot, take a bus for a mile to a channel, a boat across the channel, and a 50 minute bus ride to the main town, Puerto Ayora.

It´s humid but not horribly hot. I walk around to several of the cheap hotels. Their prices are much higher than the book says, and they are almost all full. Strange, you would think that in the midst of a recession in the off season it wouldn´t be that way. I find a simple room for $15.

By now it´s about 3 and I head out for the famous Charles Darwin center. It´s about a half mile to the end of town past not that many restaurants and souvenir stores. Then over another half mile and increasingly hotter to get there. I´m hoping to see hundreds of giant tortoises at the end of it.

Disappointment. There´s a total of about an acre of enclosures, and maybe a dozen tortoises walking around. Not all that giant, either, although I just saw giant sea turtles in Oman, so maybe now I´ll never be satisfied. I was able to sit about six feet from one and stare for twenty minutes. She seemed to be saying, Í sure hope that you have this all figured out more than I do. I tried to look confident.

In the evening all the hundreds of rich tourists take launches back to their small to medium sized tour boats. By the next morning I am horribly bored with Puerto Ayora. I pay $30 for the two hour ride in a thwapping speedboat in open ocean. We then arrive at Puerto Villamil, the only tiny town on Isla Isabela, by far the biggest Galapago island.

Then I settle in, on Saturday finding a room right on the beach, complete with sea breezes, hot water, and a fridge. $20 a night, and I start in on my self imposed discipline of trying to write 3000 words a day.

Said days are thus spent in concentrating for hour and a half bursts, then walking around on the beach to look at all the iguanas wandering back and forth, maybe taking my daily dip, walking the couple of blocks to ´downtown´to try and find edible food, walking the half mile to the internet place. Kind of idyllic.

They have a turtle station here which is much nicer and has many more turtles. The islands though are dry deserty volcanic places, like much of Baja. The only tortoises I´ve seen in the wild were only around 18-24 inches. They do have very silly necks and heads.

The volcano caldera tour is supposed to be a bust, since it´s been raining like crazy on the mountain. It´s cool having Sirius on the top of the sky when the stars are visible. I still hope to go snorkeling, and am trying to arrange a boat tour. All those things are expensive.

And it´s very hard using this keyboard at the internet place.

So Much For Rose Smelling

2009-01-24T18:47:00.002-07:00

The sickness didn´t get better on Wednesday. On Thursday I realized that it was probably a reaction to the pills I was taking for the intestinal stuff, so I stopped taking the anti-fungal. I was still awful on Friday, spending most of the day in bed. The incessant clouds and rain didn´t help; I was often in thermal underwear with two other layers and blankets. It´s not that it was so absolutely cold, but rather that my defenses were gone and there was no such thing as a space heater.

I couldn´t go to the Amazon lest I get some horrible other disease. The Ecuadorian coast was hard to get to, and is pretty crappy once you get there. But I noticed that my guidebook said Écuador & The Galapagos... Hmmm, ordinarily I would be far too cheap to spend the $500 to get there, not to mention the $2000 for a week´s cruise. But it would be warm.

Saturday I stopped the cipro and moved back up the hill into town. I got a great room with WIFI and its own little balcony for $7.50 a night, and started writing away. Sunday I bought my ticket.

Tuesday was Inauguration Day, and I wasn´t going to miss that. Friends Jim and Marshia were even going to have a little party. I awoke bright and early to find that my computer wasn´t working. Neither was anything else. The hotel girl said that all power in Banos would be off all day. Aaagh!

Around 10 somebody noticed that the best hotel in town had a little generator going. I talked to the British owner, who said, sorry, but his big screen tv wasn´t hooked up to the same circuit. Aaagh! But at eleven he let us know that we could come over to his house and watch it all on his personal tv.

So I got to witness history from far away. Then at around 2 the sun almost fully came out. Barack: He causes planes to land on water and the sun to shine in Banos. Marshia and I celebrated by riding bicycles down the hill.

It was about a 30 km hill. And there was some up, but mostly d-o-w-n. There´s one quarter mile long tunnel, and I remembered it as being a lot of fun, so I went right into it. About half way through, at about 30 mph, I realized that I hadn´t let my eyes get adjusted, and that I could crash into the wall at any moment. And once I had lost my ignorant confidence...

But I came out the other end unscathed. And once we got to the bottom, we just stopped an upgoing bus and rode back.

Wednesday morning the clouds were back. And my little experiment of just staying in Banos had come a cropper. Who knew it could be so friggin cold here on the equator?

Right Now, Not So Ecuadorable

2009-01-13T17:45:00.002-07:00

Even with stops in Atlanta and Miami, it's pretty painless to get to Quito. Of course, they have all the flights arrive at around nine at night, so that by the time you get through Immigration all the luggage is piled up in giant heaps of black bags on the floor. (I have so much stuff in my 'backpack' that I can hardly lift it, let alone carry it on my back. It's smaller than most Ecuadorian luggage.) But after a couple of minutes of freaking out that yours has been stolen, you finally find it.

The next morning it is amazing how quickly one adjusts to this foreign country. People are small and the pace is quiet. But it is also cloudy and rainy, not to mention an upcoming weekend, so my initial plan to go to Mindo, a cloud forest reserve, has to change. By three in the afternoon I am on a bus to Banos, and by six thirty I am there and hanging out with our friends Jim and Marshia who own a small hotel there.

And then by three in the afternoon the next day (Saturday) I am esconsed 3 km down the hill in my house rental for the next three weeks or so. It's got several rooms, a little porch, a little garden area, and, like every other house in Latin America, eight foot high walls surrounding it. Banos is, however, a no crime area.

My project is to put an allegorical gun to my head and, like in those old college days, force myself to write. And, like in those old college days, the first day I hemmed and hawed and did nothing, mainly because I still hadn't figured out how to approach the next part of my current project. But by Sunday afternoon I had decided to write a history of my drive to Panama 8 years ago. That stuff is easy, and I had quickly done 1700 words.

Unfortunately, part of renting a house is putting food inside it so that one doesn't have to go 6 km back and forth to restaurants three times a day. And it turns out that the only supermarket in Banos (population 14,000) has been closed for a week. Something about a messy divorce. So everyone had said that I should go up the hill to the Sunday market, which I did. And there I bought many fruits and vegetables.

But I also had tasted a plum that an indigenous lady had wanted me to taste.

So by the dawn of Monday I wasn't feeling too good. And then as the day progressed it got worse. By three am Tuesday my bowels, and everything else, had been evacuated. I thus lay in bed for 24 hours.

Around two this afternoon I finally forced some clothes on, walked out to the corner, and got a cab into town, where the nice Farmacia lady sold me a big pile of pills. I barely had enough energy to down the first ones, buy some Ecuadorian gatorade, and take a cab back to the house.

By five I had enough energy to help this little bird that keeps hopping into the house to find his way out again. By six I could read a NY Times article. Now it is eight and I am blogging.

Although my stomach still is gurgling.

And it's been cloudy and cold pretty much nonstop. Which is kind of weird, since Banos is only at 5500 feet, it's, uh, on the Equator, and the Amazon is only two hours down the road from here. At certain points, though, I've had to have on thermal underwear, a long sleeve shirt, and a sweatshirt, and been under two heavy blankets.

But the theory is that I'M ON THE FRIGGIN' EQUATOR, so that the Scottish Highland weather won't last...

(Oh, and writing blogs does not contribute to my daily authoring quota.)

Bye Bye Dubai

2008-05-30T16:12:00.002-06:00

I was there at 6:20 am to catch the bus that was leaving town. Said bus was clean and modern and not overly populated. We headed out and northeast along the coast, which was perpetually semi-developed and not all that interesting, what with the rugged mountains no longer marching down to the ocean. That went on for several hours.

Then we turned left and up towards Dubai. We reached the UAE border at around 11, and although the formalities were slow they were hassle-free. When we were moving again I was back at the town of Hatta, where I had been three and a half weeks earlier. Now it was about an hour into Dubai.

Back on this side of the Gulf the overwhelming drabness of the sandy dirty brown sand presented itself once again, and, even acknowledging all the ridiculous amount of oil money sloshing around, I once again asked myself: WHY??? Who could possibly want to live here, even if it is on a manmade island shaped like a palm tree?

And when we got back to the city of Dubai around 2 pm, I was once again struck by how much it was like a caricature of Houston, all buildings and roads and traffic. Muscat has obviously been built with a sense of proportion. Dubai and Proportion are mutually exclusive ideas.

I found my way back to the Youth Hostel, where, incidentally, I have yet to see a youth. Wonder of wonders, they actually had my reservation on file, so I got a single room. I turned on the ac full steam (as usual) and lay on the bed for a while. Then a walk down the street to the hypermarket, where I stuffed my stomach and loaded up with crap to take on the plane with me. Then basically I did nothing else.

The trip was now over. I was up the next morning at 5:40 and was at the airport and checked in before 7. Which gave me a couple of hours to just sit there. And contemplate the reality that a) of the hundreds of little billboard ads in the airport, only a tiny handful had any Arabic on them, and that was usually a logo, and b) on all the billboard ads here, and everywhere else in the world for that matter, there's all these guys standing around in fancy rooms wearing $2,000 suits, and yet everybody around me getting on flights was dressed incredibly more slobbily than I was, so who are they trying to sell to?

Anyway, that was about the deepest thought that I had for the next 16 hours, which was the length of the flight to Houston. Once again Emirates provided me with 40 New Releases, 20 Classics, and 30 Hindi films. And I ended up watching five complete movies. The flight path was more interesting, however, since we got to fly over Iran, and then a couple of thousand miles of Russia. Best of all, we flew over the middle of a clear Greenland in daylight, giving me the chance to see its frozen fjords and dark cliffs for only the second time in my life. Even better than that, we got to do the same thing for Baffin Island for my first time ever.

There was supposed to be an hour and a half layover. We started out arriving thiry minutes late, and then I had to share the line for Immigration with a bunch of fat Americans coming back from Cabo. When I got to the baggage carousel it was already completely backed up with all the gigantic suitcases of all the Indians who would take forever to get through the Foreign Immigration line. I looked in vain for mine as more and more baggages kept coming up the belt and as the time kept ticking away.

Finally, with about twenty minutes left before my ABQ flight left, the final bag came up and it wasn't mine. Okay, well that solves the problem of how they were going to get it to my flight on time. I took off, took the little train to the right terminal, and made my plane with minutes to spare.

And then sat there thinking about what the odds were that I'd ever see my belongings again, and calculating how much it would cost to replace them all.

But Maureen was faithfully waiting for me as I deplaned, and within 24 hours not only had by bag arrived, but they had delivered it up to the mountains.

And then it was back to the same old existential grind.

Giant Mountain, Nizwa, Turtles

2008-05-14T09:52:00.002-06:00

10 km out of town I noticed that they had given me a car with no gas. So I had to turn around and get some.

By noon I was inland on the coastal highway south. By 12:30 I was driving up a LP recommended wadi towards the ocean. It and the ocean I got to weren't that interesting, and then I had to drive back.

Up until about a year ago most of the coast route was unpaved. Now most of it is a four lane highway and the rest will be finished in a couple of months. It goes through boring interior rocky areas for a while and then along boring seacoast. I almost missed the LP highly recommended 'can't miss' wadi.

It's supposed to be THE beauty spot of Oman, but apparently no one told the highway crews finishing up the giant freeway bridge overpass at its mouth. Still, when you walked in a ways, what with the date palms and the rock walls and the pools of water, it was pretty nice.

Then back to the highway and on another 120 km to Sur, the big town around those parts. There wasn't that much to it, though, so as the sun sank I kept driving another 50 km towards Turtle Beach. The brand new LP says that a 4WD is no longer necessary, and that's probably because the whole thing is now paved.

It was long past dark at 7:45 when I finally groped my way to the Turtle Reserve. There they said to wait in the parking area until 9:30 when the guided tour started. I drove over there and waited.

And started getting a giant headache because I basically hadn't eaten all day. There just aren't that many options in the middle of nowhere. So I frantically ate every last potato chip in my possession. And waited.

At 9:30 Ali, the guide, showed up with about another dozen tourists, including the travel writer from the Sydney Herald, who seemed to be the kind of guy who really hated traveling. The spotter duly reported three turtles over at that other beach, so we all walked through soft sand to get there.

In broken English Ali gave a talk on turtles, their life cycle, and breeding habits. Then he led us over to where one, then another, had just finished laying their eggs. Although officially medium-sized, they looked pretty big to me. And pretty tired. Gentle beings, they let you pat them on their heads.

The third turtle was just finishing preparing the sand for egg laying, and Ali had us come over one a time to quietly watch. Then 15 minutes later he had us all come over and watch the perfectly round, perfectly white eggs pop out one by one.

By now it was 11:30, and we started back. But all of a sudden Ali dropped to his knees and started digging about a foot deep and pulling the sand over. Suddenly there were a half dozen perfectly formed four inch long baby turtles, flippers flipping, newly hatched from eggs deposited two months ago.

In June or July they can have 200 or 300 turtles in a night. But I was sufficiently impressed with the ones that I saw.

Now all I needed was a place to sleep. And fortunately I didn't get lost as I looked for the Turtle Bay Resort. Although, as usual in the rest of the world, 'resort' never ends up as glamorous as you imagine.

The next morning I put my thermometer out in the sun and it went up to 135. That seemed a tad high, but it was still too hot to lie on the beach, so I headed on back to Sur, where I grabbed an Indian working mab's lunch. Then I started out on what I thought would be an easy drive to Nizwa.

About 100 km or so into it I took a detour to Wadi Ben Khalid, which was a scenic mountain drive that ended up with pools and date palms and reddish brown rocks. Quiet and peaceful.

It was past 4:30 when I got back to the main highway, and about 80 km after that I passed the Wahiba Sands, which is a very large area of very high dunes, on the left. The LP said I needed a 4WD to get to one of the resort camps; it later turned out that they will come and get you. Oh well, who wants to ride a dune buggy up a 750 foot sand dune anyway?

Nizwa was getting further and further away. I finally got to the turnoff past 7, and it was still over 100 km away. As the kilometers kept ticking away and the sky got blacker and blacker, so did my mood.

I got there about 8:30 and it turned out that the only 'cheapo' place, at $40, was a total dump, with vile rooms and vile staff who didn't speak a word of English. It also turned out that after paying for my food at a bad Turkish restaurant I only had #35 in Omani rials. Which meant that I had to drive 12 km until I finally found an ATM that worked.

I finally gritted my teeth and got a room there at close to 11 pm. Okay, how bad could it be? At 11:45 they started up a giant, old generator right next to my room. I went out and yelled at the guy. He yelled back at me. I yelled even louder. After ten or fifteen minutes of this he went and turned the generator off.

The next morning I drove to all the cultural reasons to go to Nizwa: Nizwa Fort, Bahla Fort (closed in the 108 degree heat), and Jabrin Fort. Jabrin made about the 27th fort I'd seen, and since they're all pretty much the same, light brown adobe, with round towers, some old cannons, and date palms growing nearby, it was getting kind of repetetive.

So I decided to head up to Jebel Shams, the highest point in Oman.

The road, though ridiculously steep in places, was paved for all but the last 13 km, and they're in the process of finishing those. Slow going then, but easily doable in a car. When I got to a turnout at the end of the road, I walked about 20 M and came to one of the deepest gorges on the face of the Earth.

About six miles away was the other side and some more vertical mountain above it. In between it dropped straightaway at least 5,000 feet. And I guess I'm getting old, but as I sat there 3 feet from the edge I got this overwhelming sense of vertigo. So I scooted a foot back.

No good. The lohnger I sat there the more the chasm was silently calling out for me to come join it in oblivion. Unnerved, I gave up and retreated to the car.

Strangely, about a km away there was another spot right on the edge. But they had a flimsy 4 foot fence there, and because of that it wasn't scary at all.

Anyway, I headed back down the mountain and into Nizwa, where the next cheapest hotel was $65. But here you got a clean, modern staff and a clean modern room, complete with minibar and a pool outside. Not to mention the only internet in town downstairs and about the only Pizza Hut in Oman a few doors down. I relaxed my weary bones for the evening.

The next morning was Wednesday, and my trip was winding down. So I wound slowly down the mountains in my rentacar back towards Muscat. I got there around 2, checked into my corniche balcony room, and at 5 drove around the shore for one last time and actually found my way back to the car agency. Then a walk to my fancy Indian restaurant, a taxi back to Mutrah, one last walk along the corniche (temperature down to 102 by 8 pm), and my journey was about over

Doin' That Muscat Ramble

2008-05-13T09:20:00.003-06:00

At 4 pm we started seeing the first signs of vegetation and habitation. By 4:40 we were on a modern freeway slicing its way through the same reddish brown Hajar mountains that I had last seen in the UAE.

Greater Muscat stretches over 60 km along the coast, and as soon as we hit the suburbs I could see that Salalah had been Omanic Hicksville. All the buildings were new and white and lowslung, and with the rugged mountains coming right to the coast it made a calm and pretty and prosperous picture. Now HERE was by far the best compromise between modernity and tradition. Hey, there were even Subways and Dominos (though not too many) and all the other wonderful things that make up life as we know it.

Most wonderfully, for the first time in the past months, there were actual swathes of grass and actual green trees that weren't date palms.

At 6:30 the bus dropped us off at Ruwi, which was the first place since the first day in Dubai where there was a sense of bustle and congestion. Virtually all the people bustling were Indian. It was more than clear that Oman (and the Gulf in general) had imported far more Indians than there was work for. I immediately got a fair price for the 8 km taxi ride to Mutrah, the lowkey seaside area, complete with its 1 km curving corniche.

There are about 5 one star hotels at the north end of same, and by 7:30 I had a $40 room in one of them. Elevator and a/c worked, and I even had a balcony which overlooked the bay, albeit with a construction site in between. I went out and walked along the corniche, but the closest thing I could find to Indian food was a vegetable burger and chips. In true Indian fashion they served my banana shake in an attractive 24 inch glass and then provided a 6 inch straw to drink it with.

After that I cruised the souq area, where there were souvenir shops but minimal hassling, even by Indian shopkeepers. I've figured out that that's probably because most of the Indians in the Gulf are from southern India, and they lack the weird desperation that so many northern Indians have. I bought a little frankincense, and then strolled back to my hotel, the Islamic crescent moon shining down on Muscat Bay.

All I had to do on Saturday was check out Muscat's 'old town' and then negotiate a deal on a rental car. Easy enough, but at 106 degrees nothing's too easy.

Muscat is one of those National Geographic places that I had always wanted to go to. Especially the incredibly romantic old fort of the Sultan. Turns out that when I got there, about 4 km from Mutrah, there wasn't a town and it wasn't old. The 'gates' are about 6 years old, and inside them are a few white government buildings and the Sultan's not too shabby palace. Considering, however, how spectacularly successfully Sultan Qaboos has brought Oman into the 21st Century, I don't begrudge him it.

At 1 pm Muscat shuts up tighter than an Omani drum, so I went back to the hotel and lay there in the a/c. Around 4:30 I took a cab back to Ruwi, hoping to find some of the gazillion car rental places that were supposed to be there. As usual, the ones listed in the book were no longer there, and it turned out that the nameless ones were all a mile and a half away, which I ended up trudgingly walking to.

The problem with renting cars in Oman is that everyone only wants to give you 200 km a day, and then it's 20 cents a mile. I finally got a guy to give me 300 km a day at a slightly higher price. I then went back to a really nice Indian restaurant in Ruwi and had an all you can eat Southern Indian thali for $3.00, cheaper than in India; I can't wait to go to their location in Sunnyvale, CA

And the next day I came back at 10:30 and picked up the car.

Salalah

2008-05-10T02:29:00.002-06:00

It was clear as soon as I got off the bus that Oman was much, much wealthier than Yemen and much, much poorer than Dubai. The few people on the street at 6:30 am were all Indian, as were the few annoying cab drivers. I walked 400 M to the Salalah Hotel, but they were full. The Bangladeshi desk guy told me of another hotel, 'only 200 meters'.

Not to quibble, but it was 1.4 KM, me dragging my case over gravel parking lots. But when I got there the nice Filipino man gave me a room, and I ha toast and tea and then gratefully crashed for the next four hours.

I got myself together after noon, walked across the street to the Turkish restaurant, and had some babaganoush. It being a cool, breezy 92, I then started to walk around Salalah and take in my new surroundings.

Virtually everyone around me was Indian, and what with the dayglo-ish painted signs on all the businesses, it made the place look like a depopulated and somewhat more polite India. The nature of the businesses was also rather strange and utterly different from everywhere else I had been: Over the next day I would see literally hundreds of 'Hair Dressing' (for men), 'Tailoring', and 'Laundry' establishments. Not to mention 'Food Stuff & Luxuries'.

Right now I was surrounded by at least 20 'car rental' places, usually allied with 'copying' or 'real estate'. But none of them was open. Maybe it was because of the 1-4 closure thing. I walked around some more and then found an internet place.

At 5:30 almost all the car rental places were still closed. But I finally found one who would rent to a non-Omani. $27 a day, but the catch was only 200 free KM. I took it and then drove around Salalah the rest of the evening to finish my various errands.

The next morning I set out to explore as much of Dhofar as possible in 200 km. The Dhofar region is basically there because a small strip of oceanfront land is surrounded on all sides by high mountains. These catch some of the Indian monsson, so that from June to September the whole area is actually alive and green, the only place on the Arabian peninsula to ever get that way. This means that folks from Saudi, Dubai, et al, all flock here then.

But it was only May, and most everything was still pretty brown. First of all I had driven a couple of km through palm groves down to the ocean. Now I was heading halfway up the encircling mountains to an Islamic pilgramage site, Job's Tomb. I paid my respects and tried to commisserate. But, after all, Job ended up getting a sort of apology from God, whereas I'm still waiting for mine.

I turned around and headed back down the mountain, skirting Salalah to the west. Here there were hundreds of giant new houses being built: I guess the Dubai crowd was really getting into it. I then kept going west, aiming for the beach area of Mughsail 48 km away.

When I got there, there wasn't all that much there there. A km or so of average beach, at the end of which were some blowholes that turned out to be a couple of manhole type grates under which you could hear a whoosh and through which came occasional light spray. There was also one perfuntory restaurant 'resort' on the beach, where I ate.

This was the western end of the Dhofar flat, and now the road climbed up, up, up on the coastal route towards the Yemen border. I climbed up, up, up about 3,000 feet all the way to the top, where I had to turn around because of the km.

Dhofar has been famous throughout history as the only place where the frankincense tree, a weird little runted affair, grows. I stopped on the way back down and walked over and patted a tree and peeled off a little bark, although it is the sap that they use. They had been burning it ever since the tourist hotel in Sa'na, so I was starting to get sick of it.

Then I got back to the beach area and, for the first time in the trip, actually got wet. Although it's not like I had had that many opportunities so far to pass up. In deference to the Saudi schoolgirls who were right down the sand I wore a t-shirt: Not to save them from the sight of a man's chest, but to save them from the sight of a pathetically pale one.

The water wasn't as warm as you might imagine. I didn't really swim much, since there are supposed to be rip currents, and I didn't want my body to be washed up six weeks later on the Malabar coast.

I made it back to the little car rental office with no dings and with 2 km to spare. Then internet, food, and back to the hotel and bed.

Up at 5:30 Friday for the 7 am bus to Muscat. Good I bought the ticket Wednesday because the bus was completely full. But comfortable. And strong a/c.

By now I had seen the occasional Omani man, who could be distinguished by the round embroidered cap that he invariably wore. Oman used to own Zanzibar and its slave trade, so that some Omanis have strong African features. One such extended family now occupied much of the bus, the women all in tripped out Africanized Moslem robes.

In general, Omani women at their most conservative are like those on the Gulf, with at least their faces showing. Most of the women you see, however, are either Hindu women in saris, or Filipinos or Egyptians, etc., in western clothes.

The bus climbed up to the top of the mountains, and soon we were surrounded by an endless plain of flat, flat featureless sandy dirt. When we stopped at 10 am my thermometer read 112 in the sun. In the shade it was only 110.

As we drove on there was a small patch where a few weeds grew, and then back to nothing. The flat brown sand changed to flat grey gravel. In the afternoon we stopped for a break and I saw my first American Halliburton employees. At 3:46 it was 46 Celsius, which is 115 in real degrees. I finished my third can of iced tea and got back on the bus.

Welcome to Dhofar, The Home Of Frankincense and Mirth

2008-05-08T09:24:00.006-06:00

Hey, how's it goin'? Pretty hot out today, wasn't it.

So this Muslim guy walks into a bar. And because of that he burns in hell for the rest of eternity.

Did you ever notice that Saudi women have a slightly bigger eyeslit than Yemeni girls? No, seriously! Check it out some time.

Hey, what do you get when you cross a Jew and a Christian? Whoa, with all their money and guns I don't want either one of them mad at me.

These days when I tell people I'm from Dhofar, they all think I'm saying Darfur. Guys: It's the difference between incense and incensed. Those Sudanese bros should learn to chill out.

Don't you think that it's, like, totally gay when infidels say that we Muslims are homophobic? If you want my opinion, they're all just a bunch of fuckin' queers. But if that's your thing, man. Just remember what they say about being in bed with a bedouin: It's always in tents!

Okay, management wants me to remind you that there's a zero drink maximum, so go crazy guys. Next week I'll be appearing at the Laughing Camel in Riyadh. Until then don't steal anything: I don't want to have to be trying to hear one hand clapping.

Insh'allah, dudes.

Into The Wadi Of Death

2008-05-07T05:35:00.003-06:00

I don't know if I've been explicit enough so far, but in Yemen every single woman is covered, face and all, in black. As I looked out my hotel window the next morning even my misognynist heart was melting for them, even as they were melting in the ferocious heat.

Al Mukallah was the most prosperous Yemeni city so far, with even a canal bisecting its main business street. But as I stepped out onto it, the heat, which had been Nashville hot in Aden, was already way past Memphis and almost to New Orleans.

I walked to the bus office and found out that the bus to Sayun left at 6 pm. So I exhausted myself walking 300 M to an internet cafe, only to find that it opened at noon. So I called Adel.

He showed up and we took a taxi to the tourist police to get a permit for Sayun, and then to a restaurant, where I ate more Yemeni food, by far the best part of which are the 20 inch diameter delicious crispy naans that they serve with everything.

Now Adel wanted to show me around his town, which was indeed romantically set, what with white buildings, blue sea, and reddish jagged rock mountains backdropping and jutting into said sea. But it was over 100 degrees and humid to boot, so that kind of put a damper on my sightseeing excitement.

At 1 Adel dropped me off at an internet place, but at 1;15 they closed for siesta, so I wandered back to the bus office, where I zombied for about an hour. Then I went to a place that advertised pizza, but they said they couldn't or wouldn't make one for me. Then back to the internet place, which was supposed to open at 4, bud didn't. So I sat on the steps and Adel walked by and, as the sun started to fade a little we walked around some more.

At 6 I got on the bus and met some new friends, an artistic Hong Kong backpacking couple named Ada & Andy. Back on an airconditioned bus Al Mukallah started looking nice again, but it was soon dark and we settled in. This time they put in an American video, a nonsensically ultraviolent flick produced by one of Bill Clinton's billionaire buddies. It occured to me that we wonder how Islamic fanatics get such sick ideas as piloting airliners into buildings and video beheadings, when the obvious answer is that they do so by watching American movies.

(Speaking of which, as we were passing poor sleepy villages, I remembered the Atlantic Monthly notice that pointed out that 30% of all Americans had seen beheading videos on the internet, and that about half of all males who had done so wanted to see more.)

We got to Sayun, a not very big town, about midnight, and Ada & Andy & I had independently decided to try the Tower Hotel, recommended in the LP as a 'midrange' choice. When we got there it was worse than a $3 Nicaraguan craphole, but it was midnight and we were screwed.

The next morning was Sunday, which is like their Monday, or sometimes like their Tuesday, but in a small town was just Blahday, like every other day. I went to the bus office to enquire about the 5 pm Tuesday bus to Oman, but was directed to another bus office, which directed me to a third.

At that one the guy said, 'No bus,' and everything else in Arabic. After many attempts to talk to many people, the story emerged: For the first time in memory there had been no diesel fuel in town for the last three weeks. Which meant that forlorn cars were lined up at gas stations. And that the bus probably wasn't running.

Gee, why hadn't I thought to plan for that possibility?

Okay, time for Plan E.17. I called Adel in Al Mukallah to find out if and when a bus went up the coast from there to Oman. He found out that there probably was one Wednesday morning at 7, which would mean that I would have to take the Tuesday 6 am bus from Sayun back to Al Mukallah. But what if they did find diesel? Or what if they didn't and I was stuck in Sayun for a few days?

There was also the problem of changing hotel rooms. I found the Rayboon Hotel, which was cutely located in a twisting alleyway, and it was cheaper and the room was far better. I went back to get A & A, and we took a taxi with our stuff over to the Rayboon. But I was confused, because this Rayboon was laid out differently, and the rooms weren't nearly as nice. Oh well, I'm just old and easily confused. I moved into my new room.

And rested. Because Wsdi Hadramawt, in which Sayun was the principal town, was the hottest place so far, and by noon you just wanted to lie there for an hour, especially with the inferior a/c in the inferior room. No wonder the first Western 'explorers' didn't reach this area until the 1930s.

After a whle I got up, went outside, and walked around a few corners and up 50 M, where, indeed, was another Rayboon. Same management, newer building. But by now it was too hot and annoying to move all my stuff over, especially since no one at either of them spoke any English.

After eating a little it was past one, and now everything closed up tight for the afternoon. I went back and lay in my bad Rayboon room. At 4:30 I went over to the only travel agent in town and ordered up a car and driver for Monday. Then I waited for the tiny restaurant to open at 7:15. That was pretty much it for the day.

Monday at 7 Yusuf the driver showed up and knocked on our doors, and off Andy and Ada and I went towards Wadi Dayun, which is a wadi that branches off of Hadramuht. Now the word 'wadi' can refer to a gulch, a canyon, a valley, anything that water goes through, usually occasionally. In this instance, the light brown cliffs in the Wadi Hadramuht area are exactly like cliffs in southern Utah, except that there's a flat valley floor between them that is 8-18 miles wide, and it includes date palms, farmland, and fantastical cubist adobe houses, which is what we tourists come for.

Of course, much of this area is 'newer' construction, which is cheap and adobe but not nearly as scenic, and most of us tourists come in January when it isn't so damn hot. But Yusuf's car, a Chinese built GoNow SUV, had a/c, and so we headed out about forty miles to the start of Wadi Dayun.

At the place where the Belgian tourists were killed three months ago the police asked us if we wanted an excort. I said, Nah. I figured that any suicide bomber would be crazy to be out on a day like today.

Well, the first village was against the cliff and pretty nice, but the others weren't incredibly worth going halfway around the world for, especially since there are great mountaintop ones right outside of Sa'na.

So we got to the end of the road and turned around and headed back. And about 15 miles before Sayun we made our major afternoon stop at Shibam (no, not last week's Shibam, but thanks for paying attention), which IS a reason that people go halfway around the world.

Okay, it's not the Pyramids or the Taj, but once you've come halfway around the world it's kind of neat. What it is is a village in the middle of the wadi valley, about 800 feet square, that contains about 500 eight story (generally about one room to a floor) houses all squashed next to one another. We got out to walk around and to take yet more hundreds of pictures of building angles.

It was 2 pm, so everything was really shut down. And you can't blame then since it was 105 in the shade and 115 in the sun, where I got stuck for a while. After wandering around I ended up at a closed souvenir shop, so, completely wiped out by the heat, I just sat there. A & A turned up a few minutes later, then a Yemeni, who went and got the owner, who just barely cared enough to open his shop and try and sell us stuff.

When we were done with Shibam we found Yusuf and started back for Sayun. It had turned out that Yusuf was friends with the bus company owner, and now he called him again for me, and the guy said that the Tuesday bus was probably happening, but check back at 9 am. The uncertainty in my soul continued overnight.

By Tuesday am I had concluded that if the bus wasn't happening, I could still take an unairconditioned share taxi down to Al Mukallah for the probable bus on Wednesday. At 9 am I called Yusuf to have him call his friend, and the answer was that the bus was 90% certain. Not good enough. I sat in my room for 2 hours, then called back, since if the bus was coming it would have left Al Mukallah at 11. Departure was confirmed. Now all I had to do was have Yusuf take me to go buy the ticket.

By now A & A had given up and taken a share taxi to Tarim, the stop for the day. But I was obligated to hire Yusuf for the full fare; he had been so helpful and I was so glad to have my bus ticket that I didn't care. So we drove to Tarim, which was a totally uninteresting destination, but the wadi was still beautiful, especially if you haven't seen it before in Utah.

We got back to Sayun at 3:30, the bus office opened up at 4:15, the bus arrived at 4:45, and we were headed for the border at 5:15. For all the endless and tedious hassles involved with Yemen, I've got to say that the Yemeni men (didn't get to talk to any women) are, like I said in the beginning, honest, polite, and shy. In general, nobody hassles you one bit, and they really try to help out irrespective of whether you, the incredibly rich person, are going to give them any money. Also, like I said, the place is wild and wacky, and well worth a visit.

Still, I was looking forward to getting out of there and to a place where the a/c worked and there was a little more order to things. Speaking of which, perhaps because of the diesel shortage, the bus's a/c was minimal. We drove along the flat wadi floor for about an hour, and as the twilight lengthened we finally took the steep climb out of the valley. When we got to the top the gloaming was total, and one could barely make out rocky desolation as far as the eye could see.

We stopped for dinner at 9 and I spend most of the time watching some camels wandering around the Yemeni truckstop area. They are surpassingly strange beasts, a weird combination of dainty and oafish. We got to the border at around 2 and pulled into the Omani city of Salalah after dawn and right after 6 am.

I Find Osama Bin Laden

2008-05-05T11:20:00.004-06:00

Don't get me wrong. I've always thought that if there was derring to be done, I was the guy to do it. But this was my vacation.

I had kind of known that Bin Laden's family had originally come from Wadi Hadramawt, but I certainly wasn't thinking about it when I was at this claustrophobic antique souvenir store in Seef, looking at all the weird old stuff for sale. Instead I was thinking about how damn hot it was. And then I noticed the owner... Nah, it couldn't be! I must have dropped my jaw, because he said, "Do I remind you of someone?"

"Yes," I blurted out, not stopping to think. "Osama Bin Laden!"

He grinned and held out his hand. "You know, you're only the second person in six years to have even noticed," he said.

"I can't believe that" I countered.

"No, it's true" he said. "Maybe it's the MTV generation. I don't know. It just seems like nobody pays any attention to anything any more."

"But, but, but..." I sputtered. "How can you just stand there with all those people dead?!"

He raised both hands and stepped back a little. "Hey, don't blame me for that."

"Don't blame you? Your name was all over 9/11."

"Yeah, my name was all over it. That's because I got paid for the use of my name. But I didn't actually do anything"

Maybe the heat was getting to me. I tried to think straight. "You mean to tell me that the conspiracy theorists are actually right and that the U.S. government planned 9/11?"

He snorted, "U.S. government??? Are you nuts? They could never pull off anything that complicated."

I was even more confused. Then it hit me: 'Oh my God, it was the Israelis! I had kind of guessed that all along!'

Now Osama was the one to look befuddled. "Israelis?' he said. They already own Wall Street. Why would they want to destroy it?"

"Okay," I said, giving up. "Then who IS responsible for 9/11?"

He leaned forward, raised an eyebrow, and whispered: "The architects."

'You mean, as in 'the architects of 9/11'?'

'No. As in: The architects. Of 9/11.'

'Wait a minute. You're telling me that a group of architects planned and executed 9/11?'

"Sure," he said. 'Them buildings was UG-lee!'

"Architects?!" I repeated. "There's no way that they would allow thousands of people to die!"

"Who are you kidding?" he said. "Ever since the time of the pharaohs they could care less how many people were killed building their precious little projects. And with 9/11 they could throw in a highly ironic post-modern performance piece to boot."

I still couldn't believe this. "But how could they even pay for it?"

He cocked an eye. "Haven't you seen all those buildings in Dubai? Shanghai? Hong Kong? Those guys are rich, man. And they just couldn't stand it that those crappy 1965 shitbox WTC buildings were dominating the New York skyline." I noticed a chair nearby and sat down. Osama handed me a cold Diet Pepsi. "Hey, I know it's hard," he said. "But you just don't want to cross those aesthete types."

It was slowly sinking in. 'But, but, but...' I stammered. 'But isn't the U.S. Government looking for you?'

He smirked. 'Hey, they're still looking for WMD.'

'But what if I went and told them what I know?'

'Good luck trying,' he said. 'The other guy who 'found' me? He told them that he had met with Bin Laden. That was two years ago and he's been at Gitmo ever since.'

'Okay, okay,' I said, giving up. 'But why are you here running an antique store in Yemen? I thought that you were really rich?'

He pulled out the pocket of his long white shirt to show that it was empty. 'You think one wife is expensive? Try fourteen!' Then he laughed. 'Just messing with you,' he said. 'Actually I bought a bunch of Google at the IPO and unloaded it all last year when it was at 700. I'm doing all right. But, hey, this is home. Have you tasted the honey from around here? And look at all this cool jewelry and woodwork.'

My head was still spinning, but Osama kept talking.

'I guess, praise Allah, that I've had a pretty charmed life so far. And what are the odds that you'd have a presidential candidate whose name rhymed with mine? Right now I don't know what to do: The Republicans are offering me $30 million dollars to lend my name to an 'attack' in October. Bill Clinton's offering me $40 million dollars to do one now.

'Either way,' he concluded with a smile. ''Terrorism' wins.'

Neda Was I Ere I Saw Aden, The Land Of Beautiful Palindromes

2008-05-05T09:59:00.005-06:00

Friday morning is Sunday morning, so things were pretty dead when I got to the share taxi stand at 8:30. But by 9 we had the full complement of nine passengers, so off we went for Aden.

The roads so far had been small twisted affairs, even the main road connecting Sa'na and Hudeidah, two cities of about 3 million each. But from here on out the road was new and straight, so that good time was to be made. The land got flat and deserty, but with jagged mountains off to the side, kind of like the California desert. About 30 miles from Aden the rocks and mountains disappeared and we were back to the weed speckled sands of Arabia. At 11 we got to the taxi park about 15 km outside of Aden proper.

I was standing there in the hot sun trying to figure out where the bus company was when Abdul the taxi driver came up and made my acquaintance. He said the bus company was about a km away, but for 300 rial... His was the first Yemeni cab I had seen with a/c. What's more, Abdul had a 30 word English vocabulary, fantastic for these parts. So I hopped in.

It being Friday morning, the bus company office was closed. But various hangers on said that the bus to Al Mukallah left at 3 and 7 in the afternoon. No morning bus? Since the book says that it is a 12 hour ride, and one would think that...? Nope. 3 & 7.

So I paid Abdul some more money and he drove me the 15 km into Aden proper. Now Aden is a famous world seaport, owned by the British from 1839 to 1967, then the capital of communist South Yemen from 1967 to 1990, now part of just Yemen. It's built around a giant harbor that was formed by the jagged volcanic rock at the south end. On one side was colonial Aden, on the other was Crater, which has nothing to do with an actual crater, and in the middle was Meira. We headed for Crater.

When I finally found the hotel I was looking for it was full. Also, waiting for the 3 pm bus for tomorrow would throw off my whole schedule. It was time for Plan B.0.

We swung into action. Abdul headed off for prayers, while I went to chow down for my big journey, trusting that a good Muslim wouldn't drive off with my pack. I was correct, and at about 1 pm we had about an hour for Abdul to show me one of the Ends of the Earth.

It certainly has the setting. Weirdly eroded black volcanic rock intrudes into the town of Crater, which is hot and dirty and even poorer than the rest of Yemen. First Abdul took me to the Aden tanks, which are a series of centuries old water cachements built into the volcanic rock, and where discos and whiskey took place under the atheist communists.

Then we went to Sira Island, which is a 200 foot high volcanic rock with an old fort on top of it over a little bridge and with the blue Arabian Sea stretching off to the horizon. Incongruously nearby was a second Pizza Hut in Yemen, this one ever dirtier and more woebegone than the one in Sa'na.

Now past the Sheraton complex (whiskey and disco available) and over to the colonial side, the only colonial thing about which was a large, totally bare, lifeless British graveyard with crosses and all, in the midst of humdrum industrial stuff. Crappy place to have to die.

Me and Abdul were good buddies by now, and he was telling me all his political views.

Then through Meira, whose main business street has a mile long, communist era, semi snazzy for Yemen but all the same 6 story block of apartments. Then the 15 km back to the bus company.

It was now 2:15 and the office was open, but the unfriendly lady in black said all the tickets were gone. Well, how about tomorrow morning? No buses in morning. Only at 3. Okay, I'll buy a ticket for 3 tomorrow. We can't sell you one because you don't have a police permit.

Now all of this was being done in Arabic through Abdul. And now he finds out that if we go get the police permit I might be able to get on today's bus. So off se go the 15 km into Aden.

We walk across the big police courtyard, and then wait 15 minutes for the policeman to take his own sweet time filling out the permit. Then race back to the bus company,where is it now 3:05. Not to worry, since the bus is late. So then a quarter mile walk to photocopy the permit (which it turned out wasn't necessary), and then I got the last seat on the bus and we took off.

I was of course exhausted by now. But my new seatmate was chipper, his name was Adel, and he became my newest Yemeni friend. What's more, having been a seaman he had a 200 word English vocabulary. We looked out at a flat weedy bushy sandscape with a flat ocean always about 5 miles away. And the bus a/c purred away. Later they popped in an Arabic movie video, which was a disjointed comedic pastiche.

Thanks to a new road, the 12 hour bus journey was only 7 and a half hours, including a stop for dinner and two stops for smokes and whizzing in the desert. When we got to Al Mukallah Adel walked me a couple of blocks to a hotel, and by 11 pm I was safely exconsed in my air conditioned room.

Ibb Taizz

2008-05-04T11:44:00.005-06:00

On Sunday I had asked the bus guy 5 times when the bus left for Ibb, and five times he had said 9 o'clock. So I should have known that when I got there at 8:15 the bus would have left at 8.

Not to worry. Just roll the ol' case another few block over to the share taxi area. Except that right before I got there, there was a minibus that was almost filled up. So I impulsively hopped on board.

And got to sit in the back with my legs and knees all mushed up. Not to worry, because after 15 minutes the driver pulled over and tugged the guy out of the front seat and put me there. Ah, comfortable seat and restfull legs.

But there was a price to pay, since now the driver wanted to have a perpetual conversation with me, with him not speaking a word of English and me not speaking a word of Arabic. And then after the first police check, (I would never have a problem with one, he started pestering me to give him 1000 rials.

The scenery for the first couple of hours was mostly flattish and brown. Except that we kept stopping in it. First, 20 minutes for qat buying. Then another 20 minutes for more qat buying. Then he kept pestering me to chew qat. Then another 30minutes for 'lunch'.

Arab men are always getting pissed off at each other, and then calming down. So now I decided to try a little creative anger. I started roundly cursing him out in English, threatening to take my backpack off the roof and finding another ride. He got the message and got real conciliatory. Being hungry now, I went in to eat. And he didn't bother me for the rest of the trip.

A little further down the road, and we started going up into the mountains. Big dramatic dry mountains with huge vistas beneath. Now, however, on top of the mountains there were giant dark threatening clouds. After 104 degrees in Kuwait, a little rain would be refreshing. Soon a little rain started.

And then a lot. The driver pulled over and took all the stuff off of the roof, and squooshed it in with the passengers in the back. Now the clouds were even darker and the crashing rain was mixed with hail. And there we were on a winding mountain road with a fogged up windshield and a driver high on qat, hurtling towards Ibb.

The reason I was going to Ibb is that I was going to Jibla, which is another medieval cragtop tourist town. But when we got to the medium sized, poor, ugly city of Ibb, the lowering skies and lack of taxis meant that Jibla was going to have to be called on account of rain. I paid the extra minibus fare to Ta'izz and we continued, arriving at about 3:30.

Ta'izz is another Yemeni city of at least 2 million, but, again, even the 'downtown' is poor and dirty and pathetic. With only a few mistakes I was able to find the hotel I was looking for, which turned out to be poor and dirty and pathetic.

Thus refreshed, I set out at about 5 to explore Ta'izz. Unsurprisingly, there was not much to explore. The city is supposed to have an Old Town of renown, but it didn't have one twentieth the charm of Sa'na's. Oh well.

At 6:20 I found an internet place, but it was closing in ten minutes because this was Thursday night, which in the Moslem world is Saturday night, which is, oh, forget it.

This Is Really Cool, Man

2008-05-03T04:08:00.004-06:00

It hit me about an hour later. Like 3 cups of coffee but without the jitters. I suppose that if you had a giant chaw of it all day... But it hasn't done wonders for their work ethic.

Although Mike showed up bright and early at 8 am, in a slightly newer car, and off we went towards the mountains.

Like most dirt poor countries, Yemen has a lot of dirt. The light hazy brown kind. With hazy brown New Mexico stratified plateau mountains to go with it. And the houses and towns are the exact same color, camouflaged in front of cliffs or on top of rocks.

Although the first fifty miles or so were kind of flat. But then we got into some cliffy areas and we came upon the first major tourist sight town, Thikra. It's, ahem, dirt poor, but the old medieval stone houses cluster photogenically up and against a hill. For the first time there was mild hassling from 'guides' and souvenir sellers, but it weren't nothin' compared to Egypt or India.

We then went about 10 km further to the town of Halabah, which had less photogenic hillside houses, but a beautiful old water tank that the houses reflected on to.

Next to Shibam, at the bottom of a 2000 foot cliff, which was nothing too special. Then we drove around and up the cliff to get to Karkaban, which was, as you might guess, a picturesque village on top of a cliff. Again a few semi-annoying 'guides'.

I had Mike drop me off and I headed back to Shibam by foot, taking a path that led straight down the mountain. It was paved, but with largish rocks, which, combined with the heat and the constant pressure on the thigh muscles, had quite an effect.

But I made it. And soon we were off for Al Mahred, where the LP said we could catch a road south to hook up with the one to Al Mukarrah, my destination for the night.

The road itself was pretty spectacular from the start, with the New Mexico strata look giving way to actual dry brown mountains. Much of the bottomland, though, was irrigated, which, along with the countless old mountaintop forts and mountainside villages, not to mention the bigness of everything around us, all served to keep one's jaw dropped throughout. It was a vast fantasy wonderland, kind of like Morocco was supposed to used to be.

Except that we kept having to stop. First, Mike kept trying to buy his daily qat fix, but would be continually dissatisfied by the price that the people standing by the side of the road wanted. But that was the least of the stopping, since we also had to get more water about every twenty minutes. It seems like the radiator in Mike's car wasn't working.

Anyhow, we were also starving by now, and the small population in the area was really rural. Finally we found one cheesy Yemeni restaurant that had some leftover lunch food. Then, it was an hour or so on to Mahred, which we reached around 5.

Of course, once we got there, there was no road, which meant that we would have to turn around and go back to Sa'na. Unless we wanted to pay $61 to stay at the fleabag hotel in Mahred.

So back we drove into the dark, the water stops getting more and more frequent. At 8:30 we limped into town, and Mike started whining about needing more money. I paid him and went back to my room, having mentally blown off the next day.

But I called him at 10 and his car was repaired and he was eager to complete the deal. So now we were headed back into the mountains, but a little southwest of yesterday.

This was not New Mexico, but the old one, the really dry, rugged huge Sierra Madre cactus part of it. And virtually no habitation, except for the occasional small scraggly road townlet, overly replete with plastic garbage scraps.

We turned off and up the hill to Mukallah, which was vaguely nice and where we had Yemeni lunch. Then up more of a hill to Hajjarah, which looked like a mini Old Sa'na on top of a mountain, and was pretty cool, actually. A few more semi-annoying touts, but they soon closed up for the day at 2.

And then back down the mountain to Sa'na.

All in all, accounting for all the problems involved in a third and a half world country, it had been enjoyable, and was about as otherworldly an experience as you can get in the 21st century. After spaghetti on the 8th floor terrace of my hotel, I went down and wandered around the streets of Old Sa'na for one last time, admiring, admiring, admiring.

When I got back to the hotel, I had to stop and admire that one last time, also. Except for the foot high stairs, which totally destroyed my knees, the rest was downright charming, with each room different, and with various tapestries, knives, tea kettles, etc., covering the walls and tables.

And as I lay in bed that night I thought of all the new friends I had made there: Eric, the gay guy from the Bay Area who lives in Bali and who was visiting with his Indonesian/Yemeni boyfriend and that guy's family. Theo, the non-practicing Jew from Vermont, who was here studying Islamic culture. Peter & Brenda, the 65ish Australian couple who were now up to 101 countries. Nils, the American-Norwegian journalist, who was up to 118. And Etienne & Gerard, the two ridiculously handsome 6'5" French brothers who were over for a few days in Dubai.

But tomorrow I would be leaving this all behind.

Sa'na

2008-04-28T12:37:00.002-06:00

Besides a brief scare that my baggage hadn't made it to the Sana airport, the assorted flights from Qatar were fine, and I arrived at my hotel in the old city around 1 am.

The next morning I looked out my window, and the old city of Sana is one of the neatest Old Cities I have ever seen. The houses are all light brown stone with white crenelation, have stained glass windows, and are eight stories high. Instersperced among them are various mosques and alleyways.

The Yemeni women are all in black, and the men are shy, polite, and honest. Many wear a ceremonial dagger, but since they're all 5'3", the effect isn't very ferocious. The vibe is about as far from 'terrorist' as you could possible imagine. Nobody hassles you at all, not even at the tourist shops.

Not that there are that many of them. Indeed, there's not much to do in the Old City except walk around, but it's really pleasant walking around.

I walked around for a while and then grabbed a taxi for the Tourist Police, a few miles away. 'New' Sana is in fact the capital of a very, very poor country, and looks the part. Still it's not very crowded, and the entire feeling is extremely laid back. The Tourist Police turned out to be a couple of friendly guys, who immediately gave me the Permit I needed to travel outside of Sana. Now all I had to do was to make a hundred photocopies to hand out at all the police checkpoints around the country.

I went back to the hotel, rested a while, and then decided to find a nice restairamt This meant going to the gate of the old city again and hailing a cab. The driver turned out to have an interesting story.

His American name was Mike and he had gone to the States when he was twelve to visit his father, who lived in Birmingham. He stayed there, illegally, went to school for a year, and then because he looked older started working at convenience stores. About three years ago a robber shot at him and missed, his adrenaline pumped, he grabbed the store's gun, chased the robber out into the street, and shot at him.

The police came and arrested him and threw him in jail with hardened criminals for firing a gun on the street. A year later his trial came, the DA said to plead guilty and get probation, he did so, and got probation. He also got deported for life. Now he's stuck in Yemen driving a really bad old taxi. He's only twenty.

We drove around for awhile not finding any restaurants. Finally we ended up at Yemen's only, and the world's worst, Pizza Hut.

The next morning I slept in again, and around noon I called Mike and he drove me out to Wadi Dahr, which is about 20 kilometers from the old city. It's a small town in a rustic canyon that puts New Mexico to shame, and its centerpiece is an eight story house built on top of a giant rock. In any other country there would be a big parking lot, gift stores, and restaurants. Here you get there on a beat up dirt road.

Having spent some time there we now headed back into town. It was time to buy some qat.

I had read about qat for years, but it was still quite the sight in the early afternoon on the first day seeing every single man in every single small store, taxi, wherever, with a giant chaw of qat in his mouth. When we were in Wadi Dahr I saw the spindly qat trees, which use up most of the fertile soil in the country. The qat leaves have to be picked fresh every day.

Mike took me to the qat market in Sana, where little men sat crosslegged in the back of old beat up station wagons with their big bags of qat. I bought a bag of high quality leaf, most of which I gave to Mike.

Sunday I had first gingerly eaten three leaves. Nothing. Then a few more. Then a mouthful. Still nothing. As usual I was now grimly determined to find out what the hype was all about. Especially since virtually the entire male population of Yemen and Ethiopia is addicted to it.

I retired to my hotel room and started filling my mouth with the stuff. Still nothing. Chew, chew, chew. Driblets of bitter juice trickle down my throat. Still nothing. After a few hours of reading, chewing, staring at the wall, chewing, etc., I finally gave up and spit it all out.

One beer would have given me a bigger buzz. Either I am not genetically predisposed or these guys have come up with the most amazing placebo high ever.

There's No 'I' In Team And There's No 'U' in Qatar

2008-04-28T00:37:00.002-06:00

One day visa for $28. Rental car for $30 & airport tax of $11. $5 to go from Empty to Full on the gas tank. I had eight hours to prove the hypothesis that Qatar is the most boring country in the world.

It started out nicely enough. Alone among the Gulf States, Qatar had left 40 yards in between the 'corniche' road along the coast and the actual water, so that there was room for palm trees, grass, and a promenade. And there was less than a square mile of a mini Dubai, with impressive shiny buildings all being built.

The mall didn't open until 10, and that was going to be my only chance for real food. So I cruised around the older part of Doha, the capital city. It was solid middle class Arabian business district, neither fancy nor depressed. When I got to the mall at 10:07 almost every parking place was already taken.

Tha mall itself, which is supposed to be the high point of a trip to Doha, was not nearly as impresive as the other Gulf ones I had seen. So after finding a Subway and a Starbucks, I headed out to cruise the countryside.

Qatar is flat and stony desert, kind of like the pictures of the surface of Mars, but not remotely as glamorous. I was kind of going towards a 'quaint fishing village' at the north end of the peninsula. For the first time there were lots and lots of trucks. Slow ones. Plus for the first time the traffic was sort of dangerous and the roads were of very uneven quality.

I pulled off at a 'public gardens', which had parking for 1000 cars. I was the third one there. It consisted of some wilted grass and some wilted hedges, all in the hot sun. I then went to a small nearby town.

I then got totally lost trying to find my way back. Qatar is totally lacking in directional signs, except for the ones that lead you in the wrong direction. It took me over an hour and a half to become unlost.

I now had a steely resolve to get to that fishing village, and finally reached it at 3:15. It wasn't quaint and it wasn't a fishing village. I now had to get back to Doha and find the airport again all by 5:00.

The road back, like the road there, was surrounded by dirty, ugly industrial construction projects.

I did manage to get to the airport without any problems. Most importantly, the hypothesis had been proved.

You Can't Spell Bahrain without Ah

2008-04-25T08:51:00.002-06:00

After the over the top intensity of Dubai and the strange backwardness of Kuwait, Bahrain was Just Right. Friendly people who speak English, warm Cinnabons, and gas at 75 cents a gallon: What's not to like?

I had learned my lesson in Kuwait, and upon arrival at the Bahrain airport I went straight to the rental car area. A nice Mazda at $33 a day, and away I went, heading for the Juffair district, where the directions posted on the internet 3 months ago said that the Youth Hostel was. And, look at that, but there was a directional sign on the main road, and I went straight to it! Only problem was that it had been closed for the past four years.

It was hot and pedestrian free in the area; a lone Indian workman walked by. But not only did he speak good English, but he knew exactly where it had moved, way on the other side of town. With his precise directions I headed off.

I got to the Geant hypermarket in the fancy mall suburb and looked to the only 'other side of road' available. Nothing. I went into a store and asked. Instead of 'youth hostel' I might as well have said 'schmerdwall'. He shrugged his shoulders.

I kept driving around and around the area, then back to the back side of the Geant, etc., etc. Nothing. I then went back to the original area and tried one last store. The Indian there said, 'huh?' Utterly defeated, I walked out the door.

He followed me, saying 'The Youth Hostel is over there', and he pointed to an old yellow building about 400 yards away. Now if I could just u-turn my way over. I got there and found myself the only customer of the day. But instead of dorms all it had were really nice singles with tv, a/c, desk, etc.

It was now 2:02, and, having awoken very early in the morning, I lay down on the bed to get some rest. At 2:04 the fire alarm sounded all over the building. Twenty minutes later it hadn't stopped, so I left the building and hit the road.

First stop, the Subway at the Geant. Then across town to the National Museum, which was pretty good. It appears that the place has been settled extensively since the Bronze Age. Then I drove through downtown Manama, the capital, and found it rundown, crowded, and empty.

So it was back to the mall, this time the fanciest one in the country. Really big, and filled with everything from Gucci on down. You might wonder why I would go halfway around the world to hang out in malls, but in these countries at least that is pretty much all the 'social' life there is, and that is always interesting to watch. Women's attire went from burka to a couple of Western gals in really ugly t-shirts and a couple of Lebanese types showing a lot of cleavage. None of the traditional types bats an eye at the western degradation, including a few pretty risque store displays. And, again, all the modestly clothed Islamic types were busy window shopping at all the swimwear and dress stores, etc.

By now I was pretty exhausted from my long day, but first I needed to go to the Geant for some food for the morning. By the time I had finished all that it was about 9, and as usual for around here the mall was getting really crowded. I was really tired by now, and came this close to backing into a parked car. Whew.

I thankfully slept in that morning. Then it was up and out to an old Portuguese fort, where I was about the only visitor. As I was leaving there were several security guys in dark suits and headphones and walkie talkies. I asked what was going on, and was told that we were soon to be visited by all 27 NATO ambassadors, who were in Bahrain for some meeting.

Sure enough, as I left the site there arrived 5 motorcycles and 10 police cars. Followed by 10 motorcycles and 20 police cars. Followed by 4 limousines, 6 ambulances, more police, and 3 darkened out buses. Whew.

I drove west along the coast and found my next target of tourism, the 26 km long causeway to Saudi Arabia. I drove on it for about 12 km until I got to the border, where I turned off for the visitor center. Since Saudi does not give out tourist visas, this was probably the closest I was ever going to get. Going up to the observation tower, I longingly gazed at the McDonald's across the border.

Then I noticed that right below me was the same police car entourage. The darkened buses all drove up, and out of them came many, many people in casual wear. They turned out to be the NATO party, and they turned out to be rather ordinary and friendly folk.

Back into Bahrain and on to ancient burial mounds, which were right in the middle of an urban town and were just 20 foot high piles of dirt with rubbish all around. Then to another fort, which was closed on Friday, and into the uninhabited south of the island, which is really hot and barren and is filled with oil wells and gas refineries.

A visit to a nice little Oil History museum, and then off to find the Tree of Life, which is a giant tree that is hundreds of years old that is in the middle of hot, barren nowhere. But I couldn't find it.

So I turned around and headed back. From this angle I could now see it off in the desert, surrounded by vehicles. Although there were still no signs for any turnoff. I took a dirt track and headed for it.

About 200 yards ahead of it on the left was a herd of over 50 camels. Along with others I stopped and took all kinds of camel pictures, went up and patted the sitting ones on the head, etc.

The tree was big and low and spreading, with all kinds of kids climbing all over it.

I had by now seen everything there is to see in Bahrain, and headed back for Manama. As I've intimated before, Arabs aren't that big with computers, and most who are have their own, so internet places are hard to find. But with only a fair degree of difficulty I found one.

Kuwait

2008-04-23T09:29:00.003-06:00

Bright and early I got in my car and headed to the airport. I had paid close attention when the taxi had taken me the other day, and now I u-turned, went right, over to the right lane, into the tunnel, up to the airport, and... there was the 'car rental returns' in a lane I couldn't get to. Okay. Round the airport loop, back up, and... I was back on the freeway to Dubai.

Aagh! And rush hour traffic to boot. Patience. Ten minutes and a u-turn up ahead. And then I was back there and in the right lane.

Whew. Now into the airport, check in, and wait. And wait. By the time I got to Kuwait 6 hours later it would have been faster (if I drove at 100 and IF they would have let me go through Saudi) if I had driven.

Anyway, entering Kuwait was painless, and as I left the airport it was immediately apparent that Kuwait was a LOT more lowrise and lowkey than Dubai. Surprising, considering that it has more oil reserves per capita than anywhere else in the world. I took a bus into town so as to hang out with the 'real' Kuwaitis.

Which were mostly Indian, at least on the bus. And the neighborhoods we went through were almost decrepit. Strange.

When we got to the central bus station I got a slick city bus map and went to find the cheapest of the 'real' hotels. It was $110. So I kept walking and tried to locate a cheapo that I had read about. When I finally found it it was indeed a steal at $40, and though basic it did have a/c and hot water.

After resting I set out to get to a highly recommended museum before it closed. This involved taking a bus for about a half an hour to the middle of nowhere. I got off at the right stop, and the book had said to walk 5 minutes, turn right, and go another 50 yards. It was 14 minutes and 290 yards, but who's counting? When I found it it turned out to be really good, but now I only had 30 minutes to see it.

The museum was one man's lifelong personal collection of artefacts of the Muslim world, from Morocco to Kashmir, and it really impressed one with the history and depth of said culture. We in the West tend to think of Islam as the dumbest of the dumb guy religions, but the historical fact is that almost all Christians and Jews who converted did so willingly. And it is difficult to deny that as the result of this new religion in the eighth through tenth centuries, the previously uncivilized Arabs made some of the most beautiful things ever.

My favorite part was the Arabic calligraphy. It's the most incredibly aesthetic groups of squiggles ever, and it actually means something to someone. And my favorite part of that was a teeny tiny Koran done in the 10th century.

The ethnic wear and jewelry of the womenfolk showed that everywhere in the Muslim world women traditionally wore colorful and ornate stuff, so that the current black robe fad is an aberration. Incidentally, almost all Muslim women here are covered in black except for their faces, although a few of them have on the amount of makeup that would scream 'slut' in the West. Also, the stores all sell regular women's wear, so I guess that they wear that at home.

I found my way back to the center of the city and my hotel, which turned out to be in the center of the 'souk', or old market, area. And although not exactly old, it did have a lot more character than the rest of Kuwait. Most of the Kuwaiti men wear the white robe and headress, they all come out at night, and they like to sit around in open air restaurants eating with their friends and toking on giant four foot high hookahs.

The next day I started out again, this time to see all that was interesting in Kuwait. Armed with my spiffy new bus map, I hopped on the 15 and confidently waited for it to reach the Salfiya endpoint. At some point the driver looked at me quizzically, I looked back, and showed him my map. He said, 'That KPTC map, this KJN bus'. I got off and looked at the side of the bus... It turned out that there are about 5 competing city bus companies, each has its own version of each route, and this one was a mile away from where I wanted to go. I started walking in the hot sun.

A mile later I got to where I was going, the Kuwait Scientific Center, and spent an hour or so touring the adequate aquarium. Now it was time to head back along the coast towards downtown again. I took a cab for $6 to Green Island.

Nothing was happening there, so I decided to go to the Kuwait Towers, which are the country's biggest tourist attraction. This involved heading back inland for about a mile, but my trusty map said that once I did I would find the 505 bus, whose route went the exact rest of the way I wanted to go. I dutifully got to the place on the map, and there was a freeway. After standing there for 10 minutes in the by now 100 degree heat, I took the first bus that would stop.

After asking about the 505, I got off at the first place where there was any civilization, and kept asking. It turned out that the 505 didn't exist. I now took a taxi for $4 to the Kuwait Tower, which looked exactly like a Soviet World's Fair Exhibit from 1970. The concrete at the base was even discolored. I rode the elevator up to the top where there was a restaurant that was seemed to be the meeting place for every officer in the Kuwait Army. I rode it back down.

I realized that the whole place reminded me of a fairly prosperous city of 1970 that wasn't spending too much on its upkeep. And what was weirder was that the only 'good' part of its location was the shoreline, but that that was hardly developed with more than a busy road and the occasional Applebee's by the Sea.

LA is built more for walking than Kuwait. Of course, what idiot would want to walk in this heat? But I had something to prove to God and Nature, so I continued on for two miles to a Kuwaiti mall.

Outside of a little action in the Food Court, which took up over half of the place, the mall reminded me of one of those malls that cities build to try to spruce up their downtown, and then nobody goes there. For all the wealth that Kuwait is supposed to have, this was weird.

I couldn't help being underwhelmed by the entire place. If Dubai was like Shanghai on steroids, Kuwait is like a really hot, dusty Indianapolis. Except with less to do.

Oh, and all this time I was less than 100 miles from Basra. But there had ben no scenes left over from the first war, and no sense whatsoever of the current one. I suppose though that it's like when you're in San Diego, you really don't think about Mexico all that much.

Back Roads In A Small Car

2008-04-21T08:34:00.003-06:00

The UAE is a collection of seven emirates, which are kind of like states in the U S of A. In Dubai Arabic is kind of an afterthought, whereas once you get to Abu Dhabi it becomes predominant. When I got to Al Ain English was non-existent. And so were the women. There were, however, still lots of Indians.

Perhaps because of the heat this culture is very night oriented, with 9 and 10 pm the busiest shopping hours. So the next morning when I crossed back from Oman there was nothing going on. I headed out of town and started to work my way east on the 'back roads'.

Of course in the UAE even these are at least four lane. I cruised along looking at the sand all around me, by now interesting because it was a nice reddish brown and even sometime formed dunes. Without further ado I made it to the small town of Hatta, which is one of UAE's tourist destinations.

It must be that because there are so very few of them, since it is small and, except for a nice small oldtime village recreation, has nothing going on. Well, almost nothing, since the Herax mountains start here. And they are pretty neat, being, again, reddish brown, desolate, jagged and jumbled.

I decided to try and get to the Hatta Pools, which are a little waterfall area in the middle of nowhere. Which meant taking a dirt track for about 10 km. In my tiny car with the minimal clearance. I bumped along for about 7 km, the road getting worse and worse, and found myself in the middle of desolate nowhere with no signage and the typically terrible Lonely Planet directions. I finally got too paranoid of wrecking my rentacar and/or getting stuck that I gave up and turned around.

Now it was further east over and through the dramatic mountains and to the 'ocean' coast, which couldn't help but be remote and exotic. But it wasn't. Instead it was humid and flat, and scrubby desert turning into a brown dirt beach. I stopped at a brand new promenade, with inlaid bricks, palm trees, etc., that went on for a couple of miles. I was the only person walking along it.

I got back in the car and headed north. First stop: Fujeirah, eponymous capital of my third Emirate. But I didn't stop, since it was ugly and hazy, and all the construction they were constructing looked like what they build in the poor parts of Turkey. I was actually aiming for the small town of Koor Fakkan, where there was another of the two real youth hostels in the country. This time finding it would be easy, since the LP said that it was right across from the major hotel in town.

But it wasnh't. This time it only took about an hour to find, since the locals kept calling the hostel to get directions. It turned out that it had moved 3 times since 2004.

And there was basically only one other hosteler there, a really cheap German investment banker from Malaysia. After spending another hour trying to use the LP directions to find a dam site, we had some mint tea and he talked my ears off. I walked on the beach for a bit and then it was dark.

I was the only person at a midscale restaurant having dinner and then I walked back to the waterfron. Deciding that it would be good to meditate a bit, I sat down on the beach, closed my eyes, and imagined my self at another beach. Ah, calmness.

I then went to one of the only two internet places in town, but the internet had been down in the whole town for the whole day. Funny, but the UAE is now the richest country in the world, and they have communications worse than Armenia or Senegal.

So, unable to think and write, I decided to shop, and went into the giant discount market across the street. Here there were a lot of women, but except for the Indians and Filipinos, they were all dressed in black. Although almost all had at least their faces showing. And the menfolk were all in white robes. Frankly, I'm all for modesty, but I think that they have it backwards: the women should be in white to show their purity, and the men should be in black to show the lust in their hearts. Interestingly, by the way, the store sold women's clothes, and the ladies in the black robes were shopping for them, so I assume that they get to dress up when they're home.

But now it was close to nine and the town was starting to wake up. But I needed to go to sleep, so I went back to the hostel. This night only cost me $15 and I just had to share the big dorm room with the one German, although these low prices meant that no towels were available. Period.

The next day I got up and started out bright and early and kept heading north along the east coast. Yesterday the air was relatively sandless, although a strong haze kept me from seeing much of the mountains. Today the haze was worse, and although the mountains were close to the shore, I couldn't really see them. And the beaches were unappealing when they existed. Although that wasn't keeping a lot of building from going on in Dibba, right at the northern border. What with the scrubby land to begin with, it had a feeling like that of the edge of newly developing Florida in the Sixties.

Back west for about 25 miles over the mountains, and then I was back to the land of flat, ugly brown sand with patchy weedy vegetation. The sandhaze was back with a vengeance, and as I got to FAK, the fourth emirate, it looked like construction does in the cheap part of Syria. And not only was there no wealth or taste on display, but there was only one crowded road through town.

I was back on the Gulf coast and driving north, since the guide book said that this area was mountainous and beautiful. It wasn't. Actually, it was a bleak, sandy industrial hell, filled with concrete plants and rock crushing works. And all the hundreds of trucks filled with concrete and rocks heading south to all the construction sites. By the time that ended I was at the Oman border (don't ask; look on a map) and had to turn around.

Back through RAK and down the hazy ugly sandy coast to the fifth Emirate, Umm al Qusain. This emirate's 'city' was way out on a peninsula, and was by far the most downscale place so far, hot and dirty and looking like a poorer part of Morocco. But I had had to see for myself.

Then south to the sixth Emirate, Adnar. The LP had said that this was the smallest and poorest of the lot, but that was four years ago. Now there were literally hundreds of 12 to 30 story building, most of them uncompleted. It did have the first (small) stretch of half decent beach in the country, but it was virtually empty.

Finally I got to Sharjah, the seventh and last Emirate, which is only a few miles north of Dubai. In its downtown area, which was very built up but not too fancy, there was a restored 'fort' and a 'heritage area'. Inside the fort were pictures of bygone times of 1943. Dwarfed by the city and the modern times around it, the whole thing was kind of sad and pitiful.

And all the other cultural attractions were closed, since it was between 12 and 5 in the afternoon.

So now all I had to do was find my way back to Dubai and the youth hostel. But from this point south there was an endless--and I mean endless--thicket and morass of high rise buildings and construction sites. After having been a while in a comparatively less developed area, the overwhelming intensity that is Dubai was hitting me. And, as I had intimated earlier, driving around the built up part of the UAE involves endless roundabouts and u-turns; traffic lights and left turns are few and far between. So if you guess wrong at any point you run the risk of never finding your way back to where you had been.

But I had been generally lucky, and once you get used to the roundabout dance you find that the traffic is pretty reasonable. And I was lucky once again and found myself back in the recognizable hostel neighborhood.

When I parked and went in it turned out that they actually were honoring my reservation, and I now had one of the few and prized private rooms. Now for only $50 I had the first halfway civilized accomadation of the trip: Cleanliness! A shower stall! Toilet paper!

Finally I had time to rest and contemplate. But I still had no answer to the question: Why? Why the hell is Dubai happening?

It's easy to see why it works for the Indians and Filipinos. Even those on the lowest rung have it better than back home. And not just in terms of salary. Indeed they would probably pay just for the privelege of living somewhere with a sense of order, plenty of free parking, and air conditioning everywhere.

But all these literally thousands of new giant buildings have to have realtively well to do people to live in them. How many rich Indians, Russians, and Iranians can there be? And what do they do once they get here, beside financing more building construction?

And why on earth would an American or European move here? The climate already sucks, and it's just the middle of April. The beaches are lame. It's hard to find interesting desert. In comparison LA is neighborly and easy to get around. And although I saw no Westerner save that German guy on my driving circumlocution, there were sure a hell of a lot of them in the Mall of the Emirates, etc.

Oh well. Maybe, like with the songs of Mariah Carey, I'm just not getting it.

I prefer to conclude, however, that everyone else involved is really, really lost.

Abu Dhabi Dubai Abu Dubi Dubi Dai Said The Emir To The Sheikh

2008-04-19T09:59:00.002-06:00

I finished my blog, walked all the way back to the hostel and my room and ...realized that I had left my backpack with all the money and documents, etc., at the internet place. I hobbled as quickly as possible back over there and, once again, God and human nature were kind to me and the bag was returned.

The next morning I went back to the airport and negotiated a rental car for $33 a day. Gas is $1.70, the menu at Chili's charges the same prices as the U.S., everything here except the hotels is pretty reasonable. Dubai is a great place to live; you just wouldn't want to visit.

And today a sandstorm had blown in from Kuwait, so that after a couple of hundred yards visibility got really vague. With very few mistakes I found my way onto the twelve lane freeway west, and found myself driving along an 'avenue' of collosal buildings being built on either side of said freeway. And off to the side, misty in the sandfog, was the new World's Tallest Building, the Bur Dubai. It looked like the Empire State Building squeezed through a tube, and is so skinny that it must fall over.

A few miles later I turned right and headed for the 'beach' a couple of miles north. The water is beautiful aquamarine, but the sand is just a continuation of the rest of the country. And soon there was a quick misty view of the Burj Dubai, which is the famous hotel built like a sailboat with $7000 a night rooms. I didn't stop to go in for a look since that cost $200.

Then it was back to the freeway interchange and the Mall of the Emirates, the one that's famous for the indoor ski slope. I parked in the purple zone, went in, and dutifully gawked at everyone schussing and tobaggoning away. $80 for a daypass if you're interested.

Then I turned and checked out the mall a little. Forget the U.N. of yesterday: here 90% were Westerners, 8% UAE, and 2% 'other'. And this was about as upscale as any U.S. mall ever gets. Still, Starbuck's prices were about the same.

I got back on the freeway (which is quite a difficult thing to do in Dubai, what with all the roundabouts, turnarounds, exit ramps, frontage roads, etc.) and started the 130 mile run to Abu Dhabi. First there were about 10 miles of half completed high rise apartments and offices, then new industrial parks, with giant warehouses and factories a-buildin'.

Why is this all happening? The only explanation is that it was built and they came. After all, Dubai has no oil, and I have no idea what widgets will be built or where they will be distributed to. This is the middle of nowhere.

And what in the world brings all the westerners? After all, many of them are rich people who are just moving here to be here, and what will they do besides mall ski?

Oh well, that's their problem. Mine was getting to Abu Dhabi. The freeway narrowed to eight lanes and I cruised along at 75, while everyone else was doing at least 100. And after an hour or so of driving through the grass studded dirty sand I started entering the outskirts of the city. About 10 or 15 miles in, having passed the World's Most Collosal Mosque on the left, I got to downtown Abu Dhabi.

Which is clean, well to do, new and sparkling, and somnolent. The buildings are snazzy and all, but are all exactly eighteen stories high. I made it to the 'corniche', the freeway along the 'waterfront', parked, and walked around a grassy area for a while. There's absolutely nothing to do in Abu Dhabi, so I headed back up the peninsula that the city is built on, and back to the sand and the interior.

Since hotels are about $500 a night in Abu Dhabi, my plan was to head inland 100 miles to the town of Al Ain. Well, not Al Ain iself, but the tiny enclave of Oman called Bumeiri that is right next to Al Ain., and where supposedly hotels were a lot cheaper.

I got to Al Ain without a problem, but it turned out that Al Ain was a LOT bigger than I had foreseen. And when I finally got to the 'town centre' there were no signs pointing to where Bumeiri might be. Even though the Lonely Planet map made it look like it was right there.

Stop and ask people. Virtually no one speaks English. Start getting vague directions. Turn, get to the roundabout, go left to the next roundabout, turn right to the light...

I spent about an hour and a half trying to find the damn Bureimi. Finally the sun was down, I kept coming back to the same roundabouts, and I was starting to do stark raving mad with frustration. Part of me was convinced that all the Arabs were laughing at me, that there was no Bureimi, or that there was and they were deliberately lying to me, or that they were so stupid that it existed but no one really knew how to get there.

Finally, on my last attempt I took a left at the roundabout, took a right at the next roundabout, drove down about four miles, did a u-turn, drove back about four miles to the same roundabout, and ...there it was, to the right!

I drove about 100 yards to the 'police post', which wasn't manned, and I was in Bureimi, in the country of Oman. Now around these parts Oman is like Mexico is to the U.S., and I entered a world of cheaper buildings and Arab men in their white robes hanging out in the evening. The good hotel listed in the book was all full up, but the crappy one had plenty of rooms. I was now able to get a fleabag room with a horribly hard bed for just $33 a night.

I took it.