Notes from the 'Nog

Life in Pai

2012-01-27T09:22:00.002+09:00

January, 2010

...took an early minibus to Pai. As the road was quite curvy, none of the luggage could go on top, making for a very crowded ride. Miki and I had chosen seats well, and had a fair amount of space, but personal boundaries meant little as centrifugal forces thrust us against one another through all the turns. The Thai girl in front of us filled a veneer bag with the contents of her stomach.

Pai was a cute little town, very touristic. This had once been a backpack destination, but now fashionable middle-class Thais outnumbered the farang. It seems their numbers overtook that of the 2000 locals. Every single resident appeared to be involved in the tourist trade somehow, every structure in town being a hotel, cafe, or shop. Many of the latter had post boxes from which to send postcards, or those white cement milage signs seen on every Thai road. The town was blessed with natural scenery, of red dirt, and alpine peaks that looked a lot like New Mexico. The trees on those hills were the bare skeletal shapes of winter, but here in the valley all was warm and welcoming. The music overheard, plus the multiple flyers for yoga or similar hippie attractions had great appeal. This was a place that I could happily place a few happy weeks.

We had a stroll around town, taking all of an hour. There was nearly no traffic on the street, until you needed to cross, then a van or a bus would roar out of nowhere. It was my own private "Local Hero" moment. We wound up in hammocks overlooking the river, reading, and dozing. Kids splashed in the water, dodging the bamboo rafts ferrying Thai families downriver. There was a way on a hill just outside town, but we couldn't be bothered to climb it, preferring instead the view from the hammock. For isn't doing nothing what this town is all about?

In late afternoon, we had a coffee in an adobe colored stucco cafe with colorful window frames fueled further comparisons with New Mexico. Dinner riverside at sunset rounded out the day.

(Though not quite. Had a beer at an outdoor jazz cub that happened to be closed. The owner told me how Pai had built a bunch of new hotels for the increasing number of Thai tourists. Sadly, they never came...)

On the turntable: "A Dead Band's Party" (Various)

Lazing on a Chiang Mai Afternoon

2012-01-24T09:20:00.003+09:00

January 2010

Awoke early for the bus to Chiang Mai. Shared a truck with a Swiss teacher who'd made a visa run to Laos. We discussed Thai politics and the expat situation here. This country is very strict on outsiders, apparently worse than Japan, which surprised me. We talked about Burma. He said that the current situation with the Thai king is frightening in that if the military takes over and takes a militaristic stance, it could become another Burma. That country, on the other hand, is slowly changing, prodded by China. The road up to Mengla will always stay open for the flow of goods into Thailand. When I mentioned my talk about Kengtung, he told me of a government clash with the Shan, the fighting going all the way to Tashilek. Some shells accidentally fell on Mae Sai, whose residents flew south. The world media had nary a word.

Our bus would lazily through the hill into Chaing Mai. We spent about 2 1/2 hours at a cafe, reading and having coffee, then went exploring. We visited the city's oldest way, then walked past the museum and the women's prison to Wat Singh. It was busy on this Sunday, people strolling the buildings, and under the trees that had pithy sayings strung to them. In the shade, and old car sat to be admired. A few blocks up was Chedi Luong, whose massive stone ruin hovered above all but one tree so tall it was out of proportion to the rest. The grounds were packed for the funeral of a famous, high ranking monk. Rows of chairs were lined between the pillars like in a Catholic cathedral. Men in white military uniforms patrolled around. The King's son was due to arrive for the actual funeral service the following day. Before the chedi was a two-story boat with a black elephant on the prow--the monk's vehicle to the next world. His life-like wax figure sat in a smaller boat nearby. The grounds were filled with tables offering free food. We walked and ate, walked and ate.

Out front, the Sunday market was just revving up. We walked a little but I was somewhat burned out. I can only take so much of markets. I did partake of a cheap massage, probably the best of the trip thus far. Afterward, there was a brief moment of panic when I couldn't find my cherish jade necklace, but it eventually turned up. We walked past the string orchestras sitting in the street, along the klong, and through a maze of ski to our room, the cheapest yet in Thailand, and the grottiest--cold water, mosquitos, broken windows. But the comfiest bed made for good sleep.

On the turntable: Van Halen, "Fair Warning"

On the turntable: Willa Cather, "Death Comes for the Archbishop"

Into Burma

2012-01-21T23:46:00.007+09:00

January, 2010

...visa run back up to Mae Sai. After changing hotels, we caught the bus back north and slipped over the border. Immigration almost refused the fee, a crisp $20 folded in half, saying it was too old. Tachilek looked little different than the Thai side, only grubbier and less friendly. Our smiles weren't returned, except for one kid and an older man. The tuk-tuk drivers and street vendors were extremely aggresive, falling into step beside you, and not fucking off until the twentieth "No!" The cigarette sellers held up their cartons, thumbs cleverly concealing viagra of dubious effectiveness. The more permanent shops sold the usual tat-- clothes, tea, pirated DVDs. Men of all ages and trades walked around in longyi.

We walked gingerly along the busted concrete crumbling into open sewers. We found a wedding reception in progress, a Toyota out front done up in bows. Up the hill to a massive gold chedi. behind it, two dozen concrete monks formed a conga line behind the Buddha. Miki tried to snap a photo of some Lisu girls, but upon a shouted command from one girl, the rest fell into line behind her, out of camera range. This leader glared at Miki as she passed. The mountains in the distance were dotted with gold gumdrops. We had a goat curry in a grungy basement restaurant, which surprisingly sold Heineken. Then, back to Thailand.

In our truck was a Swiss guy with a guitar. He'd stayed in Burma for 14 days, hanging out with some musicians he'd met on a previous visit, and ringing in the Lisu new year. He said it was a drag to return to his hotel every night, as no private Burmese citizen can host a foreign guest.

Our bus rolled south to Chiang Rai. I was crammed into the seat behind the driver, sitting sideways with my knees straddling the engine block. A young girl was nearly between them, and my left knee was pressed into the flank of her overweight mother who was constantly shifting and fussing with her kids, giving me the feeling of kneeling on a waterbed. A hilltribe man behind me was leaning forward into the seat, obviously motion sick. His bony fingers pressed into my shoulders from his tight grip on the seat. The driver's wife constantly hopped on and off the bus with embarking and disembarking passengers. I wondered at a life spent hanging off a bus all day. We stopped at the drug checkpoint and for the only time out of six checks, I was asked to produce my passport. The cop swaggered down the bus in dark '70's cop shades, looking the baddass. I suppose you have to be a badass to shoot unarmed students and journalists.

Back in Chiang Rai, I changed money, had a quickie massage. On the way back, I watched a Frenchman penetrate the massage gauntlet, dismissing their siren-like calls with a simple tip of the hat. I eventually settled in with a coffee and a book on my patio at Baan Bua. Miki and I walked up to the Saturday night market, where finally got the checked kramas that we'd been searching for since Cambodia. There waas plenty of interesting food, but I was marketed out, so pushed through the old city walls to a place I'd noticed that advertised ravioli at 150 baht. the menu however quoted 250, so I gruffly told the owner that dishonesty was bad business, and walked out. A consolation prize was a Thai shrimp and chili pizza, washed down with a fine German pilsner, served up by a ladyboy waiter.

On the turntable: Treat Her Right, "Treat Her Right"

Rai and the Sky

2012-01-14T11:53:00.003+09:00

January 15, 2010

...we awoke before dawn to catch the morning market. Over a breakfast of Chinese frybread and hot soymilk we watched the hill people sell their textiles and jewelry. A couple of old monks were on their begging rounds. I waved over a couple of guys I'd seen yesterday, one Japanese and one American. I'd noticed them when they'd arrived since the girl they were traveling with had quickly jumped atop their song taa-ou to get the bags, swinging up one sexy bare leg for leverage.

At 7:30, we climbed into our own song taa-ou with three hairdressers from Bangkok. Our truck twisted and weaved back down the mountain. A gate like a torii arch was an obvious hint of an Akha village below. I smiled at a nearby sign written with, "Agro Tourist Bureau." We stopped at an army checkpoint, its soldiers on the lookout for drugs. Men in uniform were huddled around a pot cooking rice. One soldier strode across the grounds, and I noticed one of the hairdressers nudge another. Miki and I went to see what the soldiers were eating, and they offered us each a rice ball dipped in chili sauce. It was the best rice of the trip. I looked up to notice the hairdressers giggling and filming us from the truck.

We drove for the next hour, picking up passengers along the way. By the time we stopped we had 10 aboard, plus 2 infants. Our connecting truck wasn't carrying quite as many passengers, but was cramped nonetheless. It let us out in Chiang Rai, near Wat Jet Yot, where we grabbed a cheap room at Orchid Guest House. We walked over to Orn bookshop, housed on the second floor of a quiet suburban home. Its layout and stock would rival any used bookstore in a comparably sized college town. After popping into the wat, we walked through town to a restaurant on the western edge, reputed to be the best local food in town. Nothing on the menu appealed, so we ate instead in a quaint cafe nearby. We continued our ramble, no plan in mind.

Near the river, we ran into Thom, a Frenchman we had met in Chiang Saen while we had been sitting in the street waiting for our ride north. He'd invited us to his home to stay, but as his village was 25 km out of town, we begged off. (We were to meet him yet again in front of a bar.) We passed the vocational college, the streets filled with girls in their school uniforms, which included long, hip-hugging sarongs. Nearby was the hilltribe museum, a simple yet informative intro to the subject. A group of tourists there were in the final preparations before setting off on a trek.

After a quick coffee at Cabbages and Condoms downstairs, we walked over to Wat Singh, with its beautifully carved doors and puzzling murals of Krishna. Outside, two cyclo drivers napped in their machines. Down the street we saw a man looking through a broken piece of glass burned black. I suddenly remembered the eclipse. He gave us a peek, the sun with a large chunk bitten out. By the time we got to Wat Phra Kaew, the sky was dimming as if a thunderstorm was rolling in. The temple grounds were lush and shaded, the buildings masterpieces of reddish wood and overlapping roofs. The pieces in the museum were wonderful, and I appreciated the fact that it was free. The real gem was the jade Buddha, housed in a lovely building that had a massive and apparently ancient turtle in its pond. The Buddha itself was magical in the way it captured the green light.

We zigzagged around town, occasionally looking up at the eclipse through my sunglasses lenses smeared with Tiger Balm. Later, I saw a well decorated truck with a half dozen people in the back, driving slowly past the market, speaker blaring, "The end is near! The end is near!" Past the mosque, through the market, and back to the tourist ghetto of Wat Jet Yot.

Miki and I split up, me in search of an imported beer after seeing two Germans enjoying a Weitzen earlier in the day. Afterward, I compared prices at the massage parlors around. In front of one, a sexy middle-aged woman took my arm and tried to pull me inside. Based on how she and the others were (barely) dressed, I suppose they have a more extensive repertoire than the others.

Later, we went to the night market. The food stalls were built around a large courtyard filled with plastic tables and chairs. Over food and a beer, it was a pleasant way to pass a warm summer night in January, under perfect weather. On stage, a musician was playing music that was vaguely Hawai'ian. He was later joined by a second guitarist and a drummer, the latter over-miked and playing a monotonous rhythm on congas with sticks. The singer's way of singing in his native Thai made it sound like the mic had a short. Between sets, a half dozen girls danced in a trad style, their hand swirling and turning to hypnotize, lulling us into peaceful warm places of our own making...

On the turntable: Deep Purple, "Purple Passages"
On the nighttable: Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy"

Mae Salong

2012-01-07T23:44:00.003+09:00

January 14, 2010

We met a former Thai Air Force officer in a song taa-ou that took us to the bus. The bus, a rickety affair, dropped us at the T-junction in Ban Basang. There were a few song taa-ou there, but none would move until they got 8 passengers. We waited 30 minutes, but no one else showed up. We tried to haggle a price for a private ride, but they pulled out a piece of paper (English only, of course) claiming that they had 'set rates.' I walked to the street to hitch a ride, and the rates became unset immediately.

The road weaved and wound as it climbed to a ridgeline, following it through villages and small towns. In Mae Salong, we grabbed a bungalow and had lunch. From our table, I noted the Thai flags running up the main street, a reminder of who was in charge here, despite the overt Chinese feel. I'd noted similar flags on the border towns of Chian Saen and Mae Sai. There sems to be a strong nationalistic streak running through the Thai gut. In Laos, I rarely saw any flags, subverting the usual chest thumping at which socialist states are so adept. The flags waving throughout Thailand were a constant reminder of whose soil you were on.

We followed the ridge out to the marketplace. Akha and Risa were decked out in their finest, selling silver and textiles, not a word of English pushed past their teeth black with betel. The town's Chinese residents sold tea in more permanent shops standing behind them.

We walked up a road to the tomb of an old KMT general who had led his defeated band here in 1949. The trail became overgrown and laden with leaves, so i grabbed a large stick and tapped the path like a blind man, hoping to scare any poisonous critters away. The trail became paved again at a series of bungalows that were quite the thing 20 years ago. The style of the buildings and the grounds were quite Chinese. The trail led to a set of 718 steps that led to a temple. We arrived sweaty and out of breath at the top to find a young man teasing a dog. Not viciously, but causing it to yelp and snarl. I stared at the man, and he made a gesture with his hand like, "What? Go away!" I said, "You know, that dog is smarter than you, man," which made a woman sitting nearby laugh. We had a short stand-off, Miki and I calling him an idiot, and him glaring, but at least he stopped harassing the dog. Miki and I went into the temple, then heard another yelp. Back outside, I wanted to get the dog away from him, but saw that he wasn't making any contact with the animal, who was now asleep at his feet. Nothing I could do about that.

The view from atop the temple was incredible, with the town stretching away down the ridge, rows of tea climbing the sides. It was Chinese as touted, but was lacking in trash and squat squares of concrete. If only all China could match this. It was more like North Vietnam to me. On the way down we found a smiley, chatty monk sweeping the front walk to his temple with a three meter bamboo broom. Five minutes with him restore my faith in humanity.

We read the afternoon away on the porch of our bungalow, then walked the ridgetop main road through town. Midway down he road was a teahouse, Chinese in look, but made of dark teak, lit by candles. The entire back wall was open to reveal houses on the opposite hillside behind. A wonderful place to read awhile and soak up the view, but unfortunately, closing for the night. Our eventual destination was the Mae Salong Villa and dinner. We sat on the veranda, eating Yunnanese food recommended by the owner. the meal was good if pricey, and tainted somewhat by the owner checking on us every five minutes. Hardly her fault, since we were the only customers at that early hour. Below us, the valley and the villages hanging on the mountainscape disappeared into night...

On the turntable: Blue Oyster Cult, "On your Feet or on Your Knees"

To the Line

2012-01-03T01:10:00.008+09:00

I walked the dawn streets looking for a place to have breakfast, filing past begging monks. Nothing was open, so I had to satisfy myself with buying bread and coffee at 7-11. I sat eating them on the banks of the Mekong. The sun was just coming out of the Lao jungle, shimmering across the river to me. I took my time here. We'd passed the better part of a week on or beside its waters, and today we'd say goodbye.

An obviously gay couple walked by, the third I'd seen in this small town. Chiang Saen must be on the gay and lesbian travel circuit. There were also some trucks vying to ruin my peaceful morning with their speakers -- one for a group called "Miracle of Life." At eight o'clock sharp, the national anthem came on and moved me along.

We flagged a passing song taa-ou for the ride north. The Golden Triangle refers to this entire area, but the town of Solp Ruak had adopted the name since it sits on the western bank of the Mekong where Thailand, Laos, and Burma come together. I'd debated a quick stop here, but the town was ugly and quite touristy, so was satisfied simply with this quick peek from the back of the truck. We began to take on more passengers now, including a few village folk, three monks, and a Burmese girl with a cosmetic of ground bark on her cheeks who was eating nuts and throwing the shells out onto the road behind us.

Mae Sai wasn't much to look at, but it certainly was bustling. I love borders and I love market towns and this town had all the best qualities of both. A real dream for people watching. Besides the obligatory Chinese, there were the broad faces of Burmese, and the dark skins of those from further west. Tribal people added color in headgear and dress. A few of them were topped with steep-pitched conical hats, balancing baskets filled with nuts across their shoulders. Dozens of vendors roasted chestnuts. I saw more thanaka, that ground bark paste on faces, especially on the cheeks of poor kids who'd come up to me with hands outstretched upon seeing my white skin. One street kid slept in the doorway of the Thai Airlines office. We walked through the cavernous Chinese market, then down the main drag with its money exchange, gold sellers, and gem shops. In one flashy cafe, three monks sipped coffee. Border guards toting M-16s strolled around looking tough. Atop the hill was Wat Phra That Doi Wau, offering excellent views into Burma. It all looked like one continuous city from up here, except that Burma had quieter streets. Near the wat was a large steel scorpion, supposedly the biggest in Thailand. I still don't know why.

We had lunch at a Burmese Muslim place, hidden down a side alley, which did a good biryani and a nice noodle soup. Later, we did an internet time out, at a shop run by a friendly Burmese guy who spoke quite good Japanese. He'd been here 20 years and told us that the economy here was dying, the death knell being Thailand's decision to change visas from 30 to 15 days. I asked him about travel in Burma, and he suggested I ask at the border.

We were toying with the idea of a trip up to Kengtung, as a kind of visa run, arriving back in Thailand with a new 15 day visa, which would carry us to the day of our flight back to Japan. I approached immigration and asked the woman there about doing a day trip. She was really funny and friendly and told me to simply walk across the border and ask. I gave her my passport and did just that. There were quite a few people sitting on the bridge, including more begging kids. Where did they belong? From here, I could see how close the buildings on both sides were. With a running start and some courage, a person could jump from the rooftop of one country to the next. On the Burmese side, a cop sat in a plastic chair reading a paper in the middle of the road, cars passing on both sides. Vehicles did a do-se-do into the opposite lane. I entered the Burmese immigration office and asked my question. A guy at a desk gestured to a guard who led me into Burma. Inside the tourist office, I found a man writing something on a piece of paper. I asked him if the road to Kengtung was open, and his answer was what was written on the paper: "The military allows people to go to Kengtung only with a guard." I pointed at the paper, and asked, "Hey, are you studying English?" He said, "Yes," and we both laughed. The military. So the situation wasn't political, but some type of unrest. The officer told me that we could take the bus, at a cheaper price that I'd thought. But we'd have to pay the expenses of the guard --salary, room, transport, etc. I thanked him, nodded to my guard, and walked back to Thailand. There was a brief moment of tension when I couldn't present my permit to cross the border, but that was cleared up with a phone call. My five minute foray into Burma ended without incident. I was amazed how relaxed and playful everyone was, far removed from the tense border I'd heard about.

Miki and I spent the rest of the day at Mae Sai Guest House, a group of bungalows on the river. They were perhaps the nicest lodgings of the trip -- walls and floors of woven bamboo with good light and strong hot water. We sat on the veranda and looked at Burma 10 meters away across the river. It felt like nosily spying on neighbors. Life there didn't seem so different from over here. The family 'next door' was busy cleaning its garden. I was annoyed with the way that the patriarch would toss veneer trash bags over the wall into the water. It was funny to see his dog eating the same trash, then be called to be fed up above. A large snake swam from Thailand to the Burmese shore, then returned again. Didn't have the correct visa, I guess.

After dark, dogs on both sides of the border began barking at one another. A drum beat from somewhere off in the hills. From the Burmese side came the sound of voices. Two or three times, the crack of gunfire made me wish I'd paid attention to the design of our bungalow's roof...

On the turntable: Van Halen, "Fair Warning"
On the nighttable: Wiliam Eastlake, "Lyric of the Circle Heart"

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T00:04:00.005+09:00

Thar be Dragons!

East...

West...

And in those places between...

A Lad in Saen

2011-12-30T00:50:00.002+09:00

January 13, 2010

The dawn light was still gray as we climbed the steep stairs of Wat Jom Khao. The temple hall was decorated with paintings of Buddhist lore--most of them quite surreal. The male figures had the cheesy mustaches of a silent film villain, and the Buddha himself was quite ugly, his face old and out of proportion. Beside the temple was a low squat tower. From this hilltop, we could watch the sun rise behind the old French fort, watch the light take hold in Thailand across the water.

Back down the hill, the monks were finishing their final alms rounds. About a dozen women were kneeling in the street. Upon a certain verbal cue in the monks chant, they all simultaneously began to pour water from soft, shapely vessels.

Miki and I hustled up our own breakfast, then walked down a slope to the Mekong that served as the border. We were processed out of Laos and jumped into a waiting pirogue to make the crossing. It was ridiculous how easy it all was, how casual everyone was. Infected with this spirit I tried to talk the woman at Thai immigration into giving us 18 day visas rather than the usual 15. She seemed to go for it, until an official little man in a starched brown uniform popped his head in the window and explained (politely, but slightly aggressively) how to pay the overstay fee. Fifteen days it was.

We took a song taa-ou, following the Mekong to Chiang Saen. we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the quiet little town, past the old ruins which were much like those in Ayuthaya, usually a broad platform of raised brick, with a few chedi or a seated Buddha at the end. Unlike the segregation of the ruins into parks as at the old capital, here the town had been built to encompass them, houses and shops constructed right up to the leaf-covered grounds. Three of the old city walls remained, the fourth having crumbled into the Mekong long ago. We walked the north wall, under large trees growing through gaps in the brick.

The waterfront was lined completely with Chinese boats, their crews loading them with various goods. We watched one group carrying 5 cases of Red Bull, holding a chopstick in one hand which the foreman would take as a means of keeping count.

We spent the better part of the day at Wat Chedi Leung. The chedi is --was-- massive and furry with weeds. There was a variation on the broken platform theme in that this one had had a roof built over it to protect the large gold Buddhas it housed. A group of monks from Chiang Rai came and filled the floor with their orange forms. Two guys had unmistakable gang tattoos, and one was probably a ladyboy, very delicate in face and gesture. I found myself wondering why, if they didn't take food after noon, were so many so fat? After a brief chant, they were off again, filing in pairs through gaps in the ruins. The head monk came and found us, a nice young man of 24, who seemed eager to practice his English. Such a dichotomy, this young guy overseeing such an ancient site. Adjacent to the main hall was a small outdoor cafe called 'Heaven on Earth.' It did have a semblance of such, with thoughtfully arranged flowers, colorful art, and comfy chairs in which to pass a couple of hours.

We had a massage while the light faded, followed by a simple meal by the river. Then began the worst night of the entire trip. Our quiet, peaceful bungalow by day became the center of the party by night. Voices drifted from the vendors across the street, eventually drowned out by the thump of 3 or 4 competing sound systems. Our pipes must've backed up at some point for the air in the room became thick with the reek of raw sewage. No, I don't believe I can recommend the Chiang Saen Guest House...

On the turntable: Nirvana, "Bleach"
On the nighttable: John Nichols, "On the Mesa"

Mekong, Upriver

2011-12-27T23:09:00.008+09:00

January 12, 2009

...we made our way down the dusty hill to where the slow boats were moored. The trip upriver to Huay Xai was touted to be 5 -6 hours, but it took us 9 1/2. Such is Lao Time. I felt sorry for those trying to cross into Thailand as we docked just 5 minutes before the immigration post closed. But this was the way I had intended to pass the day, and it was heaven to drift quietly up the Mekong, watching the mountains drop away into jungle. Our boat had long, ornately carved rails, between which soft bus seats were laid in rows to pamper spoiled white asses. The passengers were all European at first, including a French woman who seemed unable to sit still for 5 seconds. As we continued upriver, the pilot stopped about a dozen times for locals who stood on the high rock crop banks waving shirts. We stopped at one village that had a market right on the bank, and seemed to be selling nothing but T-shirts. Nearby, a couple sat eating in their pirogue, clearly embarrassed to be the subject of every one's photos.

Our pilot steered us past the low jungled hills, past the shores of rock and sand. The rocks had been carved during rainy season in a pattern that was almost purposeful, methodical. He used a proper captain's wheel, unlike the single bamboo shafts attached to the afts of the pirogues. Both his steering house and the bow contained small altars, the latter more ornate, its joss sticks lit before launching. On board, an old woman sat with her three granddaughters, none of whom moved for the entire trip. The woman seemed to have knee trouble, and was asking the French bata-bata butterfly for treatment. Again, interesting how Europeans are seen as a source of medical treatment. A Frenchman sitting nearby rubbed some sort of salve into the afflicted joint. I watched all of this to the soundtrack of my iPod, listening mostly to '60s stuff, and slightly chagrined that the "Oldies" setting now includes music from my college days.

We reached Huay Xai at dusk and grabbed a room. The owner was a gorgeous woman in her '50s, with the glamour and dress of a beauty queen. There were photos of her in her younger day, resembling two daughters well represented in the adjoining photos. Clearly brought up with great expectations, I wondered how they felt about waiting on and cooking for tourists.

We walked up the main street, taking all of 5 minutes. It was all very Thai, even on this side of the river. At the base of the long steps leading up to the Wat, a man whispered hello from the shadows of the naga's head, a clear attempt to sell drugs. We ignored him and found a restaurant on a deck overlooking the Mekong, the sun's final act being to accent the purple hills with pink. A Korean girl sat behind us, filling out her journal, and across the room, a man sat at a keyboard, his crooning being a vast improvement over the previous BGM of bad pop songs. As the Xmas lights came on, Miki and I raised our final toast with Beer Lao...

On the turntable: Genesis, "Plays Live"

Winding out of Laos

2011-12-20T14:07:00.001+09:00

...Laos wakes early to chickens and shouted voices. Music was coming from somewhere, and like all trad music I'd heard since while in country, was of the "more cowbell" variety. This was Saturday -- market day. The town had swelled with villagers from the surrounding hills, which explained the voices and all the boats moored at the bottom of the steps. Being hill-tribe people, there was an array of colorful clothes and interesting headwear. A few women had their hair tied up in interesting buns, many at the front. They had gathered to buy or sell veggies, tobacco, silks, and meat carried in bags or arranged like a crime scene. One woman stood chatting and smiling to a friend, holding bovine forelegs with the shinbones protruding. The old-timers, as expected, had beautiful faces.

We waited fro Liu to buy a couple of chickens for his sons, then boarded a boat for the seven hour trip upriver. It was a chilly morning, but warmed up once the mist burned off. It was a pretty smooth ride, the mountains reflected off the glassy surface, with occasional rapids, which the boat seemed to climb. We passed fishermen, people damming small streams, a boatload of monks, bathing buffalo, women placer panning gold, and naked kids having kung fu battles on the beaches, complete with high kicks and flying sand. Norman Lewis talks of the monoscape of the jungle. It is the perfect camouflage, as people literally just popped out of the dense foliage. Other times, in straining your eyes, you could make out these figures and small huts, like viewing a Chinese landscape painting.

We stopped in a few villages along the way. The first was a Tai-Dam weaving village, with a sign out front saying, "No Slash and Burn Village." The villagers rushed to hang their wares in front of the homes for us, the first customers of the day. A few women were at their looms, all four limbs moving independently like a drummer. One woman was boiling silk worms and pulling the yellow thread out of the pot, while her baby slept in her lap. She offered us a each a worm to eat, which tasted just as bad as the ones I had had in Korea 13 years before. I found one scarf that I liked, weaved in remarkable detail by a women in her '80s, with failing eyesight.

We had lunch in a different village, eating in front of the hospital, closed for the day. As we ate, a large palm frond fell onto the electrical wire. I doubt that the hospital will have power when the open tomorrow.

The third village was a very poor Khmu village, which we'd noticed by its small hospital built high on a cliff overlooking the river. It was a steep scramble up sliding sand. A couple of men were repairing fishing nets, one with great dexterity considering that his right hand was gone. He'd made the bad decision to fashion a knife from a UXO. Based on the reactions we got, not many farang have come here. There was the usual parade of kids, as well as a very old man who was brave enough to come up and take Miki's hand. We passed a few old women bathing, completely unconcerned with covering bare pendulous breasts with their sarongs.

Later, we did a pee stop on a remote stretch of sand. As I did my thing, I had a fantasy about Liu and Suan, the boat pilot, pulling away, marooning Miki and I here at the edge of the jungle. Would we be able to survive, to get out? My answer came a few kilometers upriver. The entire right band had been cleared of jungle, for a new road leading to the nearby Vietnam border.

In late afternoon, we arrived at Muang Khua. The waterfront was a construction site, and the rest of the town not much better. The hotels were large, characterless concrete boxes, and before them garbage and food was strewn everywhere. People walked by doing the patented projectile nostril clear. Definitely a Chinese town. There was a hard edge here that I hadn't yet found in Laos, both from the Chinese and Vietnamese locals, and the tourists. Greeting two foreign men with a "Hello," one answered with a gruff "Bonjour." He was of the age to have possibly fought at Diem Bien Phu, 50km away. A daily bus leaves here at 6 a.m.

We met our driver from the first day, who said that the town "isn't beautiful, too noisy." We concurred. A friend of his had a guest bungalow in a village one hour away. "Great view," he promised.

We arrived in a village flanking the road, like a hundred others during the last 3 weeks. Our bungalow turned out to be a pile of blankets and a mosquito net in the back corner of a shop. Um, no. Had I been traveling with the driver from point A to point B, and these were the digs, offered up at, charitably, $1 a night, I'd be fine. The trouble was compounded by the driver's buying our dinner at a stall beside the road, whose meats were of an age slightly less mysterious than that of Dick Clark. Again, had this been part of the flow of travel, I'd be a good sport. But we'd pre-paid $70 a day, and found the food and accommodations sub-par. So we mutinied. We asked to go on to Oudomxai. Liu and the driver acquiesced, but there seemed to be some unspoken tension there. I hated this loss of trust, after three days, of what felt (naively perhaps) like friendship. Once the driver turned up, the vibe changed. There was a definite aggressiveness in both his manner and technique. What was unfortunate was that Liu seemed to have shifted sides, in deference to him. He was no longer in charge , it seemed. And our tour had begun to suffer -- the itinerary became less interesting, the amenities, less amenable.

We reached a sort of armistice over dinner in Oudomxai, the laughter and good feeling returning. What rankled though was my pride. I didn't want the driver to think I'd refused the "bungalow" because I was just another spoiled tourist looking for comfort. It was all a matter of me wanting services equaling payment rendered. Yet even this left me uneasy about how conservative I've become. Almost as amends, we wound up in what was perhaps the nicest accommodations of the whole trip -- a Chinese hotel, that while reasonably plush, couldn't offer protection from the sound of a loud TV echoing from down the hall...

...Oudomxai is a Chinese town, and the market reflected it, in the broccoli and bok choy, in the imported smokes. There were a few hill tribes about, but more often there were men in Mao caps. We drove south, stopping at a couple of uninspiring villages. One of them was a cold place, the people not interested in us at all, not returning our smiles or greetings. It was almost like an unspoken comment on cultural tourism being a trip to a human zoo. Miki were by now tired of these village visits, uncomfortable with this very point. Far better to spend a week or a month with them, offering work as an exchange for food, and hopefully, mutual understanding. A lot of these villagers are obviously unhappy with busloads of tourists dropping by to gawk and shoot photos. We quickly took the hint and fucked off.

In a single roadside stream, people were washing farm equipment, their cars, themselves. An old man smoked a cigarette through a waterpipe. Tall corn stood in rows on badly deforested hills. Banana trees extended their fingers to high-five the sky.

Our driver made quite a few stops on the way for his own personal needs--for rice, sugarcane, ice. I didn't mind much, but we spent perhaps a cumulative total of a couple hours waiting on him. I like him, despite myself.

The hills dropped, then we were at Pakbeng, a single dusty road leading up from the Mekong. The town itself wasn't much to look at, but the surrounding hills, and the river, added charm. Most of the hotels and cafes had waterfront decks, on which we had a pleasant way to pass the afternoon. There were only a handful of foreigners about, including one who lounged on a bed sitting on the veranda of a guesthouse next door. Farang began to arrive en masse in the late afternoon, trudging up the slope laden with bags like pack animals.

Our own guesthouse was pretty nice, a wooden affair of dark teak. It was noisy though, mainly from the karaoke coming up from the street. Judging solely from the thumping bass patterns, Laos has only 5 songs. And Lao people are outright bad at singing. One could argue that the pitch of the music is different from what we know in the West, but most of the singers (ahem) I heard were miles off the key of the song itself. As the bass thumped on, I began to curse the Japanese for inventing karaoke in the first place. One cafe offered a diversion in some Thai radio. I found it amusing mainly because the top news story was about predicted tapioca shortages in 2010. We live in interesting times...

On the turntable: "Still Swinging" (Various)

Nine months after...

2011-12-11T00:58:00.000+09:00

I wrote this not long after the quake and tsunami of March 11. It appears in a less vehement form in the Quakebook collection. Buy yours here. Every cent of the proceeds go to charity.

That Friday, I awoke before dawn, in order to get to my early morning yoga class. As always, I swallowed a splash of coffee to fully rouse myself, then quickly checked my email before setting off. I noticed a message from my sister wondering if my wife's family was okay. I didn't have time then to check the news, and it was difficult to concentrate on my teaching that morning. It was only later that I saw the videos of the water rushing in. I watched one video after another, as if not quite convinced that this was real. NHK was streaming in another browser window, and in a third, I followed Facebook updates from friends. This last was the most surreal. From the nature of the messages, it was obvious that cell phone reception in Kanto was down, Facebook being the only reliable means of communication. But it was unsettling to this vicarious experience of the post-quake confusion in real-time. One post: "Where are you? Did you get the kids?" Another: "Trains stopped. Walking home. Google Maps says I should be home in seven hours." For the rest of the day I imagined my friends walking through the cold night. That night I couldn't sleep, my head filled with images of all that moving water.

The next morning, I checked in to see that a great many people I cared about were having a pretty rough time. It was also apparent that we had better access to news, when the media was still giving facts and hadn't begun squealing like nervous nellies. I went off to work, but couldn't keep my concentration. Even though my wife and I were safe in Santa Fe, loads of people checked in on us. My co-workers could see that I was disturbed. I'd already begun to hear about the sense of calm amongst the Japanese, about the absence of looting or advantage-taking. Yet minutes into my work shift, I watched a woman try on sweaters, then toss them in a heap on the shelf, all before the eyes of her two young children. In the big picture, retail came across as pathetic. My manager let me go home early . Once there, my wife told me how she'd seen a car rear-end another, then quickly U-turn in order to flee. What the hell is wrong with my countrymen? After a year back in the States, we are quite depressed about the state of things here, at the behavior we witness daily. A day before the quake we began to reassess things, and I began to look at grad schools back in Kyoto. The moral strength and cooperation we witness in Japan becomes almost the justification for a return, the sort of society in which we want to raise the child now deep in my wife's belly. I'm not such a pollyanna that I don't recognize the problems there, the things that once rankled. Over 15 years in country they'd slowly worn me down, in what one wit called "death by 1000 cuts." But America's flaws glare by comparison. (Though that's a rant for another day.)

By Sunday, we needed to turn off the laptops and go for a walk. The news was no longer fact-based and entered the realm of speculation. As the week went on, I relied more on Facebook and Twitter than any media source. The foreign press sickened me. On the first day, as I desperately tried to find out if people I loved were still alive, these websites forced me to wait for 30 seconds as they tried to sell me stuff. Their later sensationalized coverage will always be remembered as they created a panic of fleeing foreign Tokyoites and drew attention away from the true suffering going on further north. Again, the priorities and morals of my birth country astounds me.

As the week went on, our lives began to revolve around what was happening with the reactors. Online, silly humor interspersed with drop-dead seriousness gave me the impression that Tokyoites were slowly losing their minds under the worry about the radioactivity, as they were jolted yet again by another aftershock. By the following weekend, they began to write of other, more normal things, and in the international media, Japan dropped out of the top headlines.

And as we continue to live here safely in America, my sleep is still disturbed, I still finds myself occasionally shedding tears. It's incredible how emotionally attached I am to Japan. It appears the quake caused some profound seismic shift within me, as I begin to seriously consider where to live the rest of my life.

On the turntable: Asleep at the Wheel, "Live at Billy Bob's Texas"

Afoot in Laos

2011-11-21T01:47:00.006+09:00

January 2010

...set off for a five day trek. The van left Luang Prabang, winding higher and higher into the hills. We got out in a Khmu village, where a boy of about three was playing with a large knife. We had lunch on a tree stump on the far side of the village, the floor of the jungle around us littered with dry leaves. Local people had a way of just popping out of the trees. Nearby, a couple of men were in the middle of a transaction over a water buffalo. The going rate was $500.

The path formed one section of a dike around rice fields, now brown and out of season. We crossed streams over stones, dodged large piles of scat, and scrambled over fences built to keep the buffalo out. One animal stared us down as we passed, protecting her baby which hid itself in the shrubs by the stream. Further downstream, we stepped over the crushed body of a centipede huge and nearly a foot long. Our guide Liu told us that its bite was deadlier than a cobra, bringing death in less than half an hour, unless the victim takes in opium, which will counteract the venom. Beyond this was a tall tree stump that held an egg, a few flowers, and some rice. Spirit shrine for the mountain beyond.

Above us to our right was the new road, a mere scar cut into the ridge. Some kids were sliding down the dirt slope. Spotting us, they cut across the fields to intercept. They were all pre-teen, doing their daily 90 minute commute home from school. In the morning, they leave at 5 a.m. We became a makeshift schoolbus as they followed us the rest of the way to their village singing a song, each kid taking a different verse.

The village was a mix of Lao Loum, Khmu, and Hmong. There was some sort of party going on in one of the houses. This being dry season, there was more time to play. Our appearance shifted the attention our way. We sat beneath the chief's house 'talking' to his wife and a dozen kids who'd surrounded her. One of the kids was a girl who'd followed us, who Miki and I agreed was a great beauty. She also had a certain obvious sweetness and intelligence, but what really endeared her to us was the fact that she'd done the long school commute without shoes.

We left town, along the road now, with a different set of kids in tow. They left us when the pitch became steep. The road was built in the past six months, but sections were already crumbling down the hillside. Near the top, we found some women who were lugging large branches back to their village. (Earlier, we'd seen kids as young as 5 doing the same.) This village was where we'd spend the night.

It was actually two villages; the Hmong scattered along the hilltop, and the Khmu homes just below it, built in two parallel rows bisected by a single road. We paid a visit to the chief, in whose shack we'd be staying the night. He brought us tea, which I sipped while watching his one year old grandson bathe from a spigot. He was perpetually naked and had a bell around his neck. Pigs, dogs, and chickens ran around him in the yard. The chief caught one of the latter, took it to the kitchen, and slit its throat. His son held a bowl for the blood to spill into. We'd eat its flesh for dinner. I thought about my stance on killing, how I usually insist that nothing be killed specifically for my personal consumption. I think now about how weak this is, that buying any kind of meat is always second-hand complicity in that animal's murder.

As I was thinking this, I'd been hearing a sort of gamelan, and closer inspection revealed that it was coming from the shaman's house. He was chanting in front of the spirit altar, shaking a rattle and stamping his feet, hoping to bring a cure to a sick girl in the village. Liu told us that he'd carry on like this for two hours or more, neither tiring nor stopping for food or drink.

We walked the dusty road between the Khmu homes. The huts were set back aways, with small garbage baskets sitting at the roadside like mailboxes. Unlike the Hmong and their smokey kitchens, families here had built fires out front. A group of kids were running around and jumping over shrubs and sleeping dogs. We stopped to buy some kind of sweet rice snack at the village's lone shop, and here a woman asked us to look at her sick toddler. It had gotten spots a few days before and the mother wondered if we had any medicine. The child didn't seem bothered at all, neither itchy nor in pain. I assumed it was some kind of allergy, though couldn't say for certain. Our first aid kit wasn't with us anyway. But this experience made me feel some guilt and helplessness, and solidified the fact that Westerners are seen as some kind of reverse witch doctors, bringing aid from distant realms.

We walked back below the ring of mountains fading in the light. The village had no electricity except for a single bulb hanging behind the chief's house. We sat below it, eating soup and eating the chicken that had been running in the yard an hour before. Afterward, Liu talked about the origins of the Hmong, which he'd then translate to the chief. It was interesting to see Liu's bird's eye view, having removed himself from village life to the city. The chief and his son hung on his every word, the oral tradition at work. It's amazing how well people listen if they aren't spoiled by TV. They did compromise on radio. (I'd often seen people carrying what I'd though were transistor radios in their pockets. They turned out to be cell phones with music downloads.) We listened to a Hmong radio program, a woman's a capella voice singing forlornly across mountains, valleys, and borders. When it was over, devoid of further distractions, everyone turned in by eight. I read for another hour before following. As I read, two teen girls watched me, squatting just out of sight in the darkness. (They'd watch me again as I bathed by the spigot in the morning.) And the shaman continued his chants well into the night...

...I awoke to voices and chickens. People were busy in the pre-dawn hour. We took a walk in the mist, watching kids trying to goad their chickens into a fight. They tie their bird to a string, then throw it at another bird that is just going about its business. I only saw two fights, both ending with one of the parties retreating within seconds.

At breakfast, the chief hurled stones at a pig that had bullied his own piglet away from its sop. The piglet was sleeping nearby amidst a pile of rubbish. I really liked the chief, always smiling and happy. He'd been elected just after the communists took over in '75, and had moved the village from the deeper mountains three years ago. Based on this latter info, I wondered if he'd been one of insurgents who'd terrorized the high roads for decades.

We left the village up a narrow dusty path, as the mist burned off to reveal beautiful peaks. Closer in, rice fields surrounded small huts used for rest, naps, or the occasional overnight. The road led to a Lao Loum village at the edge of the Nam Ou. We sat awhile on its bank waiting for a boat to take us up river. Below us, a boy removed water from his flooded pirogue, then set out fishing. Our own boat eventually turned up, and we rode through a glorious day, the sun on our faces, cooled by the spray.

Muang Ngoi eventually welled up on the Western bank. Fishermen and kids did their thing below the long concrete steps which we ascended to out guest house. We got a bungalow overhanging the river, with a hammock to serve as metronome for a lazy day.

The village was a single dirt lane lined with small shops. It was only about 500m long, with a wat at either end. We had lunch in a small restaurant/shop midway, where the cooking took ages. As we waited for our food, who should turn up but Ian from Dreamland. He'd had a nice day as a mahout and had arrived here after a couple of days on the river.

After lunch, we walked out of town behind an old monk sheltering from the hot sun beneath an umbrella. Liu followed suit, pulling from a tree a leaf about a meter in circumference and holding it over himself. Further along, a girl in a tree dropped tamarinds to us. Later, ducking under a low branch of bamboo, I came up too quickly and smacked my head on the next. Liu warned me about a small venomous snake that lives in bamboo. It usually minds its own business unless disturbed in the manner I'd just demonstrated.

The trail led to a wide-mouthed cave, little more than a single room. There was a pool just deep enough for wading, which deepened toward the darker, rockier back. A tourist had once slipped and died here. Looking back toward the cave mouth, the light spilling in tinted green, the sun backlighting the jungle just outside. In front was a stream that flowed from the cave next door.
Large fish, some a foot long, swam in and out of the shadows. This stream met another under the shade of a large tree overhanging the water. An Asian tourist sat in one of the branches, pondering something important. Nearby, a village girl swam naked, her mother squatting on the bank, eating taro.

Back in town, I spent the rest of the day in my hammock, watching the water moving between immobile mountains. Boats came in and out, some poled, some powered. On the opposite bank, a herd of cows were moving in one direction, a herd of buffalo in the other. Where they met, they mingled and began to graze. I liked this. Small pigs ran around and stopped, ran around and stopped.

At six, the electricity came on, so we went to eat. Afterwards I wrote, until the 10pm electricity curfew left me in mid-sentence. I went back outside to watch the stars awhile, brilliant in their full voice...

On the turntable: The Cure, "Wish"
On the nighttable: Douglas Preston, "Cities of Gold"

October 14th Elegy

2011-10-14T00:34:00.000+09:00

Pak Ou

2011-09-17T00:14:00.005+09:00

January, 2010

...about 100 of us are herded onto different boats. Our group is led to a small vessel that is little more than a roofed canoe powered by a small engine. The pilot sits crosslegged, hands on the steering wheel, his son of 4 or 5 at his side. The boy shivers in the cold. We're all cold. This morning, like every morning, is overcast and chilly. The cold wind at this speed isn't comfortable. But it is a delight to be on the Mekong again. The usual scenes are there: old boats trawling up-, down-, and cross-river; a new boat being cobbled together. Dozens of people on the banks, others in small fishing canoes, all of them equally photogenic. Banyam trees rising from the riverside, their root systems forests in themselves. Cows graze the rivergrass, elephants are ridden along the low jungle trees. An old truck 'liberated' from the US army is used for construction. Deathboats race by like Hot Rods, carrying their helmeted passengers. Rock reefs rise like the spines of dragons, with watermarks showing what the river can do in rainy season. We round a bend to a new series of mountains, rockier, more foreboding. Up there is the cave of Pak Ou. As we pass this point, the sun comes out, compounding the mystery.

The upper cave's darkness nearly hides the hundreds of Buddhas placed in small nooks and cracks in the rocks. The lower cave is more overt, Buddhas of every size are stacked up the front entrance, capped with a gold chedi. A warrior guards them, sitting spread-eagle at the cave mouth, though missing a head. Wonderful metaphor...

On the turntable: Spoon, "Transference"
On the nighttable: Mary Austin, "Land of Journey's Ending"

Sunday Papers Tenth Anniversary Edition

2011-09-11T22:39:00.004+09:00

I mourn those who lost their lives that day. And I mourn those who were killed in their memory.

America, I hope you get over your national nervous breakdown soon. Ten years of violence and suspicion just weren't worth it.

Perhaps if we didn't cling so tightly to our identity as Americans. Seems to me that we are 'people' first...

Lazing in Luang Prabang

2011-09-09T04:34:00.001+09:00

January 1-6, 2010

...our first act of the new year is to catch a bus bound for Sam Neua. Far to the north on the Vietnam border, Sam Neua was the stronghold from where the Pathet Lao launched their attacks against US forces. Curtis LeMay is famed for his comment about bombing enemy forces back to the Stone Age. Yet it could be argued that the Pathet Lao had never left the Stone Age, living and plotting their raids from a series of caves. It was these caves that I wanted to see, a bookend of sorts to the Viet Cong tunnels of Cu Chi that I'd crawled through over a decade before.

So we waited for the bus. And waited. An hour after it was to leave, it hadn't. "No problem...Maybe this afternoon...Maybe tomorrow." We could stick around Phonsovan, attend the wedding to which we'd been invited. As we made our deliberations, a bus bound for Luang Prabang revved up behind us. We boarded and left within 5 minutes.

The trip seemed repeat of the one two days before, a dreamy floaty meander along mountaintops, Hmong villages like pearls on a necklace. One village seemed populated only by children. In another, a young man kicked a cow, sending the rest of the herd spinning like bowling pins. In the next, young women play catch with prospective suitors. At a pee stop, a hilltribe woman squatted in full view beside the bus and let fly...

...for 5 days we settled in Luang Prabang. There was little to do but wander the streets, hide from the sun on the grounds of shady temples, or sip coffee on the veranda of an old colonial French building. We liked the pace, tried not to plan, not to fill our days with things to do. One day, we went up the mountain at the center of town. On another, we visited the 'museum,' little more than a tribute to a long dead king, housed in a beautiful old building. Rings that had formerly been on the fingers of US Marines were on sale in the lobby.

One hot afternoon, we crossed the river on a rickety bamboo bridge to a small village before doubling back to town along the riverbank. A few foreigners had stripped down and entered the water, letting the current pull them toward the Mekong.

I especially liked the small alley down which we were staying. We'd first stayed in a different, grungy place across town, after searching for an hour, in a town swollen for the long New Year's weekend. Hotels were booked nearly solid with 500 Thai tourists. After a mosquito plagued night, we moved to our current digs, run by a friendly Hmong couple. In the afternoons, a man across the street played a wooden marimba, accompanied by his teacher on a gamelan, who also did double duty in singing out the notes whenever his pupil got stuck. Next door was a shack whose outdoor kitchen looked out on the alley and served as center for the alley's social scene. The baby that lived in our house was slightly croupy, and the mother spent a good part of the day soothing it in a sing-song baby voice that I at first had thought was a children's program. On the other side of us was a gallery, its European owner always reading a newspaper by day, merrily drinking wine with friends at night. Across from him was the Heritage House, a one hundred year old building built on stilts and partially hidden by tall trees. At the end of the alley was a large wat, and beside it, the peaceful Mala Cafe.

The cafe was where we relaxed during the blackout, amongst the trees and the ponds and the fish. Without TV, the staff seemed bored, except for one girl who, with a small baby on the seat, rode a bicycle up and down the alley, giggling as she was chased by dogs. The blackout also caused problems at the night market, quashing the usual tunnel of light. Some vendors had their own power generators, but I felt sorry for those who didn't, as they'd have no business. But it was pleasant to sit in the garden of the guest house basking in the complete absence of man-made sound. Nothing but the voices of people coming fr0m out of the dark, inciting the barking of dogs, all accompanied by that omnipresent marimba. When the power eventually returned, the son at our guest house turned on the TV within seconds.

The town quieted considerably after the 3rd day of the year. Most of the time I spent sitting and watching life as it is lived in Luang Prabang. Watching the tuk-tuk drivers gossip as they'd awaited fares. (They nap in the seats, rather than slung out in hammocks like their corresponding brethren in Vientiane.) The mystery of what goes on behind the louvered blinds above the shops. Joma like a US cafe, done up with murals and warm colors. Muggy, overcast mornings burning off to become hot afternoons. A tourist guy with dreads, drunk everyday by afternoon, talking to ghosts, holding a beer in one hand and a book by Coelho in the other. His local counterpart, walking down the center of the main street in a sarong like a checkered tablecloth, topped by a coolie hat. Other times, he'd be squatting in a storefront smoking his pipe. Running into White Lotus's Beatrix at breakfast one morning. The sound of Lao, like backwards English, especially in the tones of men. Watching incense swirl into beams of sunlight at Xieng Thong, inspiring thoughts on transcendence and flexibility in travel. Zigzag walking the side alleys, looking at centuries-old human technology -- cooking, weaving, carpentry. Being sniped for a photo at Art House Cafe. Monks begging at dawn, along two parallel rows: one of orange garbed boys, the other of foreign photographers right up in their faces. The ever-present rivers. With the sun high, the river looked like someone was pulling a sheet of plastic wrap over dull-looking stones.

Every night we had dinner with the Italians. After they left, we ate at a couple of fusion cafes, one screening Casablanca on the bare white wall...

On the turntable: Jerry Jeff Walker, "Navajo Rug"
On the nighttable: Craig Childs, "House of Rain"

Toasting the New Year on the Plain of Jars

2011-09-03T04:08:00.007+09:00

December 30-31, 2009

...caught a minibus bound for Phonsavan. An overcrowded vehicle pulled away to reveal another one with ample space, allowing for a peaceful ride but for the driver and his morose humor. Every time our vehicle would chase an animal off the road, he'd make a chopping motion with his hand and say, "Laap! Beer Lao!"

The road snaked along mountain ridges, the valley floor dropping further and further away, with higher, prouder, peaks rising up on all sides. I remembered how incredible Laos had looked from the air, and now I was riding over some of the same unbelievable shapes I'd seen back in 1997. Closer in, things were equally fascinating. Hmong village followed Hmong village, each of them at the highest point of their respective mountain. Many people were hard at work digging a trench beside the road. Others were taking a bundle of reeds they'd gathered, then smacked them down with great force. These would become the roofs of houses, or the mats within. Nearly everyone seemed to be at work, from the aged down to the youngest kids. Nearly all of the women were busy doing something, including pre-teen girls carrying wood on their backs, counterbalanced by a strap around their foreheads. The only people I saw idle were the men, lounging under bamboo shelters, or leaning against pillars playing guitar. A few new homes were going up. The one's we'd seen in the lowlands were raised above ground by posts, but up at this height they were flush to the ground. Where all the wood came from was a no-brainer. The Hmong are infamous for their slash and burn approach to agriculture, with the entire region devoid of trees, completely picked clean. I saw one restaurant being built at the edge of a hilltop whose sides had been cleared for the wood to build it. I can picture the entire thing sliding away with the return of the monsoon.

In one town, we passed a long line of schoolkids heading home. In another, a man, badly injured on his motorcycle, was carried off and loaded into a car. An Italian guy who had helped now washed the blood from his hands. We stopped for lunch at a sizable town that had sprung up at a T-junction. Here we picked up a Swiss bicyclist who, upon reaching this spot, had found himself out of money. Bicycle touring through Laos seems to be quite popular. I'd already seen two women riders earlier in the day. The Swiss joined us for the final 3 hours of our drive.

Phonsovan was a one street town built upon a high plateau. At night, the only lights to be seen were spilling out of the open fronts of restaurants, or from the passing vehicles, dust swirling up through their beams...

...had breakfast at Crater's Cafe, located beside the UXO museum. At nine, we joined some new friends (including the Italian with bloody hands) for a one day tour of the area. We started at a Hmong village that sat atop a red earth mountain high in the clouds. The guide seemed bemused that our biggest reactions were to the animals. Pigs and dogs ran everywhere. A few buffaloes were tied to stakes, including one with an immense set of shoulders and a gnarled ear, the blood from it still staining his upper right flank. There were pigeons in coops, and a monkey on a chain. The latter was connected to a defused bomb ringed by a tire. This village is famed for using bomb casings as fencing, or as the support beams for structures. A few were also used as planters, or as cooking implements. This is unusual in itself, of course, so our finding greater enthusiasm in the monkey was highly amusing to the guide, his high pitched giggles heard frequently. Carlo, the Italian, mentioned that there had been more bomb casings on his visit here 5 years ago. The guide said that the Vietnamese had bought much of it for scrap.

I was greatly impressed with the visit to the shaman's house, with its immense spirit altar of origami paper and light, beside an ancient poster of Bruce Lee in 'The Big Boss. " Outside, a small girl seemed absolutely terrified at the sight of us, bawling in tears and clutching tightly to her older brother. Other kids were less bothered, including two boys who pushed bricks through the dirt like they were race cars, and one girl with a curious shock of blond hair. (I saw two others while in the area, complete blondes framing dark Asian faces.) As we left, a small gang of kids walked through the village, playing war games with their water machine guns. I found it chilling, since up to a few years before, boys not much older than they had been robbing and killing bus riders with arms of a similar type. Having ridden through their villages up along the ridgelines, I could see the ease with which they could.

Our next stop was the Plain des Jars site 1. We wandered the jars that spilled across the grassy hills, taking care to stay on the paths. The dozen or so bomb craters were reminders of the perils which still exist here. After lunch, we went to site 16, opened just 2 months before. There was a real sense of danger as we walked the trail through the quiet forest. Our guide chose this moment to make a phone call, and we weren't exactly sure which places were safe. (His call seemed rather important--he showing furious and manic body language as he pleaded with his 15 year old sister's boyfriend not to elope with her.) I set off alone up the trail in order to pee, and nearly shit myself to see that I was standing amidst a group of holes where UXO had been dug from the ground seemingly days before. Carlo yelled to me that he'd found a safety marker, one that I had strolled 20 meters past into the red.

Our final stop was at the Old City of Muang Khoun, which the American Air Force had flattened in a single night. It reminded me a lot of Ayuthaya. We visited a large Buddha seated on an open brick platform between two broken pillars. A group of Thai were up here, the girls posing like supermodels, the camera toting boys down on one knee in search of the perfect angle. A short drive away was a single stupa that rose like a missile into the sky. It had been hollowed out by Chinese thieves, revealing an older stupa within. A trio of girls were sitting on the grass outside, playing a game where they'd throw a stone into the air and pick up as many sticks as possible before catching it again. An older woman sat with them, laughing at everything.

Back in town again. As Phonsovan is close to the Vietnamese border, that language can be heard everywhere, particularly in its Vietnamese restaurants. We chose one near the UXO museum, me enjoying my first water buffalo meat in over a decade. Some street kids were stealing food from the plates left behind by foreign tourists. We took a portion from our own plates, put it in a bag, then gave it to them conspiratorially. This didn't endear us to the owners. Then off to bed at 10, trying to ignore the karaoke and fireworks that counted out the last hours of 2009...

On the turntable: Richard Hell, "Time"
On the nighttable: Earl Ganz, "The Taos Truth Game"

Between Holidays...

2011-08-27T00:57:00.006+09:00

December 27-29, 2009

...awoke to the sound of pre-dawn roosters. One of them had a crow so bad that it kept Miki and I in bed, giggling. We rented bicycles and peddled around looking for other, less ramshackle places to stay. One of these, Mayly guesthouse, was highly touted but slightly past its prime. For some reason, the owner began to discuss with me his plans of expansion, but he sounded a bit weary from the uphill struggle, worn down by his own pessimism. Where a few years ago he'd been the only guesthouse on the far side of the river, now he was surrounded. Vang Vieng was on the grow, and as such, it was a very noisy place. Night was accompanied by the thud of bass, day was the sound of hammer and saw. For every existing guesthouse, two more seemed to be going up.

Five minutes on the road out of town, I got a flat. This was followed by an hour walk back to town with the bike on my shoulder. The woman at the shop would do nothing for me, so I walked away angrily after an uncharacteristic show of temper. I am usually very patient in times like these, but have grown weary with kind people who have sold their humanity for tourist dollars. More than this, I hate myself for my anger.

The new bike, from a different shop, handled the bad roads well. It took us through rice fields and jungle, past lazily grazing cows, and under high karst mountains. It also took us through a series of small villages newly created to house the resettled Hmong. In one, we caught a glimpse of some ceremony: two lines of Hmong girls in traditional dress tossing a ball back and forth. (I later found that this was practice for a courtship ritual.

We reached Blue Lagoon cave soon after. A boy took us up a steep climb over sharp, triangular rocks. The cave itself was a mere gash in the cliff face. Inside was a tight maze of narrow openings and a slippery, knife edge ridge above a chasm of imperceivable depth. It truly was dangerous going. The boys would stop sometimes and point their torches up at a heap of rock and say something in Lao. One boy ran his hand along a stalactite: instant xylophone. Back outside, we sat and drank water, our bodies and knapsacks streaked with mud. I found it strange that we hadn't seen anything that the guidebook had promised: no lagoon, no Buddha, and no Brooke Shields.

We cleaned off in a stream down on the valley floor, beside a boy spearing small fish with a small gun. Downstream, we had lunch on a deck overlooking a bamboo bridge, kids swimming and bathing below. One kid was handicapped, pushing himself along on a makeshift walker. His granny squatted, doing laundry at the water's edge, suddenly angry at a 4WD that created waves as it made the crossing. When we paid for lunch, we only had bills of a large denomination (worth $6 dollars US), which the owners couldn't break. The husband went somewhere for about 5 minutes, then returned, handing the bill to a girl, who probably would've biked off somewhere to change it, leaving us waiting further. Never in a hurry, the Lao.

We pedaled out along the dusty roads, under a sun now hot. There were plenty of villages out here, plus one 'town,' which housed a college composed of a few concrete buildings around a large, overgrown athletic field. It was around here, at a T-junction, that we found a good-natured Frenchman astride a dirt bike, looking at his map. He'd rented the bike 21 days before and had been riding around the country. He pointed us down the right direction. We ran into him later at a river crossing, the 3rd crossing of the day. We'd twice had to pay for the privilege, to nearly identical women sleeping in nearly identical huts beside a barricaded bridge. (Near the first, two girls riding a motorbike had fallen sideways into the river from the bank.) The Frenchman had told us that we'd mistakenly come along the southern road, and were now looping back. Which explained all the foreigners we'd passed coming the other way. It also explained why we'd had such a hard time following the map we'd gotten at the bike shop. This turned out to be lucky after all, as the northern road was fairly shady, cutting back some of the afternoon sun's bluster. Water buffalo had their own solution: bathing in the river, burying themselves in mud. In this they proved smarter than the red-faced tourists on bicycles.

Back in town, we rehydrated at Vang Vieng resort, then rode across the bridge to Tham Jang cave. We arrived at 4:20, 10 minutes before closing, but the gatekeeper wouldn't let us in. I tried reason, I tried pleading. I even pointed at the monk seated nearby and said, "Show some of his compassion." He didn't budge, despite there still being at least 20 people lingering up at the cave entrance. "You are a bad man!," I yelled in his face, showing anger for the second time that day. What had compounded my anger was the fact that, 15 minutes before, I'd realized that what we'd thought was the Blue Lagoon cave was a different cave deliberately mislabeled in order to dupe tourists. I wasn't liking the people of Vang Vieng at the moment. But our friend here wasn't so much greedy as lazy, and at 4:30 on the dot, he mounted his bike and rode away, passing a German in a small swimsuit who was swimming into the lower reaches of the cave, breaststroking like a big fat frog. Five minutes after the gatekeeper left, Miki and I hopped the fence and climbed the steep steps. We weren't able to enter, barred by a heavy gate now locked. As we looked out over the river, I wondered if I wasn't a bad man too.

In town, we looked for a place to enjoy the sunset. For all the building, very few riverfront cafes or hotels had seating that faced the million-dollar scenery to the west. We eventually found one, but the mozzies soon drove us off. So we walked the town. The video in one cafe was playing "Friends," (and would be every time I walked by). Another cafe had the sign, "No Friends." Two other cafes were partial to "Family Guy." A different cafe had the sign, "Give Pizza a Chance." Many other signs had bizarre English with nospacingbetweenwords. Down on the island, the coming of night brought mayhem. Many of the bars had their names spelled out in Xmas lights, music pumping competitively, the alcohol reached only by crossing haphazard bridges. (There was a charming transcendent nature to it all.) This, along with the chubby, half-naked drunks strolling around really made me dislike the frat party that is Vang Vieng. Twenty years before, I'd probably have loved it, but now, for me, "party" is no longer a verb.

We finally sat to eat at the Organic Cafe, but found both the men and the food wanting. As we ate, a truck kept circling the block, the people in back holding up a trophy and singing...

...Miki had a fever last night, so we had a mellow day of resting and reading. We spent most of the morning at Luang Prabang bakery, then separated. I watched monklets beg at the Irish Pub where I ate Steak and Ale pie. We spent the rest of the day beside the river on the island, lazing on one of the covered bamboo bungalows. Later, roti pizza from a street vendor....

...in the morning, we rode out to some caves in the back of a truck. Our guide was a jolly Lao named Boum, whose girth gave me confidence in the fact that, if he could negotiate the narrow passages of a cave, I certainly could. It turned out not to be necessary, a world away from the ridiculous danger of a couple days back. The first cave was a series of interconnected chambers; the second a long tube. Coming out of the latter, we saw hundreds of dead bees on the trail. The caretaker of the cave was nearby, preparing to roast the honeycomb. A few days ago, no one had been able to enter the cave due to the bees, but I doubt the genocidal solution was done out of concern for the tourists as much as a means to have a tasty snack.

We rejoined the rest of our group at the Water cave. The highlight here was pulling yourself through while sitting in an inner tube. Some of our group stayed inside to swim, but I'd had enough of the cold water and had come out early. After lunch beside the stream, we walked through a couple Hmong villages. The poverty was pretty severe, especially when compared to the Lao of Vang Vieng town. The low-riding pigs and chickens weren't food but commodities to be sold if money was needed for medicine,. etc.

The rest of the day was the highlight for me, the kayaking. I wound up with a boat to myself. Before leaving, the guide had shoved some weeds in a round slot in the aft. Assuming it was some superstition, I asked him about it, to be told, "Keeps the water out." It was bliss to work my way slowly down river, beneath high karst walls. Villages came up, and their villagers -- fishing, bathing. Two children led a herd of buffs across the river. A granny and child on the bank, silhouetted against the sky. Further down river were people tubing, looking drunk, cold, and bored. They were passed by the long-tailed boats ferrying Asian tourists up river. Most bizarre were the bars. You'd hear them before you saw them, the music booming along the water. Then the structures would loom up, rickety and precarious and teeming with partiers, who'd dive off the platforms or were swinging out over the river on zip lines. It all reminded me of the night scene in Apocalypse Now when Willard's team drifts up to a stream of lights hanging across the Mekong, distorted music rising above all. We took a break at an empty platform further on, to sit in the sun and swim. I took my turn on the zipline. Two moments took guts: letting your feet leave the platform, and letting go of the trapeze bar.

Had dinner back in town, sharing a table with a half-dozen Vietnamese backpackers. Funny that my memories of Vietnam 12 years before was of a country not unlike Laos today. And now the Vietnamese are backpacking. The meal, and the day, was soured a great deal by the waiter, who was as surly as he was incompetent. He got 2 of our 3 items wrong, and forgot the other one altogether. When it came time to pay, he couldn't remember what we'd ordered. We were complicit in our own poor memories. A fitting, and metaphoric, end for our lukewarm relationship with Vang Vieng...

On the turntable: "Suzanne Vega"
On the nighttable: D.H. Thomas, "The Southwestern Indian Detours"

...And all throughout Laos...

2011-08-19T05:18:00.000+09:00

December 24-26, 2009

...this being Xmas eve, Miki and I had dinner at the Cote d'Azur French restaurant, culminating in a stroll down the French market and past the bars, the female staff dressed sexily and topped with Santa hats...

...we pedalled out of town on this Xmas morn, bound for Wat Si Muang. It was an extremely active place, worshippers showing great devotion as they placed tall arrangements of yellow flowers and candles on the floor just before their prostrating foreheads. Other worshippers were banging gongs, and one man seemed determined to destroy the head of a large drum with the force of his beats. The temple had been built on the site of a former Khmer temple, the ruins of which still rose as a pile of porous black stones behind the newer structure. A massive bird was perched atop this, turning its head almost mechanically. It remained balanced on a single leg, the opposite claw wrapped around it as if a hand. Nearby, a baby gibbon swung itself playfully about its cage, stopping only to look sheepishly into my eyes. Its parents were in an adjacent cage, looking forlorn, as if they'd given up on life.

We'd heard about a naga shrine that was out on the island. A man had told us to find the watertower, turn right, and cross the rickety bridge. The bridge was certainly rickety. If I hadn't seen a motorcycle go over, I doubt that I'd have had the nerve. On the opposite side was a small village on the bank of the Mekong. The shrine was set amidst a quiet bit of jungle, decorated with serpents of exaggerated size, all surrounding Shakamuni and his naga cloak. It was an equally peaceful and spooky place.

On the ride back through the village, we were chased by a group of dogs, which scattered with a loud kiai and an aggressive stance (something I've found to work well on Asian canines). We spent the rest of the morning in a cafe run by a Japanese woman, reading in comfy wicker chairs and sipping one of the best coffees I've ever had. The cafe was decorated in true sparse Japanese style, consisting of just a few pieces of furniture, some hanging textiles, and plenty of negative space. Next up was lunch at a Laotian restaurant where we shared a dish that was cooked like nabe, but rolled up like harumaki.

At one o'clock, we were picked up for the ride out to Dreamtime Eco Retreat. After a quick stop at the market, we rode the dusty red road through the jungle to the bungalows. Ours was built alongside a small stream, with a hammock for swinging. The other bungalows were built to be hidden from the others, a trait common to places like this. The main bungalow was the center of things, where we all lazed around reading and dozing, alongside a large litter of cats. The place was owned by a pair of Belgian brothers, who'd been raised in Israel. Their mother and sister were visiting, along with two other Israelis, 2 Brits, and a French woman. Mike, the owner, had found the land 3 years ago, and opened to guests the year before. The place was spantan and simple, little more than a handful of modest structures surrounded by ungroomed jungle. He hopes to create more of a spiritual center, but to progress slowly, by word of mouth.

We all had a Xmas dinner of grilled Mekong River fish, potatoes, corn, and wine. Lots of wine. The night culminated around a bonfire in the jungle with good songs and conversation. Definitely a memorable holiday...

...I awoke feeling poorly,laying in bed soaking in my own alcoholic sweat, the only peace found in the variety of birdsong. We finally got up, but with no one else around, slept again until 9:30. We'd thought about staying a second night, but not really being of the party set, felt a little out of rhythm here. Most of the morning was lost, but I did take the time to walk the trails, trying desperately not throw up. For the first time in my life, I'd immediately vomit up the water I'd drink. It may have been the wine, but my money was on the fish, cooked and eaten in the dark. (Cornflakes and coffee eventually restored the balance.) As I walked, I tried to distract myself by looking at bugs (including one that looked like lint), listening to the birds, and trying not to think about snakes too much.

We left at noon, and stopped soon after, wheels buried in 3 inches of sand. A villager suddenly aparated out of the jungle, and helped us out. It was a bumpy ride in the back of the pickup, which didn't help my head any. I had a quiet hour to recover in the cool of the Mixay Hotel lobby, but the next ride in the back of a minibus brought the headache to the comeback trail. Halfway to Vang Vieng, we entered the mountains, winding up through the banana trees and the jungle. This was the landscape I'd remembered from previous visits to SE Asia. It dawned on me that I'd been in the flat of jungle lowlands for three weeks. We arrived in town after dark, 2 hours late...

On the turntable: Happy Mondays, "Greatest Hits"
On the nighttable: Edward Dorn, "Interviews"

Vientiane Solstice

2011-08-11T00:31:00.006+09:00

December 23-24, 2009

...started the day in Sabadee Cafe, with a coffee that was the best I'd had since starting the trip. The poster above me showed a collage of photos of various menu items, each one with a time and date signature in the lower right corner. Equally hard to ignore were the BGM Xmas Carols being sung slightly off-key by what I presumed were Laotian kids. There probably weren't many tracks on the CD, for the same song would repeat every 15 minutes.

First up this morning was the National Museum. Downstairs was the cultural history, many exhibits made of styrofoam and papier-mache, like in a elementary school history project. The Buddhas were, of course, lovely. Upstairs was all political. Paintings showed the devil French acting in their usual barbaric French ways, with lots of dead babies and monks tied to posts. Later, photos showed Laotian rightists meeting with men only identified as "American imperialist." Another exhibit showed the cultural traditions and clothing of the various SE Asian countries. Singaporeans were represented by their stewardess uniforms.

We rented bikes and rode along the dirt trails paralleling the Mekong, through open air restaurants and past lazy dozing dogs. Some Chinese tourist was taking a photo of the Don Chuang hotel which rose like a tombstone above the rest of the older French architecture. Midday we arrived at the Linda Sisaphon, which did a great Thai lunch of crab and tofu puffs, and spicy noodles. The ubiquitous corner television was showing a karaoke video of Ram Wong, Laotian style. Unlike in Cambodia where the hands seem to delicately trace the Khmer alphabet in the air, the Laotians instead keep their arms stiff at their sides like David Byrne.

Bellies full and sinuses clear, we biked through a series of gradually posher suburban neighborhoods to Sok Pa Luang, where we sat awhile on the steps of a small, unoccupied temple and watched the dogs sleep and the leaves fall. Stomachs finally ready, we walked across the grounds to have a sauna and a massage. The former was wonderful, a handful of us clad in sarongs and roasting in the steam. Water and herbs were boiled in a steel drum, from which a pipe fed a small opening in the floor of the shack.. The shack and the heat began to make me feel a bit like a Vietnam War era POW. The light streamed through a small square window and was backlit by steam. Slipping further back in time, I was now a 1950's European cinema-goer. Sitting and passing the afternoon in this way was a wonderful thing, in the company of two Frenchmen, a Columbian, and a Puerto Rican guy ever hitting on a gorgeous Persian-American girl. The massage that followed wasn't quite as good, done by a young, obviously untrained guy who pawed me like a weak kitten. A return to the sauna was a nice consolation.

The light fading, we followed a dirt path along the Mekong. There were quite a few rickety wooden decks built over the river, where people could drink and watch the light fade further still. We took a seat on the deck furthest west, well beyond the dusty construction zone nearer the city. Below, fishermen brought in their boats, women bathed, and kids played, everyone eventually fading to silhouettes and becoming figures of art, the subjects of our photos. And the miracle of the sunset followed, as it would again tomorrow.

We returned to our new hotel, Mixay, and got into a conversation with David, who'd been staying here for 5 months. He'd been offered a job with the UN, who'd then reneged upon his contract when he'd arrived. The length of his stay in country was due to the fact that he was in the process of suing them. A lawyer and former anthropology teacher, he'd been living in Hanoi for the past 8 years. We had an interesting chat, but for his bile against aid groups, he insisting they were all corrupt. Most interesting was his take on the Vietnamese, forseeing an inevitable decline in their currently booming economy, since their main investment was in their children and in feeding them. Once the resources have all been eaten, it's all over...

...In the morning, we took a jumbo out to the Buddha Park, which is an older version of the work by Luang Pu that we'd seen a few days before on the other side of the Thai border. Here too was the same jumbled array of towering Hindu and Buddhist figures, built in a somewhat amateur fashion. The setting though was better, alongside the Mekong, looking in the direction of the other park, a few kilometers and a whole country away. We had a good time climbing in and around the hollow, pumpkin-like tower, but didn't feel that the expensive tuk-tuk ride out here was exactly worth the fare.

We were dropped off at Pha That Luang, a big, gaudy, gold gumdrop that is a source of pride for the Laotians. There was a pretty impressive temple being built next door, roofs folding in atop one another. A group of ladyboys posed in front for photos. We left them behind and began to walk across the city, past a sign for a shop called, "Scoubidou," and past bus stops which all had those large plexiglass walls that in China would hold newspapers for commuters to read. Here, they held only advertisements.

We'd hoped to have lunch at the infamous Pyongyang restaurant, being naturally curious about what passes for North Korean food, but the restaurant seemed to have been closed down. We walked hungrily through the city, having a snack at the mall, which was filled with hundreds of young girls in a frenzy over some boy band that was scheduled to play later. We quickly escaped to the Scandinavian Bakery, where we passed the afternon reading and writing. We also had a war of attrition on the balcony, with a workman blowing dust outward into our drinks. We finally gave in due to the chemical warfare that followed, consisiting of fumes from floors newly stained. We ducked into a supermarket geared toward Vientiane expats, stacked with a far better selection than anything I'd seen in Japan. Appetites whet, we sought out dinner...

On the turntable: Sonic Youth, "Daydream Nation"
On the nighttable: Edward Abbey, "The Brave Cowboy"

First Day Vientiane

2011-08-01T08:42:00.006+09:00

December 23, 2009

...We tuk-tuk to the Immigration post, get processed, then board a bus that crosses the Friendship Bridge. On the Lao side, we switch from the left of the road to the right, then have our tires sprayed. It's a bit like being part of a child's toy car set. Off the bus now to apply for our visas. We wait under a banner that proclaims Vientiane to be a non-smoking city. It isn't a long wait, and after getting our stamped passports, we go to the tuk-tuk queue. Rather than the usual chaos, we are shown a sign with fixed prices, held up by a handful of smiling drivers. One is chosen for us, and upon paying the fare upfront, we are given a receipt and climb into a jumbo. the whole process has been quick, neat, and polite. The same can be said about the roads, the driving, the city itself. no rush, little dust or trash. Laos begins to work its magic spell early.

We check into a hotel, and begin to walk. A few blocks over is the fountain of Nam Phu , and nearby, we grab a tuk tuk to take us to Patuxai. This large concrete slab stands in the center of a roundabout, showing what Soviet architects could have accomplished had they been allowed to design the Arc de Triomphe. The Champs d'Elysees then would be the broad avenue leading past the moneychangers and fancy hotels to a mock-up of the White House, painted pink in this particular version. On the way, we detoured through the 'Development Center,' a fine euphemism for the up(-per) scale Malaysian shopping mall built on the grounds of what had for centuries been the city market. This places enables the rapidly increasing middle class a place to spend their kip while simultaneously crushing the chances for the lower wage earning sellers of the former market to join them. Seems that the socialist economic policy here is a slightly less than level playing field.

Nearby is That Dam, a stupa whose former gold leaf was stripped by Siam invaders nearly 3 centuries before. The US Embassy stands beside it, reminder of yet another cultural theft.

Took a lazy stroll amongst the Buddhas at Si Saket, then crossed the street to Haw Pha Kaeo, squeezing between Chinese tourists to walk through a building that can't seem to decide if it's a temple, a museum, or a gift shop. Inside, a Buddha had a large fleck of gold stuck to its forehead, as if playing Indian poker.

There was much more space out by the Mekong. A construction team was in the midst of some huge project which stretched halfway across the river to Thailand. (It dawned on me later that in this, the dry season, the river is always that low and dusty.) After buying a painting from a young mother, we ate some ping ka and learned from a former Thai expat that all this construction going on was the building of a park. He'd come here a dozen times on visa runs, but hadn't visited for over a year. He'd noticed a lot of new businesses and hotels over that time, probably due to the Southeast Asian Games which had just finished the week before. The vibe however, hadn't significantly changed.

We worked our way slowly through a few other Wats, their gilded facades even more brilliant in the fading light. Kids played volleyball in an adjacent lot, and others, clad in saffron, knelt before the Buddha and followed the chants of the head priest. We wandered the alleys of Chinatown back to the riverside, where hundreds of people sat drinking Beer Lao and watching the last of the day's light. Up the street at the Hare & Hound, I found my own beer to wash down my first Bangers and Mash in five years, to the accompaniment of a Laotian boy singing along to an Abba CD.

Our hotel had a special show for us, perhaps inspired by this town's popular "Dumb Show." It began when I tried to make a phone call, but the guys at the front desk couldn't figure out how to make the phone work, then finally said, "Broken." When I said that I'd just used it a few minutes before, they went and got someone else. Later, when Miki and I asked them a few questions, they just looked at us. In the past, I've found that even if you don't share a common language, it is possible to convey information if both parties are patient listeners and have a small share of common sense. These guys appeared to be operating at a deficit.

The highlight of the show began later. We'd already suffered for a few hours from noisy Thais in the hotel fiercely competing with the street noise coming through a window frame that had no pane. This was all nearly drowned out by the sound of water (along with the accompanying smell of waste) rushing through the pipes just outside the aforementioned windowless window. Somehow, Miki and I both fell into sleep, but an hour later, the A/C unit (which we purposely hadn't paid for) began to turn on and off by itself. I guessed that someone in a nearby room had gotten the remote control for our unit, and perplexed as to why his wasn't working, kept turning ours on and off for at least half an hour. I noticed that our own remote control was marked with 206 rather than 209, so I went down the hall and knocked on that door. I was answered by a German voice, which continued to speak in German, rather in than the English that I spoke, or in the language of the country in which we were all guests. (Somewhere, there is probably a German blog entry about all this.)

I eventually went down to the front desk, waking and scaring a poor girl sleeping in a cot in the lobby. She seemed reluctant to wake the manager, who, when he came out, was rubbing sleep from his eyes. I explained as simply as I could about the problem, then led him to our room. He stared at the offending unit for about 5 minutes, during which time it was silent, of course. Then, he said something like, "Too cold, it becomes ice," and left in apparent incomprehension. Ten minutes later, after I was on the brink of sleep, the phantom A/C resumed its earlier routine, until someone somewhere finally grew tired of the monotony of pushing buttons and gave up.

Until 6 a.m. the next morning...

On the turntable: David Byrne, "Growing Backwards"

I am Irony Man

2011-07-29T00:54:00.002+09:00

I'm a huge fan of irony. I've never demonstrated irony so perfectly as on that April afternoon in 2009 when I sat for an hour in front of Akihabara Station, reading an actual book.

On the turntable: LCD Soundsystem, "LCD Soundsystem"

Door to Door

2011-07-22T01:48:00.001+09:00

December, 2009

...slept poorly, with a bad stomach. Awoke at 4:40, vomited at 6, on a bus by 7. A long day of praying that my bowels would hold. Miki vomited at 8. No toilet on board, with a bathroom break on the side of the road, trying not to think about mines.

There was an Englishwoman on board who was finishing a long stint with an NGO in the jungle. She loved Cambodians, said she never saw one angry. Unlike Thais or Vietnamese, who were just looking to rip you off, the Cambodians are more friendly. They always seemed to be helping one another.

Further conversation was drowned out by the karaoke videos blaring through the bus speakers. The music was catchy in its own way, Ram Wong sounding like lazy calypso, with gentle free-styling rap lyrics, the hands of the dancers tracing small circles. The girls in the videos all wore traditional dresses, and had tall hair and long lashes, looking like they were at a Kennedy era garden party.

Got to the border at 2, processed through quickly. Met some farang on the other side, including a laid-back Canadian tennis instructor. For a few baht, we joined their minibus ride to Bangkok. Miki and I had originally planned to head due north, taking a couple of days to get to Nong Khai. I also knew that there was a train leaving Bangkok at 8pm, though I doubted we'd make it. Yet our driver, unasked, seemed as if he was trying to get us there on time, driving at dangerous speeds, passing on the left, and forcing oncoming traffic onto the shoulder.

We got to Hufflepuff Station five minutes before the train left. There was only one sleeping berth remaining, but Miki said she was fine in a reclining seat. She was comfortable enough, but didn't sleep all that well due to the cold air blowing through windows left open all night. I didn't mention to her that I'd had an excellent night's sleep in my cozy bunk. I did awake often, but I'd pull back the curtains to watch the jungle pass by in the dark.

The train arrived on time, which got us to Mut Mee Guest House by nine, allowing us to score the last room at this popular place. We had a lazy breakfast, our first food in 38 hours. In the afternoon, we rented bikes and rode out to the bizarre Sala Kaew Ku, with massive concrete nagas, Hindu and Buddhist gods, and walk through diorama of the wheel of life. In the temple itself, beside all the Buddhas, was the corpse of Luang Pu himself, as if contained by a snow globe, the hall flanked by photos of him, all doctored with a magic marker to fill in lips, eyebrows, and hairline. Back intown, we biked down the Mekong. Very slow pace here, tourists and locals chilling on cafe verandas. Cars and tuktuks drive sanely for a change. Climb up to the rooftop Buddha of Wat Lam Duan, look at the submerged chedi of Phra Tat Nong Khai. Even the market here is laid back, wide and clean, with no pushiness.

The rest of the two days I spend at Mut Mee, rocking back and forth in a hammock, watching the Mekong race by. The river is fast here, pulling fishing boats along quickly. I think how I've been on it twice before, hundreds of miles away both to the north and to the south. A boat repeatedly crosses between here and Laos on the far bank, transporting goods back and forth. I eat, read, get a massage, doze in my rustic bungalow with its wooden decks and shower open to the sky. After three weeks of hard and fast travel, it feels great to come to a complete stop. This pace, this life here is addicting; I could easily finish out my days here. Nothing to do but laugh at the cat siblings who ambush one another amidst the leaves and the rattan furniture. I think about how much cleaner Thailand is in comparison to Cambodia; how much more pleasant to be here, and I'm not sure why I felt so much resistance to the country to the east.

I have another massage, the most intense of my life, this small woman's elbows grinding into the areas I most need it. But the pain. As she presses onto my outer chest from above, she inadvertently gives me an Indian burn, and I howl in pain. "Too tense," she says. Afterward, I fall asleep in a hammock, and am spacey for the rest of the day. An excellent night's sleep follows...

On the turntable: Louis Armstrong, "Stockholm 1959"
On the nighttable: Eric Blehm, "The Last Season"

Pehnning Phnom

2011-07-16T01:45:00.004+09:00

December 2009

...Bustling, noisy, expensive city. People less friendly than in Siam Reap, but then again, they've had a harder history. More beggars and amputees. One guy had shriveled legs folded well past his hips like an extreme version of Cow Face Pose. Far more bicycles than cars, but Black Lexus SUVs prevail, the apparent replacement for the white Landcruiser legacy of the UN days. Motorbikes everywhere, some with up to 4 riders, including kids. One woman has her child tucked under her left arm as she worked the throttle with her right. Some girls use an underhand grip, on the handlebars, nearly all wearing gloves and long sleeves. Other girls sit side saddle behind their beaus, completely relaxed, not at all concerned with the wind mussing their hair or clothes. Traffic is less hectic than in Bangkok, but it is more anarchic, cars and bikes rush into every intersection, stop, then steer to untangle the snarl. A white woman pedals through it all, prudently wearing her bike helmet...

...monk begging in late morning, a woman on her knees before him. The jingle of ice cream vendors. The riot of noise of funerals. French buildings with ornate trellis designs on balconies. Cyclos more often seen ferrying goods than people...

...great respect for life, more so than in other parts of Asia. Then again, these people know suffering. The love of children is especially strong. The rebuilding of a culture can be measured in its number of children...

...when I was in Vietnam in 1997, I'd spent some time with European aid workers who'd fled the coup that summer. They'd told me that the average Cambodian was fairly stupid and unskilled, the majority of its educated class having been executed by the Khmer Rouge. I don't find this to be true now, yet Phnom Pehn seems a little less educated than the tourist-savvy Siam Reap. Two of three tuk-tuk rides end up with me giving the directions...

...didn't sleep well at all during my time in Phnom Pehn, disturbed perhaps by the ghosts of those who'd died there. Physically felt ill as well, my nervous stomach constantly upset. I felt much more at ease after crossing back to Thailand...

...the name "Lucky" for the supermarket really sums it up. US goods at US prices. A few Westerners are shopping there. I'm baffled by Cambodia, this 3rd world country with a 1st world economy. Far too touristy now. I realize that every place has its 'heyday,' but to visit afterward is perfectly valid. The experience you create will forever be your own. Yet I feel that I blew it in not coming here sooner, either in 2003, or in 1997, as I'd planned. Had I come in '97, I couldn't have seen much of Angkor, but I would have seen the country at an important time in its development...

...had a burger at Rabbit Cafe, staffed with handicapped workers. Likewise, I'd had a massage from a blind masseuse the night before. She hadn't been that good -too soft - and seemingly had a cold, constantly sniffling throughout. But I liked the gentle birdlike chirping of her conversation with the woman beside her. Later, when I saw a sign in front of another place with the words, "Massage by Blind Person," I cringed a little...

...Chan Muslim school and town, women in headscarves bike to the mosque...

...two naked children play with a bicycle tire...

...Cambodians laid-back about haggling, not too good at it. Thais, by contrast, will actually walk away rather than offer a counterprice...

...motorbikes attached to what looks like a rowboat, with slats of wood running the length, atop which passengers sit...

...monkeys and elephants and beggars around the base of Wat Phnom. Hundreds of statues inside...

...a taste of colonial flavor in a coffee in the Elephant Bar at the Hotel Le Royal. Now restored and part of the Raffles chain, this legendary hotel had once been a star on the SE Asian colonial circuit. It served as a refuge for foreign journalists during the Vietnam War, then a sanctuary once the Khmer Rouge rolled into town. Continuing the theme, we finish the afternoon at the Foreign Correspondents Club. Happy hour beers drunk at the window, watching the last boats of the day go up the Tonle Sap. We talk with a brother and sister from the States. He's taking a group of 18 year old on a 10 month world trip. She works for an art group in Marin, most recently having hosted Gary Snyder at a reading...

...peace from the city's bustle found at the mellow history museum. Beautiful arched roofs around a lovely courtyard, the statues open to the air. Incredible to see the pieces that were missing from Angkor...

...fat cops arbitrarily point their red and white sticks at cars and trucks, pocketing wads of rolled-up baksheesh handed through windows...

...OK Guest House just that, merely okay. The staff a little surly. One guy actually seemed angry when we caught his mistake on the bill. Rather than apologize, he simply said, "Pay what you like"...

...The Killing Fields. Such a beautiful morning. Surreal to hear the voices of children as we look at the tower of bones. Chickens peck in and around the mass graves. Miki and I circumambulate the as yet disinterred mass grave, filled in as a swamp. A boy follows along on the opposite side of the fence, begging for money. In a patois strangely similar to JarJar Binks, he goes on about not going to school, about the cops always beating up on him. As we say our multiple "Sorrys," he begins to plead, his voice raised in volume and fervor. It adds an bizarre, somber accent to an already somber walk. We come back to the excavated graves again, and Miki begins to weep. She tells me later that coming from Hiroshima, she feels a kind of affinity with these victims of mass violence.
We finish our visit with a short film in the museum. It is so badly produced that I would've laughed had I been anywhere but here. The soundtrack had cliche'd horror movie music, along with occasional werewolf howls. I think that the true power of this place is enough to move anyone. The film's overwrought emotion is almost parody. In the yard again, we see a palm tree pushing up through the dead trunk of an oak, proving once again the resilience of life...

...Toul Sleng,a shop of horrors. Being in the torture rooms makes me feel physically ill. The wooden cells aren't much better, like narrow rodeo chutes. The photos of the victims are surprising in their complete lack of emotion on their faces, showing no fear, no anger. It is like they've already accepted their fates. I wonder what was going on in the minds of the children. In the final building is an interesting photo display by a Swedish socialist who'd been a member of a group brought to Cambodia in 1978 to tour the country. Interesting to see his comments from 2008, written from the vantage point of history and hindsight. As I walk these grounds, I watch the other visitors, and am unable to grasp the mentality of those who want to shoot video here, or at The Killing Fields. I can't take much more and make for the main gate. It feels strange to walk out of Toul Sleng prison, considering that, between 1975 and 1979, almost no one did...

On the turntable: Son House, "Father of the Delta Blues"

Road to Phnom Pehn

2011-07-09T01:39:00.002+09:00

December 2009

...The distended belly of a child playing with friends. Another boy slides naked down the rough wooden steps of his home. Yet another throws fruit to a monkey tied to a tree, the monkey nearly his size. Many homes have ads for tobacco or for political parties. Two men soak up to their necks in brown muddy water. Women sit under netting and pick tea. Heavy stares in a rural roadside market. A smile to an old woman in the market isn't returned. A French man buys a huge spider as a snack. Miki chooses rice mashed with banana. Motorcycles in the bus's luggage hold. The karaoke videos on the bus share a common theme: poor country/city boy pursues glamorous girl of obviously higher social status. The karaoke vids are eventually replaced by noisy Cambodian manzai routines. Heading south into a landscape that is lakes and streams, then rice fields lined with palms, then forests laden with banana trees...

On the turntable: Pink Floyd, "Meddle"

Angkor: Dreams in Stone

2011-07-04T06:12:00.004+09:00

December 2009

...Bayon smirking faces hiding secrets they won't reveal...

...monotonal hum of cicadas creates a supernatural, otherworldly feel, like film suspense music, or that track by Black Sabbath, "E5150." Any musician could quickly identify this pitch...

...two boy monks linger atop the ruins of Preah Palilay. At the foot of the ruin, a woman bathes in a sarong. A temple is a short walk away, where the head monk is busy blessing a young couple...

...a Cambodian tour guide at Angkor speaks with a Cockney accent...

...frustration at the ongoing construction at Angkor, and the inability to enter the innermost, and therefore holiest, sanctum...

...visiting Angkor at sunrise. Walking through the temple in the dark is like walking to some pagan sacrifice. The coming light brings out the temple's features, like Shiva's trident. I like the temple more like this, from a distance, features indistinguishable. Later, we have coffee and baguettes on the grass, with the temple's reflection appearing amidst the lilys on the surface of the pond...

...Miki shopping at Rin's stand, while I play with her 1 year old daughter. Rin assumes Miki is Japanese because she's 'not sexy' like the more fashionably dressed Chinese...

...ruins are more interesting the more disheveled they are. It was great to walk through the forest of Angkor Thom, duck through a hole to see a new pile of stones before us...

...head craned upward in order to aim a camera has become a form of worship of sorts, a new form up supplication...

...the landmine orchestra stops their playing once the tourists pass by...

...finding solitude in an empty courtyard of Ta Prohm, eating dried pineapple amidst the broken walls and persistent tree limbs...

...road to Bantrey Srei. A sign written with "We Don't Need Weapons." Another sign for battered wives. NGO offices interspersed throughout the jungle. Kids play in the canals. Land for sale. Volleyball games here and there. Jackfruit for sale. A hello Kitty tuk-tuk. Coconuts piled in the corner of a yard look like skulls. A guy drives golf balls out into the open fields. Eight people piled into one tuk-tuk. Miki falls asleep in ours. Later, a trio on a motorbike warns her about her scarf, which is blowing precariously close to the rear wheels--potential to strangle her, break her neck, throw her from the vehicle. A thought keeps reoccurring in my head: "Democracy comes from the Barrel of a Gun"...

...the red dust and porous rock of Bantrey Srei. Cambodians bicker in the forest beyond, cows far more grave beyond them. Entered the site after having lunch, next to a hefty, happy Frenchman. It's never a good sign when the toilets smell like what you had for lunch--fish paste mashed with rice...

...sunset at Phnom Bakheng. Thousands crammed atop the ruin to watch the sun drop into the jungle. Despite having Angkor Wat behind us, the whole experience seemed pointless. Better to watch it set behind something. The only real gain is for the elephant mahouts, shuffling lazy tourists up the mountain...

...feeding two hungry kids atop the Bakong. An even poorer looking boy in a tree is bullied by another boy heading to school. Chatting with a group of Japanese nursing students from Fukuoka. The landmine orchestra plays a traditional Japanese song as they pass. A Korean princess in high heels and Jackie-O shades doesn't even make an attempt to climb the precariously steep steps. I watch her Korean tour group climb the ruins from one side, the Japanese nurses from the other. I fantasize that they meet at the top, and a wicked kung fu battle breaks out...

...guide at Prah Ko tells us he lost 2 family members to the Khmer Rouge. He's happy with the peace but still doesn't like cops...

...monk at Lolei. he himself is a student, but is hard at work teaching English to local children. He talks with us as lunch is being prepared in the shade. His white board is filled with dozens of English words translated into Cambodian. I notice that there is no translation for 'antique'...

..artist at the Eastern Baray has paintings of Angkor scenery, monks, and a man in a wheelchair. I assume that the latter is a political statement, but find out that it is a tribute to his uncle, a landmine victim. The artist is 24, and hoping to make enough money to go to art school in Phnom Penh...

...our tuk-tuk driver, surly and unfriendly. It's beginning to affect our day. At lunch, he apologizes, telling us that the night before he'd fought with the hotel owner, quit, and had gotten drunk. This morning he's been nursing an aching head. After this he becomes nice and helpful. As he waits for us at the final temple, he flirts with a woman selling drinks. It's the first time we've seen him smile all day. Then he drops us off at our hotel, his employment there finished. We've been together all day, then our lives go in separate orbits. How American of me to want to be friends, yet our relationship is based on economics...

...Angkor Hilton owner perpetually shirtless, watching the French version of Jeopardy. Roza, the 21 year old manager, ever smiley, ever sleepy, newly married to a girl "not beautiful." Our resident gecko bounces its voice off our bathroom tiles all night. Other geckos sing from outside, each in its own distinct voice...

...the Brazilian girls at our hotel wonder if Roza, the manager, knows he has girl's name. I wonder if he knows it means 'rouge'...

..walking the Old Market grid of Siem Reap, made slightly annoying due to the impossibility of going 10 steps without someone shouting, "Hello tuk-tuk?" I've come to hate the economy here. Dollars are used but I can't approximate their ever-changing value. I do like the narrow dusty streets, the French balconies. But far too much is geared toward the tourist dollar. "Seam Reap it in," has become my mantra. I compromise on a coffee at Red Piano. I sit on the veranda of this old French building, under the cool of spinning fans. The view of the street is obscured by potted plants, but beyond can be heard the ever-present purr of moto engines, waiting...

On the turntable: Rolling Stones, "It's Only Rock'n'Roll"
On the nighttable: Bill Morgan, "I Celebrate Myself"
On the reeltable: "Nobody Knows" (Kore-eda, 2004)

To the Border

2011-06-25T05:38:00.000+09:00

December 2009

...out of Bangkok, early Sunday morning. A driver's ed course on the outskirts of town, a simple layout of tires and cones rather than the miniature manicured streets of Japan. Eastern Thailand is flat, reforested, but for the large lurking Maurice Sendak trees seen occasionally between the rows. Lots of people as work in the fields, or manning the stalls alongside the roads. There are no Sundays for the rural poor...

...Aranya Pratet, a dusty, featureless border town. Poipet across the way, the white-tile razzle dazzle of casinos. The countryside is merely rice fields, stretching away to both horizons. Dusty paths bisect them, sometimes traversed by bicycle or motorbike. The odd village pops up now and again. We stop awhile in one, talk with some kids selling bracelets. They speak good English, and a couple even speak basic Japanese. One girl asks for a coin, and we give her five yen that she can make into a necklace. She in return gives us bananas. Another girl looks hurt when I give her one yen. They seem happy despite the rural poverty out here, the houses simple and built upon stilts. The wall of one house has been recently repaired and painted with the 'trois colouers.' After dark, I notice that there is no electricity out here, single candles break the darkness within. There is a bizarre light in the sky above the fields, probably a far-off tower, but there is something otherworldly about it...

...Siem Reap has plenty of lights, Xmas decorations hanging around most of the large hotels. (I remember too seeing Santa out there somewhere, a bizarre sight in rural Cambodia.) Many of these big hotels are Korean, one with a sign for "Korean girled meat." Most of the people we've encountered are young, kids hocking their wares will grow up to lead tours and run hotels. I love that those kids we met earlier at the road stop have little, but still have to confidence to convince us to buy their bracelets for 25 cents...

On the turntable: Depeche Mode, "Music for the Masses"
On the nighttable: "RE/Search, Real Conversations #1"

Ayuthaya

2011-06-13T08:21:00.006+09:00

December 2009

...Our Thai friends Dew and Pom drove us north. When they pick us up, Dew is not allowed to enter the house that we're renting, due to her being Thai. She tells us that it feels lousy to be discriminated against by her own kind. On the way out of town, Miki waves to a palace guard, who half-raises his gun...

...at a rest stop, a group of kids is milling about. They think Dew is the farang, and speak Thai to Miki instead. I sip coffee in the sun...

...Bang Pa-in Palace isn't too interesting to me, too grand a display. A woman thinking Miki is Thai, scolds her for her improper 'wai.' A monitor lizard sunbathes beside a wide lake. The bungalows built for the consorts are small Victorians sitting on a wide grassy expanse of lawn like in a Midwest college town. A houseboat provides shade from the heat, two pink pitched roofs over water. Lazy tourists drive golf carts around the expansive site. Later, we cross a moat on a pulley system operated by young monks. Rama V built a temple here, designed as a cathedral. Bizarre to see Buddha sitting behind stained glass. A monk here has tattoos that his robes can't completely hide. Working off some prison karma, I suspect...

...a truck waits for a massive snake to cross the road. Further on, a monitor lizard doesn't share the same luck...

...a blue-eyed nun plays with some children at Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon. I press my fingers to apply gold leaf to the reclining Buddhas, then to my sweaty forehead, where the gold remains all day. Buddhist figures with their arms extended, like The Supremes doing "Stop! In the name of love." Dead turtles bob in the moat, fish dining on their feet...

...Wat Phra Mahatat and its wonderful disembodied Buddhas. (A wonderful pun, if you get it...) A film crew from Akita is shooting amongst the trees. A gay Thai man asks to take a photo with me...

...sit awhile with the Buddha at Wat Phra Si Sanphet. On the grassy lawns beyond, farang pay huge fees to ride elephants. Next door, people fire rounds at a shooting gallery. As I sit, the ruins here are invaded by kids on a school excursion. A boy steals a kiss from a girl, who protests, but follows. Twelve years ago, I had the place to myself. How can UNESCO protect what it deems worth protecting? Tourist circuses inevitably follow, destroying any value the place once had...

On the turntable: Green on Red, "The Best of..."
On the nighttable: David Desser, "The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa"
On the reel table: "Hearts and Minds" ( Davis, 1974)

The Grass is always Tastier...

2011-06-11T01:46:00.006+09:00

A decade ago, on a visit to the States from my home in rural Japan, I entered for the first time that yuppie food mecca of Whole Foods for the first time. I'd been struggling for years as a vegetarian in a country that had forgotten that that had been its traditional diet for centuries. After WWII, when the nation was occupied by an army of big-bodied meat eaters, animal parts were seen as a status symbol, a way of elevating you above your poor, malnourished, millet-eating neighbor. The custom stuck and by the '90s, finding a restaurant meal sans meat was an exercise in developing the purest Zen-like patience. Pork oil in the ramen. Beef stock in the soups. The real whack of the keisaku was settling yet again on a salad, only to find bacon in the dressing. I eventually found Tengu Foods in Saitama, and mail order became a monthly exercise, though admittedly, this wasn't the most eco-friendly, sustainable solution. Thus, entering Whole Foods was an epiphany. In the States, I could eat in a way that was healthy for both myself and the planet. I toyed with the idea of returning to the States within the year.

Life is a fickle percussionist, and I didn't get back here until a year ago. And now, I can barely stand Whole Foods, the extremities of its prices nearly equaling that of the pretension. Meanwhile, I've been visiting the blogs of a handful of expats who've done an I-turn into the Japanese countryside. Many have recipes included. So here I sit, mouth watering over photos of homegrown veggies, mulling a possible return to that great supermarket without walls...

On the turntable: Everything but the Girl, "Baby, The Stars Shine Bright"
On the nighttable: Yoshida Kiju, "Ozu's Anti-Cinema"
On the reeltable: "Food, Inc."

Visions of Bangkok 2

2011-05-29T02:32:00.010+09:00

December 2009

...Weaving beneath the high walls of Thammasat U., along streets selling Buddhist art and amulets. In front of nearly every amulet stall is a man with a monocle to one eye, examining the quality of the stones. Monks swathed in saffron peruse Buddhist statues carved of wood and stone. And there is of course food: fruits and chicken and fish. I get some chicken fried in garlic, washed down with a whole coconut. The vendors aren't pushy at all, not bothered if you don't buy...

...sunset cocktails at The Oriental. Not the Bamboo Bar made famous in the writing of a generation of scriveners, but out on the patio beside the river. At the next table, a pair of Dubai businessmen have a meeting with a well-dressed, quick-talking Thai woman. This interweaving of the region is foreign to both my American and Japanese selves. It speaks a completely different vocabulary, dialect, language. Southeast Asia and its complexity of linked cultures intrigues...

...another night on the Chao Praya, eating on the patio on the opposite bank of the river. Neon lit dinner boats cruise slowly past, some with bands playing on board, traditional dancers somehow finding balance on one foot. Tugs pulling barges laden with sand represent the economic spectrum's other end, their dark hulking forms blocking any light emitting from the opposite shore. After dinner we go next door to the Patravadi Theater, to watch an eclectic mix of Thai and modern dance and musical styles. The lead performer dresses in the traditional way, but has the look and moves of a butoh dancer...

...an uninspired walk through the Grand Palace, and its attached wat, one chedi looking like a wedding cake, and another chedi a solid piece of gold that makes me think of the equally absurd Asahi Brewery Sperm. Outside again, I look once again through the palace gates, flanked by lethargic looking guards. A far cry from the erect poses of Buckingham Palace. I'd love to see a pair of these Thai guards frolicking barefoot on the grass behind, guns down, playing frisbee...

...Wat Pho massage not quite as good as I remember, but a good review of my own Thai Massage training. (The last time I was here I was lured in by a beautiful young Thai girl, only to be worked on by a pair of hands decades older. Fishing for farang.) Afterward, we walk the wat at night, having it mostly to ourselves. Being alone with the reclining Buddha is a rare treat, and we linger long. A nice consolation to Bangkok's smog is that the light amidst the forest of chedi is as lovely as it gets, though it is impossible to capture on film, despite Hollywood's moniker of 'magic hour'...

...Miki and I join the 'cool' of Khao San Rd., sitting at a cafe table and watching the world. Thai girls in scanty dresses hustle street traffic for business. One of them can't be more than 11 years old, but already looks hardened. In sharp contrast are the hill-tribe women, tottering along and selling their headdresses and noisy wooden frogs. Slick Sikhs grasps hands of passing travelers and greet them with, "You are a lucky man!" Music pulsing, pulsing, less like a heart filled with excitement but more like a cerebrum on the brink of hemorrhage. Backpackers lurch by, the ones with their packs on looking like they just stepped off the moon. Their bags are huge these days, and what's with the rain covers? I hate how the farang always keep these packs on, clustering in small shops and blocking the way. Carts, vendors, punters--everyone--rushing suddenly to the curbside when the cops occasionally pass through...

...riding the river buses up and down. Boats of all sizes. Most pleasurable to the eye are the roly-poly brown ones that plod across like top-heavy turtles. Cops on jet-skis jump their wakes, slalom the clumps of river weeds drifting slowly by. Long-tailed engines like dragonflies. The city's extreme poor are housed in shacks along the banks. The flow of the river counts time in its own unique way...

...Climbing the lego set that is Wat Arum. The lazy alleys behind, monks dozing, children queuing in their boy scout uniforms...

...life in Asia is life lived on the streets. (I've always thought of Kyoto in the same way, that most Asian of Japan's cities.) There seems to be little separation of life and work. The movable feasts of cart and boat. Food displayed in inflated bags...

...Imported personalities such as Ronald McDonald and The Michelin Man 'wai' in front of their respective shops...

...the dainty way that Thai women handle money...

...the birthday bash for the King. They love him here, his photo everywhere, in various poses and at various ages. My favorite is him playing the sax. For his bash, there are fireworks and Xmas lights strung from trees. One street is closed to car traffic, but packed with bodies dancing and singing to some live band, apparently incredibly famous...

...Khao San Rd, Sunday dawn. Twenty-four hour Burger King. Broken bottles down the streets...

On the turntable: Kevin Seconds, "Heaven's Near Wherever You Are"

Visions of Bangkok

2011-05-19T01:32:00.000+09:00

December 2009

...the obvious economic power in Sukumvit, where the Thai women look bigger than those lower down the economic ladder, they're taller and curvier like the Asian women further north. Many are doing ablutions around Erawan, to the accompanying music of tradition dancers and musicians. I'm amazed at how young most of the worshippers are, how seamless the fusion of commerce and spirit...

...tuk-tuk scurries across the city. The driver picks up his wife, who bats him about the shoulders or shrieks when he does something reckless, which eggs him on even more. We three in the back share a bond, as we rush between tons of chrome and steel, choking on exhaust fumes...

...the surly staff at The Atlanta. My mother for 2 days, grabbing my wallet and cash when I'm too confused and tired to pay my taxi driver. Lightly slapping my cheek when I can't find my visa. Slapping Miki's hand when she uses the wrong utensils. Late night dip in Thailand's first swimming pool. Sitting in the high red booth, which, like the menu, haven't changed since the hotel opened back in 1952. (The music here is two decades older still.) The hyperbole of the signs around the place, threats and insults softened by the erudition. The desks reserved for writing, and the books penned by former guests. A glimpse of "The Queen," as she's led quietly to her Volvo, her cat ceaselessly yowling in its cage. Her son, the mysterious Charles Henn, being simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Ah, The Atlanta! Such a reminder of more genteel times...

...a cabbie, all smiles and seemingly without a care, as he leans against his brokedown cab on the highway late at night. An example of 'Mai Pen Rai" optimism vs. the fatalism of "Shoganai"...

...farang circus on Khao San Rd. Slumping, hulking, frowning beasts. No one talks at any of the cafe tables, just looking cool and seeing who comes by. Posers. Khao San on steroids now, spilling into the street itself. A far cry from the week I spent here in 1997, though I did notice the change beginning during another visit in 2003. A different breed of backpacker now, more Asians and Eastern Europeans, the latter unmistakable since they swagger like thugs. A meaner spirit here now, less experience and more consumption (though that may have also been true back in '97). Western girls showing ridiculous amounts of flesh, their nearly visible breasts swinging in tank tops like udders. A cop with his vice grip on a young Thai who's nearly gone limp. Another Thai (friend? foe?) stands nearby yelling at him. A couple of seedy looking foreign guys involved somehow. The whole street looks on, except for the cafe workers who try to ignore it and keep busy. "Something to drink, sir?" Miki and I spend half the day here prepping for our journeys out. We stay at the D&D, but their are no dungeons or dragons to be seen. We are happy with our cheap, quiet room, until returning at night to find we're just below the rooftop bar which pumps bass downward until late. Change rooms the next day, then change hotels the next, moving away from Khao San entirely to a small dark rental house nearby, which has no hot water and loses its electricity after dusk. Many late night massages. Free breakfast on the carp patio, watched over by a cross-eyed cat. Fireworks for the King's birthday, watched from the roof of the D&D, bursting over the city like it's under siege by the red shirts, who'd demonstrated near the Democracy monument earlier in the day. (This political tension hung over our entire trip, with the king lying ill in hospital. Had he died, we planned to flee the country immediately. But the violence held off for a few more months, before erupting in March.) As the explosions rock the city, the Western punters below, oblivious due to the rock-blockin' beats, party on...

On the turntable: X-Ray Spex, "Germfree Adolescents"

Taipei Notes

2011-05-06T02:40:00.003+09:00

December 2009

A train took us into Taipei. Unlike in Japan, no one was texting, though a few people had no qualms about talking on their cell phones in soft voices. More than a few phones had really stupid ringtones. We had a brief adventure in trying to exchange dollars, bills of a 1996 vintage being problematic for some reason. The height of this comedy was when we couldn't figure out how to cross the street to a bank in clear view. The drama was compounded in trying to figure out how to deal with the chips used as subway tokens.

We got off the MRT and had a Chinese Pizza and tea, a delicious and cheap lunch. The better part of the afternoon was spent at the National Museum, a place I'd long wanted to visit. We tried to see the exhibits chronologically, zigzagging from room to room as this place has no rhyme or reason in regard to layout. We started our tour slowly, amazed by jade possibly as old as 8000 years. But these and the pottery began to grow tedious after an hour. It was interesting to see their progression through time, and how styles had changed based on things like spiritual and political change, contact with foreign influences, etc. I was also comparing this with chronologically parallel art over in Japan. But I really wanted to see more statues, more paintings, and more spiritual art in general. (I got an inadvertent glimpse of the latter when a young woman stood staring at a blank space behind glass.) The ever-increasing crowds also began to grate, their numbers surprising on a weekday. Unlike the Japanese, who queue and file past, making it easy for me (at 6' 1") to see over their heads, the Chinese cluster like a rugby scrum. At one display, Miki and I found ourselves completely surrounded, and pressed to the glass. The most popular displays were those related to a specific personage, proving that the cult of personality is ever-pervading. I was also surprised by the number of video and interactive exhibits. A shame that people can't seem to relate to a simple static item anymore.

We'd expected to spend most of the day at the museum, but after a few hours, our brains were full. We did, however, save room for leftovers. The nearby aboriginal museum was intriguing, but had a sad lack of English explanation. I was impressed by the spirit poles, a pot with 2 intertwining serpents, and weapons used to subdue evil spirits.

We went back across town to the Chiang Kai Shek memorial. The large building was at the end of a huge open plaza, and his figure, seated in his chair atop a high flight of steps. was reminiscent of Mr. Lincoln. On the veranda of the equally massive National Theater, some students were practicing acrobatic routines. Out on the tiles, people queued up to have their photo taken with a dog. While observing all this, I loved this feeling of incongruity, that lack of understanding that I've long lost in Japan. It is always fun to hear of things mysterious to visitors to Japan, and today I could rekindle that sense of wonder. How easy to it to accept that which you don't understand.

In the Memorial itself, we caught the tail end of the odd performance known as the changing of the guard. Five men took turns high-stepping and suddenly freezing into strange poses, like an bizarre game of freeze-tag. I suppose they needed the exercise after standing still at attention for so long. I find these displays have an equal dose of the comic and the horrifying. I had a similar reaction to the propaganda downstairs, pictures of scenes from the generalissimo's life, his writing, his cars, and the mock-up of his office. There was a strong emphasis on his awards, international recognition, and photos with other heads of state. It was like the unpopular kid who tries so hard to be accepted by the big boys. I got into a conversation with an 80 year-old mainlander from Fukien, though unfortunately I didn't ask his opinion on all this. But I didn't need to ask the opinion of another man of similar age, who when entering the hall, removed his cap and bowed deeply to the bust of General Chiang.

It was growing dark as Miki and I walked the streets now crowded with traffic, past a couple of the old city gates. The phallic 101 building continually lurked over our shoulders, proving that the government's craving for international acceptance didn't end with ole' Chiang Kai Shek. We stumbled across an alley now renovated to look as it did before the occupying Japanese bypassed it with the broader avenue beside. The buildings flanking the alley were empty but for a few small displays amidst brick and beam. I can see cafes and restaurants here in a few years.

Nearby was Longshan temple, completely abustle. People of all ages were chanting, kneeling in prayer, or holding joss sticks at 45 degree angles from their foreheads. We eavesdropped on a Japanese tour in order to hear about the figures to whom the Taiwanese were bowing. Our timing was perfect as the guide quickly ran through the names, then said suddenly, "OK. Let's eat!" to the obvious relief of the tour. We had no idea if all the activity here was a festival, or simply an average night, but you'd think it was Christmas by all the numbers here. One young man in a dress shirt and tie was sitting full lotus and chanting, one hand raised vertically to his chest. An old woman came over, and with obvious displeasure, did some weird mojo in his direction.

We walked a couple of blocks over to Snake Alley, the only other place I knew about in Taipei. It was a let down. Rather than a market awash with rampant and dangerous serpents, there were only a couple of dismal and near-empty shops, though one of them did host a lovely albino python. Nearly as interesting were the few shops with sexual paraphernalia, plus a few pitiful hookers lurking down alleys. All the food on display around here stimulated a different desire in Miki, who bought a phallic cob of corn to eat on the way to the train station...

...our last morning in Taiwan was spent slowly, over tea. Got to Taipei around noon, dropped the bags, and went up to a couple of temples. The Confucian Temple was newly restored last year, a bright blue, with lovely walled gardens and ponds. The Taoist counterpart nearby was all red and brick, looking older, but vibrant. The Confucian Temple was more a museum, yet the gardens offered a quiet escape from the city. From atop the Taoist temple's 4th floor, we could see Yangmingshan to the north, the stacked up Chinese-take out boxes of the 101 building to the south. There were so many things here that we hadn't seen, post pilgrimage fatigue catching up with us, and a few quiet days were more fitting to our mood than rushing around a busy city. We'd be back.

The neighborhood around the temples was very intriguing, but we'd have to wait for that next visit. A nearby Rinzai Temple was a garish yellow against the hills. The soccer stadium next door was in the midst of being torn down, looking like a Roman ruin. With the Asian Games being held here next summer (2010), this whole area will have a different look the next time I'm here. At the airport, we checked into the mysterious Air Asia, a steal at a mere 50 dollar ticket from Taipei to Bangkok. They said nothing about my bag being 2 kg overweight. As we boarded our flight, I hoped that they wouldn't be as lax about things such as the number of bolts on the plane's fuselage...

On the turntable: Grateful Dead, "Santa Fe Downs, 10-17-82."

After the Quake...

2011-04-26T01:26:00.001+09:00

March 1st, Miki and I moved from our mountain home in Tesuque to the extreme southern edge of Santa Fe, the desert mere steps off our back door. Then, a week and a half later, Japan was in turmoil. I was unable to write anything, or barely even think. I stayed in the realm of feeling for a while. Then the words returned. I had a piece ready to post here, but chose instead to publish it in #quakebook. I'll eventually post the original, but for now you can read it in a shorter, less acerbic form here:

http://www.quakebook.org/buy-quakebook/

I also wrote a piece for the Write for Tohoku project, available here:

http://fortohoku.org/

These two digital books cost $9.95 each, which will provide you to with a good read while simultaneously supporting the survivors in Tohoku.

On the turntable: Jefferson Airplane: "The Volunteers Sessions"

Chungli notes, Dec. 2009

2011-04-08T07:45:00.011+09:00

It was our 4th day in Taiwan. Our new friend Olimpia had picked up up at the airport and brought us back to their spacious flat in Chungli. After a quick tea, we had Teppenyaki at a small Japanese place around the corner, mere hours after leaving Japan itself. Later, we took the dog to run around the beautiful banyan trees lining the roads. One in particular had a root system which pushed it a meter above the ground. Slawek finished work and we went out to the night market to look around. the stalls ran down both sides of the street, many converted to food shops, various smells intermingling. Snakes tangled together in cages were also considered potential edibles. The scent that stood out most was "stinky tofu," pungent and strong like Nuc Mam. Nearby, Slawek's Polish friend was doing the best business, selling his "Polish cakes." A group of about 20 people, mostly young, was completely surrounding his table. He spoke to us entirely in Polish, which according to Slawek is his wont. He started this business two years ago; after a party, he told a couple of friends to try to sell the cakes that remained at the end of the night. This they did in less than 20 minutes. Now, he makes more money in a night than Slawek does at the University in a month.

Next was dinner at a Hakka restaurant. Over a table with the obligatory lazy-susan at the center, we shared various things, including a complimentary cold, sliced duck, downed with a weak Taiwanese beer. The food was good, except for the shrimp, covered in vanilla icing and sprinkles.
Later red wine until late...

...coming back from Taipei the next night, Miki and I completely forgot about rush hour until we were crushed into the last train car. Chungli Station was equally manic, with an election truck howling away in full force, fireworks shooting horizontally in every direction, and a procession of at least 200 supporters waving and smiling inanely. For a full 10 minutes, they blocked the entrance to the station, preventing all traffic, buses, and taxis from coming in or out. The loudspeakers on Japanese election trucks may be annoying, but these clowns had brought the whole city to a stop. Unreal.

We took a bus to campus, had a uninspired dinner, and waited for Slawek to finish his soccer practice. We sat on the grass and talked with a couple exchange students. One, from Guatemala, absolutely loved it here, and planned to stay on longer once his program finished. The other had the opposite opinion, badly missing his wife and two daughters and was counting the days until graduation in May.

While waiting for Olimpia to pick us up, we sat on the campus' open lawn beneath a huge banyan tree. As dogs frolicked around us (dogs in Taiwan always seem to be merrily running somewhere), Slawek told us about a Canadian gone missing. A couple of friends went to visit a woman with certain spiritual gifts, who said that the Canadian was currently in a deep trance, essentially made the pet of a group of aborigines deep in the mountains of the south. On a follow up visit to the woman, she revealed that he had suddenly snapped out of the trance, so the villagers had been forced to killed him. We continued in this vein, talking of things unexplainable, until Olimpia came and rescued us from the encroaching darkness...

...the next day, we barely left the house except for a few hours in the afternoon. We'd finished our long 1600 km walks only a few weeks before, and welcomed the chance to lay low to recoup. Slawek had told us of a restaurant near the University which intrigued him, but had never visited. It was one of those places of classic Chinese design, with moon windows framed with lattice-work, and walkways zigzagging over ponds brimming with carp. We thought it a wonderful place to sit and linger with our books, but the prices scared us off, and we rushed out past an obviously angry waitress.

We found a cheaper, modern coffee joint back in the city proper, where we read until our massage. This was the fourth massage I'd had since finishing the Shikoku Henro, but was the only one that had wrenched those last bits of tension out. I paid a serious price in pain. Miki and I were both silent as we ate dinner, the beef noodle soup that I'd been seeking for days.

Slawek and Olympia were up in Taipei for a party, and we had the place to ourselves, in exchange for dogsitting Maya. We took her for a walk, her behaving well despite being off leash on these narrow, well-trafficked streets, obeying all the commands I issued in a bad Polish accent. But at one point, she suddenly stopped and turned back toward the house. I ran to catch her and carried her to the park, her shivering violently as we sat on a bench. We thought that it was the sound of one of those election trucks that set her off, and that we'd wait until it passed. But 20 minutes later, we gave up. When I set her down, she turned and literally sprinted all the way home, Miki and I trying to catch up, yet failing despite running on legs strengthened by 10 weeks of walking. The city polls had closed and they were apparently celebrating the election with a full-on fireworks display, well visible from the 11th-story flat. They continued for 2 hours, with Maya cowering on the sofa the entire time...

On the turntable: Frankie Goes to Hollywood, "Liverpool"
On the nighttable: Miyamoto Tsuneichi, "The Forgotten Japanese"

Shihtoushan, Dec. 2009, Pt. 2

2011-03-30T02:33:00.007+09:00

...was awoken at 5 by a bell ringing from one of the temples on Shihtoushan. Slept again, but had to get up for 6:30 breakfast. We found ourselves the only ones there. It was a simple meal of congee and veggies, thankfully less oily than usual. There was also a triple-decker sandwich of peanut butter and tofu, as well as the obligatory steamed buns. We decided to save these for lunch, and as we walked toward the door to look for a baggie, the caretaker yelled at us for wasting food, until he figured it out. We relaxed and read in our room until 9:30 or so, then decided to go over the mountain. A long steep flight of stone steps led to the top. There was a woman about 30 meters above us. I heard her shriek, then yell something down to us. I thought she was talking about some stones that had fallen just beside her and were now rolling our way. Then I saw the snake, about two meters long, greenish yellow with black dots. It was racing downhill toward us, veering suddenly up the slope again when it got close. At the temple at the top of the hill, we again found the woman talking to a couple of old nuns, gesturing wildly to tell them that the snake had fallen from the cliffs above, landing at her feet and scaring the crap out of her. She laughed and pointed in our direction. In her broken English, I caught two words: "beautiful," and "poison." Much later, I came across a picture of this type of snake. A Russell's Viper, one of the most deadly in the world.

At the next temple, we met a friendly young nun who spoke good English. She spent the next half hour explaining all the figures here, to our relief, since they'd been puzzling us since yesterday. Our talk was occasionally broken by another visitor, who paid this nun great deference. It was apparent that she was someone of great respect and importance, but we never got her name. Further down the mountain was another temple, a cave temple like the others, but this one was an actual cavern rather than a ornate building erected across a gap in the cliff face. The entrance looked to have been re-carved, evidence of rebuilding after the 1999 earthquake. The monk we met there had a kind face but didn't speak. Miki commented that the women's temples seemed softer than those of the men. This point was proven at a small Confucian temple back up on the ridgetop. Three old men were sitting back in conversation, and seemed quite reluctant to let us enter. OK, fellas, keep your boys club...

We ate our lunch at a pavilion above Chiuanhua Hall , then dropped down a steep narrow trail through the jungle. Midway down were some Chinese characters carved into the rock wall, alongside some bizarre cuts that looked like the face of a gorilla. At the bottom of the steps was a rowhouse, abandoned but for a single residence in the middle. A man was sitting inside, watching a TV that blared its drivel into the jungle. As the bus stop was directly across the road, we in turn sat and watched him. Chinese homes are open like dollhouses, so we could his every move. When an exercise program came on, he sat astride his scooter which was close to the set, then followed the arm and neck stretches onscreen. This finished, he returned to his seat further back, yet could only remain seated for a few minutes at a time. He'd get up, go pull some weeds, then sit. get up, walk across the road, return, and sit. He repeated this for the 45 minutes we were there, though we don't know how it all turned out since the bus came by about then and took us away.

We followed the river back to the city. One stretch of hillside had been cleared of jungle in order to erect graves that were almost the size of some Japanese apartments. In Asian societies, the dead always get the best real estate. The temples that served them also made the occasional appearance, their ornate roofs always looking in need of a shave. On the train platform, we sipped our long awaited tapioca shake and nearby, a woman popped her son's pimples. We walked from Chung-li's station, past the youth culture monuments that flanked the station, moving back in time past shops that served the needs of their parents and grandparents. Later, after dark, my friend Slavek showed up with a couple of colleagues from the University, one French, the other Mongolian. We sat at a dark back table of a local drinking hole, eating wings and drinking beer. The design was of any similar establishment back in the States: long bar, funky art, pool table. A few of the local expat teaching crew were in attendance, served by a friendly Chinese girl with perfect English. Accent American, of course. I thought of all the other expat nights I've crashed -- Seoul, Nanjing, Miyake...

On the turntable: Talking Heads, "Stop Making Sense"

Shihtoushan, Dec. 2009

2011-03-09T02:18:00.009+09:00

We were walking through the forest when I noticed the birdsong. It was different than that of the birds which had serenaded us in Shikoku and Kumano. The forest opened onto a large parking lot, revealing a pagoda atop one hill, and Chuanhua Monastery above it on another. Here we'd spend the night.

We'd left early from Zhungli. With time to kill until the train, we walked the narrow streets surrounding the station. It was a busy Sunday morning, and Miki commented that she felt that fashion here in Taiwan was a simpler, scaled down version of the fashion in Japan. We laughed at how Mr. Donuts says, "Japan's #1" where the ones in Japan tout America. Circular signs hang in front of 7-11, advertising coffee and mimicking the familiar Starbucks logo. Beauty salons have sexily-clad employees and I wonder if they're a front for prostitution. There are different faces on the streets, speaking in different rhythms, making me wonder if they are maids and if they are Filipinas.

The train we take is an exact replica of an express train in Japan. From it, we get our first glimpses of true countryside. It is landscape I'd been expecting, jungle and rice fields, none of this cold urban stuff of the last few days. A lone dirt house sits squat between these two extremes. In front, a man squats and soups the rims of a luxury car.

After 45 minutes, we are in a quieter town. Trying to find the bus, we head down a road lined with shops now becoming familiar. What surprises us is a bride and groom coming out of a comic shop and getting into a Lexus doled up for the occasion. Well-dressed young women stand nearby, taking photos and wearing wide smiles. We spy a foreign couple walking with a Chinese man. The latter helps us find our bus and after 10 minutes we're aboard. At the bus stop, a young couple expresses their affection. Behind them, a shop keeper rocks her toddler to sleep, despite Eminem blaring through the speakers above. There's a market going on at the center of town. The bus can't make a turn due to a couple of poor-looking peasant women who've set up shop at one corner, their goods overflowing into the street. The driver yells at them to move, and after a moment, we inch forward, unsnarling the traffic backed up in three directions.

The town drops away and the mountains loom up. Our eyes follow a river awhile, then taking a wild guess, we get off the bus in exactly the right place. There's just a hint of a village here, just outside the gate leading to the mountain temple complex. We enter a small restaurant and mime-order noodles and rice. A woman at the next table talks in a really loud voice, something I'd grown used to during travels in China, but hadn't yet seen in the more refined Taiwan. A boy sits in the kitchen doing his homework on a day so sunny it is shame to waste it indoors. A poster above him shows us a picture of Bigfoot on the moon, appearing from behind a rock in that familiar stride.

Next door is a small shop where we decide to stock up on snacks for the hike. The woman behind the counter is busy making betel. She is dressed much more conservatively than those binlang girls decades younger selling their wares in the glass booths in the cities, their skirts shorter than the odds of the KMT retaking the mainland. The woman seems determined that I try some of the betelnut, which she is spreading inside some sort of shell with a butterknife. I pop some in my mouth, spitting a massive blob of red out onto the road outside. The woman laughs. Miki asks for some, and the woman suddenly stops laughing, seemingly annoyed. We never find out why. Is it because Miki's a woman, and they don't do betel? Or is it because she's Japanese? The latter is doubtful, since most people think she's local, continuing to speak to her in Mandarin even after it's obvious she doesn't understand anything. On the final climb up the stone stairs to the temple, another betel seller on a landing chooses to speak with her in English, asking her how she can be so beautiful. Miki smiles, vindicated. Perhaps this man is the betel seller's husband?

We find our room at the temple, the key handed over by a woman happy to use her rusty English. It is a plush room, with a big bed and balcony. Not bad for 64 NT (1800 yen) a person. We do fell slightly disappointed at not being able to do "A Day in the Life" of the monks here. We'd expected bland common meals, tepid baths, austere sleeping quarters, crack of dawn chanting. Which is why we came. But the room pleases.

Time to explore. In the main hall, Buddha, Confucious, and Lao Tzu all sit together. Upstairs, they each have their own section, but down here, they intermingle. In front of them is Matsu, Goddess of the Sea. I know her better as Tien Hau from my time in Hong Kong. She mysteriously gets the place of honor in this, the Hall of Earth. The grounds have the usual Chinese 'look,' of lattice gates, three-legged iron incense pots, tea pavilions, phoenixes and dragons guarding every eave. A trail leads us away, where a man is playing a bamboo flute. It is similar to the shakuhachi, but with a differently carved mouthpiece. I pick one up and begin to play, and the man begins to instruct me in Japanese. We'd heard that many of the old timers can speak it, but he's the first we've come across. He plays a few songs--a couple classics, some Misora Hibari. As he plays, Miki sings along, as does a Chinese man strolling by. Later, when we meet this latter man again, we try to ask him how he knows these songs, but outside the lyrics, we don't share a common language.

The trail brings us to a Taoist temple. A nun clad in maroon is chanting, a trio kneeling behind her, their voices harmonizing beautifully. I step around back to look into the grotto itself, which contains a single statue of an immortal, its expression both soft and tough simultaneously. Coming back around again, I find that one of the chanters is now sobbing. I'm assuming that this is a memorial service of some kind. A man comes over and speaks to her kindly yet sternly, warning her perhaps that the crying may confuse the spirit, bringing it back to this world rather than allowing to pass into the next where it has already found immortality.

Further up the mountain is a temple dedicated to Kuan Yin. The statue outside looks similar to Kannon over in Japan, but with its long face and large hands it has the androgynous look of a drag queen Beside the temple is a small grotto with a small red-faced figure with bulging eyes and wild frizzy hair. His red face is that of a drunk. I wish there was an explanation somewhere, but I wouldn't be able to read it anyway. We follow the trail around, other figures looming up in the forest. One Kuan Yin sits in meditation before a high rock wall, a heart locket around her neck.

Back at the room, we read for a few hours on the balcony, eating ice cream, drinking coffee. It is peaceful here, and we decide to stay another day, rather than rush north to Wulai. Below us, someone is playing er hu, singing boisterously. Around five o'clock, the day trippers go, the shutters of the shops shut. The mountains beyond disappear into the mist and fading light, the pagoda before us blending into the trees.

In the dining hall, we have a simple dinner of tofu disguised as meat. There are no monks here. Due to the absence of these fingers, we go look at the moon. The halls are empty and we have the gold statues to ourselves. A caretaker comes up and despite our making it obvious that we don't speak Chinese, proceed to explain. We listen but don't understand. Except for the words Kung Si, Lao Si, Ami Tamo.
Confucious, Lao Tzu, Buddha...

On the turntable: Rodney Crowell, "Sex and Gasoline"

'Round Shikoku Day 36

2011-02-25T02:22:00.002+09:00

This will be the last post of the Shikoku series. The fuller, more fleshed out tale of the journey will hopefully be available in book form sometime in the future. Stay tuned...

I had probably the worst sleep of the entire pilgrimage. The stoically hard zen futon gave little comfort, and my aching knees and shoulders kept me awake. We rose with the bell calling the residents to zazen. To have taken part would've prevented us from leaving until well after 7. Too late for us. So we'd agreed beforehand that we'd go before the 5:15 sitting. It was stil full dark as we made our way up the road. The moon was full and bright enough to guide us without any other lighting. But I didn't think it was safe yet to enter the forest. After 30 minutes we came to a small coffee shop I'd noticed the previous day. Here we sat, with our meager breakfast, watching a cat play and waiting for light. Finally, the sun came up, once again bringing definition to the world.

We entered the trail, and minutes later, heard something very large move through the forest above us. Unmistakably, a bear. We moved quickly now, making an incredible racket, whistling and hitting our staffs on rocks and trees. Past the Taishi statue at the trail confluence, we began our descent toward Temple 80, the trail getting steeper and steeper. This would've been a rough climb, and I knew we'd chosen our route well. Before I could congratulate myself too much, I was startled by the sound of another animal, a boar this time, moving through the grass just off trail. We rushed even faster toward the valley floor. Beneath us, the low mountains of Kagawa were like gumdrops.

Midway down, we began to pass henro. Weeks ago, Monoshiri had told us that in doing this pilgrimage counterclockwise, you encounter far more people, and it was true. We passed about 8 people in less than 20 minutes. They'd all stayed in minshuku at the bottom, and this being early morning, were still clustered up in parade formation. We'd been keeping pace with our own group of a half dozen or so, and these folks were now a day behind. Some nodded hello, others stopped to ask conditions ahead, or to ask what day we were on. This latter question had begun to appear around Temple 66. We were all nearing the end, and rather than a feeling of competition, it was more like we were brothers-in-arms, encouraging one another while sharing something profound, something with obvious, yet still undetermined repercussions. Miki and I often did this amongst ourselves, wondering how far a certain henro had gotten, or noting that someone semed to be having a particularly hard time today.

Unsure of the trail, we weaved around irrigation ponds and olive groves to Temple 80. Another Kokubunji, and like the others (besides the one in Ehime), didn't have dramatice scenery or dazzling structures, but had something undefinable that resonates longer and deeper anyway. Amidst the trees and subtle beauty, we met a foreign henro couple, the first for us. She'd started from the beginning, with her boyfriend later coming over to Japan to join her. We didn't talk long, as the four of us felt that nagging internal voice that said, "Get going."

As we still moving out of the traditional order, the path was poorly marked. The actual path down from 82 dropped down the other side of the mountain. We instead moved along its foot, through the outskirts of Takamatsu, a city we'd seen begin to awake earlier from our pre-dawn aerie.

At temple 83, we ran into Confused Henro again. We dubbed him this since every time we'd seen him, he was off the path and looking around frantically for it. A man in his 70s, he'd intended to do it by bicycle. However, his bike had broken down, so he was finishing it on foot. While most walkers had been at this for a month by this point, he was still in the early learning stages of walking, which explained the pained and bewildered look on his face most of the time. He gave us a bag of 8 mikan as settai, which I believe was less a gift than a means of reducing weight carried. As this was settai, we felt obliged to accept, eating most of them on the spot in order to reduce our own burden.

From here, we followed a canal diagonally across the entire face of Takamatsu. I'm sure the city has spots of beauty, but they weren't revealed to us. The canal fed the sea, and above it all rose Yashima. It is a famous battle site of the Gempei War, and a place I'd long wanted to see, though I hadn't known of the connection with the Henro until that moment.

All day we'd been looking forward to a dirt trail, but the path up was concrete switchback all the way. The feet said, "Groan!" At the top was a large grassy park with the temple at the center. As a tourist site, they'd used the museum's proceeds to concrete absolutely everything. But again, temple's with the ugliest faces often contain the nicest personalities within. The man in the nokyo-jo chatted with us about the history. He gave us cakes as settai as we left.

The park surrounding the temple had been our intended camp spot for the night. But our early start left us with more daylight for walking, so we decided to carry on an extra hour to the base of the mountain upon which Temple 85 sat. But we had to get off this particular mountain first. The trail down was the steepest of the whole pilgrimage, and with my heavy pack, made for some rather tough going. With every step, I felt like someone was pushing me from behind.

Along the final stretch were plenty of jizo. I felt especially bad for those who died after coming so far. Most pitiful of all were those who'd died at the many stones marking significant places in the Yashima battle. The majority were for warriors who'd fallen there. I could picture a henro reclining in the shade of one of these for a little rest, then never getting up, joined eternally with history.

We pitched our tent at dusk, in a bicycle shed next to the cable car station. It was a good spot, offering good protection against the cold, and near the toilets. From this height, we could see the river below, with Yashima looking like Diamond Head on the other side, all backlit by the lights of Takamatsu. After setting up, we walked back down aways to an Udon restaurant. To Miki's chagrin, it was a chain shop rather than the mom and pop Sanuki place that she'd longed for. We stayed here for a couple of hours, keeping warm and trying to catch up on our journals, which seemed to be perpetually 4 days behind. Back at camp to settle into what would become a good solid sleep, on this, our last night spent in the tent.

On the turntable: Tomita, "Music for Living Sound"

'Round Shikoku Day 34

2011-02-16T06:13:00.004+09:00

We'd wanted to stay in a shukubō once during the Henro but preferably one on a mountain. Last night we discovered that most have closed, and the rest only offer rooms to groups. This final piece of information clinches it for me: this whole thing has deteriorated to the pursuit of money. My experiences here have led me to see a pattern in the way religion is going in this country--priced and packaged for tourist consumption. But maybe I'm simply a skeptic about religion in general.

Yet Temple 71 was the type of place to renew my faith. These mountain temples built in and around forbidding rock formations and cliffs. The stairs alone were enought to drive away those without strong intent; it is nice to see the car henro work for a change. One of them was a 91 year old pilgrim who had made it to the top on rickety legs and a cane. He stubbornly refused help from anyone. That for me defines true shugyo.

Those willing to make the effort were rewarded with statues and altars built into the caves, lit with candles, which caused their features to flicker from fierce to loving. This, like Muroto, was the place where the dead return to linger amongst the living. And my own dead returned to me in a powerful way. After we dropped back down between lakes and bamboo groves, we stopped for a break. I held a mikan in my hand and started to think about how few fruits and veggies I ate prior to coming to Japan. This led me to think about my vegetarian days, and I couldn't remember when I had started to eat everything again. Was it during those days after Ken's death? I suddenly had powerful memories of evenings in my dark kitchen, cooking for two people instead of three, as I always had. The sobs suddenly came, and I found myself crying in a way that I hadn't in years. I kept it up for a good 20 minutes, walking down the road, with tears coming down.

Temple 72, a quiet spot of peace, helped calm me. Temple 73 had the opposite effect. A famous site on the pilgrimage, its small confines were packed with about 200 people. There was also a photo exhibition in one of the halls, including a picture of the Dancer Henro we'd met a month ago at Temple 18. We moved away, back down to Temple 72 where we'd left our bags. We searched the shaded grounds for the famous pine but found that it, like most of the other trees associated with the pilgrimage, had died a number of years ago. As we left, a woman sat on a bench wiggling her achy feet. Just beyond the gate, a couple in a car kindly slowed to let us pass on the narrow path, but a moment later, a priest came roaring past in his luxury car without a care.

At Temple 74 we had a surprise in Miki's brother and his wife. As today was a national holiday, they decided to spend the day walking with us. This particular temple wasn't much to speak of, the grounds hardly distinguishable from the parking lot that surrounded it. The hill that backed it, where the child Taishi had spent so much of his time, was being carried away piecemeal by those who put profit before prophet. Nearby, we found a grassy spot beside a school and had lunch. Miki sister-in-law made rice balls and baked yam. The latter were wrapped in newspaper, and unwrapping one, I was surprised to see that Patrick Swayze had died.

Near temple 75 was an old shop selling katapan, something I'd never heard of before. It was as if, 200 years ago, somebody had accidentally overcooked a batch, and decided to market it. The lines out front attested to its popularity. Also popular was the temple itself. This, the childhood home of Taishi, was probably the most important temple on the whole pilgrimage, its structures and grounds reflecting this. But we hadn't known that this was the day of their annual festival. I first thought this auspicious, but quickly changed my mind due to the crowd and to the circus atmosphere. While it was interesting to see people other than henro at a temple, the hundreds of people here was s bit much. Plus the flea market took it even further, and the karaoke competition pushed it over the edge. The caterwauling from behind us caused Miki and I to have a tough time keeping our chanting in sync. (I think that this was a message from Taishi that I use my aforementioned gift of cynicism to write on how ridiculously commercial it has all become.) We put on a game face for the sake of Miki's brother and his wife, but they sensed our discomfort and encouraged us to move on. Before doing so, we said goodbye to a couple of henro who'd been keeping pace with, one we called the No no no Henro, for what he'd said when I accidentally started to walk off with his staff at Temple 66. The other we called Smoking Henro, for obvious reasons.

We said our goodbyes to Miki's brother at Temple 76, beneath the temple's old and unusual bell tower. Miki and I moved away as a couple again to Temple 77, through rice fields and past a couple of lovely shrines.
Shorinji Hombu was on a hillside to my left, a familiar icon from previous visits back when I'd studied the art. Temple 77 itself was much more modest. Rice covered the walkways. The woman in the nokyo office let us camp in a shed behind the Taishi-do, plus gave us a bag of bread for breakfast. As always, when we are most jaded by the pilgrimage, someone does something to restore our faith. Out of courtesy, we waited for the nokyo-jo to close before putting up the tent. The sunset was turning the buildings a darker brown, stretching the shadows of some girls playing catch between them.

We escaped the cold in a nearby Joyfull, remembering that the Fleet Foot Henro had spent the night in one, to be told off by a waitress for sleeping. Back at the temple, I was overcome by the silhouettes of the buildings in the dark, by their dignity. Later too, stepping out of the tent for a midnight pee, they, backlit by the full moon above, made me linger a long while...

On the turntable: Miles Davis, "The Complete Miles Davis at Montreaux"
On the nighttable: Joe Ambrose, "Chelsea Hotel Manhattan"

Poetry Ed Ted

2011-02-05T08:35:00.005+09:00

Recently, I applied for the position of poetry editor for the famed Mountain Gazette, a position that, alas, I didn't get. The application called for a creatively written essay stating why you were suited for the position. Here is mine, hyperbole intact...

When I saw the guidelines for applying for the Poetry Editor position, my first reaction was that it is set up in a similar way to the “Cool Things I Have Done” series that continues to play out in the letters section every issue. We Americans, especially those of us in the West sure love our bragging and boasting. How then to approach it the context of a job app?

My first instinct is to follow the example of the samurai from my adopted home of 15 years, yelling out his breeding and heroic exploits to his enemy before galloping headlong to engage them. This approach only goes so far, and is a sure to get an arrow in the chest from those lesser cultured Mongolian hordes.

A more American approach perhaps? Taking a cue from the hip-hip generation and simultaneously dissing my rivals while boasting of the skills of my Samuel Johnson, all done in rhyme? This is a little closer to the spirit of poetry I guess, but isn’t quite me.

Why not step away from poetry entirely for a moment, and simply let the narrative flow, as if told to friends over beers?

Let it start in New Mexico, where I grew up, in a small town south of Albuquerque. We weren’t a mountain town per se, but the mountains weren’t too far off, with the La Drones out west and the Manzanos just to the east. We’d often do the short drive to the latter, though more often it was not so much for the wild we’d find but for the wild we’d create.

The mountains would intersect with writing for the first time in Tucson, where I did a degree in Creative Writing. On weekdays we’d craft the words inspired by our weekend muse of Mt. Lemmon, Sabino Canyon, or those other nameless desert washes lined with crosses marking those who’d been swept away by the flash floods of summer. During my senior year the outdoors trumped the indoors entirely, me being less taken with Dead European males and more with the writing of Lopez and Abbey, McCarthy and McGuane, Kerouac and Snyder.

In fact it was The Beats who informed my next phase, as an aspiring young poet who most found inspiration in actual physical landscapes bearing strong resemblance to those literary ones in which he’d spent so much time getting lost. Long afternoons spent up at Sandia Crest, and later in the Santa Ynez above Santa Barbara, always with a book in a pocket and dreams in my head.

By then, The Beats had really marked the path. Heavily inspired by Snyder and Nanao Sakaki, Japan became the obvious next step. My final American summer was spent in the company of urban poets at Naropa. When not discussing the work of Kerouac, I was talking about the man himself over pizza lunches with Ginsberg, or out searching for his muse in the Flatirons of Boulder.

The next twelve years were spent in the shadow of Mt Daisen, the highest peak in western Japan. It was here that I first encountered “Mountain Gazette,” in the form of “Go Higher.” The words contained within were a pleasant return to Western landscapes vastly different from the low Asian hills that I climbed and skied on weekends. Rural Japan was a pleasant place to live, within biking distance of the beach and a half hour drive to the lifts. The small community there was similarly nourishing. We few foreigners were close and well traveled, the drudgery of our teaching jobs funding frequent trips into Asia. My own boots bear the dust of the Bhutanese Himalaya, the Taoist Peaks of China, the Shamanistic Mountains of Korea; their soles caked with the mud of jungles that stretch from Okinawa to Sri Lanka.

I moved next to an urban setting, at a million-five the biggest I’d ever lived in, yet one still ringed by hills. I moved into a small house ‘in the hills back of Northern-White-Water' ala “Dharma Bums.” This Kyoto was a tough fit, and in hindsight I realize that I spent most of my time in the mountains outside the city. A new partner shared my joy of walking the old roads that connect the villages and temples out there. Over my three years in Kyoto, I figure I walked the majority of the remaining sections of these lines stamped into being by pilgrims, merchants, and samurai. (One road in particular inspired the creation of the first English guide to tramping its western portion: http://tokaishizenhodo.blogspot.com/)

Kyoto is the place that I cut my teeth as a writer. The ramblings of feet and mind were documented in “Notes From the ‘Nog,” (http://notesfromthenog.blogspot.com/), and by the time I left the city in the summer of 2009, I’d begun to make a decent living as a translator and writer whose work appeared frequently in ‘Kansai Time Out,’ ‘Deep Kyoto,’ ‘Hailstones Haiku,’ and most of all in ‘Kyoto Journal’ for whom I’d also served as PR director and am currently a Contributing Editor.

Before leaving Japan, a couple big walks remained. Over 10 weeks, my wife and I walked the entire Kumano Kodo and Shikoku 88 temple pilgrimages, sleeping out on most nights. I watched the passing of winter from Southeast Asia, before returning to my native New Mexico after 20 years away.

I landed in a small Zen center in Santa Fe, finding it the perfect halfway house, blending Japanese and New Mexican culture and design. After being released again into the wild, I found a small casita north of town, living not so much off the grid as beside it. From the window behind my desk, I can see the peaks of the Jemez. Here I continue to shape words, when not selling backpacks at the REI over in town. (A disclaimer: despite working for a big chain [though one with excellent business and environmental practices] I choose to spend my paycheck locally.)

On those walks during my latter years in Japan, I gradually became a student of wild culture, tempered somewhat by the deep-ecology of Snyder (obviously) but more so by the human culture that arises from its mythology, ala Joseph Campbell. It was an obvious next step, what with my being so at home both alone in the wild, as well as in beer and music-fuelled comraderie. I love it that Mountain Gazette covers both.

As summer moved into autumn, I read nearly every book on New Mexico that the library has, trying to better acquaint myself with my new/old home. I pored over writing that, while interesting, is as dry as the land itself. Which brought the thought: “I need more poetry in my life.” It was exactly then that I saw that you’re looking for an editor of poetry.

You’re up to speed now, and it looks like my round. Over the next beer, I hope to hear your story.

As for mine, references are of course available on request.

On the nighttable: Suzuki Bokushi, "Snow Country Tales"
On the nighttable: They Might Be Giants, "Lincoln"

'Round Shikoku Day 29

2011-02-02T13:20:00.003+09:00

I awoke in a pissy mood for some reason. This wasn’t helped when, stepping down from ringing Temple 57’s bell, I was nearly run down by a car henro who insisted on pulling right up to the nokyo-jo, rather than park in the designated lot just below.

The climb up to Temple 58 helped to improve my mood, walking through the trees on a clear morning. We found a small gazebo beside a pond where we could stash our bags, grateful not to have to lug them the last 500m up a narrow flight of stairs. It was quite atmospheric, with a few old buildings around a shady courtyard. The Hondo itself was gorgeous, with a curved multi-level roof. Beside it, just out of view, was a massive box that looked like a 70’s film conception of a futuristic house, all right angles with obligatory glassed-in room hanging over into space. There was a sign nearby with a picture of the same structure, along with some pithy expression about living the spiritual life. I agreed with them all, but still found it a justification for spending temple donations on someone’s personal folly. The monk in the nokyo-jo was friendly, and addressed me in English. Beside him was a poster announcing temple events—children’s karate classes, Buddhist symposiums. This place seems closely connected to its danka and looks like it has an eye on the future indeed.

I was looking forward to the next temple, Kokubunji, since the previous two had been among my favorites. I was let down by the squat concrete structure in the treeless gravel yard. When I made a joke to the nokyo woman, she looked as if I just slapped her. The bus henro arriving at that point chose to ignore my greeting, and my mood slid downhill yet again. Not even the sight of a shop selling a puzzling combo of bagels and handmade guitars could resuscitate it.

The rest of the afternoon was through a landscape of blurry features, the same scenes of narrow streets with cars driving too fast. Schoolkids biking home greeted me not with the usual, “Harro!,” that foreigners are so accustomed to, but with the puzzling, “Goodbye!” as if they wanted me the hell out of town. The Henro path followed the expressway over a series of hills that served no apparent purpose but to get that extra little bit of concrete onto the ground.

The scenery at sunset did inspire, of high mountains fading away for the day. One of these was the mysterious Ishizuchi, and another hid the next temple, #60. We arrived at Ikiki Jizo, which supposedly had Tsuyado. I got there first and rang the bell. I asked the priest about it, and he merely crossed his arms and said ‘No!” in English. I followed up with a couple of questions about alternatives, but he continued with the crossed arm gesture, continued with the ‘No.” I finally said, “Look, I’m talking to you in Japanese, please speak Japanese.” And he did, saying nothing more than “Nai,” without any trace of explanations or politeness. I finally lost my temper, shooting him an incredibly angry look and a “Thanks for your indelible kindness.” Miki came up just then, trying in her usual calm, mild way. Though his language softened, his stubborn resolve didn’t. I went away furious. The animosity and hostility I’d sensed in the locals had been put directly out there by this man, a priest in charge of one of the temples associated with the pilgrimage. For weeks I’d been chewing on the idea of the Henro being dead, and this man had blood on his hands.

It turned out to be for the best. Well after dark, we eventually found lodging between Temple 63 and 63, to which we’d hitch. They’d mind our bags as we went over the mountain to temple 60, which we’d then pick up the next day. The universe certainly is interesting in the way it spins. It took only a few minutes to get a lift with a man who raced motorcycles for a living. In courting death, he’d gotten an association with it. Before races, he claimed he could tell which rider would die by the look on his face. He also told a story about his trip up Ishizuchi. He’d met three figures in white, and assuming they were henro, took a photo with them. Later, the only thing he saw in the photo besides himself was three glowing orbs. A shaman later told him that it was the god of the mountain.

I was interested in hearing more, but we soon arrived at our inn. They were full, but we were given a small apartment over a butcher’s shop just around the corner. Certainly ironic, considering the traditional Henro prohibition against meat. I went to bed still smarting over my encounter with the priest. It was a shame to both start and end a day in a foul mood. Besides which, this was probably the most exhausted I’d felt on any given day. Sleep came easily…

On the turntable: Dead Can Dance, Memento"
On the nighttable: Gary Snyder and Tom Killion, "The High Sierra of California"

Apres-Ski

2011-01-27T13:19:00.001+09:00

Could it really have been 8 years since I've last skied? The last time I remember is up at Daisen, on a crowded Saturday where I achieved legendary status in coercing homebound skiers to give their lift tickets to myself and 7 friends. The following winter was spent traveling around the States, and the one that followed I spent in Europe. My last winter living under the shadow of Daisen, I was newly enamored with someone, and so focused more on indoor activities. Living later in Kyoto, my skis went into storage under my house, until pulled out dusty, and given to a snowboarder friend when I left the country.

My current employment situation offers me a chance at some cheap, yet high quality gear, as well as a nice break on lift tickets. So it was that I headed up to Pajarito last Friday as a sort of gear test. This ski area, at the edge of the Jemez and above Los Alamos, is only open three days a week. Choosing a Friday made the best sense, and I doubt that I saw twenty other people on the mountain. I also didn't see my new boots, which I'd left in the back of my truck down in Santa Fe. Rentals would have to do. I didn't want to make my friend Derek wait for me, so we made plans to meet in an hour, after I'd had a chance to break in my new skis down on the bunny slopes. A few minutes after he left, keys in pocket, I realized I'd left my goggles in his car.

Not that I needed them. The day wasn't too bright, despite the sun being warm and strong. Many people are bemoaning the lack of snow in northern New Mexico this year, but these 40 degree days offer a pleasant day. Besides my goggles, I didn't need a hat either, and after a few runs, I regretted the sweater. The snow itself wasn't much, long tracks of icy snow with grass and rocks poking through. These offered some fun obstacles to slalom, but the ice and a poor boot fit made right turns difficult. There was a lot of play in my right heel, and I often had to lift my leg from the hip to make a turn. The first hour on these beginner slopes was accompanied by an avant-garde soundtrack, like an LP at the edge of its grooves, as my new boards scraped over ice. And it was tough going at first, the missing gear made it more of a body test than anything. Legs, shoulders, and hips took some time in finding their old rhythm.

I eventually met up with Derek and we took the lift to the top of the mountain. The view from the lift was of all the northern part of the state, with perhaps a bit of Colorado thrown in. The foreboding peaks of Truchas looked less so with their jagged tops covered in white. Everything below was all brown, but for Black Mesa squatting proud in the center of it all. The view mesmerized me with each ride, one time so much so that I forgot to get off the lift, finally jumping off from about three feet up, narrowly missing an orange cone enema. My pride took a hit, but it was my only fall of the day. Conditions were better up here, and finally I could get a decent ride. With each subsequent descent, my muscle memory began to kick in more and more. For the final few runs, I felt in control. There was a bit of powder, a borealis of snow visible from the corner of the eye. But the rocks up here were bigger and less avoidable as I clack-clacked out a morse-code all the way down. Derek was a delight to watch on his telemark skis, the lift of heel and bend of knee like some graceful crane with its weight balanced atop a narrow support. I'd like to graduate to telemarks in a few years.

As we neared the end of the day, a soft white glow appeared just over the top of the ridge. The shadows maintained their timeshare control of the hill, and the hat finally came out. Though we'd skied less than three hours, Derek and I were both happy. Not only had the body remembered its chops, but my soul was reminded of how I love this sport. It won't be long before I return to the top of the mountain, if these springlike days of January allow it.

On the turntable: Mark Knoplfer and Emmylou Harris, "All the Roadrunning"
On the nighttable: Gary Snyder and Tom Killion, "Tamalpais Walking"

'Round Shikoku Day 24

2011-01-26T07:23:00.005+09:00

In the morning, I saw my breath for the first time this autumn. We moved along a road paralleling Rte 56. A handicapped man in a yellow cap was leading a group of kids to school, like a biped schoolbus. We met up with an older henro who matched our pace awhile. He was a nice guy, and we made small talk until Miki and I stopped for coffee. From here, we went up and over a small pass, then moved through farmland until arriving at Uchiko. There was an old kabuki-jo here, big and strutting its muscles against the smaller buildings in town. These too were impressive, a couple parallel streets of old shops and trad ambiance. Just outside town was a farmers market in the woods beside a fast river. We took a long rest here, eating bread straight from the oven, warming our bellies as we headed into higher altitudes.

We followed a lovely river for the rest of the day. The road out of town must be well traveled by school kids on bikes, for there were signs placed at random intervals, explaining the finer points of a safe commute. Burma Shave for the shortpants set. Each village had stands selling the persimmons that grew everywhere. At midday we came to a small village beside the river that had many henro amenities, with plentiful toilets and rest huts. Miki stretched out in one and pulled out her bento that she’d bought down in Uchiko. I hadn’t been too satisfied by the selection there, so set off to try my luck here. Entering a small sake shop, a woman told me she’d make me some coffee and asked me to sit. When she returned a few minutes later, she was carrying a tray with an entire lunch laid out. Settai. As I ate, we talked about the pilgrimage. She’d done it by bus years ago, and thought that walkers were ‘erai,’ (A word often applied to walkers and loosely translated as ‘remarkable’). She told me that the character of the Henro had changed, and not for the better. Most young henro did it for sport. She said that in the old days there had been more settai given, but that it is fast disappearing. As a result, the pilgrimage was dying. I told that the most amazing walkers were those folks in their retirement years. All the boundless energy that was responsible for the period of tremendous economic growth between the Olympics and the Bubble Years has to be channeled somehow, and many were channeling it through their feet. She also asked me what I thought of Ehime people. I tried to be diplomatic, and said that I noticed a bigger difference from village to village, some friendly, others cold. I didn’t want to tell her that I found Ehime people less than sparkly, but Ehime’s henro path had taken me closer to the center of big cities than in Tokushima or Kochi, and that could be a factor.

In the afternoon, the valley narrowed, as did the road we walked. Had this been a forest path, clinging to the river, it could’ve been beautiful. Paved, it was tough going, choking on exhaust from the trucks that passed frighteningly close. Even the weather was conspiratory. After all these lovely autumn afternoons, the humidity was up and we were suddenly returned to August. As we knew that today would be a short day, plus that we only had two more days walking before our break, there was a certain lack of inspiration today, senioritis.

Along the way we were overtaken by an old henro on a bicycle who was unmistakably homeless. It turned out that he’d be staying in the same Taishi-do as us. We’d heard from HayaAshi Henro that a homeless guy was living there and thought we’d take our chances. We walked with heavy hearts, worried about our stuff and worried about a loss of privacy on a day when we’d deliberately finish early and wanted to simply chill out. For the next hour, the social stigma against homeless was at work in me, and I wasn’t very comfortable with it.

In the next village we met another funky character. A crooked little man was leaning against a bridge railing beside his wheelchair, fishing. He yelled to me something and held up two fingers, the digits turned toward me in a way that would provoke most Brits. It turned out he was telling me that there were two paths toward the mountains and to Temples 44 and 45. We took the right fork and a minute later, yet another character turned up, stopping beside me in his car. He said something in a difficult dialect, something about ‘fast’ and pointed to his left. I thought at first that he was telling me the other way was quicker (despite the higher pass), but it turned out he was offering a ride up to #44, saying he’d get us there in an hour, and to #45 a half hour after that. Miki and I talked it over briefly, then she gently refused the settai, saying that his offer resonated in her heart, but that we needed to walk. He looked a little sad as he drove off, which brought our spirits even lower. Minutes later I got my first look at the peaks we’d be going over the following day, and my back began to ache in anticipation.

We finally got to Oda. Just outside town, we passed a man wearing a wetsuit for some reason. There seemed to insects everywhere. Praying mantises strolled the road with a certain poise, and if by contrast, the frenzied grasshoppers smacked their heads against something with every leap. Some farmers were finishing the rice harvest in this, the middle of October.

We arrived at the Taishi-do and saw a familiar bicycle leaning against the front. Entering, we saw that besides the usual small tatamied area before the altar, there was a second room behind. Here we found the bicycle henro and another, even older man who looked like he hadn’t moved in years. They were barely visible through all the cigarette smoke. I said that since we didn’t smoke we’d sleep in the front room and grabbed a handful of grubby looking futons. Despite our earlier trepidation, they were both very nice men, and completely respectful of our privacy. The only thing that made me nervous was when they asked our dinner plans. I had visions of them rifling through our bags while we were gone. But later, we had another clue. Beside the altar was a hand-written sign asking anyone who stayed to leave some food as settai. This sign MAY have been made by the resident henro here, as a means of soliciting food. Their question may simply have been a fishing for us to bring something back for them. We quickly said goodbye, leaving the two of them to watch TV and smoke cigarettes, much like a good percentage of residents of this country.

As we had futons, plus lodging booked for the next two nights, we decided to mail our camp gear to Miki’s Mom, in order to lighten the load for the mountains. Later, I stopped in a shop to buy a snack, and ended up getting it for settai, my second of the day. I passed the rest of the day reading on the front steeps of the temple, until the cold at this high altitude drove me inside. Udon at a nearby restaurant helped with the chill, but it didn’t last. Thin futons laid beside torn shoji made for a very cold night. At least there was no wind. I can’t imagine being in a typhoon here.

On the turntable: "Echo and the Bunnymen, "Echo and the Bunnymen"
On the nighttable: Chungliang Al Huang, Quantum Soup"

Coming Home in Winter

2011-01-18T06:40:00.002+09:00

A light atop the mountain guides my eye to the ski area.
The thought of people wintering up there
takes me back to an ancient bus
sitting halfway up the slope of Daisen,
where old men sit drinking tea to keep warm
as they wait to put chains on the tires of the city buses
that bring tourists up to the lifts.

Celestial light too,
bathes blue the path through the trees up to my home.
I remember how a woman told me
of bears awakening from their slumber
by the unseasonable warmth.

I begin to whistle as I ascend the steps.

On the turntable: The Byrds, "Untitled"

'Round Shikoku Day 20

2011-01-11T09:37:00.002+09:00

At dawn, I walked down to the old-timey kissaten where I’d eaten yesterday. It was just after 6, with a few surfers eyeing the water, and a young henro heading north. The waves were much calmer, and the water under the bridge where we got caught is a meter lower. It looked to be a fine day.

Back in Shimonokae, we pick up our bags at Anshuku. Next door at the combini, we found the son behind the counter. He was in employee-robot mode and pretended not to know us.

We spent the entire day following the Shimonokae River up and over the mountains. It was a narrow track, wide enough for a single car. The trees overhung the trail. It had grown overcast by now and the shade was chilly. But it was the first time since beginning the walk, (well over than a month now) that I hadn’t been wet, either with sweat or rain. We ran into the old couple we met on the runny mountainside path down the peninsula. They are on day 45 of their 7^th walking henro. (Amazed they are still together considering how often Miki and I have bickered on this, our first.) They have also done it another 60 times by car. They were very friendly and spiritually driven, talking a lot about Taishi. And they were quick. Miki and I stopped an hour later to have a snack before a shrine when they came strolling up.

Faster still was a young girl who passed us. We stayed the same pace awhile and chat, but she seemed to prefer her own company and moves on. Her speed was the greatest I’d seen in any henro, moving deliberately like she’s late for a meeting. We caught up with her again in Mihara Village, where we all ate on the grass before a shrine. Off her feet, she was friendly and warm, but didn’t offer much about herself. She eventually moved on and we don’t see her again.

Mihara is a cute town with friendly people and a few funky cafes and inns. It, like a lot of Kochi, is a place I’d like to linger, but not on this trip. Despite the rain, this had become one of my favorite prefectures. The people have long been thought to be hard and cold, but overall I found them friendly and open. For example, as we were heading out of Mihara, an old man drove up and handed me a ‘settai bag’ of various fruit and snacks, a bag that he’d obviously prepared at home. I can imagine him leaving a few of these bags in his car daily, handing them over every time he spots a figure in white. After handing me mine, he drove up and handed one to Miki. Then he drove on to hand yet another to a third henro walking a couple hundred meters ahead of her. I wonder how often this kind old farmer does this, handing out his goodies like Halloween.

The road out of town led to a park built in the shadow of a great dam. Along the way, we passed still another henro, lying prone in the dirt behind a truck painted up like BJ McCabe’s. Half the time you see a henro at rest, he’ll be sprawled across whatever it is that’s supporting his tired body. After the dam was a long tunnel. Midway through I felt a strange shift in balance, and when exiting the opposite end, noticed that I was on a decline of nearly 45 degrees.. This odd loss of equilibrium is something I’d never have noticed in a car. This steep descent continued for a good half hour until leveling out on the valley floor. We’d apparently been climbing all day onto the high plateau of Mihara, though I hadn’t been aware of it, until looking at a topo map later.

We stopped at a supermarket for our dinner. When we came out, the other two henro had caught up, and we all moved on in yet another henro parade, under the watchful eyes of cows, and beneath the vines of wild squash dangling themselves over porous concrete embankments. The parade continued right up to the gates of Temple 39. For the last couple hundred meters or so, we’d all chosen to take different paths through the rice fields, following directions known only to us. It was like a game show, with the winner being the exhausted henro last seen lying behind the truck.

There was supposed to be a tsuyado here but it was closed due to some event. As we were asking for a place to put up our tent, Tired Henro overheard and said he’d ask at his inn. The owner was a friendly guy who offered us a room without food for 1000 yen. We of course accepted. After a long hot bath, the two of us lounged in our room, which could’ve slept 20. A karaoke machine stood in one corner., untouched by us Instead, I went in search of beer for both myself and Tired Henro. In the dining room I found him eating with Gentleman Henro, who insisted Miki and I join them. It was interesting evening, the talk being about the pilgrimage of course, a conversation that alternated between heavy and light. Tired Henro was a pretty philosophical guy, whose inner process was going through a pretty tough workout. Gentleman Henro was adept at keeping the talk from growing too serious, but he did allow himself to talk about his walk down the peninsula during the typhoon. He found himself thinking about the kanji for the Heart Sutra, chock full of “mu’s’ and” ku’s.” “Ku” can mean both emptiness as well as sky, and Kukai supposedly took his name while meditating in the Murodo cave, his seat giving view to sea and sky. But during the typhoon, the horizon line had disappeared, the sea and the sky growing indistinct, without separation. Life too is like this, differences being created only by human judgment. A profound experience he had and I felt myself a little envious by it…

On the turntable: "Buddha Bar Krishna Beats"
On the nighttable: Christopher Robbins, "Air America"

Feliz Akemashite!

2011-01-01T09:24:00.004+09:00

Wishing a prosperous and rewarding New Year to friends East,

And West.

It was 30 Years Ago Today...

2010-12-08T05:39:00.002+09:00

My alarm radio turned on at 6:30 as it always did. I had it set to WPLJ, a station I'd discovered a few months before. During the summer, my musical interests were expanding, due in part to an older friend up the street who turned me onto The Ramones "Rocket to Russia" and the first album by The Clash. One September afternoon, I flipped my radio's switch to FM for the first time, and there were The Talking Heads doing "Life without Wartime." My radio never played AM ever again.

This particular morning, the first words I heard were, "New York has been living a nightmare." My brain switched on instantly, wondering what had happened. Soviet attack? Another blackout? Then I heard that John Lennon had been killed.

When I didn't get out of bed, my mother came in to see what was going on. I told her I felt sick. She brought me the thermometer to take my temp, which I then held in front of the heater until the mercury rose past 100. I spent the rest of the day with the music.

I've often had the experience where I really heard a band for the first time, despite having listened to them for years. It's happened with Dylan, with The Clash, and many others. Lennon's music too seemed to flow in and out of my life. One night in college, while watching the film, "Track 29," I was floored by the song "Mother,' it having special resonance as I was in the midst of an existential coming to terms with the fact that I'd been adopted.

In Japan, I found traces of Lennon all around, not really a surprise considering the Yoko connection. The tribute compilation, "Working Class Hero,' was in frequent rotation during my first year there. When I was in the national finals for Shorinji Kempo, standing on the floor of the Budokan with the other martial artists, my thoughts weren't on how far I'd come, or on the competition later in the day. My mind was instead fixed solely on "Holy Crap! John Lennon played here, man!" After my son was born, I'd often sing to him, "Beautiful Boy." That line saying life is what happens when you are busy making other plans took on a horrible resonance after Ken died.

Today, thirty years after Lennon's murder, I again find myself with the day off. I'll simply sit, dream my life away, and watch the wheels go round and round...

On the turntable:John Lennon, "The Lost Lennon Tapes"

Shoot Your "I" Out

2010-12-07T01:17:00.006+09:00

I remember meeting a Shambhala kyudo practitioner a number of years ago. She was pretty adamant about the shot not being important, in keeping with the teachings of that particular style. And I get it, the Zen mind thing. Hey, I read Herrigel's (problematic) book too. But the way she went on and on, as if working on some actual shooting technique was wrong somehow, was getting frustrating. Now, I'm a pretty modest fellow, and held my tongue, but what I really wanted to say was, "Well, comparing your 6 months of practice with my 8 years, I'd guess you're far more proficient at not hitting the target than I."

On the turntable: JBT Scare Band,"Rumdum Daddy"

5-7-5-0-1

2010-11-25T02:17:00.000+09:00

It's funny, but emails can be a lot like haiku. There is a deliberate sparsity of language, yet the meaning can be inferred in multiple ways. Ironically, this sparsity leads toward experiential truth in the case of haiku, and toward perceived (and ofttimes misperceived) meaning in the case of mail.

On the turntable: Johnny Winter with Muddy Waters, "Live at the Tower Theater, 1977"

Life Following Art

2010-11-23T00:53:00.000+09:00

I am currently reading John Nichols New Mexico trilogy, which begins with The Milagro Beanfield War. I have read them before, during my first autumn in Japan, in an attempt to capture a little of that NM fall magic that I love so much.

I remember calling my folks back then and asking them to send the novels over. As they affixed the stamps to the package, it was like the release of water from an acequia, followed by a flood of books to follow over the next 15 years.

On the turntable: Grateful Dead, "1972 - 04 -14"

Bleeped Kyoto

2010-11-18T10:30:00.005+09:00

Deep Kyoto's Micheal Lambe wrote a piece about the proposed and controversial Kyoto Aquarium. Originally published in the Kyoto Visitor's Guide, it was pulled after a phone call from city hall. While part of me wants to thank the city government for helping justify my move from their fair city, a deeper voice insists I speak out (yet again) against such shortsighted nonsense. So here is Micheal's piece. Read it, and decide for yourself.

Personally, I prefer to see my fish in the alleys of Nishiki...

Umekoji Park and the Kyoto Aquarium

Umekoji Park, a short walk north of Kyoto station, is an important patch of green in Kyoto city. Green spaces like this perform an important environmental function in a city: cleaning the air, and regulating the temperature. They are also beneficial for people’s physical and mental health. The park at Umekoji is very popular with the local community and is often used by sports enthusiasts and sports clubs from neighboring schools and universities. Others just come for a jog or to walk the dog. Families come here and children play. As I work nearby, I often go there myself, to throw a frisbee about, or take a stroll, or just to lie on the grass and breathe the fresh air. The grass, the trees, and the flowers here are very pleasant on the eye, and provide a rich habitat for birds and insects. You see a lot of smiling faces in this park...

I was shocked when I heard that Mayor Kadokawa had given Orix, a private company, permission to build a massive aquarium on a large chunk of this precious public land. Apparently, local officials believe it will bring in more tourists and revitalize the local economy. It’s hard to believe though that an aquarium can succeed in Kyoto; an inland city with no maritime associations! People visit Kyoto for its cultural and historical associations – not to see a large concrete box-like facility full of fish and deeply depressed dolphins! Surely it would make more sense to encourage businesses that take advantage of Kyoto’s existing assets; to restore machiya, improve existing museums and educate people about Japan’s traditional arts.

Incredibly, Orix Corporation claims that the aquarium will be an educational facility; teaching children about marine ecology. Here in this highly artificial environment, children will watch dolphins jump through hoops and be taught that wild animals are playthings to be kept in unnatural conditions for our own amusement. If you want to teach children about marine ecology, take them to the sea! Here in Kyoto we should be teaching them about the environment that is around them; the rivers, woods, and mountains and their indigenous species. This aquarium on completion will release 5,400 tons of carbon dioxide per year into Kyoto’s atmosphere. It is pure sophistry to claim it is an environmental facility.

Despite strong public protest however, the project is going ahead. Construction began in July and the aquarium is due to open early next year. I think it’s time that foreign residents and visitors to Kyoto threw their weight behind the local campaign to stop this terrible plan. Let’s tell Orix and Mayor Kadokawa that this isn’t what visitors to Kyoto want. If you agree with me please visit http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-the-kyoto-aquarium/ and sign the petition to “Stop the Kyoto Aquarium”!

On the turntable: Phish, "Rift"

'Round Shikoku Day 14

2010-11-06T06:14:00.003+09:00

I again didn't sleep well, due to the rooster crowing about four hours before dawn. I opened the blinds to the view of Kōchi city below, glittering under a flawless blue sky.

[...]

Temple 33 was quiet and free of people but for a lone man setting up a veggie stand off to the side. Suddenly there was a gentle cling-cling of those fairy bells, and withing minutes, three groups of car pilgrims showed up. In front of the Hondo, they all chanted in their own particular timing, as if doing it in rounds.

We moved away from the sea into farmland spreading out toward, and between, the hills. Passing one greenhouse, I distinctly heard what I thought was a Hank Williams song. We followed a small canal to Temple 34, whose courtyard contained a Kannon statue with a face of unbelievable softness and compassion.

It was a hot day so we took time for ice cream, and then again for cold tea in front of a cafe. We'd been pretty close to burn out, but rather than take a day off, we chose to instead do a couple of consecutive half days, less than 15 km each, taking our time. Nearing Tosa city, we met Rte 56, and crossed the long bridge over the Niyodo-gawa into town. I'd been craving a milkshake for a week, so was thrilled to see those familiar golden arches. But I'd chosen the only Mac in the world that doesn't have a milkshake machine. Those few minutes inside caused a bizarre reaction in me. All the parents scolding their children for no apparent reason, created almost a panic reaction in me, and I desperately needed to flee. I guess I wasn't ready for the real world yet.

We found solace in a quiet cafe closer to the town center. We needed food, but they only did two things: tea or coffee. We hemmed and hawed a bit, but finally settled onto brown velvet cushions rarely seen except for on retro film sets. There was only one other customer, but he left early, returning a few minutes later with some yōkan, kindly worried about our stomachs. The cafe owner herself also gave us some cake she'd gotten from another customer, then left us alone for a couple of hours. We relaxed and eased into peace.

Around 3:30, we made for Temple 35. A paraglider had launched himself off the peak at the perimeter of town, and was now spiraling above the fields across which we zig-zagged. The final approach to the temple was up the same steep mountain. Through the gate, guarded by eye-less Nio, we reached our refuge for the night. There was a tsuyado there, a lovely 6 mat room below the Kannon hall. After 5pm, the crowds left, and we had the grounds to ourselves. The buildings themselves were of great age, and to protect them was a fire truck perpetually parked in the corner of the parking lot. There was strange pagoda which you entered down a set of descending steps, leading you to an alter, small and candle-lit, then descending again to the exit, from above. I couldn't grasp the physics of it, and decider to leave it to Escher, expert on such things.

We were intrigued by the sign for the 'forbidden forest,' but left it alone, to instead sit at the edge of the hill and watch the full moon rise over Tosa. After dark, we alternated reading in the tsuyado, or taking walks, solitary but for the resident cat. As I lay down to sleep, my eyes returned again and again to the tall figure out the window. Amida, silhouetted against the moonlit sky.

On the turntable: Pearl Jam, "Lost Dogs"

'Round Shikoku Day 11

2010-10-28T11:43:00.004+09:00

The night before, two cats had been fighting beside the harbor, like a couple of drunken sailors. This morning, a handful of kites were swirling in the sky, as if churning the clouds in order to ring out the last remnants of rain. A trio of old men sit looking over the harbor, not speaking. The seawall is an impressive piece of work, built like a labyrinth to protect the boats and the town from the typhoons which return again and again. The men seem a type of chorus, and may be looking for a tempest of another sort --a tsunami. Stirred into motion by the recent Samoan earthquake, it is due on these shores sometime after lunch. As if this isn't enough, a typhoon is also on its way.

Temple 25 overlooks the harbor, up a long flight of steps that pass beneath a beautiful bell tower. Twenty-six isn't very far away, atop a low mountain like Temple 24. The trio are interrelated and hold an important place in the Kodo Daishi mythology. Apparently it was here that he'd engaged a tengu in debate, who, if I understood correctly the overheard explanation of a tour guide, may actually have been a foreigner. My own pet theory is that the tengu may have been a tree, as the forest is filled with twisted and fantastic shapes. Ironically, on the way down the mountain, my pack caught a tree limb, which broke off the trunk and crashed down a few inches to my right. Most of the wood was rotten (and now sprinkled across my clothes and pack), but the center of the limb was solid enough to have broken a bone or shattered my skull. It was a close shave, but somehow I survived the Tengu's mojo.

There is a small market where the trail meets the highway. We buy lunch here and eat while watching the sea. Next door is a whale-themed center, where the model of a cute looking cartoon whale stands grinning beside an immense harpoon gun. As I eat, I wonder what sort of message this place is trying to send.

When we shoulder our bags it begins to rain, a rain that won't cease for 24 hours. A car driven by a monk stops beside us, and it looks like he's about to offer a ride, but his wife seems to talk him out of it. They drive off. An hour later we're walking down the main street of Kawa, a fine mixture of old Edo and Meiji period buildings. It is a relief to be off Ole '55 for the first time in days. A helicopter is circling the town, on tsunami watch. The really heavy water is in the air, falling all over us. The world is gray, gray funemushi bugs like something from Giger's nightmares, dashing along the gray concrete walls. My mood too is gray and for the third consecutive day I begin to hope for a ride. But this time I really meant it. I was tired of walking and wanted to get on with it, but I wanted to keep my integrity and not deliberately flag a lift. Yet the cars kept skimming past, the rain kept hammering down.

Near dark, I stepped onto a bridge and took a few steps into calf-deep water. "This sucks!" I yelled at nothing in particular. There was a machine shop nearby, so I ducked in, pouting at the rain. It didn't seem to notice, coming down as hard as before. As we walked on again, I went into survival mode, as I often did at this time of day. I was looking for a covered place under which to set up the tent. The bus shelter along this stretch of coast had been built to withstand typhoons, with four sold walls, sliding doors, and a floor spacious enough to set up a tent. But there weren't any in sight.

What I did see was a pilgrim's rest hut, built beside a small cafe. The owner came over, a small sickly-looking woman with bad hearing. I was dry for the first time in hours, and had hot coffee in hand. As we warmed up, we asked about possible places to sleep. A she was thinking, a friendly, robust man walked in; the husband, looking 20 years younger than his wife. When she asked his opinion, he quickly said, "You can sleep here," pointing at a low coffee table beside us. His wife looked horrified and began to protest. Miki and I have often commented on this sort of thing. Men, being impetuous, are often quick to offer help or things, being somewhat disconnected from the realities of daily Japanese life. The women are the ones who put the foot down. They are the ones forced into addition cooking and cleaning due to their man's whims. We've seen it most often with potential rides: the man slows down, then accelerates as the woman beside him sits shaking her head.

The man won this time. He had three friends in tow, and they invited us to join in their impromptu pot-luck sukiyaki karaoke party. It was a surreal night, of food, beer, and loads of enka. Our host thought that Miki looked like the famous Taiwanese singer, Teresa Tang, and made her sing a few of her tunes. I don't know any enka, but I made due with my usual repertoire of Okinawan classics. The woman sitting next to our host was very friendly, quite possibly his mistress. The other couple was quieter, the husband saying little besides, "More Beer!" as raised a bottle to top me up. His wife said nothing at all. All the while, our hostess stayed behind the scenes, cooking and prepping a shower for us. When she did sit down, there was obvious warmth between her and her husband, despite is possibly philandering ways.

The party broke up around nine. Miki curled up into the love seat, while I stretched my sleeping bag along the coffee table...

On the turntable: Jeff Beck, "Beck-Ola"
On the nighttable, John Nichols, "The Milagro Beanfield War"

October 14th Elegy

2010-10-14T03:44:00.001+09:00

WordSmiths

2010-10-12T02:14:00.002+09:00

This summer, my brother and I started a editing services company. In addition to our main site, New Wordsmiths, we also started a blog where we'll post flash reviews of books and short stories. My first contribution is here:

Spiritual Memoir and Eat, Pray, Love

On the turntable: Albert King, "At Montreux"

'Round Shikoku Day 8

2010-10-06T02:12:00.001+09:00

After breakfast, the cook at Yuki-sō was outside our window, throwing small lobsters into a pail. Each would shriek as it made contact with the others, the whole thing a mass of writhing, spiked red. Today, the town would have their lobster market. Next month was the lobster festival. They certainly love their crustaceans.

The chef was young, with a good sense of humor. I'd joked with him that I wanted pancakes and a milkshake for breakfast. (What I got was fish and a salad.) As we set off, he gave me a hard time about the size of my pack, but then he kindly lifted it onto my shoulders.

The trail took us out past a couple of beautiful swimming beaches. We also noticed quite a few decks for picnickers that looked perfect for sleeping on, all a stones-throw from toilets and showers. Last night had been the first night since starting the henro that we'd paid for lodging, and the sight of all these free palaces pained us.

Entering Kiki, we found a sports day event in progress at the elementary school. A very old woman sat above on a hill, and gave us each a small bag of 5 yen coins as we passed. (These we eventually donated at temple 23.) We met a few other old timers down in the the town proper, all very friendly and interested in us. It's amazing how one village welcomes henro, and the next looks at them with obvious scorn.

At the far end of town, a sodden rice field was separated by the sea by a narrow concrete wall. Beyond it, the trail climbed into the hills. About half way up we found an old henro listening to the radio and smoking. On his back, he carried a sleeping bag, a vinyl sheet and a worn-out hat. He looked like he'd been doing the circuit for decades. I wonder if he was one of the guys I'd seen at the tent city yesterday.

Where the trail entered rice fields again was a pile of empty beer cans. Miki and I both felt angry. For the better part of yesterday, we'd walked past signs telling people not to dump trash along the roads. many were directed especially at walking henro. I think it is this poor behavior that is causing many zenkonyado to close, and the source of the unfriendly looks we've been getting. (In my own country, it is bums eating out of dumpsters.)

As we neared the sea again, Miki suddenly said that she wished we could finish the walk this fall, rather than keep it as an open 'someday.' We sat and talked awhile, made a couple calls to juggle our schedule, and by forgoing our Kyushu plans, scraped together an extra 20 days.

The trail climbed again, overlooking Ebisu cave and Lover's Point, before returning to sea level at Hiwasa. Many people were walking the long crescent beach, fully clothed in a way that suggested that summer was over. And the cool overcast sky concurred. Autumn in Japan means festivals, and before Hachiman Jinja, some men were putting a couple of mikoshi together. the castle stood proudly above the town on one hill, Yaku-oji on another. The temple is well known as a place to yakuyoke, and the flight of steps up to them was dotted with coins of those who looked to remove this bad luck. (Oba-chan's coins, her karma, not ours) I was 42, a bad year for males, but unfortunately didn't seemed to have the correct change. Midway up was a large urn, where a person was encouraged to pound the ash it contained in a number corresponding to your age. At the top, you were likewise supposed to strike a metal plate with a wooden mallet, again relating to how many years you've lived. On the level above the Hondo was a tall gaudy pagoda. Once inside, you'd pass through a curved dark passage, and enter a room decorated with the Buddhist hells. Then you'd climb to the top of the pagoda (heaven, get it?) to stand beside Kannon and gaze out over the town. This type of Disneyfied Buddhism can be found all over the country, and I've never been fond of it.

Near the temple was a michi-no-eki, the place we'd heard about, where the drunk henro had been rolled for all he carried. As we ate lunch in front, we chatted up a long-haired motorcycle henro we'd seen a few times. He was a Korean exchange student at Doshisha, and had done the first 30 temples in a few days. As he and Miki continued their talk, I wandered off to the foot bath and gave my poor dogs a good soak.

From here we faced a long 15km walk along a busy road. it was an uneventful upward slog to ----- Tunnel, and we rested a long while before entering its 700m length. A group of bicycle riders came up behind us, with a large support team. The leader had his hand on the back of a motorcyclist, getting an assist up this steep hill. (Settai?) Another rider was nursing a flat tire. They all had "88" on their shirts, but we never figured out what was up. Later, another guy came up the hill on a beach cruiser. No gears!

Before going through the tunnel, I put on my iPod, to block out the shriek and roar of cars as they passed through. Entering the mountainscape on the far side, John Prine was perfect. I kept him and Dylan on rotation, letting the lyrics take me from the monotony of this stretch of the walk. It was incredible how much energy the music gave me. John Prine reminded me that there are people out there who feel worse than I. Occasionally, the scenery too gave me a boost, but for the most part it was just a country road flanked by tall pines. Thankfully there were the odd cluster of homes. In one hamlet, a waterwheel thunked rice into flour. We found a trio of old women there and talked awhile. They told us that being young, we'd be in the next 'city' in an hour. While I appreciated their confidence in us, it actually took two. I also noticed quite a few public phones. These have been dying out in this age of the cellular, but in Shikoku, they are used as safety means for walkers. For the safety of American walkers in particular, there was a Pringles vending machine.

Late in the day, we entered a long open valley, with high ferocious mountains to the west. I didn't like the look of the clouds they draped over their shoulders. Closer to town, more and more buildings appeared. In front of the stone-cutter's place were a marble surfboard and Doraemon. A sign outside of Mugi announced that they were seeking Chinese brides.

But prospective husbands require a certain amount of character, and the lack of it in this town became quickly apparent. Nearly everyone we greeted completely ignored us. At the station, I asked the attendant if the inn across the street was open, and he merely said, "Why don't you call?" Prick. I wasn't keen on camping out somewhere since the town seemed so unfriendly to henro. The rain would limit us to choosing a place with a roof, and based on our welcome here, that would draw unfavorable attention. We found an inn a half hour away, then went to buy food. I was chomping at the bit, hoping to both beat the impending rain and to get away from this inhospitable place. But back outside, we found the weather had changed for the worse. And in front of us, the lights of Azuma Ryokan were now lit.

The owner was a friendly, chatty woman, especially after she started in on the shōchū. She was well-versed on the Henro, having done it six times. After our baths, we sat in the restaurant downstairs, talking with her and the inn's only guest, a young woman walking alone--the first we'd met. As we were heading upstairs, who should appear at the door but Bandage Henro-- an hour past dark. And the rain increased in volume outside...

On the turntable: Big Star, "#1 Record"
On the nighttable: Lekson, et al. "Canyon Spirits"

Immaterial Witness

2010-09-29T01:56:00.000+09:00

I now live in Santa Fe. This means I live amidst a hodge-podge of religions as great as at any other place or time in history. After the indigenous earth religions of the natives came the Spanish Catholicism that attempted to eradicate it. The Third Wave brought the Anglo seekers of the original draft, those artists and writers of the early decades of the last century, who created the myth of the noble Indian, which motivated further waves of Anglos to follow. More recently came the hippies and the neo-hippies, who too came looking for that simple native spirituality, yet this round of pilgrims had one eye ever on the East, diluting the local brand with elements of Buddhism and the New Age. Most recently came Indians of a different genetic strand. There are currently a handful of vedic ashrams or ayurvedic schools in the area, with yoga schools thick on the ground. Living here I am exposed daily to a wide variety of people, all grounded (or in far too many cases, ungrounded) by some belief system or other.

Spirituality in 21st Century America is far different than what I've experienced in Asia. During my own training and travels, I have noticed no real separation at all between spirituality and daily life. The evidence is everywhere, no matter the country or culture or class. Spirituality is at once sacred and personal, and is at the same time secular and universal. They walk their talk. Or more appropriately, there is little talk at all, and why would there be, since it is like talking about how to breathe or how to eat? By contrast, expressions of personal emotion here in the US feel dramatized, but that's not really our fault considering all the way we're constantly spoon fed overblown emotions by the media.

But why then, do we Americans talk so much shit about our feelings but rarely focus on what's valid, on what's real? Self-expression sounds scripted, like in a bad TV show. I naturally find myself making comparisons with the Japanese, who are as impenetrable as the concrete that they're so busy girding their nation with: a cultural and historic hardening and protecting from the inside out. By contrast, American emotions run as wild and unpredictable as a river. The approach to spirituality is interesting, frequently talked-up and emphasized as a sort of adventure. Which strikes me as odd considering that spirituality's purpose is to dam that unpredictable river of the emotions. Long ago, Trungpa Rinpoche downplayed this as spiritual materialism. In Japan, I found most people just turned up at a retreat and silently did their thing, uncomplaining about the omnipresent pain, physical or psychic. In the US, it's like it didn't happen unless we promote it. We wear our spirituality like a coat, putting it on and taking it off with every slight change in the weather. The worst are those who talk up others' spirituality, spouting aphorisms or stories of long-dead sages, as if we haven't already heard them. I often want to say to them, firmly but politely, "Just do your practice and cut the Zen talk already!"

On the turntable: Krishna Das, "Heart as Big as the World"
On the nighttable: Jack Kutz, "Mysteries and Miracles of New Mexico"

Spurning Japanese

2010-09-25T16:27:00.002+09:00

The grass is always greener, right?. With the coming of autumn comes the usual introspection. I'm missing Japan pretty badly at the moment. My life here, while rewarding, is far busier than I'm used to. And though difficult at times, I recognize that this return to the US is important, big-picture wise.

A few months before the move, Miki and I climbed up Daimonji. As we looked out over Kyoto, she suddenly asked, what if we didn't go? And I went cold, physically uncomfortable with the idea of staying in that city any longer.

A large part of that reaction had to do with how the local government (and I use the term loosely) presents the ancient capital. This summer, they surprised me with their capacity for shortsighted stupidity, going through with the construction of an aquarium for the 'benefit of Chinese tourists.' As I write this, the Chinese are in a rage and are canceling their travel plans by the thousands. The Heians may or may not be turning in their graves, but we can now see that the graves themselves are.

A fellow devotee to Ninkasi, Micheal has taken a sober approach in helping spearhead a movement in stopping this senseless project, one that went ahead despite overwhelming public protest. Check his Deep Kyoto for more information.

The petition site is here.

On the turntable: Neil Young, "Fork in the Road"

Children of Water

2010-09-23T03:16:00.004+09:00

Fall in Kyoto has much to offer. Multi-colored maple leaves strewn across stone like little lost gloves. Dango eaten beneath the full autumnal moon. Festive student carnivals played out in game and song.

This fall, there is even more. On October 1st, a band I used to play with, Morphic Jukebox, will play a short set prior to the screening of a film in which I had a hand in, "Children of Water."
It's as if I never left...

Details here at Deep Kyoto.

On the turntable: Neil Young, "Dreamin' Man 92" (I'm here too, in the audience...)

Los Alamos

2010-09-16T00:51:00.003+09:00

(This piece completes the triptych. Posts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared earlier.)

Forgive me but the entire world was conspiring to make me think of mushrooms. On the drive in, huge clouds stacked up with weather above the mountains, including a tall mushroom shaped-cloud rising from the Jemez. After tracing a line rising diagonally long the edge of the Pajarito plateau, we arrived in Los Alamos, and immediately sought out lunch. The Hill Diner is an old favorite, though not quite as old as the décor would have you believe. It speaks of woodsy roadside diner, the paneling hung with photos from a half-century gone, with old neon beer signs, and garage sale items like skis and snowshoes hanging from the walls. Mushrooms showed up again here, batter-fried and flanking my chicken fried steak. This place is popular with both the locals and those working at the labs. The ‘good ole’ lost America’ theme attempts to whitewash some of the threat that hung in perpetuity over those ‘gentler times,’ a threat birthed less than a mile away. In a conspiracy of irony that only the universe can craft, I noted Asians at about a third of the tables here this Saturday morning.

After lunch, Miki and I wandered around town, a pleasant place like a small New England college town, trees shading dormitory-style housing for the lab families constantly revolving in and out of their temporary assignments at the Labs. It would be a pleasant place to live but for the work going on across the canyon. We stopped off in the tourist info center to see what this town had to offer. I desperately wanted to find something attesting to the local character, to draw my attention away from the obvious. As a fan of history, I find that I visit places with a fair amount of projection, scanning the landscape and residents in an effort to find connections with those events that brought them onto the world stage. I’ve done it in Vietnam and Cambodia, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, using tragedy as an information sieve, until time and the locals present me with a different face that allows me to let go my stereotyping. Then I can finally accept the place on its own terms. I’d done it earlier in the day with the cloud formation, and in coming upon the ruins of an elementary school in mid-demolition. This latter caused me to exaggerate the presence of tragedy here, but what else could I think, being presented with such an obvious example of the decline in education spending in the town which, again, started the arms race and the current blank check approach to military spending?

Scanning the walls of the tourist center, I so badly wanted to find mention of an ancient Native American festival, or a photo of a ruined Spanish church, or read a about some Anglo bigwig who’d established a modest ranch which eventually grew into this town. But all I could find were T-shirts and coffee mugs tastelessly emblazoned with pictures of an exploding bomb, hung above bags of “Atomic chili pepper.’ A sign on the glass door listed events held during the summer in this, “The Atomic City,” including a concert being held, without any apparent irony, next Friday, August 6. The view beyond the poster and through the glass door revealed a town whose history began with the atomic age, and seems stuck there, both in architecture and in mindset.

A short walk took us to a series of lovely buildings that look as if they belong in an Alpine town. Had I visited them prior to November 1942, I’d have found that history I’d been searching for, in the form of the Los Alamos Ranch School, whose alumni include the CEOs of a few major corporations, as well as William S. Burroughs and Gore Vidal, though these two latter names inevitably escape mention. On an autumn day less than a year after the US entered the Second World War, the grounds were bought by the military for a top secret project. Some of the buildings are now being used as the Los Alamos Museum. The actual place where the bomb had been designed is now a large open space with a pond in the center. It was here that we’d meet up with Pax Christi for the peace march. Along the way, I stepped over a patch of mushrooms, barely noticeable amidst the neatly clipped grass.

The peace march was to begin at Ashley Pond, site of where the first atomic bombs were built. There was a picnic going on, children running after balloons, and the adult members of the local YMCA queuing up to buy BBQ from a red trailer with a flaming pig emblazoned on one side. The Pax Christi people weren’t far away, their banners with anti-nuke slogans spread across the grass. In a pile was a collection of burlap sacks and dozens of small bags of ash that we were expected to drape and decorate ourselves with for the march. This was inspired by the biblical story of Ninevah. When threatened with Divine destruction, the inhabitants of the city repented, putting on sacks and smearing themselves with ash. Sacks were traditionally seen as a sign of deep repentance and humility. Ashes were often included as a further symbol of personal abhorrence and chagrin.

The organizer of this march, Jesuit priest John Dear, was being interview by a TV station from Albuquerque. We’d met John months ago when he gave a rousing talk on Gandhian non-violence at Upaya Zen Center. He’d really motivated us there in Santa Fe that day, so it was very disappointing that the only attendees who’d actually turned up for this event were Miki and myself. Prior to setting out John led us in prayer, where, he neither accused those involved in the making of nuclear arms of being evil, nor asked God to forgive them. (In keeping with the Ninevah biblical story, where God states He is showing pity for the population who are ignorant of the difference between right and wrong ("who cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand"). Instead John simply asked us to repent our own complicity in violence, and to beg the god of peace for a world free of nuclear weapons.

Then we marched, moving down Trinity Drive, crossing with the light at Oppenheimer. Through breaks in the buildings lining the road, we could get glimpses of the Labs standing with a certain majesty through the trees. They’d been built in the 50s, when the one-off Manhattan Project had spawned a child that had grown with the arms race. Along the way, a couple of people stopped to collect apricots that had fallen from a tree. One woman nearby nodded her head toward the labs and said bluntly, “You sure you want to eat those?” The apricot collectors quickly dropped the uneaten fruit back onto the grass.

We stopped our march at the hospital that sits beside the bridge leading over the canyon to the Lab’s front gate. About fifty young people showed up about then, all carrying sunflowers. This was “Think Outside the Bomb,” a national youth-led nuclear abolition network. They were here to protest Obama’s policies regarding nuclear strategy. While professing in public a reduction in nukes, the administration was instead going forward with policies set up by their predecessors, yet their proposed increase in the amount of plutonium pits to be constructed at Los Alamos would go far beyond what the Bushies had envisioned. The group was camped out in the hills near the Sanctuario de Chimayo for a week of workshops on permaculture and on non-violent protest. They’d be back on the actual anniversary of the bombing on the 6th, for a protest up at the Labs themselves. (And at which eight of them would end up arrested.) For today they’d settle for a less confrontational demonstration, for we’d go no further than Omega Bridge, and would do little more than sit and meditate.

John gave the word and we all sat down on the sidewalk. While some had smeared their faces with ash, other had simply outlined their bodies. A couple of people had emptied their bags in a clump, tracing with their fingers small pictures or simply the number 140,000, the believed number of nuclear bombing victims. We stayed like this for half an hour, quietly reflecting. A light rain began to fall, and I was reminded of the black rain that had poisoned so many in Hiroshima. Then, after the final signal, we all got up and began walking back to the park. As on the march down, we were exposed to a variety of reactions by the locals. Some flashed peace signs as they drove by, or honked their horns in apparent solidarity. Others yelled out in opposition, words mostly lost in the wind but for the swearing. It was predictable how the reaction of the driver consistently matched the type of vehicle driven. Most memorable was the extended, black-gloved middle finger of a Harley rider.

Back in the park, John gave a closing prayer then introduced a few speakers. One of them was Col. Ann Wright, famous for her resignation from the military when Bush okayed the invasion of Iraq. Most recently, she’d been on the Gaza flotilla that had been attacked by Israel last June. At one point, Ann asked us where we’d all travelled from, and when Miki yelled out “Hiroshima!” my wife suddenly found herself before the mike, giving a brief speech. A couple of folk singers then began to gather the crowd together in a sing-along, but Miki and I quietly slipped away. We did a symbolic circumabulation of Ashley Pond. Two black cranes extended out of the water, their iron material an ironic contrast to the delicate paper cranes of the peace park of Hiroshima.

A few hours later we met again down in Santa Fe, in the wrap-around bar of El Canon, with its million-dollar view down San Francisco street, toward St. Francis Cathedral lit gold by the setting sun. We found ourselves with John Dear and other organizers of the event, in a sort of debriefing. They seemed disappointed at the numbers, a mere hundred when last year they’d had three times as many. They also mentioned that this year’s march had seen the most vehement reactions they’d yet seen. As Miki and I headed toward home in the heavy storm, the group was questioning the event’s significance. According to the local news team that had been there, very little, as they gave us less than 10 seconds coverage, giving no mention of who we were or what our message was. To the average viewer, we’d appear to be just another bunch of loony hippies.

But really, what did they think? I know quite a few couples that live up there, most of whom work at the labs. When I mentioned that I’d been at the march, one woman seemed supportive, mentioning that her husband had been quite active in disarmament work. To which he gave the hilarious quip, “Yeah, disarming the Russians.”

Waning a bit more perspective, Miki and I returned to Los Alamos a few weeks later on a quiet Friday afternoon. We wanted to visit the museums and see how they presented ‘their side.’ The Historical Museum is, as mentioned earlier, in one of the old cabins that once made up the Ranch School. I’d entered with a certain amount of cynicism, but as I made my way through the quaint narrow rooms, I was quite taken with it. Represented was the scientists’ story, composed of the somewhat comedic tales of the civilians who found themselves sudden residents of a town that literally appeared overnight, one that remained in complete secrecy for over two years. I spoke with the curator for a while, telling her how pleased I was to find this place so free of propaganda. Through the words of Oppenheimer and others, I could really see that the scientists were the only ones who saw the real scale of what was going on. They thought that their work in presenting mankind with its complete elimination would introduce a period of enlightenment that would end war altogether. She told me that the scientists themselves had felt so betrayed by the subsequent Cold War behavior of the military and the government.

Their tale is better told across town at the Bradbury Museum. The POV here is pure propaganda, attempting to whitewash history in order to make nukes palatable. In the film, “The Town that Never Was,” there was a line about the local natives who were “happy to give away visiting right to their ancient ancestral grounds, for the good of the nation, “ that was particularly disgusting. The cold, scientific approach to information here was predictable. As was the sight of the US Government plates on the vehicles out front.

It was a beautiful day on the cusp of autumn, so Miki and I chose to drive home through some of those same ancestral lands, through the canyons that flank Bandelier. I asked her about her reaction to the day and the town. She said that she didn’t harbor any bad feelings toward the US. In the war, both the US and Japan were equally victims and aggressors. The past is done, and it is more important to focus on the future. No one wants nuclear war, so we should all work together to prevent something like this from ever happening again.

I looked out at the soil that was so sacred to the natives and wondered if they too have such a magnanimous attitude.

On the turntable: Ry Cooder, "River Rescue"

'Round Shikoku Day 3

2010-09-07T02:52:00.002+09:00

I awoke sometime before six and went outside to sit and look east to where the sun was pulling itself over the pull-up bar that is the horizon. It had been a long night, a siege against cockroaches and mosquitoes. I sat in the peace of morning, the sky a clash of blue and gray that foretold rain. 50CC Henro came out and as the first act of the day, lit one up. A severe bout of coughing followed, guaranteed to awaken anyone still sleeping in the huts behind him. Yep, that first one always tastes best. Judging on last night's performance, he'll go through a dozen more before setting off on his little scooter. He was a good guy, good-natured but for the perpetual butt in his mouth and his little transistor radio, constantly switched on. This latter habit, in conjunction with the high back rest he'd welded on his bike, reminded me of 'Quadrophenia.' A Real Who-nro.

His roommate was a soft-spoken young guy who was doing the 88 Temple in reverse order by bicycle. We all separated at 7am, by our various modes of transportation. It was a half hour on foot to Temple 11. This beautiful little zen temple was tucked away in the corner of the valley, just below where the trail leads up toward Temple Twelve. It had the quiet, forlorn feel that Miki and I love so much, until a group of car pilgrims came and chose to destroy the quiet with a noisy argument about nokyo, as usual. The priest on the other side of the counter wasn't much better, processing us all with a curt, "Next! Next!" Despite this, his calligraphy was the most beautiful so far.

The trail started steep and got worse. The first section was lined with Jizo, whose form repeated nearly ceaselessly for the next five and a half hours. Apparently many people didn't survive this stretch. Approaching the top of the the first crest, I spotted a young Henro sitting and admiring the scenery. I held up my hand in greeting but didn't speak to him since he was wearing what I thought were earbuds. It dawned on me an hour later that he was deaf. The view from this height was of the valley we'd spent the last two days traversing, now covered by a layer of mist due to the coolness of the air and from the smoke of burning rice husks rising from a dozen farms. The smoke hid the view of the highway, and some of the bigger buildings, creating a view that was almost softly Himalayan.

We spent most of the day on this trail, making our way toward Twelve, along a path that wound up and down as if testing our resolve. Besides the ever-present Jizo, there were also plenty of small signs tied to the branches of trees that offered pithy expressions as a means of urging us on. Like Burma Shave ads for the Buddhistic set. A few small temple halls showed up here and there, eroding slowly into forest. We broke for lunch at one of these, and were soon joined by Shibui Henro, dressed in the full kit. He was an interesting guy, doing the full 88, joined by his father for this first Awa section. I hope we run into him again.

The day took us over three passes, each of them a challenge. After the second tough ascent, the pilgrim turns a corner to see the large figure of Taishi atop a flight of stairs. Very encouraging. From here we dropped and dropped and dropped into the valley, past farms with their stone walls and steps, also looking very Himalayan. The valleys in Shikoku have long held secrets of people looking not to be found. Their villages cling to the hillsides, rarely containing more than a dozen homes.

The trail bottomed out at the base of this valley, where a stream was rushing between boulders. Above it was a sign saying that the next climb was the steepest on the entire pilgrimage, and would take 50 minutes. A woman of around 70 hobbled up then, supported by a pair of walking staffs. When she saw the sign, she literally plopped down in frustration, announcing loudly that she'd eat lunch. She began to talk with us, but after a couple of minutes, began to get strangely aggressive, then abruptly walked off, saying she'd eat lunch elsewhere. We found her awhile later, squatting and eating onigiri in the middle of the trail.

The final ascent was as tough as advertised. My heavy bag and I rested three times along the way. Once, I heard the jingle of a bell and clack of a staff and assumed a henro was on the trail just above me. Reaching the next clearing, I saw merely a lone Jizo on an altar, with a bell above him and a staff at his feet. There was no one else around. It was strange, but then again, I'd already hallucinated three times already today. This happens to me sometimes when I'm fatigued, and the straps of my pack are pressing into the optic nerves in my shoulders. One thing I didn't imagine were all the vipers I saw on the climb, including one that darted across the trail right in front of me, in pursuit of lunch.

We finally reached the temple. Even with our bags, we were two hours quicker than average. I was really feeling this weight for the past two days, but seemed to have found my groove. Walking the final set of stairs, a guy began chatting up Miki, and I heard him complaining to her about how curvy the road had been, the drive taking over an hour. Jesus.

Sitting beside the gate was a woman from Flagstaff. Now living in Himeji, she was doing the Henro after having previously done pilgrimages in Italy and Spain. We also saw the two henro who'd been our comrades in yesterday's parade. We did our rounds, then went up the last 30 minutes to Okuno-in. Not many walk this trail and it showed. It was dark and wildly overgrown, with narrow sections leading over high drops, and large swaths taken out by landslides. Mountain sacred to the Yamabushi always have the same look as this one. A place where dimensions overlap. Halfway up is a large rock face where Taishi beat the giant snake. On the peak itself is a large altar. We sat behind it and drank in the view of the peaks before us. We were at 938m, but these were much higher, including Tsurugi which dwarfed them all. In nearly every valley was a small cluster of homes hanging to the steep mountain faces. They were humbled by the large slabs of rock on their slopes. I had never realized that Shikoku was this wild.

Back again at the temple, we grabbed our gear and moved slowly off the mountain. Miki was using a staff now for the first time, a thick cherry branch that she'd found up at Okuno-in. Despite our quick speed of the morning, we'd lingered through most of the afternoon, and hoped to get down to a rumored campsite before dark. If it was full, we'd have a long, dark walk before meeting road again. Entering a village, a man offered us four mikan. At the far end of his village was Joshin-an, where Emon finally caught up to Taishi. His staff had grown into a tree of unbelievable height. Beyond it, we dropped into an orchard, then down into a small village beside a small river. It was a peaceful place, maybe eight houses, three of them empty. There was also an elementary school. We asked at the lone village store if we could camp there, and the young woman working there told us that we were welcome to sleep across the road at a small covered space that they sometime use for their market. This woman had herself been a henro, but had liked this valley so much that she'd stayed on to help out at the store. Twenty-two, she'd given up on life in the city and is looking for a life of farming. When we first saw her, she was cutting the stems off fresh mikan while listening to sumo on the radio. She offered us sweet potatoes and barley tea as settai, which we enjoyed as much as the conversation.

We eventually set up camp, then went to eat at a pilgrim's rest hut that we'd noticed on our way into the village. It had electricity, allowing us to read and write in our journals. Yet after about an hour, an old man came up out of the dark and grumpily told us that the hut was only for daytime us. Go to bed! At 7:30. It definitely diminished the warmth here. If you make a hospitality area beside your house, and show no hospitality, what was your motivation in the first place?

On the turntable: Supertramp, "Retrospectacle"

New Bottles

2010-08-25T06:05:00.002+09:00

This return to the US has me staring down the barrel of the gun of aging. In Japan, no one could peg just how old I was, often guessing a decade younger. Here, I am expected to act my age. In Japan, I could constantly reinvent myself, the judgments and perceptions of the locals going no further than my identity as gaijin. Beyond that I had all the room in the world to be who I wanted to be. Now I'm back in my own cultural context, and can't escape the framework.

Yet how AM I defined here? I find myself as Neither/Nor. I'm a native New Mexican who no longer recognizes his state. I'm as much a gaijin here as I was in Japan.

I'm most puzzled how do I fit into all of this as an American. Since the national nervous breakdown year of 2001, I no longer know what that means. The America I see in the 21st Century is not the place I learned about in school (however fictitious that was). I don't remember such a high degree of fear and anger, of distrust and ingratitude. While most of the Japanese I knew tried to harmonize and blend with what was happening around them (manifested at its worst as the dreaded 'shoganai'), Americans try to dominate the space. I see it in the conversations, in the body language, in the government policy. I don't really want to be part of it.

While in Japan, I'd made a conscious attempt to be a big fish, as a yoga teacher , a writer, a musician, a martial artist. It was exhausting. Here I want a quiet and simple life. To do my job and go home. But those around me (God bless 'em) are pushing me to both succeed and exceed. Such an American thing, to fill up and overflow the container that is your life.

On the turntable: Yes, "Tales from Topographic Oceans"
On the nighttable: Stanley Crawford, "The River in Winter"

Over the Line

2010-08-20T07:05:00.002+09:00

A decade in Japan created in me the habit of wearing shoes without laces, preferring the whole Mr. Miyagi, slip on-slip off thing. The shame about this is that I lost a creative outlet of artistic self-expression: tying a pair of worn-out shoes together by the laces and throwing them over a power line.

On the turntable: Ricardo Lemvo, "Ay Valeria!"

Izu Dancing

2010-08-17T07:43:00.003+09:00

My work situation has finally stopped thrashing about, entitling me to some free evenings. The nightly monsoons have kept me away from the live music down on The Plaza, so films once again present themselves as alternative. After the marathon stretch of Kobayashi's "The Human Condition" (we could only handle one hour doses of this brutal, 10 hour masterpiece), we've settled in with Shimizu Hiroshi. He reminds us some of our beloved Ozu, manipulating actors as props as a means of diminishing the subjectivity of role, and creating a story that speaks to the universal in us all. If Ozu was a maker of tofu (as he famously claimed), then Shimizu is a master of okayū. He shares Ozu's slow pace of storytelling, yet utilizes camera techniques seemingly cribbed from European Surrealist films of a decade earlier. These effects weren't commonly seen in Hollywood until being 'pioneered' in Citizen Kane in 1941.

Shimizu was one of the first directors to commonly use location rather than sets. To view the dirt roads of 1930's rural Japan is to see the contemporary Laos roads over which I traveled this winter. It also shares a lot with the deep-country Shikoku pilgrimage trails I walked last autumn, minus the power lines and vending machines. Shot on a bus actually traversing the Izu countryside, "ありがとうさん” ("Mr. Thank You") features scenes of a long gone country life rolling behind the characters , showing it such deference that the landscape itself eventually becomes more important than the actors themselves. It is one of the earliest road movies that I can think of. As I watched it, I surprised myself in that the film reminded me somewhat of John Ford's 'Stagecoach' (filmed three years later), where archetypes are thrown together, then bound by the landscape through which they pass. But rather than solidifying that bond through the drama of an Indian attack, Shimizu's film stays true to the fact that most of our human encounters stay light and impersonal, in our sharing moments with strangers who will remain just that. His films offer glimpses of life that, while possibly thought mundane at the time of release, bask in a beauty that is both bittersweet and enchanting, made more so by their fleeting nature.

On the turntable: Drive-by Truckers, "The Big To-Do"
On the nighttable: Hammett, et al., "The Essence of Santa Fe"

'Round Shikoku Day 2

2010-08-10T06:08:00.003+09:00

I'm in the process of transferring my Shikoku journals to digital, though I hope to see the final result revert back to a piece of analog technology, bound in cardboard. In the meantime, I will post occasional tidbits, about once a week, as the yoga teacher in me pounds and twist the words into proper alignment.
(As always, more recent lifestuff over at Bentos...)

The stars over Tokushima have proven to shine bright and clear. Under them I sleep better than expected, considering I'm sleeping in a small three mat room with two others. The late arriving pilgrim, a 20 year old student from Toyama, was on the couch, his legs extended up the wall, poor guy.

I get up at 6:30 and have my breakfast out in the sun. The owner of this 'office' where we slept pulls up on his fancy Italian bicycle. Like last night, he had a small watermelon in one hand, a knife in the other. I suppose I've been reading too many tales about the Taishi, because ordinary people are beginning to take on fantastic properties. It all feels like the Wizard of Oz somewhat. I dub the owner 'The Watermelon-Bearing Boddhisattva.'

It takes an hour to get to Temple 6. We pass many jizo, their faces lit by sunlight. I figure that most have been standing here long before any of these houses were. Along the way, we three pick up another walker, who'd been resting in a bus shelter. We eventually spread out along the roadside, a proper henro parade. I'm in the lead, humping my huge pack like that guy in any Vietnam War film, the one who totes the heavy M60, and who, when the firefight breaks out, merely shifts his weight to his back leg, bellowing, as the shells cartwheel around him in slo-mo. Why am I the one on point anyway, when I'm the only one who can't even read the signs well? Probably at the exact moment as I was having this thought, I accidentally stray from the walkers' trail and follow instead the one meant for cars. But I'm too busy singing Blues songs in time to the rhythm of my feet. I make up a new pilgrimage precept: Don't Play Air Guitar on the Pilgrim's Walking Staff.

We do our thing at Temple 6, then Miki and I decide to leave the others behind for the short walk over to Temple 7. We find a Kumano Shrine here, the passage between the gate and the kami being a long narrow corridor. A Hong Kong couple at Temple 7 laugh as I approach, and I later realize that I'm wearing my Bruce Lee T-shirt under my pilgrim robe.

It's another hour before we reach Temple 8. We had stopped midway for a break, gnawing on a day old sweet potato beneath the freeway. Temple Eight stands at the end of a valley, and we hear it before we ever see it. We've dropped our bags behind some stone jizo at the base of the hill, since we once again need to pass by here on our way to Temple 9. As we admire the Benten Shrine on the pond, we hear a beautiful voice chanting near the pagoda. We are saddened to find that it is a mere recording. Up at the Taishi Hall, I find an old man with the outfit of a seasoned henro, chanting powerfully and devoutly. When he finished, he seemed taken with us, offering seasoned advice and kind words. Miki had been suffering quite badly today, and he was talking about how you have to shoulder your burden and do the best you can, asking Taishi's help if needed. He was yet another character in our growing tale, the sage who shows up to deliver the exact wisdom we need at the time. I find that a trend in these people is a growing devotion to Taishi. This is considered a pilgrimage of personality, yet to follow such a person is in itself an act of great faith. When we leave our own aged sage, I notice that he is wearing a sash written with Dai Sendachi. He then gives us his fuda, the red color of one who has done the pilgrimage 50 times or more. I'm smirking and thinking of soccer, but Miki is beaming like she's clutching one of Willy Wonka's gold tickets. She tells me it is incredibly auspicious to get one at all, and we've been out here for less than 24 hours.

It is another long walk to Temple 9. The houses drop away and the fields lengthen toward a grove of tell-tale trees. Across from the main gate is a small shop selling udon noodles. Its two seats are occupied, but we are led to a bench out front. I'm happy here, feeling like an extra in a period film. We eat tarai udon, which is firm and tasty, preceded by sweet potato as settai. As we eat we encounter the smiling Dai Sendachi again, his demeanor changed from sage to grandfather, as he walks in the main gate with a couple two generations younger. We also see the two guys from our parade this morning. There are quite a few people coming and going, this still being the long Silver week of holiday. After our meal, we finally enter the temple. There is a rare Japanese reclining Buddha here, but it isn't on display today. I want to use the restroom, but the only one I see is for the handicapped. I find it locked. After waiting at least 5 minutes, I try the door again, and again, then finally ask the woman at the nokyo-jo if it is purposely locked. She says yes and asks me if I want to use it. Of course I do, and why did you choose to ignore my rattling of the door as you are sitting a mere five feet away? And why would you lock it in the first place, making it laborious for the handicapped to use at all? Is this beautifully built chamber built for their benefit, or for yours?

My mind is growing sour. All of these temples look too built up and modern, funded by our offerings as pilgrims. Entering a nokyo-jo is like entering a comfy, air-conditioned office, our paperwork deftly processed before we are whisked away. It has the feel of a stamp rally, and I'm not getting much of a spiritual vibe at all due to all the concrete, electric doors, fully automated toilets, etc. When we do feel like lingering, the crowds elbow one another, sending us screaming outside to the path once again. This is where I'm beginning to feel that spirit lies, personified in last night's caretaker, in the Watermelon Bearer, in the Dai Sendachi, and in whoever owned the shop that left some sugary sweets and barley tea out front, for us to enjoy during the long walk to temple 10 on a day growing hot.

But arriving there presented new challenges. We still hadn't seen any buses yet today, but the number of cars created the identical result, with the van drivers aggressively honking, and the drivers of the two luxury cars who had the audacity to park directly in front of the main gate. I found myself trying very hard to find acceptance at anything that arose on the pilgrimage, but I was continually amazed at what people accept as acceptable.

The 333 rough stone steps were enough to humble anyone, but the crowd here was still too big, too pushy. For the first time, we had to queue at the nokyo-jo, processed like an assembly line. These mountain temples are where we usually find the most spirit, but the numbers here stamped it out. On the way back down, I told Miki that we might find more spirit if we forego the material nokyo collecting in order to make it more pure. She asked, "Do you really want to?" I laughed as I said no.

We'd left our bags at a shop at the bottom of the hill, where we sat out back and ate ice cream. This five minute break set up a chain reaction. Thirty minutes later, as we waited for a stoplight to change, a couple waiting at the same intersection offered us a lift. Surprisingly, it was an independent taxi, which confused us a little. As the ride was offered as settai, we accepted, having agreed before the trip not to actively hitch, but to take those rides freely offered. The couple was from Sakai, and did a section of the pilgrimage each month. Today, they had started their second go-round. Another mythical figure, The Taxi Henro.

Having saved us a 7 kilometer walk, they dropped us at Kamo-no-yu Onsen, which offered free huts for walkers. I relished the bath after a couple of hot days. It was late afternoon on a holiday, so the baths were busy, mostly with rough-looking laborer types. At one point the rotemburo was filled tough men talking tough, like I'd stumbled onto a yakuza meet. After the bath, I climbed into a massage chair. It was a high tech modern type, which did everything but knead my shoulders as I'd so desperately hoped.

The onsen also had free bicycles, which we rode up to town in order to buy food for the long stretch of mountainous section tomorrow. It was a delight to ride bikes for the first time in weeks, our legs having their own holiday in tracing a pattern not used for walking. Our stomachs too had a treat in a long meal at Joyful, me downing beer and pasta in a pathetic attempt at carbo loading. Stuffed and happy, we made our way back to our shabby two-mat shack, perfect for the pair of us.

On the turntable: "Harry Nilsson, "The Point"

Slouching toward Shikoku

2010-07-20T00:28:00.000+09:00

9/19/09

...we awake at 5:30 and walk toward Oku-no-in as temple bells begin to peal. The cemetery looks almost two dimensional in the fog. Three monks are chanting at the Gōkyo, slower and deeper and even more Tibetan than at the service yesterday. We go around to back to Taishi's tomb and meditate awhile. Then a quick prayer asking for protection as we're about to trace his footsteps across Shikoku. On the walk back, sunlight begins to spot some of the mossy stones, animating them.

We have breakfast, pack, then get a bus for the cable car down. We are standing in front, the car submitting to gravity, moving down the steep pitch as if an automobile in idle. The driver has little to do but brake and inch us into the station.

On the next train, we lurch through the mountains toward the River Ki. We are once again back in the wild land of the gods, and I can see how this formidable range kept out invaders. Back on the plains, today's invaders are the other passengers. I hate that we have to pass north of the Ki and out of the land of the dead, then return all the way back to Osaka. I'm not ready for city yet. The bodies hem in much too close, and I can't quite concentrate on my book, having been too relaxed by all the space I got these three weeks on the road and in the mountains.

Then on the ferry. I spend most of the crossing filling in my journal, but feeling the need for perspective, I go out on deck. If I go from dry land to dry land without a glimpse of water, I'll never be sure I actually left Honshu. It is windy, the waves high, large freighters rolling as they pass through our wake. Tall shafts of white reach up Awaji's rocky southern sides. I cross to port and look past the bow at the shoreline of Shikoku which we'll walk for the next few weeks or so. I go back inside to pee, my stream drawing a crescent moon as the boat breaks the swells.

On the turntable: Fleetwood Mac, "Roadhouse Chalk Farm"
On the nighttable: Frederick Barthelme, "The Brothers"

Sleeping with the Taishi

2010-07-13T05:23:00.003+09:00

09/19/09

Tentokuji is a large temple that sprawls around its garden. We seem to be the only independent travelers here, so besides our own room, we get the adjoining room for our meals, plus we get the baths to ourselves. If it weren't for the morning chants, I'd feel we were in a nice ryokan. We are awakened by the sound of bells resonating across the hour preceding dawn. At 6:30, we kneel before the altar in the Hondo, listening to the priest and his son chant in low guttural tones. With the low light and the clang of cymbals, we could be in a Tibetan monastery somewhere deep in the Himalaya.

After a sparse breakfast, we move toward the Gorin, we that we have this too to ourselves. The silence is suddenly cut by leafblowers. As I've learned in Kyoto, this is apparently a new traditional practice with modern monks. I really miss the soft shush-shush of a bamboo broom moving over stone. The sunlight on the buildings is enough to impress; our photos naturally framed by more of those massive cedars. The world surrounding the dull wood is particularly green this morning. We enter the Daitō first, which I decide later is the most impressive. This open pagoda is the womb mandala, with the Sun Buddha at its center, flanked by four other Nyorai. All towering gold, they stare toward the south with calm impassive expressions that somehow change perspective with every footstep. All these in turn are flanked by large well-painted pillars of 16 Boddhisattvas, each distinct and lovely.

The Kondō is next. A common theme between the structures up on Kōya seems to be those towering ladders stretching up to the roofs, and the paper cutouts before the altars.
The figures here in the Kondō look more Indian than in the other halls, including one Shakyamuni who looks remarkably like Jesus. Back clockwise around to the front again, the incense sticks that we lit earlier send trails toward the high wooden beams.

We pass the morning walking to all the other old structures on the mountain. The odd grooves in the wood trick my eyes into seeing sanskrit characters. Approaching the Saitō, I am facing a sight familiar from the cover of the book I've been reading. Walking the veranda of the low squat Miedō next, I am serenaded suddenly by that Can-Can music from the French Follies. The sports festival from the adjoining high school is using it as their opening procession, a song better known as BGM for lowbrow sex shows. I love (and sometimes loathe) Japan for its lack of context. I usually counter this with my own sense of irony, which deepens as I stroll a 1200 year old building with this song filling the air around me.

Tourists begin to come now, in groups of twos and threes, all of them foreign. Most of the Japanese come on bus tours, though they're nowhere to be seen. The single Japanese travelers seem to be henro, tanned and thin, clutching their staffs. A smaller version of the latter is being tossed onto the flames over at Aizenmyo. A monk sits before the goma pit, alternating throwing more tablets on the flames, tapping the metal hibachi with his 'tongs,' and moving his mouth which intones syllables we can't hear.

We head west out of town, which, while not as lovely as the eastern section, has the same appealing ski town look of two-story structures, the view of the towering cedars unimpeded by power lines. Add the fact that this is all surrounded by 117 temples allows the beauty to expand exponentially. At the town's far end is a massive Daimon gate, opening onto an array of trails leading away from the peace the prevails up here on this plateau. By contrast, Kumano had been so rugged and untamed, the lair of gods both loving and wrathful. Kōya is pure Pure Land.
We walk down the street past a pair of ancient women who wave to me. Miki is in turn greeted by a foreign woman on a bike. We stop at the museum, modeled after Byōdo-in in Uji. Inside we find the rooms to be high and wide and oddly Victorian. There is plenty of statuary to admire, including one series done where each of the wooden figures has eyes that are alive, skin that begs for a caress. While I'm not often taken with written scrolls, here I'm most amazed by a sutra done in microscopic woodcuts, and a Heart Sutra done in blue.

There's not much English, so I head outside to wait for Miki, reading while a persistent bee practices landings with my foot as a runway. Then it's lunchtime, a lovely moussaka back at International Cafe. The owner is in conversation with an older priest relaxing in his samue with a cuppa. Besides the foreign tourists, this place seems popular with the local monastic set. A young nun comes in, looking exhausted , but with a grin that is the smile of any young woman in her 20s with a piece of cake before her. A foreign monk also comes to the counter, probably the Swiss monk who I've heard has lived on Kōya for 8 years. We too get our chance to chat, and after mentioning our impending plan, are given an 'underground' list of lodging for the Shikoku pilgrimage. He tells us that he doesn't give it to just anyone, making me suddenly feel like a character in "The Beach." He then knocks 400 yen off our lunch. Our first settai.

We work our way toward Oku-no-in, finally. On the way, we pass through the Burmese temple that has a tie with the book/film, "Harp of Burma." We make another stop at Karukayadō, with its story of Karukaya Doshin and Ishidomaru, done in murals. Then we cross the first bridge.

It is an incredibly serene world here. the height of the cedars comforts, as does the softness of the moss. They too are the Diamond and the Womb. The proud and ancient figures of the Gorintō are the sentinels who grant us leave to pass. Jizo dot the forest as if in a game of hide and seek. The graves are like an all-star team of Japan's greatest historic figures; they who made the country great. Not just the number, but the variety of people represented here further emphasizes Kōya's greatness. This mountain has quickly become my favorite place in the country.

After passing a couple hours looking at graves, we finally come to the Mizumuke Jizo. Here we get our first nokyo stamp for the henro. Next we'll get a tōba for Ken. I can't remember the exact kanji for his kaimyō, but the woman at the window tries writing out my pronunciation on a scrap of paper first and I immediately recognize them. The next task is to choose before which of the figures to place it. Of the seven standing beside the small stream, I pick the smallest, the oddest shaped, one slightly ugly. It should be easy to find in the future. I apply water to the strip, the damp ink streaking downward somewhat. We then cross the final bridge.

To the right of the stream stand a series of moss covered mounds dedicated to the Emperors past. Before us is a large hall dark but for the hundreds of lanterns. Each goes for $25,000. Despite the price, they also line a tunnel like path one floor below, plus another two-level hall next door, built especially for the overflow. We move around to the rear of the hall where a tour group is wrapping up their chanting. They move on and we're alone with Kōbō Daishi. We pray, then sit and wait for dark. It is completely silent, no other tourists in sight. The silence continues into dusk, then a lone cry comes from the forest, a reminder that night is the animal world. The subsequent calls of birds and insects has a different quality than in the day. Satisfied that night has come, Miki and I turn back to begin our 2km return through the cemetery. The path is lit by soft overhead lights, but they're spaced about 100m apart, forcing you to walk in darkness cut only by the low light emitting from some of the toro. This helps to created some fantastic shadows. The huge gorintō silhouetted against the night, looking like one of Sendak's Wild Things. Faces of statues also come out of the dark, the trees now become beams holding up sky. One of the most magical moments of my life. On the path, we pass only a few others, all foreign. Miki remarks that most Japanese wouldn't do this, being far too busy with baths and dinner. Ours too awaits, as we hurry against the cold...

On the turntable: Beirut, "Gulag Orkestar"

To the High Wild Mountains

2010-07-06T03:08:00.000+09:00

We get on a train before seven and spend the morning revisiting the songlines we'd made over the past two weeks. It was like watching a slide show at high speed. We have the "View Car" to ourselves. For some reason, no one else chooses to sit in this wide open, spacious car with glass running from floor to ceiling. It's a long journey, one that won't get us to Koya until early afternoon. The final approach on a cable car inches us up a slope at nearly 45 degrees.

We spend the afternoon walking the temples on this quiet mountain. We follow a saffron monk with billowy sleeves to Nyonindō, where until 100 years ago women would have had to finish their ascent of this sacred mountain. It stands just outside the town's gate, so seems a good place to begin our rambling. Inside the temple hall is a statue of En-no-Gyoja, with fierce glowing eyes that bring life to the darkness. In front of neighboring Benten is an ihai for the comfort women of WWII. The main priest here answers all our questions, his effeminate nature perfect for his position. Like the Hijira of India, or the transgender shaman of many cultures, I wonder if this role is chosen by the community.

We make another stop next door at Naninji, with its picture of Namikiri Fudo, cutting through tempestuous seas so that dharma-laden Kukai could return home safely from his studies in China. A well behaved dog sleeps on the 'front porch.' I toss pebbles to a kitten, which chases them around spasmodically as they bounce. Behind the hall is a circular pool ringed by at least a dozen Jizo. It looks remarkably like a rotemburo. A small mausoleum to the Tokugawa is just over the wall, like a mini Toshogu, yet unlike the busy bigger shrine, this one stands quietly among the trees. The trees on Koya deserve special mention, huge and majestic and old. Japanese forests are at their most beautiful when left alone. One of the smaller groves hides a small temple that looks to be one of the oldest in town, and the Thai script over the main gate hints at international connections.

Beyond it, the Kongobuji too is nearly hidden, the forest thick around this simply massive structure. There are huge buckets on the roof, with long ladders extending toward them. We take our time wandering the rooms and long corridors, many lit with oil lamps from centuries ago. We take tea in a large hall, which contains a painting of the character of "Shin," stylized to look like a mustacheo'd figure with a doughnut. A nun walks past the hall and down the corridor. Walking behind her, I note how she has retained her femininity despite the shaved head and baggy robes. We follow past the rock garden, two dragons swirling together amidst white sand. Most impressive is the kitchen, everything familiar but built to an awesome scale. The blackened beams have seen thousands of meals, as have the clay rice cookers that can serve 200.

We move down the town's single street, past shops whose architecture goes back over a century. Some of them have lofts that now serve as cafes. It's refreshing, the lack of chain shops, flashy neon signs, or powerlines. The clouds are moving in and cooling the day, so we duck into the modern International Cafe run by a guy who speaks English and French. The cappucino I order from him gives me an intense rush, my body not having had strong caffeine for weeks. I had a similar equilibrium problem as I went cold turkey earlier in the walk, listing strongly left for three or four steps. It is a wonderful day, one where we don't have to get anywhere, and can let the hours fall away quietly, slowly...

On the turntable: Ricki Lee Jones, "Balm in Gilead"
On the nighttable: Edward Abbey, "Resist Much, Obey Little"

Kumano Kōdō XVI

2010-06-29T03:08:00.007+09:00

09/16/09

...it had rained all night but the morning was blue and clear. I looked out the window at the inlet just below, the tide dropping by the minute. In the bathroom, I noticed a small shrine to Fudo. He is the god of immovability, but the toilet is the one place where I most hope for movement to occur.

We checked out and within minutes are out of town, threading hills bathed in mist, as the trees slough off the night's moisture. There is a Zen training center out here, as well as a charcoal processing plant. The fog creates an otherworldly atmosphere to the morning. We move through it to a low pass, watched over by a small Jizo, as is common. It isn't long before we're in a village, long and open and lit by the sun. As we walk out of it, a farmer pulls over in his truck, warning us that the next pass might be tough going after all the rain. I tend not to heed these warnings too much, as much of the worry is usually over-exaggerated. The Japanese can be such world-class worry warts.

At the base of the next pass were a tall Jizo flanked by two stone giraffes. There was also a proper traveler's rest house here, containing a sofa and a cot. A house stood above it all, and in the front entry way, an old woman sat with her scruffy dog.

We went over the pass and on the way down, met a construction crew. They'd spent three weeks constructing what looked like a long rollercoaster that transported the telephone cable that they'd eventually lay across the hilltops. We stopped to talk to them a bit, one guy saying. "The mountains of Nachi sure are beautiful, aren't they?" I strongly suppressed the obvious refrain of , "They are, so why are you guys so gung ho about fucking them up?" Just a short while later, we surprised a tanuki on the trail. If you've seen the film "Pompoko," you'll get the irony of finding one in the section of the Kōdō where man has done the most damage.

The adjacent parts weren't much better. During the bubble, they'd built a series of bungalows around a man-made Edo-period lake. Now abandoned, the cabins are still in good stead if you need a place to sleep and are into a little creative B & E.

We rested atop the next section, beyond where both our guide book and frequent trailside signs warned us about the vipers that we never saw. The trail began to descend, and a moment after Miki said, "this isn't so bad," it shot straight up those frustrating faux-wooden steps, traversed a very narrow path over a high cliff, then dropped down a stream bed. In bad weather, this section would be very tough indeed, and I can now understand our farmer friend's warning.

Where the trail ended, we had lunch beside a quiet river. We circled around a pair of lakes, then moved up the final pass of the day and--for us--the Ōhechi. Each pass we'd crossed over the last five days had been a little lower than the last, making this one a mere baby, comparatively. At its top was a Jizo that supposedly had healing powers, and the high tech A/V system beside it told us so.

Dropping next into Kii Katsuura, moving through town past the old sake brewing factory toward Nachi station. This section was a mess, far too many roads built with tourist money, in the hopes of luring even more. What I saw before me completely justified the internal Kinsellan voice I heard when I first learned that Kumano got World Heritage status: "Before they build it, you should go." Miki noticed posters put up by a resident's group opposed to a proposed nuke plant down here. I feel that if this plant is built, UNESCO should not only repeal the World Heritage status of Kumano, but should never reward it to anything in this country ever again.

We paid a quick visit to Funarakuji temple, which housed a marvelous collection of statues and faded paintings, all shaded by majestic trees 800 year old. Beside the temple building was a model of an old sealed boat. Upon reaching the age of 60, certain monks would be sealed inside and set adrift, faithful that they'd reach the Pure Land. Of the twenty who attempted it, only a single monk returned. (Would this then be considered a success or failure?)

A bus took us to Shingu. Along the way, I tried to find those sections I'd walked back in 2005, and noticed immediately the damage that the construction industry had done, especially near the port. We dropped our bags at the station, where Miki ran into a friend she hadn't seen in 6 years, now working at the Tourist info center.

Salutations complete, we walked through town to Kuragami Jinja. The rocks leading up were jagged and wild, befitting a place where yamabushi train. A young, thin woman appeared from out of the forest, then turned in prayer toward the mountaintop. Something about her resonated something in me, some power she emitted. Miki and I walked on toward the source, over jagged steps, scaring off a viper in the process. In front of a large tree was a stone the size and shape of a Jizo. Thought lacking any distinct features, it had a collection of small white stones around its base. When we came down later, an old woman was standing before it deep in prayer, causing me to wonder about what secrets it espoused.

The shrine at the top was equally powerful, built into an immense boulder. Behind this was a gap--the typical passage to rebirth found in Shugendo. We wanted to pass through, but a couple of men were standing there talking, one obviously rich in knowledge about the Kumano region. Leaving them to their talk, we walked over to Hayatama Jinja, passing Hikitsuchi Sensei's aikido dojo on the way. As Miki and I walked and talked about whether this had been a spiritual experience for us, we both agreed it hadn't been. Sure, we'd suffered some and had learned a handful of things, but overall, it just felt like an especially long hike.

This feeling changed once we got to the shrine, and that feeling of spirituality came on in a sudden rush. The trees, the quiet dignified buildings, the quality of light, all contributed to a great feeling of peace, of not wanting to leave its sacred precinct. I'd been here twice before, but hadn't felt it then. But today, this place, a major source of Japanese folk spirituality, had drawn me in. I want to make this my life-work.

A group of bus tourists tried to ruin it. As the tour conductor was purifying her hands before her in worship, one middle-aged man interrupted these ablutions, complaining that he didn't want to wait an extra hour until dinner. Then he and his three buddies pushed in on me as I prayed before the main shrine. I moved away, bowing in thanks before all the gods, and with that, my Kumano pilgrimage was done.

Miki and I scouted out the castle ruins as a place to sleep, but finding it less than ideal and too trafficked with dog walkers. Miki's friend instead directed us to a cheap hotel. The hotel clerk in turn lead us to a good izakaya. It was a small place, just a counter with six stool, all filled by a group of men in their sixties, local men and friends since childhood. It was funny to hear them talk about old school days. The master was a handsome man with the immense hands and powerful chest of a judoka. By day he caught the fish that he'd serve at night. I neglected to ask if he'd personally 'rassled the whale on the menu. When I did ask about the 'namero,' he brought a whole serving--basically an entire bonito, bones and all, ground into mince and served raw, seasoned with vinegar and chili. It is the type of thing that only fisherman could eat, and believe me, even with all the beer, it was tough going. That mission finished, we walked up Shingo's main shopping arcade, stomach churning and head abuzz. Closing my eyes that night was closing the chapter on this part of the trip.

On the turntable: Hootie and the Blowfish, "Cracked Rear View"