Imbibing Bibliophile #69

The Silk Road by Jonathan Tucker

 Tsingtao Beer, Tsingtao Brewery Co

On the turntable:  John Cage, "Ligeti, Pintscher, Cage & Xenakis"

On the nighttable:  W. Somerset Maugham, "A Writer's Notebook"

Imbibing Bibliophile #68

  Ultimate Journal by Richard Bernstein

Sakura Arashi IPA, Iwate Kura Beer

On the turntable:  Robert Fripp & Brian Eno, "No Pussyfooting"

Scrambles Amongst the Alps

It was only 8:30 am, and the election trucks were already caterwauling outside.  The weather hadn't been any less oppressive, nearly a week of wind and clouds and intermittent rain.  You had to feel sorry for those who'd spent big on flying in for the sakura and were getting lousy photos.  (But based on how I feel about the current overtourism here, I don't feel that sorry.)

So we'd done well, planning a hike that happened to fall under perfect blue skies.  Multiple hikes I should say, as this was technically Plan C.  We'd originally planned on a hike in the hills up north, but the rains in town had dumped unseasonal snow up there.  So Wes and I had shifted, then Will had reappeared a few days early, turned back by similar weather up in Nagano. We shifted again.

And due to my fumbling through the morning, I almost backed out myself.  I'm pretty superstitious about these things, and my comedy of errors since awakening had me worried.  I'd once given up on post-work climbing plans back in my Santa Barbara days, after a restaurant shift where I seemed to be constantly spilling or dropping things.  The Universe and myself were out of alignment that day, and climbing a cliff face didn't seem the best idea. 

So poor Wes and Will were kept waiting 30 minutes.  Then we all circled through the backroads of Shiga for awhile, while my car GPS and Google Maps on my phone found it impossible to form a consensus.  We finally found the trailhead, past a trio of old-timers walking along a shaded road that followed a stream up a narrow valley.  

Despite our climbing a lesser peak not found on most maps, the trail was pretty easy to follow, beginning with a rock crossing over a limpid river that in most countries would house crocs.  It was a quick and steep climb along a set of lazy falls to a tableland of sorts, created by one of Japan's earliest dams, built in 1889, using Dutch technology.  The dam was a pretty little thing, formed of perfectly symmetrical, hand-hewn stones. A far cry from the concrete addiction later to come.  

We followed a broad sand bed through dwarf pines.  Their resemblance to juniper brought to mind New Mexico.  Wherever we were, it didn't feel like Japan.  The landscape continued to baffle as we began to climb again, through a natural forest of low-growth, not often seen in this country. Only the snowdrop asebi and the new budding azaleas reminded us where we were. 

We climbed out of the trees and into a sandy ridge punctuated by scrub trees.  Pillars of rock rose to form seats with a perfect angle for sitting with the view.  After a bit of scrambling down sandy sections that had eroded away any hope of a foothold, we sat awhile atop one isolated rise, trying to identify our surroundings, the higher peaks to the south, the villages and hills out toward the lake.  

The final push to the top was up a steep set of rocks, the short lengths of rope here and there adding very little assistance.  Devoid of the usual markers, it turned out to be a false peak, the true summit being the next hillock over.  A lone hiker was enjoying his lunch there, so deciding to give him his solace, we settled in.  It proved a long rest, filled with lunch and stories.  The laws of inertia were doing their thing, and this long pleasant rest seemed the only thing we had in mind.  Any of our original plots -- to do an extended loop from this peak, followed by another climb a short drive away -- all eroded away.  The three of us are notorious for racing through hikes, and this plodding pace felt just right, on the first true day of spring.         

There was one order of business, that of Wes ceremoniously passing his new guidebook to me. (Fitting for a peak named after a ceremonial hall.) I'd watched him work through the book's full gestation, and it was nice to finally feel its full weight in my hands. Then it was our own weight that we were carrying, lunch-laden stomachs assisting a little too much during the steep scramble down the face of our lunchspot.  It was much easier going up the opposite side to the proper summit, where we took the obligatory photographic "proof" before another rapid descent down the other side. The trail finally leveled out, then took us in the shadow of another dam, which Will dubbed the "vomiting koala."   

The next section I would place high on the list of Japan's most beautiful hikes.  Though again, it was barely Japan at all.  The scenery seemed to shape-shift -- from Borneo, then Australia, then the California Sierra.  Another stream fell with a certain lethargy as we passed beneath large ferns and cubelar walls of black stone.  It was a wonderous place, somehow out of time, which got Wes and I started on Land of the Lost references.  

We once again found the lazy river at the bottom.  A trail opposite brought us to the road, and a walk of a kilometer or so back to the car.  But we decided to stay with the river, following a faint trail through the sand, then eventually rock hopping as the walls steepened.  Wes and I followed the opposite banks, as if a competition to see which course was better.  It turned out we were both right, as we zigzagged back and forth over the water further on.  We saw no life on the river, save for a lone beachball that had been the life of someone's party the summer before.  Amazing that it had survived the winter.  And we set it adrift again, watching it follow its own unhurried course toward spring, as if in emulation of our own bucolic passage toward the same.    


On the turntable:  Brian Eno, "Curiosities Vol. 1"

(untitled)

春日和
ひどい黄砂や
花見の鼻水

On the turntable: Thelonious Monk, "The Complete Riverside Recordings"

Sunday Papers: Jorge Luis Borges

"Revenge does not alter what was done to you. Neither does forgiveness. Revenge and forgiveness are irrelevant."

 On the turntable: Cornelius Cardew & The Scratch Orchestra, "The Great Learning"  

Kumano Kōdō XVIII: Hongudō

After Shiomi-toge, I walked the Nakahechi and Kogumotori-goe sections of the Kōdō, camping in the cold nights of mid-March.  Sleep came poorly, compounded by bad food and no baths, so at the end I treated myself with a night at the Azumaya in Yunomine Onsen, an inn whose centuries-old history is dwarfed by the 1800 years of the hot springs themselves.  I felt warm for the first time in days, in black pine baths that are among the most beautiful in Japan.  

My friend Daniel and I would walk the little trafficked Hongudō, a section of the Iseji which ran for two days through the hills to connect the Kogumotori-goe with the sea.  My feet found familiar footholds in the Kogumotori, which I'd just climbed one day before.  Not long after leveling out it dropped sharply down the initial stages of the Hongudō route, before climbing again to Banze-toge, whose characters were of a familiar but unusual reading.  Dropping once again down the far side, the path split into five directions, and it took a little bit of connoitering to get things right.  

We should have appreciated that extra time in the forest, for there would be little more for the next  two days.  A road led us through the first of many farm villages, before dropping us onto the busy Route 168.  We'd eventually leave it to cross a wide bridge over the Shingu-gawa, but the bitumen underfoot would be a near constant until late afternoon.  It was a sunny and pleasant day, and we chatted as we went, the scenery of little but trees.  There was the odd jizo statue, a group of equally chatty monkeys, and a brook that ran ever to our right. 

We eventually arrived at a small hamlet, and in our discussion of what sort of people might live out here we missed our trail off to our left somewhere.  But we continued on as we weren't far off, stopping for lunch at a strange single switchback that curled through a sole patch of clear-cut wood.  The boulders and open view made for a good lunch spot.  

Nearing the top of the rise we noted where our missed trail popped out, which allowed us to bisect the curling switchbacks of road along the more amenable surface of forest path.  An old abandoned school at the pass had been converted into a small park, but the swimming pool remained to acquire a thick green sludge.  The trails continued on and off, passing a handful of hidden hamlets and even a Bouldering course of a recent vintage.  But we'd lose the paths again at the bottom of the hills, the forest it passed through being too dense and overgrown to decipher.        

We joined a busy road again, this one also defined by the contours of the stream that it paralleled.  The maps I carried were poor, and contradicted the equally poor signage along the way, so it was with an uneasy feeling we came to the end of the day's journey.  The inn proved amenable in picking us up, and not long afterward we were enjoying a beer and a bag of kakipi on the sofa of the lobby, a ritual common to those who walk Japan.  

It was a good night's sleep in an odd hotel, one that might have been built along the design of an old age home, and one certainly constructed with local government money.  The dawn brought a steady rain, and our driver from the day before was kind in driving us partly up the hillside roads that gave definition to the ricefields of Maruyama Senmaida.  I love this country for these types of places, grand and breathtaking and nearly unknown.   Coming across such places is one of the true treasures of country walking in Japan.  

The rain let up as we climbed to the pass, which allowed for fantastic views over the terraced fields.  Another pass soon followed, and by the time we arrived in the village at the other side, the sun was high and confident.  Sadly, our sense of orientation didn't follow suit.  We'd follow a set of signs that seemed to cheat, to follow the spirit of the Kōdō, without being the actually contours of the path itself.  We began to sense that the signage was orientated to walkers coming from Ise, as a number of times we'd see signs pointing back into the forest we just passed.  A woman at a roadside shop seemed to confirm this when I asked for directions, repeatedly pointing us in the direction from which we came.  I'd correct her each time yet she'd do it again, and I eventually gave up, resigned to my role in a sort of Monty Python skit.     

In a sort of accident we stumbled across the trail over the Yokogaki Pass, after bushwhacking above the narrow logging road we'd ascended.  At the top, the sea opened before us, even more so at a wide area of landslide that required an extensive detour.  Time was running against Daniel by now, as he needed to take a 90 bus ride back to Yunomine to get his car, then drive on to Osaka.  So we parted ways on the highway below, which he followed into town while I ascended once more. 

The road didn't take me far from Daniel's course below, as I traced the contours of a hillside on a small paved road.  I eventually found flat ground again near where some high schoolers practiced baseball moves, doing what the Japanese call "image training," scooping and fielding and throwing invisible balls.  I took a long break in a shrine nearby, having almost three full hours to my train, then finished the Hongudō with the pop of broken blisters, after nearly 60km of hard surface over the two days.  

I met the Iseji proper under the cliff face of Inaoiwa Shrine.  The flat sand of the beaches flanking the Iseji beckoned, offering ease to the feet for the final few kilometers to Kumanoshi and the train station.  After eating half the menu at MosBurger, I killed time visiting the tallest set of hananingyo dolls I've ever seen, towering at least 6 meters.  Then there was little to do but lay in the grass outside the station, listening to a mysterious woman sing a traditional ballad, as the clack of her wooden clackers counted time until my train was ready to go. 


On the turntable:  Jimmy Smith, "Lonesome Road"

Kumano Kōdō XVII: Shiomi-toge

In completely the Kumano Kodo back in 2009, I realized that there were a few spur routes left to walk, not to mention the entire Ise-ji.  Over the subsequent decade, a number of routes have been opened up, with each new guidebook fattened by a dozen new pages.  One section, the Shiomi-toge, paralleled the road route I'd taken back in 2004.  I had hoped to walk it while I was in Kumano last autumn, but a typhoon had closed to the trail for repairs.  Finally, having a free morning before a week-long tour leading a school group, I race out of my campsite at dawn to catch a bus, scaring a tribe of deer whose snowy white bottoms bobbed as they vault across the hillside.  

The day nearly takes a tragic turn due to the driver of the mini-bus I hop onto an hour later in Tanabe proper.  As I board, he immediately tells me that this is the wrong bus, innocent enough, but he next tells me to get down, a rudeness I find shocking.  I am stepping out when I spot the kanji for my destination written on a chart behind his seat.  I fume through the 20-minute ride, finding fault once again in a tourist industry run rampant, compounded by the driver's bluntness. My mind turns through the script of polite expressions I might use to tell the driver that it is best not to assume that every foreigner he meets has an identical agenda.  The majority of tourists may indeed be heading to the same place (Takajiri), but he nearly made me miss the ride, and therefore would have prevented me from doing my walk altogether, timewise.  In the end, I just decide to let it ride, figuring that if the guy has issues with foreigners, my plea to him will just add to whatever it is he is carrying. 

The road leads through the dwindling suburbs, where the white of plum blossoms are beginning to assert themselves.  I climb steadily, finally entering forest an hour later.  The trail steepens into ishitatami cobblestone, and rock openings reveal old statuary rarely seen on a section of the Kōdō nearly forgotten.  One small Buddha is camouflaged in a small groove in the cliff face, and as I climb for a better look I'm wary about snakes that might be sleeping beneath the remaining leaves of autumn, under the curled hands of maple, or the spear heads of bamboo.  

The trail is fickle and I return again to tarmac too soon.  This road climbs through small villages whose economy was once the orchards that hug the ever steepening mountain face.  Shades of the old ways linger.  An ancient man steps of out a ramshackle old house which sprawls and decades in need of repair.  From the unkept look of things, I sense the wife has died long ago, and the old timer is simultaneously withering away at the same time as his kingdom.  

In fact the only people I meet are over eighty, a fact that hardly surprises anymore.  A number of them are preparing their trees for the coming of spring and the cessation of morning frost.  One spry woman keeps pace with me on a steep climb, concerned about my hiking alone, warning me of wild boar.  I lose her at the remains of the old barrier gate, when the angle of the pitch climbs sharply.  

Midway up is the Hirune-oji, a rest spot that offers coffee, a tree swing, and ocean views.  A sign tells me that travelers often rested here, but the jovial name is of course more recent.  The waters far off broaden as I climb.  A logging road weaves me along for a while, before I arrive at the massive Nejiki-no-sugi, a cedar whose twisting, multi-pronged trunk points at the pass not too far away.  

The forest just below the pass has been horribly clear-cut, whose scale has been compounded by a recent storm that fell a few dozen other trees just below.  They've all snapped in half like pencils, and I wonder what that sounded like.

 The pass is a flat clearing offering some of the best views on the entire Kumano Kōdō, the peninsula's entire southern coast spread at my feet, and the higher jagged peaks of the Ōmine mountains behind me.  I have a quick lunch at begin to descend in the latter's direction.  This proves to be the worst part of the walk, a full hour down a steep, paved logging road made slippery from last night's rain.  As this route is technically part of the popular Nakahechi, the signage is good, but it is a small hand-written sign that points down a narrow trail to Takajiri.  I stick to my original route toward my campsite at Kōdō-ga-ōka, but I muse that the Takajiri trail would make for a nice extension to the usual route.  My own isn't much fun, and by the time I've passed the ruined hulks marking an old farm village, my feet make me wish I'd listened to the bus driver this morning, and gone home early...


On the turntable:  Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros, "Global a Go Go"
On the nighttable:  Ernest Hemingway, "In our Time"

A Detour Through the Quiet Life on Kuromon & Koromonodana Streets

 The next installment of the Kyoto Streets series, at Deep Kyoto:

 http://www.deepkyoto.com/a-detour-through-the-quiet-life-on-kuromon-koromonodana-streets/


On the turntable: Echo & The Bunnymen, "Crystal Days 1979-1999"

Imbibing Bibliophile #67

Danziger's Travels by Nick Danziger

Randen Beer,  IN International 

On the turntable: Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, "The Essential Fripp and Eno"

Imbibing Bibliophile #66

                 My Life as an Explorer by Sven Hedin

(flight), Rokko Brewery

On the turntable:  Keith Jarrett, "Inside Out"

(untitled)

Spring days
Winter nights.
Camping on the Kodo.

On the turntable:Brian Eno, "Ali Click"

(untitled)

Only when the wind stops

Do I hear the gurgling spring.

Shiomi-Toge.

On the turntable:  John White and Gavin Byars, "Machine Music"
 

Sunday Papers: John Milton

“They eat, they drink, and in communion sweet  

Quaff immortality and joy.”

On the turntable:  Joe Strummer, "Nothin' 'bout Dum"

Four Days on Easter Island

Our eco-lodge has a pleasant garden, the view from the front veranda all blue and verdant green. We took a meandering stroll down to Ahu Ko Te Riku, a stand-alone moai set atop a broad platform of neatly aligned volcanic rock.   A wedding party was having photos taken, the entire group in white but for a trio of men looking fierce in traditional costume.  It was a beautiful evening, the breeze keeping the mosquitoes away, but oddly we were the only ones dining out on the terrace of Te Moai Sunset.  Before us, the sea and the sky performed a call-and-response routine with color, and when it was nearly done, we enjoyed the encore afoot, moving across stone along the way home...

...the stars that followed surpassed even the greatest work of the setting sun.  The nighttime canvas had a depth of field beyond anything I'd ever experienced, and I have spent years in the desert of rural New Mexico.   And the forms they took were strange and unique to me, the Southern hemisphere of course having a repertoire all its own...

...temporal space too had a fathomless depth, as it often does on remote islands.  I noted that people made more eye contact while speaking, even if walking side by side.  In most places people will look straight ahead during a walk-and-talk, but here, the eyes sought a reconfirmation of connection, probably in a way that the eyes of a sailor at sea will ever seek out the assurance of dry land... 

...the dug-out huts of Orongo, lined against the sheer cliffs that drop away toward a trio of rock spires.  Men used to repel down these cliff and swim out to the islands, in order to snare tern eggs and bring them back to the clan.  This served a political as well as religious need, and determined the hierarchy for the coming year.  The first thing the newcomer Christians did was to ban the ceremony, which led to a rapid and profound cultural demise.  The huts front the broad volcanic crater, its hollow center black and filled with reeds...      

...there is another volcano, Rano Raraku, it sides dug away to the extent that the mountain is now saddle-shaped.  We go sit awhile inside the dormant crater, in the shade of a single tree.  Under the gaze of a dozens unfinished moai on the opposite ridge, the talk turns to the spiritual, an obvious interest for our guide Nathalie, who runs our eco-lodge.  The talk grows broader, and I am surprised that she has also read Brian Weiss's classic book.  We move around to the other side of the volcano, where more unfinished moai simply litter the hillside, standing or tilting at various angles.  It is a photographer's dream. The eye begins to make out the embryonic moai, blocks of unfinished statues still affixed to the volcanic stone that birthed them.  Once the eye makes the adjustment, they are simply everywhere...

...Nathalie apparently likes our company, and takes us through a variety of caves at the center of the island.  You can find them easily since that is where the trees are, absorbing water from beneath the island's rocky surface.  The vegetation they contain is varied and lush, like a salad bowl.  One broad cave is a banana grove, and a massive beehive clings to the rock beside.  We follow the interconnected lava tubes awhile, and pop out through a narrow hole the size of a small window.  It is incredible how far our subterranean journey took us...

...the inland array of moai at Ahu Akivi, set against the jungle and looking like the set of a Vietnam war film...

...climbing yet another volcano, Puna Pao, where the 'stone hats' are quarried.  The rolling grassy sides are like England's South Downs...

... during yesterday's lunch at Anakena I couldn't tear my eyes from the waves.  I return to body surf them, getting a taste of why this island is considered one of the world's top surf spots.  The water is clear, the seafloor a gradual slope of soft sand.  I bob awhile, my eyes never leaving the moai lined up just off the beach, then catch numerous waves, repeatedly  and violently dropped into their troughs.  When I leave the water I notice that my earring has been ripped out.  My fingers immediately check for my wedding ring. We drive down a bad road to the neighboring Ovahe, famed for its sandy cove.  I look at it from the rocks above then turn back, satisfied with my earlier swim.

 ...the towering Ahu Te Puta Kura, face down and forlorn on a lonely stretch of shoreline.  I find the navel of the world at the water's edge, and wonder who gets to sit upon the four smooth stones within...

...Tongariki, the island's showcase, seen in a thousand photos.  The fifteen moai were knocked well inland in a 1960 tsunami, to be put back in place by Japanese money.  Today they are framed perfectly by the hard curve of the rocky shoreline behind...

...Ahu Vaihu, where eight moai lie faced own upon the black rock, as the waves crash below and the wind tears at their broad backs...

...a pair of dinners taken at the water's edge.  The service is slow but the surfers entertain...

...awaken the final morning to see the boat we left in Valparaiso is now moored off shore.  We've had four days of perfect weather, the same amount of days they were at sea, and they'll have four more on the way to Tahiti.  Their only shore day this week will be spent in rain.  I scan the town for familiar faces as we pass through on the way to the plane.  What follows is a three-quarter circumnavigation of  the earth, via Santiago, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam, then Osaka.  Five, two, thirteen and ten hours aloft, covering 13,000 kilometers. It is days before my body knows what time it is...


On the turntable:  Joanna Newsom, "The Milk-Eyed Mender"  

Santiago sketches

We begin the day with a visit to Isla Negra, Neruda's rambling old beach house built above the high waters of the Pacific.  It is a wonderful layout, the rooms flowing into one another, and filled with the fascinations of a man's life.  The beauty of his eye matches that of his verse.  It is the perfect place for an artist to finish out his life, surrounded by his memorabilia, and with a lovely view to ponder.  It reminds me a great deal of Bergman's estate on Fårö.  We were lucky to arrive at opening, and have the place to ourselves for a short time.  But even as others joined us, there was still a sense of quiet repose here, in these houses beneath the sweep of trees leaning away from the wind.  

Our driver seems to have no idea where he's going, and I watch again and again our vehicle turn broader loops on the Galileo Pro map on my iPhone.  It is lovely countryside though, through pine forests and classic little beach towns.  The main thoroughfare from Valparaiso to Santiago passes through Chile's wine country, and I find myself wishing I'd budgeted a day to stop along the way.  As it is, we only have this one day in Santiago, which is why the driver's indecision frustrates me.  I feel this way often while guiding in Japan, when my drivers ask me which way to go.  These guys have a single job to do, and aren't doing it. It wouldn't take more than five minutes to confirm the route before setting out.  

Our visit in Santiago too begins at Neruda's house there, the third in two days.  This one is almost a hybrid of the others, with the crowded decor of Isla Negra, but  built more vertically like La Sebastiana.  I like how each of the little houses is interconnected by courtyards.  The weather here must be better than out on the coast.

Santiago itself is modernizing quickly into the usual cold faceless city, but still bears plenty of monuments to its fading colonial glory.  (Valparaiso on the other hand was going beyond faded and running more to wilted, but at least they had the street art, and bit more charm.) The city's main appeal was its plentiful green spaces, and the funky bohemian vibe to BellaVista and La Starria.  We follow a walking course in one of my guidebooks, which takes in all the old buildings, and we break awhile from the 35 degree heat in the Pre-Columbian Museum.  I am mesmerized by the old statues in the basement, and while wandering the rooms above I feel a little sadness and surprise in the number of cultures that died after the Spanish came.  As Americans, we are taught that our history began with Columbus, but in growing up I learned that his name is synonymous with genocide.  It is inherent in the name of the museum, his surname now serving as a definition for colonization.  

Santiago's glory is in the outdoor museum that is the Plaza de Armas, but I have to say my own highlight is Iglesia San Francisco, whose thick boxy exterior has the look of the fortified adobe cathedrals of my native New Mexico, yet whose interior is almost Byzantine.   

We fly off to Rapa Nui for a few days, but return to Santiago for 12 hours.  At dawn I climb up Cerro Santa Lucia, and scramble to the top of the fortress there, which could easily be found in Rajastan.  Santiago is infamous for its smog, but this day is reasonably clear, and lingering summer snow can be barely made out on the mountaintops just outside town.  (I'll get a better look a few hours later as we fly over these Andes, the high valleys not many dozen meters below us, and not that far north from where the Uruguayans crashed in 1972.) Upon arrival the previous night, flames crept up the hillside above the zoo and Neruda's home.  The smoke lingers in the morning air.


On the turntable:  Jefferson Airplane, "Last Flight"

Sunday Papers: Pauline Kael

"The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience, they're inheriting an audience." 

On the turntable:  John Coltrane, "Coltrane Jazz" 

Valparaiso sketches

The first things that strikes the visitor to Valparaiso is the color.  At the very first I thought it was simply graffiti, the artists having been diligent in using the downtown area as a canvas.  But as the car rolled on I saw that nearly every surface had been defaced, the art growing more refined the classier the neighborhood. I've always thought that the most repressive regimes tend to produce a fairly literary culture, and perhaps these artists are acting in the same spirit.  It would be interesting to see the effect of social media on graffiti.  Because when you think about it, those of us who use Facebook are acting as graffiti artists aren't we?   

 The first stop was Neruda's house, a strange vertical labyrinth that was almost like a towering jenga, all jutting corners resting on a central spine staircase.  The rooms were small and well decorated, though the ability to see how they interrelated was disrupted by the number of visitors, most standing around, listening to those infernal headsets.  I'd first seem these in Avignon last summer, and immediately hated them.  Like when we are on a mobile phone, we tend not to notice what's happening around us. I've always disliked how the Japanese visit art exhibits, moving around the walls in a single queue, which makes it impossible to change the angle or perspective as a viewer since to step back leaves a space that the next person with fill, completely obliterating your view.  These sets are even worse since these people become static objects that must be navigated around, and detracts a great deal from the visit.  As I mentioned before, this changes our ability to engage a place, so immersed as we are in the flow of subjective information.  If you want to learn more, look it up later for God's sake.

The city itself made for a better exhibition space anyway, providing constant color in a landscape shrouded by summer fog.  The gloom and the hills really did channel San Francisco.  We killed time at the surprisingly impressive (and free) Natural History museum downtown, waiting for J. Cruz Malbrán to open.  When it did, we sat at one of the long tables covered in sticky plastic, as a cat settled in above, curling itself at the foot of the familiar ceramic dog listening to 'his master's voice.'  The shelves were littered with old nic-nacs, as if everyone in the neighborhood had contributed the contents of their attics.  The meal (singular) consisted of chorrillana, basically grilled slices of beef piled atop a mountain of fried potatoes. There being no menu, this was it; the only real choice being red or white, in regards to the half bottle of wine serving as accompaniment.  

The streets outside were bustling with a lunchtime crowd, with people sprawled in the park, and a brass band blasting their horns off the marble facades of the old buildings at the center of town.  We left this all in climbing up to Cerros Concepción and Allegro, where we meandered around the narrow lanes, admiring the street art now highly refined.  These mesas act almost as islands of wealth and culture above a gradually deteriorating downtown. 

I left LYL at Palacio Astoreca, then descended again to the lower depths.  The city has a certain reputation for danger, so it was best I was alone and unencumbered by a backpack.  It was certainly one of the roughest places I've been in for a while, where every single resident seemed drunk, and the cars would swerve at you if you stepped into the street.  I would not want to be here at night. A large portion of the Barrio Puerto was crumbling ruins, victims of the 2010 earthquake.  

I took a similar stroll the next day at dawn, keeping to the safer highlands.  The murals seemed to shift with the coming light, so I looped a few times, picking up a dog somewhere along the way, the only life I saw, but for the life being rekindled in a dying city, in the vivid faces of its street art.  


On the turntable:  Joni Mitchell, "Shadows and Light"  

Floating off Patagonia

I passed my winter a couple of years ago reading three classics of polar exploration:  Fridtjof Nansen's Furthest North, Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World, and Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage.  It was this final book that really caught my imagination, and upon completion I immediately began to look for a sea journey that take me to the waters of Cape Horn.  And I found one, sort of.  While it wouldn't take me (this time) to Antarctica or South Georgia Island, it would take me through both the Beagle Channel, and the Strait of Magellan.   

The true journey starts further north at Peninsula Valdes.  I'd been interested in seeing the old settler villages that Chatwin discusses (and offends), but we chose wildlife over the Welsh.  It is a long drive out to a beach best known from that David Attenborough nature film, where the orcas race ashore to take sea lion pups.  While I didn't really want to see that, I did want to see the fins of the great beasts cutting the cold grey waters offshore.  I was denied this (as I was while kayaking Canada two years ago), but bizarrely I saw an entire pod from the ship the following afternoon....

...our Defender seems to skip across the boggy surface of the Falklands, where roads are a recent and still untested concept.  I'm amazing at the light touch of this strong and heavy vehicle, like the kinetic grace of an NBA player in a slam dunk contest.  It is a world of green out here, framed by the grey of sea and sky.  I imagine it must look the Orkneys or the Shetlands, far away at Britain's other end.  The people too are conservative and hardy, as they would have to be.  But it was the penguins we came to see, hundreds of them, all standing at odd angles like at a cocktail party. (If you've got a few penguins, you've got a tourist industry.) We tail a few as they make their way out to the water, heads arcing like a metronome.  Watching them, one can't help but laugh. 

Town itself is small and very English.  There is an iron bust of Maggie down by the water, not far from the wrecks of older ships.  This far-flung outpost has a long seafaring tradition, as the last outpost before the Horn.  While the Panama Canal brought an end to that, the island appears healthy, if not a bit self-contained.  And I can't stop thinking of Brexit in that regard...

...the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans must not get along because the waters between are among the most turbulent in the world.  A day after leaving the Falklands, the rocking was horrendous, but we got what we paid for.  I jokingly thought while bouncing across the bogs of the Falklands that it was rougher than the boat. Not any longer.  Albatross skimmed these towering waves the entire day, oblivious to the tempest beneath.  The passengers however walked along the breakfast buffet as if doing dance steps they'd learned from the penguins the day before.  I'd hear later from the assistant captain that the wind speed was 87 knots, a record for this 24-year old ship...

...re-reading Theroux's In Patagonia (of course), the perfect accompaniment as his book is a meandering journey with little regard to destination.  We too weave through these islets, seeking calmer water....

...as an American who has lived at both ends of our broad landmass, the notion of traveling from Atlantic to Pacific is something of a wonder.  I remember feeling that during my single day's traverse of the Panama Canal.  And though this passage through the Beagle had taken two days, it was nothing short of magic...

...the Rocky Mountain feel of Ushuaia, its multiple outdoor shops overhung by glaciers. Our lunchspot too not unlike those in towns populated by mountain hipsters, this bakery with sandwiches, craft beer, and rummage sale decor.  But rather than hipsters it is immigrants who made this town.  Reading a little history later in the maritime museum, finding it incredible the number of people in Patagonia who had roots in former Yugoslavian countries.  The end of the earth as opportunity and adventure as opposed to the end of the earth as nowhere else to go...

...I spent the morning kayaking the Strait of Magellan, as dolphins curled across the waters nearby.  We'd picked up our gear in a small ranchero house built beside a compact rodeo grounds. In fact Punta Arenas itself feels a bit like a small town in central Texas, but that association may have been brought about by the similarity in flags.  We visit the former house of Bruce Chatwin's great-uncle, the inspiration for his journey.  And a travel classic was thereafter born.  From here it is a long ways out to the trio of historic ships just out of town, recreated to a greatly refined detail, and good fun to clamber around.  Shakleton's egg-like is a small space for six men to spend two weeks.  And Magellan's Nao Victoria was so narrow and tall it hardly looked seaworthy...       

 
...on the way to Lake Llanquihue, driving through forests scented with pine, though bespeckled by the light leaf of eucalyptus.  Enjoying rural still-lifes unseen by ship: old man making his way slowly down dusty lanes by cane, a trio of sleeping dogs, women working in the forest.  Plus strawberries, vineyards, corn, and a volcano the replica of the familiar Fuji...


On the turntable:  Jackie McLean, "Demon's Dance"             
On the nighttable:  W. Somerset Maugham, "The Summing Up"

Writing Journey to Rural Japan

Back in 2013 I wrote a review about a book I very much admire, Andy Couturier's The Abundance of Less (when it was titled A Different Kind of Luxury).   

I am happy to see that he is leading a group to Japan this spring, to get a taste of the Japanese rural life, and to meet a few of the people from the book itself.  

Details can be found here.


My original 2013 review in it's entirety:

It was alternative culture that led me to Japan.  In my final couple years as a university student, I found myself ducking classes more and more in order to read the works of those whose viewpoints didn't necessarily align themselves with the conservative mainstream '80's microcosm that was my school.  Despite this, their words were available on the shelves of the campus library, and it is from this berth that my imagination began to sail in directions at odds with what I was learning in the classroom. 

The radical ideals of many of these writers had been honed in the temples of Asia, so it was only natural that I would gravitate there.  When I arrived in the Japanese countryside in the very-much-analogue year of 1994, I found myself in an environment similar to the University I'd left a few years before, an environment of materialism and conformity.  I learned quite early that even the people on the street who looked the most radical were most often merely dressing the part, and that eventually they too would be absorbed back into the greater culture at large.  I did eventually find a few aspiring artists or those who "aspired to" a simpler way of life, (and there were also rumors of interesting happenings down in Kyoto), but for the most part I settled into this cultural outback of the countryside.

Little did I know that it was exactly there where the kindred spirits dwell.  In the late '90's, an article began appearing in The Japan Times, an article called "Alternative Luxuries."  I would read Andy Couturier's pieces with great relish.  I had found over the years that in Japan, people are allowed to have dreams, but it is only the brave few who actually act on them.  Yet here in print were people who had not only followed their dreams, but had let those dreams shape their very way of existing.

A handful of years later, I once again came across Andy's articles in this very blog.  Not only had the articles been fleshed out further, but so had my own relation to them and to Japan itself.  Some of the inspiration had rubbed off to the extent that I too had crafted my own semi-alternative life here (Not being Japanese in the first place, this isn't terribly difficult.)  Like Andy, I had built my own friendships with people to whom a simple life is simply common sense.  Though a few are based in cities, most live deep in the countryside, and share with the men and women in Andy's book not only the ordinariness in how they live, but the complexity in how they view their lives and their interconnectedness. 

I had a glimpse of the latter one autumn night, a few weeks before I was leaving Japan, a departure that had I assumed at the time was final.  The night that my wife and I had just finished the Shikoku 88 Temple pilgrimage, we were put up by a few young people living deep in a valley in Tokushima.   As the evening went on, my hosts and I found that we had many friends in common, and I began to sink into a certain melancholy, saddened to be leaving this country in which I had built deep friendships over 15 years.  But then it dawned on me that I wasn't stepping away from the circle.  In moving back to the States, I was helping that circle to expand.

And there, upon arrival, I found Andy's book, a book I'd been waiting all of those 15 years to see published.  And in rereading those familiar voices, and in reading the comments of those who praise this book, the circle continues to expand.    


On the turntable: James Gang, "Thirds"

Montevideo sketches

The first view we had of the city was of the ruined wrecks of ships, lashed together like a mountain of scrap metal at the center of the harbor.  The harbor front wasn't much more attractive, but it was the downtown itself that the rusting hulks most resembled.  The streets were lined with beautiful old colonial buildings, now left into crumbling ruin.  It reminded a lot of Havana, yet without any of the Cuban optimism. 

Uruguay could never be considered one of the continent's wealthier countries, and a deep poverty was on show, huddled beneath these edifices of ruined splendor.  Five of these buildings had been designated as memorial sites of sorts, but it seemed little different than having a rusting old Edsel in your backyard, and calling it an antique auto show.   

But it was pleasant to stroll the streets, lingering a little in the green and open spaces of the plazas.  Here, people walked dogs which bowed down before one another in a certain deference that served as metaphor somehow of years spent under military dictatorships.  But I know I'm projecting.

We reached the Plaza Independencia eventually, with the 1927 Art Deco rocketship that predated Buck Rodgers. This heart of the city gave evidence of a parallel between the cultures of Uruguay and Argentina, right down to the color and iconography of their flags. It was a delight to stroll back toward the harbor through the pedestrian streets, which started clean and tidy near the plaza, but it felt that by the middle reaches they'd given up, as structure after structure was simply boarded up and abandoned. The economy was not very kind here.

Ironically enough I spent most of my time in a memorial to a disaster of a different sort, one dedicated to the Uruguayan rugby team that had been in the Andean plane crash in 1972, made famous in books and films.  I had always remembered it that they'd been a soccer team, though the cannibalism part I could never get wrong.  I remember reading Piers Paul Read's Alive, probably when I was a boy of no more than 11 or 12.  I remember being haunted of a photo of Susana Parrado, who even at that young age I found a certain beauty, an image that perhaps was guiding me toward pubescence. It was a bit shocking to be wandering through fragments of airplane, which I at first thought were taken from the wreckage itself, but they'd simply replicated parts from a plane of a similar vintage.  Nothing apparently remained of the old wreck site, as the fuselage that had been their home for 72 days was burned shortly after their rescue.  There were a few odds and ends that had been picked up by mountaineers about 30 years later.  Most interesting to me was getting a follow up to the story, four decades after having read the book.  It was haunting to learn that the entire site where the plane once lay has been overtaken by the glacier.  

And I again saw metaphor, as a sluggish economy slowly encroached to overtake the glory of a once elegant society.                              


On the turntable:  Jeff Beck & Eric Clapton:  "Exhaust Note" 

Buenos Aires sketches

Cafe Tortoni is the perfect encapsulation of Buenos Aires, a baroque French look enveloping a Latin soul.  The city itself screams high culture, and Tortoni's waiters serve up cafe creme or a proper English tea, while the books on the shelves behind you are all local writers, and famed Argentinians look down from the photos on the walls (including from Manet's Chez Tortoni) .  It reminds me of Cafe Greco in Rome, and even the clientele looks the same: a few local hipsters immersed in their books not so much to strike a pose as to ignore the cruise ship tourist types, or the large groups of Chinese who look most out of place.

The streets outside could too be Paris, though thankfully less grungy and with less blaring of car horns. The boulevards are broad, the marble buildings still grand and surprisingly white, though that could be the bright sun above.  This latter point could also be why the parks have far more trees, most with thick trunks and huge canopies.   No building is more grand than the Tango Porteño, though sadly it is impossible to enter without an accompanying guide.  I bemoan again what tourism has done to the world, that it is becoming difficult to truly connect with a place, or to simply engage, without having someone in your ear drowning it all in facts.    

One fact that we do quickly pick up upon is that the streets are less safe than Paris.  On a few occasions someone gestures to LYL to hide her camera.  She does, and places both hands on her handbag.  Locals also serve as a resource in finding a good place for lunch, where we take reprieve after a morning of wandering.  The 90-year old Chiquilin is a perfect choice, soaked too in that baroque vibe, but the meat and the wines are from the pampas nearby . 

Strolls makes for the best digestif, and this one was through a city that grew more and more fascinating as we went. A literary, cultured, classical European society of the 19th century, superimposed upon by the military dictatorships of the 20th. I felt that that older society had been the victim of murder, and was now beginning to decompose economically.

On the turntable:  Jethro Tull, "Days of Giving"
On the nighttable:  Vincent Van Gogh, "Dear Theo"

(untitled)

Detached stone Buddhas
Ignore the blooming of plums.
I crave popcorn.

On the turntable: Jon Hassell, "Power Spot"
 

Imbibing Bibliophile #65

Dear Theo by Irving Stone

7-11 Cafe Latte

On the turntable: Brian Eno, "Discreet Music"

Running off to the Circus...

...And happy to see that they’re using fewer animals. I’d like to think they’re phasing out that part of the show. (And after all, the athleticism of the human acrobats is far more interesting.). One positive aspect I suppose is that it appeared that the trainers had a loving relationship with their animals, though my heart went out to the aging elephant and lion. I hope that as the animals age, they won’t be replaced.

As it is, I found it a good teaching point to discuss with my daughter man’s inhumane treatment of animals. That said, I think she found them the most memorable. And maybe in that lies the secret, that as young children begin school and their own societal domestication, the animals give them a glimpse of the wild that still struggles to survive within.
  

On the turntable:   Jeff "Tain" Watts, "Watts"