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Above: The dubiously valuable Burmese kyat
Travel has a way of shaking one’s faith in the workings of paper currency, as I point out in the most recent installment of my Traveling Light column at Yahoo! News. As I say in the opening paragraph,
One of the most startling travel epiphanies I’ve had in recent years came on a trip to Burma, when I was counting out money to buy a packet of toilet tissues. The Burmese kyat had recently suffered a jag of devaluation. Tallying up my toilet-tissue money, I noticed that it consisted of twelve small denomination bills.
Given that Burmese tissues came in packets of ten, it occurred to me that it would be more economical to simply use the currency as tissue and pocket the difference.
For my full meditation on the money’s value (or lack thereof), including a history of what has passed for currency in the past, click here.
Last week’s column was a Q&A that dealt with Buddhist meditation in Thailand — and I offered the reader a counterintuitive approach to seeking out a proper meditation monastery:
…my advice is this: Travel to Thailand, but save the monasteries for last. Give yourself a month (if you have the time — and I recommend that you make the time) to wander the country, north and south, jungles and beaches, Bangkok and Isaan. It’s dirt cheap to travel in Thailand, so knock yourself out. Go on a trek. Learn to scuba dive. Talk to everyone — Thais and travelers, rural villagers and middle-class urbanites — and listen to what they have to say. If it comes up in the conversation, ask people about Buddhism, or Buddhist meditation. Watch how people live. Enjoy the backpacker hangouts if that’s your thing — but try to get off the travel-circuit and explore small, everyday Thai towns. Learn Thai phrases and make Thai friends.
After a month of this, your visa will have expired, and probably you will have fallen in love with Thailand. Perfect. Now pop across the border, renew your visa, and come back to Thailand. Not only will you know by then what kind of meditation center best suits your interests — you’ll also have an experience of Thailand that is far more intimate and authentic than what you’d have experienced walled up in some monastery. You’ll also have a better idea of the role Buddhism plays in the lives of the people who’ve been practicing it for thousands of years — and not just the role it can play in your California (or wherever) lifestyle.
Full meditation column online here.
Above: Bourdain strikes a new pose.
I opened The New Yorker this week to discover that the advertisement for travel-chef Anthony Bourdain’s television show, No Reservations, has been altered. Last September, you will recall that I disparaged the original ad for Bourdain’s show, which inanely implored readers to “be a traveler, not a tourist.” San Francisco Chronicle travel editor John Flinn used my observations in a column that riffed on the traveler-tourist distinction — and I later added some more perspective in a post called “The tourist is always the other guy“, which landed a brief Nota Bene link from Arts & Letters Daily.
I’m not sure if all of our blog and media hubbub had anything to do with it, but the ad for Bourdain’s show has been changed. The updated tagline now reads, simply, “Be a Traveler” — which seems like a much more dignified exhortation (though I’ll still assert, perhaps needlessly, that watching TV does not make one a traveler).
To view the updated ad, click here.
One of the most vivid shocks for first-time travelers in the developing world is witnessing the human capacity to load vehicles with far more people or supplies than one would think is logistically possible. I still recall the amazement I felt when I first witnessed a family of five perched atop a single 100cc motorcycle in Vietnam, a truck piled with three stories of sugarcane in Peru, or a minivan stuffed with nearly two-dozen people in Egypt.
Recently, via BoingBoing, I discovered a website that pays homage to the remarkable human ability to creatively overload vehicles. Located at Ezprezzo.com, the Overloaded page can be found here.
“I’ve been lucky enough to go to many of the uncharted places on the map, and these days what I do is go more and more into the unmapped hours of the clock. I travel into 3am, I go into the dead hours of the night, I travel into silence and darkness and uncertainty, because those are places in myself that perhaps I don’t visit enough and that as a writer of discovery I feel I should explore.”
–Pico Iyer, from “A New Kind of Travel for a New Kind of World”, a speech given at the Key West Literary Seminar, January 5, 2006
Since I frequently travel alone, I’ve gotten into the habit of capturing certain moments on the road by literally turning my camera on myself. The arm’s length self-portraits that result are usually kind of interesting, and — several years ago — when I rehauled RolfPotts.com, I posted a number of these self-photos into a tongue-in-cheek collection I called the Narcissus Gallery. Over the years, a number of readers have written in asking when I would update the Narcissus Gallery, and I always told them that I’d do it when I had a moment.
Well, finally I had to chance to sort through some old photos, and I’m posting my findings into a New Narcissus Gallery below. Pictures are posted in no particular order, though you’ll notice that I don’t have any shots from 2002-2004, when I was in the habit of traveling without a camera. Each hyperlink below pops up into a new picture window.
“In more remote countries, Americans are still something of a novelty and they look at us the way we look at the Hollywood B-actor set. For example, you may think that Pamela Anderson is a surgically enhanced bad actress who’s out of touch with reality and gets paid too much for her minimal talent. But if she showed up at your BBQ party, you’d probably think it was pretty cool. You’d certainly tell your friends that Pamela Anderson showed up at your party. And if she was kind and polite, you might not be as quick to bash her next acting performance. In the eyes of many foreigners (who haven’t met an American), Americans are overweight, gun-carrying versions of Pamela Anderson.”
–Doug Lansky, e-Marginalia interview (2005)
My inbox has been busy recently with announcements for various travel-writing contests. I don’t have a lot of insider information on these, but I’ll share what I know:
Above: A sunset view from the Indian island of Diu.
Yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle travel section debuted India’s Isle Of Ghosts, my travel story about the island of Diu in India. Originally researched and written for Islands a few years ago (and shelved when that magazine changed ownership), this travel tale uses ghosts as a metaphor for examining this mostly forgotten corner of the old Portuguese empire:
In a way, my visit to Diu had been an ongoing encounter with ghosts – and many of the telltale phantoms on the Hindu island weren’t even Portuguese. In Diu Town, for instance, I’d found that certain neighborhoods were full of Indians that looked like Africans. Called siddi, this community was descended from local Indian Muslim merchants who, during the height of trade on the Indian Ocean centuries ago, lived (and kept local wives) in African ports.
Moreover, all the hotels in Diu Town were owned by Ismaili Shiites, whose Hindu ancestors had been converted to the faith some 700 years ago by Persian missionaries (who, resourcefully, had arrived in India claiming that the sect’s founder was the 10th incarnation of the god Vishnu). Over the years, Diu was variously a trading center for the Mauryans, a capital for the Chavada dynasty, a refuge for Rajput rajas and a military outpost for the Ottoman Turks.
Naturally, Diu also contained the telling details that are a post of any postmodern journey:
Though physically isolated from mass culture, Diu Town was beginning to show the telltale quirks and ironies that come with globalization. In the public square, for instance, the old Portuguese whipping post bore a poster that read: “Learn Karate! (Sinsei: Kiran P. Prajapati).” In Diu’s outdoor market, one could choose between baseball caps embossed with either a New York Yankees symbol, a John Deere patch or (against all probability) a logo touting Northern Arizona University’s department of nursing. Not far from my hotel, a man sold packets of incense that he
claimed could be burned in accordance with any religion. In the spirit of ecumenism, the incense packets were adorned with the picture of an oversized U.S. $100 bill.Thus, I was not too surprised to find a half dozen tiny Indian nuns singing African American gospel songs (“I Get So Thrilled With Jesus”) when I walked into St. Paul’s church.
The full text of my Diu story — as well as my photos from the journey — can be read online here.
In case you missed it, World Hum recently ran an intriguing Antarctica story, entitled A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth. Written my McMurdo Station veteran Jason Anthony, the story details a journey to the Russian research station at Vostok. “Occupied since 1957,” Anthony writes, “Vostok is also the most isolated of Antarctic bases. Its few old buildings sit in the middle of the godforsaken polar plateau, near the South Geomagnetic Pole, at an elevation of 11,220 feet. It is as far away from the familiar you can go without leaving the planet.”
He adds:
No one visits Vostok. It doesn’t exist in the world traveler’s currency of guess-where-I-went. The odds that someone will find their way there to see it on their own are infinitesimal. No one will stumble onto this weathered colony or follow a guidebook to its doorstep.
For details on Anthony’s journey — which is indeed brief and awkward — click over to World Hum here.
“Personally I like going places where I don’t speak the language, don’t know anybody, don’t know my way around and don’t have any delusions that I’m in control. Disoriented, even frightened, I feel alive, awake in ways I never am at home.”
–Michael Mewshaw, “Travel, Travel Writing, and the Literature of Travel” (2004)
@Backpack Foodie & Kim:...
