thejayfather

theparque

2010-08-14T21:32:00.004-06:00

it's hard to believe that it's been over a year since we came back from Peru, but time flies when you're having fun. after leaving the south of the country we flew back to the capital and spent a couple of days exploring the areas around Miraflores, Lima's fancy neighborhood.

Jill and i doing our own version of El Beso at Parque del Amor.

one of the main attractions there is the Parque del Amor, where as you can see we came up with the obvious picture. but it's a very nice park really, walled off from coastal cliffs by mosaic tiled walls that also form benches from which to admire the hazy view.

the love of my life, above, and below, the two of us with fancy Miraflores in the background and the Pacific Ocean 300 feet straight below us to the right.

we finally tried eating salchipapa--sliced sausage with french fries--and spent much of one afternoon wandering around looking for a place that served cuy, roast guinea pig. we had been avoiding it up to that point in the trip for some vague fear that it would make us sick, but now that we were on our way home, we figured we'd throw caution to the wind and just do it. the only problem was that it's more of an Andean treat, and nobody in the low-lying cosmopolitan bustle of Lima seemed to be interested in cooking up a furry little friend. so we were a little bummed, but at least we got that sickness we were wanting on the way home, but that came a little later and since i particularly graphic in describing the last bout of illness, i'm sure no one will mind if i skip the gory details of this one.

when we found the search for household-pets-as-food fruitless, we turned our attention to some more, yes even more, ruins. we walked and walked until we found Huaca Pucllana, a clay pyramid and surrounding religious complex dating back 1500 years or so, then decided to walk some more when we discovered it was completely enclosed behind a wrought iron fence with a steep fee to breach. so we got more adventurous. we took a series of crazy taxis and buses out to what seemed like the middle of nowhere and found the following:

Jill braves the desert sands of the Lurin River Valley adjacent to the very busy and bustling metropolis of Lima, and below, i try the same, only less successfully:

pretty much literally the middle of nowhere. actually it was the middle of nowhere right next to somewhere; it's a strange little section of desert right next to the outskirts of Lima, and just across the street from yet another supposedly amazing archaeological site: Pachacamac. i say supposedly because after all the hassle to get there, we found we had chosen the only day of the week that the site was closed.

the wonderful rewards that awaited us for making the hard slog out to the archaeo-cultural site of Pachacamac on its day off. hey, at least we weren't the only ones:

so after spending a few minutes wandering through the desert dunes like Lawrence of Arabia, we made the long trek back into town wondering whether Pachacamac's being basically a much bigger version of Huaca Pucllana made it less of a big deal that we hadn't seen it, since we had chosen not to see the other, or if it compounded the sense of loss at not having been able to see either as a representative sample of the genre. apparently we didn't wonder very hard though, since i still don't have any answer for that. the bus ride back was hot and annoying but things like that do give you a good chance to see parts of a city that you wouldn't ordinarily, as we drove through many Lima neighborhoods that i'm sure get few if any tourists.

i suppose that's because there's little for a traveler to do in an ordinary neighborhood where folks are just going about their business, and indeed we decided to head back to where we knew there'd be something to do for the few hours before our very late night flight back to Atlanta: the Larcomar mall in Miraflores. just down the coast from the Parque del Amor is this entire shopping center with a movie theater and a bowling alley and the whole nine yards literally built right into the cliffs overlooking the ocean.

the view from the Larcomar.

we wandered around and had some good hot chocolate at a place that seemed to have built a balcony right out over the sheer drop-off, and finally ended up at a restaurant where we had a bow-tied waiter who had not only an apron on but also a towel over his arm, but who seemed to have nobody else to wait on but us. this place was a seriously upscale eatery, with excellent food and ambiance, and we enjoyed it all for a good amount of time but very little cash--i think the whole meal with dessert was about US$30 for the two of us--a tiny fraction of what we would have to pay for a similar meal back in America.

as if to highlight that disparity, the food on the flight back to the States almost made me have to actually use one of those little bags in the seat back pocket for the first time in my life, so all things considered, though i was glad to get home after a couple of weeks on the go, i really could have handled staying in Miraflores for a while.

ellago

2010-04-24T15:48:00.000-06:00

for some reason Jill had been much more excited about Lake Titikaka than i had, but then again she had done most of the planning for this trip and seemed to know better what to expect. i had heard of some islands that were alleged to float on the lake, and Jill was talking about staying overnight on an island in the lake, so it all sounded fine to me and i was just interested in having been to what is commonly referred to as the "highest navigable lake" in the world.

my brother told me all he wanted from Peru was a picture of me not laughing in front of a sign for Lake Titikaka; since he's my most faithful reader, here you are. below, some of the many tourist boats that ply the (generally more clear) waters of the lake; here in the harbor the algae was so thick we saw birds walking across its surface.

clearly the qualifier "navigable" gives away that it isn't actually the highest lake in the world, and i still haven't found a source to indicate what exactly constitutes a navigable versus a non-navigable lake, but the Wikipedia article gives a clue, calling it one of the highest "commercially navigable" lakes in the world. indeed, there are a lot of boats that ply the icy waters, most of which seem to be part of the tourist trade, but the lake is a huge one, straddling about 60 miles of the Bolivian border and sprawling over more than 3,000 square miles of the earth's surface.

Jill and i feeling chilly on the boat out to the floating islands despite all the sunshine. below, i have followed the indigenous spelling for Lake Titikaka, as our tour guide told us that the Spanish, in spelling it Titicaca had managed to both strip the original of its meaning and add some offensive scatological references as a way of demeaning the native peoples. so ruthless!

and it's a beautiful lake, with generally clear waters and nice views of the high Andes on both the Peruvian and Bolivian sides. but, boy, is it high up there. by comparison, Snowbird, the ski resort at which i spent many of the days i should have been in high school, is about 11,000 feet above sea level on top of it's highest peak; Lake Titikaka and Puno on its shore sit at around 12,500 vertical feet, well more than twice the elevation of the Salt Lake valley. that produces some rather odd climate characteristics, in that it was quite hot when we were standing in direct sunlight, but really very chilly if the sun became obscured by a cloud or we stepped into shade, hence the warm clothes despite generally bright skies in most of the pictures.

as we reached the edge of the large Puno harbor, we came into sight of the quite extensive complex of islas flotantes, or floating islands, which are also known as the Uros Islands, after the indigenous people who built and inhabit them. all in all, there are 42 of these structures on either side of a channel that leads out to the open lake, and our tour boat took us to the one named Isla Santa Maria. we were told that the islands were built by the Uros so they wouldn't be taxed by colonial and later governments, and while there used to be many of them, the people find that their children typically want to work on the mainland so there are fewer and fewer inhabitants and islands all the time as tourism and light trade become the only things keeping the islanders afloat. keeping the islands themselves afloat, on the other hand, are thick mats of totora reeds that are layered and continually replaced on top of large sections of totora root beds that are harvested just for the foundations. stakes are then driven all the way through the islands to fix them in place in the lake, but they can be moved if necessary and can of course be altered in size and shape.

above, Isla Santa Maria of the Uros floating islands in Lake Titikaka, clockwise from top left: the watchtower that gave a good overview of the artificial archipelago; Jill and i eating the amazing all-purpose totora reed; the dragon-like boat of the Santa Marians, which they allowed us to ride... for a small fee. which actually seemed very small when then made a frail looking little lady take one of the oars to row us; a general overview of Santa Maria showing its houses and height above the water; the handicrafts the islanders were most interested in selling to us; and a handy schematic of how the islands are built that our tour guide pulled out to show us. below, a video of the friendly departure song the islanders sang to us.

for some reason i had thought these were the islands we would be staying on, but was somewhat relieved to find there were more traditional islands for that purpose. in actuality, the islas flotantes are pretty sturdy feeling, although your feet sink in a good inch or two with every step, as if you were walking across a field of very thick grass. almost everything on each island is made of the totora reeds, including the houses and, on our island, most of a watchtower; they even had a boat made almost entirely of reeds which they said would last anywhere from six to nine months before having to be replaced. as if all that weren't enough, you can even eat a good portion of the versatile totora reed, though it seemed like eating styrofoam made of water, so its nutritive value probably isn't too high. there were a few things not made of totora though, including a discreetly placed solar panel that generated some power for the one TV on Santa Maria. even here you can't get away from TV.

above, the setting sun glares through one of the many stone archways that straddle the pathway up to Pachamama, one of the island's two peaks, the other being Pachatata. the former is Mother Earth, the latter Father Earth. below, scenes from our costumed dance party show Jill being dressed by our hostess Grigoria.

but we didn't stop trying (to get away from TV), and we eventually succeeded. about three hours further out into the lake we finally came to a tiny harbor on the southeast side of Isla Amantaní, and were there introduced to our hostess for the next 24 hours, Grigoria. as a Quechua speaking island native Grigoria didn't speak much Spanish, much less any English, so she smiled and bobbed and then took off like a mountain goat up the steep slopes to her house, which was about halfway to the pinnacle of hilly Amantaní. when we got to her house, which was made of adobe bricks like the other buildings scattered around, we met her daughter, Yovanna, who spoke good Spanish and a couple of words of English and so helped us to communicate. she showed us our room which was on the second floor up an outdoor ladder, and which had a door just about high enough for my legs and belly to get through; unfortunately, and even more uncomfortably, both of the beds in the room shared this same, um, shortcoming of being too small.

but we were only at the house long enough to get some hostess-provided lunch, which consisted of several different varieties of small potato, in almost all colors of the rainbow, some fried cheeses and a soup or stew that was filled with a local grain called quinoa (say keen-wa). owing to my earlier sickness this was the first time i had eaten in almost two days, and it was a ginger effort at that. Grigoria had deeply weathered hands with dirt deeply encrusted in large cracks, and as she placed the bowls on the table i watched her thumbs dip into the broth of the soup. though it made me think twice about beginning to eat again, my second thought was how humbling it was to see how this woman lived and all the hard work she was doing to keep her home and family going while her husband and son were away working on the mainland. with no electricity she cooked in a tiny candlelit kitchen over an earth stove and made almost everything her and Yovanna needed to live, including most of their clothes. and i was glad i ate the soup: it was delicious and just what the doctor ordered to get me back up to strength, and one of the first things we did when we got back to the States was find some quinoa to have in our own pantry.

above, some scenes from Grigoria's house, clockwise from top left: me on the staircase ladder that led to the top floor; a view of the house itself, which was actually one of the larger ones we saw; some of the many varieties of potatoes available were lying around in the courtyard; a soup Grigoria made us with quinoa, a very filling and proteinaceous grain native to the Andes; the view from the house down the hill towards the lake, looking east towards Bolivia; along with the quinoa we were served some of those potatoes and a bunch of fried cheeses, probably made of goat (or maybe llama) milk; Grigoria's tiny kitchen, in which she prepared us meals in earthen pots over a clay oven; and Jill shows that the door to our room really wasn't made for a pair of 5'9" foreigners. below, the night sky was so awesomely clear and dark that the stars seemed to go on forever and the famous Southern Cross constellation could hardly be missed.

not long after our life changing lunch, we took a hike with the rest of our tour group up to the top of one of the island's twin peaks known as Pachamama and Pachatata--Mother Earth and Father Earth, respectively--just in time for a rather spectacular sunset on the lake. then we came back down and were geared up in some traditional costumes Grigoria had for us so we could attend a dance at a local hall that seemed to have been built just to hold such dances for tourists. the small band made up of local teenagers cranked out the Andean beats and pretty soon i needed to escape the stifling heat that was building up inside by taking a wander outdoors. the darkness was profound and the night sky shimmered with a literally endless array of stars and galaxies, and despite the deep cold i had a hard time wanting to go back to the frivolities. when the dance was over and we were back at Grigoria's, Jill and i crept out of our room for as long as we could stand the chill just to take some more of it in. it was one of the most fantastic, serene things i have ever experienced.

scenes from Isla Taquile, above, clockwise from top left: the men (or boys) do the knitting on this island, and indeed can be seen at their avocation almost constantly; Jill and i joined the band for a little music making--naturally i took the pan flute; Jill tries coca leaf tea; i have better luck with the fish; a young Taquileño with the trademark cherubic cheeks. below, Taquile is not without its own archway fetish. Peru is in the background this time.

the following morning we bid our farewells and made for our boat which was to take us south to Isla Taquile, another indigenously peopled island but this one with just a touch more modernity (and, very sensibly i thought, no dogs). there was a pretty touristy presentation of music and dance by some islanders, who seem to be mostly famous for their hats, which are knitted by the men, and a lunch at which we finally got some coca leaf tea, which was much better in the anticipation than the actual experience. coca tea is made by steeping coca leaves (yes, the ones used to make cocaine, though apparently it takes several tons of leaves and a lot of kerosene to come out with a kilo of the drug) in hot water, and is supposed to be very good for helping acclimate to high altitudes, but frankly it tastes like dirty grass clippings and is not at all pleasant. a better option is muña tea, made by steeping a sprig of a very common plant that has a reasonably pleasant (especially with a lot of sugar), almost minty taste, and we were even advised that this was actually better for altitude problems than its more famous coca cousin.

on our way back to Puno we saw a few private boats out, this one looking vaguely like a Middle Eastern dhow or felucca. it was a beautiful sunny day out on Lake Titikaka.

well, whatever drink you end up liking, our trip to the many and varied islands of Lake Titikaka had been educational, enlightening and altogether very enjoyable, dirty wet grass notwithstanding. i had kind of felt that after Machu Picchu much of our trip would be a bit of a letdown, but found the lake quite the contrary and actually competing for my favorite part of the whole journey. the floating islands were novel, but i really think it was the homestay that Jill arranged on Amantaní that did it for me. it's hard to compete with the sheer awesomeness of something like the Lost City of the Incas, but there was something about the serenity of an island with no electricty, miles from anywhere, with perfect views of crystal waters and clear starry skies that i will never forget.

theborder

2010-02-28T19:16:00.002-07:00

this day, our first full day way up on the altiplano was supposed to be a major one, a great one. it was to be a leisurely day to trip to Copacabana--not that Copacabana, the one just over the Bolivian border around the south end of Lake Titikaka. but once again, we hit a few snags, only this time it wasn't the fault of striking transit workers.

no, while socialism got involved a little later on, this time what went on strike was my whole digestive system, beginning when we left the clay-eaters of Atuncolla. not that i blame any of it on them--my problems i believe stemmed from lunch, though curiously Jill and i split everything we ate, and she didn't even get a hint of sickness. i may have eaten more lettuce on my sandwich or something, but what i got seemed much bigger than i would have expected from such a small garnishing. in any case, that night a massive foreign horde had invaded and my body's defenses had been overwhelmed and basically revolted to join the onslaught. seldom have i experienced such pain, nor when i have have had to do so on a tiled bathroom floor of dubious cleanliness. and usually i have a pretty good gag reflex but in this instance i had to press my toothbrush into a service it was never quite designed for, which i did seven times over the course of a very long and uncomfortable night. so when the morning came and we were to head for Bolivia, i was still feeling pretty fragile and not at all like being on a bouncing bus with a bunch of loud-mouthed, tobacco-reeking hippies, but i guess we all have to sacrifice.

proof we did make it to Bolivia, above, and below, proof it wasn't quite as we'd planned...

trouble is, not all sacrifice turns out to be worth it. when we got within fifteen minutes of the border the bus steward started making the rounds and asked us, in broken English, if we had our visa. in broken Spanish i told him that, no thank you Friend, we didn't need one of those, and he could move on with his rounds. after doing so, he came back, seemingly having forgotten what we talked about, but really having worked out the words to tell me that in fact, Friend, you will be needing a visa, thanks to a new requirement just for Americans, hooray! apparently Bolivia's socialist president, Evo Morales had decided to impose this requirement, but whether it was because the much vaunted "change" America's Dear Leader was supposed to be ushering in hadn't yet destroyed capitalism or because a mighty cash cow was going unmilked i don't pretend to know. nevertheless, at 135 bucks a pop--more than we paid to get two Chinese visas through a travel agent in Japan--i suspect it was a little of both, such a delicious irony for us residents of the Evil Empire to reflect on.

we let our new friend know that for us this was only a day trip, and somehow seemed sure that would make a difference--as if he made Bolivia's entry requirements all by himself--but he was quite certain that US$270 would be required whether we wanted to be in country for two hours or two weeks. we were still pretty sure he was making it up so we let him know we would take care of things at the border and he went away again... for a few minutes until he came back with the kind of plan that almost made me think he did make the immigration laws in those parts. he said there was a way that we could pay half price, but he would have to take care of our customs paperwork and we would stay on the bus the whole time it was in Bolivia, under his wing, so to speak. Basically, he was pretty sure he could smuggle us over not one but two borders for the measly sum of 135 American Dollars. when i reflect on what some people go through to get to America, or the expenses to which my parents went to allow us to immigrate to the United States, i tend think that we were being offered a killer deal. on the other hand, when i think that Jill and i would probably still be locked in a Bolivian prison, having paid $135 to get there, i'm confident we made the wise choice to disembark the bus at the border and wait in the charming Peruvian border town of Yunguyo for the couple of hours it would take the bus to come back for the return trip to Puno.

Jill having "crossed" one of the loosest borders we've come across.

now when i say Yunguyo is charming what i mean is that it is small and consists of a street with a bunch of cambios--currency exchange shops--and a side street that looked like it would go down to the lake shore but that turned out to be guarded by a scrawny but fearsome looking wild bull who happened not to look like he was tethered to anything. so all our exploring came to naught and we ended up sipping Sprite and munching saltine crackers so my guts would have something to do during all the time we were waiting. actually we did do something a bit more exciting after all: i had the distinct feeling that our friend had been telling us porkies about the border crossing because we hadn't come across anything about this supposed new visa fee, so we wandered up the road and just walked across the border like we owned the place. and nobod seemed to care. there was even a very military-looking Bolivian border guard standing off to the side of the road, so we decided to approach him lest he be tempted to check us out in greater detail. we wanted to see if he could confirm or deny these fees that were increasingly seeming like an attempted scam, and without any apparent knowledge of English, he did in fact confirm the exorbitant visa fee story, but then curiously didn't seem to mind that we just wandered off further in the direction of Copacabana proper.

so we have been to Bolivia--hence its flag in the sidebar--just never officially, and not for very long. i'm pretty sure that if i ever wanted to cross a border illegally, that would be the one to go with. i haven't yet worked out what one would do later on when someone asks to see entry papers. i don't remember a time in all our travels that we've ever been stopped for such a check outside of some official and obvious checkpoint, but i'm sure the one time you don't have that little stamp in your little book is the one time you'll run across the cop who wants to card you just because he can. so we were lucky. the weather was good, the little fellow pictured above at the cambio kept us supplied with refreshment and even sold us a few Boliviano notes and coins, and our actually well-informed friend even stopped on his way back through to pick us up, just as he had said he would. things were looking up for us and the rest of our time by the great lake.

thepenes

2010-02-14T20:27:00.003-07:00

so we had arrived in Puno and witnessed a strike, had got some lunch and taken a quick look around, but other than that we had a whole day we hadn't planned to have in this town and we didn't know what to do with it. so we hit up some tourist agency to see what kind of cultural things we had missed on the way down from Cuzco and what may be near enough to do in a day, and as luck would have it we weren't disappointed.

on the altiplano, you may grow sturdy but you don't grow tall: Jill and i at a bizarre roadside attraction on a hill overlooking Lake Titikaka.

we were able to book an afternoon tour to a little place called Sillustani, just off the road back to Juliaca. there we would be taken to see the remains of some ancient funerary structures of the Colla people, a group of the indigenous Aymara who, along with the rest of them were conquered by the mighty Incas who rolled into town in the 1400s. the Collas lived on very high, windswept plains and buried their nobles in stone towers, the better to worship them, you see. each tower appears to have been a mostly hollow cylinder whose height indicated the relative importance of its family of inhabitants, with a beehive shaped stone mound inside that actually housed the mummies. it is thought that the beehive shape was intended to represent femininity, while the cylinder evoked a more masculine idea. and that's what made our tour so comical, and not to the youngest members of our party either...

above, clockwise from top left: Jill with the roadside puma, an important animal in the Inca culture; Jill taking in the eerie desolation of Sillustani's high plateau; our tour guide, explaining the penes over and over again; the 2-Sol (67-cent) picture of Jill with the baby llama, cheap at twice the price; and some hardy-looking, red-cheeked children of the high Andes. below, Sillustani was bleak in a beautiful way, feeling somewhat medieval to me somehow.

the problem with tours is that you usually have to take them with other people, and generally there are bound to be some you'd rather not travel with. unfortunately, this tour was no exception, and the problem pair in this case were an old couple from somewhere in Spain, so you wouldn't have thought they'd have language problems. actually the guy seemed alright, but he was hard of hearing and so maybe it was his fault that his wife was as loud and terrifically obnoxious as she was. when we were standing up on the plain and Jefe was explaining what the so-called chullpas were, he would get a bit shy and give all references to phalluses in a rather timid voice, so much so that the the Spanish guy couldn't hear him. he kept asking his wife what was being said, and as we were standing on what was supposed to be hallowed ground, the cold wind blustering through the tall montane grass, she finally gave in and yelled at him: "como un PENE!" i was glad i knew enough Spanish to be amused at the exceedingly inappropriate way old ladies sometimes talk.

above, who needs gravy for potatoes when you've got... clay? below, clockwise from top left: Jill and i with the Familia Vilca of Atuncolla; Jill with their pet alpaca (note the stubbier nose and shorter ears than on a llama); myself and Senor Vilca with the same alpaca and a couple of llamas; some pet--and i use that term very loosely here--guinea pigs, the nearest of which is very pregnant; and the entrance to the little village of Atuncolla.

if people are going to be extremely annoying, at least they should provide some entertainment, even if it only lasts a few moments. but the remainder of the trip we distanced ourselves from the Penes so as not to offend our new friends the Vilcas. after the plains of Sillustani, we stopped in a small village named Atuncolla, where the few residents lived simply and mostly self-sufficiently, it seemed, their children wearing handmade traditional clothes and sporting the chapped red cheeks common to young inhabitants of the altiplano. we toured the housing compound of the Familia Vilca, which consisted of a courtyard enclosed by a wall of mud bricks and a few small structures, each with its own purpose in mind. they had their own living quarters, some guest quarters that could be rented very cheaply if one desired such an authentic experience, a cooking area, a sort of shed, and a hutch for the guinea pigs. to avoid being indelicate about what the guinea pigs were for, i will say that the Vilcas were feeding their guests on this tour; we weren't treated to anything quite so lavish, but i hope you get the idea. instead, we had some homemade cheese, which i understood came from either the llamas or the alpaca, some potatoes, and some clay. yes, they made us a steaming pot of clay. to eat. it was grayish brown and fairly runny, and we were to break the small potatoes and eat them with some clay on top, like it was some sort of gravy. it actually wasn't bad at all, but we really didn't know what the point was or who first figured out that eating clay was a great idea. as it turned out, it may not have been in my case, as my guts were beginning to feel a bit the worse for wear from our strike-side lunch, but what i began feeling that evening was just the beginning and would make the next day's trip far worse than even the Familia Pene could have done.

thestrikes

2009-11-27T15:55:00.001-07:00

we've found it's best to maintain some flexibility in travelling. never has this rule of thumb been more important to us than when it came time to leave Cusco. Jill had booked us on a bus that would leave around 7am and take something like 12 hours to get to Puno in the southeast of the country, stopping all along the way at sites of interest. we are pretty organized as travelers and we had arranged for the hotel to have a taxi waiting for us at around 6:30 to take us to the bus depot, and all was going according to plan until we arrived at said depot and found... nothing. it turned out to be some guy's house and the taxi driver started honking and yelling to get someone to come out, which the very sleep-addled guy finally did--on the balcony, at least. he was good enough to tell us that the bus wouldn't be departing that day, and that he'd be grateful if we kindly got lost.

Jill speaks good enough Spanish to get us around, but we had to confer with the taxi driver on the details of what was going on; he let us know that there was a strike of various groups of transportation workers, and that they had blocked off all the roads into and out of Cusco and thus that no long distance transit would be occurring that day. clearly the driver had known all about this and why he didn't think--or one of the hotel staff didn't think--to tell us about it when we told them we were getting a long distance bus to Puno is still a little mysterious to me. in the case of the driver, i suppose that decision turned out to have a small financial benefit, because he must have known we'd ask him to take us elsewhere and he would be able to renegotiate his rate with virtually captive passengers. as it turned out, he was actually far less unreasonable than he could of been and tacked on a trip to the airport for only about $1.50.

the tiny airport we weren't yet supposed to see, in Juliaca, which is a 45 minute taxi ride up the road from Puno; below, the aeroplane we weren't supposed to take--and almost didn't get to!

this was the first time either of us had been in the situation where we were just going to show up at the airport and try to book a flight at the counter, and it began to feel like we were reenacting some scene from a predictable movie. we split up and went to the counters of the different airlines to see what they would charge to get us to the nearest airport to Puno, which is in Juliaca. as Cusco is at such high altitude planes have a hard time taking off in the thin air--especially as the air gets warmer and thus thinner as the day goes on--so almost all the flights out of Cusco leave very early in the morning. our movie experience cranked into high gear when we learned that LAN airlines was the only one with a flight still to depart, and that it would be doing so in a matter of minutes. the desk agent let us know that she had precisely four minutes to get us booked and ticketed, and after doing that continued checking her passenger list and ignoring us for what felt like about five minutes. but she did get us booked, and several hundred dollars (plastic to the rescue once more!) and a few minutes later we were up in that very thin air on our way to Juliaca. and then about 25 minutes after that we were on the very high ground of Juliaca.

so it did turn out to be the most expensive flight on a per-mile basis that either of us have ever taken, but well worth it as our whole schedule would have been thrown off by at least a day. at this point it would be well to note a couple of interesting points about the transportation strike in Cusco. this strike and its like are apparently a way of life in Peru, and i'm told across South America in general; we later learned that we had only very narrowly avoided either being stranded in Aguas Calientes or in getting there at all due to a railroad strike that had been going on around the time we were there. we also learned that the transit strike in Cusco was scheduled to end at exactly 7pm on the very day that we were supposed to leave, which i thought was quite civilized, though i was unsure why they weren't simply striking for as long as it took to get what they wanted. perhaps they only wanted to provide us with a unique experience, and if so kudos to them, and many thanks indeed.

covered by the media like a national sport, Puno's version of South America's pastime depicted in still, above, and moving, below, pictures. especially enjoy the guy with the bullhorn--we did:

but after finding a van to take us the several miles from the airport to Puno, we realized we had a whole day with nothing much to do. and then i started feeling a bit raw about not having been able to witness firsthand some of these strike shenanigans--at least that would have had redemptive cultural value, right? as it turned out, i didn't have to fret long. just after checking into our hotel, we were looking for some food on a pedestrian-only street through town, and we got treated to front-row seats for the Puno strike! this one may have been a little less dramatic, without the use of boulders in the street to block traffic, but they were marching instead and they were loud and even ended up burning things in front of the cathedral. the funny thing was that here again they dispersed pretty quickly after the burning was done--oh that, and that they were all health workers and thought that releasing a bunch of thick, black smoke into the air was good for everyone's salud.

though i suppose i shouldn't complain about them getting back to work quickly. health workers are important and after we finally found somewhere to eat and something to do, i found myself thinking i might well need one myself...

thestones

2009-11-25T15:58:00.002-07:00

getting back to Cusco from Machu Picchu, i hadn't thought we would be too interested in looking at very many more pre-Columbian ruins--or any ruins for that matter. but it turns out there's some pretty good stuff in and around the old Incan capital, so we took a look around.

old town of Cusco as seen from the nearby hills. like all Peruvian cities, big or small, Cusco has at least one plaza; this is the main one, the Plaza de Armas, on which sits the cathedral at left and a church at the far end, and is ringed in shops and cafes, many with nice balconies to sit and people-watch from. below, some of what you see while people watching; apparently they're still using child labor to keep the plaza beautiful...

one of the main things is the ruins of Saqsaywaman, located just out of town in the hills from which the first picture was taken. it's thought that only about 20 percent of the ruins still remain, so the huge area--possibly the size of a modern international airport terminal--that 20 percent covers indicates that the original site was absolutely enormous: a whole city of itself. there isn't really a consensus about what Saqsaywaman was, many think it was some form of fort, but there's no real clue as to what was being protected or from whom. in any case, there are areas with several tiers of huge stone walls and other areas of low rocks with perfectly squared cutouts that don't seem to have an obvious function. the whole thing is on a large grassy plain that is kind of fun to wander around--before the busloads of tourists show up, anyway.

some stony scenes from in and around Cusco and Saqsaywaman, clockwise from top left: Jill and the famous 12-sided stone (really, count them) set in an alleyway wall in the old town; an overview of the town and one of the hill carvings that the Peruvians seem to like so well; a rock at Saqsaywaman that appears to be in the middle of being transported to its place in the wall, see all the little stones underneath that will serve as rollers; a couple of wall shots showing more areas in which, despite the lack of mortar in constructing the walls, you couldn't fit a butter knife between the stones; Jill and i in front of part of the main body of walls at Saqsaywaman. below, some indigenous women sitting in front of yet more tightly fit stone walls back in town.

when those buses started to show up we made our getaway and walked down the pathway to town we assume the Spaniards used to cart off all the rocks they plundered from the site so they could build churches and cathedrals. one of these, the Church of Santo Domingo, was built on the ruins of an ancient temple named Coricancha, and so provides an interesting fusion of building styles. funnily enough, the stonemasonry employed in the older Incan bits are considerably more impressive than the later Spanish works, but the Spaniards introduced intricate woodworks and ornately decorated tiles to show they weren't going to be completely shown up. one very interesting thing we came across was a picture depicting the Godhead, or Trinity, as three separate persons; apparently there was a whole "Cusco School" of religious art that followed this practice but in most cases the paintings had been defaced by visiting clergy from Spain or Rome. apparently that was more offensive than the depiction of a wild chinchilla (most people think it is a guinea pig) as the main course in a famous painting of the last supper that hangs in the cathedral. go figure.

Cusco's Plaza de Armas at night, with the twinkling lights of the hillside barrios as backdrop. below, one of our favorite restaurants in town had this cool art installation depicting the famous national dish of cuy, or roast guinea pig. for some reason we were worried that eating it might make us sick, so we decided that it should be one of the last things we ate before returning to the US. as we came to find out, however, this plan was flawed in ways both very serious and laughably ironic.

we spent the rest of our time in town wandering in the hillside alleyways in the evenings, where we found some good restaurants to eat at; though we decided it was better to wait till later in the trip to enjoy cuy, the famous national guinea pig dish, we did manage to find some alpaca steaks that were quite enjoyable. they were tender and juicy and reminded me somewhat of ostrich meat of all things. there were also a lot of places advertising massages and all kind of esthetic treatments like facials and pedicures. being right up Jill's professional alley, she thought it would be very entertaining to see what a Peruvian facial was like, and so had what she described as one of the most bizarre experiences of her life at the back of a Peruvian mini strip mall.

all in all it was a fun time; we had only one full day in Cusco, which i thought was enough to see Saqsaywaman and Coricancha, but the colonial part of town was quite nice and afforded an opportunity to slow down a bit from the previous few days. as it turned out that slowness was also pleasantly far removed from what was coming up the next day too...

thelostcity

2009-11-24T20:51:00.001-07:00

Jill musters a lot more excitement to be awake at 4am than i ever could. why so early? read on...

the way i look in the above picture pretty much describes how i feel when thinking back on the events of this day in Peru. this was the big one, the main reason we came, and if i hadn't had that look on my face it could have all gone wrong. you see, this picture was taken shortly before four in the morning while standing in the freezing cold waiting for a bus up to the base of Machu Picchu. even at that time the street was teeming with others headed up to the lost city of the Incas, and lines to get on one of the buses were long but mercifully not as loud as the nightclub next to our hotel had been all night.

getting close: the map of the Protected Cultural Area of Machu Picchu, just outside the entrance!

so we piled into one of several dozen identical short coaches that trundled off in file for the arduous switchback climb up the side of the mountains to get to the city base. light was just beginning to illuminate the valley as we hit the first hairpin turn, and had we been more awake we might have worried about the speed the driver still felt compelled to maintain around that bend, on a loose dirt surface no less. but all the concerns we had were focused on getting up to the entrance in time to be one of the few allowed to climb Huayna Picchu that day; a failure in this regard may also have ruined the trip, and it felt like we were cutting it pretty close.

soon enough however, a little after 6 am or so, we were standing in another long line, this time for the entrance, but now we were being told our small tripod looked like a professional model and would thus have to be checked for a small fee with some staff who wouldn't accept responsibility for actually protecting the object we were entrusting to them. there's really not much you can do about these things when you finally get to Machu Picchu though, it's so remote and there's such high demand for getting in that you can't even argue with the US $45 per person entrance fee. that's actually very reasonable when you think about what you're getting to see, but it sure feels steep for Peru.

the sun rises over the Guard House, which sits at the southern end of the complex, where the Inca Trail terminates. the main corpus of buildings lies below and to the left (north) of the terraces in the picture.

but all the frustrations and worries just melt away when you get inside and finally get to look out over the incredible sprawl that is Machu Picchu. it's pretty hard to describe how stunning it all is when you're finally seeing in person what you've only seen in pictures, even if you have seen a lot of them. Jill got me a great book months before we went to Peru, the Machu Picchu Guidebook, which is quite aptly subtitled "A Self-Guided Tour", dividing as it does the site onto several areas, or conjuntos, and describing each one in detail. even now, after poring over the book and visiting most of the conjuntos, it's quite strange to think that we were there at all, but that's why we took our own pictures:

Jill and i in the very very early morning sun with most of Machu Picchu behind us (looking north). the mountains immediately behind the buildings are said to resemble the profile of a face that is pointed toward the sky: the left-hand mountain is the chin, the taller one to the right is the nose, with a mouth in between and eyes in the shadows to the far right. the sign below gives their names: "Huchuypicchu" is the "small" chin, and "Waynapicchu" (Huayna Picchu) is the "big" nose.

by the time we finally got in the complex it was pretty light, though the sun hadn't yet risen over the surrounding Andes mountains. We made a beeline for the sacred mountains at the far north end of the complex, hoping to sign up to be among the lucky 400 souls that would get to climb the largest of the two, Huayna Picchu. we were numbers 218 and 219, which meant that we could climb, but would have to wait until 10 am to begin our ascent. this turned out to be a good thing because we had time to run back to the south end and see the first direct rays of sun hit the site.

the moon is still visible over the Temple of the Sun in this early morning shot. below, the sun climbs higher in the sky to generate this holy-land reminiscent (to me) image over a wall of one of the buildings in the popular district of the residential section of the complex.

those first rays of sun are pretty intense, and while the air is quickly warming up it starts to dawn on you where you are and how incredible this place is. Machu Picchu is on a high plateau with drops of a thousand feet or more down to the Urubamba River below. there are building complexes on the east and west of the narrow strip of grassy terraces that run several hundred feet from north to south through the whole site. the west side consists mainly of housing for the Incan nobles and sacred buildings and other worship structures such as altars, while the east side was apparently where the farmers and servants lived. on both sides, however, are incredibly steeply terraced strips of earth that were used for farming; even today there are no fences or guardrails and many of the terraces are higher than they are deep, giving a serious feeling of vertigo. it's hard to imagine working on those miniature fields all day, knowing that one false move could be your last.

looking at the west side of Machu Picchu from the south end shows both the precipitous drops from the terraces into the valley of the Rio Urubamba way below and the tremendously efficient use the Incas made of the space they had in this temperate summer retreat. below, one of the many llamas that wandered freely about the site, all of which were far more comfortable with the steep layouts than i was, not to mention a lot more agile to boot!

but shortly after our ten o'clock hike time came around, i realized we hadn't even conceived of steep yet. there was an easy trail past Huchuypicchu to the base of Huayna Picchu, the nose mountain, and then the trail just went strait up. literally. it was actually done in short switchbacks but we really and truly spent the next half hour or 45 minutes going almost straight up what felt like a cliff face. the steps were made of very tall, very uneven rocks and we would have to pause frequently to stop our quads burning. there were only very occasionally short lengths of rope or cable loosely tethered to the mountain to give a handhold, and honestly climbing Huayna Picchu was one of the most terrifying things i've ever done. several months removed from the experience it's easy to say i'd do it again, and without a doubt i'm glad i did, but i distinctly remember thinking at the time that there was no way i would ever ever make that climb again. i remember that very clearly.

one of the tamer stretches--really, these rocks are even and the straight-down drop is a few feet and not just inches away--of the Huayna Picchu climb. this part was actually on the way down, and we had to sit and scoot our bums down each step. the rest of the way was far too chilling to be taking out cameras to document the really serious stuff; people fall off the side of HP every year and you would only break a few very feeble plants before they would break your very long, last fall. but it really is worth the climb when you get to the top, and that top is so much higher up than you think. from here the whole complex of Machu Picchu looks tiny and you can see a few of the switchbacks the buses take to get to the base, along with a glimpse of the Inca Trail going off to the top left:

it was somewhere between noon and one when we got down and breathed a strong sigh of relief, which is quite funny given that we were still at the top of a very high mountain plateau--i suppose these things are relative. anyway, by this time, we were down to the last couple of swigs of our water and we had been told we couldn't bring any food into the complex, so our muscles had the jelly-quivering of overuse with no nutrients of any kind to get them to calm down. which only made watching all the people dropping their orange peels on the grounds the more annoying. seriously. Machu Picchu is heralded not just as a national treasure but as one of the "New Seven Wonders of the World", which i would agree is apt; but while the guards will whistle at you for stepping on the wrong rock, they don't seem to mind people littering all over the place.

amazingly, this is the only section of wall that is collapsing in all of Machu Picchu. archaeologists believe that this was a late building and was being erected in a hurry at the end of the empire, which led to the builders not preparing an adequate foundation. it does show the incredible fit the stonemasons were able to achieve, and the stone below, carved in situ, shows further the amazing talents they had. apparently, nobody knows exactly the methods that were used by the Incas to cut their rocks, and the tightness of fit of the rocks in their walls cannot be equalled even with modern tools: there are whole walls made without any kind of mortar that will not even allow for a butter knife to fit between two stones.

we had also been told that you couldn't leave Machu Picchu and reenter on the same ticket, so even though we were dehydrated and starving, we kicked it into high gear and jetted around to the rest of the conjuntos we wanted to see. of course, we found out later on that there was no such rule and they would have been happy to let us back in, but by the time we made this discovery we had seen all we wanted to anyway. in the end basically everything we had heard about the logistics of a Machu Picchu visit had been wrong, so if you ever go there just remember one thing: be flexible. i won't give a list of dos and don'ts, because i imagine that some of the misinformation is just due to people reporting their experiences of visits on different days, when the caprice of some guard or gatekeeper could have kept them from taking in food or allowed a tripod bigger than ours. who knows?

some of the many "image stones" around the Machu Picchu complex, including the famous "Intiwatana", or "hitching post of the sun", at top right, and a pointing arrow stone at bottom right. the Incas believed their gods inhabited the surrounding mountains, and so carved many stones in ways more or less impressionistic to turn their attention to the hills. below, another gratuitous shot for our "icon" picture collection.

so after getting the last of our many many pictures--i think we had 300-400 between us--we left as fast as our tired legs could carry us in search of food. trouble was, the only thing at the top of the plateau, thus on our side of a reasonably lengthy bus ride, is a single hotel, which is home to just one very overpriced restaurant. but in the state we were in it seemed far better to break out the plastic and grab some grub, even if it did cost the better part of 70 US Dollars! at least it was a buffet and they had cold Inca Kola on tap, i must have drunk almost my own body weight. they had more than enough food to get us going again but some of it wasn't too much to Jill's liking; though not always, in this case it was a good thing for me that i eat pretty much anything. so we ate and rested long enough to stop shaking and then boarded the bus for the valley town below.

some of our food and Inca Kola at the hotel restaurant. as you can tell, we have rarely been so happy to eat. below, back down in the Urubamba Valley, where the train terminates in the remote town of Aguas Calientes, which is also known as Machu Picchu Peublo, or village. we had to stay here two nights due to the train schedules and having to get up so early.

once back down in Aguas Calientes, we decided to take a look around, as we had been unable to the first night because our bedtime was so early. like we were, it is a sleepy town, so we got some snacks and watched a local football (that's soccer, for the Americans) match for a while. this was the first place i had seen chicha morada, a Peruvian drink made of purple corn, so i had to have some. it was good but strange, a little like red grape juice but with a funny aftertaste. i didn't ever get a second bottle; it wasn't that bad but Inca Kola is definitely where it's at in terms of Peruvian beverages.

the native costumes aren't so much costumes, this is the way many people really dress. we would often see women in these very tall hats, and they always wear very thick stockings--it gets very cold up here at six or seven thousand feet.

and then after some food it was off to another eight o'clock bedtime in the tiny secluded town of Aguas Calientes. it could have been the anticipation of Machu Picchu or the thumping bass from the nightclub next door to our hotel that kept me awake much of our first night there, but on the second i was truly tuckered out and slept like a baby. no more bleary-eyed, dopey-looking pictures of me on this blog for a while.

thesacredvalley

2009-09-07T07:24:00.007-06:00

after just one full day in Lima we packed up and headed out in the direction of Cusco, the jumping-off point for the Sacred Valley area of Peru. it's either a 30 hour overland trek or a 40 minute flight, so we plumped for the latter and had our bleary morning eyes opened wide by the stunning scenery afforded by the Andes foothills, which rise fast and steep out of the permafog that envelops the narrow coastal plain.

five minutes out of Lima and the mountains are already over 10,000 feet. the wing is that of our small but new TACA Airlines Airbus A319, a comfortable ride even at that early hour.

to catch the 7am flight we were up before five, but getting to Cusco didn't mean we could slow down. we were on our way to the town at the base of Machu Picchu, called Aguas Calientes, and for much of that distance there is no road. many people take the high-priced train all the way from Cusco to Aguas Calientes, but we decided to break the journey up and go part way by road.

scenes from the beautiful Sacred Valley region of Peru, between Cusco to the south and Ollantaytambo northwest of there. below, Jill and i were glad for the wise luggage choices we had made, especially given the cramped bus conditions on the way through the Sacred Valley; what you see in the picture is our entire compliment of luggage for the whole nearly two-week trip. genius!

after getting our bearings and taking a moment at Cusco's Plaza de Armas (did i mention all Peruvian cities have at least one square, or plaza?) to observe our third anniversary, we went in search of a bus station and began the very crowded, though thankfully cheap, drive to Urubamba. conveniently, the bus terminus in Urubamba was the departure point for a whole bunch of minivan taxis, or combis, so we crammed into one of those for the remainder of the trip to Ollantaytambo, the end of the road.

many people in the highlands display a pair of toritos, or little bulls, on their houses as a kind of talisman (this picture also neatly shows off the zoom capabilities of my new camera: when this picture was taken we were sitting at a restaurant all the way across the plaza--yes, even Ollantaytambo has one--about 300 meters away. the camera is at full 40X zoom and not supported by a tripod, yet see how nicely the picture turned out). below, the kind of native dress that makes the region famous began to pop up all over the place.

what we found there was, although of course touristy, so much different to the big city of Lima and even the bustling Cusco. this was a real highland village, and we began to see many people dressed in the native style, and apparently for their own reasons and not just so they could sell themselves for pictures with tourists. either way it was a nice, sleepy town and we were early for the train that would take us the rest of the way to Aguas Calientes, so we settled down to an early lunch of "pizza" and Inca Kola at a small family-run place on one side of the plaza. the Inca Kola was pretty much standard but the pizza, while not bad, might have been better described as some slightly soggy bread with a whole bunch of cheese on it. but pizza retaurants are all the rage in Peru, and we had been told that when in doubt, they were usually the safe place to eat, so we did.

and then we started to wander around town, which was when we came across Juan Diego:

Juan Diego serenades Jill in appreciation for her kind donation.

his sign reads as follows:

ME LLAMO JUAN DieGO
I am BLiNd
THanK you FOR youR DONATiON
GOd BLess you
SOy INVIDENTE
GRacias por su DoNacioNes
y que Dios Los BeNDiGA

Juan Diego was sitting outside the gate for the Ollantaytambo ruins and, with his strange harp-like instrument played and sang a quite haunting tune to Jill:

we decided not to pay the fairly high entrance fee for the Ollanta ruins, reasoning that we would soon be getting quite a fill of other ruins just up the road (or track), but there were all kinds of hewn-rock structures scattered over the hills surrounding the town. many of them blended in quite well and you would be looking around to admire the scenery and suddenly realize there were buildings there,camouflaged by their having been constructed with rock the same color as the mountains. they were all over the place.

the marketplace near the entrance to Ollanta's official ruins had all kind of wonderful things on sale, like this fun balaclava that i thought was something to do with Peru's version of lucha libre, but turned out to be for a type of traditional dance called the Capac Qolla. the mask itself is call a Waq'ollo and can be had in all color schemes imaginable, and is usually worn with a square, flat hat called an Aqarapi that is intricately adorned with antique coins dangling from its brim. at one point we actually caught a couple of brief glimpses of this dance being performed for some other tour group as our train passed theirs. below, the market and some of its other wares in context of their dramatic surroundings, made more so by the ancient buildings almost hiding scattered in the hills.

after the market we made our way down towards the Urubamba river to catch our train, which would follow that water course through ever-deepening canyons to Aguas Calientes. progress on the train was slow, taking about two hours to cover something like 25 as-the-crow-flies miles, but the scenery was beautiful and the dryness of the open valleys began to give way to descending mists that laced the mountain trees.

Jill tries out some of Ollanta's "flying" steps made of cantilevered rocks in a wall, an effect we would see more of at Machu Picchu. below, the train we were about to get on to go there:

and that was it. we were finally almost where we had come all that way to be, and with just enough time to grab an early dinner and head for 7:30 bedtime. we had thought getting up at five to leave Lima was pretty intense, but that was nothing compared with the sleep sacrifice we made to ensure an early arrival at Machu Picchu.

thevalleyoffire

2009-07-10T15:16:00.000-06:00

i've been to Las Vegas enough times that on our recent trip to the Silver State i wanted to get out of the bustle and neon glare of town while Jill was at her conference. so i chose to check out what the Las Vegas Review-Journal called "the best place to take out of town visitors" in 2008: Valley of Fire State Park. and all in all i'd have to say that (not having seen all of the other contenders for that title) i agree that it is about the best thing to see around Vegas.

here i am at the entrance to the park, with very little hint as to the explosion of color that lies just beyond the bend. being all alone and having forgotten a tripod, i had to make do with the roof of the car, which is the blurry red thing you can see at the bottom right of the picture. below, these shots should give you more than a hint at the colors, which are generated primarily by iron deposits in the silica that makes up these rocks. you can see some of them that don't have the iron deposits, and in some parts of the park the two colors are juxtaposed to very dramatic effect.

the park has several very distinct rock formations and clusters of formations, like the "beehives" that are pretty prominent inside west entrance. but a lot of the formations consisted of hollowed out areas in large cliff-like faces, which looked either like miniature or faraway troglodyte cave dwellings or gave the impression of ghoulish faces trying to break out from behind a stretchy screen. to me it did, anyway, very strongly. there are a few short trails in the park and if you hiked all of them and saw all the formation clusters you could do the whole park comfortably in five or six hours, plus another hour each way in travel time to and from the city. i didn't have quite that long, so i skipped a couple of the hikes and must have looked a bit strange hurrying around to see all the formations, but i did it, and that's what counts.

above: pretty self-explanatory, i hope. they're very proud of this one, and apparently it's quite famous. below: the north shore of Lake Mead on the alternate route back to town that takes you through some stunning scenery in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

when i had to go back and pick Jill up, i decided to take the long way 'round and went through the north end of Lake Mead National Recreation Area, which had some great views of its own, including a few of the clear blue waters of lake, which in the dry desert heat of the day looked very inviting indeed. but i resisted going closer to dip in, knowing Jill was tired and hungry, and headed back on the long road to get her. i'm sure she'd had a good time at her convention, but the next time we head for Las Vegas, i think i'll spring her from all that excitement and take her to see the real jewels of the desert. she'll love the park and i won't have to use the car as a tripod, talk about a win-win!

thecityofthekings

2009-07-08T17:20:00.002-06:00

so here theblog finally is, after all that waiting, in Peru. and it seemed like we waited a long time to go there too; after deciding some time last year that we were going to make this trip and booking all of our tickets and accommodations in January, May just took forever to come around. and now look, it's already a month and a half since we got back.

if there's not a cross on a hill in Peru, there'll be a flag. oh look: this one, behind the President's Mansion in Lima, has both. and its own condor doing fly-bys.

but this was a trip well worth the wait; it was a first time to South America and so something very different than we have been used to. the major motivation to go to Peru was to see the ruins of Machu Picchu of course, but with a 12 day trip there was plenty of time to see lots more. as a refreshing break from our usual travelling M.O., we alloted only one day to our initial destination, the big capital city, Lima. and what a sprawling mass it is, filling the gap between the Pacific coast and the nearby Andean foothills and teeming with something like eight million people crammed into all kinds of slums and tenements. there are nice areas too, but we didn't find those until much later in the trip.

but on that first day, we stayed clear of all the barrios and favelas and headed right for the tourist meccas in the heart of old colonial Lima. one of the main legacies of Peru's past as a Spanish colony is that every town has at least one plaza, or square, and usually several. the main ones usually take the name Plaza de Armas, but in Lima there are several of these so the very famous one, with the president's mansion and the cathedral, is simply called Plaza Mayor by the locals, meaning the main square.

examples of the fine colonial architecture from Lima's Plaza Mayor and just beyond are almost enough to make you think it was good of the Spaniards to take over. below, security around the Palacio Gobierno sometimes seemed excessive, but given the South American penchant for coups, may have been wise...

the plazas actually tend to be very pleasant spaces, oases of relative calm and clean in seas of chaotic traffic and dust. it's nice to have some green and a place to sit and slow down right in the middle of a big city, and the tremendous colonial architecture as a 360-degree backdrop doesn't hurt either. Lima has the very best examples of such buildings, largely i suppose because they have the money to keep them looking nice. the north end of the plaza is entirely taken up by the Palacio Gobierno, or Government Palace, which sits well behind a large, guarded fence and, in clean gray stone serves as a nice contrast to the many brightly colored buildings on the south and west sides of the square. these are bright yellow and have ornately carved wooden balconies, as do several of the buildings down the side streets, which are likewise painted in bright yellows or blues. on the east side of the square is the large cathedral, and about a block to the northeast is the Convento de San Francisco, or San Francisco Monastery, which houses an extensive array of catacombs, all the bones from which have been organized by type and even in some cases arranged into hypnotically ghoulish circles of femurs and skulls.

the Museo Taurino in Lima's apparently very dangerous Rimac area has a fairly impressive collection of tauromachian art, including this and another numbered Picasso prints. the steps in the one room museum have tiles depicting the brands of the major ganaderias, or bull breeders. also pictured are museum boss Jaime and i in the stands of the plaza, and Jill and i outside the ring.

coming up from below ground, we headed across the Rio Rimac and into the neighborhood of the same name to go and see the famed Plaza de Acho bullring of Lima and the bullfighting museum next door. there was not very good information on this stuff in our guidebook, so when we got there in the late morning we were a little distressed to find the whole complex gated and locked, with scarcely a soul in sight. giving the fence a bit of a shake did bring a guy out from the bowels of the museum, and he let us in even though he looked very bewildered by our presence. for our $1.67 apiece admission we did get the personal attention and guide services of the museum's jefe, Jaime, who communicated the best he could with very limited English and Jill's translations of the non-fight specific words. later, he took us into the plaza itself, though he somewhat indignantly declined my request to walk on the sand. instead, i got a couple of preprinted pictures of some young bullfighters, including Peru's own wunderkind matador, Paco Cespedes, which he said he gave me because he could tell i had aficion for the art, which i admit was somewhat gratifying to hear.

the Templo de Lima Peru de La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Ultimos Dias, where Jill used the signage to remind herself that her body is a temple, and that mine is... a youth center and a cafeteria. who knew?

following our foray into the fighting world, we planned to head back to the touristy section of town to regroup and consider what to do next, but our new friend Jaime wouldn't let us leave unless we were in a taxi. he seemed genuinely concerned so i don't think he had a racket going with a cab driver friend, but he kept saying how dangerous the area was and that even in broad daylight and with only a couple of blocks to go, we simply couldn't be out walking around as foreigners in these parts. so even though we had walked over with no incidents other than being stared at a lot, we took the taxi and soon decided to take another one out to the eastern reaches of town to see the LDS temple in the La Molina area. it is a nice, middle class feeling area, and the temple sits on beautifully kept grounds, as they always do. there were people about but nobody seemed to take much of an interest in us, and it was even a little difficult to get someone to take a picture of us, though we did manage in the end. after that we retired to the comedor, or cafeteria, for some pretty decent treats, as we had recently eaten a late lunch back in town.

my lomo saltado and Jill's supremo al pollo, a type of breaded chicken cutlet, that altogether set us back about US$5. just behind the mustard and salt are the pictures that Jaime had given me from the bullring. don't tell him, but i accidentally left them there and they had been thrown away by the time i went back to pick them up!

Peru is not exactly known for its native cuisine, but there are some pretty good dishes to be had, like what pretty much constitutes the national standard, lomo saltado. it's basically just steak strips, french fries, tomatoes and onions all cooked together in a beef gravy and served with some rice: simple but effective, and covering the main food groups. the important ones at least. almost all meals in Peru are heavily dependent on potatoes, and when you grow something like 4,000 varieties, that makes sense. it also makes for food that seems pretty safe to us, if nothing else, and for a diet that can tend to make people fairly stocky. alas, it didn't do that for me, but we will have to leave the City of the Kings and continue our adventures in the rest of the country to find out why not, so stay tuned!

thepageant

2009-06-28T00:05:00.000-06:00

we were sure tuckered out the following day, but i think it was worth going to the Manti Pageant last Tuesday night for the first time in about 20 years. officially known as the Mormon Miracle Pageant, it is an enjoyable, if slightly unusual theatrical performance seemingly held over from a heyday of similar church spectacles (does anyone remember the Young Ambassadors?) stylistically, this seems to have been around the time of the American Bicentennial in the mid-seventies, though this pageant actually started a decade earlier. there are still such pageants all over the place, but Manti's is probably the biggest, and possibly eclipsed in renown only by the Hill Cumorah Pageant in Palmyra, New York. both depict the origins of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and i believe that these days they even use the same scenery, shipping the simulated boulders and trees all the way across the country from Manti to Palmyra between shows.

the east tower of the Manti Temple as seen against the fading evening light. the show starts around 9:30 pm, well after dark has fallen over the Sanpete Valley.

the nice thing about the Manti Pageant is that it's performed on the hill right in front of the temple, so there's a wonderful backdrop for the whole thing. most LDS temples have a gold statue of the angel Moroni on top, but several of the originals, including Manti, don't. instead, as part of the performance, they have a live actor representing him stand on one of the towers, complete with flowing white robes and a long trumpet.

as the name suggests, the "plot" of the Miracle Pageant follows several of the wonders of Mormonism, recounting Joseph Smith's First Vision, wherein he said he saw God the Father and His son, Jesus Christ, who let him know that at that time, the Gospel was not to be found in its fullness upon the earth, and that through him it would be restored. part of that restoration consisted of Joseph translating a record of ancient inhabitants of the Americas that had come to the continent from the Holy Land by divine direction. they had been led by prophets who had written about their interactions with God, and one of the last of these, a man named Mormon, had gathered the records, abridged them and inscribed them onto plates made of gold. as such the book that Joseph translated was named the Book of Mormon, and several of the scenes in the middle of the pageant are reenactments of Book of Mormon stories. Mormon's son was named Moroni and as the last righteous man in the line of these prophets of old, he took the plates and hid them in the side of the hill Cumorah and returned many centuries later in angelic form to direct Joseph to them, hence his prominent position as a herald atop so many temples throughout the world.

the most important portion of the Book of Mormon being presented: Christ's visit to His people in the Americas. below, the pageant culmination with a choir of "angels" to the right of the spectacularly floodlit temple, and in front on temple hill a reenactment of Joseph Smith receiving his vision in the Sacred Grove, which actually is in Palmyra, New York, quite near the hill Cumorah.

the Book of Mormon prophets repeatedly stated that the Americas would be a promised land to those who would keep God's commandments; the pageant takes up this theme and culminates with stories of Mormonism's early pioneers crossing the plains and leaving the United States to colonize the Utah Territory. all in all it's a very well done production, requiring something like 800 cast members and a crew of some 300, all volunteers as far as i know. in recent years they have had attendance of just under 100,000 people over the eight days of performance, and there is seating for something like 12-14,000 provided. not all of those seats were full on Tuesday but i understand weekend crowds are huge; in a town with just more than 3,000 inhabitants, you can imagine what 6,000 cars all leaving at once will do to traffic, so getting home at 1am on a work night was a small price to pay for not being stuck all of a Friday night in a traffic jam down in central Utah. i guess once every 20 years that wouldn't be so bad, but the experience was a good enough one that i don't think it'll be that long before we go back.

thecamera

2009-06-19T21:48:00.002-06:00

still building up to the Peru posts, but here's a little teaser about one of the things that made it possible to bring those posts back to you: my new camera, the first one i've bought since early 1998. that one was a crappy old film point-and-shoot that i got for about $35 to take on my mission with me. it served me well and as far as i know still works, even after taking pictures in the middle of a tropical cyclone in Samoa. but this one is much better. behold:

the Canon SX110 IS in silver. 10x optical zoom and a huge screen on the back. and best of all, it takes AA batteries.

its a bit hefty but it still fit handily in my pocket, and it met my main criterion of having some serious optical zoom (and with the 8GB memory card i got for it, i could take about 3,000 high-quality pictures). i'm not sure where i picked up this fetish for optical zoom, but Jill seemed to think i had gone quite out of my mind when that was all i could talk about in the weeks prior to ordering it. but i think even she was convinced of the wisdom of thejayfather when we got to Peru and started tromping around in the great big outdoors. and i'm sure you will be too, Dear Reader, soon, very soon. in the meantime, here's a little taste of what it can do:

a shot of the machine in action, as it were, with Jill's Gorillapod holding it to a post; below, the picture we turned out with this handy setup near Parque Del Amor in the swanky Miraflores district of Lima. a teaser, remember, just a teaser!

thedam

2009-06-17T20:39:00.004-06:00

some of you may have noticed a couple of new flags having surreptitiously appeared in "theplaces i've been" section of thesidebar. it is true that Jill and i recently returned from an exceptional trip to the remnants of the ancient Inka kingdom, now known as Peru. since it's been a while since i've been at the blog (which was partly because i hadn't really been much of anywhere to blog about), i thought i'd get back in the swing with a slightly smaller idea than trying to tackle such an epic adventure as our first foray into South America right away. so here comes a little piece of... the great battle-born state of Nevada!

Jill and i with this cool and memorable sign. thanks Herbert Hoover!

and a little of Arizona, i suppose, as the dam referred to in the title is indeed the magnificent, if quite congested, Hoover Dam, which straddles the state line. we were in Las Vegas last weekend and decided to go and spend part of our Sabbath at the Church of the State, though we picked a rather poor congregation as an example, so to speak, as the Hoover Dam is one of the only US government megaprojects that has ever come in under budget and on time, as far as i know.

the clear waters of Lake Mead play host to the four intake towers that are, in part, responsible for its existence, two-tone hills providing dramatic surroundings; below, Jill and i in front of the dam's concrete arch, the mighty Colorado River alarmingly far below us and those rather short safety walls.

so we approached from the Nevada side, and spent about an hour covering the last three of the 30 or so miles it takes to get to the dam from Vegas. the US Bureau of Reclamation have police officers that "screen" every vehicle trying to cross the dam, and they don't allow any semi-trucks, buses, RVs or vehicles with trailers across for fear of terrorist activities. almost as useful as a TSA checkpoint at the airport, this screen consists of a guy looking into your car--both front and back seats!--to see that the nuclear device or dirty bomb you brought with you has been well hidden and not casually tossed in plain view where its sight might terrify others, and then waving you on. these genius setups were on both sides, so we paid the rather steep parking fee of $7 in Nevada to avoid having to repeat the charade, and walked across what turns out to be a pretty short stretch of road linking the two states.

it is actually a pretty cool site, though absolutely crawling with people. it's done in a pretty nifty and definitely very 1930s design--surprise--with four water intake towers, two of which are used for generating electricity, standing strikingly in the clear blue waters of beautiful Lake Mead to the north. each of the towers closest to the dam itself has a clock that reports the time of the state in which it sits. this is supposed to result in what may seem to be a paradoxical, or at least an odd situation, as a 30 second walk could have you looking at a clock that is an hour ahead of its Pacific Time Zone neighbor. however, since Arizona doesn't celebrate daylight savings with the rest of us, we were robbed of this little luxury and the clocks registered the same time. well almost. apparently Arizona settles for saving just a minute or two of daylight, rather than the full 60.

the Hoover Dam Bypass will allow all the vehicles thought too terroristy to cross the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona without having to take a something like 100 mile detour. it's a win for national security and it looks cool. hooray for Uncle Sam!

so Hoover Dam is definitely worth a visit, and it sure makes a nice break from the tiresome casinos in town. it has some pretty cool spillways on either side that allow high waters in the lake to flow to the river below and rejoin those diverted through the towers to generate electricity. thus the Colorado keeps flowing, but without any of the dramatic churning at the bottom of the dam as you might expect with a more than 200 meter drop. in like manner, now that i've got some good material, i'll be resuming the flow of blogging, just easing back into it with this place and this post as my starting point and pattern.

thefive-o

2008-12-07T15:28:00.005-07:00

no, not the cops, but the number of full years one of our favourite guys, Jill's dad, has been alive as of last December. though we missed it in 2006 while we were in Asia, his birthday usually occasions a pretty big family outing. this time, rather than going snowmobiling, we went down to Moab, Utah and rented a Jeep to go four-wheeling over the red rocks around Arches National Park.

the man himself, proudly proclaiming the day. below, Jill and i at the top of Dead Horse Point, with Canyonlands National Park below us, one of the most awesome sights i have ever beheld.

Jill's parents rented a house in Moab for a couple of days, and in addition to the main event, we enjoyed eveningtime entertainment consisting of Wii games (the Wiis were brand new at that time), a piñata (that we put up indoors and attacked with a spatula), and watching National Treasure 2 at the local three-screen megaplex. before this trip, i had only been to Moab twice: once while in high school to ride the slickrock trail on a mountain bike, and once to take our Japanese friends, the Kusudas, to Arches National Park. this time, we skipped Arches and headed over to Canyonlands, taking some snow-scattered, cliffside mountain trails in the four-by-fours.

Jill and i pose atop the able rented Jeep with Gooney Bird Rock in the background to the left. below, despite being asked not to, i decide to put that Jeep's abilities to the test. it passed.

those often scary trails eventually led us up the mountains to arrive at Dead Horse Point, the main feature of an eponymously named State Park. basically, it is a very narrow section of plateau that sits high above the Colorado river in Canyonlands National Park, and was used by horse thieves as an easily guarded place to keep their spoils. a little bit of fencing and a guy parked at the narrow entrance made it just about ideal for rustlers, as long as you don't count the lack of space, food and water, which often killed the animals. oh well, at least it has great views. i mean really great views; once you've seen the Grand Canyon, you pretty much think you've seen all the good holes in the ground, but i can't remember seeing a landscape that impressed me as much as did the view from this place. it's easy to take for granted the scenery or attractions near where you live, so i don't often have a great desire to explore Utah until we're off living somewhere else, but this is one part of our big empty state that's well worth seeing. thanks to Jill's dad for being the reason i got to, and since it's almost that time again, happy 51st in advance!

theotherSAR

2008-08-02T15:38:00.002-06:00

and now to spoil the mood. in keeping with my craze of adding more stamps to our passports, Jill and i decided to leave the relative haven of Hong Kong for a day trip across the Pearl River delta. i had been warned not to go, but that stamp was just itching to be had, the guidebook had made our destination look wonderful, and even the mode of transport to get there would be fun. so what if Macau was known to be a seedy vice den? we weren't going to the casinos.

the famed, if not drab, Casino Lisboa anchors a whole strip full of such seedy joints, which bear resemblance to their Las Vegas counterparts only in gaudiness. apparently several of the Vegas magnates have opened rather plush hotels in Macau since we were there, but back in July 2005 this was as good as it got. and i wasn't even allowed in--because i was wearing shorts! below, our transit to the former Portuguese colony came in the form of this Boeing 929 jetfoil boat; yes, it really is made by the aeroplane people, and yes, it really is powered by a jet engine.

though we had wanted to take a helicopter, we opted for a jetfoil boat because it was considerably cheaper, and while in some ways i still wish we had shelled out some extra bucks for a scenic flight, i wasn't disappointed by the boat. when they were finally able to crank up the jet engine as we reached the edge of Victoria Harbor, the giant ferry rose up on its foils and cut so smoothly through the still choppy waters we might as well have been flying. it was a beautiful sunny day and that whole stretch of the South China Sea was bustling with craft of all kinds going to and fro everywhere. it was awesome to see how fast we passed other jetfoils coming back from Macao, and the whole journey took only 45 minutes one way to cover more than 40 ocean miles.

the only problem with all this, as it turned out, was our tickets. to save a few Hong Kong dollars and to ensure that we'd be back to Kowloon the same day, we had bought and booked seats for our return journey at the same time we booked them for the outbound leg. which would have been fine, if we had ended up needing a whole day to see Macau, as we had thought we reasonably might. so it was a little distressing when we discovered that we still had six hours to kill before our trip back when we had seen everything--literally, everything--that we were interested in seeing on that hot, dirty peninsula.

some of the few worthwhile sights of Macau, clockwise from top left: the centerpiece fountain of the Largo do Senado (Senate Square) plays in the sun in front of the arcaded front of one of the Portuguese colonial buildings; Jill stands in front of the facade of the church of São Paulo, the last remainder of that edifice; the tiled sign set in the wall of a corner building demarcates the beginning of the Largo de São Domingos, or St Dominic's Square; a line of pedicabs in front of the Casino Lisboa; and Jill in front of the Igreja São Domingos, the interior of which forms the backdrop for this collection of pictures. below, the hilltop lighthouse at the Guia Fortress rises above the whole Macanese enclave.

there are some good sights to see. the two churches, of São Domingos and São Paulo, are rather impressive, the former set on a pleasant square that is surrounded by colonial buildings and floored with black and white cobblestones arranged in gentle waves, and the latter set on a plaza that is surrounded pretty much by obnoxious Chinese tourists. Fortaleza Guia, or the Guia Fortress, sitting atop a central hill is almost worth the phenomenally sweaty trek to the top, if not for the smog-ridden view then at least for the cannon riding opportunities (see below). built in 1638 atop Macau's highest point, the fort was joined by an upstart young lighthouse in 1865 that still functions with a light visible for over 20 miles in clear conditions, which i take to mean under 20 yards in normal conditions.

the view from the Guia Fortress looking approximately southwest-ish, and below, the occasional special view at the Guia Fortress, where the ghost of an ancient warrior rides his surdy cannon into battle... or something.

a word here about guidebooks. i suppose it's the job of pretty much any such work to make its subject seem appealing, and the types of folks who are apt to write such books are bound to be lovers of travel. however, i can't help feeling that the folks who wrote the book we used on this trip were either a little punch drunk on, or at least blinded somewhat by that love. having been reliving this excursion through writing this post, i have felt a little softened toward Macau due to the pictures of the good bits. but really, i don't think i could ever recommend Macau as a destination to anyone, as much as i love seeing new places and as much as i wanted to like this one in spite of the warning i had received about it. i could happily live in Singapore or Hong Kong, but i'd be severely aggravated at having to spend just another hour in Macau. incidentally, we used a Rough Guide to Hong Kong and Macau, while we had a Fodor's book that covered all the other countries we visited on the Southeast Asia trip. it's not that the Rough Guide is bad, indeed, we started off the Japan trip with another of those, but its authors were a little effusive about some of the features we found most dubious in Macau; in any case, we used the Lonely Planet books for our Taiwan travel and have pretty much got used to them on our trips since, so that's what we usually recommend.

anyway, i'm not expecting anyone to try to make me live in Macau, but then again, i wasn't expecting my first foray there to be so awful, so who knows. we tried to salvage the trip by searching for the highly recommended junk boats that take you on a ride around Macau and under the bridge that connects it to the other two islands of the colony, Taipa and Coloane. unfortunately, we couldn't find any such dock as was mentioned in our book, and nobody seemed to know what we were talking about, so we called the whole thing a big bust and headed back to the jetfoil terminal to see if there was any way to get out of there on a much earlier boat than the one we were booked on. oddly, in a perversion that may have actually made our trip for us, the demand to get to Macau by jetfoil was a lot higher than demand to leave the awful place, so we got onto the next boat with no problems at all. and after just five hours in town we settled back into our plush seats for the comfy, quick ride back to civilized, blessed Hong Kong.

thetoros

2008-05-24T17:00:00.002-06:00

it's probably been a bit difficult to follow the timeline of many of these posts, with me reporting events way after the fact and not in orderly fashion. but this post, though older like so many others lately, happens to report an event exactly two years old today. to mark this celebration of relative antiquity, and possibly to diminish the appearance of its age, i introduce the topic with some really vintage words:

At the first bullfight I ever went to I expected to be horrified and perhaps sickened by what I had been told would happen to the horses. Everything I had read about the bullring insisted on that point; most people who wrote of it condemned bullfighting outright as a stupid brutal business, but even those that spoke well of it as an exhibition of skill and as a spectacle deplored the use of the horses and were apologetic about the whole thing. The killing of the horses in the ring was considered indefensible. I suppose, from a modern moral point of view, that is, a Christian point of view, the whole bullfight is indefensible; there is certainly much cruelty, there is always danger, either sought or unlooked for, and there is always death, and I should not try to defend it now, only to tell honestly the things I have found true about it. To do this I must be altogether frank, or try to be, and if those who read this decide with disgust that it is written by some one who lacks their, the readers', fineness of feeling I can only plead that this may be true. But whoever reads this can only truly make such a judgment when he, or she, has seen the things that are spoken of and knows truly what their reactions to them would be.

so saith Ernest Hemingway, who penned these words more than 75 years ago, and who, at least in the English language, is perhaps the most studied observer of modern bullfighting, modern here being within the last century. i have lived most of my life thinking that my family had attended bullfights during our trips to Spain when i was a young child of three or four; apparently i was wrong about that but i'm sure i wouldn't have remembered my reactions even if i had attended one those many years ago.

the postcard advertising the bullfight we attended on our honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. 300 Mexican pesos was about US$27 at the time, and worth every penny.

nevertheless i have been somewhat fascinated with the idea of bullfighting, so i jumped at the chance to see a real live bullfight when Jill and i were last in Mexico, if only to make good on an event i thought i had observed a quarter century before. Jill was game too, which was convenient since we were on our honeymoon and it wouldn't really have done for me to go alone. even though it was held in the small bullring of Puerto Vallarta, a tourist town, the fights themselves were very authentic and it turns out that the fights are quite popular all over Mexico, and almost as much as in their native Spain.

me outside the Plaza de Toros in Puerto Vallarta, just before the appointed time.

if you've read this far then it's safe to assume that at least the idea of bullfighting doesn't put you off. i can understand how it would, and warn that there are some pretty graphic images to come, so i will understand if you take this last chance to bail out. but as Hemingway says, it's impossible to know your reaction to the spectacle until you've seen it, even though you may--very reasonably--never intend to do. unfortunately, there are some of the tourists in town on that day who had made up their minds about the barbarous event before it even started--why they still went was beyond me, it's not like anyone made them. one such woman insisted on shouting through the whole event and heckling the matadors and their peones, or underlings. she could have left, as several people did after or during the first fight, but her display not only served to confirm opinions that Americans can be obnoxious and culturally insensitive, but displayed a complete lack of understanding of the the whole bullfight.

though no excuse for her behavior, this ignorance is understandable, and comes from a basic misperception of the nature of the event. given that fights and matadors are given similar press coverage to the final four and NFL quarterbacks, it makes sense that we would think of the bullfight as sport, though sport it is really not:

The bullfight is not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, that is, it is not an equal contest or an attempt at an equal contest between a bull and a man. Rather it is a tragedy; the death of the bull, which is played, more or less well, by the bull and the man involved and in which there is danger for the man but certain death for the animal.

thanks to Senor Ernesto for the for the correct definition. the bullfight is art.

the paseo of the bullfighters and their staff, or cuadrilla, occurs at the beginning of the event and allows a sense of occasion and a chance to salute the Presidente, the authority for the fight. below, the bull is announced before he thunders into the arena.

about an hour after the matadors have begun their highly ritualistic dressing in their ornate trajes de luces (suits of light), the late-afternoon event begins with a procession across the plaza de toros, or bullring. some important person, perhaps a local dignitary, will have been chosen to officiate at the fight, and this presidente will, upon being saluted, throw down the keys to the toril, or bullpen. the bulls are kept in semi-darkness for several hours preceeding the fight, so as to calm and rest them and hopefully keep them from splintering their horns by ramming the enclosure walls. the fighters will have sent trusted members of their staff to examine the bulls and draw for them, each one hoping to have a brave, usually meaning aggressive, bull. generally, three matadors will each kill two bulls; at the fight we attended there were four young matadors who each went up against a single toro.

the bulls are announced just before they are allowed to charge down the tunnel that leads out into the bright sunshine of the ring, which most do explosively, though one or two at our corrida, or running, required a jab in the hind quarters to get them going. perhaps oddly, these are the most dangerous bulls for the matadors because they will be unpredictable in their charges and will also require the most risk-taking in citing to charge. in any case, this is when the matador first gets to judge the character of his bull, as the man stands behind the barrera, the red wooden fence that surrounds the sandy ring and provides some protection from the bull's charges. the other matadors and the current fighter's own staff will enter the ring with their capotes, large, heavy capes used to attract the bull's attention and steer him in this prelude to the fight. they will often use them to lead the bull away from a horse or a man in vulnerable position in a maneuver known as a quite, which is also usually taken as a good chance to show off some fancy cape work.

one of the matadors uses the heavy rose and goldenrod-colored capote to attract the bull. you can tell that this is a full matador and not a peon because the ornaments of his traje de luces are gold.

during all this beginning activity, before the first of the fight's three acts, or tercios, has begun, the matador will be studying his bull to detect signs of cowardice or tendencies to prefer one horn over the other for hooking, or to veer to the left or right in charging. many of the actions taken during the fight will have the express purpose of correcting any of these undesirable traits. after a few minutes of observation, the matador himself will enter the arena and finish the introduction with a series of veronica, gaoneras, or other studied operations, citing the bull to charge past the cape as it is swirled in this way or that past the raging beast. this demonstrates the artistry of the fighter and also, after the media-veronica, a final half spin of the cape, serves to plant the bull in its last position, allowing the matador to walk away with his back to the horns, hinting at the mastery he hopes to gain over the bull in the coming 20 minutes or so. indeed, the killing of each bull is a relatively short procedure, and necessarily so due to the bull's being so quick to learn. after too much experience in the ring, any given bull becomes far too dangerous to fight, he knowing just what is going on and just how disrupt it, and so must be killed rather speedily. this is also why a bull will almost never leave the ring alive, whether the matador is able to kill him or not--he will never be able to be fought again because that next time he will surely kill the man, and though that may seem more sporting to some, remember that letting the bull have a chance is one thing, but letting him have an equal chance was never the idea.

the picador on his these-days-heavily-armored (and blindered) steed drives his pica, or vara, a long lance with a disc just to the rear of the point to prevent too-far penetration, into the shoulder muscle of the bull as other toreros, or bullfighters, wait to make the quite and lead the bull away from the horse after the encounter.

so now the first act of death commences, the tercio de varas, in which two picadors, or lance-wielding men on horseback, begin attacking the great hump of muscle that runs from just behind the bull's horns to the middle of its ribcage. much of the time in the three tercios is spent weakening this mass so that gradually the bull's head and horns will droop and enable the matador to reach in over them to secure his kill. the bull will usually be picced two, three or four times during the tercio de varas, and will still appear strong and high-headed afterwards even though a sheen of blood may be coursing down his flanks (which actually helps to lower the furious animal's blood pressure, keeping him from death by extreme acute hypertension). the picador should not have ruined the bull by piccing him in the ribcage or by grinding or twisting the vara, but should have, among other things, helped lower the furious animal's blood pressure, thus keeping him from death by heart attack, thus properly setting the stage for the next act, the tercio de banderillos.

some colorful banderillas with their barbed points hang awaiting use in the callejon, the narrow walkway separated from the ring by the red wooden barrera.

banderillas are two-foot long sticks with harpoon-like points at the end and covered the length of their shaft in brightly colored paper. the majority of the members of a matador's staff, or cuadrilla, are banderilleros, or placers of these sticks. the idea is again to jab them into the bull's hump of muscle, a pair at a time, only this time to remain under the hide, hanging by the barbs of their points. a banderillero, and sometimes the matador himself, will place one of up to four sets of banderillas as close together as possible by citing the bull for a charge and then running at the bull in a sort of arc and thrusting them downwards with arms extended high over the horns to allow them to come within range of the man. the following video demonstrates this reasonably well, though you will be able to see that the pair were not placed in great proximity to each other:

a peon places a pair of banderillas with some grace, if not much care. at least he got them on the correct side.

you should also have noticed that all of the banderillas had been placed on the right side of this bull, which was undoubtedly ordered by the matador to correct a tendency of that animal to veer or hook one way or the other. by the end of the tercio be banderillos, the bull should be as corrected as possible, and should have been weakened enough that the final series of cape passes will drop his head sufficiently for a kill, but he should not have been destroyed by being rendered lame or timid.

this bull follows the cape in its low arc along the sand. having finished the placement of the banderillas, we are now in the third act.

thus begins the tercio de muerte, the third of death--that of the bull if all goes correctly. it is with this third that most people in non-bullfighting nations would likely be familiar, the matador now doing his work alone with the small red muleta cape. probably less well known is the sword he will also have with him during most of this time, which he will use both to spread the cape and also to kill. somehow, we rarely get those last images, but it is that final moment that the whole fight has built to, a crescendo to a dramatic final showdown. without this it all comes to nothing. the moves with the cape in this act are collectively known as the faena, and are meant to highlight both the man's artistry and his mastery over the bull, not to mention his bravery. it is here that he can choose the degree of danger to which he is exposed by carefully controlling the distance from his own body that the bull's horn pass. his nervousness may be given away by feet that slide involuntarily away from the huge beast as he tramples past, or his fear may be revealed by great gaps between his skin-tight suit and the hooking horns that seek to deliver him a cornada, or goring. all the while seeking to avoid these giveaways, the matador must also strive to execute his passes with as much grace and beauty as possible.

some moves of the two most appealing fighters of our day at the ring: Pepe Murillo above, and the show-stopping Antonio Garcia below. some of Garcia's actions were pure theatrics, but he played the crowd well and knowing that he had planted the bull with a fine series of passes, could both kneel before it and turn his back on it without fear.

we didn't seem to get many pictures of Rodrigo Merino, the afternoon's first fighter, though i remember him seeming a bit awkward and lanky. Pepe Murillo was likewise tall but seemed graceful and was a pleasure to watch, though his kill was somewhat troubled and unremarkable. Antonio Garcia was anything but unremarkable, a bit over the top even, but the stars were aligned for him on that day and his work was tremendous in just about every way. and then came Christian Hernandez.

Christian Hernandez demonstrates a pase with the muleta; note his sword holding out the cape to make its area larger. a careful inspection will also reveal a nice low pass, intended to further tire the bull's shoulder muscle, but due to overzealousness in piccing (see the large tear in the flesh between the lower two banderillas) this bull is worn out enough to be brought almost to his knees. below, Hernandez sizes up his bull before citing for another charge. i like this picture so much (taken by Jill of course, to whom i dedicate this post as a reminder of our great honeymoon) that a copy hangs in my office.

following Garcia must have been difficult, and unfortunately Hernandez made it look just that. his passes were functional but not especially attractive, and his kill was actually quite disturbing, he seeming to have entirely lost his nerve by the time he actually took the sword. his bull didn't seem especially big but it may well have been a more difficult specimen than my untrained eyes could detect. despite these problems, the best pictures of the final phase of a fight came from this last matador, whose ever-redder face betrayed a growing embarrassment at the state of his corrida.

Hernandez salutes the presidente before the hora de verdad, or moment of truth, asking his permission to kill or perhaps dedicating the bull to him. below, Hernandez goes in volapie, sort of. this method of killing sees the man charge the bull, going in over the horns with the sword while keeping the bull's head down and steering him past with the muleta. sadly, Hernandez can be seen here already running away from the bull before he has even got close, which netted him a sword through the poor bull's lung and a loud series of whistles from the crowd. as a side note, you may wonder about the caked mud on the bull's rear; this is there to prevent messes in the ring.

so how does one kill a bull? after all the preparatory work is done, it comes down to (hopefully) one shot with a long, very sharp sword, called an estoque, which should be inserted between the shoulder blades in an opening that is formed as the bull's head is carried lower and lower. if done correctly this will sever the aorta, and the bull will very soon be dead, often before he hits the ground. the act of the estocada is done in one of two ways, the more common volapie, or "flying while running" toward the bull, style, and the more dangerous recibiendo manner, in which the man stands stock still and hopes the bull charges his muleta in a very straight path. it is at the moment of death that the bull really gets his best chance of the fight, that if the man is doing his job properly (ie, not like Christian Hernandez is doing above), the bull can raise his head for the last time and deliver a good and possibly fatal goring to the matador who seeks to put him out of commission. this is the hora de verdad: to see if the man will give the bull that chance. the following videos show first, what it looks like to run at a bull with the intent of killing him, and second, what it looks like after you've done that correctly:

Pepe Murillo demonstrates an estocada that is more or less correct, if not particularly pretty. you may note that the point of the sword has actually exited the bull, which may say more about the animal's size than it does about correct placement. you will note that Pepe is quite pleased with the result. below, you can see how quickly Antonio Garcia's bull drops after having received the sword from him on a first attempt. he is justly elated at the nice rounding out of what was a virtually perfect fight for him.

since we're watching videos, it may be worth taking a moment to note their wonderful soundtrack--indeed, the soundtrack of the bullfight itself. a corrida relies to some degree on the presence of live music, a band that sits by the presidente playing various paso dobles that are quite often fairly incongruous to the sight before you. in any case, they do a pretty good job with what they have, and it all adds to the atmosphere and, in our case, helped to drown out that large, obnoxious American woman. all the shouts of ole! as each pass was made helped there too.

the noble beast is dragged out of the plaza in a rather unceremonious fashion. at least there's a brass band playing.

but what happens if you can't kill the bull, as in the case of poor Christian Hernandez? you try again, and possibly again, until the crowd starts their loud whistling, petitioning the presidente to either end the butchery or allow a particularly valorous bull to be put out to pasture as a stud. if he is to be put out of his misery, the matador may be allowed to use a special sword or even a dagger to sever the spinal cord just at the base of the skull. this is what Christian had to do.

how about in the case of a clean kill? just as the one Garcia demonstrated, the matador cites the bull to charge and drags the muleta, held in the left hand, low to keep the bull's head down, making him pass to the fighter's right, while he leans in over the horns to drive home the estoque with his right hand. as you saw above, the bull will remain standing for only a short time before he collapses. and rather than whistles there will be a waving of white handkerchiefs, signalling to the presidente that the crowd favors the awarding of trofeos, or trophies. these will be an ear or two and may even include the bull's tail in exceptionally proficient cases, and will be added to the victory lap of the ring that a clean kill will inspire. Garcia was awarded both ears of his bull.

after his fight Antonio Garcia thanks the crowd and again salutes the presidente, before taking his lap of the ring with his trofeos of two ears in hand. the blood on his traje de luces indicates the closeness with which he worked the bull during the faena.

and then the fight is over. the matadors retrieve their ceremonial capes from the people in the audience to whom they had entrusted them as a sign of respect at the beginning; if one is draped over the barrera in front of your seat and the fighter does well it is a mark of great honor, if he does less well you may be tempted to slink away from it after the fight. the matadors and their cuadrillas gather to pack their equipment and talk about the bulls, perhaps offering encouragement to the fighter of that very difficult one.

the torreros gather following the corrida, with members of the cuadrilla gathering the swords and capes from the callejon. here again you can see that the full matadors, with the exception of Antonio Garcia, in white, have their trajes ornamented in gold, to distinguish them from the peones. below, a solemn senior banderillero carefully folds a heavy capote for future use.

so as we begin the summation it's fair to note that the corrida we saw could be indicted on a number of grounds, not least of which were certain annoying spectators. besides that the bulls were small, the fighters generally worked with too great a margin of safety or too many tricks, and you could even argue that it, like all bullfights, was just a barbarous, cruel business plain and simple. we didn't see any of the horsey trauma Hemingway said we would, due to the extensive padding those animals now get to wear, but i suspect that any such deaths would be more troubling than any we did see. a horse, when killed, is good only for glue or dog food, whereas the bull is actually taken and his parts used practically in their entirety. i'm not going to be an apologist for the bullfight, and i really do understand how someone could have a real problem with it, but i'd say it's better that the bull get to provide a show and demonstrate his bravery than that he gets a simple, unceremonious mallet blow to the head in some filthy slaughterhouse. besides, that person with the real problem is welcome to stay away. though they are never allowed to fight humans while growing up, these bulls are bred for fighting and are kept just as you would expect very valuable animals to be: as kings. their time in the ring is their end purpose in life.

the fights are a serious business and will be reported in the press even in the case of a minor venue like Puerto Vallarta. above, Antonio Garcia is interviewed on camera, while Jill and i pose with the victor below.

and so having seen it, i can now make my end judgment, and tell you whether i have that fineness of feeling spoken of to revile this slaughter. alas, i do not. while i might not say i have developed true aficion for the bullfight, i am interested by it, and it is definitely a fascinating spectacle. Jill, too, decided that she really rather enjoyed it, and we have plans to see another running later this year. i'd have to say that looking at the pictures and videos is actually a lot less interesting and perhaps more troubling than seeing the real thing live, so if you got to this point, without any trouble or upset you're probably ready for the real thing. next time you're in Mexico, or better yet, Spain, or even a number of other South American countries, try to catch a bullfight and if nothing else discover what your true reaction to it is.

for reference, should you like some on this topic, a few recommendations follow. certainly the place to start would be Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, pretty much the English language bible of bullfighting. though somewhat dated, having been first published in 1932, it is still an excellent and thorough guide and would be quite profitably read before seeing a bullfight for the first time. his other work of nonfiction, The Dangerous Summer, about a season of dueling matadors, is also a good read, and the fictional The Sun Also Rises has some nice references to the art and is highly enjoyable as a novel as well.

for immediate satisfaction, the Encyclopedia Britannica has a lengthy and informative article online, and the Wikipedia article isn't that bad, although it does change from time to time. there is a very helpful FAQ available online from a company which runs tours to the Tijuana bullring, which answers a lot of basic questions quite well.

ESPN Magazine has an interesting article about a young Mexican matador which includes some great pictures, and its Sports Travel website has at least a couple of bullfight articles that may be more or less useful. finally, there are apparently a number of bullfighting clubs right here in the United States that maintain websites, including the LA Bullfight Club and the Club Taurino de Chula Vista, both members of the National Association of Taurine Clubs. i didn't know there were that many either.

theSARs

2008-05-03T11:30:00.003-06:00

we were fortunate on the next leg of our Southeast Asian journey in that there was no good way to make it by overnight train, and even though we didn't get to fly Singapore's reportedly awesome airline, we did plump for a plane again. the destination was the "Special Administrative Region" of the People's Republic of China known as Hong Kong, a former dependent territory of my own native land, Britain. Hong Kong is an intense visual experience, with all the stereotypical images of bright, neon east Asia, like all that we had seen at that point in our international experiences taken to the next level and squared.

the hustle, bustle, neon and glow of Nathan Road's famous Golden Mile in Kowloon.

of course the best way to see the view and the lights of Central is from Victoria Peak on Hong Kong Island. getting up there means either a long, hard walk or a short, scenic ride on the Peak Tram, a tourist attraction in its own right. with a rise of almost a quarter of a mile over less than a mile of track, and maximum gradients of nearly 50 percent, the ride can feel pretty hairy at times, but the views are spectacular.

the 120-year-old Victoria Peak Tram that winds its way through the densely populated hills of Central. below, Jill and i wind our way through the densely populated star chambers of Madame Tussaud's Hong Kong wax museum, clockwise from top left: Jill gets intimate with her longtime hero, Indiana Jones--who knew?; i take a moment to catch up with my old buddy Tony Hopkins; then get my just desserts for listening to Madonna; finally Jill and i get to know the (sort of) locals, taking the time to hoop it up with Ming Yao.

before we get to those views, however, i should mention the cool views we got at the Madame Tussaud's wax museum in the Peak Tower at the top of the tram. you can't see many stars in the sky with all the light pollution emanating from the Central skyline, but they're all visible inside, and up close and personal. they even have some displays with closed-circuit cameras pointed at them so you can see yourself on TV giving a speech with George Bush or stepping off a plane to greet the crowds with Hu Jintao. but we soon had to leave our friends to continue our tradition of watching the sunset from a high spot in a world city, so we stepped outside and staked a great vantage point complete with a piece of railing to steady the camera so we could take pictures as the lights came on in all the buildings. there are a lot of them on Hong Kong Island, and that view is a sight to see; it's a little boggling to think of all the people that live and work in such a small space.

the awesome Central skyline at dusk, taken from Victoria Peak. below, a shot taken from sea level of the afternoon moon rising over the coolest looking building ever, the Bank of China Tower. it was designed by I.M. Pei, the same architect who did the Louvre pyramids; apparently he's a fan of triangles.

when we had had enough of funiculars and skyscrapers we decided to take in some of the shopping for which Hong Kong is famous. first we took a bus down to the south side of Hong Kong Island to see Repulse Bay and Stanley, site of a famous outdoor market known for its silks. Repulse Bay, as the name hints, was initially important for its maritime connections, including both piracy and naval maneuvers. now however, it may be better known for having a wide building with a huge hole running right the way through it, put there on purpose apparently so that the feng shui spirits would be better able to pass through on their way from the hills to the ocean. or something like that. closer to where we were staying, we checked out the Golden Mile of Nathan Road, which began right about where our hotel, the Eaton, stood. incidentally, the Eaton is a really nice hotel, with a great buffet dinner and particularly pleasant, if a little small, restrooms; the reason i feel qualified to mention that is because the only time i got sick on these travels was after eating a mango-sauce covered soft-serve ice cream at McDonalds on Nathan Road, and i spent the next several hours hugging the bowl in my bathroom at the Eaton. in any case, the Golden Mile seemed like a bit of a bust, being principally a place for overpriced cheap electronics and overpriced expensive jewelery, but there were a lot of 7-11s, which always had a supply of Hi-Chews and my favorite drink from Britain, Lucozade. i was pretty much in heaven, and must have had about three or four of those delicious concoctions each day we were in Hong Kong.

we had a great time in Hong Kong. we had good accommodations, as we had almost everywhere else on our big trip, mostly thanks to our travel agent in Taipei, Jeannie Leng. incidentally, while we usually think of travel agents as being a lot more expensive than making the arrangements yourself, in Asia the opposite seems to be the case. apparently, the agents have networks in each of the other Asian countries that they use to get better prices, and there aren't a whole slew of discount booking sites, at least that are available in English. so if you want to travel around while you're there, just get a travel agent. anyway, back in Hong Kong, most things are written in English, so even though hearing Cantonese was very strange to our Mandarin-accustomed ears, we could generally understand where we were and what to do from the good signs. we got to visit the LDS Temple in Kowloon, which is a lot more boxy looking than most of the others, and which our pictures, and those on the Church website, manage to make look both small and uncrowded, even though neither of these is a correct impression. it's a very efficient space, but really crammed in.

the Hong Kong Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, crammed in on Cornwall Street in Kowloon. below, one of the double decker buses that took us (and our stuff) all over Hong Kong, literally. the Eaton Hotel is the red brick and glass building just to the rear of the bus in this picture.

we also got to take a small side trip out of Hong Kong, one that was supposed to be a day trip to the other SAR, but that ended up being so much less, in every way. i may write about it in another post, but i won't spoil the mood here. because when the time came to make the short flight back to Taiwan, we became very pleased with our sojourn in this administrative region, and with one of its people in particular. we had taken another double decker bus on the long ride from Kowloon to Lantau Island, where both the world's largest seated buddha and Hong Kong Disneyland live, along with the new Chek Lap Kok airport, so we could catch our plane. the airport is the bus terminus and it was only after we and the other passengers were all disgorged from our carriage that we realized that Jill's prized souvenir umbrella, heretofore strapped to her backpack since its purchase all the way back in Thailand, was still on that bus as it trundled back into town. after checking in for our flight we went to the offices of the bus company and asked them how we could get the item back, and basically when the two agents sitting like bank tellers selling tickets to folks out on the sidewalk determined that lost and found wasn't in their job description, they suddenly became a lot less proficient in English and started ignoring me. now you have to understand this about Chinese people in general: that they don't like conflict, and in my experience will do anything, including pretending you're not there, to avoid it. thus being ignored may have made me more contentious however, and soon they were sending out a manager to try to get me to calm down, though not to fix the problem. how could he if we were leaving the country in a couple of hours? he reasoned. i wasn't so concerned about this problem of his, and i realized we may never see the umbrella again, but the least he could do would be to just tell us he would try to get it back or send it to Jill, even if it wasn't true. later on, that's what i thought was happening, after i had secretly followed that manager back into the office while the locked door was still swinging closed behind him. i needed better answers than he had given me, but the folks on the inside got in a real flap that i had come into their space and they didn't seem to know how to get rid of me. eventually, they called in a supervisor from somewhere else, whom they used to lure me back outside for a meeting, and he told me that he would get the umbrella, even before we left the island. finally, someone was at least pretending to take us seriously, so we went along with what we thought was just a placation and grabbed a Lucozade in the terminal building to pass the time until we were due to check back on his progress.

we did check back with the office, a couple of times, each time with the remaining staffers telling us he had not returned, confirming, we supposed, our hunch that he had been putting us on. but then, not many minutes before we were to board our aircraft, an empty double decker came roaring into the bus depot--empty, that is, except for that lone supervisor and Jill's umbrella! this guy had taken a whole bus and sped it all the way out to Hong Kong's mainland to track down our bus, stop it and get our left item! what a guy! that was customer service, at least if it wasn't self preservation. i did feel a bit sheepish when he actually delivered the item, but i guess all my pushiness paid off. so we still have the umbrella, and at one time it was actually decorating a room, but the moral of the story is, if not taking care of your belongings, that using intimidation to get what you want from Chinese folks who have a hard time saying no often works. but be careful, there may not always be a guy who understands Western negotiation with a spare bus hanging around. good luck!

theparadise

2008-04-22T20:35:00.001-06:00

paradise indeed. this picture pretty much sums it up.

apparently Milton never made it out to Indonesia, because a couple of weeks into our legendary Southeast Asia tour we found paradise there in a big way. the tiny island of Bintan is one of more than 17,500 in the Indonesian archipelago, and conveniently sits just a few miles to the south of Singapore. after restless nights on trains, and days of backpack-laden wandering around hot city centers, a couple of days on a deserted white sand beach was just what we needed. plus, i wanted another stamp in my passport. (in fact, that was the only reason i wanted to go, but i had to sell it to Jill on the grounds that it was only a 45 minute ferry ride away and there was a beach.)

the awesome "turbocat" ferry that took us on the short hop from Tanah Merah in Singapore to Bintan Island, Indonesia--a very beautiful ride across clear blue-green waters. below, upon arriving, we found our old friend the humble durian was equally as discriminated against as it was back in Singapore.

the ferry was one of the huge turbocharged catamarans that seem to be so popular in this part of the world. through large windows we looked out over pristine waters glistening under a beautiful blue-sky, and leaving the Tanah Merah ferry terminal turned exhilarating as we sped into an ocean channel teeming with huge container ships and buzzing speedboats. the trip was brief and we soon found ourselves pulling into a bay whose wooden huts looked like they could have been plucked from the 19th century. going through Indonesian "customs", which was really just a money grab--$20 each for a three day visa, US currency only, please--and arriving at the Nirwana Gardens resort with its "no durian" signs quickly brought us back to the present though, despite the refreshing remoteness and primitive feel of the resort.

the secluded pathways and beach front chalets at Nirwana Gardens. below, one of the diversions in the open-air lobby of the main hotel makes Jill and i feel like queen and king for the day.

there wasn't a whole lot to do on the island, but then that was the point, and for a only couple of days lounging on the beach or in the horizon pool it was pretty much perfect. so we rested and recouped, we ate in the restaurants and we drank the best smoothie concoctions i've ever had at the swim-up bar; we even had our picture taken by the very enterprising barkeep. but all the relaxation threatened to come to a premature close when we were presented with the bill for all this fun and it ran to more than half a million Indonesian Rupiah! all's well that ends well, however, and a quick crunch of the numbers revealed that our two days of splurge had cost only 50 real bucks, so we sailed back to Singapore calm in mind as well as in body. incidentally, while foreign money often feels like play money, nowhere has this been more true than in Indonesia in my experience. i still have a worn 1,000 Rupiah note, small and dirty--and worth about a dime. you wonder why they don't just drop a couple of zeroes to revalue the currency; maybe counting in hundreds of thousands is easier than using decimals? in any case, it's their business, and i feel like we got our money's worth. and i'd definitely use some more to go back and explore more of the paradise that is Indonesia.

Jill and i get our picture taken by the multi-tasking tender of the pool bar at our Bintan Island resort. he also turned out a mean "snowy": Nirwana's smoothies made with ice cream and orange and raspberry juices.

thephotographed

2008-04-20T15:03:00.003-06:00

a big part of writing posts for this blog is actually just selecting the pictures that should go along with and will best illustrate the story. the pictures are chosen to fit the text, and often the text is shaped by what pictures are or aren't available. fortunately, there are usually more pictures available for everything i'd care to write about than i could ever reasonably use, and we all know who's mad camera skills are responsible for this good fortune. on the flip side of that however, is that all too often her beautiful face doesn't get around to the front of the lens, and i'm not usually in photographer mode so i don't think to ask if she wants her picture taken. i've noticed recently that there are comparatively few pictures in our huge collection featuring just Jill, and while this is an oversight of mine that needs to be corrected, i thought i'd brighten up these pages with just a very select few pictures that i do already have of my girl.

very shortly after we met, in Taiwan, Jill and i became fast friends and visited all kinds of places all over the island. here Jill stands in a dry riverbed in Taroko Gorge with the Eternal Spring Shrine behind her. below, she graces the Singapura sign inside the Sentosa Island Merlion in Singapore.

there are more than just these pictures of Jill, which fact, though i have tended to favor pictures of the two of us together, will give me the chance to put up some more just of her in future. and it may remind me to invite her out from behind the camera a little more often, which you can see would be good for all of us.

okay this one i stole, as it was taken by one of Jill's sisters on our wedding day, but it's such a good one i couldn't resist.

themerlion

2008-04-15T20:38:00.002-06:00

welcome to Singapore...

though once again it's been a while, and by now the story may be getting just a bit disjointed, the last time we left Southeast Asia we were skipping out on our tour guide Dr Nick's tip at the KL Sentral train station. this time we were going as far as it was possible to go by that method of travel, all the way down to Singapore. this ride was just a few hours but was even more jarring at its conclusion than the trip into Malaysia had been. as the sign above, taken in a subway car, demonstrates, Singapore can be a pretty strict place. don't get me wrong, it's a very nice place, a clean place, an orderly place; but upon stepping into a cool, modern train station to go through customs one is little prepared to be greeted by a phalanx of paramilitary-looking guys holding submachine guns and demanding... that you spit out the gum you're chewing and hand over the rest of the pack, evil foreigner! no fines for possession, just a volley of bullets from a teenage Rambo. a bit scary, but did i mention Singapore is clean?

other than the nagging terror of being an outsider in pretty much a police state, i really liked Singapore right from the get-go, it providing a welcome contrast to the clamor and bustle of all the other places we had been for the previous six months. i liked it for the same reason i liked Japan: that it was organized and quiet and people give you some space. not that there's much space to give, mind you, as Singapore sits on just 271 square miles of land, at least 30 of which are man-made or reclaimed from the ocean (to put that in perspective for the Utahns among us, Salt Lake county is just over 800 square miles). but people there speak English, just like in Malaysia, it being the most official of the four official national languages. the others are Chinese, Malay and Tamil.

but if one can't chew gum in Singapore, and it's small enough that you could spit a piece cross-country, what does one do, i hear you cry? fortunately, we had asked the same question before leaving Taiwan, to a young native of the tiny nation, a missionary of the LDS Church named Elder Merican. though he gave a long list of things to do during my hour-long conversation with him, i quickly got the point that Sentosa Island came at the top, so it was there we went first.

the Sentosa island Merlion, majestic symbol of the city-state of Singapore; and below, Jill beautifies the view from his crown over Keppel harbor. Singapore is said to have the world's busiest port in terms of tonnage shipped (or second busiest, behind Shanghai, depending on whom one listens to).

funnily enough we didn't see much of the island, which we thought small at the time but is actually rather large, with several five star resorts and long beaches made of white sand hauled in from Malaysia. a lot of the attractions there were also placed since our trip in mid 2005, but there was at least one important structure we got a very thorough look at. the Singapore Tourism Board explains what it is and why we went looking for it:

The Merlion has a lion head and a fish body resting on a crest of waves. The lion head symbolises the legend of the discovery of Singapura, as recorded in the "Malay Annals". In ancient times, Singapore was known as Temasek, a Javanese word for sea. In the 11th century A.D, Prince Sang Nila Utama of the Sri Vijaya Empire rediscovered the island. When the Prince first landed on Singapore's shores, he sighted a mystical beast which he later learnt was a lion. The Prince then decided to name the island "Singapura" which in Sanskrit means Lion (Singa) City (Pura). The fish tail of the Merlion symbolises the ancient city of Temasek and represents Singapore's humble beginnings as a fishing village.

beginnings indeed; Singapore has grown so fast and been so economically successful that it's considered one of the four "Asian Tigers" and even ranks up with the world's wealthiest countries. nevertheless, it's still a tropic with its fair share of jungle and wildness, which we decided to experience in a couple of very different ways. first, there was the incredible Night Safari at the zoo, which is just what it sounds like but even better. the problem with safaris in general is that most of the animals are nocturnal and so asleep when you're driving around to look at them. not so in Singapore, where they are awake, alert and on the prowl as the open sided bus conveys you around the park, stopping whenever Malayan tapirs cross the roadway or come to sniff the passengers. amazingly, when you're done with the motorized tour, you can wander almost the whole park on a series of paths that in many cases cut right through the animal habitats, all of them totally open and lacking any type of enclosure! and we're not just talking about tapirs and sloths either, there are lions, tigers, hyenas, elephants, giraffes; you name it, it's out there wandering around with you in the dark. awesome! it seems hard to imagine Singapore having lax liability laws, so we couldn't figure out how the safari keeps folks from being attacked. our best guess is that in addition to keeping the animals very well fed, there may be some kind of ultrasonic fence system in place around the areas of the scarier beasts.

well, even after all that we hadn't quite had our fill of dangerous creatures, so the next day we bussed and hiked out to the middle of suburban nowhere to try and find one of the most highly recommended attractions in our guidebook. it was a very odd thing indeed, and made me wonder about the zoning laws in Singapore; we had thought for sure that we were way off track when we finally got to the place as directed. but lo, to our astonishment, set back a little way from the rows of other houses in the neighborhood, was a sign for the grandly named but highly unassuming Singapore Crocodile Farm. they do have a website though, on which we read:

Six decades ago, not long after the end of the Second World War, an enterprising Chinese man, Mr. Tan Gna Chua, decided that he wanted to share his home with these unloved reptiles. With the help of his family, he transformed the one acre of land that surrounded his home at Upper Serangoon Road into a reptile farm, which was the first of its kind in Singapore. They started with only ten crocodiles. With careful breeding, the numbers grew rapidly. Being the entrepreneur he was, Mr Tan opened his farm to the public. Within its premises he set up a factory, where the crocodile skin was processed, made into various products, then sold at the gift shop as well as overseas. Visitors were free to come in to take a look around, without having to pay an entrance fee - and this is still the case today.

the Singapore Crocodile Farm, clockwise from top left: a house that ended up serving as offices and a shop for the farm, complete with all the handbags, watch straps and souvenir crocodile heads you could ever want; and at least there's more out back if you don't see something you like: a not very deep pool full of caymans is one of several that sit where other folks would have their back yard; this may be the industrious Mr Tan himself, who spent a good 15 minutes stringing these chicken heads onto some kind of wire before throwing it to the crocs at precisely 11am, just the time this last fellow likes to be fed, apparently.

despite its distance from everything, making the trek to Mr Tan's place was one of the most singular experiences i have had while traveling. it's totally surreal that in amongst all these very dull houses there are pools and pools of various teeming crocodile species, and that if you show up at just the right time you can see them snapping at each other to get to the food that is so unceremoniously tossed them. the folks there were indeed set up to receive tourists, but it was clear that this had never been the point of the place--we were the only visitors there at the time, and they carried on with their operations as if we hadn't been. truly remarkable.

as long as we're talking about wildlife, we should mention another kind that is prominent in this part of the world, one that despite its total inertness and vegetative state may be as potentially harmful as many of the creatures heretofore mentioned. i'm talking about the humble durian, a fruit that is banned not just from underground trains, as the first picture shows, but from most other public places as well. the lack of a specific posted fine suggests to me, rather sinisterly, that getting caught breaking the durian rules will net you an encounter with another squad of riot police rather than just a ticket for a few hundred bucks (incidentally, each Singapore dollar was worth around 60 US cents while we were there, to give you an idea of the magnitude of those fines). this is a very strange thing, especially considering that the cantaloupe-sized delicacy is extremely popular and can be had quite cheaply on any number of street corners all over the city. and it's really very good. so what gives? that it only seems to be sold in the open air is a clue: durian basically consists of a full-frontal assault on the olfactory system, each one containing the sulfurous pungency of a month-old crate full of rotten eggs. they also look a bit dangerous, as the picture suggests, but they really are very tasty. if you can get past the smell. and you don't get arrested for possession.

so as long as you can stay out of jail, there are a few other things you should see before leaving Singapore, one of which is actually a giant concert hall and performing arts center whose shape and design are said to be inspired the durian, belying a national love for the eggy treat. i'll leave you to check out the Esplanade website for an idea of what the center, which is also reminiscent of a pair of bug-eyes, looks like, and then i'll leave you with this cool picture of the sign in front of the buildings, one of the most entertaining bits of modern art we've come across in all our travels. and it's true:

theautumn

2008-04-06T11:02:00.005-06:00

while we were anticipating the arrival of the Kusudas at Thanksgiving, Jill and i had to occupy our time with other activities. we had decided, as evidenced by our thrilling trip to Wendover, that we should try to get out and see as much of our hometown as we could, treating it as we had our foreign homes on our travels, like we were tourists. it seems as though you never really get out and see the sites when you are "home", even though you run around like a crazy person to cram every last thing into any vacation you're on. and there are plenty of things to see in Utah, and lots of awesome outdoors to discover, as i had done at Arches.

a very hazy view of downtown Salt Lake City, taken on a cool October day from Ensign Peak. the state capitol is fairly clear at the far left of the picture, and the silver domed roof of the Tabernacle is about the most prominently visible feature of Temple Square, approximately in the center of the picture.

we decided to start gently however, with the short and relatively easy hike up to Ensign Peak, above the Utah state capitol building in the hills north of downtown. the significance of the place historically, and especially to Latter-day Saints, may have best been described by Boyd K Packer:

On July 26, 1847, their third day in the valley (the second having been the Sabbath), Brigham Young, with members of the Twelve and some others, climbed a peak about one and a half miles from where I now stand. They thought it a good place to raise an ensign to the nations. Heber C. Kimball wore a yellow bandana. They tied it to Willard Richards’s walking stick and waved it aloft, an ensign to the nations. Brigham Young named it Ensign Peak.

Brigham Young was the second prophet and president of the church and was also the effective founder of the Salt Lake Valley and much of Utah.

the trailhead for Ensign Peak lies among a cluster of houses in the "Avenues" area of Salt Lake, and would be hard to find if it weren't for this bold entry marker. below, Jill and i stand in front of the monument atop the peak and prove that it's not just Chinese people who will cut off the tops of your photos for you.

the peak itself does boast a great view of the valley--when smog conditions permit, at least. it was a good introduction to some of the many other, probably more difficult hikes that we could undertake around here, though we wisely timed this one so winter would prevent us from having to do more for several months. but we did celebrate this small triumph with a good old fashioned Halloween party a couple of days later. Jill's class at school decided to celebrate that most wholesome of holidays with an evening of fancy dress, though for some reason they all showed up as pirates. Jill and i, on the other hand, threw together some costumes with the effects we had on hand and so went as Japanese people, or at least as people vaguely inspired by the Japanese.

Jill sticking out among the pirate girls in her class; here Lindsey, the hostess, Sharon, comprehensively failing to look as menacing as a pirate should, and Hailey, who may have been a little too creative with the boot polish. below, Jill and i look much more reasonable as dressed up people when there aren't any pirate types around. the facial hair was all me, by the way.

so the autumn of 2007 was a good time for us, if a touch slow. not that we weren't busy, however. i was studying hard for my licensing exams and Jill was going to to town trying to facialize everyone she could get her hands on. she's very good at her aesthetics, by the way, and i didn't do so badly on my tests, as it happened. and now that she's done with school and i'm all licensed and registered, we may just have the time and the weather to get out there a little bit more in thespring.

thevisitors

2008-03-29T23:01:00.010-06:00

"are you dead?" was a question fairly recently posed me on these very pages, by our friends Katie and Billy. apparently it has been a while, because soon after that query was posted, another friend, Jenn left these remarks: "I second Billy and Katie, are you dead? It's been almost 5 months since you posted last. WHAT IS GOING ON?"

maybe not quite five months, but it's a bit difficult to answer since there has been quite a lot going on, but i'll give it my best shot over the next few posts. the first thing i want to cover was a pretty big deal for us, and i've been meaning to write about it ever since. now seems like a particularly good time to get to it and make my return to blogging. just after we went to the salt flats, we got the great news that we would be able to share Thanksgiving with our good friends from Japan, the Kusudas. Yuuto was my student in Japan, and a very precocious one at that: at six years old he reads and writes English better than many native speakers of the same age. through meeting them at various parent teacher conferences, i could tell that Yuuto's parents were responsible for developing and augmenting his natural gifts in the language arena; not only did they take a very keen interest an helping him progress, but they both speak very good English themselves. we had a great time getting to know them better than those conferences had allowed when they came to visit.

the Kusudas arrive at the Salt Lake airport on Thanksgiving: from left to right are Natsumi, Yuuto's cousin, Yumiko and Shigeaki, his parents, and in front the man himself, looking very amused because Mr Ball "spelled" Yokoso ("welcome" in Japanese) wrong on the sign. below, the same group basks in the fluorescent light of Mecca... er, Wal-Mart.

Yuuto's mother, Yumiko, his father, Shigeaki, and one of his cousins, Natsumi, all arrived with the big star himself in the evening of Thanksgiving day, having flown in from Los Angeles. Yuuto thought it was hilarious that i had left out a character from the Japanese word for "welcome" on the sign we made for their arrival, and after all the English spelling tests i had given him, was probably justified in not letting it drop all evening. we took them to a family gathering at my grandpa's house, where Yuuto and Natsumi played with the other kids and showed them how to do origami, while Shige and Yumiko very patiently answered lots of questions from curious relatives and doled out hordes of gifts to the hosts. they brought Jill and i some calligraphy scrolls and another amazing Kokeshi doll for the collection Jill started while we were still in Nagoya.

we managed to pack a lot into a fairly brief visit, and funnily enough the number one destination, first on our list the following morning, was a trip to Wal-Mart. apparently news of its fame and possibly its vastness has crossed the Pacific ocean, because Yumiko had specifically requested to go there, for souvenirs. unfortunately, Salt Lake City Wal-Marts don't tend to stock a lot of souvenir-type items, but there is a "Supercenter" not far from us, and we did at least get to make the trip a decent Kodak moment.

scenes of the city, clockwise from top left: Yuuto and Natsumi with the official Jospeh Smith Memorial Building Nutcracker; Natsumi and Shige help Yuuto along in his first ever ice skating outing; the chilly group in front of the Salt Lake LDS Temple, probably the defining landmark of the state of Utah; and then with the only slightly lesser-known R2-D2 mailbox. below, a little taste of our man Yu-chan as he busts out his favorite phrase for the camera:

the rest of that Friday was spent touring the bitterly cold downtown of Salt Lake City, including a very thorough visit to Temple Square, our town's best claim to fame. later on we watched Yuuto get into his first ever trip to the ice rink, this one outdoors on Gallivan Plaza. he made a really good go of it, but was often just content to hold a hand on either side and get dragged around on more or less locked legs. by the time the adults were getting wiped out from that he was starting to skate for several feet by himself, but then we had to go so we could indulge Natsumi's sporting pleasure. She is on a basketball team in Japan and Shige had been wanting to see some professional sports, so naturally we took them to the Jazz game. despite the altitude of our seats, it actually turned out to be a really enjoyable game, beginning with the Jazz trailing the New Orleans Hornets for most of the first half. just before halftime the Jazz came back in a big way to take the lead by just a point as the buzzer went. with all the excitement in the air, everyone in our party started gathering their coats before we realized there was still another half to go. this one wasn't quite as entertaining as the first had been, but the Jazz held on and extended their lead to comfortable margins by the time it really was all over.

the view from the top: is actually a lot better than the camera makes out, and at least you can see all the action. below, a little clandestine footage of Yuuto's reaction to the Jazz scoring:

the best part of the game may have been the reactions it got from our guests. we weren't sure how much of it Yuuto would understand, but he caught on very quickly and was soon cheering for the Jazz... as long as he thought nobody knew. Jill had to use her spy skills and handy camera to get some evidence of what would happen when the Jazz scored, at least when Yuuto didn't think we were watching him.

the next day was a pretty long one, but not as long as it could have been. we're used to large distances in the West, but sometimes it's so big out here it's almost unfathomable. the Kusudas had really wanted to go to the Grand Canyon, understandable given that it's a relatively close Wonder of the World. unfortunately, it's still more than a ten hour drive each way, so given our time constraints we all agreed to head for the famous Utah site of Arches National Park instead, far more reasonable at just four hours away. funnily enough, it was also my first time there.

Natsumi, Yuuto, Yumiko and Shige stretch their legs at Arches after many long hours in the car (during most of which Yuuto was saying things like "there's a wocket in my pocket, there's a lox in my box" or singing the first two lines of a Spice Girls song "Stop right now/Thank you very much/I need somebody/With a human touch"). below, scenes of the red rock park, clockwise from top left: Shige, Yumiko and Natsumi in front of Balanced Rock; Jill looking radiant in front of Turret Arch; Yuuto and i basking in that radiance underneath North Window Arch; and another example of Jill's stunning photography at Turret Arch.

we spent several hours in the park and could have spent more if the drive home hadn't been ahead of us. nevertheless, we did make it reasonably close to the most famous arch of them all: Delicate Arch. made so recently by being the focal point of Utah's centennial license plate design, we had to see it and try to get some photos, despite still being quite far from it. below, Jill and i were trying to add to our collection of portraits taken at iconic sites, when Yuuto jumped in front of the camera with the precision timing of a master comedian. we were all laughing for ages and the picture below is still one of my favorites. Yuuto was actually pretty comical throughout. as we were coming down the trail from the vantage point of Delicate Arch, a runner came jogging past us and Yuuto just yelled out "Where you going man?" really loudly. the other folks on the trail were busting up as i was filling with pride at having helped with the slang.

Yuuto livens up the scene with some split-second hi-jinks. below, a nice portrait of the whole group in front of the Christus statue at the visitor's center on Temple Square.

Jill and i were fortunate to make a lot of great friends in Japan and we are so glad the Kusudas came all the way to Utah to visit us. we had a great time and we're looking forward to the next meeting. until then, we'll miss you!

thesalt

2007-11-30T16:15:00.001-07:00

having seen a fair bit of the world as tourists, Jill and i thought it might be high time to see a little of our own back yard in a similar way. so one rainy Saturday in late September we headed out west along I-80 to see one of Utah's most unusual sights: a concrete tree. properly known as Metaphor: The Tree of Utah, it was erected for no apparent reason many miles from anywhere on the side of the freeway. Karl Momen, the Swedish artist who designed the tree claimed he was moved to do so by the "vastness and relative emptiness" of the area, and also that the sculpture "brings space, nature, myth and technology together". these thoughts, along with those inscribed on the tree's base--"A hymn to our universe whose glory and dimension is beyond all myth and imagination"--hopefully help to make the tree more meaningful.

sometimes known as the Tree of Life, Metaphor's six orb-like boughs are encrusted with rock and minerals native to Utah.

not much farther down the road, just a few miles this side of the Nevada border, begins the huge expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats. pretty much just what they sound like, they are enormous salt-encrusted plains which have been used pretty much since their modern discovery for about one thing and one thing only: the pursuit of speed. from bicycle racers in the early days to jet-powered cars in the late summer of each modern year, the Flats are somehow a speedster's dream. the salt is thick and will cake up on the soles of your shoes as you trek around, but altogether it provides a hard, and perhaps more importantly empty, surface.

the salt of the flats looks more like snow, and starts from nowhere, just emerging from the surrounding desert. below, the highway rest-stop marker at the Bonneville Salt Flats...

...and what that marker says:

WELCOME TO THE BONNEVILLE SALT FLATS

AND UTAH'S FAMED MEASURED MILE—SITE OF WORLD LAND-SPEED RECORD RUNS

Utah's famed measured mile is located approximately seven miles beyond this marker, well in front of the mountains you see on the horizon. The elevation along the course is approximately 4,218 feet above sea level. The total length of the course that includes the measured mile varies from year to year, but for recent runs it has been laid out in a path 80 feet wide and approximately ten miles long, with a black reference stripe down the middle. Due to the curvature of the earth, it is impossible to see from one end of the course to the other. Timing of world land-speed record runs is under the jurisdiction of the United States Automobile Club. World land-speed record times represent an electronically-timed average of two runs over the measured mile, within a one hour time period—one run in each direction. The first world land-speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats was set on September 3, 1935, by Sir Malcolm Campbell. His speed was 301.13 miles per hour. Craig Breedlove holds the honor of being the first man to go faster than 400, 500, and 600 miles per hour. His record of 600.601 miles per hour, set on November 15, 1965, was finally broken on October 23, 1970, by Gary Gabelich. Gabelich's new record is 622.407 miles per hour.
Both Gabelich's rocket engine 'Blue Flame' and Breedlove's jet-powered 'Spirit of America' were equipped with specially designed inflatable tires, pre-tested to speeds in excess of 800 miles per hour.

Erected by THE GOODYEAR TIRE & RUBBER COMPANY June 1972

we went on to that measured mile, but didn't really think a run on it would be good for the undercarriage of the car, so we settled for a bit of a run on the deserted but paved road out to the salt. sshhh, don't tell...

Jill and i on the thick crust of salt at the Bonneville Flats. below, the thriving metropolis of Wendover, Nevada, the place where Utah gambles.

finally that day we decided to go the remaining few miles to Wendover, mostly just because it was there. frankly the nothingness of the salt flats was more intriguing than this place, which is like a tiny Las Vegas with all the entertaining parts taken out. a handful of trashy casinos and more Utah-registered cars than you could shake a very big stick at, it's pretty much where Salt Lake people who think that Utah constrains them too much go to feel cosmopolitan. and the good folks of Wendover gladly take their money, hand over fist, and who could blame them? they did get to build that huge neon cowboy, after all. on our very brief stop to use the facilities in a casino, we were quickly reminded why certain of Utah's constraints can be a very nice thing. the state clean air lawsallow for no smoking in public buildings, so you not only get to breathe free, but you don't end up stinking after going out to eat (or indeed to the restroom). so despite the opinions of the folks who flock to Wendover, Utah isn't such a bad place, and i think we'll be doing a little more sightseeing here before we move on to our next world stop.

thepeninsula

2007-10-27T15:00:00.000-06:00

not the hotel, the Malay (or Thai-Malay) Peninsula. though it's been a while you may remember that we left the story of the Southeast Asia trip when we left Thailand, in a train carriage. we thought going by rail would be a great way to see the countryside of old Siam, the region's only never-colonized country, as we rolled towards one of its most recently de-colonized: Malaysia. what we didn't count on however, was that shortly after chugging out of Bangkok's main station, the lights in the firmament would fade out and we would be left to appreciate the many miles of Thai wilderness in almost complete darkness.

a night on the tracks

you may also remember that we were fortunate to have secured sleeping berths in our train carriage, so all the nighttime hours weren't completely wasted. though i will say that it's awfully hard to sleep on a moving train--even with ear plugs--unless you're extremely tired. that being said, trying to sleep on a moving train will get you awfully tired for the next night of sleeping on a moving train, so with a two-day trip it all kind of works itself out. it was the time in the middle that was kind of difficult, starting with being woken, or at least roused, early on the morning after leaving Bangkok, just as we were approaching the Thai-Malay border. the train ground to a halt and we were directed to take our bags and make our way through the long platform-side building that served as a joint ingress/egress point for both the Thai and Malay customs and immigration services. shortly after getting through that mess and setting off again we began making stops at all kinds of little Malaysian towns whereon hordes of folks joined themselves to our happy rolling throng. only we were getting less happy the more they piled themselves into our car, encroaching ever so slowly but very surely into our personal--and paid for--space, eventually practically sitting on top of me. for some reason i had assumed Malaysia would be more civilized than Thailand, but i felt quickly disabused of that notion by my very uncouth seat mates.

the Georgetown Mosque on Pulau Pinang, Malaysia

soon enough we ground to final halt in the rather unsightly town of Butterworth in northern Malaysia. here we were unceremoniously booted from the train so it could head back up to Thailand, and we wait for our ride to Kuala Lumpur. only thing was, it was still morning and our ride wasn't coming until late that evening. in the blistering heat we did the only thing anyone could do: we took the ferry over to Pulau Pinang--Pinang Island. the breeze on the boat was nice but as we stepped off the ferry with laden backpacks and no good map of Georgetown, we quickly felt the misery of our situation. it's pretty hard to adequately describe how hot it felt just walking around the outskirts of a semi-urban area completely exposed to the sun and the 100+% humidity. heat doesn't really bother me that much, but Jill was probably the most unhappy i've ever seen her. at this time we weren't married and i remember thinking that this was likely to be her at her worst and that if i could get through that day with her then we'd probably have no major problems in life. strangely enough, that may have been the day i decided we should get married.

in any case, after interminable minutes of wandering, we finally stumbled upon a mall of sorts, where we availed ourselves of their Pizza Hut. or Pizza Hut's air conditioning, more exactly. by the time we finally left there, the worst of the heat had thankfully passed and we began a more considered exploration of the place. on our way to see Fort Cornwallis and the famous mid-roundabout clock tower, we came upon a large mosque and decided to see what we could. the thing with that was, we arrived at this mosque just a day or two after the July 7th bombings of the London Underground and buses (about which we had heard very little), so the folks in the visitor's center were a little on edge when a Brit and an American showed up. we had a nice conversation with a well-spoken and thoughtful fellow there, who repeatedly apologized for those and the September 11th bombings, despite my telling him i strongly doubted his involvement. in our theological discussions, we didn't really agree on many points of doctrine, though he was very respectful and quite well informed of our LDS beliefs, and we learned quite a lot about Islam from him. he had us don long robes so that we could be taken for a tour of the large and airy mosque itself, which we did with great interest. it's still the only mosque we've ever been in.

enjoying a cool Kickapoo Joy Juice in the fierce heat of a KL Sunday brings obvious joy to my face. note the sweet haircut, specially designed back in Taiwan for the sultry Southeast Asia weather.

but soon the time came to leave, both the mosque and the island of Pinang. late that evening we boarded another sleeper train, much more tired this time than we had been the previous night, to begin the journey to Kuala Lumpur. KL, as it's often known, was just about as hot as Pinang had been, but there was more shade to be found in the shadows of the tall buildings. tall buildings like the famous Petronas Towers, owned by the national oil company and still the tallest twin towers in the world. until Taiwan built its incredible 101 building in Taipei, they were the tallest buildings period, and they do look awfully cool. there's a skybridge that runs between the two towers at about the 42nd floor, but they only let a certain number of people up there per day, and we didn't get there early enough to get tickets for the one day we were in town. just like the Taipei 101, however, the Petronas Towers have a sprawling mall at their base, and we spent some time enjoying the air conditioning there while we ate yet more pizza at the California Pizza Kitchen.

the spectacular Petronas twin towers in the heart of KL, and below, another shot of the same taken from the observation deck of the Menara Kuala Lumpur, a telecommunications tower a couple of miles away.

though we had found the folks in the north to be pretty much uncivilized, it was nice to be in a country where pretty much everyone speaks English, and quite well for the most part. standards of living seem pretty high, at least in the city, and i understand this is largely attributable to the vast wealth that Petronas generates and throws around. one wonders what will happen to Malaysia's economy when their oil reserves run out and there is no longer such a sector to prop the whole thing up. not to say that they haven't tried diversifying; folks in Britain will remember the the flashy introduction of Malaysian-made Proton vehicles somewhere in the late 80s. trouble is, you no longer see many of them in the UK and even though more than half the cars in KL are Protons, we understand they're heavily subsidized domestically. add to this the continued pandering and wealth-shifting to ethnic Malays by governments since the well-liked Mahathir Mohammed's, and you get a place that probably won't be somewhere you want to be when it all comes crashing down amidst enormous civil unrest. i'm no Malaysia scholar, but these were the general thoughts i remember having as we were there.

in any case, the so-called Garden City of Lights is actually a fairly pretty town, and one of the best places to get a panoramic view of it is from the top of the Menara Kuala Lumpur. i don't really know what Menara means, but the tower is owned by the Telekom Malaysia group and is apparently the fifth-tallest telecoms tower in the world. its top is even a little higher in elevation than those of the Petronas towers, but only because the base is set on a pretty high hill; the structure itself is a good deal shorter. either way, it's a fun ride to the top and the views are spectacular. and after coming back down we got some souvenirs at the--you guessed it--mall at the bottom and had Indian food at a restaurant that overlooked a tree-filled garden with monkeys clambering about.

the terrifying heights of the Menara Kuala Lumpur, and below, the awesome lodge we shared with some new Korean friends at the Firefly Park in Kuala Selangor.

but possibly the best thing we did in all of Malaysia was to take a very crowded city bus on a two-plus hour drive out to the coastal "town" of Kuala Selangor to see the highly recommended fireflies on the river. just when we thought the bus couldn't go any further, it kept on and on until we were finally booted off in a small parking lot in the middle of nowhere. at least there were a couple of Korean girls standing there looking as confused as we felt, so we agreed to share a taxi with them the remaining few miles out to what may be the most remote tourist attraction i've ever been to. but it was well worth it, and was actually packed with Chinese tourists, so good thing we had a reservation. the same could not be said for our random new friends however, so we opportunistically halved our bill by agreeing to share our little watertop chalet with them. the Firefly Park sells you tickets not only to their accommodations, but to their electrically powered--and thus virtually silent--boats that make late-night trips along an inlet from the Strait of Malacca in the Indian Ocean, along which many millions of fireflies light up the night like a fantastically starry sky. it's a lot cooler than it probably sounds, and we were even able to catch a couple of the flies by hand despite not being able to capture them on film. partly because it was so good, partly because we had come so far, and partly because our first ride was punctuated throughout by the loud belching of an old Chinese woman, we decided to ride again, which worked out nicely as we got a boat all to ourselves and the pilot was happy to extend the ride. i seem to remember that guy getting a good tip.

the $1,000,000 chair, carved from a single piece of jade, that Dr Nick the travel guide took us to see (and sit in, obviously). it's a lot more comfortable than it seems like it would be.

one poor fellow who did not, however, was Dr Nick. not really a doctor, but a nice guy nonetheless, he was our tour guide on our last day in KL, and he took us to see the amazing chair pictured above, among other things. though i can't find his card i know we have, i think he was working for the Tourism Malaysia folks running tours that people like us called up to book at the very last minute. it turned out that we were the only people on this particular one, and we were cramming it in just before we got on another train for Singapore, but he was very gracious and showed us pretty much everything we wanted to see and more.

the Batu Caves, clockwise from top left: the 272 steps leading up to the caves, which if climbed, it is said, will net the faithful Hindu forgiveness of half his sins. beware indeed, for monkeys come in all shapes and sizes... as apparently, do Hindu deities. even the many macaques were a little confused by it all. below, the views from inside the cavernous vaults were pretty enlightening:

one of the big places we wanted to see was the Batu Caves just north of KL, which are a series of vast caves set high in a limestone cliff that house one of the largest Hindu shrines outside of India--i mentioned that there were a lot of different racial and ethnic groups in Malaysia, didn't i? every year there is a festival here known as Thaipusam, which sees somewhere around a million and a half Hindus gather at the complex, some of them marching all the way from the Sri Mahamariamman Temple in KL to do fun things like put meat hooks through their backs and use them to pull carts up all 272 stairs to the top as an act of devotion. these are the same folks who get themselves all worked up into "spiritual" frenzies and push swords through their cheeks and other such fun things--quite a spectacle to witness i imagine, if you're there on that day. here's a little taste of what we did witness up in the caves, for the curious:

and then we come back to Dr Nick. he didn't climb the steps with us, but kindly waited around for us to get back, after which he took us to a couple of duty free shops, but with the express understanding that we were seeing only native handicrafts and had no obligation to buy. there was one pretty cool place with a whole demonstration of the batik making process and then several pretty amazing examples all over the walls and for sale. Dr Nick had picked us up from our hotel and had kindly agreed to drop us off at KL Sentral, the largest train station in Southeast Asia. by that time we were hungry from our excellent tour, and we wanted to thank our guide for the extra mile he had seemed to put in. the problem was we were all out of Malaysian Ringgit for a tip, and had only large denominations of American bills. to our shame we slipped from Nick's van into the station and used a credit card to buy Halal (meaning "permissible" in Arabic, and used kind of like a Kosher designation for Muslims) burgers at McDonald's, vowing that we'd mail him his tip when we got home. i still feel bad about stiffing the doctor; now if i could only find his card...

Dr Nick; not a doctor, but a pretty good travel guide and rubber tree-tapper.

thebragbook

2007-09-20T18:09:00.000-06:00

somewhere not too long ago thejayfather heard that blogs are often considered nothing but "brag books", places where people get to thumb their noses at the world and say "look at all the cool things that i've done and you haven't." despite the reports of our fun travels on these pages, the idea has never been to show off, only keep a record of a few of my doings. effectively, this blog is my personal journal, and only remains out here in the ether because i don't seem to be able to keep one any other way. for long, that is. i start them on January 1st every couple of years or so, but by the 4th or 5th the entries are already getting patchy. there have only been a couple of times that i've been able to keep up the momentum, times when the reason for keeping the record has stayed fresh in my mind.

for this blog the reason of course is you, Dear Reader, and you may well imagine that i kept a reasonably up-to-date diary at least for much of my time in Taiwan. but the first journal that stuck, the one that sparked all the others, was a record of the trip that pretty much ignited the international wanderlust you've been reading about here for the last two-and-a-half years. at that time Blogger was a mere twinkle in Google's eye--i hadn't heard of it anyway--and where i went there wasn't much in the way of broadband anyway. but i did take a small notebook and a trusty Parker pen, and the results of their mating are now available for the perusal of a select few in my recently published, fully online, thoroughly modern Samoan Jornal: My experiences in the tropical South Pacific paradise of Samoa.

thejayfather before he was even thejayfather, standing outside his beach fale on a remote corner of Savai'i island, Samoa. this picture was taken between Christmas and New Year's, 2003-2004.

where here i can ensure my thoughts are expressed appropriately, when writing my Samoan journal i never considered anyone but me would ever read it. for this reason, there is no link to to the hallowed pages containing a transcription of my uncensored thoughts; only those who are invited will be able to read. if you'd like to be one of those lucky souls, let me know who you are and what you're hoping to gain from the experience. and of course, come back and let me know what you thought.

please tell me who you are and why you'd like to be invited to view the Samoan Journal:

thewat

2007-09-01T12:39:00.000-06:00

i knew i was famous somewhere... it was rewarding to arrive in Thailand and find i was already practically a household name.

after biding our time earning a hefty tax break in Taiwan, we were finally able to head on our long awaited tour through Southeast Asia, beginning on that most Asian of holidays: the Fourth of July. when Americans plan a trip, the first impulse is to stay as far away from travel agents as possible, but as with all else this impulse is just the wrong one to take to Asia. our plans were not straightforward and we never got as good a price going through airline and hotel websites as we did just handing over the dates to our agent and letting her go to town. actually, i handed several sets of dates to several agents all over Taiwan and let them duke it out for the best deal. they each have these networks all across the region that give them sweet deals on certain airlines and hotels, and we finally chose what turned out to be a really good set of flights and lodgings from an agent named Jeannie Leng in Taipei. she was so good we even tried to get her to do all of our trips from Japan, but she couldn't arrange anything that didn't originate in Taiwan. so we took off on a China Airlines 747 for Bangkok and three and a half hours later we were safely on the ground and through customs at Don Muang airport.

following all of our adventures in Taiwan we thought ourselves pretty savvy travelers, and though we didn't feel like we had left our comfort zone, there was this awareness that we didn't know quite how things worked anymore, and we definitely didn't know our way around. we hadn't wanted to get guidebooks for each of the countries we'd be visiting, so we got one that covered the whole region, and so it wasn't very detailed regarding any single place. for that reason we decided to bite the bullet and take a taxi to our lodgings, rather than try to figure out a bus or something, as we usually would have done. good thing Thailand is cheap, because that airport (which is no longer in use for commercial flights) is way out of town, the taxi ride taking almost half an hour, most of it at freeway speeds (even on surface roads). fortunately, we had heard from several friends that taxi drivers at Don Muang pass along to passengers the hefty fee the airport charges them for getting in, so we hiked out of the transit loop (to the dismay of many drivers) and flagged down the first car we saw outside the gate.

our self-congratulation for being so travel smart was pretty short lived however, as the next day we got one of our best ever lessons through our own painful experience. our first intended stop in Bangkok was the impressive Grand Palace complex, formerly the residence of the Thai royal family. the huge area is walled and surrounded by water, either river or moats, and is not only heavily guarded but heavily visited. our taxi dropped us some distance from the main gate, but we espied another gate close by and made for it. before we could get to the guard however, a helpful English-speaking guy came over and asked if we were going in. "you'll have to wait," he said, "the palace is closed right now for morning prayers. is there anywhere else you'd like to see in Bangkok?" indeed, we told him, there were several other places, some of which we pointed to on our map. "no problem, just take a tuk-tuk (one of the small three-wheeled taxis for which Thailand is so famous) around to some of those places, and come back later in the day."

Jill in our first tuk-tuk. it's just as cramped as it looks, and much noisier besides, but has excellent air conditioning--at least when the cab is moving.

at that moment, a tuk-tuk just happened to pull up right next to us, and our helpful friend offered to tell the driver where we wanted to go. how nice, we thought, as we boarded our cramped and noisy ride, and the palace guard looked on. soon we were on our way to our next-best spot, the Golden Mount, or Wat Saket (Saket Temple). or so we thought, anyway. he first took us to a local temple he said was quiet and overlooked, which was enjoyable though in some disrepair. there we found people selling small birds for tourists to set free and by so doing gain answers to their prayers; we later learned that those birds were all trained to return to their cages. then, supposedly on our way to the Golden Mount, our driver began to tell us of a special deal whereby he would get some free gas for taking us to a duty-free shop, which would enable him to honor the low fare he had promised us (the other guy had negotiated with him to take us to about five places for 50 Baht, the equivalent of $1.25). fair enough, we agreed, as he assured us that all we had to do was look and pretend to be interested for a few minutes, and then he would get his free gas and we could go to the Golden Mount.

having done our duty we returned to our carriage, whereupon we were told we hadn't looked long enough, so we would have to go to another store. this process repeated itself a few more times, with each one making both the driver and me more angry. at the last stop we even bought a few of the cheap trinkets, but when he told me we hadn't spent enough i laid it out: he had better take us to the mount, or things were going to get nasty. he finally drove us there and let us out across the street, saying he'd find parking, but surprise surprise, when we came out he was nowhere to be found. at least we didn't have to part with our buck-25. it started to dawn on us how intricate and well orchestrated the scam had been, and how we hadn't seen it coming at all. the taxi driver drops us far from the palace entrance, right by a guy who just happens to be walking by and wants to help the foreigners. it also just happens to be prayer time and we can't go inside, but you can go see some other things and "oh look", there's a tuk-tuk right now, let me help you get a good deal. very smooth, and i'm sure every driver in town is part of that or a similar scam.

the overwhelming gold of the Wat Phra Kaew, Thailand's most sacred Buddhist temple, at the Grand Palace, which we finally saw later in the day. clockwise from top left: the Phra Sri Rattana chedi, a stupa that looks a lot like the Golden Mount; the guardians of Phra Mondop, the library; Jill doing her best gracious Thai pose in the clothes she was loaned and had to wear to be considered modest enough to enter the complex--shorts are not allowed; and some of the Yaksha demons that adorn the chedi. below, the Wat Arun, or Temple of the Dawn, lies directly across the Chao Phrya River from the Grand Palace and is one of the most visited temples in Bangkok.

it was frustrating that the guard hadn't done anything, but i guess that's not his job, and you've got to let your fellow countrymen hustle to earn their money. Thailand is very permissive with that kind of thing, but we're lucky this tame experience has taught us to be very cautious in all our travels, including helping us to avoid the very costly art scam in Beijing. i did wonder what King Bhumibol thinks about all the scamming. Thailand's long-serving monarch is widely revered in his country, possibly due to his having spent some of his vast personal fortune on development projects in rural areas (also perhaps because to insult him is a jailable crime). we went to see a movie at what was rumored to be the world's largest movie theater, in the MBK shopping center, and following the previews there came on a song for which everyone in the theater stood up. as we rose we saw pictures of the king flash up on the screen in slideshow fashion, a demonstration which continued for the full five minutes of what we determined must be the national anthem. it was kind of surreal but people seemed to genuinely reverence their very own Rama (IX).

one of the many large monuments to current King Bhumibol Adulyadej and his wife Queen Sirikit, this one just off a large intersection. below, a longboat like the one on which we cruised the mighty Chao Phrya River, which runs right through Bangkok. if you follow this far enough out, you come to huge floating markets, wherein people sell their produce from tiny punts. where we went there were only a couple of ladies floating around and selling Singha beer, and who urged us to buy one to thank our driver. not very smart, perhaps, but certainly politic.

at some point during our stay in Thailand, we knew we would have to satisfy one of Jill's greatest ever dreams: riding on an elephant. to her this was synonymous with a trip to Siam, and since there isn't much room for the giant creatures in town anymore, we signed up for an all day excursion out to one of the national parks. before going to Khao Yai, which lies (i think) to the northeast of Bangkok, our awesome guide Sumpit took us to some village markets and for what she called an ock-cart ride. it took us a while to figure out that x is a hard letter for Thai people to say.

the authentic Thailand trip, clockwise from top left: our great guide Sumpit, whose English wasn't quite excellent, but may have been eckellent; some of the tasty morsels available in a typical Thai marketplace; Jill and me in front of the Haew Narok waterfalls in Khao Yai National Park; and us on our ock-cart, which was much more fun than we thought it would be.

the actual elephants were really cool, and it was amazing to be riding through a jungle on them. there were signs all along the road through the park that warned of elephants crossing, though we didn't see any that way. our mounts were brought to a tall platform by young fellows who used hooks to steer the beasts by their ears. there were seats strapped onto their backs for us, but we were also allowed to shuffle off and sit right on their necks, which meant you had their haunches pressing into you with each lumbering step. no fear of lawsuits here; in fact, there was a Dutch family on the tour with us, a couple and their two sons. the father, René, was riding with one of the boys when the seat mount slipped and he almost feel clean off the elephant. somehow he managed to stay on but he looked a bit shaken up--it feels higher than it looks up there.

Jill and me on our sturdy beast, spurred on by the handler's constant shouting of "ma maa, ma ma maaa!". in the picture above, try to spot the deliberate mistake, an act of which we were mercifully unaware at the time. below, we had been wisely advised to buy some bananas at the country market, each of which our hungry elephant took down whole. this was way better than the zoo.

but we had to come down at some point and return to the zoo of Bangkok. it's a busy city that is actually a lot less dirty than it very easily could be, but is kind of packed with dirty old white guys, all walking around with 12-year-old Thai girls. but once again, this is something that everybody in the City of Angels (that's really Bangkok's nickname) seems to turn a blind eye to, and we tried to ignore it also as we avoided the clubs and headed off the see more Buddhas. i think i've already mentioned that despite there being literally millions of Buddha statues in the world, each one of them has a very specific claim to fame, usually relating to size. we visited the (supposedly) tallest seated Buddha in Taiwan and saw the (again supposedly, there's no way to really tell) tallest seated Buddha in the world in Hong Kong, along with Japan's largest in Nara. we've seen some of the largest standing Buddhas in the world, and probably the largest Buddha that sits right on the Tropic of Cancer. i'm sure there's also a category for largest Buddha built by blind monks, as well as one for largest Buddha standing on a hill or resting in a valley or even on a park bench; the categories are literally endless. but here in Thailand we entered a whole new league: the reclining Buddha.

the "Reclining Buddha" at Wat Pho, or aptly enough, The Temple of the Reclining Buddha in Bangkok. his mother-of-pearl-inlaid feet are very famous and come with a sign warning: "DON'T TOUCH MOTHER OF PEARL". Jill's cape is to piously cover her arms rather than a sartorial choice, although it does make her look quite English departmenty. below, the Phra Buddhajinaraja, an impressive Thai-style Buddha inside the Wat Benchamabophit, or Marble Temple, a heavy tourist draw in its own right.

not so much reclining as just lying down, the Buddha is still pretty impressive at 46 meters (151 feet) long, and is probably claimed to be the widest Buddha in the world. well, whatever, we've pretty much seen them all, the skinny Thai ones, the moderate Japanese ones, and the jolly fat Chinese ones, and i can tell you that once you've seen a couple of each kind you've more than seen them all. so after a long day of Buddha watching and shopping at the endless street markets, you... take a tuk-tuk to one of the night markets, of course. the one we went to is called the Suan Lum Night Bazaar, and is huge and more organized than its name makes it sound. rows and rows of very interesting shops, along with several restaurants and the strange but famous Joe Louis Puppet Theater, made for some good souvenir shopping, dinner and sightseeing. Suan Lum is definitely a place you have to go in Bangkok. but even night shopping has to come to an end at some point, so we headed back to another recommended spot in town, our hostel the Suk 11:

views of the very friendly Suk 11 hostel, named after the road on which it stands. the main road across town is called Sukhumvit, and all the side roads are sois, each with a number. this cabinesque lodge is, oddly enough, on Sukhumvit Soi 11. clockwise from top left: the Swiss Family Robinson look of the outside; the acceptable graffiti on the inside; the communal-feeling lobby; and us leaving our mark, in English and Chinese. below, much less comfortable accommodations on the train to Malaysia.

mercifully far from the hippie mecca of Khao San Road, the Suk 11 is nevertheless pretty bare bones and communal, but is clean and convenient, not to mention really atmospheric. and it sure beat our lodgings for the next couple of nights: a train sleeper carriage on the way to Kuala Lumpur. check out the preview of that little adventure above, and thejayfather will bring you the full story soon.

thetaxbreak

2007-08-25T13:29:00.000-06:00

i'd had a couple of motorcycle accidents before, but as yet hadn't actually come off the bike, so the physical evidence of my misfortune was that much more powerful as i sat staring at it in a dimly-lit hotel room in Hualien on Taiwan's east coast. it turned out that i'd been very lucky, sustaining just a pair of scraped knees and an awfully large blister on the palm of my hand. along with some bruising to the ego, of course. the thing that hurt most was actually my rear, owing to the time it spent in the saddle getting to Hualien, but i couldn't complain because i was lucky the bike was still ridable after going down.

some good start to our last week in Taiwan, but at the end of this June day we were feeling lucky just to be in one piece. we had already made one trip around the Ilha Formosa, as related in thecircumnavigation post, and were doing it again, in reverse, to bide our time before touring Southeast Asia so that we could take advantage of the favorable tax conditions our staying in the country would provide. Taiwan derives most of its revenues from the heavy taxation of imports, and so income taxes are kept at a very friendly (and easy to calculate) six percent for residents. to be a resident, however, a non-native must be in the country for at least 184 consecutive days. since non-residents pay a relatively hefty 20 percent, we decided to hang around until July 4th so we could save some of the money we'd soon want to be spending touring other exotic locales. we also got a chance to see a couple of the things we had so far missed, allowing us to truthfully say there are only about two things in the Taiwan guidebook that we haven't seen.

a map of Taiwan, the beautiful island. we started this trip from our home in Fengyuan, just north of Changhua on the west side of the island, and rode over the Central Cross-island Highway (sort of) to the popular east coast resort town of Hualien. on subsequent days we rode further south to Taitung, then through Fengkang and back up to Kaohsiung and Tainan in the west, and back to Fengyuan.

our goal for the first of our five days was fairly modest we thought, involving at most 150 miles of riding across the famed Central Cross-island Highway, one of only two roads to do such a thing. we figured it would take no more than five hours to make the trip and looked forward to being in Hualien in time for a good dinner and a nice trip to the beach. when we finally arrived there 11 hours after setting off, i was left sitting in that little hotel room, my beaten body aching from the journey, wondering just what had happened to all that time and how we could have been so wrong in our estimates. as i looked back i couldn't see any one thing that could account for the discrepancy, so i took each item in its turn. first, when we were just a half hour out of Fengyuan, we were riding along happily when my right arm, the throttle arm, suddenly shrieked with pain and had to let off the gas. i couldn't tell what was wrong but thought i'd been hit by road debris as i could see a mark of some sort on my bare forearm. i tried to soldier on but the pain was so exquisite that i had to motion to Jill to stop her rented scooter and come see what was wrong. what we saw appeared to be the last remaining half of some kind of creature, instead of a large bit of gravel, as i had supposed. i imagined that whatever it was had been hovering in mid-air just waiting for an improperly clad motorbike rider to come by. he had thrust out his tail stinger just like an angry cartoon bee might have done, determined to do the most damage possible if hovering on the highway was going to mean his own demise. which it did: after impact, only half of him was left, but he'd done such an incredible job of embedding that barbed spike in my arm that it took us several minutes to bring it out again without totally tearing up my flesh. and then the swelling started and didn't let up for several days, getting bad enough that i almost took my first trip to a Taiwanese doctor.

the best shot we could get of my most obvious injury from wrecking my bike. a very large and surprisingly not too painful blister from coming off and sliding across the ground.

if we were people looking for a sign, this would have been it, a clear message from the gods that this trip was ill-advised. but we weren't, and merely counted ourselves lucky to be able to carry on. at length we began to climb into the foothills of the enormous mountains that run the length of Taiwan, leaving only a narrow plain to their west for man to till and harvest. at their height the mountains rise over 11,000 feet and can be pretty inhospitable (as we were soon to find), but we came across one group of nuns who appreciated the solitude. much of our time in Taiwan was spent exploring the backcountry to find those buildings that were designed to be hidden or just to blend with nature. as our road wound its way we saw a gleaming white pavilion tucked away on a nearby hillside and felt our way towards it so that we could get some pictures. as we wandered around the grounds we were practically taken into custody (albeit a very hospitable one) by a bald woman in long black robes, who offered us a welcome drink on this incredibly hot day. we were ushered into a small room where we were met at length by another robed woman sporting a crew cut, who spoke some English and asked what we were doing. when she had satisfied herself that we were only tourists she began to show us around the Cheng Yuan Temple, which she told us was a convent for Buddhist nuns like herself. that week, however, the convent was hosting other women from all over Taiwan who had come to stay and live the ascetic life by, among other things, silent meditation and chanting, which they were doing now in a large hall that appeared before our eyes as we rounded a corner of the deceptively large complex. the nun, who was Filipino, told us that she had been there several years but was still struggling with the Chinese language, and was glad to have someone to speak English with, if only for a few moments. she spent some time trying to explain, at my request, the point of being a Buddhist nun, which apparently amounts to being able to free yourself from worldly concerns. i was pretty unconvinced and we parted ways agreeing to disagree, and apparently agreeing to resist the urge to take pictures of their pristine temple, because i can't seem to find any anywhere.

for the moment it seemed our luck was changing and the signs were good, but not too much later i met with my unfortunate accident on a series of switchback turns going higher up the mountain. though a couple of hours into our journey without having made much actual eastward progress, i was encouraged by the weather and the virtual emptiness of the roads and was happily singing to myself over the roar of my 150cc Yamaha engine. i came up for a hairpin to the right which i was planning to take nice and wide, but all of a sudden a large truck came lumbering around the other way. realizing that i would have to correct to a new, tighter path or go straight into the side of this juggernaut, i tried to slow down quickly and reorient myself to the inside line. on the gravelly surface however, my front tire couldn't take the combined braking and turning and slid out from under me, sending the whole bike and i sliding across the road towards the truck that was now stopping. it turned out it was only stopping so that the two guys inside could laugh at the spectacle they had just seen, and soon they sped off again while i was left to pick up my possibly broken bike from an all but abandoned road in the middle of nowhere. Jill was unhurt, riding a good distance back from me, but had been pretty traumatized by seeing me go down. it wasn't really that bad of a wreck, and the bike was ridable but somehow never again felt the same to me. i was very glad of the helmet that took some pretty good scratches while protecting my face from what could have been a nasty road rash, and other than grazed knees and the strange blister i was physically fine.

though we'd just scored one more sign for turning back, the hurt ego went into overdrive and insisted we'd come too far and endured too much to go home at this point, so we rode on to the next town and got cleaned up in a McDonald's before continuing our journey. we were still headed up the Central Cross-island Highway and hadn't gone too much farther when we started to come upon construction work. this mighty sounding road is actually only one lane in each direction, and is built on some pretty hairy terrain, so we could see how there might be some repairs going on. little did we know they were the same ones that had been going on for almost six years! back in 1999, on September 21st, Taiwan experienced one of its worst ever earthquakes, which killed almost 2,500 people and demolished hundreds of structures, including a good chunk of the Central Cross-island Highway. to be fair, we had been warned that it might not have opened yet, but all the good folks that we had asked to check it out for us had politely declined, saying we probably shouldn't be riding all that far anyway. i may digress here and say this was one of the things i found most frustrating about Taiwan, or about Chinese people. we would ask for help to plan our travels, wanting information or maps from websites that were only in Chinese for instance, and our conscript would only help us if what we were planning to do was something she thought we should be doing. this was not something we were used to, and not something i ever got to enjoy, or even see in its probable proper light, of friends looking out for us.

anyway, after this, our third major setback, we had to backtrack and get a map to figure out how to get across the island on even smaller roads. we did so but as we ascended the drizzle began and the temperature dropped, and our bikes started to wheeze as the air got rapidly thinner. the roads got narrower and narrower with steeper drop-offs and more maniacal drivers just dying to pass up the vulnerable bikers. frankly, it was terrifying, and shortly before we reached our first summit i was sure that i was going to have to explain to Jill's parents how i had been the reason she was killed on a treacherous mountain road whose crumbling edges had tumbled into abyss without ever even being marked.

the view from the top: the fading light and thick clouds we were soon to pass through while making our way down the magnificent (and this time very scary) Taroko Gorge.

finally we made it to the top, and feeling like we had passed the worst we enjoyed the magnificent scenery. it had taken us about six hours to come this far, and the sun was thinking about setting beyond the horizon, but we were sure by this point we had made it. we were about halfway there geographically, and the rest was all downhill--surely it could only be a couple more hours. but we met some prescient college students on that summit who told us they were going to where we had come from, Fengyuan. we wished them luck and expected the same of them when we told them we were going the other way, but instead that jarring Taiwanese paternalism came out and they told us to turn around, we'd never make it. naturally, we scoffed at their suggestion, for how could they know of the trials we had already conquered? we parted company slightly annoyed but hopeful still of our good Hualien dinner.

below us lay Taroko Gorge, Taiwan's incredible granite-walled canyon, which we had been looking forward to seeing along all its great length. but the signs once again were against us, as darkness and bitter cold began to set in, and even what sights of the gorge walls we could see weren't enough to keep up our spirits. the light faded quickly and we descended into cloud, rendering our visibility almost nil, which forced us to reduce speed to appropriate levels. thinking of our now-unlikely dinner made hunger rear its disquieting head, which compounded our misery to almost unbearable levels. the roadway through Taroko Gorge suddenly seemed unbearably long, its many twists and turns cruelly keeping us from our destination. we had only a few places to stop and stretch and relieve our straining eyes, as the road was narrow and being plied by large work trucks apparently driven by suicidal maniacs who were oblivious to our presence and plight. at one such stop we used what one could only call a restroom if he were inclined to be particularly generous, as it was little more than a trench in the ground with some plywood separators to form stalls. it was attached to a small store whose existence all the way up there i can't begin to explain, but i'm sure our appearance made the hard lives of those folks pretty entertaining for just a moment.

the next stop was some time later, about 10 hours since departure, after we had finally emerged from the cloud and descended almost to the mouth of the canyon. we pulled off the road and went hunting in our backpacks for the few snacks we had brought, only to find that the bags they were in had burst at high altitude and spread their contents all over our clothes. this finally broke some of the tension that had been steadily building and we laughed as we ate what we could salvage, feeling now that we had all but made it. then we descended into hilarium as Jill related that she was so tired from single-minded focus on the dim road and my brake light that her eyes had begun to play tricks on her. at one point she had thought that a lizard crossing the road in front of her bike had actually been a dinosaur. that one still keeps me laughing.

so, we missed our great dinner and had to settle for yet another McDonald's (it was the only thing still open when we rolled into town after 11pm), which we ate while resting up in that dim hotel. it was a good thing we had already been to Hualien, because the next day we took off again pretty early for the coastal ride down to Taitung (say Taidong). this stretch of single-lane highway is about another hundred or so miles, but with several things to see along the way, among which was this little gem:

i just wish i'd been around to see some of the activities that made them put up this sign.

as i recall, it took about five or six hours to ride this leg of the journey, so we made frequent stops to check out the scenery or just take a rest from the weight of our backpacks. we found this sign, which is unusual mainly for having good English translations, by a creek just off to the side of the highway. i wouldn't think there'd be much left to eat after bombing a fish, but i'd love to meet the guy that got caught trying it. later, about halfway from Hualien to Taitung we took a few minutes to celebrate our crossing of the Tropic of Cancer, which is marked by this very memorable structure:

Jill showing off the unmissable marker for the Tropic of Cancer, which we did actually miss and had to turn around for. clearly it was worth it though. the Tropic itself runs east to west right through that gap in the tower. below, i stand outside one of the many Caves of the Eight Immortals, which are right on the highway just a few kilometers south of the Tropic.

there are several Caves of the Eight Immortals, which have been turned into a large complex for passing tour buses. artifacts found there have revealed that the caves were inhabited in prehistoric times, but more recently they have been used as temples, several of them now housing gaudy religious icons. as you can see from my clothing, even though we were riding at sea level right along the coast on this day, the weather wasn't so great, and the mist that hung over the caves gave them a kind of mystical feel. when we started hiking around the site however, the Taiwanese summer humidity quickly cured us of our windswept riding chills and i started to boil in all that raingear.

though it did give some helpful protection as we started riding again, this time as far down as the Platform of the Three Immortals (anyone sensing a theme here?) halfway between the caves and Taitung. the Platform is really just a small outcropping of rock separated from the mainland by a narrow channel. for some reason the tiny island thus formed is important enough to have one of the coolest bridges in the country (or in any country actually) spanning the strait that leads to it.

the eight-arched footbridge that leads to the Platform of the Three Immortals in Taitung County. the top of each arch is smoothly humped, but the steeper sides have long, sloping steps. it's cool at first but by the sixth arch it's getting pretty annoying to walk over. this spot is popular enough with the many tour buses that ply this coast to warrant a parking lot and several trinket shops, not to mention food stalls, as below:

those delectable treats above are squid on a stick, very popular delicacies in this part of the world, but not something we were ever particularly tempted to try. there are various Pacific fish to either side of the squid, and some kind of roasted shell bug creatures in the near container. needless to say, we didn't try those either. most of the food in Taiwan was not bad, just kind of scary. on the few occasions when i did manage to eat something that my eyes said i shouldn't, i found that the things didn't necessarily taste bad, more like they just didn't belong in my mouth. nevertheless, i do admire the Taiwanese for making use of things i would never dream of eating and that would probably serve no other purpose, and we were able to find several things that we did like. among these was a breakfast dish called dam-bing that is made of egg crepes and bacon and was served at a little place right across the street from of our hotel in Taitung. both times we came to town we ate at this little breakfast shack, and both times we stayed at this hotel. on this trip we stayed for a couple of nights, so we could spend a day visiting Green Island, an hour's ferry journey from Taitung.

the ferry that took us from Taitung to Ludao (Green Island), and Jill and me on that journey, with mainland Taiwan in the background.

originally we had wanted to take a helicopter over to Green Island, but after spending half the morning at Taitung's tiny airport being told that all the guidebooks were wrong and only planes made the trip, we settled for the much cheaper ferry. which worked out well, because the scooter rental places are right next to the harbor, so five minutes after landing we were zipping off to explore the busy tourist island.

Jill and the aptly named Green Island Lighthouse, which is still operational, and below, the more deceptively named Green Island Lodge, once a prison for political dissidents.

the lighthouse was built during the Japanese occupation of the island in the 30s, in response to the wreckage of the American ship President Hoover on a coastal reef. the Green Island Lodge was one of three prisons on the island, which were filled with those who dared speak out against the government of Chiang Kai-shek during his period of "White Terror" in the 1950s. acroos the road from the Lodge is a large and quite pleasant park containing the Human Rights Memorial Monument that commemorates those incarcerated in the prisons. we took a while to relax in the park but skipped the very popular snorkeling and the busy Kuanyin Cave (one of religious significance wherein there is a stalagmite wearing a red cape, to represent the goddess Kuanyin) in favor of the real attraction of Green Island: the Chaojih Hot Springs.

Jill and me in the coolest of the three pools at Chaojih Hot Springs in the south of Green Island. it was still a little too hot for me.

with the East Asian penchant for hot springs, it would be easy to think there's nothing special about Chaojih, but that thinking would be wrong. you see, these three pools on the beachfront are among only three saltwater hot springs in the world. the others are on Mt Vesuvius in Italy and somewhere in Hokkaido, Japan (we tried to figure out where so we could go there when we were in Japan, but nobody down in Nagoya could figure it out). the saltwater is supposed to have even more remarkable healing powers than regular freshwater hot springs, so we gave it a try notwithstanding what i remember to be a rather high entry price.

taking Wednesday off to relax on Green Island was definitely a good idea on this trip, but soon enough we had to be on our way, this time back across the island and up to Tainan. we had to ride about 60 Km (35-40 miles) farther south to get to a road that would cross the island again, but that coastal stretch was one of the most beautiful i've ever seen. there's not much life along there but mountain forests slope down steeply into clear blue ocean, with only space for the road carved out. there are a couple of towns and some beaches but generally it's remarkably unspoiled and the vistas are amazing, and were especially so given the great weather we had that day and the fresh air we could feel as riders.

when we turned to the west to cross the island, we began to climb up into the mountains and were glad for the cool air that accompanied our rise. we weren't so glad to be met by a full scale police roadblock that had been set up by a county force that was obviously bored with little else to do. they could have tried going out and patrolling the road, but chose instead to just divert all traffic on that road through the parking lot of their station for inspection. they didn't seem to want to be bothered trying to understand our "Engrish", so they let us go without even seeing any documents, and we kept on all the way to Kaohsiung (say Gaoshung). the west coast in this area was much less attractive than the east had been, and Kaohsiung, Taiwan's second largest city, gets very industrial on its outer reaches and was distinctly unpleasant to ride into. we ate in town but didn't stay, pressing on to spend the last night of our little tour in Tainan, probably my favorite city in Taiwan.

though not that we had much time to enjoy it this time through, as we took off pretty early for the grueling ride back to Taichung and Fengyuan, all of which was very hot, very dirty and marred by all kinds of roadworks. we even rode through the vast Taichung harbor complex, where we dodged huge dump trucks and got caked by the clouds of industrial dust that stuck easily to our sweaty skin and damp clothes. this last hundred miles or so took another six or more fairly uncomfortable hours, but we were able to look back on one of the most satisfying, if turbulent, trips we had taken to that point. plus, we were so happy to have reaped such huge tax savings that we treated our grimy selves to a good old American hamburger at Chili's in Taichung. then, finally reaching Fengyuan after dark, we turned our minds to the pending trip we were going to take in Southeast Asia. and with that, i'll turn my mind to how to report it here.

thetemple

2007-07-29T14:38:00.000-06:00

the green green grass of home: the view from our Air France plane as we crossed over the channel back into England.

we had been wanting to visit the London England LDS Temple during our stay in the UK, but as the name doesn't imply, this building is a good 30 miles or so outside the city center, which is a long way in that part of the world. so we planned our return to the States for a couple of days after we got back from France, giving ourselves time to get a car and drive down to the little village of Lingfield and spend some time in the serenity that it and the temple would provide. before that, however, we had to pick up our things from Kim and Todd's place, which was right in the heart of London. we did this with the aid of our little rental car, a Peugeot 207, but going from Heathrow to Holborn, even after the congestion charge hours, is a lot like driving into the heart of darkness. suffice it to say that i don't recommend driving in Central London to anyone who isn't a serious thrill seeker.

Jill's day- and nighttime views of the London England Temple and its reflection in a pond on its large grounds.

we did make it unscathed though, and from there on to the temple, which is in beautiful Surrey countryside close to Gatwick airport. the temple itself sits on a 32 acre estate known as Newchapel Farm, which boasts gardens, a large reflecting pond and an Elizabethan mansion called the Manor House. the church has also built some dormitory-type buildings for visiting patrons of the temple, which is where we stayed our two nights there.

the Elizabethan "Manor House" that stands on the 32 acres of temple grounds at Newchapel Farm. below, the church really is going into every nation; a selection of the signs we've seen on church buildings in the course of our travels, clockwise from top left: outside the London Temple; on our newly built stake center in Taichung, Taiwan; in front of the Hong Kong Temple in Kowloon; on the chapel we went to for services in the Beauborg area of Paris; on the steeple of the Seoul Korea Temple; in Welsh at the new Chester chapel; and the sign on our Meito Ward chapel in eastern Nagoya, Japan. the sign in the background is also from the London Temple.

i had been to the temple once before in 1992, for its open house and re-dedication after being refurbished, but i hadn't remembered how incredible the grounds and surroundings were. it can be a bit of a hassle to get all the way out there in the countryside, but it's well worth the effort. one place that probably wasn't was one i hadn't ever been before, the famed seaside town of Brighton, another 30 miles south of the temple on the Channel coast. since we had a car, we decided to give it a look, but weren't too impressed by the "beach" made all of pebbles and rocks. still, they made for some good entertainment on an otherwise dull and dreary day:

Jill launches pebbles toward the surf on the "beach" at Brighton. this strip is lined with hotels and a large pier is just visible off in the distance.

so we didn't stay long in Brighton despite the serious entertainment provided by trying to hit other airborne rocks with pebbles (which never worked). i'm sure it's a very nice place to be during the season (notwithstanding all the others who flock there, thinking the same thing), but it was pretty chilly and couldn't hold a candle to the temple environs. what a nice way to spend the last few days of our European vacation.

thesigns

2007-07-28T13:57:00.001-06:00

one of the great things about all our travels has been the chance to be immersed in another language. although we learned precious little of any of them, it is really cool to hear so many unfamiliar sounds and see foreign writing, much of it in our case in totally different scripts. Since it's difficult to give you the sounds of all those languages, i thought i'd at least give you the sights. so far, we've been to Taiwan, where they speak what we usually call "Mandarin" Chinese and Taiwanese; Thailand, where Thai is spoken; Malaysia, where they speak Bahasa Malay and English; Singapore, where English is the administrative language, Malay the national language, and Tamil and Chinese also considered official; Indonesia, where Bahasa Indonesia is spoken; Hong Kong, where it's Cantonese and a lot of English; Macau, where Portuguese and Cantonese are spoken; Mexico, where they speak Spanish; Japan, where Japanese is the order of the day; Mainland China, where they also speak Mandarin, but have changed some of the written characters; Korea, where Korean is spoken; Britain, where real English still generally prevails, along with a bit of various Gaelic tongues, like Cornish, Welsh or Scottish; and France, where the people speak French.

signs of our times, clockwise from top left: French in Paris, English and Chinese in Hong Kong, Welsh and English in Conwy, Wales, Korean in Seoul, Chinese in Beijing, Japanese in Nagoya, Portuguese and Chinese in Macau and Spanish in Puerto Vallarta. in the background is a sign from Georgetown, Malaysia, written in Malay. click the picture to enlarge it. below, some Thai script seen outside a government building in Bangkok.

the longer we spent in a place, the more familiar its language became; we got to the point in Taiwan and Japan where we could read and understand a few things, though generally Chinese and Japanese are still alien to us. good thing you can almost always find someone who speaks some English and wants to practice, even in the most remote corners of the world.

thecuisine

2007-07-27T11:42:00.000-06:00

France is famous for its food, so it's appropriate that i mention our experiences with it here. we weren't exactly dining on haute cuisine the whole time we were there, so lucky for us there was plenty of good stuff to be had without breaking the bank. perhaps in large part due to a very protectionist agricultural policy, France is still heavily invested in farming despite being such a commercial and industrial giant as well. it shows, with fresh fruits and vegetables everywhere you look, and bread and all manner of wonderful cheeses to be had all over the place. even after accounting for less-than-favorable exchange rates though, many of the greens and fruits weren't as affordable as such heavily subsidized stuff should be. no matter, i would have happily subsisted on Camembert and baguettes the whole time we were there--those things were plentiful and cheap.

food in France, clockwise from top left: fruit and vegetables on stands outside shops everywhere; enjoying Camembert baguettes in the open air; more looking-at-but-not-buying fairly high priced produce on the streets; and the breakfast (and maybe even lunch and dinner) of champions: petite madeleines--small, shell-shaped cakes--and baguettes with a whole round of Camembert cheese and a large bottle of Orangina, possible the best drink in the world. below, France may be the happiest food place on Earth: instead of life-sized Mickey and Minnie, there's a giant Orangina.

we found the legends of a Paris being littered with streetside cafés to be largely true, though we didn't really visit many of these as they were usually either packed or closed. we did try the French version of McDonald's, which is named Quick and should be avoided at all costs for reasons of poor customer service and really quite awful food (yes, probably even worse than Mickey D's). we also had some great Turkish food and even an excellent Indian curry at a pretty swanky place that appeared to be frequented by Japanese businessmen. it was quite surreal to be ordering Indian food in French, within view of the Eiffel Tower, all while listening to the now-comforting jabber of a language we thought we had just left behind. a world city indeed. still, i always came back to my baguettes and my cheese, though it, unfortunately, didn't always come back to me. i had bought another four-inch wheel of Camembert shortly before we left, and put it (in its wood case) in the large pocket of my cargo pants. because of the staples in the case, it set the magnetic wand off as i was going through airport security on the way back to London, and the several staff there were totally nonplussed about what to do about it. i would have thought they'd have been happy to be exporting more French cheese, but after x-raying it and several minutes of very confused consultation they made me throw my half-eaten cheese away. i consoled myself with the fact that we were flying Air France, and they were bound to serve up some decent fare, but disappointment struck again: those looking for signs of American dominance in their culture wars against France will be happy to know i only got a lousy pack of cookies.

laDéfense

2007-07-26T08:59:00.000-06:00

aside from the Eiffel Tower and the Tour Montparnasse, there isn't much of what you could call a skyline in Paris, which makes it a bit of an oddity among world capitals these days. not much of one in the downtown, anyway, but a dogged investigator continuing west along the avenue that we traced earlier, from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe, will come to the purpose-built business center of the city known as La Défense. this area, home to numerous skyscrapers housing many of France's commercial giants, sits exactly on the line described by the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, which line is given the title of Axe historique (Historical Axis).

La Défense seems a strange title, inviting many visitors to assume that the area has a militaristic purpose, but it actually takes its name from a statue called La Défense de Paris, an 1883 monument to the soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War. in the late 1950s, the government decided to develop La Défense as a business district and high-rises began to spring up along both sides of a wide central walkway or esplanade known as le Parvis.

a view down Le Parvis from La Défense's west end, revealing some of the high-rise office buildings to either side, and the Arc de Triomphe off in the central distance along the Axe historique. further along this line, though not visible in this picture, lie the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and the Louvre, among other landmarks; below, Jill cools off by wading in a pool on the esplanade.

there are currently over 70 large buildings on the 77.5 acres of La Défense, with plans to bring that total to more than 80. with 150,000 daily workers in the area and 20,000 residents, attempts to beautify the concrete jungle include the installation of 60 modern art sculptures and monuments. it can be hard to tell which are which, or indeed where these end and the buildings begin: the most famous and certainly most impressive building in the whole complex is something of a monument in itself. The Grande Arche de la Fraternité, known simply as La Grande Arche, sits right on the Axe Historique and is truly monumental in both size and scope. additionally, like some of the other monuments in Paris, this one has already attained some measure of fame despite being less than 20 years old, having been featured in numerous movies (including of course, the great Bourne Identity).

the best of many sculptures at La Défense, this one cunningly disguised as a human thumb (perhaps a monument to the opposable digit?). ours are put up for size comparison and flank the inanimate one, if it's hard to tell. below, La Grande Arche de la Défense, the latest addition to the Axe Historique, and also its westernmost point.

La Grande Arche is almost perfectly cuboidal and is said to have been designed to resemble a tesseract, or four-dimensional hypercube (go on, look it up; i did). true or not, it certainly seems to be a modernized (and enlarged) mimic of the Arc de Triomphe, and is indeed a symbol of triumph, though not of the military kind. rather, La Grande Arche is a symbol of France's great achievements in world capitalism. though outwardly an ardent globalization protester, France is actually a huge success in worldwide business, as La Défense attests and La Grande Arche summarizes. La Défense is now Europe's largest business district and France is home to several of the world's biggest companies, including its second-largest retailer, Carrefour. but perhaps there are still bugs to be worked out of the French system: both sides of the impressive monument to its laissez-faire economics are crammed with government offices.

theLady

2007-07-19T16:19:00.000-06:00

a bit of mixed bag, this one, but then, what lady isn't? actually i'm speaking of the post being a mixed bag, but the lady in question is of course our lady; that is, Notre Dame de Paris. our day to explore this most famous of cathedrals also took us to many other sights of note around the French capital, including the following, a very important one in the Republic's history:

the Colonne de Juillet (July Column) as a roundabout in the middle of the Place de la Bastille, so named because it was the site of the Bastille prison.

on the 14th of July, 1789, French commoners stormed the Bastille prison that once stood on this spot and subsequently razed it in anger at the ruling regime. this was considered the beginning of the French revolution (a surprisingly affective act then, considering there were only seven inmates at the time) and the date is still celebrated in France as Fête Nationale (literally National Holiday, though it is known as Bastille Day in English); it is thus similar to America's July 4th "Independence Day" holiday. today nothing remains of the prison whatsoever, and the Colonne de Juillet that now stands in its place can't really compete with the many other attractions Paris boasts. it was worth seeing, of course, but there's not much to hang around the area for.

so we didn't, walking the few blocks (in unseasonable heat) to the Beaubourg area, location of the quirky Centre Georges Pompidou (Pompidou Center). housing a library and a museum, and built essentially with its guts on the outside, the center is named for a former president of France and has grown greatly in popularity from an originally cool reception when it opened in 1977. the building sits on a large square that hosts entertainers of all sorts--on the day we were there a very slapstick comedian was getting a lot of laughs for his schtick and several mimes and "statue" people were busking to healthy crowds. we didn't go in the building, but all the good stuff, such as pipes color-coded to their function, is on the outside anyway:

the Centre Georges Pompidou, an inside-out building in Paris's Beaubourg area. the colors of the pipes and gratings correspond roughly to their functions.

nearby the Pompidou Center is the lady we've been talking about, Our Lady, as it were. Notre Dame, as we say, means just that and is a common way of referring to the Virgin Mary in French. What we're really talking about however, is Notre Dame de Paris, the amazing cathedral that has served as the backdrop for so many literary and cinematic works. built in the Gothic style, Notre Dame is an imposing structure and has has stood in approximately its present form for over 700 years. primary construction was started in 1163 and took almost 90 years to complete, although the whole building wasn't considered finished for about another hundred.

some views of the in- and outside of Notre Dame de Paris, including the famous gargoyles and one of the "rose" stained-glass windows. it was fairly dark inside and very busy when we were there, with some sort of mass going on, which provided some pomp and ceremony to enhance our visit; below, a view of the River Seine from the Île de la Cité, the island on which Notre Dame stands.

the cathedral sits on the south-eastern corner of the Île de la Cité, one of the two islands in the Seine river that constitute the center of Paris (the other is Île Saint-Louis). though the flow of the river has since changed the shape of these islands, they were there and also served as the basis of the Roman settlements over two thousand years ago, so Notre Dame is really at the city's heart in many ways. Île de la Cité is also home to the Préfecture de Police and the Palais de Justice, among other notable buildings, but perhaps the second-best-known structure connected with the island is the Pont Neuf. meaning "new bridge", it is actually the oldest surviving one in Paris and rests gently on the western tip of the isle as it spans a wide Seine. just like Notre Dame, the Pont Neuf is a bit of a celebrity, as are some of it's nearby structures, particularly in one of my favorite movies. The Bourne Identity's title character wakes up in Paris after an overnight drive just across the river from Notre Dame, and later orders his former spymaster, Conklin, to come to Paris and walk to the middle of Pont Neuf and remove his jacket. all this while Bourne is watching him from the La Samaritaine building, a luxury department store that sits on the left bank at the north end of the bridge.

La Samaritaine and me, on Pont Neuf. I'm standing right about where Conklin would have taken off his jacket, with Jason Bourne watching from just behind those letters on the building's roof. La Samaritaine does in fact have a rooftop cafe, but this has been closed to the public, along with the rest of the building, since 2005 while renovations are being made to bring the structure up to fire code.

so there's even more to the appeal of Paris than just finally seeing all the things you learned about in French class. i've heard the bells of Notre Dame and roamed where Quasimodo did, and even though Jill thought the pictures of La Samaritaine were a bit much, i've stood pretty much in Jason Bourne's shoes. which practically makes me famous, i reckon, and that's another thing to love about Paris: she doesn't keep all the glory to herself, she loves you back.

laTour

2007-07-09T17:19:00.000-06:00

there doesn't seem to be much more for me to say about la Tour Eiffel, but it is worth a quick daytime look. it's currently the tallest structure in Paris, and owing to the generally very low skyline, the tower is visible from almost anywhere in town. it is a striking view, but close-up views during the day reveal huge webs of ugly brownish-painted metal that are less than entirely romantic. one could almost understand the bitter controversy sparked by the tower's initial placement along the beautiful River Seine. it still makes for some good gratuitous over-photographed-monument holiday snaps though:

a view of the Eiffel Tower from one of the nearby neighborhoods, and below, another gratuitous view enhanced by the presence of Jill, myself and our bodyguard (cleverly disguised as a random tourist).

as i mentioned in theeveningtime post, the whole tower seems something of a cliché, though this may be understandable of the world's most visited monument. last year there were almost 7 million visitors, and we were happy to be two of the more than 200 million that have come to admire the engineering feat since it was erected in 1887. since we're on stats, the excellent Wikipedia article on la tour tells me that the building was the tallest in the world at that time, until it was surpassed by the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930 (it had earlier taken the title from the Washington monument). now it seems that the distinction changes hands (or more importantly, countries) every few years. a couple of years ago we visited the twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which were the tallest structures until the Taipei 101 building took over in early 2005, while we were in Taiwan. Petronas is now reduced to being the tallest twin towers on earth, and soon the Taipei 101 will be dethroned by the Burj Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (which will soon thereafter lose its preeminence to the Al Burj, also in Dubai. this one looks like it may hang on for a while, being more than twice as tall as the 101!). in any case, the Eiffel Tower is about 81 stories tall, which is almost the level at which Taipei 101's "tuned mass damper" sits, to help minimize the building's vibrations during earthquakes and high winds. according to the Wiki article, the Eiffel Tower sways about 2-3 inches (5-8 cm) in the wind, and its top can flex away from the sun up to 7 inches (18 cm) due to the steel's thermal expansion on the heated side. not something most folks want to think about at the top.

the view to the south of the Eiffel Tower, showing the mighty Seine river in all its glory. this shot was taken from the second floor landing moments after sunset.

but enough tech talk; the views are what people go for. we like the views too, and have this habit of going up the tall structures we visit just before sundown so we can get the view in the daylight and then see all the lights come on. this strategy ended up working out as well in Paris as it has elsewhere, only here the lines were so long even on our weekday trip that we were almost too late to see the sunset. there are three levels, but at only €11,50 (about US$16) to get the top, one can hardly pass up the full ride. it's well worth it, and you get to stop and look around on the first and second floor landings (while you endure yet another wait for the next elevator), which is where all our best view shots came from. still, i have to say again that the best view may be of the tower itself, and then after dark, but i'll leave you to judge from Jill's photos. better yet, go there and have a look for yourself, it is worth it, despite the cliché.

la tour à nuit. c'est magnifique!

theavenue

2007-07-08T19:20:00.000-06:00

what is there to do during the daytime in Paris? one thing that must be done, and quite thoroughly, is an examination of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, one of the world's most famous (not to mention expensive) streets. anchored at one end by the Musée du Louvre (Louvre Museum) and at the other by the Arc de Triomphe (Triumphal Arch), and festooned with million-dollar boutiques in between, the Champs-Élysées has been referred to as La plus belle avenue du monde (the most beautiful avenue in the world), a moniker that's hard to argue with.

the Musée du Louvre, clockwise from top left: Jill and me in the courtyard with the Louvre Pyramid behind us. the Pyramid was built in 1989 and serves as the museum entrance; what the Pyramid looks like from below, with views to the outside and an atrium teeming with visitors even on this fairly slow day; the art space as art: just one of the hundreds of spectacularly decorated walls inside the Louvre; and the Venus de Milo, one of classical Greek sculpture's most celebrated works, stands without much ceremony in a dimly lit room and only a small circle of red-velvet ropes for protection. below, a very involved tour guide shows schoolchildren through a hall decorated with art covering a staggeringly broad time period.

the Louvre itself is magnificent and was one of the first things we made sure to see. most of the places on our Parisian itinerary were sights i had learned about in French class back in junior high school, and the Louvre was pretty much at the top of the list. home to La Joconde (Mona Lisa) and Venus de Milo, the Louvre is justifiably famed, but the whole experience at this museum is much greater than the sum of its parts. it is the only museum that i have been to, as far as i can remember, whose art space itself seemed to be art; that is, the lines between the artworks on display and the space in which they are displayed are seriously blurred, producing a more holistic and altogether engaging encounter. the building itself was once a palace and literally everywhere you look there is something to engage your eyes, be it a statue, an ancient artifact, or a ceiling fresco. the Louvre is big enough, and holds enough incredible art that you would probably need a solid week to see and appreciate it all, but that kind of time investment would take too much away from all the things there are to see just outside.

along the Champs, clockwise from top left: Jill and the street sign bolted to one of the ultra-expensive buildings that lines the avenue; the 3,400-year-old Egyptian Obelisk that stands at the center of the Place de la Concorde; me in front of one of the fountains that flank the Obelisk. these fountains are a memorable sight from the final stage of racing in the Tour de France (which just began in Britain, of all places), when riders pedal their way up and down the Champs-Élysées and around the Place de la Concorde several times before crossing the ultimate finish line; and rented sailboats chased by young boys on a large pond at the Jardin des Tuileries evoke images of a simpler time in the French capital.

leaving the museum and heading west towards the famous avenue, one first encounters the Jardin des Tuileries (Tuileries Garden), which was once enclosed by the now-destroyed Tuileries Palace, home of French royalty before they built and moved to Versailles. our mid-April weather was unseasonably hot, and the Jardin was packed with Parisians enjoying the afternoon sunshine in the park's tranquility. just beyond the garden lies the true beginning of the Champs-Élysées, the Place de la Concorde. legendary as the site of the revolutionary guillotine that beheaded Marie Antoinette, Lavoisier and Robespierre, among many others, it started out life as a simple square to honor King Louis XV. nearly half a century before his statue there was torn down by the revolutionaries, his successor Louis-Philippe placed the 23-meter high, 250-tonne Egyptian Obelisk that had been gifted to France in the square's center, flanked by two commemorative fountains. this one of "Cleopatra's needles" is, like its counterparts in London and New York, among the oldest true obelisks today, having been initially constructed around 1450 BC to mark the entrance to the Luxor Temple.

continuing east beyond the Place de la Concorde the low (for a modern downtown) buildings that give Paris much of its charm slowly draw closer to the edge of the tree-lined avenue, and the expensive retailers that add to the city's fashionable reputation begin to make their appearance. along the Champs-Élysées are the Élysées Palace, residence of France's president, numerous packed cafés and Louis Vuitton's largest store, along with the gleaming outlets of other retailers who can afford rents said to be north of a million dollars per thousand square feet of space. needless to say, we didn't do a lot of shopping.

the Arc de Triomphe, France's monument to her war dead, is so large that shortly following the celebrations marking the end to World War I, a biplane was able to be flown through the major archway to commemorate fallen airmen.

what we did do was make our way to the Place Charles de Gaulle, formerly (and often still) known as the Place de l'Étoile (Star Square), due to its being the intersection of 12 of Paris's streets, including its widest avenue, Avenue Foch. the Place is home to another of France's most well-known monuments, the Arc de Triomphe. the second-largest of more than 100 triumphal arches in the world (the largest is in Pyongyang, North Korea, strangely enough) it is quite a bit more spectacular than London's Marble Arch, and also seems to get a lot more attention from the locals than its English counterpart. during the several minutes we were there trying to get someone to take a decent picture of us, dozens of French Foreign Legionnaires were amassing on the square in preparation for what appeared to be a commemoration involving the tomb of the unknown soldier, which rests beneath the eastern arch. we didn't do much resting, however, due mostly to the growing heat and also to the noise and smog. one more thing the Louvre and the Jardin des Tuileries have going for them is space and distance from the city's hustle and bustle; not so the Places Concorde and Charles de Gaulle. both are effectively huge and very busy roundabouts upon which chaos and not much else besides the car horn reigns. when we'd got the best pictures we thought we would, the call of the nearby Eiffel Tower rose above the din and we quickly made our escape there.

theeveningtime

2007-06-28T21:57:00.000-06:00

the very noticeable Sexodrome on Place de Clichy in Pigalle, Paris. in English, the -drome suffix usually connotes the location of a particular sporting activity (cycling takes place at a velodrome, horse racing at a hippodrome), so i guess that makes this the gym for French folks.

i guess this post should come last out of the French ones (there will be a few), but i really wanted to get to this slightly scandalicious picture. it was taken with Jill's characteristic skill in the Pigalle red-light district, near to Montmartre. the Sexodrome is about the most obvious of the area's risque establishments, and is roughly across the street from the incredibly obvious Moulin Rouge. meaning "red mill", the Moulin Rouge is a late 19th century cabaret made famous in the United States (and doubtless elsewhere) by the recent movie of the same name, and it does indeed feature a larger-than-life version of its namesake structure:

the famous Moulin Rouge ("red mill") cabaret in the Pigalle area of Paris, near Montmartre. below, one of the soulful art nouveau signs for the Paris Métro (subway) system, this one at Pigalle station.

we didn't actually go to the "Féerie” show, mainly because it would have cost €89, which is about $126, and that without the dinner. still, it's a cool exterior and it was good enough to say we'd seen it. after doing so we made our way up into very nearby Montmartre. the patron saint of France, Denis, was decapitated on Montmartre in AD 250, thus giving the hill its name: "mountain of the martyr". in more recent history the area has been a magnet for artistic and creative types, with big names like Picasso, van Gogh and Matisse either living or working there. probably the artist most associated with the place is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the short-statured "soul of Montmartre" who produced numerous paintings of and posters for the Moulin Rouge. the most prominent landmark on Paris's highest hill is the Byzantine-inspired Sacré-Cœur Basilica, whose front steps play host to as many hippie revelers as its nave does worshipers. with or without those drunken view-seekers, Sacré-Cœur is an amazing sight, perhaps especially at night, when it is bathed in bright floodlight:

foreign visitors and local revelers flock to the bright Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, or Basilica of the Sacred Heart, that sits atop Montmartre in north-central Paris like moths to a night light. below, the inside is worthy of as much attention as the outside, boasting as it does one of the world's largest mosaics, this one named Christ in Majesty.

it's no surprise that the Basilica's steps attract so many people with such tremendous city views to be had, but the views inside the building can be equally impressive. Sacré-Cœur means "sacred heart" and accordingly the apse features a giant mosaic of Jesus with said heart, entitled Christ in Majesty. historically this is one of France's more important churches, having its roots firmly implanted in the soil of post-revolutionary politics, and its designation as a basilica may reflect some of that significance. a basilica is, in the Catholic sense, a designation conferred upon a large and important church that has been afforded special ceremonial rites by the Pope. today there are almost 1,500 of them around the world, most in Europe: Italy is home to over 500. with the possible exception of St Peter's in Rome, however, Sacré-Cœur may be the most well known around the world. it is surely one of the most spectacular.

the Eiffel Tower, here set a-twinkle as it is for about five minutes, apparently every (dark) hour on the hour. there are also a pair of continually revolving searchlights atop the tower, added for the new millennium just like the twinkling lights.

for real spectacle one need not look much farther than Paris's--indeed France's--most celebrated icon, the Eiffel Tower. visible, as it is, from all over the city, we saw it from all angles and a wide range of distances during our five days in town, not to mention in different lights. though there'll be more to say about the structure itself, mentioning La Tour's nighttime appearance is a necessity. bathed in a sodium-yellow glow from the hundreds of lamps affixed to its trusses, the tower stands out as a slightly eerie but awesome beacon in the dark sky, especially the closer one gets to it. to be smitten with it seems like such a cliché, and we went expecting to be somewhat disappointed by a landmark that would turn out to have been dramatically over-hyped, but the Eiffel Tower really is incredible, exuding a very compelling attraction that, much like magnetism, gets stronger the closer you are. maybe that's why it's made of metal. after returning to the ground from up in the observation decks, from where we'd seen the sun go down, we got a very powerful example of the tower's ability to amaze: the hourly display of powerful twinkling lights, pictured above, came on right at 10 and immediately a very audible collective gasp-cum-squeal went up from the probably hundreds of people milling around the tower's large footprint. this reactionary cry seemed more impressive than the light show itself, which may help explain the Eiffel phenomenon: each of those in whom the tower's magic was thus instilled will likely carry their personal testimonial of its wonder back to those far corners of the earth whence they came. they'll tell their friends, "you should see it in person, it really is as good as it's supposed to be--maybe even better." so friends of thejayfather, you should see the Eiffel Tower and Paris in person. they really are as good as they're supposed to be and maybe even better, especially in the evening time.

thebagpipes

2007-06-24T18:23:00.000-06:00

thebagpipes indeed. to be honest, i don't really enjoy their sound, but when you've taken it upon yourself to go to Scotland, you've got to be prepared to hear them at least once. fortunately for me, it was only once, and early on in the trip. i had been to Edinburgh a couple of times before this flying visit, but Jill would have felt cheated of the "whole experience" of Britain if we hadn't made it north of Hadrian's Wall, and probably would have felt more so if we hadn't heard a piper while there.

the lone bagpiper in all his noisy glory; and below, Jill gets to sate her desire for the authentic Scottish experience.

this guy was set up playing just down the street from the impressive Edinburgh Castle, which plays host to the very famous Edinburgh Military Tattoo, a festival involving quite spectacular displays from several military display bands that is held almost throughout the month of August. to give an idea of how big a deal this is, the parking lot was already well on its way to readiness for the shows when we were there in mid April, and furthermore, the tattoo is thought to be among the reasons Edinburgh has become the second most visited city in the UK after London. i saw the show, along with the castle, as a youngster, but this time we didn't even bother with the castle because the tickets were a scandalous £11 (about $22) each.

the entrance to Edinburgh Castle, which is about as close as we got, due to the shockingly high price of admission; and below, some shots of St Giles' Cathedral, or the High Kirk of Scotland, clockwise from top left: the outside, showing the distinctive hollow-crown tower; the memorial to James Graham, the Marquess of Montrose; the light from the high windows bathes the cathedral interior; and the stunningly intricate ceiling of the Thistle Chapel.

after avoiding that attempted fleecing, we began to make our way down the most famous of Edinburgh streets, the Royal Mile. this is the thoroughfare between the castle and Holyrood Abbey , and is actually a Scottish mile in length, this being equivalent to 1.1 Imperial miles. though many claim the street is actually named High Street, it does in fact have six different names at various points along its length. in any case, one of the most striking of the several landmarks along the Mile is St Giles' Cathedral, or the High Kirk (church) of Scotland, which has served its nation's capital for over 900 years and is dedicated to the patron Saint of cripples and lepers. with its crowned tower and intimate chapels it is another major tourist attraction, as well as being a fully operational parish church, and more besides: the Thistle Chapel, completed in the early 20th century, houses The Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle (Scotland's highest chivalric order) and is fitted all over with ornately carved wood fixtures and throne-like chairs for the monarch and the 16 knights of the order. an impressive room in an impressive building.

the Scott Monument, erected in the Princes Street Gardens in 1844 to Sir Walter Scott, poet and author of Ivanhoe and Rob Roy, among others.

Edinburgh is home to many impressive buildings; indeed, the Wikipedia article on the city declares that "because of its rugged setting and vast collection of Medieval and Georgian architecture including numerous stone tenements, it is one of the most dramatic cities in Europe." dramatic it may be, but it is almost certainly also drab, as the above picture, of the Scott Monument indicates. for some reason, most of the buildings in Edinburgh's vast collection are similarly caked in dark grime, which gives a slightly gloomy feel despite the architecture's noteworthiness. though there's still filth, a slightly lighter feel can be found up on Calton Hill, which is the home of both Scotland's devolved government and a host of quite whimsical monuments. they all have their dedications, but why they're so concentrated in this one spot i don't know.

i am standing in front of what David Hume, possibly Britain's greatest philosopher, got when he asked for a "simple Roman tomb" for his remains, which rather enormous structure stands unabashedly atop a hill in Calton Cemetary. below, a few of the monuments and other decorations on Calton Hill, including the National Monument to those who died in the Napoleonic Wars, seen in self and shadow in the two bottom pictures.

one thing Edinburgh has going for it, if not cleanliness, is a pretty extensive list of names and nicknames, among which is the potentially misleading "Auld Reekie". i've been to smelly cities, and i didn't think this was one of them, and indeed Auld Reekie means "Old Smoky", not "Old Stinky". in days of yore the only fuels available in town were wood and coal, so chimneys would belch out thick columns of smoke, so hence the name. hence also, i assume, much of the grit and grime that still covers the city's structures. still, some people are making the best of it, trading on this nickname to pitch their businesses, like the one we patronized that focused not so much on the grimy as the ghoulish. as a bit of a fright fan, Jill wanted to go on one of the several "haunted underground" tours that are offered, and we ended up choosing the one run by Auld Reekie's. in the late 18th century, the long 19-arch South Bridge was built to link old town to new, with 18 of the arches being enclosed to provide space for commercial enterprises. unfortunately, the vaults thus created were never properly sealed and quickly began to leak, which led to their abandonment by legitimate businesses. illicit activities took over what quickly became Edinburgh's slum, and the dispossessed of the city moved into their new free housing in huge numbers. because conditions down there were so awful, the police would never enter and so rapists and murderers would escape there and then continue their vices with no fear of reprisal. it is believed that Burke and Hare, infamous serial killers who sold corpses to medical schools in the late 1820s, hunted for victims in the South Bridge Vaults.

the sign promoting the underground vault tour we went on, run by an outfit calling themselves Auld Reekie's. below, one of the rooms under the South Street Bridge said to be haunted by the angry spirits of previous inhabitants who had suffered death in various unpleasant ways.

little wonder then that spiritualists and paranormalists, as well as entrepreneurs catering to the amateur ghostbuster have seized upon and exploited the vaults since their rediscovery in 1988. there are numerous spirits said still to frequent the vaults (though some are known to be of the liquor type stored by neighboring pubs) and the area has played host to a number of TV specials and all kinds of studies. the picture above is of one of the supposedly haunted (albeit less than some other) rooms in the complex, but we were assured that ghosts such as the South Bridge Poltergeist were often captured on film, most often appearing as an orb of light. well, though i did get the chills, we saw no orbs, nor did we feel anything like a cold hand on the back of our necks that others had reported feeling. but one of the studies conducted in the vaults did find that generally speaking, the people who experienced what may be termed paranormal phenomena were the people who expected that they would. in other words, what you believe dictates what you get, so while maybe i don't believe in angry spirits hanging out under Edinburgh, i did have a good time, which is certainly something i believe in, even in the land of bagpipes.

thecastle

2007-06-23T17:51:00.000-06:00

Chester is not far from England's border with Wales, which border is only about as clearly delineated as US state boundaries generally are. after spending some time in Chester and Tarvin we decided to head into Wales to show Jill and Todd all the sheep, and the land of Tom Jones' nativity. Jill had really been wanting to see a castle too, and while Chester has one, it isn't one of the most impressive or classic looking. i remembered that the town of Conwy (pronounced Conway), about halfway out along the North Welsh coast, had a castle that i had always thought looked pretty striking, so we went there.

some views of Conwy Castle, including a picture of a model showing how the castle may have looked during its heyday, in the front center. click on the image to enlarge it.

indeed, Conwy Castle dates from the late 13th century, and stands largely intact guarding the mouth of the River Conwy. there are great views from the high turrets, and the castle is large enough that spending an hour there made us have to hurry to see it all, but we had other things to do, other places to go in North Wales. my maternal grandmother, whose maiden name, Thomas, was given to be my middle name, is Welsh, and my mother's dad, a Roberts, is Welsh at least in ancestry. when he still lived in Britain he kept a sailboat at the small village of Abersoch, way out west in North Wales, and so Kim and i decided to take Jill and Todd on a sort of pilgrimage out there.

Abersoch, clockwise from top left: Kim and i outside the Abersoch Post Office, with home pride stickers all over the windows; the early afternoon shadows that me, Jill, Kim and Todd cast on the beach; a view of that beach at low tide, with tractors pulling boats into and out of the surf; and a message in the sand for all the Welsh to see.

Abersoch welcomes, or at least tolerates, hordes of tourists every summer who must stretch the village's capacity to its breaking point as they descend in droves to lounge on the large beach. though it was quite hot while we were there, the tourist season hadn't yet started in earnest, so there were only weekend travelers to peruse the sleepy shops and paddle their feet in the water. despite the painful cold of the Irish Sea, plenty of folks were out splashing around or tooling about in boats that had been towed out to meet the waves by large tractors. one thing we noticed about Abersoch that probably accounts for much of its draw was the almost exclusive sandiness of the beach. many other beaches we had seen in Britain were seriously pebble-ridden, if not entirely made of small stones. the next beach we went to, at Llanbedrog, was much this way, though to us no less a draw because of it.

Jill and me on the rocky Llanbedrog beach, with some of the famous holiday cottages of the village. my mum would stay in cottages not far from here during her childhood vacations; below, some of the changing huts lined up on the sandier part of the beach, newly reinstalled in more varied colors than those of bygone days.

strangely perhaps, Llanbedrog's beach seemed busier than Abersoch's, but since we only went there to see where my mother used to take her childhood holidays, we weren't that bothered by the relative crowds. there seemed to be even lees to do in this village than the last one, so we began to make our way back to England in our trusty rental car. but one thing was still missing from my Welsh experience. it wasn't that i was feeling bad for not having reached the place with the longest name in the world (about which more later), but that i hadn't seen any of the vast slate mountains i remembered being everywhere as a boy. North Wales is home to Snowdonia National Park, which is itself home to Snowdon, the highest peak in England and Wales (the highest in Britain is Ben Nevis in Scotland). several of the mountains around this region are composed of slate, which is mined to this day, primarily for roofing material, though in much reduced quantities than were being obtained prior to WWII. these days the area derives some revenue form tourists riding down into the belly of the old mines to have a look at where their souvenir trivets came from. i wasn't so interested in that as i was in seeing the huge stacks of loose shale that ranged up mountainsides just next to the roadways, so i took the others on a detour through the Welsh countryside looking for the quarries of my memory. what may have seemed like a wild goose chase to start with turned up success surprisingly quickly, as we found some pretty good examples near the famous festival town of Ffestiniog (phew).

Todd stands in front of one of my slate mountains. this stuff is literally found just stacked up and sliding down the hillsides--Todd isn't more than a few feet from the edge of the roadway; below, i'm posing with our handy little rental car right at the Welsh border. we rented this one in Chester and took it all the way across North Wales and then all the way up to Edinburgh and back, but that's for next time.

so about Ffestiniog. not the town, but the name. if you've seen much written down in the Welsh language, you'll have noticed that it seems to have a near monopoly on consonants, which can make things hard to pronounce, to say the least. the place i mentioned earlier, the one with the longest name, is 58 letters long, of which only 13 are vowels. it's of such a ratio that Welsh would have to get together with a Polynesian language like Samoan and have offspring to result in a hybrid with a consonant-vowel proportionality that we could handle. the name of that village, which incidentally is home to not much more than a wool shop and a proudly-signed train station, is Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which i challenge you to say on your own. i learned how from a Welsh homeroom teacher i had, but i couldn't even begin to try to break it down in this post. you may want to do a little research into it, at least so you can impress your friends. i will tell you that llan means saint, and the double l sounds like a very breathy "thl". i hope that helps you get started.

me and Jill by the Church's sign in Welsh. this one balances the English one on the other side of the building, which is the impressive new Chester chapel, actually built several miles from Chester in Ewloe, Wales, naturally; below, some of the bilingual signage that is prevalent in Wales, this in the Conwy Castle car park (parking lot).

so "f"s sound like "v"s, unless they're doubled up, "w"s sound like "u"s and double "d"s sound like "th"s. some letters aren't there at all, but are more than made up for by a bunch of digraphs that take the total "letter" count of the Welsh alphabet to 28. its all a bit confusing, but it does sound pretty cool when you're listening to the Smurfs dubbed over in it on your tiny black-and-white childhood TV. and besides, you'd better get used to it if you intend to be a true world traveler: Welsh competes to be the most widely spoken of the Celtic languages, and not only do around a fifth of the Welsh population speak it, but a sizeable chunk of the good folks in the Chubut province of Argentina, of all places. so just chew on that while you're trying to say "Cymru am byth"*.

* meaning "Wales forever".

thevillage

2007-06-14T16:52:00.000-06:00

no, this is not a post about an M Night Shayamalan film, but about the small housing clusters often found in non-US countries. about one in particular, actually, the one in which i spent the first 14 years of my life, which is about six miles East of the great city of Chester, England. the name of this magical little place, Tarvin, which is home to between three and four thousand people, is thought to be derived from the Welsh word terfyn, which is itself derived from the Latin terminus, and means boundary. indeed, ruins of Roman structures have been found in Tarvin, including a rather intact set of bridges, making this a very old village, and showing that it was indeed at the edge, or boundary, of the major Roman settlement at Deva (Chester).

Jill and me at the entrance to Park Close, the street where Kim and i grew up, or at least aged somewhat from newborns. below, some of the wide open spaces surrounding Tarvin. the cows were very friendly and constitute a large part of Cheshire County's economically important agricultural sector.

most of the historical significance on our trips there, however, came from memorial rather than archaeological artifacts, and we found plenty to stimulate our reminiscences. this was the part of our trip that i had most looked forward to, and it didn't disappoint. as we trekked around our old haunts, however, Kim and i became convinced that somebody had managed to pull a real-life "Honey I shrunk the Village" on us. everything--everything--was so much smaller than we had remembered it: our old house, our street, the distances between places all seemed to have shrunk with the many years that had passed since we were last there in 1993. we made good use of that oddity though, exploring much of the village on foot in a very short time. we got to see my old primary school and junior school, the old Scout hut that is sadly no longer in use, and the glitzy destinations along the High Street, which includes all of perhaps eight shops, a Methodist church and a pub.

schools 'n things in and near Tarvin, clockwise from top left: my primary school, which would be like kindergarten and first grade in America; the apparently disused old Scout hut, which sits at the North end of Tarvins large playing fields; the junior school Kim and i went to, which serves what would be second through fifth grades in the States; and Jill saving me from the horrors of my old high school in the nearby village of Tarporley, which takes in the equivalent of grades six and up. this place looked a lot rougher than i remember it. below, views on and near Tarvin's High Street, clockwise from top left: St Andrew's Anglican Church, standing since at least the early 14th century; King Louis' fish and chip shop, a Tarvin staple of fine English cuisine. the chips were just the same as we remembered them; the Tarvin News store, or Post Office, better known to us by its former name, Anley's, or as the place to spend your pocket money on sweets (candy); and the rather forlorn-looking George and Dragon pub, closed due to a fire that local talk says may have been attempted insurance fraud...

so Tarvin is old, going back about two millenia, and small, which it looks set to stay, thanks to a clever set of greenbelt laws that should really be deployed in the US. as such the village is able to maintain a great deal of its charm and character, but it loses none of its importance in the surrounding area. St Andrew's Anglican church, which dates from at least the early 1300s, is thought to be disproportionately large for Tarvin's size, reflecting perhaps the village's Roman-born status among surrounding communities. this church is well maintained and worth a visit, with headstones in the graveyard from the 1700s and musket ball-derived pockmarks in the outer walls still visible from the mid-17th century Civil War. inside are many stained-glass windows and old relics, including a carved figure known as the Tarvin Imp, who is said to ward off evil spirits. i best remember the interior of the church from the proud time i played the lead in the school Christmas play there as a second-grader. the Anglican church is more properly known as the Church of England, so for all the Americans horrified that school events would take place in a church, the hallowed separation of church and state works a little differently over here.

the best parts of this trip to Tarvin, at least for Kim and i, were also indoors, but somewhere a bit more modern: our former next-door neighbors' house. Brian and Lorna Stott moved into number 3 when i was about four, bringing with them their son Chris who was a few months older than me and who turned out to be a fast and close friend. i vividly remember our shy and awkward first meeting by the lamppost between our houses, with our mothers urging us to share some Chewits candies. Jill and Kim's husband Todd indulged many hours of chatting and reminiscing as Brian and Lorna and their younger son, Robin, for whom Kim used to babysit, played wonderful hosts to the four of us.

thevillage people, of Tarvin, that is. some of our neighbors in Park Close, from left to right: Pam Kelly from number 5, Pat Parkin at number 2, Robin, Brian and Lorna Stott from number 3, and thejayfather and Kim, formerly of number 4. below, Chris and i pose by his front yard early one Halloween. he is dressed as a Red Devil, the mascot of the great Manchester United Football (soccer) Club, and i as some kind of punk it seems. no lame jokes in the comments box about that please.

unfortunately we were unable to see Chris on either of our visits to the Stotts, but i imagine his ears were burning pretty well both times. Brian and Lorna pulled out old photos and videos and we relived many good times. Brian had been the coach of many of the football (soccer) teams that Chris and i had played on, and Lorna had served with my mum as a founder and early leader of the Beaver Lodge (a pre-Cub Scouts boys group) when we were young lads. it struck me how closely our lives had been intertwined, and i'm glad that we are still able to maintain a friendship. certainly on our next trip to Britain, Jill and i will be making our way up to thevillage of Tarvin to see our old neighbors again. until then, my profoundest thanks to them, and a promise that it won't take another 14 years for that visit.

me on the legendary Battle Wagon bicycle that my dad restored for me, circum-pedalling the old house at 4 Park Close.

thehometown

2007-06-12T15:23:00.000-06:00

as good as it was to get back on British soil in London and visit family in Cornwall, there was extra excitement surrounding our trip to Chester in the Northwest. my sister Kim and i took our spouses up there to show them the city that only we of the seven members of our family were born in*. i was very pleased to find that time seemed to have been kind to Chester: it seems to be fairly affluent and well maintained, and generally thriving really. it's really a cool city, with almost 2,000 years of history behind it, starting with the Romans in AD 79. they established the city as a fort and called it Deva after the goddess of the local River Dee, and they built a wall all the way around their settlement. this wall, though subsequently rebuilt in medieval and Victorian times, is still standing and is the most complete city wall in the UK.

clockwise from top left: one of the signs marking the way along the walls surrounding the old city of Chester; a view of those walls near the cathedral; inside the famous "Rows", elevated walkways providing access to yet more shops; and what the Rows look like from the street.

one of the prominent historical periods represented by Chester's buildings is the Tudor, typified by the black and white wood and clay used in its construction. the wood is black because it is painted with tar to give it weather protection, and the clay (or often dung) is pasted over a latticework of sticks between the wood beams and then whitewashed for rain resistance. most of these buildings date from the 16th and early 17th centuries, and as such often appear to be very "wobbly" or crooked, as there was no way for large timbers to be cut exactly straight then. in the center of Chester, near the "Cross" (from whence the town crier still yells out proclamations at noon) are many of these buildings, several built with an outdoor walkway around the second story known as the "Rows", which arrangement is thought to be unique. many of the other structures in town and the surrounding areas are built with the indigenous sandstone, which is quite soft and so clearly shows the wear of its age. one of the largest structures rendered primarily in sandstone is the Chester Cathedral, of which the early-8th century Saint Werburgh is the patroness.

some views of Chester, including, clockwise from top left: the famous "pillarbox" style mailbox; some telephone boxes outside old Tudor buildings; the Queen's Park Bridge that spans the River Dee; more Tudor buildings along the important Eastgate Street; the River Dee itself, taken from the Queen's Park Bridge; and a view of Chester Cathedral from the back. below, the city's most famous landmark, the Eastgate Clock, which was built in 1897 to celebrate the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria, is still ticking.

i was able to appreciate Chester much more on this trip than i ever had as a child. it has a castle (also built of sandstone), a horse racing track, one of the best zoos in the country and plenty of green space in and around it. it's rich in history and is the principal town of Cheshire, a county whose relative wealth derives from widespread agriculture and a healthy tourism sector, among other things. it's also got a awesome leisure center called Northgate Arena, which has pretty much the best swimming pool imaginable for young folks. Kim and i remembered having and attending many birthday parties there, and were dismayed to find that it would cost us over £3 ($6) just to get to go and have a quick look at it for old time's sake. oh well, we had to make do with the available entertainment:

good old fashioned fun on the streets of Chester--but leapfrogging the traffic bollards used to seem so much harder, below.

we rented a car in Chester, and though the city center is almost impossible to access by motorized vehicle, i was surprised at how easily i was able to navigate (and actually to drive on the left side of the road; though we'd been riding a motorcycle on the left in Japan, it was a lot harder to keep a car within lanes). somehow i was able to feel my way around much of the city by memory, even though i'd never driven there before. one of the locations i was able to find was our old church building, the very one in which i was baptized over 20 years ago and which i went to at least once a week for 14 years. the Blacon neighborhood it's in wasn't the nicest back then, but it's looking decidedly rough these days. the building was sold some years ago and is currently being used as a mosque, according to what we were told.

the old Chester chapel, or new Chester mosque, perhaps, which looks a lot grimmer even than it was. below, better times at that chapel: my dad and me on the day of my baptism, Thursday, March 5th, 1987.

there is a new chapel for the Chester ward, though it's way out in Ewloe in North Wales and is about twice the distance from our old house as this building is. we did make our way out there for church, and were warmly welcomed by many old friends, just as we were in our old neighborhood on our trips there. details of these visits, as always, will follow, so stay tuned to thejayfather.

*Jill and i recently learned that not only is Daniel Craig, the latest James Bond actor, one of Chester's most famous sons, but that he was born in the same hospital as me, and on the same day, 11 years earlier. talk about cosmic.