They tend to stick all the tourists together on Indian trains, which makes them a good place to meet people. I end up on the ride from Varanasi to Agra with a klatch of Australians, one couple who are hippying it out for a few months plus a mom and her two adult daughters who just got back from a week’s trek in Kashmir. Plus a six-year old girl from the berth next door who keeps coming over and putting on a charm show. We put up a silk scarf in front of the overhead light, and between the six of us manage to come up with a fifth of Whiskey, some RC Colas, a blunt and a few energy bars, so the night goes well, though we get little sleep. Vendors pass through the car at regular intervals hawking cups of chai, bottled water and soda & various deep-fried foodstuffs. The one thorn in our side is the train attendant, who keeps finding excuses to come around and stare at the chicas. I start off trying to stare him down and shame him away, but turns out you can’t stare an Indian down; they don’t give a shit, they just keep staring back for however many hours it takes for you to look away. Throwing a shoe at them works quite well, though! I’m going to try staring at Neal Mohan when I get back and see what he does; the shoe I’ll save for Rajas Moonka.
I’m so ready to be palpably underwhelmed by the Taj Mahal that I’ve psyched myself out before arriving and have to adjust my whole world view when I find myself unexpectedly staring up at the most beautiful piece of architecture on Earth. It’s like a desert mirage, and hangs there like a cloud. Photographs don’t capture the full measure of it’s sublimity, and later that day I delete the ones I took in frustration. In part it’s so exquisite because it doesn’t try to do too much; there are no bombastic broad shoulders fanning out on either side, nothing that bespeaks a mote of insecurity on the part of its architect, just a pristine little elevated square of white marble topped by a central dome that borders on bulging out too much but then stops at just that place, like an alabaster balloon, with a retainer of eight little minarets and a monumental garden pathway. Off in the distance on either side are red sandstone gates that would qualify as world monuments in their own right, but they stay far enough apart not to mar the star attraction, like bridesmaids’ done up in prom dresses, to blur their beauty a bit as they stand off to the side. As the day progresses, shadows play with its surface and the sun subtly alters its color, an intentional effect meant to mimic the presence of the creator since Muslim law forbids direct representation of God. And it does feel like some all-pervasive presence is at work as the dome browns and pales over the course of the day, an ethereal, conscious motion running its fingers through us. Up close you see treasure chests of emeralds, rubies and sapphires that have been chipped into the shapes of delicate flower & vine patterns and embedded along the doorways and the inside of the building.
Being stuck in Agra after viewing the Taj Mahal is like waking up a week after you’ve married a shockingly beautiful woman and finding her entire extended family has moved out of their trailer park and into your apartment. All you can say is ouch. It’s a big thumping city that wears you out quick, and everyone you meet has a cousin with a rug store or a jewelry shop. The one bit of beauty that rises up out of the noise pollution are the pigeon keepers in the Muslim section who send their flocks into the air above the rooftops in late afternoon and direct them with a series of whistles that send them gyrating this way and that on command like magic kites. The food is good, too, high Mughal cooking like you see in the States except it tastes better, but you have to watch where you eat. The local newspaper has a front page story about a scam where one restaurant poisoned tourists, then put them on a rickshaw that took them to a backdoor clinic that gave them a prescription of more poison to keep them sick for a week or so while they charged their health insurance policies tens of thousands of dollars.
My mom wanted to come down and visit for a few days and since I sponged off of her when she was working in Ethiopia and Tanzania I ask her to meet here in Agra. She shows up on the second day and we’re supposed to take a train down to Aurangabad, but a major train accident on the way forces us to shift gears and get a flight from Delhi. So we drive up to the capital and crash at some fleabag hotel beside the airport when suddenly a memory flashes before my eyes like a vivid dream; I am in Dublin the night before Euro Partner Day and we are drunk in a cab going back to our hotel and I’m talking with Tim Evans and Jacoby Thwaites about how great Zaytoon’s kebab is when the Indian cabbie stops the car, turns around with a crazy look and howls: “Kariiiiiimm!” When asked for more context he says that Karim’s in New Delhi has by far the best kebab on the planet and makes Zaytoon look like McDonalds. How dare I praise plebian Zaytoon while regal Karim’s still stands? The owner, he claims, is a direct descendant of the chef of the Mughal emperors and the recipe’s been a family secret for centuries.
I wasn’t planning on going to Delhi so I quickly forgot the incident, but suddenly there it stands before me, the White Whale of kebabs. So I drag my poor mother back onto the street and find a couple of nice kids with a van who say they’ll take us there and back for 400 rupees. We end up getting an impromptu tour of the city’s highlights by night, including the Congress Building, Connaught Place, India Gate and so forth, before descending into the maze of dim-lit Old Delhi with its endless bazaar labyrinths and impossible masses of people camped out by the big mosque around cookstoves and donkey carts, from where we stagger through the traffic in a small alleyway to a bombed-out little storefront that is the promised land of kebabs – woo hoo, Karim’s! And yes it turns out to be the most deliciously spiced, melt-in-your-mouth kebab experience ever. Ladies and gents, we have a new world champion. And end up talking all night to a family from Lucknow that’s crammed in beside us on the benches. Which was more sublime, the Taj Mahal or the kebab? Tough call.
At five in the morning we rustle out of our beds and fly to Aurangabad. There’s a Starbucks in the terminal – I almost weep for joy. And pass through airport security with a look in my eye that says “you can pry this quad venti non-fat latte out of my cold, dead hand”. Aurangabad it turns out is a run-down little city in the rural district of Maharashtra that’s chief claim to fame is proximity to the ancient cave art of Ajanta and Ellora, which escaped the rampages of Muslim conquerors by being lost and forgotten for centuries.
Ellora is a series of 30 caves along a wilderness escarpment, chock full of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist statuary and chapels starting from around 200 AD. At the time it was used for cave monasteries, and the sculpture is downright staggering. First the caves have been grooved out to provide proper ceilings and floors with little stone steps leading up to them, then palace pillars with ornate carvings along them are cut out of the interior. Then there are all these magnificent, vibrant sculptures like what you might see in some lost wing of the British Museum, in quantities it’s hard to fathom. The highlight is a huge temple complex they carved completely out of the rock, Lalibela-style but a thousand years earlier, with all manner of elephant, monkey and lion sculptures adorning its surface and interior chapels, and three stories of hallways carved into the adjoining rockface on either side of the building. In some places you can still see the delicate paintwork that originally covered it. Jaw-dropping.
Ajanta is even more ridiculous. An entirely Buddhist complex with caves that were created as early as 300 BC, it lies two-thirds of the way up a huge, horseshoe-shaped cliff in the jungle and was lost until the early nineteenth century. The statuary is all here as well, and some of the caves have acoustics more perfect than most modern concert halls, but what’s so devastating are the largely intact murals from over 2000 years ago inside every cave, each one qualifying as a major work of art on the scale of the world’s greatest paintings, with long story cycles depicting various ancient events lost in the mist of time, people of all races and all walks of life, as sophisticated and subtle in style as Picasso or Rembrandt, an incomprehensively vast Cave Louvre still sitting here like a prehistoric time capsule, telling us of a civilization and a take on humanity more rich and visceral than you could have imagined. Enough said; some things you just have to see for yourself.
Well I would hate to go on at The Creek after THAT, even with LJ. And so the environs of Aurangabad seem a bit dingy afterwards, though not unpleasant like Agra. There’s a “baby Taj” from four centuries ago that mimics the original but is made of plaster and is crumbling quickly and a little water tank where people come to hang out in the afternoon and the ruins of a fortress complex dangling here and there along the side of a nearby mountain. We also make it out to drive through several hours of rolling farmland to a large crater lake populated with tons of birdlife, large troupes of tree monkeys and several abandoned old temples gone back to the jungle like props out of a Tarzan movie.
The people who live in Maharashtra are so much nicer and more relaxed than most in UP that I’m not prepared for it at first and get quite snappy when anyone approaches, as I automatically assume they’re out to scam me. But these are some of the mellowest people out there, and it’s a pleasure to hang out with them. The one idiosyncrasy is that they all want their picture taken with us. They don’t want to talk, want nothing especially to do with us afterward, just the photograph, ma’am. For example, one guy comes up to us on a bus and asks for a photo, it gets taken and then he goes back to his seat and acts like we no longer exist for the duration of the ride. It’s OK for awhile but they keep coming one after the other for the entire time we’re down there, and the ones with extended families deploy themselves in a long, impromptu rope line that stretches off in the distance so that each one can take their turn being individually photographed beside us.
I start getting impatient but my mother, who is at the end of the day a nicer person than I am, dives into the work as if she were Hillary Clinton and the future of US diplomacy counted on her handling of the whole situation, greeting everybody with a warm smile, a handshake and a moment of total attention, no matter whether the whole operation takes up the entire day or not. I think maybe something got lost in translation between our two generations. Born in the rural mountains of South Carolina, she somehow managed to retain a rural warmth that’s gotten stamped out of me for the most part, even after she moved to Chicago and worked her way slowly up the ladder of social work, from case worker to the head of all foster care, emeritus professor and international aid manager for East Africa. I would love to capture that patience and simple, genuine warmth for myself – but I suspect you’ll all have to make do with me as I am. I’m no Agra, but I may be Aurangabad.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
A Benares of the Mind
The chicken bus border at Bhairawa is the most chaotic and disorganized place I think I’ve ever been. It consists of little more than a concrete gate that says “Welcome to India” with a low-caste drum-and-chanting Kali procession moving past it, villagers trucking grains back and forth on buffalo-powered carts, and two Nepalese traffic cops consumed solely with the mass truck traffic. I’m the only gringo in evidence, and navigating through the street even with a backpack is a big challenge; I’m nearly mowed over more than once. When I ask the Nepalese cops about immigration they roll their eyes and impatiently point me toward India, then go on directing traffic. The Indian side is even more lassez-faire; they keep pointing me further and further down the road until eventually I’m well clear of the border and can do nothing more than get some guy to drive me toward Varanasi sans passport stamp. Has not been a problem thus far, we’ll see what happens when I try to leave the country.
So I’m driving along the border between UP and Bihar in a rickety old South Korean jeep with two kids who don’t speak a lick of English between them, skirting the Buddha trail from Lumbini to Bodhgaya, which is ironically today the most lawless and dangerous part of India, rife with Maoist guerillas, random acts of banditry and out-and-out caste warfare in parts. One local saying is that Gautama’s enlightenment in 600 BC was the last good news to ever come out of Bihar. But I encounter no overt lawlessness (aside from all the psycho driving) as we barrel through what seems like an unyielding urban center all the way from the border to Benares, punctuated with the occasional patch of rice paddies and one sad little government-run monkey forest where the monkeys all sit by the side of the road and watch the traffic go by, just like the people. Anyone who’s been to India will be familiar with the driving “rules”, but it was my first time so I was a bit daunted, seasoned traveler though I am. Driving here involves non-stop passing of donkey carts, buffalo carts, ice cream trucks, wandering sadhus, bicycles loaded down with rice sacks, slow-moving cargo trucks and packed public buses, here and there a cantankerous steer or a sudden flurry of goats crossing the road, honking your horn the whole time to let people know you’re coming and veering in and out of the wrong lane ad nauseum, often escaping an oncoming collision in a matter of centimeters. You spend the first hour in wide-eyed terror, then surrender yourself to the universe, kick back and watch the carnival of life go by.
It’s a long ten hours from the time I leave Lumbini to our arrival in the traffic-choked streets of Varanasi, and night has fallen hard. Everybody here is gearing up for Diwali, every house is lit up with Christmas lights, every storefront sells psychedelic neon Hindu idols and every little kid is packing ten or twenty M-80’s and is busy unleashing them into street traffic. It’s at that point that my driver offers up my very first northern India scam, dropping me at some fleabag hotel that wants 2500 rupees a night and refusing to take me further – in the hopes that he’ll get a big commission on top of what I already paid him. So I trundle into the broke-leg streets of Varanasi with my bags, not having the slightest idea where I am, and eventually get some scrawny bicycle rickshaw dude who looks like he’s about eighty to drive me to a ghat that’s near my hotel. During the ride power in the city goes out – probably can’t handle the load of all those Diwali lights – and my driver suffers what appears to be an asthma attack so that I get out and help walk the bicycle through the noisy, darkened streets until we arrive in the general area of my hotel, at which point I wander around in the dark asking for directions until I stumble across it at a little after midnight. Welcome to India! Life is good.
I’m up with the sun at 6am and go trundling through the ghats all morning. Mark Twain said this city was “older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together” and it must have been the riverfront he was referring to (admittedly there were no motorcycles in Mark Twain’s time, so the rest of the city may have seemed quite a bit older), especially in early mornings when thousands of people fan out across the various stone temples and religious-site-cum-bathouses that line the western bank of the Ganges in Benares, with steps leading directly to the water, each with a different cosmic sponsor (in one case it’s a deified local tree). Between each ghat there are little boatyards packed with weatherbeaten wooden sailboats, and circles of sari-wearing women singing and chanting. As the sun rises hundreds of people disrobe into their loin cloths and dive in. Some ghats have fallen out of favor and lie disused and decrepit, others are packed to the gills and have holy men chanting through loudspeaker systems as the celebrants drop in the water and let the river carry their sins downstream. At spots there are barbers shaving men’s hair off in preparation, and at one there are shorn high-caste acolytes in yellow robes chanting for hours on prayer mats. All along the waterfront the boats are just offshore, moving in to disgorge more worshippers. Tourists are few and far between, and the few that are here are of the blonde-dreadlocked, tabla-playing neo-hippie variety that have become such an international stereotype.
It’s a boring old truism that the Ganges is dirty as hell and that no one in their right mind would bathe here. But I wish I had the ability to convey the real beauty of the place. A singular life experience. Admittedly I was not tempted to take a dip in it myself, especially after seeing a heartbreaking funeral for a very small boy, maybe two years old, his father tending the duties by himself, attaching the child’s limp body to a small piece of driftwood and pushing it out to be upturned and sunk into the river along with all of the ashes being swept out from one of two segregated cremation zones. Equally upsetting was the attitude of the bottom-caste crematory staff, who were more interested in trying to stop me and scam me out of money than they were in attending to the man’s needs as he said goodbye to his small child. There are some very tough people in UP.
Around noon it gets hot hot hot here; all you can do is lie down and be poached beneath a ceiling fan as you wait for the furnace of mid-day to break. Then it’s off the wander the streets of Varanasi and see the big Diwali preparations, which include lots and lots of lights, firetrap storerooms crammed to the gills with combustible pyrotechnic devices, and religious processions in the streets with chanting and drums. The festival is based in part on a myth in which Rama’s wife was kidnapped by an evil baron in Sri Lanka, and Rama recaptured her with the help of Hanuman the monkey god, who created a bridge of monkeys that allowed Rama to walk over and get her back. As the sun starts to fade you’re invited into stranger’s homes and offered sweets, and one family even insists on feeding me.
At night the Diwali bomb hits. All down the river Hindu priests are performing fire ceremonies, the ghat steps are lit up with candles and long streams of tiny paper candle rafts are unfurled onto the river until it’s lit up like a kilometer-long birthday cake. The fireworks are not organized in the manner of an American celebration; instead it’s a mass chaos of every man for himself as M-80s blow off all around you, tens of thousands of bottle rockets scream overhead and the big 4th of July-style fireworks get shot from the rooftops for nine hours non-stop.
I can take it for a couple hours but eventually retreat to my hotel balcony, where the mild, elderly, lily white high-caste proprietors sit in their bamboo chairs and look out onto the chaos below like benevolent demigods. Hung along the walls are lush paintings of a Ganges of the mind, hung with flowers and tame jungle vines, where green-hued Krishna descends into the turquoise stillness of the full moon into this imaginary river, as an elephant gazes placidly at its own reflection from the shore. And I realize that this is what my proprietors see when they look out at the dirty, urban Ganges, this ancient but overbuilt matrix of the spirit and material worlds. During my time in India I see so many of these holy sites, irretrievably engulfed by the pollution of modernity but somehow still imbued by them with an eternal, placid peacefulness that entails blocking out the reality around them the way we block out bad smells that we pass on the streets of New York. It is this magic of the imagination that still makes Varanasi such an amazing place, as the primevality that they perceive is passed on to travelers by their actions. It is a collective act of will in a way. My proprietors wish me a Happy Diwali, offer me a lentil square and stare out with a look of profound peace as mass explosions rock every inch of the city, sometimes just a few feet away.
So I’m driving along the border between UP and Bihar in a rickety old South Korean jeep with two kids who don’t speak a lick of English between them, skirting the Buddha trail from Lumbini to Bodhgaya, which is ironically today the most lawless and dangerous part of India, rife with Maoist guerillas, random acts of banditry and out-and-out caste warfare in parts. One local saying is that Gautama’s enlightenment in 600 BC was the last good news to ever come out of Bihar. But I encounter no overt lawlessness (aside from all the psycho driving) as we barrel through what seems like an unyielding urban center all the way from the border to Benares, punctuated with the occasional patch of rice paddies and one sad little government-run monkey forest where the monkeys all sit by the side of the road and watch the traffic go by, just like the people. Anyone who’s been to India will be familiar with the driving “rules”, but it was my first time so I was a bit daunted, seasoned traveler though I am. Driving here involves non-stop passing of donkey carts, buffalo carts, ice cream trucks, wandering sadhus, bicycles loaded down with rice sacks, slow-moving cargo trucks and packed public buses, here and there a cantankerous steer or a sudden flurry of goats crossing the road, honking your horn the whole time to let people know you’re coming and veering in and out of the wrong lane ad nauseum, often escaping an oncoming collision in a matter of centimeters. You spend the first hour in wide-eyed terror, then surrender yourself to the universe, kick back and watch the carnival of life go by.
It’s a long ten hours from the time I leave Lumbini to our arrival in the traffic-choked streets of Varanasi, and night has fallen hard. Everybody here is gearing up for Diwali, every house is lit up with Christmas lights, every storefront sells psychedelic neon Hindu idols and every little kid is packing ten or twenty M-80’s and is busy unleashing them into street traffic. It’s at that point that my driver offers up my very first northern India scam, dropping me at some fleabag hotel that wants 2500 rupees a night and refusing to take me further – in the hopes that he’ll get a big commission on top of what I already paid him. So I trundle into the broke-leg streets of Varanasi with my bags, not having the slightest idea where I am, and eventually get some scrawny bicycle rickshaw dude who looks like he’s about eighty to drive me to a ghat that’s near my hotel. During the ride power in the city goes out – probably can’t handle the load of all those Diwali lights – and my driver suffers what appears to be an asthma attack so that I get out and help walk the bicycle through the noisy, darkened streets until we arrive in the general area of my hotel, at which point I wander around in the dark asking for directions until I stumble across it at a little after midnight. Welcome to India! Life is good.
I’m up with the sun at 6am and go trundling through the ghats all morning. Mark Twain said this city was “older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together” and it must have been the riverfront he was referring to (admittedly there were no motorcycles in Mark Twain’s time, so the rest of the city may have seemed quite a bit older), especially in early mornings when thousands of people fan out across the various stone temples and religious-site-cum-bathouses that line the western bank of the Ganges in Benares, with steps leading directly to the water, each with a different cosmic sponsor (in one case it’s a deified local tree). Between each ghat there are little boatyards packed with weatherbeaten wooden sailboats, and circles of sari-wearing women singing and chanting. As the sun rises hundreds of people disrobe into their loin cloths and dive in. Some ghats have fallen out of favor and lie disused and decrepit, others are packed to the gills and have holy men chanting through loudspeaker systems as the celebrants drop in the water and let the river carry their sins downstream. At spots there are barbers shaving men’s hair off in preparation, and at one there are shorn high-caste acolytes in yellow robes chanting for hours on prayer mats. All along the waterfront the boats are just offshore, moving in to disgorge more worshippers. Tourists are few and far between, and the few that are here are of the blonde-dreadlocked, tabla-playing neo-hippie variety that have become such an international stereotype.
It’s a boring old truism that the Ganges is dirty as hell and that no one in their right mind would bathe here. But I wish I had the ability to convey the real beauty of the place. A singular life experience. Admittedly I was not tempted to take a dip in it myself, especially after seeing a heartbreaking funeral for a very small boy, maybe two years old, his father tending the duties by himself, attaching the child’s limp body to a small piece of driftwood and pushing it out to be upturned and sunk into the river along with all of the ashes being swept out from one of two segregated cremation zones. Equally upsetting was the attitude of the bottom-caste crematory staff, who were more interested in trying to stop me and scam me out of money than they were in attending to the man’s needs as he said goodbye to his small child. There are some very tough people in UP.
Around noon it gets hot hot hot here; all you can do is lie down and be poached beneath a ceiling fan as you wait for the furnace of mid-day to break. Then it’s off the wander the streets of Varanasi and see the big Diwali preparations, which include lots and lots of lights, firetrap storerooms crammed to the gills with combustible pyrotechnic devices, and religious processions in the streets with chanting and drums. The festival is based in part on a myth in which Rama’s wife was kidnapped by an evil baron in Sri Lanka, and Rama recaptured her with the help of Hanuman the monkey god, who created a bridge of monkeys that allowed Rama to walk over and get her back. As the sun starts to fade you’re invited into stranger’s homes and offered sweets, and one family even insists on feeding me.
At night the Diwali bomb hits. All down the river Hindu priests are performing fire ceremonies, the ghat steps are lit up with candles and long streams of tiny paper candle rafts are unfurled onto the river until it’s lit up like a kilometer-long birthday cake. The fireworks are not organized in the manner of an American celebration; instead it’s a mass chaos of every man for himself as M-80s blow off all around you, tens of thousands of bottle rockets scream overhead and the big 4th of July-style fireworks get shot from the rooftops for nine hours non-stop.
I can take it for a couple hours but eventually retreat to my hotel balcony, where the mild, elderly, lily white high-caste proprietors sit in their bamboo chairs and look out onto the chaos below like benevolent demigods. Hung along the walls are lush paintings of a Ganges of the mind, hung with flowers and tame jungle vines, where green-hued Krishna descends into the turquoise stillness of the full moon into this imaginary river, as an elephant gazes placidly at its own reflection from the shore. And I realize that this is what my proprietors see when they look out at the dirty, urban Ganges, this ancient but overbuilt matrix of the spirit and material worlds. During my time in India I see so many of these holy sites, irretrievably engulfed by the pollution of modernity but somehow still imbued by them with an eternal, placid peacefulness that entails blocking out the reality around them the way we block out bad smells that we pass on the streets of New York. It is this magic of the imagination that still makes Varanasi such an amazing place, as the primevality that they perceive is passed on to travelers by their actions. It is a collective act of will in a way. My proprietors wish me a Happy Diwali, offer me a lentil square and stare out with a look of profound peace as mass explosions rock every inch of the city, sometimes just a few feet away.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Brown Sugar
I’m tired and intent on spoiling myself in Kathmandu, so the first order of business is to upgrade hotels and find out what passes for pizza in these parts. My buddy Tom Przydrozny beamed out instructions to stay at the Dwarika a few days earlier so I’m booking two nights there. Tom doesn’t let me down – Dwarika is magnificent, luxurious and calm, more a museum than a hotel as its buildings and furnishings are composed entirely of centuries-old woodwork chock full of traditional Nepalese carvings. They were saved from destruction by the hotel’s namesake owner, out of various and sundry demolitions of traditional homes that have occurred in recent decades as the city’s urban blight expands outward across the valley. Otherwise all this magnificent art would have been firewood – often he had to compensate construction crews with an equal weight of plywood in order to save them. I could have spent my entire time in Kathmandu just perusing the inlaid Hindu carvings in these window frames, stupas, headboards and chairs and made excellent use of my time; the furnishings in my room alone could make up a wing in the Met.
The pizza, on the other hand, is pedestrian but acceptable.
Nepal is a deeply Hindu country, though a small minority of Buddhists still live here, and a giant plaster statue of Shiva stands sentinel over the whole of the vast Kathmandu valley as you approach it from the east. Appropriate as Shiva is god of the universe’s endless cycles of destruction and regeneration, and he stands guard, trident in hand, over the most profound destruction of the rural valley and original city, and its re-creation as an impossibly populous third world urban center, a thick cloud of smog-belch hovering over roads choked with construction sites, motorcycles and minivans. Vishnu, the other major extant deity, is the Preserver, he who when possible keeps what’s good from going into the trash compactor of Shiva’s interminable churning. So if Kathmandu is in the throes of Shiva as never before, then Dwarika is a little island of Vishnu amid all the indiscriminate bulldozing.
There are still lovely old neighborhoods in Kathmandu with big square courtyards and wooden window work still attached to their original buildings, but they’re few and far between enough that focusing solely on them is like flying to Paris and talking about Disneyland France. Mostly Kathmandu is a modern third-world Asian city so densely packed with people, rickshaws, pack animals and cars that every moment is a sensory assault, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Stop for a moment in the crushing foot traffic and you’re likely to get mowed down. The locals are so inured to it all that they blithely scamper out into heavy traffic in their business suits and saris and elbow their way through the clogged streets, often with small children in tow and with insufficient regard for life and limb, some carrying huge canvas sacks stuffed with cargo slung across their backs as they bolt out onto the highway. Diwali is coming up so everyone is starting to light candles in their windows and set off fireworks on top of the usual chaos.
Punctuating every part of the city are the ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples that everyone visits while stuck in town setting up their Annapurna treks. They defy umbrella description apart from their antiquity. In some monkeys are considered holy and thus allowed to run rampant, in others it is the rat that is revered and you’re unlikely to escape without having at least one scamper across your leg. There is the vast white dome from the fifth century that attracts hundreds of Tibetan exiles and their shaman prayer flags (I first saw them in Russia and still they follow me), the giant medieval pagoda down by Freak Street and the 2000+ year-old statue of Shiva in his brutish, red-faced Bhairawa the Destroyer incarnation, stepping on the head of a man (looks like Buddha?) with a string of skulls slung around his neck and a pair of nasty looking fangs.
I ask one man what the point is of all these innumerable manifestations of a single deity and he says it’s basically all “illusion” but that the god wears a different face in human society based on the different roles it plays. For example, Shiva brought you into being so in a way he’s like your mother, but when the time comes for Shiva to take your life you don’t want to see your mother coming to lop off your head. “It is as if you have committed a murder and your father is the judge” is the best way he can put it.
The most haunting temple is a little one to Kali where a “living manifestation” of the goddess is installed and made available for viewing and worship from a small balcony. This is a little girl that is plucked from some rural village every few years at the age of four, gussied up like Kali and worshipped until she turns eleven, at which point she’s sent back to her village to resume a normal life. The belief is that she actually is the goddess Kali during that time. She looks cute and a bit sad, stuck up there from 9-5, seven days a week like some primeval Barbie doll. Kali is a strange one to be manifested as a small child. Closely associated with Shiva the Destroyer, she’s bloodthirsty and dangerous, considered a personification of Time itself by those with a philosophical bent. In the early nineteenth century they still sacrificed young boys to her in Calcutta and Kerala, and even now they’ll be sacrificing a goat to her in a nearby temple in two days.
The final stop on the holy site circuit are the cremation grounds along a bend in one of the Ganges’ many northern tributaries. The baths are lined with grimy marble steps where sit a smattering of middle-aged man looking out over the multiple smoke pyres with a wistful look in their eyes, and a klatch of dreadlocked, loin-clothed sadhus, itinerant holy men with their faces painted in chalk, like tribal relics. Sadhus are colorful and give good photo, but as far as I can tell this group is merely a bunch of surly deadbeats who got tired of working and raising their families and now hang out in holy places smoking dope and hitting up tourists for small change. There’s apparently no requirement they become enlightened, they do it “for their own pleasure” as one man puts it, and if they happen to stumble across enlightenment along the way so be it, they share the wealth with the occasional faith healing.
Along the opposite side of the river is a grim-looking concrete hospice where the terminally ill come to die by the side of the river. Every once in awhile an ambulance rolls up and disgorges another body in a burlap sack. The male relatives follow it out and the local funeral director (i.e. an “untouchable”) dresses it up with flower garlands and colorful dusts, then it’s raised to the platform, firewood is stacked on top and it starts to burn, with a big cloud of smoke rolling upwind of it for three hours or more. Further off someone is pouring the ashes from a completed cremation into the river, and a bit further up from that three little children swim. Shiva’s work never stops. And sadly there’s no Dwarika Hotel for the collection of spent human souls. The ashes whorl downstream and dissolve into the mud-color of the river like brown sugar into dark coffee.
The pizza, on the other hand, is pedestrian but acceptable.
Nepal is a deeply Hindu country, though a small minority of Buddhists still live here, and a giant plaster statue of Shiva stands sentinel over the whole of the vast Kathmandu valley as you approach it from the east. Appropriate as Shiva is god of the universe’s endless cycles of destruction and regeneration, and he stands guard, trident in hand, over the most profound destruction of the rural valley and original city, and its re-creation as an impossibly populous third world urban center, a thick cloud of smog-belch hovering over roads choked with construction sites, motorcycles and minivans. Vishnu, the other major extant deity, is the Preserver, he who when possible keeps what’s good from going into the trash compactor of Shiva’s interminable churning. So if Kathmandu is in the throes of Shiva as never before, then Dwarika is a little island of Vishnu amid all the indiscriminate bulldozing.
There are still lovely old neighborhoods in Kathmandu with big square courtyards and wooden window work still attached to their original buildings, but they’re few and far between enough that focusing solely on them is like flying to Paris and talking about Disneyland France. Mostly Kathmandu is a modern third-world Asian city so densely packed with people, rickshaws, pack animals and cars that every moment is a sensory assault, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Stop for a moment in the crushing foot traffic and you’re likely to get mowed down. The locals are so inured to it all that they blithely scamper out into heavy traffic in their business suits and saris and elbow their way through the clogged streets, often with small children in tow and with insufficient regard for life and limb, some carrying huge canvas sacks stuffed with cargo slung across their backs as they bolt out onto the highway. Diwali is coming up so everyone is starting to light candles in their windows and set off fireworks on top of the usual chaos.
Punctuating every part of the city are the ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples that everyone visits while stuck in town setting up their Annapurna treks. They defy umbrella description apart from their antiquity. In some monkeys are considered holy and thus allowed to run rampant, in others it is the rat that is revered and you’re unlikely to escape without having at least one scamper across your leg. There is the vast white dome from the fifth century that attracts hundreds of Tibetan exiles and their shaman prayer flags (I first saw them in Russia and still they follow me), the giant medieval pagoda down by Freak Street and the 2000+ year-old statue of Shiva in his brutish, red-faced Bhairawa the Destroyer incarnation, stepping on the head of a man (looks like Buddha?) with a string of skulls slung around his neck and a pair of nasty looking fangs.
I ask one man what the point is of all these innumerable manifestations of a single deity and he says it’s basically all “illusion” but that the god wears a different face in human society based on the different roles it plays. For example, Shiva brought you into being so in a way he’s like your mother, but when the time comes for Shiva to take your life you don’t want to see your mother coming to lop off your head. “It is as if you have committed a murder and your father is the judge” is the best way he can put it.
The most haunting temple is a little one to Kali where a “living manifestation” of the goddess is installed and made available for viewing and worship from a small balcony. This is a little girl that is plucked from some rural village every few years at the age of four, gussied up like Kali and worshipped until she turns eleven, at which point she’s sent back to her village to resume a normal life. The belief is that she actually is the goddess Kali during that time. She looks cute and a bit sad, stuck up there from 9-5, seven days a week like some primeval Barbie doll. Kali is a strange one to be manifested as a small child. Closely associated with Shiva the Destroyer, she’s bloodthirsty and dangerous, considered a personification of Time itself by those with a philosophical bent. In the early nineteenth century they still sacrificed young boys to her in Calcutta and Kerala, and even now they’ll be sacrificing a goat to her in a nearby temple in two days.
The final stop on the holy site circuit are the cremation grounds along a bend in one of the Ganges’ many northern tributaries. The baths are lined with grimy marble steps where sit a smattering of middle-aged man looking out over the multiple smoke pyres with a wistful look in their eyes, and a klatch of dreadlocked, loin-clothed sadhus, itinerant holy men with their faces painted in chalk, like tribal relics. Sadhus are colorful and give good photo, but as far as I can tell this group is merely a bunch of surly deadbeats who got tired of working and raising their families and now hang out in holy places smoking dope and hitting up tourists for small change. There’s apparently no requirement they become enlightened, they do it “for their own pleasure” as one man puts it, and if they happen to stumble across enlightenment along the way so be it, they share the wealth with the occasional faith healing.
Along the opposite side of the river is a grim-looking concrete hospice where the terminally ill come to die by the side of the river. Every once in awhile an ambulance rolls up and disgorges another body in a burlap sack. The male relatives follow it out and the local funeral director (i.e. an “untouchable”) dresses it up with flower garlands and colorful dusts, then it’s raised to the platform, firewood is stacked on top and it starts to burn, with a big cloud of smoke rolling upwind of it for three hours or more. Further off someone is pouring the ashes from a completed cremation into the river, and a bit further up from that three little children swim. Shiva’s work never stops. And sadly there’s no Dwarika Hotel for the collection of spent human souls. The ashes whorl downstream and dissolve into the mud-color of the river like brown sugar into dark coffee.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Descending from the Moon
Emerging from the environs of Everest is like clambering off of the moon and slowly swooping back in a long curve toward the atmosphere over the course of several days, like Chuang Tzu’s big philosophical bird. Our first night is spent in Tingri, a godforsaken little concrete outpost that is as middle of nowhere as it gets. Even in the desert a day outside Timbuktu I felt I hadn’t quite made it all the way because I still could have gone fifteen days further with the Tuareg by camel to see the salt mines hidden in the Sahara’s bowels, but everything beyond the bumfuck little town of Tingri is closer to, not further from, the familiar. The mountains around it are craggy and barren, the hotel is a broken-down dump torn from the set of a 1970s slasher movie, and the one-storey concrete block housing scattered about bespeaks the breakdown of liveability. The one thing to do is wander about and watch the villagers tend goats. At one point a woman goads a cow away from a precipice and leads it back into the yard. The stars are again magnificent at night, but we are warned not to wander the street (singular) because there are packs of wild dogs.
So we’re left to Google Sky Map it from the hotel stoop, and for the first time I see & identify all twelve astrology constellations, including my own Capricorn, which is disappointingly modest. Also seven or eight shooting stars, until I run out of wishes. The food at the hotel is good Chinese home cooking, but something makes me very ill and I spend the next day getting sick all over some of the most beautiful places on Earth. First there is the final mountain pass: 5500 meters high, clotted with rope lines of prayer flags at the top and with an unbeatable vista of a dozen different ice mountains. I spend 20 minutes searching for somewhere to go to the bathroom, but every bit of cover is a holy place of some sort and I’m not that much of a jerk; I’m captured in one bit of tourist video shambling off in the distance like some trailer park denizen’s amateur footage of Bigfoot.
Then we start the border descent – if you were to bike this route you would spend at least two days going downhill. Interspersed at regular intervals are stone medieval ruins of forts overrun in distant centuries by the Nepalese or English. After a couple of hours there are bushes that can spare enough energy to bother changing colors in autumn. Then there are trees, real trees! I’d forgotten them so thoroughly I didn’t know how much I missed them. And more and more trees, the mountains are still big but are covered with them now, great operatic cliffs draped with vines and wildflowers, and with waterfalls spilling over them at regular intervals, like the lush mountains of Sichuan. We’ve arrived at Paradise.
The Chinese government is busy improving the roads, which are perched perilously over the precipice of a massive canyon and were previously prone to deadly landslides. Unfortunately, this means they’ve closed off our little one-lane road at one point for the next six hours, until dusk. So we get out with our backpacks and hike through the remote, mountainous construction site (though I still feel like crap) with its blue tarp tents and its little canvas canteen, its waterfall-powered cement machine and its dozens of Nepalese laborers hacking the rocks apart above us, chopping up the road and carrying it off, and setting concrete blocks with steel supports to be laid later in the day, hardhat Chinese engineers talking through some technical quandary here in the middle of nowhere, and a couple of waterfalls thrumming above us and right onto the old road. Then further across the pristine canyon and down into the snaking, one-lane border town of Zhangmu, which follows the looping road for well over a kilometer and continues across the border on the Nepalese side with another name.
Zhangmu is a singular place, hugging the road along the side of a mountain like a ghetto Positano, with little more than storefront shops, ratty tourist hotels and the occasional brothel. It’s a bit Wild West, with Chinese, Tibetans and Nepalese rubbing shoulders along the many bends in the narrow road as it repeatedly doubles back & descends. The water here is from little rivers that flow down the side of the mountain, and it’s pretty unhygienic; water from one is used to power a small tsampa mill at one point, further down you see the same stream being peed in from a hut, someone’s washing clothes in it at the next bend and further below you see someone drinking from it. Our hotel is a notch better than Tingri, but that’s a low bar to set; one restaurant’s food is edible but the whole place reeks of yak grease and so do I afterward, even after showering. So why do I love Zhangmu so much? In a word, it is awesome.
Next morning the border opens and we’re off across the Friendship Bridge to Nepal. The Chinese border post is busy with Nepalese day-laborers going the opposite way, and though they do search our luggage they’re extremely polite. My temporary travel partner Rany Ng’s Tibet permit apparently expired the day before and so I prepare to call her parents and inform them she’s in prison, then call Google and tell them I’m happy to take her job and her equity, but thankfully the Chinese let her go and we’re free to continue. Our Tibetan guide, who so annoyed me throughout the journey, waves us a doleful goodbye as we cross into another country and I’m suddenly struck by how limiting his little forays from Lhasa to the border must be, and get some insight into why he seems so bored by it all. He blathered on in places of worship, incessantly hit on and at one point proposed marriage to Rany and I’m pretty sure spent every night of our journey in one brothel or another like a little Johnny Appleseed of VD, but he did take me out for a really good pub crawl in Shigatse, and for that I thank him, dumbass though he may be. And in Tibet you’re required to have a guide, so he did make this leg of the trip possible.
Paradise continues on the Nepal side but the vibe is different. The people look markedly different ethnically for one, and there are dozens of huge, colorful trucks parked along the road that you have to navigate around with your luggage. There is more chaos and yet somehow less stress, like you can breathe a bit more easily. Everybody’s chilled out and hanging by the side of the road all the way to Kathmandu. We acquire a Nepalese driver and start journeying south through an especially lush stretch of the Himalayas for an hour before all traffic stops. So we get out and wander past fifty or so trucks and see a bus that went off the road the night before, teetering on two wheels (one front and one back) with its ass up in the air blocking traffic and its front-end pointing perilously straight down into what can truly be called an abyss. You think of all those people you see riding on the top of every bus in Nepal and wonder if they all made it off alive or not. And look, there’s a suspension bridge that advertises bungee jumping just 100 meters further! We bless our luck – like a sign from God! – run over and get ready to bungee jump for the first time in our lives, but the operation has been closed because there are too many people milling about, and my faith in divine interventions that involve catastrophic bus accidents is shaken to its core.
As we wait for our car to carefully slide its way along one side of the cliff past the accident – which involves slowly driving UNDER part of the bus without hitting it and knocking it into the canyon – we meet an innocuous little Brahmin police officer who asks us for a ride home as he’s been at the site of the accident all night. A very sweet, mild guy, seems respected by his community, harmless really. You have a hard time imagining him swatting a mosquito much less forcibly taking down a perp. He’s a fine person but I start getting alarmed when he tells me he’s been selected for UN peacekeeping work to train the police force in Haiti and potentially the Sudan. He’s off to Haiti in a few weeks! Because, he says, they need training and Nepal wants to help.
Ladies and gentleman, from a UN system veteran, here we have a case study for why UN missions rarely work as well as they should. This little dude may be just fine in his home environment, but having experienced the Haitian police force in action I can authoritatively confirm that he’s dead meat the minute he hits Port-au-Prince. You can only laugh. He asks if they speak English there and I watch him grow bewildered and his eyes glass over in panic as I inform him they speak a sort of combo dialect of French and West African languages. The sad part is he’ll probably be over there talking softly and overly politely in his OK-but-not-exactly-stellar English to a translator who will “sort of” understand him and relay the general sense of his lecture to a bunch of quasi-reformed Haitian cops crammed into undersized school desks in a sweltering, windowless classroom, listening to him yammer all day about being more polite. He seems a bit worse for wear as a small glimmer of reality sets in, but he has a “gentle but stiff upper lip” vibe going and gives us a little goodbye wave without commenting further. I do hope he’s OK, he’s a remarkably sweet fellow, and may be in my beloved but troubled Haiti right now.
So we’re left to Google Sky Map it from the hotel stoop, and for the first time I see & identify all twelve astrology constellations, including my own Capricorn, which is disappointingly modest. Also seven or eight shooting stars, until I run out of wishes. The food at the hotel is good Chinese home cooking, but something makes me very ill and I spend the next day getting sick all over some of the most beautiful places on Earth. First there is the final mountain pass: 5500 meters high, clotted with rope lines of prayer flags at the top and with an unbeatable vista of a dozen different ice mountains. I spend 20 minutes searching for somewhere to go to the bathroom, but every bit of cover is a holy place of some sort and I’m not that much of a jerk; I’m captured in one bit of tourist video shambling off in the distance like some trailer park denizen’s amateur footage of Bigfoot.
Then we start the border descent – if you were to bike this route you would spend at least two days going downhill. Interspersed at regular intervals are stone medieval ruins of forts overrun in distant centuries by the Nepalese or English. After a couple of hours there are bushes that can spare enough energy to bother changing colors in autumn. Then there are trees, real trees! I’d forgotten them so thoroughly I didn’t know how much I missed them. And more and more trees, the mountains are still big but are covered with them now, great operatic cliffs draped with vines and wildflowers, and with waterfalls spilling over them at regular intervals, like the lush mountains of Sichuan. We’ve arrived at Paradise.
The Chinese government is busy improving the roads, which are perched perilously over the precipice of a massive canyon and were previously prone to deadly landslides. Unfortunately, this means they’ve closed off our little one-lane road at one point for the next six hours, until dusk. So we get out with our backpacks and hike through the remote, mountainous construction site (though I still feel like crap) with its blue tarp tents and its little canvas canteen, its waterfall-powered cement machine and its dozens of Nepalese laborers hacking the rocks apart above us, chopping up the road and carrying it off, and setting concrete blocks with steel supports to be laid later in the day, hardhat Chinese engineers talking through some technical quandary here in the middle of nowhere, and a couple of waterfalls thrumming above us and right onto the old road. Then further across the pristine canyon and down into the snaking, one-lane border town of Zhangmu, which follows the looping road for well over a kilometer and continues across the border on the Nepalese side with another name.
Zhangmu is a singular place, hugging the road along the side of a mountain like a ghetto Positano, with little more than storefront shops, ratty tourist hotels and the occasional brothel. It’s a bit Wild West, with Chinese, Tibetans and Nepalese rubbing shoulders along the many bends in the narrow road as it repeatedly doubles back & descends. The water here is from little rivers that flow down the side of the mountain, and it’s pretty unhygienic; water from one is used to power a small tsampa mill at one point, further down you see the same stream being peed in from a hut, someone’s washing clothes in it at the next bend and further below you see someone drinking from it. Our hotel is a notch better than Tingri, but that’s a low bar to set; one restaurant’s food is edible but the whole place reeks of yak grease and so do I afterward, even after showering. So why do I love Zhangmu so much? In a word, it is awesome.
Next morning the border opens and we’re off across the Friendship Bridge to Nepal. The Chinese border post is busy with Nepalese day-laborers going the opposite way, and though they do search our luggage they’re extremely polite. My temporary travel partner Rany Ng’s Tibet permit apparently expired the day before and so I prepare to call her parents and inform them she’s in prison, then call Google and tell them I’m happy to take her job and her equity, but thankfully the Chinese let her go and we’re free to continue. Our Tibetan guide, who so annoyed me throughout the journey, waves us a doleful goodbye as we cross into another country and I’m suddenly struck by how limiting his little forays from Lhasa to the border must be, and get some insight into why he seems so bored by it all. He blathered on in places of worship, incessantly hit on and at one point proposed marriage to Rany and I’m pretty sure spent every night of our journey in one brothel or another like a little Johnny Appleseed of VD, but he did take me out for a really good pub crawl in Shigatse, and for that I thank him, dumbass though he may be. And in Tibet you’re required to have a guide, so he did make this leg of the trip possible.
Paradise continues on the Nepal side but the vibe is different. The people look markedly different ethnically for one, and there are dozens of huge, colorful trucks parked along the road that you have to navigate around with your luggage. There is more chaos and yet somehow less stress, like you can breathe a bit more easily. Everybody’s chilled out and hanging by the side of the road all the way to Kathmandu. We acquire a Nepalese driver and start journeying south through an especially lush stretch of the Himalayas for an hour before all traffic stops. So we get out and wander past fifty or so trucks and see a bus that went off the road the night before, teetering on two wheels (one front and one back) with its ass up in the air blocking traffic and its front-end pointing perilously straight down into what can truly be called an abyss. You think of all those people you see riding on the top of every bus in Nepal and wonder if they all made it off alive or not. And look, there’s a suspension bridge that advertises bungee jumping just 100 meters further! We bless our luck – like a sign from God! – run over and get ready to bungee jump for the first time in our lives, but the operation has been closed because there are too many people milling about, and my faith in divine interventions that involve catastrophic bus accidents is shaken to its core.
As we wait for our car to carefully slide its way along one side of the cliff past the accident – which involves slowly driving UNDER part of the bus without hitting it and knocking it into the canyon – we meet an innocuous little Brahmin police officer who asks us for a ride home as he’s been at the site of the accident all night. A very sweet, mild guy, seems respected by his community, harmless really. You have a hard time imagining him swatting a mosquito much less forcibly taking down a perp. He’s a fine person but I start getting alarmed when he tells me he’s been selected for UN peacekeeping work to train the police force in Haiti and potentially the Sudan. He’s off to Haiti in a few weeks! Because, he says, they need training and Nepal wants to help.
Ladies and gentleman, from a UN system veteran, here we have a case study for why UN missions rarely work as well as they should. This little dude may be just fine in his home environment, but having experienced the Haitian police force in action I can authoritatively confirm that he’s dead meat the minute he hits Port-au-Prince. You can only laugh. He asks if they speak English there and I watch him grow bewildered and his eyes glass over in panic as I inform him they speak a sort of combo dialect of French and West African languages. The sad part is he’ll probably be over there talking softly and overly politely in his OK-but-not-exactly-stellar English to a translator who will “sort of” understand him and relay the general sense of his lecture to a bunch of quasi-reformed Haitian cops crammed into undersized school desks in a sweltering, windowless classroom, listening to him yammer all day about being more polite. He seems a bit worse for wear as a small glimmer of reality sets in, but he has a “gentle but stiff upper lip” vibe going and gives us a little goodbye wave without commenting further. I do hope he’s OK, he’s a remarkably sweet fellow, and may be in my beloved but troubled Haiti right now.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Across the Himalayas
Tibet’s been part of the People’s Republic of China for over fifty years, but it still feels like an armed occupation in Lhasa. There are military checkpoints at every intersection, patrols navigating the maze of alleys in between, and a phalanx of foot soldiers always marching the main square outside Lhasa’s monastery. Every few hours a patrol of three tanks trudges slowly through the streets with soldiers in black SWAT outfits keeping a wary eye out from the gun turrets. The sheer amount of firepower is hard to understand given the current peacefulness; apparently it’s a response to a series of large-scale protests and riots last year.
The soldiers look tense as they stand on patrol, you can smell how unappreciated their presence is, and they can smell it too. There’s a palpable and fierce unit loyalty that you can see in the terse nods they pass amongst each other; these guys have each other’s backs, someone to trust in this place, a family of sorts. And I can’t help thinking of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, how hated they must be there and how fiercely they must cling to each other in that distant place, the same tense look in their eyes. To me and other passing civilians these kids are polite when possible, but you don’t want to cross them. Accidentally take the wrong snapshot, for example, and you can have your passport revoked and your ass sent summarily back to wherever you came from.
Tibetans are a world away from the Han Chinese of the coast. They look more like Mongolians or Native Americans, with long, ornate hair braids, weather-beaten faces and peasant dress torn from some distant century. The culture is similar to Mongolia’s, reflecting longstanding cultural ties. It was the Tibetans and their llama form of Buddhism that was exported to Mongolia, and before that they shared a common shamanic religious system, which is called Bon here. There are the same prayer flags and prayer wheels for the auto-enlightenment of the illiterate (a lot of religious practice here is rote), Buddhist gift-wrapping to an animist system of thought. The similarities are so striking you get the sense of a people who once roamed over all of Central and Northeast Asia in prehistory and were pushed back to the most mountainous and least accessible parts of Asia over several millennia.
Overriding first impressions of Lhasa – aside from the military presence – are the flood of devout pilgrims from all rural points of Tibet making their way every day to the downtown monastery in their traditional woollen garments and their handheld little prayer wheels, and the warren of crook-backed little streets that pass all manner of little storefronts – the ones I remember most are the open-air dental shops with examples of metal fillings displayed on signboards out front – and markets selling great big chunks of yak butter and meat, and fresh vegetables. In front of every house is a fold-out, low-tech solar panel that heats the tea kettle in the morning. The streets are packed with cavernous sweet-tea shops where patrons sit together on long wooden benches and loudly throw down cards, play music on ancient string instruments or simply gossip. Also noodle shops with yak soup, snooker tables, taverns with house guitars that anyone can play, corner restaurants with spiced chicken wings and yak “sizzlers”, and one good espresso shop that I track down by smell on my first day.
You can see why popular culture has glommed onto Tibet as a center of otherworldly mystical experience, and why so many visitors come here expecting to encounter some manner of larger-than-life “enlightenment”. There are few things more intoxicating than watching hundreds of primeval peasants prostrating themselves on prayer mats before an ancient building, amid chanting and candles burning yak butter, with mushroom clouds of incense wafting everywhere and the intermittent tolling of the temple bells. The monastery temple has just re-opened after an eight-day closure during the 60th anniversary to prevent any outbreak of protest, and a long line snakes through the main square thronging with petitioners seeking favors from various manifestations of the Buddha: the demonic Protector who holds the entire wheel of life in his arms, the multi-headed, multi-armed Future Buddha who can shift the course of events through the distance of time, and dozens more, each with their own little shrine. It’s a cosmogony that’s complex enough to make it not worth learning in detail, and each manifestation is showered with large amounts of small-denomination Chinese currency by poverty-stricken local petitioners as they pass through.
Late afternoon you see the shorn, red-robed monks tallying the day’s take from their changing area in the center of the temple, which given the extreme poverty makes the whole thing seem more like an ancient, low-tech televangelist operation. Those little amounts of money showered over every section of the temple add up; all you have to do is wander several blocks to witness the Potala Palace at night to see that – the Dalai Llama’s winter home, a truly massive structure set high on a precipice in the center of town, probably the most impressive thing I’ve seen, excepting maybe Lalibela in northern Ethiopia. How do you describe something like that? Or fathom the wealth it took to build at a time when Tibet was composed entirely of illiterate herders and peasants scraping barley out of the moonscape? The llamas were living well before Communist China took over; each of their tombs in the palace are crammed with tons of solid gold and thousands of jewels. And though the current Dalai Llama seems like an excellent person, the old order looks ugly in its way as the current one.
The architecture and art at these religious sites is amazing. Our government-required guide, though, is a nightmare, blathering on loudly in places of worship, conveying little of interest but doing his best to destroy the ambience, trying to rush us from spot to spot without experiencing anything other than the nails-on-chalkboard grate of his monotonous cawing. This despite the fact that he spent several years studying to be a monk. I basically have to ditch him at every stop.
Lhasa is 3,500 meters altitude, we’re headed 5,400 meters high and beyond, driving across multiple mountain passes and through the heart of the Himalayas to Everest Base Camp, over the Nepali border and thence Kathmandu. The land on the Chinese side of the border is bleakly beautiful. As the Indian subcontinent bores into Asia these peaks have been muscled up from the bottom of the earth into the farthest, thinnest tip of the planet’s atmosphere. You can see deep scars on the sides of these monstrous rocks from where they’ve been forced up into the light of day, and ridgebacks of rock where the wind has wiped off whatever small margin of topsoil originally covered them.
Some mountains don’t seem to belong next to one another. Some have thick deposits of mud, others are sandy and enigmatic as pyramids. At times there are long red ridges out of the American Southwest that lay out the earth’s timeline in red-and-orange strata, and then there are these alien, jet-black behemoths that have had all the history smashed and melted out of them in the earth’s furnace, covered with little crystallized burrs like mineralized porcupine quills. All of them spat out at random from deep inside somewhere, and rising four more inches every year. But even at the highest points there are locals selling deep sea fossils from before the time of the dinosaurs, from when these highest rocks on Earth were embedded at the bottom of an ocean.
The place is majestic but it really doesn’t look meant for human habitation. Yet there are people everywhere in the narrow valleys. The tree line is far behind us, and the only plants that scrape out an existence here are nasty, hard-scrabble little minimalist weeds that cling fiercely to the side of the rock and crabbily say “fuck you, I’m gonna live.” But appear to take little pleasure in it.
The people live in pretty little traditional Tibetan villages but scrape out a tough existence sowing barley with yaks and threshing it by hand with sickles. They drive by packed onto the backs of tractors, or on bicycles carrying massive bales of hay. At one point we stop at a little millinery where they use the river as power for a primitive mill that grinds the barley into a traditional wheat called tsampa. The locals offer us “barley beer”, which is strong as hell and probably not very hygienic, as the man of the house writhes in pain from some growth in his belly for which there is scant available modern medical attention. At other stops locals clamber over to us in search of a bit of food, and we accommodate them as best as we can; god knows how they make it through the winters. The temples are pretty much done away with and instead you have these piles of stone arranged in the shape of a stupa so that you can see the evolution from Bon to high Mahayana architecture.
There is a lot of larger-than-life beauty out here; there are a couple of shockingly beautiful blue lakes that wend between the mountains and follow the trail of our road for several kilometres, and mostly dried out river beds with trickles of half-frozen water trilling through them.
All of this is a prelude to the brutal transcendence of staring up at Everest from base camp. The barren moonscape of so much of the range was unexpected because I anticipated those endless snowy Himalayan peaks that really only get going along the border with Nepal, though you see a spectacular one here and there along the road south. Getting to Everest is a slap in the face. My god, what a beast. After ascending the steep curving road to the first tent encampment, taking a bus and then hiking up to the actual base camp you’re in some of the most barren territory on earth, gasping a bit for some of the scarce oxygen and staring at a glacier-crusted monster that is the closest thing to a god that you'll ever see in this life. It’s head is an impossibly large piece of abstract Egyptian statuary, placed too far on the left shoulder. From it’s right arm issues a series of jagged rock peaks that seem themselves impossible to climb, on the left is a long ice cliff in a semi-circle that looks sharp as a knife’s edge along the top, with an amphitheatre of snow beneath the semi-circle that would be an apt setting for judgement day. The terrible wind is shearing off a thundercloud of snow from the peak as we gawp up at it.
If there’s anything remotely like a spiritual experience to be had in Tibet, it’s here, though it’s in no way comforting standing in the face of this inhuman force and its train of lesser ice-capped mountains trailing off in the distance, visibly shrugging us off as if we were gnats.
"for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us."
-- Rilke
The soldiers look tense as they stand on patrol, you can smell how unappreciated their presence is, and they can smell it too. There’s a palpable and fierce unit loyalty that you can see in the terse nods they pass amongst each other; these guys have each other’s backs, someone to trust in this place, a family of sorts. And I can’t help thinking of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, how hated they must be there and how fiercely they must cling to each other in that distant place, the same tense look in their eyes. To me and other passing civilians these kids are polite when possible, but you don’t want to cross them. Accidentally take the wrong snapshot, for example, and you can have your passport revoked and your ass sent summarily back to wherever you came from.
Tibetans are a world away from the Han Chinese of the coast. They look more like Mongolians or Native Americans, with long, ornate hair braids, weather-beaten faces and peasant dress torn from some distant century. The culture is similar to Mongolia’s, reflecting longstanding cultural ties. It was the Tibetans and their llama form of Buddhism that was exported to Mongolia, and before that they shared a common shamanic religious system, which is called Bon here. There are the same prayer flags and prayer wheels for the auto-enlightenment of the illiterate (a lot of religious practice here is rote), Buddhist gift-wrapping to an animist system of thought. The similarities are so striking you get the sense of a people who once roamed over all of Central and Northeast Asia in prehistory and were pushed back to the most mountainous and least accessible parts of Asia over several millennia.
Overriding first impressions of Lhasa – aside from the military presence – are the flood of devout pilgrims from all rural points of Tibet making their way every day to the downtown monastery in their traditional woollen garments and their handheld little prayer wheels, and the warren of crook-backed little streets that pass all manner of little storefronts – the ones I remember most are the open-air dental shops with examples of metal fillings displayed on signboards out front – and markets selling great big chunks of yak butter and meat, and fresh vegetables. In front of every house is a fold-out, low-tech solar panel that heats the tea kettle in the morning. The streets are packed with cavernous sweet-tea shops where patrons sit together on long wooden benches and loudly throw down cards, play music on ancient string instruments or simply gossip. Also noodle shops with yak soup, snooker tables, taverns with house guitars that anyone can play, corner restaurants with spiced chicken wings and yak “sizzlers”, and one good espresso shop that I track down by smell on my first day.
You can see why popular culture has glommed onto Tibet as a center of otherworldly mystical experience, and why so many visitors come here expecting to encounter some manner of larger-than-life “enlightenment”. There are few things more intoxicating than watching hundreds of primeval peasants prostrating themselves on prayer mats before an ancient building, amid chanting and candles burning yak butter, with mushroom clouds of incense wafting everywhere and the intermittent tolling of the temple bells. The monastery temple has just re-opened after an eight-day closure during the 60th anniversary to prevent any outbreak of protest, and a long line snakes through the main square thronging with petitioners seeking favors from various manifestations of the Buddha: the demonic Protector who holds the entire wheel of life in his arms, the multi-headed, multi-armed Future Buddha who can shift the course of events through the distance of time, and dozens more, each with their own little shrine. It’s a cosmogony that’s complex enough to make it not worth learning in detail, and each manifestation is showered with large amounts of small-denomination Chinese currency by poverty-stricken local petitioners as they pass through.
Late afternoon you see the shorn, red-robed monks tallying the day’s take from their changing area in the center of the temple, which given the extreme poverty makes the whole thing seem more like an ancient, low-tech televangelist operation. Those little amounts of money showered over every section of the temple add up; all you have to do is wander several blocks to witness the Potala Palace at night to see that – the Dalai Llama’s winter home, a truly massive structure set high on a precipice in the center of town, probably the most impressive thing I’ve seen, excepting maybe Lalibela in northern Ethiopia. How do you describe something like that? Or fathom the wealth it took to build at a time when Tibet was composed entirely of illiterate herders and peasants scraping barley out of the moonscape? The llamas were living well before Communist China took over; each of their tombs in the palace are crammed with tons of solid gold and thousands of jewels. And though the current Dalai Llama seems like an excellent person, the old order looks ugly in its way as the current one.
The architecture and art at these religious sites is amazing. Our government-required guide, though, is a nightmare, blathering on loudly in places of worship, conveying little of interest but doing his best to destroy the ambience, trying to rush us from spot to spot without experiencing anything other than the nails-on-chalkboard grate of his monotonous cawing. This despite the fact that he spent several years studying to be a monk. I basically have to ditch him at every stop.
Lhasa is 3,500 meters altitude, we’re headed 5,400 meters high and beyond, driving across multiple mountain passes and through the heart of the Himalayas to Everest Base Camp, over the Nepali border and thence Kathmandu. The land on the Chinese side of the border is bleakly beautiful. As the Indian subcontinent bores into Asia these peaks have been muscled up from the bottom of the earth into the farthest, thinnest tip of the planet’s atmosphere. You can see deep scars on the sides of these monstrous rocks from where they’ve been forced up into the light of day, and ridgebacks of rock where the wind has wiped off whatever small margin of topsoil originally covered them.
Some mountains don’t seem to belong next to one another. Some have thick deposits of mud, others are sandy and enigmatic as pyramids. At times there are long red ridges out of the American Southwest that lay out the earth’s timeline in red-and-orange strata, and then there are these alien, jet-black behemoths that have had all the history smashed and melted out of them in the earth’s furnace, covered with little crystallized burrs like mineralized porcupine quills. All of them spat out at random from deep inside somewhere, and rising four more inches every year. But even at the highest points there are locals selling deep sea fossils from before the time of the dinosaurs, from when these highest rocks on Earth were embedded at the bottom of an ocean.
The place is majestic but it really doesn’t look meant for human habitation. Yet there are people everywhere in the narrow valleys. The tree line is far behind us, and the only plants that scrape out an existence here are nasty, hard-scrabble little minimalist weeds that cling fiercely to the side of the rock and crabbily say “fuck you, I’m gonna live.” But appear to take little pleasure in it.
The people live in pretty little traditional Tibetan villages but scrape out a tough existence sowing barley with yaks and threshing it by hand with sickles. They drive by packed onto the backs of tractors, or on bicycles carrying massive bales of hay. At one point we stop at a little millinery where they use the river as power for a primitive mill that grinds the barley into a traditional wheat called tsampa. The locals offer us “barley beer”, which is strong as hell and probably not very hygienic, as the man of the house writhes in pain from some growth in his belly for which there is scant available modern medical attention. At other stops locals clamber over to us in search of a bit of food, and we accommodate them as best as we can; god knows how they make it through the winters. The temples are pretty much done away with and instead you have these piles of stone arranged in the shape of a stupa so that you can see the evolution from Bon to high Mahayana architecture.
There is a lot of larger-than-life beauty out here; there are a couple of shockingly beautiful blue lakes that wend between the mountains and follow the trail of our road for several kilometres, and mostly dried out river beds with trickles of half-frozen water trilling through them.
All of this is a prelude to the brutal transcendence of staring up at Everest from base camp. The barren moonscape of so much of the range was unexpected because I anticipated those endless snowy Himalayan peaks that really only get going along the border with Nepal, though you see a spectacular one here and there along the road south. Getting to Everest is a slap in the face. My god, what a beast. After ascending the steep curving road to the first tent encampment, taking a bus and then hiking up to the actual base camp you’re in some of the most barren territory on earth, gasping a bit for some of the scarce oxygen and staring at a glacier-crusted monster that is the closest thing to a god that you'll ever see in this life. It’s head is an impossibly large piece of abstract Egyptian statuary, placed too far on the left shoulder. From it’s right arm issues a series of jagged rock peaks that seem themselves impossible to climb, on the left is a long ice cliff in a semi-circle that looks sharp as a knife’s edge along the top, with an amphitheatre of snow beneath the semi-circle that would be an apt setting for judgement day. The terrible wind is shearing off a thundercloud of snow from the peak as we gawp up at it.
If there’s anything remotely like a spiritual experience to be had in Tibet, it’s here, though it’s in no way comforting standing in the face of this inhuman force and its train of lesser ice-capped mountains trailing off in the distance, visibly shrugging us off as if we were gnats.
"for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us."
-- Rilke
Monday, October 19, 2009
Autumn Moon Festival
I’m sitting on the roof of a boat staring out at the surreal conical spires that fan out for miles along the Li River, a pleasantly bizarre Dr Seuss-scape where the earth has been carved into tall shapes that defy common sense, mountains topped with pointy dunce caps, drooping cliffs with tufts of grass, triple-humped camels covered in moss, squat bales of hay with a bite taken out of them, wobbly ziggurats ready to heave over, hills with little pillbox hats, layer on layer and really high, the furthest ones visible through mist. Really strange.
If you ever wondered where those surreal Chinese landscape paintings come from, this is it; underwater for hundreds of millions of years, the porous karst has been grooved into shapes that don’t seem to belong on this earth. Nothing can mar their strange beauty, not the armada of double-decker tourist boats that chugs downstream every day, not the city of Guilin, a big bustling concrete town marooned along a bend in the Li, full of narrow alleyways and rickshaws and with twelve different bridges leading out to the mainland on all sides.
The Chinese imagine various animals and people in the shape of the hills, some of them easily recognizable, some not. The most obvious is at the edge of town, a riverfront gap in the rock forming the shape of an elephant with its trunk draining water from the Li; legend says it carried a god through the sky until alighting in Guilin and being stunned by the beauty and wanting to stay. In punishment the god turned it to stone and left it here for the locals to scramble over.
There are tea plantations in the hills and rice fields in the plains. The town is urban but charming, with a long crooked pedestrian walkway in the center that holds old fashioned tea shops for tastings, little sweet shops and plenty of restaurants, from grimy little wok shops to snazzy indoor hot pots. I almost wander into one that serves dog, but am stopped by a local named Ho who steers me somewhere better for a very spicy beef dish. He’s a disarmingly pleasant guy who teaches calligraphy at a famous art school here, and is fairly well known in his own right, having won multiple gold medals for his work at national competitions in Beijing. A great guy: engaging, unpretentious, warm. He takes me through the town at night to see the bridges lit up and the fishermen and their cormorants in the waterfront parks, the kitschy local restaurant with snakes and rats in cages (we don’t eat there) and the best local art galleries.
At one point he asks about my “wife” and so I have to go into the whole widower routine, which is tiresome, but he shares with me as well – his wife was once pregnant but they found serious brain problems and were forced to abort the fetus. She hasn’t been pregnant since and is very sad about it. Then she calls his cell as if she knows he’s talking about her, and when she hears he’s met an American she offers us two tickets to some special acrobatics and magic show they’re putting on in honor of the festival of the autumn moon, which starts tonight. The festival involves passing out little cakes with red bean paste in the center and launching hundreds of paper lanterns into the night sky, powered by a mere candle but cascading one after another over our heads like a little spirit world spit out by the Li.
The crowd for the show is strictly local, lots of families and little kids. We get there halfway through, just in time for an appearance by the monkey king and something called “the pig fairy”, who pull audience members onstage and perform magic tricks with them as dupes. Then we detour back to the art gallery where some of his work is for sale, and though he’s not hawking anything I dig out a piece of his calligraphy that’s especially impressive and purchase it. It’s a famous ancient poem by the great Li Po about another Chinese river, the Yangtze; the selection of the text is a very personal decision by the calligrapher. It goes something like this:
Brother, there is no easy path through this life.
You navigate this life through the endless jagged rapids and rocks
of the Yangtze in a bamboo raft.
That’s the way it is.
The hero is the one who doesn’t just sit on some sandbar watching his cargo rot.
Jaw set, he maneuvers the malicious current,
cognizant of dangers, empty of fear,
though the water’s tentacles grab
from all directions to pull him under.
And when the snow of the highlands settles in his hair
and he sees that awesome river finally open
into the sea,
he knows that his journey is done,
finally done.
We part afterwards and I head to my hotel. I have a “corner office” room on a high floor and can see several of the bridges lit red for the festival, a tall pagoda squat in the middle of the water, and the steady stream of paper lanterns unfurling over the river and getting sucked up by the night sky. The Chinese government outlaws them because of the fire risk, and you can see why; every once in awhile one of them craps out and goes toppling into the river. The potential for forest fire in this dry terrain is obvious. But everyone ignores the law and lets them fly. Impossible little puffs of paper telling the laws of physics to fuck off for a minute, like fireflies signalling in the vacuum of night.
If you ever wondered where those surreal Chinese landscape paintings come from, this is it; underwater for hundreds of millions of years, the porous karst has been grooved into shapes that don’t seem to belong on this earth. Nothing can mar their strange beauty, not the armada of double-decker tourist boats that chugs downstream every day, not the city of Guilin, a big bustling concrete town marooned along a bend in the Li, full of narrow alleyways and rickshaws and with twelve different bridges leading out to the mainland on all sides.
The Chinese imagine various animals and people in the shape of the hills, some of them easily recognizable, some not. The most obvious is at the edge of town, a riverfront gap in the rock forming the shape of an elephant with its trunk draining water from the Li; legend says it carried a god through the sky until alighting in Guilin and being stunned by the beauty and wanting to stay. In punishment the god turned it to stone and left it here for the locals to scramble over.
There are tea plantations in the hills and rice fields in the plains. The town is urban but charming, with a long crooked pedestrian walkway in the center that holds old fashioned tea shops for tastings, little sweet shops and plenty of restaurants, from grimy little wok shops to snazzy indoor hot pots. I almost wander into one that serves dog, but am stopped by a local named Ho who steers me somewhere better for a very spicy beef dish. He’s a disarmingly pleasant guy who teaches calligraphy at a famous art school here, and is fairly well known in his own right, having won multiple gold medals for his work at national competitions in Beijing. A great guy: engaging, unpretentious, warm. He takes me through the town at night to see the bridges lit up and the fishermen and their cormorants in the waterfront parks, the kitschy local restaurant with snakes and rats in cages (we don’t eat there) and the best local art galleries.
At one point he asks about my “wife” and so I have to go into the whole widower routine, which is tiresome, but he shares with me as well – his wife was once pregnant but they found serious brain problems and were forced to abort the fetus. She hasn’t been pregnant since and is very sad about it. Then she calls his cell as if she knows he’s talking about her, and when she hears he’s met an American she offers us two tickets to some special acrobatics and magic show they’re putting on in honor of the festival of the autumn moon, which starts tonight. The festival involves passing out little cakes with red bean paste in the center and launching hundreds of paper lanterns into the night sky, powered by a mere candle but cascading one after another over our heads like a little spirit world spit out by the Li.
The crowd for the show is strictly local, lots of families and little kids. We get there halfway through, just in time for an appearance by the monkey king and something called “the pig fairy”, who pull audience members onstage and perform magic tricks with them as dupes. Then we detour back to the art gallery where some of his work is for sale, and though he’s not hawking anything I dig out a piece of his calligraphy that’s especially impressive and purchase it. It’s a famous ancient poem by the great Li Po about another Chinese river, the Yangtze; the selection of the text is a very personal decision by the calligrapher. It goes something like this:
Brother, there is no easy path through this life.
You navigate this life through the endless jagged rapids and rocks
of the Yangtze in a bamboo raft.
That’s the way it is.
The hero is the one who doesn’t just sit on some sandbar watching his cargo rot.
Jaw set, he maneuvers the malicious current,
cognizant of dangers, empty of fear,
though the water’s tentacles grab
from all directions to pull him under.
And when the snow of the highlands settles in his hair
and he sees that awesome river finally open
into the sea,
he knows that his journey is done,
finally done.
We part afterwards and I head to my hotel. I have a “corner office” room on a high floor and can see several of the bridges lit red for the festival, a tall pagoda squat in the middle of the water, and the steady stream of paper lanterns unfurling over the river and getting sucked up by the night sky. The Chinese government outlaws them because of the fire risk, and you can see why; every once in awhile one of them craps out and goes toppling into the river. The potential for forest fire in this dry terrain is obvious. But everyone ignores the law and lets them fly. Impossible little puffs of paper telling the laws of physics to fuck off for a minute, like fireflies signalling in the vacuum of night.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
A Walk on the Wild Wall
In fifteenth century China during the Ming Dynasty, ordinary citizens were barred from viewing the procession of the emperor through the streets of Beijing from the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven, where he made animal sacrifices to the gods that were critical to the success of the following harvest. It was ordered they barricade their windows and remain home in silence lest they catch a glimpse of that most holy of rites, thereby upsetting the balance between heaven and earth.
It should probably then come as no surprise that the ordinary people of China are barred from attending or viewing the massive spectacle of the 60th anniversary parade that the Communist Party is throwing for itself today, for this ruling class is as exclusive in its way as the emperors of old. The entire downtown area is cordoned off by thousands of armed military, and tens of thousands of volunteers wearing red armbands, and those who live in the area aren’t allowed to leave their homes. Annoying.
The Chinese government says they’re responding to the threat of terrorism from Falun Gong and others, and there have indeed been two FG knife attacks in the capital over the last few days. The ordinary man on the street here expresses concern for “China’s 9/11” and doesn’t seem especially put out by the security measures. It’s all very Waiting for the Barbarians, and one wonders if FG didn’t exist whether they would have to create it, but this is probably unfair. Falun Gong is a bizarre and genuinely dangerous sect, run I am told by a friend in the State Dept by a blind man who lives in Queens of all places and claims God speaks to him through his television set. From all of us who live in Queens, my apologies to the Chinese people.
At least we have the benefit of watching the parade on TV, and it’s hard to miss the tight contingents of fighter jets swinging low through the city. On the tube you see phalanx after phalanx of high-tech military vehicles, tanks and radar trucks, anti-aircraft and nuclear missiles, bombers and helicopters, every piece of heavy equipment you can imagine trundling past Tiananmen Square and its iconic portrait of Mao, placidly smiling at the pomp. All this is followed by a series of floats celebrating the stunning recent advances in Chinese technology, medicine, agriculture, industry, space research, science and so forth – and let’s face it, China and the ruling party deserve to be proud of their accomplishments; it’s possible the rapid-fire advance of Chinese civilization over the past couple of decades – legacy of the great, visionary pragmatist Deng Xiaoping – will go down in history as the one important event of our time.
In the evening there is an interminable song and dance extravaganza on the imperial square with all of the dozens of ethnic groups that comprise China singing what are described as “folk songs” in their native tongues lauding things like “another five percent increase in the crop yield”, punctuated by massive firework displays. I get a few cheap laughs from this retro-social realist cheese, but it’s no more cheesy than your average televised Fourth of July celebration, just tuned to a different key and on a more spectacular scale. Witnessing even a bit of it from the periphery is still cool, and a highlight of my journey.
By far the most impressive thing is the weather. When I arrive in Beijing and make my way past the electronic fever detectors positioned to block the spread of swine flu (pretty intimidating), my first thought is “Oh My God. People Breathe This Stuff?!?!?” A thick layer of sickly dark yellow smog blots out anything more than a block or two away from you, and it seems laughable to read the pronouncements from the government that unspecified “eco-friendly chemical agents” will be released in the air above the capital that night to disperse all clouds and prevent rain during the festivities. Ha ha yeah whatever. An old fashioned rain dance. Good luck with that.
But sure enough the next morning the smog is GONE, as if it never existed, and there’s nary a cloud in the sky for the next four days.
Holy crap! The Chinese Communist Party controls the weather!
I’ve taken a break from the backpacking hostels to stay in a five-star hotel, the Shangri-la on the west side of town. It’s guests are a mix of well-fed, high-level apparatchiks from the provinces decked out in red sashes and drinking high-end cocktails, and professional tennis players competing in the China Open at the new Olympic Tennis Center. During my stay I see & share elevators with Novak Djokovic, Dinara Safina, James Blake, Caroline Wozniaki, “Dr Ivo” Karlovic, Elena Dementieva, Sveta Kuznetsova, Jelena Jankovic and a host of unranked qualifiers hoping to make it into the tournament. I love tennis, so this is awesome, and I end up seeing Serena Williams, Safina & Robby Ginepri play when the first round commences.
The next day of this 8-day celebration is for the ordinary people. We’re allowed into Tiananmen to view all the mega-floats up close, which is quite cool. The imperial pomp of the central square and the gargantu-scale Forbidden City is formidable and something I’m stunned and grateful to see, but the crowds for the holiday are massive and the scale of Beijing at this point starts leaving me cold, with its limitless skyscraper canyons and autocratic signs posted at regular intervals advising citizens to “work hard, be thrifty, avoid bad habits, respect the military and love civilians”. All commendable sentiments, but it seems downright odd. I’m hungry for a Whopper-size dose of democratic chaos, despite all the disabling nonsense it engenders, a little “grab a six-pack with a fake ID and hang out all night by the levee” kind of a feeling, and while the Chinese people are awesome – some of the nicest and smartest I’ve met in the world – I’m having a hard time penetrating the veneer of this great city and tasting much of anything.
That’s when I pay attention to the bicycles. I bike through the streets of New York every day, and it always helps me make sense of life at home. Why not the streets of Beijing? And so I scrabble through the side streets looking for a bike shop, find one not too far south of Tiananmen and leave a large deposit for a crappy rental one-speeder with faulty brakes, never to return (the deposit was worth more than the bike).
Like magic, big monolithic Beijing melts away and the city becomes lovable. First off Beijing is a great bike city, with dedicated lanes on every major street, even some of the highways – it’s far safer than New York. Second, you’re navigating around fellow bikers, mopeders, motorized wheelbarrowers, electronic wheelchairs, delivery bikes larded down with massive packages of goods or sky-high piles of recyclables, and a host of weird contraptions that locals have jury-rigged together; the one I remember most clearly is a lawnmower engine & handle attached to two truck wheels.
The best part of biking in Beijing is veering off into a hudong, the narrow, interconnected alleyways of Old Beijing – and discovering the honeycomb of old-school life that snakes through the city like an enormous termite infestation and give Beijing real character. You can twist through them for hours without getting bored, past open-air vegetable markets and little outdoor bars, single-floor dwellings that look about to flop over, all of them hosting a Chinese flag, one-table kitchens serving hot pot and barbecue, barber shops, cookware storefronts, concrete 1-yuan bathrooms, clothing shops with tatty western mannequins, laundry hanging everywhere and a thousand squalid wonders waiting to be uncovered. You can go down them for days without running out of cool things to see. So life still grows wild on the vine behind the solid wall of megaliths that front the major freeways. May the hudongs live forever.
On day three in Beijing I make the obligatory trek north to see the Great Wall, a spectacle if there ever was one. I go to one of the less visited sections that’s renovated for tourists, but again it’s all a bit manicured and Disneyland for my taste until I hike 2km, cross two consecutive “do not pass” dividers and discover an apparently endless stretch of “wild wall” that hasn’t been touched since the Ming Dynasty. The paving stones have cracked over centuries of winters, trees and grasses have sprung up all around, the guard towers are crumbling and sometimes look as if they’ve been blown up in an aerial bombardment.
I keep going kilometer after kilometer along the wild wall, can’t stop myself despite knowing I have to go back as far as I came. By far the best hike ever, just incredible. I’m posting pictures to Facebook soon so everyone can see for themselves. At some points it’s a bit dangerous as the only thing left clear of trees are the gate stones along the edge, and some are a bit loose & it’s a good 40-50 meters down if you fall. But hey I’m having a good time and you only live once. Then I think about it more and realize what a public laughingstock I would be back home:
“Hey what happened to Sean? I heard he died.”
“Yeah. He fell off the Great Wall of China.”
“Ba ha ha! How ridiculous.”
So I move off the edge and trundle over the trees in the center.
Another great example of wild Beijing: 798 Art District. This place is what Williamsburg wished it was back when it bothered to pretend being a serious avant garde art zone. It’s centered around a massive, Terry Gilliamesque factory from the 1950s bristling with comically huge insulated piping and tubes, steam-spitting spigots and smoke stacks tattooed with slogans from the Cultural Revolution (kept there on purpose by the artists who run the place). It’s now been refurbished and is used as a set of display spaces. The rest of the zone really looks nothing like Beijing, with spiffy little one-storey art supply shops, outdoor cafes and galleries hosting world-class exhibitions of big-name contemporary Chinese artists. It was a good chance to see what China is doing these days – a lot of figurative stuff, mostly painting, geared for the international art market. But there were plenty of sculptures outside, including a gigantic bird cage that passersby were invited to sit down in and become part of the art while they slurped a cherry ice. At night there are art book carts along the side streets and outdoor movies like you see on New York summer nights. The people wandering the streets here look cool but are not “beautiful people” per se; the vibe is more Fort Greene than Fashion Week.
There was a subversive note to some of the work, especially the outdoor graffiti, always masked in the vocabulary of the ruling party that it sought to subvert. One poster said “Life is Beautiful, Love More So, Freedom is Worth Losing Both”, followed by a quote from Mao preaching patience in the service of the cause. Another had a mischievous, smiling cartoon match and a bunch of iconic portraits of Che Guevara, quoting Che: “It only takes a spark to light the blaze!” Hard to take this too seriously as everyone looked pretty fat and content, it reminded me more of the empty acting-out of anti-Bush polemics that you’d see in artsy neighborhoods back home; the vibe I got was more of people whose temperament balks like mine at all the random autocratic nonsense, and wants to tweak someone’s nose. But the strategy of using ruling party sloganry against itself is interesting and dangerous in action; they could all be shut down at any moment, and they still skirt the edge. Another great example is a social realist poster of angry proletarians taking up arms above a giant Wal-Mart logo, and there were lots of ironic renditions of the big red buttons everyone was wearing for the anniversary.
Last night in Beijing I head out with a couple of open qualifiers who didn’t qualify to a big lake in the northwest of town by the Summer Palace, for some Peking duck and a few beers to drown their sorrows in. We circle the lake, stop at a few taverns and again see what a great, prosperous city this is. Boat rentals and lakefront bars with alternating guitar balladeers and karaoke machines, families and young couples out for a tree-lined evening stroll, little kids trying to skateboard and falling on their asses, old folks singing the old songs with the old instruments. Everyone looks happy; there’s a sense of opportunity that most never thought they would see, I think, and everyone I met without exception seems more than willing to put up their government’s sometimes overbearing presence to keep the good times rolling.
We did find an underground bar playing rock songs with lots of people from my generation, the Tiananmen Square massacre generation. They played some tunes in English (and there are English signs everywhere, and not just in Beijing, and 80% of the shirts here have English on them) and at least one ironically delivered rendition of a hymn of the Cultural Revolution that everyone smirked at and bobbed their heads to. The massacre seems largely forgotten in Beijing, at least on the surface. And I would expect zero near-term change in the low level of political freedom in China. Will the Chinese Communist Party ever have to choose between the open experimental pragmatism of Deng that has led to all this good fortune, and the blunt, dogmatic hubris of Mao, which mostly pisses people off? No matter how many health and safety secretaries you summarily execute for poisoning the baby formula, the lack of accountability will cause damage at some point. But twenty years later it seems like those kids really did die for nothing.
It should probably then come as no surprise that the ordinary people of China are barred from attending or viewing the massive spectacle of the 60th anniversary parade that the Communist Party is throwing for itself today, for this ruling class is as exclusive in its way as the emperors of old. The entire downtown area is cordoned off by thousands of armed military, and tens of thousands of volunteers wearing red armbands, and those who live in the area aren’t allowed to leave their homes. Annoying.
The Chinese government says they’re responding to the threat of terrorism from Falun Gong and others, and there have indeed been two FG knife attacks in the capital over the last few days. The ordinary man on the street here expresses concern for “China’s 9/11” and doesn’t seem especially put out by the security measures. It’s all very Waiting for the Barbarians, and one wonders if FG didn’t exist whether they would have to create it, but this is probably unfair. Falun Gong is a bizarre and genuinely dangerous sect, run I am told by a friend in the State Dept by a blind man who lives in Queens of all places and claims God speaks to him through his television set. From all of us who live in Queens, my apologies to the Chinese people.
At least we have the benefit of watching the parade on TV, and it’s hard to miss the tight contingents of fighter jets swinging low through the city. On the tube you see phalanx after phalanx of high-tech military vehicles, tanks and radar trucks, anti-aircraft and nuclear missiles, bombers and helicopters, every piece of heavy equipment you can imagine trundling past Tiananmen Square and its iconic portrait of Mao, placidly smiling at the pomp. All this is followed by a series of floats celebrating the stunning recent advances in Chinese technology, medicine, agriculture, industry, space research, science and so forth – and let’s face it, China and the ruling party deserve to be proud of their accomplishments; it’s possible the rapid-fire advance of Chinese civilization over the past couple of decades – legacy of the great, visionary pragmatist Deng Xiaoping – will go down in history as the one important event of our time.
In the evening there is an interminable song and dance extravaganza on the imperial square with all of the dozens of ethnic groups that comprise China singing what are described as “folk songs” in their native tongues lauding things like “another five percent increase in the crop yield”, punctuated by massive firework displays. I get a few cheap laughs from this retro-social realist cheese, but it’s no more cheesy than your average televised Fourth of July celebration, just tuned to a different key and on a more spectacular scale. Witnessing even a bit of it from the periphery is still cool, and a highlight of my journey.
By far the most impressive thing is the weather. When I arrive in Beijing and make my way past the electronic fever detectors positioned to block the spread of swine flu (pretty intimidating), my first thought is “Oh My God. People Breathe This Stuff?!?!?” A thick layer of sickly dark yellow smog blots out anything more than a block or two away from you, and it seems laughable to read the pronouncements from the government that unspecified “eco-friendly chemical agents” will be released in the air above the capital that night to disperse all clouds and prevent rain during the festivities. Ha ha yeah whatever. An old fashioned rain dance. Good luck with that.
But sure enough the next morning the smog is GONE, as if it never existed, and there’s nary a cloud in the sky for the next four days.
Holy crap! The Chinese Communist Party controls the weather!
I’ve taken a break from the backpacking hostels to stay in a five-star hotel, the Shangri-la on the west side of town. It’s guests are a mix of well-fed, high-level apparatchiks from the provinces decked out in red sashes and drinking high-end cocktails, and professional tennis players competing in the China Open at the new Olympic Tennis Center. During my stay I see & share elevators with Novak Djokovic, Dinara Safina, James Blake, Caroline Wozniaki, “Dr Ivo” Karlovic, Elena Dementieva, Sveta Kuznetsova, Jelena Jankovic and a host of unranked qualifiers hoping to make it into the tournament. I love tennis, so this is awesome, and I end up seeing Serena Williams, Safina & Robby Ginepri play when the first round commences.
The next day of this 8-day celebration is for the ordinary people. We’re allowed into Tiananmen to view all the mega-floats up close, which is quite cool. The imperial pomp of the central square and the gargantu-scale Forbidden City is formidable and something I’m stunned and grateful to see, but the crowds for the holiday are massive and the scale of Beijing at this point starts leaving me cold, with its limitless skyscraper canyons and autocratic signs posted at regular intervals advising citizens to “work hard, be thrifty, avoid bad habits, respect the military and love civilians”. All commendable sentiments, but it seems downright odd. I’m hungry for a Whopper-size dose of democratic chaos, despite all the disabling nonsense it engenders, a little “grab a six-pack with a fake ID and hang out all night by the levee” kind of a feeling, and while the Chinese people are awesome – some of the nicest and smartest I’ve met in the world – I’m having a hard time penetrating the veneer of this great city and tasting much of anything.
That’s when I pay attention to the bicycles. I bike through the streets of New York every day, and it always helps me make sense of life at home. Why not the streets of Beijing? And so I scrabble through the side streets looking for a bike shop, find one not too far south of Tiananmen and leave a large deposit for a crappy rental one-speeder with faulty brakes, never to return (the deposit was worth more than the bike).
Like magic, big monolithic Beijing melts away and the city becomes lovable. First off Beijing is a great bike city, with dedicated lanes on every major street, even some of the highways – it’s far safer than New York. Second, you’re navigating around fellow bikers, mopeders, motorized wheelbarrowers, electronic wheelchairs, delivery bikes larded down with massive packages of goods or sky-high piles of recyclables, and a host of weird contraptions that locals have jury-rigged together; the one I remember most clearly is a lawnmower engine & handle attached to two truck wheels.
The best part of biking in Beijing is veering off into a hudong, the narrow, interconnected alleyways of Old Beijing – and discovering the honeycomb of old-school life that snakes through the city like an enormous termite infestation and give Beijing real character. You can twist through them for hours without getting bored, past open-air vegetable markets and little outdoor bars, single-floor dwellings that look about to flop over, all of them hosting a Chinese flag, one-table kitchens serving hot pot and barbecue, barber shops, cookware storefronts, concrete 1-yuan bathrooms, clothing shops with tatty western mannequins, laundry hanging everywhere and a thousand squalid wonders waiting to be uncovered. You can go down them for days without running out of cool things to see. So life still grows wild on the vine behind the solid wall of megaliths that front the major freeways. May the hudongs live forever.
On day three in Beijing I make the obligatory trek north to see the Great Wall, a spectacle if there ever was one. I go to one of the less visited sections that’s renovated for tourists, but again it’s all a bit manicured and Disneyland for my taste until I hike 2km, cross two consecutive “do not pass” dividers and discover an apparently endless stretch of “wild wall” that hasn’t been touched since the Ming Dynasty. The paving stones have cracked over centuries of winters, trees and grasses have sprung up all around, the guard towers are crumbling and sometimes look as if they’ve been blown up in an aerial bombardment.
I keep going kilometer after kilometer along the wild wall, can’t stop myself despite knowing I have to go back as far as I came. By far the best hike ever, just incredible. I’m posting pictures to Facebook soon so everyone can see for themselves. At some points it’s a bit dangerous as the only thing left clear of trees are the gate stones along the edge, and some are a bit loose & it’s a good 40-50 meters down if you fall. But hey I’m having a good time and you only live once. Then I think about it more and realize what a public laughingstock I would be back home:
“Hey what happened to Sean? I heard he died.”
“Yeah. He fell off the Great Wall of China.”
“Ba ha ha! How ridiculous.”
So I move off the edge and trundle over the trees in the center.
Another great example of wild Beijing: 798 Art District. This place is what Williamsburg wished it was back when it bothered to pretend being a serious avant garde art zone. It’s centered around a massive, Terry Gilliamesque factory from the 1950s bristling with comically huge insulated piping and tubes, steam-spitting spigots and smoke stacks tattooed with slogans from the Cultural Revolution (kept there on purpose by the artists who run the place). It’s now been refurbished and is used as a set of display spaces. The rest of the zone really looks nothing like Beijing, with spiffy little one-storey art supply shops, outdoor cafes and galleries hosting world-class exhibitions of big-name contemporary Chinese artists. It was a good chance to see what China is doing these days – a lot of figurative stuff, mostly painting, geared for the international art market. But there were plenty of sculptures outside, including a gigantic bird cage that passersby were invited to sit down in and become part of the art while they slurped a cherry ice. At night there are art book carts along the side streets and outdoor movies like you see on New York summer nights. The people wandering the streets here look cool but are not “beautiful people” per se; the vibe is more Fort Greene than Fashion Week.
There was a subversive note to some of the work, especially the outdoor graffiti, always masked in the vocabulary of the ruling party that it sought to subvert. One poster said “Life is Beautiful, Love More So, Freedom is Worth Losing Both”, followed by a quote from Mao preaching patience in the service of the cause. Another had a mischievous, smiling cartoon match and a bunch of iconic portraits of Che Guevara, quoting Che: “It only takes a spark to light the blaze!” Hard to take this too seriously as everyone looked pretty fat and content, it reminded me more of the empty acting-out of anti-Bush polemics that you’d see in artsy neighborhoods back home; the vibe I got was more of people whose temperament balks like mine at all the random autocratic nonsense, and wants to tweak someone’s nose. But the strategy of using ruling party sloganry against itself is interesting and dangerous in action; they could all be shut down at any moment, and they still skirt the edge. Another great example is a social realist poster of angry proletarians taking up arms above a giant Wal-Mart logo, and there were lots of ironic renditions of the big red buttons everyone was wearing for the anniversary.
Last night in Beijing I head out with a couple of open qualifiers who didn’t qualify to a big lake in the northwest of town by the Summer Palace, for some Peking duck and a few beers to drown their sorrows in. We circle the lake, stop at a few taverns and again see what a great, prosperous city this is. Boat rentals and lakefront bars with alternating guitar balladeers and karaoke machines, families and young couples out for a tree-lined evening stroll, little kids trying to skateboard and falling on their asses, old folks singing the old songs with the old instruments. Everyone looks happy; there’s a sense of opportunity that most never thought they would see, I think, and everyone I met without exception seems more than willing to put up their government’s sometimes overbearing presence to keep the good times rolling.
We did find an underground bar playing rock songs with lots of people from my generation, the Tiananmen Square massacre generation. They played some tunes in English (and there are English signs everywhere, and not just in Beijing, and 80% of the shirts here have English on them) and at least one ironically delivered rendition of a hymn of the Cultural Revolution that everyone smirked at and bobbed their heads to. The massacre seems largely forgotten in Beijing, at least on the surface. And I would expect zero near-term change in the low level of political freedom in China. Will the Chinese Communist Party ever have to choose between the open experimental pragmatism of Deng that has led to all this good fortune, and the blunt, dogmatic hubris of Mao, which mostly pisses people off? No matter how many health and safety secretaries you summarily execute for poisoning the baby formula, the lack of accountability will cause damage at some point. But twenty years later it seems like those kids really did die for nothing.
Mongolia
It takes three hours in Mongolia for me to be knocking down vodka shots in a nomad’s ger tent. This kind of hospitality comes as a shock after so much time spent dealing with the stony reserve and “fuck you, you stupid foreigner” attitude of many Siberians when you first encounter them. But I manage to adjust. That’s how they roll in Mongolia.
Ulaan Baatar is a bit of an ugly duckling, but you quickly pass through its concrete blight and hit the limitless wilderness of the Mongolian steppes, impossibly vast stretches of prairie laid out between craggy, forested mountains that just go on and on and on. It looks like Big Sky country in Wyoming, peppered here and there with the gers of nomads and their cattle, oxen, yak, horses, sheep and the occasional two-humped camel.
All around, a breathtaking nothingness. I hiked 40 kilometres round-trip one day with Urna, a local guide, and we didn’t see a single other soul. In summer the nomads camp on the plain so the herds have plenty of grazing; in the winter they huddle under the side of some mountain to take cover from the wind, though even then in bad years they’re essentially sleeping in snow caves. Some tents have a solar panel stapled to them, a solitary nod to modernity. And you can see why after all this time the majority of Mongolians choose to live this way, despite sky-high literacy rates and a growing economy.
On the first day I stop at the ger in Terelj national park with the family I’m meant to stay and find out today is “Elders Day”, when senior citizens are thrown an old-style party that starts at noon and lasts until 2 or 3am. Soon you learn the standard MO: Mongolian barbecue, solidified heavy cream with berries, potato salad, everybody gathered on benches in the ger – a large circular tent with couches along the sides and a woodstove in the center – gussied up in some combination of traditional local dress plus berets & second-hand t-shirts straight out of Williamsburg. One bottle of vodka after another after another, and a lot of singing. Mongolia has the hardest partying old folks out there. Potential retirement spot for April Isaacs? Must alert her.
The first shot of every vodka bottle gets chucked out the window as an offering to the gods, the rest are distributed across the table one at a time and you have to make a toast and sing before kicking it back. My ukulele comes in handy, though they clap on 1 and 3 to my Muddy Waters blues as if it’s a Sousa march, and shout “Hey!” at the end like Zorba the Greek. They themselves sing soulful, jaunty old tunes like “Father was a Fine Horseman”, celebrating lovers, the motherland and the like. Great people, stunning landscape, high intoxication level.
“What do you think of Mongolian women?” says one sixty-year old herder in what even I can make out as a thick regional dialect.
“Very beautiful,” I reply, “and very drunk!”
“So that means we’re going home together!”
Much laughter and more vodka shots.
Mongolian hospitality is a pleasure, but you’re considered a mannerless hillbilly if you ever say “no” when it’s offered. At another ger I visited they had just slaughtered a sheep, were busy filling the organs with blood and about to boil them. I was handed a huge tray of intestines as if it were a holiday fruit basket. A small slice of boiled stomach to chew on is sufficient, but they would have been mortified if I didn’t take something. Another example is the booze; the local vodka is good, but sometimes you have to suffer through a bowl of fermented horse milk first, which tastes month-old and chunky; you know you’ve had too much when it doesn’t make your stomach sick to smell it.
The next morning you see everyone from the party back in their civvies directing the cattle with sticks, and since there’s no refrigeration the leftover food gets turned into slop for the animals. You spend a couple hours each day getting water from the nearest creek. Horse is the preferred mode of travel, though some have 4WDs, and when you’re seven or eight years old they stick you on a horse, send you off onto the plain and tell you not to come back until you know how to ride it. People help each other out here, too, as a matter of mutual survival. At one point when our car is stuck in the middle of a river we were trying to cross – with a herd of goats passing us on both sides and “baa”-ing at us in what I can’t help but construe as open mockery – a passing tractor from the Soviet era hooks a chain to us and drags us out without our asking.
There are no roads out here. You drive across the unspoiled, bumpy open plain, sometimes through near-impassable mud banks in low-lying areas. There are no permanent buildings either, just the torched remains of a monastery every 100 kilometers or so – destroyed during the purges of Stalin along with the monks, most of whom were mass murdered – and at one point an abandoned Russian military complex with all the windows blown out.
There are, though, more of the decorated poles, those ubiquitous sky god antennae, set atop a boulder pile and decorated in strips of cloth in four colors: blue for the sky god, green for the earth, red for the fire god and yellow for Buddhism. Mongolians have been Buddhists for centuries now and their shamanism is syncretized to it in the same way that African religion is to Christianity in Haiti and the Latin Caribbean. You find traces of shamanism in the culture today like a faint strain of Beethoven amid the street noise of Manhattan at rush hour. The only ones who practice full-on old-style shamanism are the Reindeer People up north – remote and awe-inspiring even to the average Mongolian nomad – whose villages are accessible by several days on horseback, and only before snows close off the mountain passes in September. The Reindeer People keep to themselves.
For everyone else the old culture shows up in little mannerisms. You circle the shaman pole clockwise three times to make a wish when you pass, and an offering of two cigarettes to it when traveling on a voyage. Don’t throw garbage into the fire because “fire is a god”. And when you take down your tent and move, you leave no trace of yourself on the land. There are also the usual hucksterish shamans running around offering the same stuff you’d find in a South Bronx botánica, prescriptions for ridding yourself of back luck or making someone fall in love with you, though the instructions are more exotic: “fill a sack with horse meat, douse it in vodka and dump it in the woods by a stream” is a standard recipe. But their primary function is to use the shaman poles to travel up to heaven and direct the recently dead to their new home.
Throat singing is the coolest extant aspect of shamanism. This is where western Mongolians and their neighbors the Tuvans eulogize the mountains they consider to be gods – everything is alive in this system, even the rocks – through a style that generates larynx-like vibrations and pitches in various parts of the body. The best can generate tones in two parts of the throat and within the bronchial tubes at the same time for three-pitch chords. My last night in Mongolia I went back to Ulaan Baatar to see them perform. It’s not a parlor trick, this is soulful singing with phrasing as moving as a great opera libretto or jazz ballad. I also ran into some backpacker mates from Baikal at the concert, and we went out after for a night on the town, which in Ulaan Baatar means weaving through the midnight bustle of Seoul Street and bar hopping its storefront restaurants and taverns as locals crowd into chicken buses outside (which serve as the local transit system), practically stacked on top of one another around the traffic circles.
On the train out via the Gobi Desert I get my first border guard bribe experience (my passport is beat up so the guard wants US$20 to let me leave the country, laughably small so I don’t argue) and then meet my new bunkmates, who turn out to be animists of a different stamp, Eva and Staas, a Dutch couple celebrating their graduation from a prestigious school of industrial design in Eindhoven by travelling around the world for a year. At first I think they should come work for Google, but then I realize they’re too smart for Google. They need to go find somewhere smarter to work, wherever that is. Staas is going to start his own advertising agency; he specializes in designing mechanisms with various levers and knobs for people to play with as they interact with a brand. Eva is more into research; her thesis is a large circular object “printed” from a “3D photocopier” that can create any plastic object that you pass it via computer blueprints.
Eva’s object is a little Hal from 2001-ish for my taste; it senses where you are in the room and follows you with blinking lights. Steeped in the theories of phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, who divide being from consciousness at the point of interaction, so that whenever you touch an object – a cement post as much as a person – it is also touching you and can be said to be “conscious” at that moment. It’s a world view ancient as the Reindeer People, and apparently it’s making a comeback.
Based on this Eva wants to make our environments responsive to us, sensing our moods and responding accordingly, perhaps even providing them with a personality of their own, so that they don’t always do what we want them to do, and convey their own “moods”. Examples of their prototypes abound, and they even have one that is being made commercially available next year.
These guys view robots as “anthropomorphic”, fodder for morons who just don’t get it, the same disdain we have today for myth-gods like Cupid and Thor. What they want instead is a magic polymer forest, where every aspect of our environment interacts with us, guesses our moods and responds, makes life engaging and has a life of its own. Some parts make more sense than others – and all of it might make more sense when you’re stoned – but they’re way out there on the bleeding edge, at the forefront of the intelligent homes and interactive animist environments that are probably our future, a world of objects as alive in their way as those sacred mountains of the primeval Mongolian steppe that we now leave behind.
Ulaan Baatar is a bit of an ugly duckling, but you quickly pass through its concrete blight and hit the limitless wilderness of the Mongolian steppes, impossibly vast stretches of prairie laid out between craggy, forested mountains that just go on and on and on. It looks like Big Sky country in Wyoming, peppered here and there with the gers of nomads and their cattle, oxen, yak, horses, sheep and the occasional two-humped camel.
All around, a breathtaking nothingness. I hiked 40 kilometres round-trip one day with Urna, a local guide, and we didn’t see a single other soul. In summer the nomads camp on the plain so the herds have plenty of grazing; in the winter they huddle under the side of some mountain to take cover from the wind, though even then in bad years they’re essentially sleeping in snow caves. Some tents have a solar panel stapled to them, a solitary nod to modernity. And you can see why after all this time the majority of Mongolians choose to live this way, despite sky-high literacy rates and a growing economy.
On the first day I stop at the ger in Terelj national park with the family I’m meant to stay and find out today is “Elders Day”, when senior citizens are thrown an old-style party that starts at noon and lasts until 2 or 3am. Soon you learn the standard MO: Mongolian barbecue, solidified heavy cream with berries, potato salad, everybody gathered on benches in the ger – a large circular tent with couches along the sides and a woodstove in the center – gussied up in some combination of traditional local dress plus berets & second-hand t-shirts straight out of Williamsburg. One bottle of vodka after another after another, and a lot of singing. Mongolia has the hardest partying old folks out there. Potential retirement spot for April Isaacs? Must alert her.
The first shot of every vodka bottle gets chucked out the window as an offering to the gods, the rest are distributed across the table one at a time and you have to make a toast and sing before kicking it back. My ukulele comes in handy, though they clap on 1 and 3 to my Muddy Waters blues as if it’s a Sousa march, and shout “Hey!” at the end like Zorba the Greek. They themselves sing soulful, jaunty old tunes like “Father was a Fine Horseman”, celebrating lovers, the motherland and the like. Great people, stunning landscape, high intoxication level.
“What do you think of Mongolian women?” says one sixty-year old herder in what even I can make out as a thick regional dialect.
“Very beautiful,” I reply, “and very drunk!”
“So that means we’re going home together!”
Much laughter and more vodka shots.
Mongolian hospitality is a pleasure, but you’re considered a mannerless hillbilly if you ever say “no” when it’s offered. At another ger I visited they had just slaughtered a sheep, were busy filling the organs with blood and about to boil them. I was handed a huge tray of intestines as if it were a holiday fruit basket. A small slice of boiled stomach to chew on is sufficient, but they would have been mortified if I didn’t take something. Another example is the booze; the local vodka is good, but sometimes you have to suffer through a bowl of fermented horse milk first, which tastes month-old and chunky; you know you’ve had too much when it doesn’t make your stomach sick to smell it.
The next morning you see everyone from the party back in their civvies directing the cattle with sticks, and since there’s no refrigeration the leftover food gets turned into slop for the animals. You spend a couple hours each day getting water from the nearest creek. Horse is the preferred mode of travel, though some have 4WDs, and when you’re seven or eight years old they stick you on a horse, send you off onto the plain and tell you not to come back until you know how to ride it. People help each other out here, too, as a matter of mutual survival. At one point when our car is stuck in the middle of a river we were trying to cross – with a herd of goats passing us on both sides and “baa”-ing at us in what I can’t help but construe as open mockery – a passing tractor from the Soviet era hooks a chain to us and drags us out without our asking.
There are no roads out here. You drive across the unspoiled, bumpy open plain, sometimes through near-impassable mud banks in low-lying areas. There are no permanent buildings either, just the torched remains of a monastery every 100 kilometers or so – destroyed during the purges of Stalin along with the monks, most of whom were mass murdered – and at one point an abandoned Russian military complex with all the windows blown out.
There are, though, more of the decorated poles, those ubiquitous sky god antennae, set atop a boulder pile and decorated in strips of cloth in four colors: blue for the sky god, green for the earth, red for the fire god and yellow for Buddhism. Mongolians have been Buddhists for centuries now and their shamanism is syncretized to it in the same way that African religion is to Christianity in Haiti and the Latin Caribbean. You find traces of shamanism in the culture today like a faint strain of Beethoven amid the street noise of Manhattan at rush hour. The only ones who practice full-on old-style shamanism are the Reindeer People up north – remote and awe-inspiring even to the average Mongolian nomad – whose villages are accessible by several days on horseback, and only before snows close off the mountain passes in September. The Reindeer People keep to themselves.
For everyone else the old culture shows up in little mannerisms. You circle the shaman pole clockwise three times to make a wish when you pass, and an offering of two cigarettes to it when traveling on a voyage. Don’t throw garbage into the fire because “fire is a god”. And when you take down your tent and move, you leave no trace of yourself on the land. There are also the usual hucksterish shamans running around offering the same stuff you’d find in a South Bronx botánica, prescriptions for ridding yourself of back luck or making someone fall in love with you, though the instructions are more exotic: “fill a sack with horse meat, douse it in vodka and dump it in the woods by a stream” is a standard recipe. But their primary function is to use the shaman poles to travel up to heaven and direct the recently dead to their new home.
Throat singing is the coolest extant aspect of shamanism. This is where western Mongolians and their neighbors the Tuvans eulogize the mountains they consider to be gods – everything is alive in this system, even the rocks – through a style that generates larynx-like vibrations and pitches in various parts of the body. The best can generate tones in two parts of the throat and within the bronchial tubes at the same time for three-pitch chords. My last night in Mongolia I went back to Ulaan Baatar to see them perform. It’s not a parlor trick, this is soulful singing with phrasing as moving as a great opera libretto or jazz ballad. I also ran into some backpacker mates from Baikal at the concert, and we went out after for a night on the town, which in Ulaan Baatar means weaving through the midnight bustle of Seoul Street and bar hopping its storefront restaurants and taverns as locals crowd into chicken buses outside (which serve as the local transit system), practically stacked on top of one another around the traffic circles.
On the train out via the Gobi Desert I get my first border guard bribe experience (my passport is beat up so the guard wants US$20 to let me leave the country, laughably small so I don’t argue) and then meet my new bunkmates, who turn out to be animists of a different stamp, Eva and Staas, a Dutch couple celebrating their graduation from a prestigious school of industrial design in Eindhoven by travelling around the world for a year. At first I think they should come work for Google, but then I realize they’re too smart for Google. They need to go find somewhere smarter to work, wherever that is. Staas is going to start his own advertising agency; he specializes in designing mechanisms with various levers and knobs for people to play with as they interact with a brand. Eva is more into research; her thesis is a large circular object “printed” from a “3D photocopier” that can create any plastic object that you pass it via computer blueprints.
Eva’s object is a little Hal from 2001-ish for my taste; it senses where you are in the room and follows you with blinking lights. Steeped in the theories of phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, who divide being from consciousness at the point of interaction, so that whenever you touch an object – a cement post as much as a person – it is also touching you and can be said to be “conscious” at that moment. It’s a world view ancient as the Reindeer People, and apparently it’s making a comeback.
Based on this Eva wants to make our environments responsive to us, sensing our moods and responding accordingly, perhaps even providing them with a personality of their own, so that they don’t always do what we want them to do, and convey their own “moods”. Examples of their prototypes abound, and they even have one that is being made commercially available next year.
These guys view robots as “anthropomorphic”, fodder for morons who just don’t get it, the same disdain we have today for myth-gods like Cupid and Thor. What they want instead is a magic polymer forest, where every aspect of our environment interacts with us, guesses our moods and responds, makes life engaging and has a life of its own. Some parts make more sense than others – and all of it might make more sense when you’re stoned – but they’re way out there on the bleeding edge, at the forefront of the intelligent homes and interactive animist environments that are probably our future, a world of objects as alive in their way as those sacred mountains of the primeval Mongolian steppe that we now leave behind.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Lake Baikal
If Irkutsk is “The Paris of Siberia” as locals claim, then Cleveland can be rightly called “The Paris of Ohio”. It’s not a bad town (especially by Siberian standards) and has a nice riverfront location, some ornate old wooden houses here and there and an especially beautiful church with medieval icon painting on its exterior. But mostly it’s your average developing world town with lots of old cars in various states of disrepair clattering along the roads, clusters of appealingly dingy storefronts and factories dominating most of the sidewalk views, and stray dogs running the streets at night like they own them.
I stepped off the train in Irkutsk two mornings ago but didn’t stay long. I was headed to Lake Baikal, a cavernous blue behemoth in Siberia’s center over 400 miles long and holding 20% of the planet’s fresh water, more than all of our five Great Lakes put together. Sitting as it does atop a continental divide, Baikal is deep as an ocean and will eventually become one as the tectonic plates continue their eternal shifting, colliding and stretching over millions of lifetimes. So deep that Vladimir Putin recently descended in a military deep-sea sub to see the vast harvest of crystallized natural gas deposits that lie at its bottom.
So first to the bus station to find a rickety local van to take me and a dozen cramped fellow passengers to Baikal’s shore four hours away, past larch forests burning bright yellow and long stretches of cattle country, where Buryat cowboys range the broad plain on horseback driving herds of steer from here to Tuva of throat-singing fame, finally arriving at a lakeshore steamboat that ferries us to Olkhon Island. During summers when tourist season is high, the line of cars to catch the ferry goes back for two kilometres, and tempers run hot; last summer a man was shot for cutting the car line and trying to force his way on.
By February this deepest lake on the planet will be so frozen over by the biting Siberian zima that they’ll be driving trucks over it. From December to January the island is cut off from the mainland, as ferries can’t navigate the jagged floes. I don’t want to be around for either; it’s already impressively brisk in September, and we’re all on deck freezing our asses off as we stare out drop-jawed at this imperial blue so clear that you can see forty meters and more down into it, and the glacier-peaked Matterhorn clones that ring it to the north for as far as the eye can see.
Olkhon itself is a craggy, forested island a little smaller than Manhattan with cliffs as high as Moher in places and lots of majestic rocky outcrops from which to stare down and across to the mainland and beyond. Western Ireland on one side facing Switzerland and its Alps on the other, with the world’s only freshwater seals living along both sides. It is massively beautiful on a scale one shouldn’t bother trying to describe with mere words. An Alaskan passenger says it reminds her of Kodiak. All I can say is I’ve never seen anything like it. It is inhuman in scale, more like a dwelling for Norse gods or a hyperbolic medieval Icelandic saga, and the few small settlements that exist here seem so inconsequential in comparison that they look as if they could be wiped off the map by one strong wind.
The village where I’m staying is typical Siberian, which is to say it’s little more than a Hollywood Western movie set. Sand roads meander through rows of clapboard wooden cottages, with Soviet-era vans puttering past from time to time and the occasional cow lazing about. The town grocer is a one-room affair with pretty basic foodstuffs and a wide selection of beers. The post office sells canned goods and packets of pasta, and boasts the one Internet access point on the island. It looks much like the Swedish island village featured in Ingmar Bergman films, perhaps even more austere if that’s possible, with stereotypical rural Russian types chopping wood or loading a crate of eggs into the back seat of their car.
I’m staying at Nikita’s Guest House, a set of cottages with attached cafeteria, bar and a banya that got a positive write-up in Lonely Planet and is now crammed with backpackers, mostly from Europe and Australia. And now that I’ve suddenly hooked into the scene I find they all stay at the same places at each stop. All thirty of us or so are booked at the same hostel in Ulaan Bataar a week hence. Nikita’s has become such a popular stop-off that new cottage construction is ongoing at the edge of town to handle the summer overflow, with talk of an official hotel and paved roads a few years hence. Ten years from now the place will likely be unrecognizable, with a Club Med, a McDonald’s and a row of tatty souvenir shops. But for now it’s still the same old little peasant village that it has been for centuries.
The food is hearty and good here, blinis with elderberry sauce and something that tastes suspiciously like grits for breakfast and fresh fish and potatoes for dinner, with strong Siberian tea and mulled wine at the café until midnight or so. The bathroom facilities leave much to be desired but are at least an authentic Siberian experience: flush-it-yourself with a bucket of water toilets and an outdoor banya (traditional Russian bath) that’s open at night where a crusty old man named Nikolai thwacks you with tree branches before you jump in a steam bath, then (if you’re especially masochistic, which I am not) you pop off and drop yourself in the freezing waters of Lake Baikal for the official end-to-end Russian bath experience.
Just outside town is Shaman Rock, a soaring stone outcrop that the Buryat treat as one of the four important spiritual poles on the planet. I’m unfamiliar with Buryat cosmology, but they signify its importance with a wooden pole that looks decidedly Native American (as do some Buryats) and is decorated with colorful patches of fabric, scarves and baseball caps that have been nailed or tied onto it.
At night the sky above Baikal is packed with an impossible freight of stars. Shockingly, they have wifi here, so I’m able to load Google Sky Map on my phone, point it up and discern the names of various stars after drinking in the café has wound down and we’re headed back to our cabins. Thanks to Patrick Schoonveld for getting me to upload that app, it’s especially cool when you can actually see the stars!
But then the phone battery winds down and we’re left to our own devices in the chill night air as we stare up at the cosmos – the northern lights blinking spectrally along one end – and several of us come up with names for our own constellations. For example, this one here is the last woolly mammoth that ever lived; to escape the Buryat hunters it kept trekking north with that spear in its side until it fell off the top of the Earth and was enshrined in the heavens. And that one there is a drunken Cossack from the time of Ivan the Terrible who was shot into the firmament by a cannonball that misfired while he was loading it. He chases the mammoth all night and never catches it. And do you see that one there, with a necklace of pearls? That is Admiral Kolchak’s wife, a noblewoman of Irkutsk; when her husband was beheaded by the Bolsheviks, she threw herself from Shaman Rock and was swallowed by the sky.
I stepped off the train in Irkutsk two mornings ago but didn’t stay long. I was headed to Lake Baikal, a cavernous blue behemoth in Siberia’s center over 400 miles long and holding 20% of the planet’s fresh water, more than all of our five Great Lakes put together. Sitting as it does atop a continental divide, Baikal is deep as an ocean and will eventually become one as the tectonic plates continue their eternal shifting, colliding and stretching over millions of lifetimes. So deep that Vladimir Putin recently descended in a military deep-sea sub to see the vast harvest of crystallized natural gas deposits that lie at its bottom.
So first to the bus station to find a rickety local van to take me and a dozen cramped fellow passengers to Baikal’s shore four hours away, past larch forests burning bright yellow and long stretches of cattle country, where Buryat cowboys range the broad plain on horseback driving herds of steer from here to Tuva of throat-singing fame, finally arriving at a lakeshore steamboat that ferries us to Olkhon Island. During summers when tourist season is high, the line of cars to catch the ferry goes back for two kilometres, and tempers run hot; last summer a man was shot for cutting the car line and trying to force his way on.
By February this deepest lake on the planet will be so frozen over by the biting Siberian zima that they’ll be driving trucks over it. From December to January the island is cut off from the mainland, as ferries can’t navigate the jagged floes. I don’t want to be around for either; it’s already impressively brisk in September, and we’re all on deck freezing our asses off as we stare out drop-jawed at this imperial blue so clear that you can see forty meters and more down into it, and the glacier-peaked Matterhorn clones that ring it to the north for as far as the eye can see.
Olkhon itself is a craggy, forested island a little smaller than Manhattan with cliffs as high as Moher in places and lots of majestic rocky outcrops from which to stare down and across to the mainland and beyond. Western Ireland on one side facing Switzerland and its Alps on the other, with the world’s only freshwater seals living along both sides. It is massively beautiful on a scale one shouldn’t bother trying to describe with mere words. An Alaskan passenger says it reminds her of Kodiak. All I can say is I’ve never seen anything like it. It is inhuman in scale, more like a dwelling for Norse gods or a hyperbolic medieval Icelandic saga, and the few small settlements that exist here seem so inconsequential in comparison that they look as if they could be wiped off the map by one strong wind.
The village where I’m staying is typical Siberian, which is to say it’s little more than a Hollywood Western movie set. Sand roads meander through rows of clapboard wooden cottages, with Soviet-era vans puttering past from time to time and the occasional cow lazing about. The town grocer is a one-room affair with pretty basic foodstuffs and a wide selection of beers. The post office sells canned goods and packets of pasta, and boasts the one Internet access point on the island. It looks much like the Swedish island village featured in Ingmar Bergman films, perhaps even more austere if that’s possible, with stereotypical rural Russian types chopping wood or loading a crate of eggs into the back seat of their car.
I’m staying at Nikita’s Guest House, a set of cottages with attached cafeteria, bar and a banya that got a positive write-up in Lonely Planet and is now crammed with backpackers, mostly from Europe and Australia. And now that I’ve suddenly hooked into the scene I find they all stay at the same places at each stop. All thirty of us or so are booked at the same hostel in Ulaan Bataar a week hence. Nikita’s has become such a popular stop-off that new cottage construction is ongoing at the edge of town to handle the summer overflow, with talk of an official hotel and paved roads a few years hence. Ten years from now the place will likely be unrecognizable, with a Club Med, a McDonald’s and a row of tatty souvenir shops. But for now it’s still the same old little peasant village that it has been for centuries.
The food is hearty and good here, blinis with elderberry sauce and something that tastes suspiciously like grits for breakfast and fresh fish and potatoes for dinner, with strong Siberian tea and mulled wine at the café until midnight or so. The bathroom facilities leave much to be desired but are at least an authentic Siberian experience: flush-it-yourself with a bucket of water toilets and an outdoor banya (traditional Russian bath) that’s open at night where a crusty old man named Nikolai thwacks you with tree branches before you jump in a steam bath, then (if you’re especially masochistic, which I am not) you pop off and drop yourself in the freezing waters of Lake Baikal for the official end-to-end Russian bath experience.
Just outside town is Shaman Rock, a soaring stone outcrop that the Buryat treat as one of the four important spiritual poles on the planet. I’m unfamiliar with Buryat cosmology, but they signify its importance with a wooden pole that looks decidedly Native American (as do some Buryats) and is decorated with colorful patches of fabric, scarves and baseball caps that have been nailed or tied onto it.
At night the sky above Baikal is packed with an impossible freight of stars. Shockingly, they have wifi here, so I’m able to load Google Sky Map on my phone, point it up and discern the names of various stars after drinking in the café has wound down and we’re headed back to our cabins. Thanks to Patrick Schoonveld for getting me to upload that app, it’s especially cool when you can actually see the stars!
But then the phone battery winds down and we’re left to our own devices in the chill night air as we stare up at the cosmos – the northern lights blinking spectrally along one end – and several of us come up with names for our own constellations. For example, this one here is the last woolly mammoth that ever lived; to escape the Buryat hunters it kept trekking north with that spear in its side until it fell off the top of the Earth and was enshrined in the heavens. And that one there is a drunken Cossack from the time of Ivan the Terrible who was shot into the firmament by a cannonball that misfired while he was loading it. He chases the mammoth all night and never catches it. And do you see that one there, with a necklace of pearls? That is Admiral Kolchak’s wife, a noblewoman of Irkutsk; when her husband was beheaded by the Bolsheviks, she threw herself from Shaman Rock and was swallowed by the sky.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Crossing Siberia
It is midnight in Moscow, 6am in Vladivostok and I lie somewhere in the expanse between, God knows where or when exactly, barrelling through the night, lurching further and further into Siberia, the bone-chill outside licking at me as I weave a bit drunk between cars, from the pectobah to my sleeping compartment. Outside you can see only the shadow-tree line flying past and a milkspill of stars like a million eyes passively looking back at you, a disinterested pantheon.
The trans-siberian is old school like an old Hitchcock movie. A period piece during wartime as you slide through the forest in the middle of the night toward an abandoned nineteenth-century train station lit up with hammer-and-sickle, the clack of the tracks scraping the bottom of the car as it turns, mile-long coal caravans slithering past, lumber stacked on flat-beds, in the rail yard random passenger cabs lit up and moving by slowly but with no people on them, linking and unlinking, ghost cars in a ghost station.
On the platform uniformed female attendants stand at attention outside each open doorway of our train, chit-chatting a bit as a robotic female voice makes pronouncements in Russian over the loudspeaker to an empty station. The sharp smell of creosote and woodstove. A mechanic pings the engines under each car with a rod, looking for leaks; they sound out like random marimba notes. A young German couple with backpacks wanders from door to door looking a little nervous. Inside the station there is only a sour-faced woman selling vodka and salami from a kiosk.
The stations are lively during the day. The platform is dotted with extremely nice old peasant women with headscarves selling whole smoked fish from wicker baskets, fresh yogurt with berries, sunflower seeds, tangerines, apples and bread. You can wander around for a bit, always a little nervous that the train may take off but elbowed forward by the desire to see a bit more, moving past Uyghurs and Tatars and Kazakhs, some oddball new thing sitting there waiting to be discovered, if you’re willing to take a risk.
The train compartment is old school, too. I had it to myself for the first two nights but a polite man named Sergei stepped aboard at Omsk (the city to which Dostoyevsky was exiled) and now lies snoring across the cabin from me. Two couch-beds facing one another in the narrow space with pillow and blanket and a small table in the middle, room up top for stuffing your luggage, a light socket for powering the laptop and a view out the window. Sergei has a coffee mug with a picture of his daughter on it that he keeps filled with some sort of carbonated home-brew. When you lie back and close your eyes the roly-poly back-and-forth rock of the train eases you into sleep rather quickly. On one side of each cab is a samovar, on the opposite an admittedly basic lavatory. No showers, but you can clean up a bit at the sink.
My fellow passengers are less aggressively interesting than one would hope, but pleasant. A number of middle-aged Russian men, some couples, a soldier here and there, and a smattering of tourists like myself. Easy enough to drink vodka with in the restaurant car, and I spent several hours yesterday getting my ass kicked repeatedly at chess by a banker named Vladimir who, aside from chessboard skills was notable for his persistent desire to discuss NHL hockey with me in excruciating detail – though his broken English combined with my grand total of ten Russian words and the black hole of my NHL knowledge-lack left him a bit heartbroken:
“Chicago Blackhawk. Very. Gut. Team!”
“Yes, the Chicago Blackhawks.”
“The goalie, what is name? He is strong.”
Blank stare.
“Their coach, he is gut man. They have same coach? What is name? Oh wait, checkmate! Haha. My friend, what you know about less, hockey or chess? Bahaha.”
Those who know me well know few statements could have burned my ass more than that one. I love chess.
Unfolding for us out the windows on either side of the car were an array of idyllic pastoral scenes as we passed over the Urals, none of the vast tulip fields I was promised by Dr Zhivago (what a rip-off), but still beautiful with the autumn leaves ripening into reds and golds over the ghost-white of so much birch-bark, bucolic farming villages with pretty wooden cottages and those omnipresent old ladies in babushkas carrying milk pails on either side of them, attached via long metal poles that are bent over the shoulders like in those great Flemish paintings. It’s no wonder Tarkovsky chose paintings by these Old Masters in the original Solaris to convey life on Earth to that strange alien being – so much of rural Russian life is captured in them. Further out, though, in Siberia proper the land flattens out into Kansas without corn for a day or so before resolving into more rolling hills beyond Krasnoyarsk.
The cities that punctuate this landscape are, for the most part, the most impressively depressing I’ve ever seen in the industrialized word, especially as you head further east. They seem like science fiction mining colonies on Mars. Some of the older ones have charming little city centers with parks, but even then these are dwarfed by massive dull-grey concrete block housing resembling penitentiary life. Tough places to live; the people here are hard-scrabble but warm enough in their way, certainly hospitable. They have the same jury-rigging skills as denizens of African cities; just now we’ve stopped in Tatarsk and a van rolls past held together with what looks like packing tape, a strategic bit of rope and a prayer, exhaust fumes belching loudly out of what passes for a tailpipe.
Weirdly, despite Stalin and his wholesale destruction, each town retains its shiny, ornate orthodox onion dome bell tower after all these years. It reminds me of three days spent travelling by boat down the Niger River seeing every wattle-and-clay hut village along the water with its own dry-mud mosque minaret. Even in the vodou regions of the Dogon there were giant stones in the center of villages meant to provide some manner of supernatural protection. In New York I suppose the World Trade Center used to stand in for the church tower. Perhaps the first thing an alien might remark on after visiting us is the omnipresence of these edifices, part flagpole, part antenna to the sky god.
Attached to these urban outposts are one or more of the Mordor nightmare complexes that pock the region and provide all the jobs, coal mines and chemical plants, grain depots and Godzilla-sized lumberyards, smelting foundries the size of cities, sometimes giving off an eerie effervescent red smoke overhead for a mile or more and crammed with elaborate industrial machinery which few people know the name for. It reminds me of nothing so much as driving through Nitro, West Virginia or Gary, Indiana on our way back from visiting relatives down south when I was a kid. These are the hidden sewers of western civilization, producing most of the power and much of the chemicals and raw materials that make Europe run from day to day. Whenever Russia threatens to cut off the Siberian spigot, panic ensues from Reykjavik to Kiev.
It’s hard not to think of the multitude of political prisoners transferred to Siberian gulags via this very rail line, some like Lenin and Dostoevsky by the czars but a vast majority of millions during Stalin’s extended reign of terror, in train cars like this one. Sometimes you can’t help but look out at this tremendous expanse of nothing through their eyes. A terrifying journey with an unspeakable end. When I mentioned this leg of the trip to my Latvian improv teacher and friend Silvija Ozols, her face jumped back for a millisecond as if I had said I was going off to a beach holiday in Birkenau. There are one or two small museums along the way at the site of former gulags, and a statue stands at the head of the Road of Bones further east, north of Vladivostok – where dead prisoners’ corpses were crushed and incorporated into the road itself. But for the most part all those millions of people were simply swallowed up whole and never heard of again, engulfed by this immeasurable, desolate landscape, so vast the human mind cannot quite compass it, even standing within it.
The trans-siberian is old school like an old Hitchcock movie. A period piece during wartime as you slide through the forest in the middle of the night toward an abandoned nineteenth-century train station lit up with hammer-and-sickle, the clack of the tracks scraping the bottom of the car as it turns, mile-long coal caravans slithering past, lumber stacked on flat-beds, in the rail yard random passenger cabs lit up and moving by slowly but with no people on them, linking and unlinking, ghost cars in a ghost station.
On the platform uniformed female attendants stand at attention outside each open doorway of our train, chit-chatting a bit as a robotic female voice makes pronouncements in Russian over the loudspeaker to an empty station. The sharp smell of creosote and woodstove. A mechanic pings the engines under each car with a rod, looking for leaks; they sound out like random marimba notes. A young German couple with backpacks wanders from door to door looking a little nervous. Inside the station there is only a sour-faced woman selling vodka and salami from a kiosk.
The stations are lively during the day. The platform is dotted with extremely nice old peasant women with headscarves selling whole smoked fish from wicker baskets, fresh yogurt with berries, sunflower seeds, tangerines, apples and bread. You can wander around for a bit, always a little nervous that the train may take off but elbowed forward by the desire to see a bit more, moving past Uyghurs and Tatars and Kazakhs, some oddball new thing sitting there waiting to be discovered, if you’re willing to take a risk.
The train compartment is old school, too. I had it to myself for the first two nights but a polite man named Sergei stepped aboard at Omsk (the city to which Dostoyevsky was exiled) and now lies snoring across the cabin from me. Two couch-beds facing one another in the narrow space with pillow and blanket and a small table in the middle, room up top for stuffing your luggage, a light socket for powering the laptop and a view out the window. Sergei has a coffee mug with a picture of his daughter on it that he keeps filled with some sort of carbonated home-brew. When you lie back and close your eyes the roly-poly back-and-forth rock of the train eases you into sleep rather quickly. On one side of each cab is a samovar, on the opposite an admittedly basic lavatory. No showers, but you can clean up a bit at the sink.
My fellow passengers are less aggressively interesting than one would hope, but pleasant. A number of middle-aged Russian men, some couples, a soldier here and there, and a smattering of tourists like myself. Easy enough to drink vodka with in the restaurant car, and I spent several hours yesterday getting my ass kicked repeatedly at chess by a banker named Vladimir who, aside from chessboard skills was notable for his persistent desire to discuss NHL hockey with me in excruciating detail – though his broken English combined with my grand total of ten Russian words and the black hole of my NHL knowledge-lack left him a bit heartbroken:
“Chicago Blackhawk. Very. Gut. Team!”
“Yes, the Chicago Blackhawks.”
“The goalie, what is name? He is strong.”
Blank stare.
“Their coach, he is gut man. They have same coach? What is name? Oh wait, checkmate! Haha. My friend, what you know about less, hockey or chess? Bahaha.”
Those who know me well know few statements could have burned my ass more than that one. I love chess.
Unfolding for us out the windows on either side of the car were an array of idyllic pastoral scenes as we passed over the Urals, none of the vast tulip fields I was promised by Dr Zhivago (what a rip-off), but still beautiful with the autumn leaves ripening into reds and golds over the ghost-white of so much birch-bark, bucolic farming villages with pretty wooden cottages and those omnipresent old ladies in babushkas carrying milk pails on either side of them, attached via long metal poles that are bent over the shoulders like in those great Flemish paintings. It’s no wonder Tarkovsky chose paintings by these Old Masters in the original Solaris to convey life on Earth to that strange alien being – so much of rural Russian life is captured in them. Further out, though, in Siberia proper the land flattens out into Kansas without corn for a day or so before resolving into more rolling hills beyond Krasnoyarsk.
The cities that punctuate this landscape are, for the most part, the most impressively depressing I’ve ever seen in the industrialized word, especially as you head further east. They seem like science fiction mining colonies on Mars. Some of the older ones have charming little city centers with parks, but even then these are dwarfed by massive dull-grey concrete block housing resembling penitentiary life. Tough places to live; the people here are hard-scrabble but warm enough in their way, certainly hospitable. They have the same jury-rigging skills as denizens of African cities; just now we’ve stopped in Tatarsk and a van rolls past held together with what looks like packing tape, a strategic bit of rope and a prayer, exhaust fumes belching loudly out of what passes for a tailpipe.
Weirdly, despite Stalin and his wholesale destruction, each town retains its shiny, ornate orthodox onion dome bell tower after all these years. It reminds me of three days spent travelling by boat down the Niger River seeing every wattle-and-clay hut village along the water with its own dry-mud mosque minaret. Even in the vodou regions of the Dogon there were giant stones in the center of villages meant to provide some manner of supernatural protection. In New York I suppose the World Trade Center used to stand in for the church tower. Perhaps the first thing an alien might remark on after visiting us is the omnipresence of these edifices, part flagpole, part antenna to the sky god.
Attached to these urban outposts are one or more of the Mordor nightmare complexes that pock the region and provide all the jobs, coal mines and chemical plants, grain depots and Godzilla-sized lumberyards, smelting foundries the size of cities, sometimes giving off an eerie effervescent red smoke overhead for a mile or more and crammed with elaborate industrial machinery which few people know the name for. It reminds me of nothing so much as driving through Nitro, West Virginia or Gary, Indiana on our way back from visiting relatives down south when I was a kid. These are the hidden sewers of western civilization, producing most of the power and much of the chemicals and raw materials that make Europe run from day to day. Whenever Russia threatens to cut off the Siberian spigot, panic ensues from Reykjavik to Kiev.
It’s hard not to think of the multitude of political prisoners transferred to Siberian gulags via this very rail line, some like Lenin and Dostoevsky by the czars but a vast majority of millions during Stalin’s extended reign of terror, in train cars like this one. Sometimes you can’t help but look out at this tremendous expanse of nothing through their eyes. A terrifying journey with an unspeakable end. When I mentioned this leg of the trip to my Latvian improv teacher and friend Silvija Ozols, her face jumped back for a millisecond as if I had said I was going off to a beach holiday in Birkenau. There are one or two small museums along the way at the site of former gulags, and a statue stands at the head of the Road of Bones further east, north of Vladivostok – where dead prisoners’ corpses were crushed and incorporated into the road itself. But for the most part all those millions of people were simply swallowed up whole and never heard of again, engulfed by this immeasurable, desolate landscape, so vast the human mind cannot quite compass it, even standing within it.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Moscow's Bowels
I love my little hotel in Moscow. It’s on a quiet street with a bunch of great old buildings in various states of decay, an outdoor farmer’s market, a local café chain outlet and a dribble of stolen wifi access. I trust the nation’s deteriorating relationship with the Ukraine to ensure that none of these farmer’s market pears are in fact from Chernobyl. And one block away a portal into the Moscow underground, by far the coolest subway system on the planet, redolent as it is of faded social realist opulence. I ended up spending much of the day travelling from one station to another and then getting out and exploring the environs for an hour or so. A great way to get to know the city, lots of surprises. And a great way to start this massive train voyage to end all train voyages.
Each Metro station is unique, apart from being slathered in high-end marble blocks head-to-toe. In one there is an impossibly enormous chandelier and preposterously imperious marble benches, in another there are mosaics with tractors in wheat fields and schoolchildren cheering as Soviet bombers pass overhead. One has cartoonishly huge marble Olympic torches punctuating the train platform, another is dominated by a series of social realist sculptures of workers heroically plowing fields, and Bolshevik insurgents male and female armed with rifles and accompanied by their loyal dog companions as they crouch and lie in wait for a whiff of the bourgeoisie. Muscovites touch the dogs’ noses for good luck as they pass en masse through the transit system, so that the snouts are rubbed to a shiny silver. Perhaps that’s why so much Egyptian statuary is missing the nose? The dogs’ won’t last into the twenty-second century. And it’s funny to see given the context; just as bland, rote superstition infected the monotheism that prevailed before, so it did into these temples of the communist mythology, and survived it. Knock on wood.
Inserted into all of the little unobserved bits of the train stations are jaw-dropping old deco light fixtures, air vents shaped in the form of stylized wheat stalks, etc. They are modernist aesthetic statements to rival the Chrysler Building or the Empire State, and it becomes clear that at the same time these two capitals, Moscow and New York, were engaged in a deadly serious, tooth-and-nail brinksmanship and competing global reaching there was a common aesthetic undercurrent at work in the great towers and infrastructure that nodded to one another and acknowledged they saw something common and new, and were creating it together. Art Deco really consists of borrowing all of social realism’s aesthetic trappings and bleaching out the ideology.
Over nine million people pour through this underground transit system each day, more than London and New York combined, and there is an etiquette to the chaos of being buffeted like a log down the Moscow Metro rapids that I haven’t managed to quite pick up. The New York choreography doesn’t cut it, I’m invariably in someone’s way. The locals seem nimble enough, even effortless as dancers, though mornings on the subway all of them are gruff as the stocky female attendants with scratchy woollen military uniforms, seemingly ripped from the era of Stalin, who sit in booths on either end of the platform and glower in an authoritarian manner to no apparent purpose.
Trying to make out the Cyrillic station names is no fun. Earnest as ever, your brain’s pattern recognition system keeps telling you it’s about to sort out the whole puzzle, there are short little stretches where they seem to converge, but for the most part it might as well be in “Alien”.
Things are considerably more chilled in the evening as people come home. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and heads to the nearest bar. As you rattle up the steep white semi-circular canyon of the station’s surface tunnel via escalator, you pass couples making out with abandon, teenagers surreptitiously passing around a bottle of vodka, businessmen with their ties askew and an unlit cigarette at the corners of their mouths, and an avalanche of handheld texting that could probably bring down a mid-sized cell phone tower. Up top, Moscow at the end of the workday becomes a vast sprawling hang-out, as if that rural Duane Reade parking lot where the kids from your home town in Topeka, Kansas hung out sitting on car hoods smoking, drinking and blaring crackly FM tunes from the dashboard radio exploded out into a vast multi-million-person mega-labyrinth. There are few more fun places to hang out at night, and with a distinct, unbending blue-collar “back in the concrete high-rise” vibe.
Finally, the musicians of the Moscow subway system are so far superior to those of New York that it’s like comparing John Coltrane to a junior high school kid learning to play a plastic recorder. And they have the guitar case out just like any random shmuck playing Hotel California over and over again at the Coney Island stop. In one station outside the Kremlin I saw a wind group nailing the Stravinsky Octet. A string quartet under Pushkin Square was rocking out to Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue. A lone violinist parted the commuter waters of Mayakovskaya like a dangerous rock in the middle of a river and planted every note of one of Paganini’s most perilous caprices. That was some bad-ass shit.
Oh, the city’s pretty cool too. Everyone is guarded here, but can be goaded into flashes of genuine warmth. It’s not even remotely as dangerous as Muscovites try to tell you, partly as a matter of pride – sorry buddy, you’re no Bedford Stuyvesant, you’ll have to try harder. There is radical affluence in many sections of Moscow, lots of jet-black Jaguars and Maseratis prowling the impassable ring roads, and some bang-up restaurants and clubs (thanks to Tim Evans for steering me to Propaganda). But the prosperity here is more widely shared than originally advertised back home. The post-apocalyptic expanse of concrete block skyscraper housing ringing the city is delivered almost as promised, except that most are clean and well maintained, have pleasant adjoining parks and posh adjunct shopping malls with neon movie multiplexes and brand name shops inside like Ikea and J Crew. There are even new, swankier looking high-rise concrete housing projects with signs up offering units for sale; the collectivist urban way of life appears set to continue under an improved economic setting. In the city center you have a real restaurant culture for all classes, with restos and cafes packed late into the evening across all of Moscow. Downtown is decidedly European, imposing urban piles tattooed with adverts for Nikon and Pepsi in Cyrillic, and the Kremlin is flatly magnificent. Unnoticed in the corners are all manner of hidden architectural gems like surviving wooden houses from the nineteenth century stranded on residential blocks, factories tattooed with hammer-and-sickles, used book stores with unwieldy piles of scientific texts stacked to the ceiling, and lost little stone churches that look more like Turkish mosques, boarded up for decades and starting to crumble.
All in all, a good day. My one disappointment is that they’ve shut down the Bolshoi ballet house for renovation. But then I remembered the night in music school when the Bolshoi came to town, my friend Karl Seeley snuck them out from under their handlers’ noses and brought them to a party at Jennifer Griffin’s house, and we proceeded to get them completely wasted -- until the US Secret Service showed up, castigated us menacingly and banished them back to their hotel. So I guess I’ve already had my Bolshoi experience.
Each Metro station is unique, apart from being slathered in high-end marble blocks head-to-toe. In one there is an impossibly enormous chandelier and preposterously imperious marble benches, in another there are mosaics with tractors in wheat fields and schoolchildren cheering as Soviet bombers pass overhead. One has cartoonishly huge marble Olympic torches punctuating the train platform, another is dominated by a series of social realist sculptures of workers heroically plowing fields, and Bolshevik insurgents male and female armed with rifles and accompanied by their loyal dog companions as they crouch and lie in wait for a whiff of the bourgeoisie. Muscovites touch the dogs’ noses for good luck as they pass en masse through the transit system, so that the snouts are rubbed to a shiny silver. Perhaps that’s why so much Egyptian statuary is missing the nose? The dogs’ won’t last into the twenty-second century. And it’s funny to see given the context; just as bland, rote superstition infected the monotheism that prevailed before, so it did into these temples of the communist mythology, and survived it. Knock on wood.
Inserted into all of the little unobserved bits of the train stations are jaw-dropping old deco light fixtures, air vents shaped in the form of stylized wheat stalks, etc. They are modernist aesthetic statements to rival the Chrysler Building or the Empire State, and it becomes clear that at the same time these two capitals, Moscow and New York, were engaged in a deadly serious, tooth-and-nail brinksmanship and competing global reaching there was a common aesthetic undercurrent at work in the great towers and infrastructure that nodded to one another and acknowledged they saw something common and new, and were creating it together. Art Deco really consists of borrowing all of social realism’s aesthetic trappings and bleaching out the ideology.
Over nine million people pour through this underground transit system each day, more than London and New York combined, and there is an etiquette to the chaos of being buffeted like a log down the Moscow Metro rapids that I haven’t managed to quite pick up. The New York choreography doesn’t cut it, I’m invariably in someone’s way. The locals seem nimble enough, even effortless as dancers, though mornings on the subway all of them are gruff as the stocky female attendants with scratchy woollen military uniforms, seemingly ripped from the era of Stalin, who sit in booths on either end of the platform and glower in an authoritarian manner to no apparent purpose.
Trying to make out the Cyrillic station names is no fun. Earnest as ever, your brain’s pattern recognition system keeps telling you it’s about to sort out the whole puzzle, there are short little stretches where they seem to converge, but for the most part it might as well be in “Alien”.
Things are considerably more chilled in the evening as people come home. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and heads to the nearest bar. As you rattle up the steep white semi-circular canyon of the station’s surface tunnel via escalator, you pass couples making out with abandon, teenagers surreptitiously passing around a bottle of vodka, businessmen with their ties askew and an unlit cigarette at the corners of their mouths, and an avalanche of handheld texting that could probably bring down a mid-sized cell phone tower. Up top, Moscow at the end of the workday becomes a vast sprawling hang-out, as if that rural Duane Reade parking lot where the kids from your home town in Topeka, Kansas hung out sitting on car hoods smoking, drinking and blaring crackly FM tunes from the dashboard radio exploded out into a vast multi-million-person mega-labyrinth. There are few more fun places to hang out at night, and with a distinct, unbending blue-collar “back in the concrete high-rise” vibe.
Finally, the musicians of the Moscow subway system are so far superior to those of New York that it’s like comparing John Coltrane to a junior high school kid learning to play a plastic recorder. And they have the guitar case out just like any random shmuck playing Hotel California over and over again at the Coney Island stop. In one station outside the Kremlin I saw a wind group nailing the Stravinsky Octet. A string quartet under Pushkin Square was rocking out to Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue. A lone violinist parted the commuter waters of Mayakovskaya like a dangerous rock in the middle of a river and planted every note of one of Paganini’s most perilous caprices. That was some bad-ass shit.
Oh, the city’s pretty cool too. Everyone is guarded here, but can be goaded into flashes of genuine warmth. It’s not even remotely as dangerous as Muscovites try to tell you, partly as a matter of pride – sorry buddy, you’re no Bedford Stuyvesant, you’ll have to try harder. There is radical affluence in many sections of Moscow, lots of jet-black Jaguars and Maseratis prowling the impassable ring roads, and some bang-up restaurants and clubs (thanks to Tim Evans for steering me to Propaganda). But the prosperity here is more widely shared than originally advertised back home. The post-apocalyptic expanse of concrete block skyscraper housing ringing the city is delivered almost as promised, except that most are clean and well maintained, have pleasant adjoining parks and posh adjunct shopping malls with neon movie multiplexes and brand name shops inside like Ikea and J Crew. There are even new, swankier looking high-rise concrete housing projects with signs up offering units for sale; the collectivist urban way of life appears set to continue under an improved economic setting. In the city center you have a real restaurant culture for all classes, with restos and cafes packed late into the evening across all of Moscow. Downtown is decidedly European, imposing urban piles tattooed with adverts for Nikon and Pepsi in Cyrillic, and the Kremlin is flatly magnificent. Unnoticed in the corners are all manner of hidden architectural gems like surviving wooden houses from the nineteenth century stranded on residential blocks, factories tattooed with hammer-and-sickles, used book stores with unwieldy piles of scientific texts stacked to the ceiling, and lost little stone churches that look more like Turkish mosques, boarded up for decades and starting to crumble.
All in all, a good day. My one disappointment is that they’ve shut down the Bolshoi ballet house for renovation. But then I remembered the night in music school when the Bolshoi came to town, my friend Karl Seeley snuck them out from under their handlers’ noses and brought them to a party at Jennifer Griffin’s house, and we proceeded to get them completely wasted -- until the US Secret Service showed up, castigated us menacingly and banished them back to their hotel. So I guess I’ve already had my Bolshoi experience.
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