tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27721530245462274242024-03-13T03:56:10.582-07:00Far Away...John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.comBlogger51125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-67828963743399585552011-05-23T15:32:00.001-07:002011-05-23T15:38:40.245-07:00Cambodian Night Fright<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">There's a good chance I may not live to finish this blog.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">I am composing this in the back of a car travelling at high speed down a dark highway in the south of Cambodia.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Our arrival at Phnom Pehn airport was uneventful, just passing though the gauntlet of 10 military officers who check your passport, take your money, and review your customs declarations. In Malaysia, the job's done by one person with a computer; here, it's a pre-computerized throwback process. Welcome back to the developing world.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Oh jeez. He's passing again. My foot digs into the floor. The propane-powered car has no pickup at all. The lights of a transport truck are growing ahead. He flicks his high beams at us. We cut back into our lane with seconds to spare.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">We ignored the airport touts when we arrived and looked for a taxi service to Sihanoukville, about four hours' drive to the south, on the coast. It's near sunset and we wanted to get there tonight. Short version: no intercity drive service at the airport. A guy approaches us, has a friend with a car, prices have gone up for gas, blah blah. An hour later we are sitting in the back of a late-model Camry with good seatbelts and struggling aircon. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Please don't pass on this curve. Oh Christ. Here we go again. My nails dig into my thigh.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Our driver seemed a pleasant enough middle-aged man. We front him $20 of his fee to fill the tank to get us to Sihanoukville, and we began snake our way out of PP's commuter traffic.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">The road's in good shape, and traffic lights and rights-of-way are mostly observed in the big city. We pass through PP's endless suburbs, past windowless garment factories whose workers are now piling onto half-ton trucks, heading home, packed liked sardines in minivans. The pace of traffic is speeding up as the sun races for the horizon. A last few moments of half-light, and our universe shrinks to the confines of our Camry. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">The only other lights on the highway are transport trucks and local boy's motorcycles. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">You don't have enough room to get between those motorcycles. You don't. You don't. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">You did. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Last time we were here we took the bus. Dirty, smelly, noisy. Never again, we thought.</span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> This way gives us a much better view of local driving customs. Suicidal driving customs, it turns out.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Take, for instance, the language of high-beams. In Canada, you may flash them to warn about a speed trap, or if the other driver has his highs on. Here in Cambodia, it's its own stand-alone language.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Each time our driver wants to pass, he flashes his intentions to the vehicle in front of him. If it's a truck or bus, they'll flash to let him know the way is clear ahead. The driver then goes into the opposing traffic lane, on faith, flashing high beams at the traffic that has the audacity to be heading the other way. Several light signal exchanges now take place, and drivers in both directions cede right-of-way. Usually. Or they'll slow down, or if they're a motorcycle, swerve off onto the gravel. Laws of physics trumping traffic rules. Several more flickerings either settle the issue amicably, or the drivers flash a photonic middle finger to one another. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> All t</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">his is of course, happens in the opposite lane simultaneously to us, with all the other drivers on the road, several high-to-low beam conversations going on at the same time. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> The use of t</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">urn indicators is another sub-dialect, not to get into now. </span></span></span></span></span>Because I am surely going to die in the next few minutes.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Our driver is confident, not very chatty but friendly enough. He seemed to know what he was doing, and we were only going 60km. That's a comfort.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Until I double-checked the speedometer. This was an American model vehicle. We were travelling 60 <i>miles</i> an hour down a country road. Passing on curves and up hills. Depending that every other vehicle also has working lights- hardly a given. Going faster when we could. And faster.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Then it starts snowing.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Big, fat, thick flakes fly toward our headlights, hitting the windshield. It looks everything like a September snowstorm in Yukon, when the ground is bare but a squall blinds the way ahead. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> Not snow. I</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">nsects. Insubstantial, like may-flies by the river. But millions of them are everywhere, peppering the windshield. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">The driver hits the wipers, smearing the 'snow' across his field of vision. He gives a soft Khmer curse and hits the sprayer button. The plain water in the spray does nothing but add streaks. But when the water hits the air-conned windshield, condensation forms on the inside of the window, fogging what little clear spots of visibility were left.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">This doesn't slow down our driver. We are now heading down the road, blind, in near-blackness, at 60 miles an hour.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">The only points of reference the driver has, between smears of clear windshield, are the lights of the oncoming transports, now passing uncomfortably close to my door.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">The driver slows as we head into a nameless highway town. He pulls into a parking lot to clean his windshield, refill the wiper reservoir with water, and we take off again.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">The drive gets hairier as the road gets lonelier and darker between the dirty little Cambodian towns. We straddle the painted line, hitting 80 now. We pass more transports, farmers on tractors, families walking along the road, ghosts in our headlights. Every new challenge on the road follows the same pattern: flick lights, change lanes to pass far too early, too slowly, and watch headlights grow ahead of us, pull into our own lane at last moment. It never gets easier.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Then we pull up to another guy, also doing at least 60. Our driver signals, moves into the oncoming lane. It's on a blind curve, but that's par for the course. Then, as we move to pass, the other driver accelerates.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Of course, such challenges to manhood cannot be ignored. The douchebag in the car ahead weaves into our lane when our driver speeds up, blocking him. Side by side, they race at ever-higher speeds. Finally we overtake him. On a hill. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">We leave our opponent in the dust, now having to stay above 80 but with no-one ahead. I glance at my wife. She's closed her eyes, making peace with her maker. I want to die with my eyes open. </span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> But this is ridiculous. I have to try to relax. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">I glance off to the side, close my eyes for a moment.</span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> Then WHAM!.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Something is under the car. The wet,sickening sound of something tumbling, breaking, but it happens too fast to see. Our driver cuts down 10 mph, checks his engine indicators. A few kilometres later we pull through a toll booth, and our driver pulls off to the side of the road. Checks for any marks on the grill, anything under the carriage. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">'What was it? I asked. 'A box? An animal?'</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">The driver just grins at me, and his English has done a disappearing act. He smiles, mumbles irrelevant 'yes'es to my questions, lights a cigarette, draws on a water bottle.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">We stretch for a few minutes, then he throws his bottle into the shrubs. He nods to me. “Twenty minutes to go", he says.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">The toll booth recedes in the distance. I wonder what else we have left on the road.</span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">* * *</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> The first s</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">treet lights of Sihanoukville reduce the anxiety that we'll hit something we don't at least see first, though the driver takes no opportunity to slow down as we enter the city. A turn down a side street or two, and we reach our destination.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">We pull our bags from the trunk and I pull out my wallet. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">I fish out his fare, and add an extra five.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> "</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Good driving", I say, and shake his hand. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">He pulls out without looking back, heading to his family four hours away. I have no doubt he'll get there safe and sound.</span></span></span></span></span></span>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-68641920087233089272011-05-04T19:37:00.001-07:002011-05-04T19:38:33.064-07:00Malacca Turned Me Into Rick Steeves<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's not often in Southeast Asia (heck, the world) that you see tourism done right. Touts and hawkers desecrate the peace at the entrances to Angkor Wat in Cambodia; corrupt politicans privatize whole beaches in Indonesia; monks forced to ask for early-morning alms in Laos to satisfy amateur photographers. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Malacca is different.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We pick up a cab at the bus station after an unremarkable two-hour drive from Kuala Lumpur to the port city on Malaysia's southwest coast. A few minutes drive, over a few modern overpasses and down wide boulevards, and we turn onto a tiny side street. Back into history.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is Malacca's (properly, Melaka) old quarter, a UNESCO heritage site. Three years ago, the UN decided the old core of this port town was worth preserving for the world. It's easy to see why.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Our guest house was a converted 200-year-old warehouse; on either side are buildings just as old, still functioning as such. Walking by them is a glimpse into history, with crates of cloth and oriental medicine, wrapped boxes of ginger and pepper and dried fish.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The warehouses line a canal that snakes more than a kilometre in from the ocean, an artery of commerce that goes back from before Columbus sailed into history.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Malaysian sultans, Chinese exporters, Arab proselytizers and Indian entrepreneurs made the city important. Smart taxes and tolerance to different ways allowed the city to thrive and grow. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then we came along. Portuguese, then the Dutch, then British. Europeans actually choked off the port with their greed and prejudice. High taxes, religious intolerance, and just downright douchebaggery saw Malacca slowly strangle. By the 19<sup>th</sup> century, British indifference (or desire to emphasize their post on the island of Penang, up the coast) finally sealed Malacca's fate. It languished in obscurity, its harbour slowly silting in. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Which is not to say it disappeared. Melacca limped along. And as it goes in so many other places, neglect equated to preservation. A hodge-podge of 500 years of building styles and cultures survive to charm today.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There's Harmony Lane, with mosques, temples and wats that have tolerated each other's differences for centuries. The buildings are so old they lack that bland uniformity you see in their younger kin. So the Chinese temple has a Hindu flair, the mosque has European accents. Then there's the red-brick utilitarianism of the old Dutch administration buildings; British and other European churches, fading in use and form.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Apparently there was a building boom in Malacca just before the Japanese invaded. Many buildings in the historic quarter sport dates from the late 30s to early 40s.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Much of SE Asian history is of the 'you have to imagine' variety- either various waves of development have wiped out older buildings, or they don't survive the climate. Usually the only old buildings in any town are temples of worship or palaces, and there's only so many of them you can visit before eyes start to glaze.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That's what makes Malacca a delight to visit after six months of touring. There are shops, warehouses, parts of a fort, bureaucratic structures. There's a wide brick walkway along the canal, for pedestrians. Restoration work and preservation seem to be ongoing.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nearly two dozen small museums crowd in the quarter, telling stories from the history of education (skipped that one) to the Japanese occupation (watched the video). </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's a town that still relishes its diversity. Restaurants and markets emphasize the multi-cultural nature of the port's history. There are Dutch, Portuguese, Indian, and Nyonya (Chinese mixed-blood) eateries dotting the quarter. Antique shops and artists' studios produce genuine handicrafts, interesting art- again, a sight rarely seen in the area.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I sound like Rick frickin' Steeves, I know.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In fact, the daughter and I started doing passable imitations of the American TV tourist to each other, so easy was Malacca's material to work with.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Malacca has its flaws, for sure. Garish Chinese-style gates advertising beer and dried noodle mixes greet you at the quarter's entranceways. The antique stores will fleece you, and tourist-junk shops abound. A riverboat ride down the canal shows massive developments near completion, which will no doubt put more pressure on the area to cater to the masses. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But you can see the development has been done with some thought to the surroundings. There aren't many examples of really unsympathetic construction. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And the core is very well protected. You see no-smoking signs everywhere- there's no smoking in the buildings. Let me repeat that. This is Southeast Asia, and there are <i>no smoking signs</i>. And not only for one place. The whole quarter. And people were respecting that. I saw no one smoking in a building.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The day we left, the papers had a story about a developer that had cut down some centuries-old heritage trees to make way for a new building. Shit hit the fan. The governor was livid. The town mortified. “He'll never work here again,” he threatened. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is simply unheard of. Worrying about trees over development? I had to pinch myself I was still in SE Asia.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We hardly stayed long enough. We walked the streets at night, feeling perfectly safe. Smart placement of floodlights add both a feeling of security and charm to the place. There's a quiet but busy sound to the evening. The church bells rang nine, prompting birds roosting in the trees to call out an angry chorus for being disturbed.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">God help me, I am turning into Rick Steeves.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It was time to head back to the guest house. The streets were quiet. We jump as some rats race out from under a car and dash for the sewer, scrapping with each other as they went. Even that doesn't bother us. It's an ancient port city, after all.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These are world heritage rats.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-85729427994365353542011-05-02T18:12:00.001-07:002011-05-02T18:14:54.382-07:00Brunei: There's No There, There<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tourists have been underwhelmed with Brunei for years. The guidebooks generally paint the picture of a dull place, with little to do. I want to take that with a grain of salt, as most guidebooks are tuned to the sensibilities of drunken Australian frat-boys. So while part of the family flies off Borneo from Kota Kinabalu, my daughter and I hop on the four-hour ferry to Brunei.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ACf8HyVXRBE/Tb9N0-KdKRI/AAAAAAAAAD0/aze1WG3JLvo/s1600/brunei-minaret.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ACf8HyVXRBE/Tb9N0-KdKRI/AAAAAAAAAD0/aze1WG3JLvo/s320/brunei-minaret.JPG" width="239" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Brunei has a history that goes back 1,000 years, but the modern postage-stamp country is an accident of British geopolitics in the region. It was created partly through the efforts of one of those early 19th-century freelance imperialists someone should make a movie about, and botched negotiations for unification with the rest of Malaysia in the late 50s and early 60s. It only gained independence from Britain in 1984. The end result is a privately-held enclave making an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Majesty_Paduka_Seri_Baginda_Sultan_Haji_Hassanal_Bolkiah_Mu%27izzaddin_Waddaulah">unremarkable and somewhat distasteful family</a> among the richest people in the world.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We arrive, and are ushered quickly through customs, and onto a dingy minibus for the half-hour drive into town. Well-kept homes populate both sides of the well-kept highway. I'm reminded it's a country with free health care and education, and no income or corporate taxes, which</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> even ofers subsidies to buy a car. Wealth almost beyond measure from oil. The 'Shellfare State'.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fantastic modern office towers rise out of fields- home to various government ministries. It's an urban layout made for cars. We saw no bicycles, no motorcyles, no pedestrians.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We're dropped off in the downtown core of Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei's capital. Five blocks wide, maybe ten blocks long, peppered with attempts at architecture.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We're settled into our 80s-era hotel just as night falls, and decide to hit the town. Forewarned being forearmed, we expect no nightlife. And are thus not surprised.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's just short of seven, but no one is walking the streets. No cars make jaywalking the least bit dangerous. Office blocks dark from the second floor up.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But there is light, at street level. We walk down Jalan Sultan, a double-wide downtown street, past CD shops, jewellers and restaurants. The intricately-cobbled sidewalks glow in the dark from the light of commerce.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Brilliant white fluorescents, clean tiles and booths- we choose a restaurant that both satisfies us on its sanitary appearance and ability to hide our ignorance of local etiquette. We're welcomed by an Indian man-all the shopkeepers here seem to come from the subcontinent- and we slide into a booth.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And into heaven.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Our host, unbidden, brings us some samosas and sweet snacks for appetizers. We order from the menu- a roti telur (with egg), chickpea masala, kuey teow ayam (chicken with large egg noodles), and murtabak daging (the house speciality, we're told, a thick roti with beef and vegetables). Small dishes of sauces from yellow to red offer various wonderful ways to torture our tongues further. The best orange and lime juices we've had this trip.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We eat till we can't any more, and pay our bill. Twelve Brunei dollars- about $9US, and we walk out happy and satisfied.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We wander some more just to aid digestion, and the downtown offers more of the same- empty parks, open but customer-free stores. Thunder rumbles overhead, lightning flashes through the cloud decks, but there's no audience on the street below.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-blp2srUK7eE/Tb9N3aHyr7I/AAAAAAAAAD4/XiyGynV-iZ4/s1600/brunei-street.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-blp2srUK7eE/Tb9N3aHyr7I/AAAAAAAAAD4/XiyGynV-iZ4/s320/brunei-street.JPG" width="239" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There's no drinking in Brunei, but that can hardly be the only reason for the empty streets. We've been other places where the majority can't drink, and the coffee shops are alive, teens walk in laughing gangs, street hustlers hang on their cell phones, parents and children play. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And it's not that the people aren't friendly. We are met with smiles and greeting when we catch a local's eye- one of the nicest receptions we've received in SE Asia. And we feel perfectly safe, even where the streets are dark. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But it's not alive.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Maybe, I think, it's a function of a society where only one person- or family (and the corporation it's tied to) really has a say in what is to be. No one has a stake, a reason to try to strive, to create. To make a different world. Brunei is a place where you work, where you consume, where you keep your nose out of the sultan's business. Nothing intangible is being created out of the chaos of people interacting, just for the sake of it. A monoculture of power is as lifeless as a monoculture of agriculture. Both mislead with the outward appearance of health and prosperity.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We spend just over a day in Brunei. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The next morning we visit the sultan's regalia museum, and finally get a peek inside a mosque (Brunei's is beautiful). We miss some touristy things- the water taxi, a visit to a wildlife sanctuary- but that's really more of the same as the rest of Borneo.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It would have been worth staying one more day. But probably not two.</span></div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-85759882356534877512011-04-29T16:54:00.002-07:002011-05-02T17:33:28.156-07:00Chance Meeting in Sandakan<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The family's busy- the kids mainlining YouTube or sleeping, my wife and our friend taking a hike- so it's my chance. I skip down the steps of our hostel, past the magic-markered endorsements of the place on the wall, and onto the streets of Sandakan.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is a working-class town, a port city on the east coast of Borneo. From the washrooms in our hostel you can see the Sulu Sea. Unfortunately, that's about the best interaction you can have with the sea here. Long monopolized by business, the town has no recreational purpose for the blue waters next to it. For a vast tropical island, Malaysian Borneo has little in the way of pristine, enticing beach attractions.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5227RG6rTOw/Tb9Ml-Dv3VI/AAAAAAAAADs/6D6L_EnT9bw/s1600/sandakan-docks.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5227RG6rTOw/Tb9Ml-Dv3VI/AAAAAAAAADs/6D6L_EnT9bw/s320/sandakan-docks.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unloading fruit at the Sandakan market dock.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sandakan isn't much to look at. The drive in goes past suburban industrial zones, a mix of hovels and mansions- the usual Asian random zoning. Then over a hill and down into the town centre, which offers little more.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Five or six off-white, block-long apartment buildings dominate the downtown. Four stories tall, their sides are festooned with rusting balconies, satellite dishes, air conditioning units, and iron gratings. Washing hangs down from the sides, years of dye staining the paint dull hues- where the monsoons haven't peeled it away to the concrete</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">. The odd tree has taken root in a crack or abandoned balcony. With the clothes, they bring much-needed colour to the drab exteriors.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sandakan was once the capital of Malaysian Borneo. Bombed and burned out of existence during WWII by both the Japanese and Allies, it never really recovered. Local pamphlets, though, still recall better times, when logging and palm oil shipments made the city boom. Once, we're told, there were more millionaires here per capita than anywhere in the world.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UL_ohGioq-A/Tb9M6ekKtgI/AAAAAAAAADw/VYslL6-LWlc/s1600/sandakan-apts.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UL_ohGioq-A/Tb9M6ekKtgI/AAAAAAAAADw/VYslL6-LWlc/s320/sandakan-apts.JPG" width="239" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Those times are long gone, forgotten like the English author who lived here in the 40s, her stately home still a tourist site looking over the city. Now, young men stand on street corners, hawking packs of cigarettes. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I walk along the manageable sidewalks, the storefronts darkened by the second-story balconies a foot or two over my head. Sunshades at street level block the blistering afternoon sun from baking the clerks inside the jewellery and cellphone shops.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tourists aren't uncommon in town, but I still get stares from the locals. Obviously not many wander this far into their daily lives. I make a brief attempt to walk out of town along the shore road, but turn around after a few blocks as the residences give way to into industrial docks, well-maintained but devoid of life.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I step down onto a sidewalk and catch the eye of a local sitting in a restaurant. A few nice words are exchanged and I throw a Hail Mary down the field of Meeting the Locals. I sit down with him and in a few moments he helps me order a roti and bottle of water.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Turns out he's a tour guide. I get the sense it's a freelance job, that he picks up his business where he can. A young man, his English is excellent. It's also pretty clear that he's not on the meter: there's no pitch coming. We just exchange pleasantries about our countries, our lives. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I've got my PADI,” he says. “I hope to go to Indonesia to work for a dive shop there.”</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I marvel that he'll go to Indonesia, where wages are even lower and standards somewhat worse than here. “There's work there for me. A chance to see somewhere else.” Sandakan doesn't have that opportunity. One day he hopes to have his own business.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The roti comes- its excellent- and we chat a while longer. He helps translate my bill payment, I wish him goodbye, and I'm on my way. I realize it's one of the few plain conversations I've had with a local- no business in the offing, nothing sought other than a few moments of unusual company.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It hasn't happened often enough.</span></div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-89326377533512201552011-04-26T17:50:00.003-07:002011-04-26T18:11:25.345-07:00Sabah: Animal Welfare<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The bus ride from KK to Sandakan is not far in kilometres, but takes hours as we wind up and down the mountainous terrain. Borneo is gorgeous country. As the bus drives along a ridge, the land falls away on both sides into deep valleys, only to rise again in big plates of rock. Homesteads and mansions perch on the tips of the hills, permanently enjoying the spectacular Swiss-like views.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For us, though, the vistas are temporary, and as we fall to the coast the mixed farms and terraces give way to palm oil plantations. For kilometre after kilometre, rows of stubby, thick-trunked palms, carefully placed in geometric perfection, move off into the distance.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I've mentioned before the effect is like a Photoshop clone-stamp; it looks like a lazy game designer quickly pasted the backgrounds of Donkey Kong Country into the landscape. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Unfortunately, the parallel doesn't end there. For real-world monkeys, the geometric landscape is dangerous and threatens their existence.</span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PjmZ0Zb5MQI/TbdjZMT69PI/AAAAAAAAADk/0fM-OD5PdLg/s1600/orangutan.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="282" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PjmZ0Zb5MQI/TbdjZMT69PI/AAAAAAAAADk/0fM-OD5PdLg/s400/orangutan.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">An orangutan hears the dinner bells.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The monoculture forests have brought great wealth to one ape- us- but impoverished all our distant cousins who've lived here for millions of years. Oranguatans, macacques, proboscis monkeys, and a half-dozen others have seen their natural orchards bulldozed and burned, wiped out for inedible palm fruit. Even if they could eat it, it's doubtful humans would let them. So they starve, if not shot or poisoned.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We visit two sanctuaries for the simians. One, the Sepilok Orangutan Centre, is supported by government and NGO programs. It was opened in the 1960s, and has decades of experience in professional animal care and management. The brown-orange apes, when found orphaned, sick or in captivity, are brought here for rehabilitation. A video show at the centre informs us this can take years, or even decades; some never leave at all.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The well-funded centre holds carefully-orchestrated public feeding shows for visitors. For about ten dollars, we're let onto a walkway that skirts the edge of the 5500-hectare rain forest preserve.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We are asked to be quiet, and the elevated wooden path opens up to a platform for viewing. A few metres away, ropes in the trees lead to a series of wooden platforms. The morning crowd of about 200 is hushed and expectant. It's all very respectful, very dignified.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Orangutans are solitary creatures, but will come together for feeding events. This is one of them. Soon a quiet murmur runs through the crowd, people pointing and the click of cameras. Children squeal in delight and are shushed. Silently, gracefully, the apes swing down the ropes to the stations. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Two professional but slightly bored-looking attendants step up onto the platforms and pour out melon rinds and bananas. Fruit is the orang's natural diet. There's no rush, no scramble, among the orangutans. Small young females and larger mothers carefully climb over and around each other to pick up fruit to eat. The only chaos comes from the smaller, more hyper macacques, grabbing, fighting, and hissing over the pieces they steal from the mellow orangutans. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">An older park ranger comes up and points to the trees behind us. “There's a male, a wild one,” he says. “Not from the park.” Half-hidden, three stories up in the canopy we glimpse the wide, grey head of an adult male. “He's here for the females,” the ranger smiles. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are less than 10,000 orangutans left in the world, and it's thought they could be gone in a decade. This preserve will be one of the last stands. The orangs we see today will slowly be weaned off human feeding, taken to more distant points in the preserve, hopefully to return to more wild behaviour. Maybe to mate with the male just up in the trees here today. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We feel privileged to have caught a glimpse of a wild male. So few left. Such need.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The next day we're taken through more plantations, and past giant artificial ponds for growing shrimp, a half-hour from Sandakan, closer to the coast. We're here to see the proboscis monkeys of Sabah.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The proboscis, from its name, has a large, flappy brownish-pink nose. It sort of looks like a caricature of Jimmy Durante, made even more humourous with the addition of a good-old boy pot belly.</span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wH046WD1kXI/TbdkWeu9jUI/AAAAAAAAADo/AWemP06MWgg/s1600/proboscis.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wH046WD1kXI/TbdkWeu9jUI/AAAAAAAAADo/AWemP06MWgg/s320/proboscis.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">You can get close enough to touch them.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The orangutan centre was a scientific and professional animal management facility; the Labuk Bay Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary is different. It was set up by the owners of the company whose palm-oil plantations have helped wipe out most of the monkey's habitat. A video about the monkeys (viewed during the tour) informs us the owners, two brothers, saw a troupe of the animals after they tore apart a worker's shack. They took pity on them. They decided not to wipe out the scraps of mangrove forest remaining to eke out a few more ringit from the swampy land. They left it for the monkeys. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A noble deed, but so much of the monkey's habitat has been wiped out there's little hope they could survive for long unaided in the area. Thus, twice daily, troupes of the orange-brown monkeys come down from the trees to feeding platforms. Sanctuary workers and tour guides call out to the monkeys and spread food out. It's all pretty casual. Walkways allow groups of tourists like us to watch.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's an amazing sight, I have to admit. The proboscis is a big ape, the largest ones the size of a 10 year old. It has a leaping gait, throwing itself forward as it moves. Its huge fangs belie the fact it's a herbivore. Mangrove leaves are its food. It has to eat a lot of them, thus the huge pot bellies of the classic healthy proboscis.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These monkeys are acclimatized to tourists. They leap onto the platform as human guides call them. They wander within arm's distance of me, watchful but calm. It's an absolutely thrilling, unique experience. And sort of sad.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I notice these monkeys don't seem that fat. The company handlers are feeding the proboscis melon rinds and bread. They fight the most over the bread scraps.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Bread?</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These monkeys are being fed the equivalent of junk food, juicy, soft fruit and bread instead of the tough mangrove leaves of their natural diet. The better to attract them to the cameras, I guess. They take the food out of tourists' hands as we pose beside them. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These wild animals have been acclimatized in a way that would make any good Yukon park ranger cringe. A fed bear is a dead bear, we say in the territory. A fed monkey...?</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The video about the monkeys says the company has pledged to restore more habitat for the proboscis to survive. I wonder if those good intentions will last through the company's next hard times, or the next corporate owners. It all seems a little too little, too casual, too late.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And I watch the little proboscis babies, clinging to their mother's fur. Will they even have a taste for mangrove leaves, after a lifetime diet of fruit and bread? </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For the welfare of these monkeys, we'll have to get them off human welfare.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-82578897849966252582011-04-23T17:08:00.001-07:002011-04-23T18:31:53.631-07:00Soundtrack, Part 3: Lost in Kota Kinabalu<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So send me the URL to this post next time I claim to be an expert navigator.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In my defence, I'm not bad. I can find our way through most city mazes, I can keep maps of building floor plans in my head. I've become the go-to guy in our group of five for weaving our way around subways to our hostels and guest-houses.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So it seemed like a slam-dunk when I loaded the directions to a hostel into my iPod Touch's mapping app when I was in Kota Kinabalu. I had screwed up my reservations, booked for the wrong days, and wanted to go explain my no-show to the hostel we had stood up (it seemed right to do).</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The little red and green pegs set, the grey line of the route clearly displayed, and I was ready. The direction finder promised me it was a one-kilometre walk, just 12 minutes.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I plugged in my new headphones, set the music to shuffle, and headed out the door.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">KK, on the northeast coast of the island of Borneo, is the capital of the Malaysian province of Sabah. It's a resort town that figures it's more famous than it is; they take reasonable pride in their history and reasonable care for the physical plant of the city. It's clean and neat, a government and tourist town. Large docks move palm oil and fish around the world from here.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The location, just five degrees off the equator on the edge of the South China Sea, translates into hot and muggy April nights. But the full moon was out, fuzzy in the humidity, and the ocean hinted its presence in the night air. A good night for a walk.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I headed east, following from the red pin on the map. The hostel I was seeking was on the same street as the one I was staying at, around a corner. Easy-peasy. The iTunes and my feet on autopilot, away I went.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Jah Wobble is an artist who's name sounds nothing like the music he produces. He came out of the late seventies new wave, but quickly turned into a kind of quirkier Brian Eno. <i>The Celtic Poets</i> is an album of his I only came upon indirectly, but it's grown on me. A combination of poetry done in a gravelly voice, and long etheral instrumentals. Arabian-style drums and horns, slowly progressing melodies. As I walk along the darkening streets towards my destination, the palms casting shadows across my path in the moonlight, it makes a perfect background.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Kota Kinabalu is a working town, a port city. No building is particularly tall, and the architecture alternates from red-brick tourist attractor to metal-clad utilitarian. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Where I'm headed, though, is growing more industrial as the streets darken. I check the map on the iPod, and a song from from Genesis' early days, <i>Supper's Ready</i>, begins to play. I shrug and keep heading east.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Written in the early seventies, <i>Supper's Ready</i> is one of the British prog-rock groups' anthems, a 22-minute work that wanders through medieval imagery, goofiness and love song, repeating a complex musical riff every seven or eight minutes. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But now I'm two-thirds of the way through, getting to the sad part ('I've been so far from here/Far from your loving arms') and I start to realize I've been walking a lot more than 12 minutes. The buildings are decidedly more dock-ish; I have to skirt around tractor trailers dropping off palm oil, and small groups of men sitting around in the sticky night, at work but playing guitars, bored. The silhouettes around the open campfires here and there don't give me comfort. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I check the map again. I have been following the right road, it has been following the shore, but somehow it's petered out, and I'm standing in the dark in a dodgier part of town. I decide to bail, to try again in the morning.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I head back, wrapping up Supper's Ready (it's that long) as I near my hostel. I check my map again. Then I notice a landmark listed near my destination pin, 'Jesselton Hotel'. I look up. There it is across the street; and my hostel is next to me.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I had headed in the completely opposite direction, thinking my starting pin was my destination. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It's not late, so I decide to press on. There's no shortage of pharmacies in KK, and most are open late. I enter a Watson's chain store and grab a cold drink. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sweet air conditioning. While I'm waiting in line <i>Grande Finale</i> from Alice Cooper's 'School's Out' album comes on. The album has the everyone-knows hit, but a couple of nice offbeat tracks as well. The last cut, on now, is Bob Ezrin way over-producing Cooper, banks of horns filling out a simple rock tune. But it's great summer music, music for hot nights and humidity. I can feel the sweat on my brow evaporating in the clinical pharmacy air. The clerk, a little creeped by my moist look, tries not to touch my hand as he give me change for my Diet Coke.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I head back onto the street, this time turning the right direction. Dave Matthews comes on the iPod, a cut from a summer concert recorded years ago, another great background for my walk in the sauna.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It's just a few blocks, quickly covered. I see my first KK rat darting under a parked car. A couple of young girls, in tight skirts and heavy makeup, lean against a street light. More port life. They look at me without interest as I walk by. They laugh to each other and kill the time until their next date.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I find my destination- easy once you know- and enter. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">'You look hot,' the owner says obviously. He hands me a cool bottle of water, and I explain my no-show. I'm still on the hook for the 100 ringit, so he's fine. No offer to waive the tax on my stupidity.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I head back outside, and decide to take a different street, in the right direction, back to my hostel. The iPod pulls out 'Marquee Moon' by Television. The unmistakable guitar lick, the plaintive wail of Tom Verlaine. Long instrumental breaks just call out for hurting youth and long-lost days, of steamy Ottawa July nights and FM radio. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The song lasts right to the door of our hostel. I head up the painted cement stairs to the second floor. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The iPod's map function may have got me lost, but iTunes never does.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-10201491131446554832011-04-14T18:29:00.000-07:002011-04-17T21:04:55.159-07:00Korea: The Undiscovered Country<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The long ride from downtown Seoul to Incheon airport offers plenty of time to contemplate. The 45-minute trip, punctuated by only a few stops, is fluid and uneventful. The Kubrick-esque polished floors and chrome, and buffed upholstery, and the soothing voice of the quadri-lingual announcer reassure and relax. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It took a nuclear accident to get us to Korea; our plans were initially for Japan, flights booked a week before the plate shifted and the sea fell on the earth. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Korea was a good backup, though my knowledge of the country was pretty well limited to the opening sequence of M.A.S.H. and my daughter's obsession with Korean pop stars. Other than that, the country was a mystery; I hadn't even bothered skimming the CIA Factbook before arriving. Kim Jong-Il, kimchi, Hyundai. Japan, watered down and split in two in a cold-war leftover. What else did you really need to know? </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Initial impressions confirmed the stereotypes. Seoul was massive, forests of what must be soul-destroying apartment blocks, punctuated by uninspired office towers. Garish signage plastered over buildings, occasional English brand names providing partial context to the dominant commerce of an area. Left-hand driving, traffic lights, wide boulevards, not enough trees. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But the people seemed friendly enough, and we ventured into town time and again, forays from our guest house. The neighbourhood pleasant, the shopping malls indistinguishable from North America.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We had one major trip, a three-hour dash cross-country past more faceless apartment blocks and ginseng farms to the southern port of Busan. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And that's when I started to get the hint I was experiencing something a little different.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It wasn't the city itself; Busan is little more than Seoul writ small, the same franchises dominating the street and corporate logos the skyline. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It was in the subway that my perception of the country began to change.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We were surrounded by Koreans, and really, no one else. The country is overwhelmingly a single race, a monoculture. More old folks in Busan, more working class. But all Korean. And no tourists. Anywhere. We were stared at, brown-eyed gazes shifting away quickly when we turned towards them. As North Americans, we were a novelty act, something unusual in town.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You could go the day and not see another European face. We realized we were out on a long limb, off the beaten tourism track despite the city's modern surroundings.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">On this trip we've been to several places described as 'exotic' or 'remote'. In Laos, supposedly one of the last frontiers of tourism, we were boating south down the Mekong River on a two-day trip. We were in one of six boats that hauled anchor that morning, each packed with over 100 European tourists. That pilgrimage is repeated daily, filling the hotels and swelling the local economy downstream in a daily pulse. We were not unusual, our experience not unique by any means.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S5wMoGlesa0/TaedaKm-_lI/AAAAAAAAADg/sBKMYwYCMS4/s1600/statue-sunrise.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="278" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S5wMoGlesa0/TaedaKm-_lI/AAAAAAAAADg/sBKMYwYCMS4/s400/statue-sunrise.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Koreans love large public art- another fact you don't<br />
know 'til you get there.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It was the same elsewhere. Swaths of 'mystical' Bali are an Australian cesspool. You can get a decent chocolate cheesecake and cappucino on the edge of a Jurassic-period forest in the centre of Malaysia.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In short, few locations touted as places to explore are much more than well-oiled tourism machines anymore. How exotic is a place where you have to wait for another European tour group to get out of the way before you take your photo?</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But here I was, in modern, metropolitan Korea, a complete stranger in a strange land. Clerks could not speak the language. I could not speak theirs. I didn't look like them or act like them. Getting lost meant frustrating jabs at maps with uncomprehending locals. I had to watch and understand their way of doing things. I was illiterate, innumerate, and at the mercy of strangers. And there was no one like me to turn to for help.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It became a wonderful thing.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I began to realize you don't need bamboo and palm leaf roofs to experience an exotic locale. Connecting with a foreign culture is just as hard- and rewarding- <i>and authentic</i>- six stories underground in an ultramodern subway station. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Koreans are busy with their lives. Walking the streets of Busan or Seoul or any one of the uncounted towns means seeing locals really living their daily lives and culture- far more honestly than any 6:30 cocktails-and-buffet gamelin show. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And when Koreans do show off their traditions, interestingly, it's more for themselves, not foreigners.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The day before we left we took a cablecar up Namsan hill in Seoul. There's a CN Tower-style communication antenna at the top, remnants of an ancient shrine, and mid-20<sup>th</sup> century concrete fortifications. I was bracing for the perfect tourist-trap. There were drummers, dancers, and warriors, all in 18<sup>th</sup> century garb. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But surrounding the open-air stage were almost exclusively locals, watching and politely applauding the dance and martial displays. A handful of non-Koreans were there, but it was clear the Koreans were doing this for themselves, not for outsiders.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It was the same at a local palace complex, and walking through a neighbourhood of traditional residences.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Koreans are busy remembering, re-living, and re-learning.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's hard to realize, seeing the sophistication and intricacy of civilization in South Korea, that 50 years ago this state had the GDP of Ghana. That starvation wandered the land. That the people here, in a country with no oil, no iron, no hydro potential, built itself up from nothing to be one of the top 20 economies in the world.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And they are still busy doing it. So busy they are just learning the tricks of the tourism trade, catering to the foreign curious and international time-wasters. So cultural exhibits and events display a charming innocence here, ham-fisted attempts at building a market for the culture of leisure they've worked so hard to join. We're welcome to join and watch, but we're not essential to the equation. Tourism here hasn't the careful slickness of Thailand, the sad sycophancy of Cambodia, the vile mendacity of Bali.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Which makes this trip, to Korea, perhaps the most honest cultural interaction we've had in the last six months. And I just began to realize this as the train pulled in to the airport station.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Korea is very much an undiscovered country. I will be back.</span></div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-82443314414505325462011-04-12T19:07:00.000-07:002011-04-12T19:20:41.973-07:00Korea doesn't give a f*** (and you'll like it)<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> I'm standing waiting for a subway train in one of Korea's ultra-modern stations, six stories beneath the street, when I notice a huge poster before me. It proclaims that 2010-2012 is Korea's 'Year of the Tourist'. A smiling face of a life-size Korean woman greeting the world is displayed. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> I find the poster puzzling- if not for the bad math, it's the idea that Korea is welcoming tourists. Cause, from what I can tell, Koreans don't give a fuck.</span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--16Xe1epSFo/TaUDzNTJtAI/AAAAAAAAADY/QRY7vniB6ZY/s1600/korea-market.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="241" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--16Xe1epSFo/TaUDzNTJtAI/AAAAAAAAADY/QRY7vniB6ZY/s320/korea-market.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">No, <i>you</i> ask if you can get the rice with no sauce.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> We're here in the early spring, so I'm not surprised that there aren't a lot of tourists. What I do find surprising though, is that there are <i>no</i> tourists. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> On our daily expeditions into the city, we might see a handful of non-Korean faces. They are few and far between. In a city of 20 million, I see maybe five or ten people a day who might qualify as actual tourists like us. Other Europeans, and there aren't many, generally tend to be ESL teachers.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Our subway rides have been in seas of black hair, with the locals staring at us with unblinking brown eyes (so it seems). We were told to expect that, and it's harmless, if a bit unnerving. It actually makes you feel like you're a stranger, and strangely adds to the adventure. They don't see folk like us ever day.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> This is a country of people who have been busting their asses for the last 30 years, building world-leading shipping lines and auto assembly plants from the hardscrabble and devastated land they inherited from their parents. The country has hardly learned yet to cater to tourists' business. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Outside of the automated voice on the subway line, English is barely heard on the street or spoken by service folks. Signage is almost exclusively in Korean script. Tourist brochures, oddly, are mostly in Korean, and only the occasional restaurant deigns to let you know the contents of the dishes they serve.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> And this is a shame. I passed dozens of restaurants and cafes where I would have liked to hang out (and spend money) but knew I would face near-insurmountable communication problems. When you've got kids with you, your explorations on a menu can be limited. So we ended up, more often than we'd like, at a Burger King or Starbucks, letting the clerk practice his or her high-school English.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Less welcome is when you are met with little more than a peremptory grunt from an older clerk in a convenience store, or just a wave to go away from a taxi driver. They won't even try to take your money. We're told it's shyness about speaking, and that's understandable, but it can be off-putting.</span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pDXvywpS33M/TaUEKsEQNxI/AAAAAAAAADc/FwJFp48etYk/s1600/parking-wallad.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pDXvywpS33M/TaUEKsEQNxI/AAAAAAAAADc/FwJFp48etYk/s320/parking-wallad.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">QED: An ad in Busan</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Let this not be a reflection on the Korean people themselves. We have found them generally to be kind, helpful, and caring, once you begin to interact. We have never felt safer on our trip. And never felt more as equals.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> And that's the flip side-the good part- of not giving a fuck.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> After four months of touts, come-ons, hustlers, liars and obsequious servitude in the rest of SE Asia, it's nice to be invisible, to count for nothing. I walk the street and no one's approaching me to rip me off. I can look people in the eye and not expect a pitch for a ride or a request for a donation. They can do without my business, just fine.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> And transactions are transparent and honest. While it's hard to work out, and give and receive the proper change, doing business as a tourist in Korea is refreshing. I pay the same, standard amount for a good or service as a local Korean. And I get the same amount of goods or services that the local would get. No haggling, no shorting, just honest dealing. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> It is such a pleasure doing tourism 'business' in such an atmosphere. Just wish I could do more of it.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> 'Korea: we don't give a fuck'. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Could be the slogan for the 2013-15 Year of the Tourist. </span> </div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-42519724717275904992011-04-06T20:03:00.000-07:002011-04-06T20:07:35.020-07:00Watching Korean pop magic being made<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Men, be careful what kind of fatherly wisdom you offer your children. You could end up as I did- freezing outside a Korean office building at seven in the morning.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It's clear, but cold, in the plaza of another futuristic office complex in Seoul. We're lined up with about 70 raven-haired Korean teens, hoping for a chance to see a concert by Korean pop stars.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The show's taping is tonight, but to get in, you have to come out before the sun rises to get tickets.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Finally a security guard comes by, taking down names. In the complicated business of getting in to the studio audience for “MNET Studio Countdown”, you have to be registered twice, present at certain times and places during the day. Thus the 5:30 wake-up call on an early spring Thursday morning. </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RAGT02uiln0/TZ0pMwhXwSI/AAAAAAAAADM/akzeqbP4Sng/s1600/MNET-SHOW.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RAGT02uiln0/TZ0pMwhXwSI/AAAAAAAAADM/akzeqbP4Sng/s400/MNET-SHOW.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“They are here, they are live, and they are <i>adorable</i>.”<br />
Photo by Jane Robinson-Boivin</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The guard, a black-suited young man with a perfectly superfluous Secret Service-style earphone, takes an extra half-glace at me and has us write our names on the list. We are #64 and #65. If we show up tonight at 5:10 exactly, we're in.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We decide to head back to our guesthouse for a quick nap, but my daughter is so excited that's unlikely to happen.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">'Too many girls just like the same music their boyfriends like,” I told her five years ago, when my word still meant something. “Don't be like that. Find your own path in music.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">What I had hoped my sage words would mean is I'd eventually share my Genesis and Van der Graaf generator albums with the girl. Instead, she went and found her own path-and it's artists with names like U-Kiss, Infinite, SHINee and B2ST. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Most North Americans have never heard of Korean pop music. But take what you might have pictured about Japanese music, dose heavily with American rap, hip-hop, and disco, and you are starting to get the idea.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Korean pop music is huge in this country of 50 million, and growing rapidly all over Southeast Asia, China and Japan. With massive corporate backing, and slickly produced videos, the star's faces are familiar in every household and on the street. Larger than life posters are ubiquitous, the stars being used to hock everything from cell phones to fashion to face cream. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Wannabe stars are put through years of training, and sign five-to-ten year contracts with studios to work for them, exclusively. Most aren't though high school yet, live in company dorms and are contractually bound to remain 'available' for their multitude of prepubescent fans. The band members are disposable and interchangeable at the company's whim. But the payoff for the successful ones is fame for life.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The music itself is mostly forgettable- studio manufactured dance tunes and ballads, ranging from bubblegum pop to faux-ghetto rap. Just broken hearts, no teenage rebellion. The odd performer stands out- like a Canadian hip-hop artist banned from the airwaves a couple years back for lyrics critical about the government. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The ban made him even more popular. All in all, it's not much different from North American pop music.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">My girl's been lucky enough to see her idols once on the trip already- in Singapore, at an arena. But tonight, we're going to see some up-and-comers, live in the studio.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We meet a pair of young American women, foreign exchange students, who are also coming to the show tonight. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“I can't wait,” says one breathlessly. “They are here, they are live, and they are <i>adorable</i>.” The three of them laugh.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I roll my eyes. This will be a long night.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Bismark said if you love the law or sausages, you should never watch either being made. The same goes for television. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We are ushered into a large sound studio, walls curtained black with a large stage to the back. The audience is coralled between the main stage and a side presentation area for the hosts, packed in enough to hike the audience energy. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The fuss and bother of pre-broadcast preparations flow seamlessly into the actual show. There's no big announcement, no flash or dazzle. Suddenly, the hosts appear to the side of the stage, and announce the first act. The stage lights come on, and a young woman sings a ballad.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">About halfway though, a bored-looking stage director comes on stage, and waves at the performer. The girl stops singing- at least, her mouth stops moving. Her song continues to play over the speakers. She bows to the audience, smiles sheepishly, and exits. There's a smattering of applause.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">This happens another two times. Groups of young androgynous men, and lolita-like girls, come onstage, singing and dancing. Then they're pulled off mid lip-synch.</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lM1c6alt9pM/TZ0o2dFeN9I/AAAAAAAAADI/LwN_RMeNmxk/s1600/MNET-SHOW2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="290" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lM1c6alt9pM/TZ0o2dFeN9I/AAAAAAAAADI/LwN_RMeNmxk/s400/MNET-SHOW2.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">And the winner is, for the 153 week in a row... corporate profits!<br />
Photo by Jane Robinson-Boivin</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I can't quite figure what's going on until I glance to the side and see a monitor playing the feed. The bands have pre-recorded their acts, which are going out 'live' to the air. Their appearance here tonight is mostly to top-and-tail the show production.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Most of the audience, oddly, isn't even paying attention to what's on stage. About a quarter are watching monitors stage right, another quarter are sitting cross-legged on the floor texting friends, and another handful have their backs to the performance, hoping to catch a glimpse of their idols as they walk backstage.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It's no wonder they don't have a camera on the audience.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The performance, such as it is, continues, and the energy increases as the show progresses. It's a countdown of the top radio and tv pop songs of the week, and the hot bands are saved for last. More of the audience starts to stand up, there's screaming and some weeping, scarves waved and heart-signs flashed. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Finally all the acts gather on the stage, and a winner is announced. There's a bit of forced congratulations all around by the bands- the decision who'd win, after all, was actually made in a boardroom months ago. Fireworks go off, confetti falls, spots sweep the studio, credits roll. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The crowd leaves, sweaty and happy. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It's dark as we hail a cab for the short trip home. My girl is happy- she's seen some of her favourite new bands tonight. She asks if she can go again next week.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">What the heck, I figure, and agree. “If we're still here,” I caution.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Sure, her music sucks to me. But I'm old. Her music should suck- the way my music sucked to my parents. There'd be something wrong if I really liked her music.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">She's found her own path, and it's lead us here, far away from home.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I couldn't ask for more.</div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-91771048876594864342011-03-30T19:17:00.000-07:002011-04-07T17:53:46.858-07:00Rise and Shine in Seoul<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's seven o'clock in the morning, and I'm about to do something I promised myself I would not do this year. But resistance is futile; the time and place is not right.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I have no choice.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'm putting on a hat and winter coat.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'm in Seoul, Korea, and it's the end of March. After four months of tropical heat and humidity, we're back in a cold climate. I had promised myself at the start of the trip that, for once in my life, I would have no winter.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So it goes.</span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ruJMLnGyJeI/TZPjt-gbGXI/AAAAAAAAADA/IIbEIQZbI_0/s1600/hongik-street.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="287" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ruJMLnGyJeI/TZPjt-gbGXI/AAAAAAAAADA/IIbEIQZbI_0/s320/hongik-street.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">All's quiet in Hong-dae in the morning.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I zip up, adjust my toque, and head out the door. The morning air is cool, I can see my breath and feel a peppermint tingle on my nose and cheeks. It's nothing like a Yukon March morning, there's no real bite, no snow on the ground. But my blood's been thinned by Beer Lao and Lombok peppers these last few months, and the chill cuts me. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Wimp.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'm on my favourite morning mission, the breakfast hunt. I scouted out a bakery nearby the night before, and made sure it would be open this time of day. In a big city, it pays to check.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Big cities don't do mornings. Most shops and stores don't open until 10 or even 11. Seoul follows the pattern. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A morning person will tell you a city is special that time of day. It's quiet. The air is still reasonably fresh. There are no lineups, no traffic jams, no hassles. It'd be paradise- if there was actually anything to do. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I turn down another street from our guest house, ignoring the sidewalk. Cars are scarce this time of day. A clutch of school girls in uniform, laughing and hugging, fall up the street. The clip clop of high heels approaches from behind, and pass brusquely. The woman is clearly not an early riser... she's lost in thought and a scowl as she heads to work.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'm in the Hongik University section of Seoul, or Hong-dae as the neighbourhood is called. It's a island of three and four-storey older brownstone buildings, edged with major roads and tall skyscrapers about half a kilometre away. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Hongik's an art school, and this is a trendy area, a hipster area. You see young photographers and aspiring fashion models doing shoots on the street. Galleries are everywhere. The local book stores specialize in graphic design texts and architecture magazines. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's a human-sized part of Seoul, not like the monstrous aggregations of dozens of 30-storey apartment blocks that jut out from the landscape in the satellite suburbs. There are family stores here, tidy little pocket cafes, cute restaurants, used clothing shops, and the ubiquitous bars. The people of Seoul love their booze. Love. Their. Booze.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Alcohol may be why, I think, Seoul seems even quieter at 7 a.m. than a lot of other big cities I've been to. That suit heading to the subway over there looks a little bleary- that college student and his girlfriend are moving a little slower. Soft nights make for hard mornings.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's not far to my destination, and the comforting hug of baking smells hit me as I open the shop door.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To a wall of nothing. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The shelves are bare.</span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Bv-xpWB7h48/TZPjvQqVy2I/AAAAAAAAADE/4W1gMmJUnag/s1600/beer-bank.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Bv-xpWB7h48/TZPjvQqVy2I/AAAAAAAAADE/4W1gMmJUnag/s320/beer-bank.JPG" width="247" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">No financial crisis at this institution.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are no bagels, no baguettes. No croissants- butter, cheese or chocolate. No loaves of fresh morning toast, no strudels, no tarts, no muffins- you get the point.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This town is so slow getting going in the morning, even the bakers sleep in. Who ever heard of a bake shop that wasn't ready by 7:30?</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fortunately I have a backup plan.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I walk down the street, passing the sole other European out this morning. He looks like he's heading to work. We exchange the Significant Nod of Shared Race Acknowledgement and head our separate ways.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I head into another shop, and speak the universal pidgin of coffee drinkers.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Hi. Venti. Americano. Black. Hot,” I order. The girl acknowledges and sets me up, with a bagel beside.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I head back to the guest house, coffee comforting my hand though the insul-sleeve. My head is warm under the toque, so the cool air is actually refreshing. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">After four months of stifling heat, of sweat, of shirts that won't dry and underwear that only sticks, it's nice to be cool for a change. No mosquitoes. No tropical disease. No touts, no bugs, or rats, and tapwater you can drink. I like Seoul.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And I think, I really didn't break my promise. The equinox was a week ago. It's already spring. I have had my Year of No Winter.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Behind me, the bright sun is beginning to peak around the blue-grey buildings, warming my back. A few more people are stirring on this beautiful day.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'll get to the bake shop a little later.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-6836266040115910492011-03-25T20:17:00.000-07:002011-03-25T20:19:11.736-07:00Quantum Physics and the search for peace in Ubud<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">I'm sitting at a round table on an open-aired tiled patio, under thatched roof, finishing off breakfast at our spa in Ubud, Bali. The only other guest up this early, Alice strikes up a conversation about her experience in town.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">“I don't know where to find the tranquility and peace here,” said Alice, a 30-something former fashion consultant from the States. “It's not easy to find.”</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Nearby an attendant is cleaning the pool, in that slow back-and-forth motion that soothes and relaxes just watching. And we're surrounded by various flowered statuary, potted plants, and birdsong. Incense is burning somewhere, and butterflies are chasing each other in a merry game around massive flowerheads.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">It is utterly peaceful, but I couldn't agree with Alice more. Ubud is really all it claims to be- but far less besides.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">The small city (or collection of villages, slowly merging with growth) is built on a series of hills and gullies in east-central Bali. The millenia of carving by water lends an incredible variety to the visual landscape. My bedroom is level to the peak of the roof of the cottage next door. Palm trees seem to reach for the sky a few metres away, while the aforementioned pool seems to float on the land. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Dod3VG6OaAk/TY1aWIawf2I/AAAAAAAAAC8/jcKcYLwBsHo/s1600/ubud-scene.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Dod3VG6OaAk/TY1aWIawf2I/AAAAAAAAAC8/jcKcYLwBsHo/s640/ubud-scene.JPG" width="356" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Not pictured: inner peace</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">The physical construction of the community is stunning as well. Strangely, the architecture reminds me of nothing less than ancient Rome, or at least what I imagine ancient Rome to have been like: each walled unit opening into a decorated and gardened courtyard. The various levels of each building, which rise three or four stories into the air, display a hodge-podge of porticoes, columns, balconies, thatched roofs, brickwork, plaster, statuary, and all manner of flourishes and colour. Take a look at HBO's Rome series and you'll get a sense of what' I'm talking about.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Then there's the landscape it's set in. The town is surrounded, and infused, with rice. You can walk a few steps down an asphalt lane, past a store selling the latest cell phone SIM cards, and stumble into a field of knee-high rice plants right out of the 18<sup>th</sup> century.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">And unlike many other places in SE Asia, people of Ubud seem to genuinely respect their environment. There is a refreshing cleanliness to the town, even in the out-of-the-way corners one usually finds heaps of rat-infested trash, where the tourists are unlikely to look.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">So what's not to like? Why can't my new acquaintance see what should surely be before her eyes?</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Ubud was featured in the movie <i>Eat Pray Love</i> as a place the Julia Roberts character could go to meet a spiritual need. And indeed, it has a long history as a place of arts, culture, and spirituality. It was here long before the tourists, and was obviously built on far firmer moral and economic foundations than keeping Australians in Foster's Lager. It has always had a connection to the deeper truths, to mysticism, to New Age before it was New Age.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">The stories of Ubud draw people here, no matter what the degree of spiritual need they might have. Some are truly hurting. Some just come to watch the show.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Perhaps, I think later as I walk down the alley to the main road, we can turn to hard physics to solve this new age conundrum.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Quantum physics is spooky. 20<sup>th</sup> century classic physicists were genuinely disturbed by the behaviour of atomic and subatomic particles. Electrons and protons and all manner of energy particles seemed to behave like they 'knew' they were being watched; that they 'knew' what was going to happen before an experiment even started; that they were in some sort of communication between each other, instantaneously, no matter the distance. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">One important element of quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg principle, says you can measure how fast a particle is moving, but you can't simultaneously say exactly where it is; or, if you tried to measure exactly where it is, you couldn't say for sure how fast it was going at that moment. In observing the particle to make the measurement, you change the nature of what you are measuring.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Perhaps that is what we have done to Ubud.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">In Ubud, the store called “Bliss” pitches facial treatments and massages. “Truth”, prominently displayed on another, sells gem stones. “Peace” sells t-shirts. Ganesha, the Hindu elephant god, is a bookhawker. Buddha has been enlisted to shill everything from vegan desserts to wifi to mojitoes. Krishna runs a cargo shipping company. Dharma, Karma, Ananda, Brahma, Puri, Ashanti, and a variety of other Hindu terms direct tourists to everything from painting to antiques to palm readers.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">In trying to draw more people to their community, to make it easier for them to find the peace and tranquility they are seeking, Ubud has become loudier, noiser, and hungrier. It is impossible to walk more than a few metres downtown without being pitched for a taxi ride or massage. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">In the hustle and the vibe, in getting busier to make a living, move more tourists, the very thing they are basing their economy on moves a little farther away, finds a home somewhere else.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">That won't stop the tourists from coming. Ubud will feed for years off the image and promises made by Hollywood. Its just that most of the people who come here won't find what they're looking for- and even though they observed all the forms, did all the right things, they really won't know the reason why.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-92186204075686904512011-03-21T19:37:00.000-07:002011-03-21T19:37:17.936-07:00Rice fields, out of time<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The Starbucks in Ubud has to be one of the nicest on the planet. Set at the corner of a 17<sup>th</sup> century Hindu temple property, the building has more the appearance of upscale art gallery than coffee shop. Its interior walls and floors are marbelled, thick comfortable chairs dampening the echoes. Its patio overlooks an ancient water garden, its lotus leaves occasionally disturbed by the invisible movements of gargantuan carp beneath the surface.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> In Ubud, global commerce has attached itself firmly to the spiritual world.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> But we're looking for a little more... or maybe a little less. To get away from the manufactured Ubud, the movie town, to what was here before. We are going to see the rice fields.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> We turn off the main road, and walk up a side street that seems to have been a communitytourism project at one time; visitors to Ubud have left their names engraved on squares of concrete. Little messages into the future from around the world. Reading them helps pass the time as we walk past the homestays, villas and corner stores that trickle away into simpler structures.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Another hundred metres and we reach the edge of town, emerging into a vista simply out of time. Stretching out before us are fields of rice. We can see for at least a kilometre, before low rolling hills and stands of trees block the view. Terraces of uniform green, knee-high stalks of the food that feeds more than half the planet.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> The pathway continues between the fields. It's trimmed by a deep groove in the earth where water flows. The irrigation system, powered by gravity, provides a trickle of water, just enough, to millions of plants over thousands of hectares of land.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> The fields remind me of a golf course, in their uniformity and precision. After centuries of use, every plot of land is trimmed, tended and defined. Low-lying groundcover plants edge the fields. There are no weeds to be seen; the lip of one terrace drops, black earth and vertical, onto the next. The water paths are deep and edged in rock; the fall of water is measured in centimetres over football-field lengths. The paths twist and turn on occasion, as they branch off to field fields in the distance. Nothing is wasted.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The path has carried us into a different time, a different cycle of life. The pace here is the seeding of the rice, of the flooding of the fields, the weeding, of harvest and feasts. Its rhythm is the waxing and waning of the moon, the steady demands of the gods. It's the birth of children, the application of life's energy for decades to growing things, the final spreading of an elder's ashes. Its soundtrack is the wind blowing over the fields, growing louder as the sun pulls the stalks up to fruit.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> The cement path turns to dirt and we enter a stand of trees. We are moving upstream, against the flow of the channelled water. We pass small control structures, not much more than cement gates a half-metre high. Here some ducks are splashing in a small pond caused by a fallen palm leaf blocking the water's path; there a yellow-headed lizard flits into invisibility in the underbrush.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> It's cool under the canopy, a refuge from the equatorial sun.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> We're just on the edge of town, but far away in time. There's nothing that couldn't have been here a century ago. Each corner of each field has a small temple or spirit house; incense curls from the box where the gods take their percentage of human attention. Scarecrows chase birds away, and bring the only incongruity to the ancientness of the scene- they wear old gortex sportwear, and promote a local football club. But the anachronism is easy to ignore.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> We ascend from the treed gully into more open fields, and are greeted by a man along the path. “Water?” he asks, pointing a few yards away. He's set up a small kiosk, selling snack foods and soft drinks from a glorified lemonade stand. We buy a couple of bottles of water from him.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> “Sit, please,” he says, pointing to a rickety old picnic table next to the stand. “it's nice there. Very hot this morning.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> We decline awkwardly. We tell him we have to get back to our kids, sleeping back at the hotel. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> It's only partly true- sure, they are there. But they'd be fine without us for a while yet. It's more like we want to avoid the contact, we don't feel part of this time, his time. It makes us anxious somehow. We say our goodbyes and continue down the path.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> There are more reminders that people follow a different pace here. A woman bathing in the stream, covering herself as we pass. A browned elder washes some roots for his lunch. A woman in fine dress carries offerings and carefully refreshes a field's spirit houses. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We approach an ancient temple, with chest-high walls and low-lying altars inside. A group of farmers are chanting low hymns. A woman regards us cooly as we walk by, and resumes her singing. We move away in silence. We are not of her time.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> We've turned around now, and just as the trappings of modern life slowly disappeared as we entered the fields, they begin to return. The path changes back to cement. Small buildings, selling local art or housing families, dot the land. Motorcycles twist and turn up the path, forcing us off with an apologetic smile from the driver. The world becomes noiser. The pace becomes faster as the cement turns to asphalt. We pass by a construction site, machines screaming as they cut wood and ceramic.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> We're back on the main road. We've returned to our time, our pace. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> We head into the Starbucks.</div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-20208090797858810312011-03-20T20:01:00.000-07:002011-03-20T20:01:14.768-07:00The Lost Script for Eat, Pray, LoveA little-known Hollywood legend tells of the chaotic making of the blockbuster hit <i>Eat Pray, Love</i>... how the star, Julia Roberts, insisted the script be worked from the novel during the actual shooting, to capture the essence and atmosphere of the exotic locations. Writers would gather material from Rome, or Bangalore, write dialogue, and present them to the actress and director for approval each day.<br />
In a backstreet in Ubud, Bali, we found a rare piece of memorabilia... a first draft of the first scene from Act Three of the movie from that location. The manuscript was in bad shape- dirty, mouldy, and only a few pages survived. But indeed, it shows how the writers captured the essence of Ubud, a community well documented in the travel industry as an artistic and spiritual destination.<br />
Here, then, presented for the first time, is a transcript of one of Hollywood's great might-have-beens... the lost first scene of Act Three... Love in Ubud.<br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;">EAT PRAY LOVE</div><div style="text-align: center;">ACT III, SCENE i</div><div style="text-align: center;">IN UBUD</div><br />
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ESTABLISHING SHOT: Street in Ubud, LIZ is exiting from van.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">Ok, thanks. No, I won't need you tomorrow. Thanks, bye.</div><br />
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CLOSEUP: Liz looking off down the street<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ VOICEOVER</div><div style="text-align: center;">I had eaten my fill in Rome; searched my soul in India. Now, here in Bali, I seek- I don't know yet. I am here in Ubud, where I have heard a man of great wisdom lives. Perhaps he can tell me what I seek.</div><br />
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SHOT: Liz starts walking down the street<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 1 </div><div style="text-align: center;">Taxi Lady?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No Thanks</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 1</div><div style="text-align: center;">Maybe tomorrow?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No, I don't think so. Sorry.</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">WOMAN 1 (Female)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Massage ma'am?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No Thanks. I'm here to find my spirit guide.</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">WOMAN 1</div><div style="text-align: center;">OK, take this pamphlet</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 2</div><div style="text-align: center;">You need transport Lady?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No, thanks</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 2</div><div style="text-align: center;">Sorry. Perhaps Tomorrow?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No, thanks.</div><br />
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Liz walks a few more steps.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 3</div><div style="text-align: center;">Taxi?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No, I just told that man there (points right behind her) I don't need one. Thanks</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 3</div><div style="text-align: center;">Maybe Tomorrow?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No, no.</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 4 </div><div style="text-align: center;">Taxi Lady?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No. Thank You.</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 4</div><div style="text-align: center;">Maybe Tomorrow?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No, I don't think so. Sorry.</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 5 </div><div style="text-align: center;">Pretty lady. You want Taxi? Go on tour, all day perhaps?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No, really, thanks. Please.</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 5</div><div style="text-align: center;">Sorry. Tomorrow?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No, I don't think so. Sorry.</div><br />
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Liz stops suddenly. She looks down. Before her, the sidewalk is a gaping hole. The sewer is running just a few feet below her. CU of her face, in fear and shock.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">Jeezus.</div><br />
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She steps over the hole. She turns as she hears a whistle from across the street.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 6 (holding up paper sign) </div><div style="text-align: center;">Taxi Lady?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No! Dammit!</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 6</div><div style="text-align: center;">Maybe Tomorrow?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No!</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">WOMAN 2 (handing Liz a pamphlet)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Here you go. Professional massage. You need massage?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ (getting very exasperated)</div><div style="text-align: center;">No. Thank you.</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 6 (APPROACHES LIZ. HE IS HOLDING A KNIFE. CU OF FRIGHTENED LIZ)</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">Oh my god. Please no...</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 7 </div><div style="text-align: center;">You want knife lady? Special price for you?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ (RELIEVED)</div><div style="text-align: center;">No, thank you. No.</div><br />
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Liz resumes walking down the street. Suddenly, she jars her back when the sidewalk drops beneath her six inches. Recovering her poise, she spies a man waving at her from across the street.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 8</div><div style="text-align: center;">Please miss, please. This way.</div><br />
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Liz follows across the street.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 8 </div><div style="text-align: center;">Miss like to go on tour? All day?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">Oh god. No! What is with you people?!</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;">MAN 8</div><div style="text-align: center;">Maybe tomorrow?</div><br />
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WIDE SHOT/MONTAGE Liz tries to walk down the street, is handed several more massage pamphlets and receives more offers for taxis. Finally she breaks out of the crowd. SHOT of beautiful park, greenery, walkways. Obviously a peaceful place.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">This looks nice....</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">WOMAN 3 (holding up basket)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Banana for monkey miss?</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">Monkeys? How sweet!</div><br />
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Liz purchases small bunch of bananas, enters forest.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">Oh, cute monkeys. Oh. There's a momma and baby.</div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">Look at that big one. Yikes... he's big.</div><br />
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CU LIZ Look of disgust crosses her face.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ VOICEOVER</div><div style="text-align: center;">Oh. You can't unsee that.</div><br />
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A monkey jumps up on Liz. She smiles and offers it a banana.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">Hey little fella. What you doing? You're a cutie.</div><br />
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Another jumps on her other shoulder.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">Hey, now. Not so fast now.</div><br />
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She offers another banana. Then a third, then a fourth, then they all start scrambling up on her. She drops her bananas in a panic.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">No please! Oh god, no! Get them off, get them off!</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Liz is seemingly overwhemed by the apes. One even begins pissing on her. Then, the animals all stop at once. They look in one direction, and all take off, suddenly.<br />
Liz, scraped and her hair in a shambles, is momentarily stunned. Then she looks up. A man is next to her. Tall, clean-cut, handsome. His hair is framed golden in the backlit sun. He reaches out to her.<br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 9</div><div style="text-align: center;">Are you OK?</div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">Yes, yes, I am. Thanks so much. You saved me.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">CU LIZ has double take at man's good looks.</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 9</div><div style="text-align: center;">(Laughing) Hey, no problem.</div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">LIZ VOICEOVER</div><div style="text-align: center;">Oh my. This man is a hunk. Could this be love?</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;">LIZ</div><div style="text-align: center;">So, are you going anywhere right now?</div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">MAN 9</div><div style="text-align: center;">Why? You need a taxi?</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;">Maybe tomorrow?</div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">--END OF SCENE--</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-83209955938145913162011-03-14T18:21:00.000-07:002011-03-14T18:21:43.210-07:00Spicy's Big Break<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 17px;">I'm woken in the morning by a strange, haunting whistle. I try to place what can possibly be making the eerie noise. It resembles the sound you make spinning a hollow, plastic tube; certainly it would be a perfect soundtrack for a UFO movie.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> I go outside and try to locate the source. At first it's above me, then moves away, then is in the distance. A few moments later it is back. </span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> "Come look over here," says a staff person lounging in the courtyard, when I ask him what is making the sound. I go over and see where he is pointing.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Above us, a flock of pigeons whirls by, about 50 strong. They are making the sound. It's a mystery what exactly causes the noise, whether the beat of their wings or a call they make as they fly. I'm told by one person they are kept birds, and the sound is from a kind of noisemaker around their necks. Will report back.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> What is clear, though, is Gili T (for Trawangan, or fortification, or gun emplacement, after its colonial role) is different from Gili Air, where we have spent our last few weeks. T is the big brother, the Big Apple, of the Gili Group. It is larger physically, and even has a hill in the centre of the island; its downtown area is more urban, more 'sophisticated', more developed. There are many more places to shop, eat, or sleep, arrange boat tours and diving, and buy mouldy second-hand books. Even the horses pulling the carts (motors are banned here too) are bigger by about 30 per cent. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The beaches are wider, and whiter, there are more tourists- the young and the old, the suitcasers and the backpackers, than on Gili A. It's country mouse and city mouse, and after two weeks of watching cattle graze I'm actually feeling overwhelmed. And this is the off-season.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Gili T has more of the hustle to it, more hunger, more need. We meet a young man we dub 'Spicy'. He worked on the beach when we first met him. He directs arriving tourists to a hotel, and gets the equivalent of a dollar if the person books there.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> He needs to do that twice a day to make ends meet. 'Ends' being his own, and his family's. His parents are sharecroppers on Lombok, renting land after their handicraft business folded in the economic meltdown from the Bali Bombing in 2002. They still dream of returning to their home island, Spicy tells us.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> He lives on the beach during the day, eats at the local's market, then sleeps, with a dozen other young male workers, at an empty gazebo after the bar's patrons have abandoned it for the night. It has no walls, no washroom. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> But Spicy is optimistic. He just got a <i>real</i> job.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> He gets to train to work at an upscale resort. For the next month, he'll learn to sweep, wash, change sheets, and maintain the grounds. He'll learn proper deportment and how to deal with people of privilege.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> And he'll do it for free. After a month of unpaid labour, he'll get an interview with the French owner of the resort, who comes in periodically to check his property. If the owner likes him, he'll pay Spicy 800,000 Rp a month. About $90.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> It's Spicy's big break, and he's excited by the prospects. At $3 a day he can start thinking of someday paying his family's way back to Bali, maybe getting married.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The next day I hop on a bike to tour the town. Turning away from the beach, with its persistent dope dealers and pearl hawkers, I'm trying to find the pastoral heart of Gili T., the way Gili Air kept an English-country-garden style hidden in its interior. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The difference between the two islands become immediately obvious as I move beyond the walls of the villas and resorts defining the beachfront. Most of the homes here are hovels, punctuated by empty lots of garbage, construction waste or fallen, decaying buildings. It's far more close to the third-world norm we've seen in other parts of SE Asia. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Among the cat-urine stink and goat pastures, women gossip and go through each other's hair for lice. Half-naked children play in the pitted, puddled streets, dodging fast-pedalling teens and horse carts. Images of western rock stars- Jim Morrison, Bob Marley- are painted on walls of yoga retreats and convenience stores. </span></span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> There's not the same sense of orderly, supported community here that you sense instinctively exists in Gili Air. You are on your own here to make it on your own. With bigger and more, it seems you get harder and meaner too.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Gili T. might be the Big Apple of these islands, I think as I head for the beachfront again, but it's rotten at its core.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> I emerge on the island's west coast. Bali can be seen lying blue and distant under the setting sun. I bike past abandoned resort projects, returning to the land under moss and scrub brush, more victims of the Bali bombing.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Instead of restarting those, new projects are being built, skeletons of walls rising among the grey bags of cement powder and piles of bamboo. Swallowing more pasture land and coconut grove, more of the only means for people here to make a living independent of the recommendations of the <i>Lonely Planet</i>.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-73564953869497758992011-03-08T19:37:00.000-08:002011-03-08T19:38:42.718-08:00Soundtrack to Paradise- Part 2<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Good DJs get people to dance; better DJs get people to drink. The best DJs get girls to take their tops off.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Based on that universal principle, the DJ aboard the Pirate Ship was very good indeed. Parked 50 meters off the main beach at Gili Air, the faux two-masted schooner, ersatz tourist 'pirate ship', had just dropped off its day passengers. A handful of lithe young women remained aboard, quickly doffing their tops while music throbbed hypnotically from speakers tied to the masts. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> A phalanx of heads snap to attention from the recliner chairs on the beach, tanned young men peering over their dark sunglasses to try to make out the just-visible naughty bits offshore. Tomorrow's ticket sales for the pirate ship were assured.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> I make my way from the beach and head back to the house. The sky is darkening, rumbling thunder in the distance.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Sexual tension is muted on Gili Air, the most laid-back of the three islands off Lombok. Gili Trewagan is the party island, filled with bars and flops and besotted vagabond 20-somethings. Gili Air is the 'newlywed and nearly-dead' island. Older couples, quieter, less booze flowing- and far more frustrated local boys as a result. While the odd one scores a young traveller, most are left to leer and awkwardly cat-call unattended women walking down the beach road. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Trance music, electronica, and reggae mixes play from the beachside bars to accompany the tropical tension, the game.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> But for me there's just one music that fits afternoons on Gili Air. The Doors, raw and animal, threatening and poetic at the same time. And with thunder in the distance, clouds of ultramarine blue forming overhead, I cue the iPod to one song: <i>Riders on the Storm</i>.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The piano slowly building tension, the tinkling of keys like the first fat drops of rain splashing into the sand. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Take a long holiday</span></i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Let your children play </span></i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Doors music just works in Southeast Asia. The opening strains of <i>The End</i> plays in my head every time I glance at the cathedral of cocoanut palms. Lines from <i>When the </i><i>Music's</i><i> Over </i>raise up unbidden with every plastic bag I pick out of the surf:</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> What have we done to the earth/</span></i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> What have we done to our fair sister? </span></i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The Doors music was born in the chaos of the 60s. Now it is crystalized, perfect, bounded, like our memories of that time. But not safe, still. Powerful, weaponized.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The tune takes me back, to being 10, maybe 11. On Friday afternoons CBC Ottawa local television ran a preview show about the Rough Riders football club game that weekend. One time, some editor had dubbed 'Riders on the Storm' over footage of the team play. It worked so beautifully. I remember running outside afterwards, energized. The sky darkening above with a full summer thunderstorm, about to break. Playing football with my brothers. Being a Rider, being a Door, in the storm, being that cool.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Of course, I never was and never would be that cool. But the power of the Doors music still works in this island, in the blue-glow calm before a tropical cloudburst.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> But tonight the clouds blow away, the sky lightens. On Lombok, across the bay, the rain is falling in grey curtains. The local boys pull out their guitars, play soccer together. Taking long glances at the women walking by. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The song ends with the hissing of rain- from 40 years ago, fading keyboards, fading feelings.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> On the ocean, in the distance, boat lights on the horizon make a string of pearls in the deepening dusk. The pirate ship is among them, no doubt, heading for her harbour.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-2101723754070081052011-03-07T19:34:00.000-08:002011-03-07T19:34:19.331-08:00Soundtrack to Paradise- Part 1<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The air is fresh and clean- washed by a light overnight rain. The wet season is slow to wind up this year. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's time for a morning stroll. I head down the path from our cabin, brushing away black and orange butterflies dancing around around me in the garden. The sky is a bright white: overcast days here charged by the tropical sun somewhere above the scattered clouds. There is the promise of blue sky later in the morning.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A lizard, like a miniature dragon, is wandering across the cow pasture next to the resort. They don't bite, we're told, but its floppy swagger still triggers some primeval warning deep in my mind. It's just looking for fruit, I tell myself. My shrew-brain watches it anyway, glad to be moving at right angles to its path.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Gili Air has a horsepath that runs the perimeter of the island. A herringbone pattern in the grey sand shows the resort girls have already been out this morning, sweeping the path with their short-handled brooms. It seems a shame to put footprints across it.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The views are stunning as I turn down the path. Clouds still cling to Lombok, the island across a narrow channel from Gili Air. All shades of powder blue and mountainous in the distance, like a Toni Onley painting. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But today I turn down a connecting path, away from the shore. To the island's interior, following a new route this morning. I'm looking for the 'cross-island expressway'. For no particular reason, just to see if its there. This is tourist work.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I pull out the iPod and turn it on. The headphones are cheap knockoffs from Vietnam, tinny but functional. I let the player pick the music, hoping for inspiration in the algorithms created to shuffle the music.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A song from <i>Another Green World</i> by Brian Eno comes on. Back home this is fall music for me: sombre, electronic hymns, long quiet passages of ambient tones. Suited for the first snows of October, the dying light of November. I have listened to this a long time, 30 years now. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Interesting choice. I turn off shuffle, selecting instead to play the whole album. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div><blockquote><i>Oh me oh my, I think it's been an eternity/</i></blockquote> <i>You'd be surprised at my degree of uncertainty/</i><br />
<blockquote><i>How can moments go so slow? </i></blockquote><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Strangely, this brain-music takes on a new character on this tropical island. Rather than sobering, it seems to celebrate the morning. The piano riffs are light. The music swells. Uplifting, embracing. Lyrics about the fall of night and passing of time somehow complement the daylight and the greenery, the richness of earth and water. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The path widens a bit, and an old brickwork pattern begins to reveal itself under my feet. Some old project, half-done, to formalize the path. The hedge grows bigger, turns into a canopy overhead, cooling the path below. I enter the locals' village. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Homes here are neat and tidy. Gardens, filled with palms and banana and mango trees. Flowers in pots and vegetables in raised beds, all order and care. Here, a goat stands on the stump of an old palm; there, a man is hand-cutting two-by-fours, the shavings smouldering beside him, the aromatics framing the scene. People move quietly through the morning, working at the speed of hand and foot.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You know how they build a fence on Gili? Take sticks- cuttings- from a tree. Commonly, it's caragana, or tamarind, or a grape-like stalk. Stick them in the ground in a row. Use some bamboo to keep them in line. Step back.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In a few months, the plain sticks sprout new shoots, new branches. A few years, you have a strong, fence. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Could you ask the earth for more? Stick a piece of wood in the ground, and in a while it will feed you. And cool you. And shade you. And keep your animals in.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> </div><blockquote><i>I'll find a place somewhere in the corner/</i> </blockquote><blockquote> <i>I'm gonna waste the rest of my days </i></blockquote><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">New life from old sticks.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">New context for old music.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The earth provides on Gili.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-54474142932491376382011-03-03T17:28:00.000-08:002011-03-03T17:28:34.123-08:00What is lost...<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> What do you get when you let go of the internal combustion engine? You could ask the people of Gili Air...</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> We left Bali in the morning, taking a fast boat across the straight to Gili Trewangan, the largest of the three Gili islands. The trio sit off the northwest corner of Lombok, the next island east of Bali.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> We then piled aboard a low-slung fishing boat, captained by a grizzled local tanned into immortality. Our first view of Gili Air was from the boat's wild pitch and yaw, as our Ahab fought the waves and current ad naseum (literally) to get us there.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Gili Air (<i>gili</i> means 'small island'; <i>air</i> is Bahasa Indonesian for water) is perhaps a kilometre in diameter, with maybe a highest point of 5 meters. We can see a few low-slung cottages as the boat drops us off at the shore. Fishing nets and floaters, and no small amount of garbage, litter the dockside beach.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Touts try to grab our bags, but we wave them off. We're then offered rides to our hotel in, of all things, horse-drawn carts. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Having given tuk-tuk drivers the once-over, it's only fair to describe the horse-drawn carts of Gili Air. The motor is a pony, about chest-high to an average person, coming mostly in shades of brown. Compared to some of the emaciated creatures seen shackled to carriages in Jakarta and Bali, they look relatively healthy and happy. They are harnessed to a small, single-axle wooden cart, with padded seats for the passengers around the edge.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> At $7 bucks a pop, we demur on taking more than one, figuring some of us can walk; we relent when we're pitched how far it is to the hotel, and we pile into two carts. The back of the cart tilts hazardously low with our weight before the driver climbs on to balance the load.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> With a tinkle of the horse bells we're off, and it's an utterly charming ride. The dirt track muffles the clip clop of the hooves, forcing the driver to honk a cartoon horn to warn pedestrians of our approach. Songbirds and roosters compete for the title of Chief Ambient Sound as we saunter along. The path is lined with flowered hedges, glimpses of surf and sand to our right, palm trees and neat-clipped pasture to our left.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Now, just like in North America, a lack of distance to travel has been no barrier to using cars or motorcycles to get there. The islanders on Koh Lipe were fine with sandwiching their wives and children on noisy little Japanese wasp-waisted machines, hurtling along the island's one kilometer of paths in any direction.We have been looked at askance in many countries when we told drivers we were fine walking to our destination.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> The hydrocarbon addiction is as strong here as anywhere.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> But on Gili Air, they've broken the habit. Internal combustion engines have been banned on the island.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> “Motors scare cows, and a lot of people had cows, so they said 'no engines',” says Kamil, our hotel owner, of the decision made long ago. People who have tried to bring motorcycles have had stones thrown at them, his wife adds.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Now that I can admire. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Here's what you lose when you lose internal combustion. It's obvious to say noise and fumes, but the full realization of what engines mask takes days to reveal. Like the blind man, your senses grow sharper, working to fill the hole created from a lifetime of the sound and smell and taste of exploding gasoline.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> The air is salty, humid and fresh, perfumed with delicate scents of hedgerow flowers teasing your nose. You remember how to smell the coming rain, a field of grass, or the presence of an animal. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> You can hear forever- an axe working across the island, a pony's throaty challenge to a rival, the surf pounding offshore. There's a gaping hole in the aural tapestry, a place your ears search until your shoulders relax and fall. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> You lose the speed of life. The psychic edge brought on by having to remember to shoulder check or step aside for the noisy, hurtling metal. Toddlers can play bare-assed in the streets and you don't fear for them. The road becomes a thing for humans, for living things, not the machine. The earth matters. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> And people matter more, it seems, here on Gili Air. There is little noticeable poverty on the island. People have clean clothes, white smiles, bright eyes, strong lean bodies. Their homes are well-built, gardens everywhere, litter hardly to be found. Their pastures are neat, their animals healthy. People share and support each other, we're told.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Music is everywhere- and not canned. Young men serenade passers-by on cheap guitars and bongo drums, singing songs about their island. No radios, no news. You can't find a TV or an episode of<i> Friends</i> here to save your life. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Is all this something that is a function of not having motorized vehicles on the island, or is that just another consequence of something larger? </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> I ponder this as the rotating fan blows air on me from the restaurant's bamboo and thatch roof. It's the noisiest human-made thing I have heard for three days.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Finally, I am far away. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-44635300066003442362011-03-02T01:40:00.000-08:002011-03-02T01:59:29.919-08:00A Beach Too Far...<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> It seems obvious to me that you can't have a store in your town called 'Jimmy Fucking Hendrix”, while simultaneously claiming to be paradise on earth.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Such is the state of affairs on the Indonesian island of Bali, or Kuta Beach, specifically. This tourist hub at the southeast corner of the island is like an aging hooker- trading on her reputation and former good looks, she has to get her clients drunk as possible before parting them from their money.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Our cab weaves its way down a narrow alley. Tourists cling to the walls on our approach, and motorcycle drivers somehow find the room to squeeze past. We're dropped off in the dusk and car exhaust, at a sleepy hotel. It's made momentarily beautiful by the orange glow that fades even as we walk to our room. We drop off our bags, wash up and head out onto the street.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> We enter another William-Gibson dystopia- broken sidewalks, sewer holes that can swallow a child, locals hustling and jiving for your rupiah. The low walls of the storefronts, busy with slogans and brand names painted with crude brushes, seem to close in. We are the ones dodging the cars now. Avoiding eye contact with locals to avoid the pitch that inevitably follows- hustles for fake pearls, or swimwear, or dope. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Hot blonde Australians wander in groups, in muscle shirts and flip-flops, halter tops and sarongs. Energy and beauty to squander. Their eyes red, almond-shaped and unfriendly, reflect hours of self-abuse.<br />
The beach, we are told, should be avoided in the evening; the streets even less safe, for pickpockets and muggers. Rabies and dengue are both in epidemic in Kuta. More than one mother, her child a poignant prop, holds a hand out for change. For the first time since Bangkok, I put my hand on my wallet in my pocket as we walk down the street. Starbucks and KFC and Body Shop offer to take our money back to North America ahead of us.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> This was not the Bali I had anticipated, even when told Kuta was Australia's Florida. To attract people who seem culturally incapable of speaking in an Inside Voice, the beach town has become loud, drunk and obnoxious. That has curdled with desperation and hunger into a poisonous and sad stew, where people with no hope for tomorrow serve those who party with no mind for it.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">But then, I was only there 12 hours.</div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-12091790386263685932011-02-26T22:01:00.000-08:002011-02-26T22:18:32.766-08:00Cab Driver's Blues<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Jakarta is a great big freeway.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Actually, it's not, especially considering the best roads are tollways. But the song sure seems to fit as we enter hour two of our cab ride across the city.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Traffic is ubiquitous and constant in this sprawl of 11 million souls. On the elevated high road we're on, vehicles are stopped far in front and behind us. We lurch a few yards occasionally, half the cars taking those opportunities to change lanes, snarling things even more. Even the motorcycles are stopped beside us.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The only consolation is that it's far, far worse on the surface roads, where construction, tuk-tuk fumes and pedestrians add to the misery of getting from A to B. From our perch on an overpass, I gaze down at the vast tenement blocks of Jakarta, all red tile, corrugated iron and decay.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“That,” my cab driver says, pointing to the slums, “is where my life is.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">You live there? I ask him. The area below is along a fetid waterway, its sides plaqued with plastic grocery bags and scrap paper. Not there, he indicates in a broken English, but in a place just like it, in another district.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It turns out this cabbie is in a chatty mood. I've found Indonesians as a whole are a very kind and friendly lot; despite the conditions they live in, they are intensely interested in others, in sharing about their lives and finding out about yours. Uniformly friendly and giving.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">My driver is 31, 41 or 51; it's hard to tell from either his English or his looks. He has eight kids, the oldest in their 20s. He was married very young- in traditional Javanese fashion. Now he struggles to feed his family.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">His eldest son, he laments, has no thought for the future, for school, work, or marriage. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">"And your boy?" he asks me, as my son naps beside me, his leg slung over my lap. "He's a good young man," I tell him.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">He waxes political. Things are hard again economically, he says, though it was getting better for a while. He's angry, about the country and politicians and how the 'Chinese own everything'. These are old complaints, you can tell- thoughts scored into the grooves of his mind over months and years of sitting in traffic like this.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">There's a random break in the congestion, and we suddenly pull out into five open lanes of asphalt. We drive for about a kilometre until the next bottleneck appears.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“Maybe I come work in your country,” he says to me as we slow down again. “What does a driver make in your country?” He mimicks a guy driving cab as he drives the cab.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I think for minute, pull out my iPod calculator. I figure I'll lowball it. I'll tell him a cab driver makes $35,000 a year. It seems a safe guess to me.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“A driver makes about $120 US a day,” I say.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">His eyes widen. “$120?” he asks, incredulously.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“Yes,” I say. “But you have to remember. It is expensive to live there.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I make a list of deductions for him. Taxes, take off at least one third. Gasoline, $40 a day. Insurance. Cab licences. Even a coffee, I tell him, will cost 25,000 rupiah.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“In the end, you might take home only $20 or $30,” I tell him.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“$120,” he repeats to himself again, rolling the incredible number around in his mind. What he could do with such wealth. He is now far away.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“Yes, but remember, lots of bills,” I repeat again, not trying to build up his hopes too much. “How much do you make in a day?” I ask.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“It goes up, it goes down," he explains. "But about 60,000, 70000 rupiah.” That's about $8.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Eight dollars a day to feed a family of eight. Still, compared to the Indonesian average- $2 a day- he's doing pretty well. I put away the iPod, suddenly aware it's worth two months' salary to him, feeling a little ashamed of myself.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We pull off the tollway, into the gridlock below, near our destination. At an intersection, street kids plaster their faces to the windows of the cab and beg. A 10 year old boy, carrying his two year old sister, have picked me to try to ignore them.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“I'm sorry about that,” the driver says to me, ashamed of the street urchins.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“Hey, not your fault,” I say, wondering whose fault it is. I gaze out across the road, studiously not seeing what's in front of me, while my driver dreams of Canadian streets of gold.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-5260375221374799032011-02-24T11:21:00.000-08:002011-02-24T11:26:43.709-08:00Bathtime in Jakarta<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The lobby of the hotel we're staying at in Jakarta is bigger than the entire hostel we were staying at last night. We cross a grand plain of marble to the front desk, a sweeping staircase to our right, hotel guests eyeing us from plush chaise lounges to the left.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We seem distinctly out of place with our bathing suit shorts, old runners and dirty worn backpacks. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The clerk is nonchalant, though, and greets us with polished, professional form. I feel like the castaway guy from the 80s American Express commercial as I slap my credit card down on the tropical-hardwood counter to put a deposit on our room.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Unfortunately, that spell is broken when the machine rejects my Visa. I have to pony up $300 US cash instead.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">After three months on the road, I am in a four-star Western hotel, in a tony area of embassies and offices just south of central Jakarta. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I'm here to meet up with my brother, who's at a conference at the hotel. It's out of our normal price range, but for two days the boy and I can splurge.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">No cage lockers here, no common-room fridges or mosquito netting. The hotel is all air conditioning, carpeting and chrome, push-button elevators and key-card locks. Buffet for breakfast, included. Staff in uniforms smile and open doors for you.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We ride the Muzak-ed elevator to the 11<sup>th</sup> floor (11 floors! And more!) and enter our room. I stayed in a hundred like it back when, travelling on business.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">And I stop myself. It has a bathtub.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It is the first honest-to-God western-style bathtub I have seen in three months.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Now, people do things differently here. And I am cool with that. They don't do baths. That's fine.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">What they have in Asia is showers. If you're lucky, there's a little heating unit attached to the wall allow a person to fine-tune the water temperature. But more often than not, it's just ambient temperature. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I can even understand why they don't have bathtubs. For one, it costs money to heat all that water. Two, it's almost always 30+ degrees here, so who would ever want to lie in a tub of hot water?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">So for the last three months, I've showered. And yeah, that's OK. Part of 'the experience'.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">But day by day, lukewarm rinse by lukewarm rinse, my need to soak has grown.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We just get settled in the room when my brother knocks on the hotel door. We head down for some supper.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It's great seeing him again, we catch up on all sorts of news. But in the back of my mind, I'm thinking about that bath tub. We call it an early night (he's working in the morning) and I head back to the room.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Back to the bath tub.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I walk into the bathroom and look around. That alone is a luxury. No more closet-sized hostel bathrooms for me. No more shower-head-spraying-everywhere-wetting-the-toilet-paper-and-cosmetic bag.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Not tonight.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Tonight is cream-coloured marble flooring, two-tone tilework around the fine porcelain tub. I pull the clothesline cord from the dispenser thoughfully included on the side of the tub, and draw it across to its receptacle. I have no clothes to steam out. I just want to do it.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I'm going to savour every minute this. I want to see the chrome mist up as the water heats it, condensing the cool air on its surface. I am going to fill it to the brim, and slowly sink under the surface, until only my nose can be seen. I am going to emerge finger-wrinkled and pink and am going to wear the white terrycloth bathrobe I just spotted on the back of the door. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I crank the dial to stop the drain.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I turn the tap, try one way, then rotate it to the left for the hottest water. I watch and wait patiently to adjust it just to the best temperature. I let it run.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">And run.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">And run.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">And run.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It has been a full ten minutes now, dear reader. And the water has not gone above tepid.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Who needs hot water when it's always 30-plus degrees?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It was so close, yet so far. Far away.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><u><br />
</u></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><u>Update:</u></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">So it's three o'clock in the morning when I'm woken up by #1 Insomniac Son getting back into bed. He's wearing the white terrycloth robe.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“Did you take a bath?” I ask stupidly. It was three a.m., after all.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“Sure,” he says.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> “It wasn't cold?” I ask. See above.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“No, it was hot.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Well, I'm instantly awake. I go to the bathtub. I can feel the heat still rising from his bath.WTF?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I try the water handle again. I turn it full the other way, and wait this time. It's hot, in a few seconds.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Oh shit. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I run, and nuke the blog post.<i> Idiot. Idiot.</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Then I realize, It's OK. I'm not writing high journalism or anything I have to pretend about. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">This is me, dear reader. I fuck up.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I pour a bath. A hot bath. I watch the taps condense vapour as they heat up. I feel the warmth of the porcelain as I slilp into the hot, hot water. I slide under the surface, my nose just poking out. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>This posting will have a happy ending after all</i>, I think.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I'm a heppy, heppy ket.</div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-62528530633193058892011-02-22T19:26:00.000-08:002011-02-22T19:26:15.264-08:00Far Away...: Lost in Transaction<a href="http://boivinartts.blogspot.com/2011/02/lost-in-transaction.html?spref=bl">Far Away...: Lost in Transaction</a>: "It should really go something like this: LISTEN TO ME MORTAL.I COME IN THE NAME OF MASTER HEADI SEEK THE GO SEI WONDER.WHO WITH GO SEI GREA..."John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-68594086148719369732011-02-22T19:23:00.000-08:002011-02-22T19:23:59.111-08:00Lost in Transaction<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It should really go something like this:</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">LISTEN TO ME MORTAL.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I COME IN THE NAME OF MASTER HEAD</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I SEEK THE GO SEI WONDER.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">WHO WITH GO SEI GREAT AND THE LANDIC BROTHERS MANIFEST TENSOU SENTAI GOSEIGER</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">34TH OF THE LINE OF THE SENTAI TOKUSATSU</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">THEY OF THE ANGELIC AND CARD MOTIF</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">WE SEEK TO DEFEAT IN BATTLE THE PIRATE SENTAI GOUKAIGER OF THE WARSTAR SYNDICATE,</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">VILE DESTROYERS OF HEAVEN'S TOWER!!</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Instead, I ask the lady at the information kiosk if there's a toy store in this mall.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We are still in KL, and the boy and I are on a mission to fulfil a birthday promise for another Sentai model. Sentai, if you're lucky enough not to know, is the Japanese word for Power Rangers. Remember that five-teenager team of robot fighters that caused a 'violence on TV' fuss in the 90s? Still around, the boy still loves 'em, always has. And has an impressive collection of the toys back home. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">In Bangkok there are whole stores in the malls devoted to carrying the latest model or variant of the Super Sentai series- the next $30, $80 or $110 collection of interlocking plastic that attaches (or may not) to the last collection of plastic. Popular throughout most of Asia.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">In Malaysia though, not so much.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KLrYFF4g5Kw/TWR8Fwp-MMI/AAAAAAAAAC0/Tb-pVaps8yI/s1600/mall-pic.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KLrYFF4g5Kw/TWR8Fwp-MMI/AAAAAAAAAC0/Tb-pVaps8yI/s320/mall-pic.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You never see anything like this<br />
in North America</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">So four degrees off the equator, surrounded by the history of the Opium Trade, exotic flora and fauna, foods born in the wars over the Spice Islands... I scour shopping malls in vain.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It is exactly as exotic as one would think. In other words, not at all.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">KL has a hundred malls of all sizes and from all eras. There's the Legends Mall, Bukit Bintang, Sungai Wang, Lot 10, Starhill, One Utama, Sogo, the Berjaya Times Square, Midvalley Mega-Mall, Suria KLCC, Low Yat, Pertama Complex. On and on. We search through 60's style, low ceilinged hallways, dingy with time and smelling of shoe leather, to antiseptic marble-and-chrome neon cathedrals of retail.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Soon you get the knack of the search. Toy stores are run by fanboys, without a lot of money. They're off the beaten retail paths. You find them on the 6<sup>th</sup> and 7<sup>th</sup> floors of malls,with the property management offices, dentist's shops and bowling alleys. You find them in the basement, where swarthy men play pool and ignore the 'no smoking' signs pasted prominently on the walls. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">To find them you walk. Past hundreds, thousands of clothing stores, offering impossibly small skirts and blouses to teen girls. Past butiks and hall stalls and department stores. Up escalators and down, all the while trying to keep your path out of the building in mind, a mental ball of thread like Theseus in the minotaur's maze. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It's actually the human cost of the mall that gets to you. The shops promise youth, beauty, energy, popularity. But you walk past sleepy men and women, hunched over glass cases displaying watches and rings and broaches, jewels and ivory and plastic trinkets destined one day for the Pacific Gyre. Past sad-eyed young people, watching their peers hustle by, watching their lives drain away in air-conditioning and under fluorescent light. Following the sounds. Toy stores are near arcades, near the roller rinks and karaoke clubs.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The toy stores uniformly disappoint. They have Gundam, Mazinger, Exo-Force, Robotech and Transformers, and knock-offs and rip-offs of endless variety and kind. But Sentai? The clerk looks up from his iPad, shrugs, sometimes with a bit of a sneer. “Not popular here. Try next floor.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">And so it goes. I take what I can out of the hunt. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We see a great deal of the city. From the monorail and commuter lines. Past mosques and parks and centres of government. The design of the city is slowly revealed, in bits and pieces. We learn to negotiate traffic, read direction signs in Malay. We see the way regular people live, play, shop.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JBeZcO2fGX8/TWR8VOUuMJI/AAAAAAAAAC4/E0nvEQEFW24/s1600/sentai.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JBeZcO2fGX8/TWR8VOUuMJI/AAAAAAAAAC4/E0nvEQEFW24/s400/sentai.JPG" width="298" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Barely powerful enough to take on the<br />
Warstar Syndicate</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We finally find a shop with a single Sentai, on the 6<sup>th</sup> floor of another anonymous <i>compleks</i>. It's not exactly what the boy was looking for, but it completes this series. We head home, he's satisfied.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I sit on the bed at the hostel while the boy assembles his latest mecha configuration. It has been about as westernized a day as could be. Burger King lunch, video game arcades, Coca-cola and ATMs. I came 12,000 kilometres for this?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Then, from the open grate in the wall above the bed, a plaintive cry, a woodwind instrument blowing mournfully. The<i> isha'a</i>, the final call to prayer in twilight from some nearby mosque. It calls out haunting and mysterious to the faithful. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I have no faith. But I am transported, once again, far away.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Thank you KL. </div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-50287300249382364652011-02-21T17:56:00.000-08:002011-02-21T17:56:39.163-08:00Tapir Heaven, Food Hell<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The two-lane country road ahead is steaming like a hot coffee, vapour rising from the asphalt as the afternoon tropical downpour stops as abruptly as it began. It all seems so perfect, as we wind our way to Teman Negara, a forest older than the dinosaurs.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The trip has been relatively easy, a three-hour drive up modern divided highway north of Kuala Lumpur. We visited an elephant sanctuary and a petting zoo earlier in the day. The boy is still smiling at having been able to touch a sun bear at the zoo. It's a black, hairy bear with a flattened snout, and about the size of a pig. Apparently it's the tamest of the bears, though to date we've only seen it from a safe distance in a cage at the zoo. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">After the eventful morning we're on the last leg of the journey, a 100-kilometre drive past palm oil plantations and small towns, to the forest edge.</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DWu7p3LqbWs/TWMUntdTkII/AAAAAAAAACs/X1U_-2JzClQ/s1600/palm-trees.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DWu7p3LqbWs/TWMUntdTkII/AAAAAAAAACs/X1U_-2JzClQ/s400/palm-trees.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I am sure there is a power-up in there somewhere...</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> The landscape, the boy notes, looks like a scene from Donkey Kong Country: identical palm trees clone-stamped in repeating patterns into the distance. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The driver cruises along at a speed just under the limit for inducing nausea on the winding, hilly route. We finally cruise into Kuala Tahan, a town on the river that borders the park. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Tired, and a little sick from a chest cold we both have, we crash for an hour or two at the hotel. Then it's off to dinner and an orientation video, then a night walk in the park itself.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Teman Negara is considered the world's oldest forest. For 130 million years nothing has erased it- not asteroids or ice ages or human greed. A third larger than Algonquin Park, the park is effectively protected from development by the Malaysian government, which unlike many in SE Asia, seems to put teeth to its environmental legislation.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Kuala Tahan is an outpost, a tourist centre, on the edge of the park. It borders a small, fast flowing river, its few streets on one side, Nature Red In Tooth and Claw on the other.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Our package has us eating at a local restaurant that evening. MamaChop's has everything going for it. A floating restaurant on a fast-moving stream; exotic surroundings, animal calls in the distance and dim lighting as the tropical sun sets.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Everything going for it, that is, except the fact it's trying to feed people. For MamaChop, it seems, has no desire to run a restaurant- or at least put any effort into it.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We're paying about $120 US a night for this trip, all included. Sure, you don't expect five-star treatment, but a bit of effort would be nice. The drivers, the trip, the hotel, were all adequate for our money. Then we are served a three-item 'buffet'- cold white rice, plain roasted chicken, and lukewarm veggies in cocoanut milk. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> I choke it back without enthusiasm. The boy turns his nose up. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I ask to consult the menu, to order something for him 'a la carte'. 'Spaghetti baloonisi' is probably not the best selection. I run down the rest of the options, and finally ask the waiter about a hambuger. 'No', says the teenager, not available. What about the chicken fingers? No again. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Going through the rest of the menu quickly reveals that the entire 'Western Dishes' side of the page is a sham. There are no western dishes to be had. I order plain rice and chicken for the boy. The youth runs back to the chef with the order. About five minutes later, I realize I just ordered a $3 version of the meal we had just been offered free as part of the tour.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">After our meal the local guide fires up a bootleg of a video about the park on the restaurant's big flatscreen TV, which up to this point has been playing Malaysian love songs and hip-hop. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The boy wants to go home, but after that meal I want to get our money's worth from the tour company. I insist we'll spend the hour going on the night walk. Our group piles into a boat, and in less than a minute we're across into the park proper. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Our guide takes us on a short walk in the dark; we see fluorescent scorpions, sleeping birds, and the glowing green eyes of what are supposed to be mouse deer. Sure, we're only on the very edge of the park, and we've only been there for 45 minutes. But it's a quiet night in the forest, and we can't help but feel a bit disappointed.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Then on the return trip, magic. A screeching sound, short and high. 'Did you hear that?' the guide says. “That's a tapir.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Cole's eyes light up, and we start peering into the dark. As we walk along the path back to the boat, out of the gloom, two large pig-shaped creatures emerge and head towards us. They are tapirs.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-frX61o2NioY/TWMU8P8CyWI/AAAAAAAAACw/JFM99UEaIHI/s1600/tapir-blog.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-frX61o2NioY/TWMU8P8CyWI/AAAAAAAAACw/JFM99UEaIHI/s400/tapir-blog.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Enjoy the show, try the veal...</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Now, maybe the best way to describe a tapir is if a pig had tried to grow to the size of a deer. They are ancient-looking animals, with a long snout and odd half-black, half-white colouring. For you old folks, these are the creatures killed by the ape-men at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey (trivia note, courtesy of the boy- that scene was impossible, as there were never tapirs in Africa).</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The giant pig-elephant-deers snuffle around us as a security guard and our guide warn us to be careful. But the animals actually seem curious and friendly, one even lying down to get a cautious rub from the tourists. Cole is in heaven. He rubs the creatures, gets his picture taken.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Yeah, I went there. They feel like cheap tight-pile carpet from the 1970s.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">But something smells here, and it ain't just the tapir. It's almost too good- this refugee from the Miocene just happening to show up, a security guard in tow. The surprise of our guide. All a little too perfect.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Later, I learn that the tapirs actually show up about twice a night, in about the same spot. They have been relocated from somewhere else in Malaysia, and are being acclimated to humans. It's good for tourism, if not exactly the purest of wildlife encounters.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">But it doesn't matter to my boy. He is in absolute heaven, that he's been able to pet a wild creature that up to know he's only seen sleeping in mud baths in zoos. He will talk about this the rest of his life. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The lousy food, the head cold, the iffy washrooms, are all forgotten. The trip is officially worthwhile because of this close encounter with 'wildlife'.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">And that's good enough for me.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-90116882332294802272011-02-20T19:05:00.000-08:002011-02-20T19:10:02.696-08:00Indiana Jones and the Caves of Batu<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It's ten o'clock in the morning and the air is already heavy with heat and moisture. I'm standing at the foot of a limestone hill, facing a wide staircase that seems to rise up into infinity.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“Don't worry, it's only 270 steps” says my driver, slapping me on the shoulder. “I'll see you in half an hour. Maybe 45 minutes. OK?”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">He turns and leaves, to head back to the air-conditioned van. I start my ascent.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vPzRbs0a5X8/TWHVbQhLO1I/AAAAAAAAACk/1EIUqOVKkZs/s1600/batu-statue.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vPzRbs0a5X8/TWHVbQhLO1I/AAAAAAAAACk/1EIUqOVKkZs/s400/batu-statue.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That's the second-biggest statue of Lord Murugan I've ever seen.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I am only here because of my driver, who suggested it as a nice diversion on our way to the interior of peninsular Malaysia. We aren't even out of the city yet- the park that contains the cave complex is bordered by a busy highway, with shops and stores across the street. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The first thing you see is a statue- a giant golden statue- rising about 1/3 of the way up the side of the hill. From its design, you can tell from a distance you're entering a Hindu holy site.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Then there's those other things that make for a Hindu shrine. Holy men half-naked, faces painted, giving blessings to pilgrims; monkeys on the steps, looking for treats; and ramshackle shops for changing money, selling food and hawking the tackiest-looking religious paraphernalia. Day-glow back-lit spinning wall clock of Vishnu, anyone?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I climb the steps, thankful for the regular landings but cursing the lacksidaisical Asian attention to a safe riser/run ratio. About halfway up I pass the statue's head. The view of the city improves behind me, while before me a large entranceway beckons.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I reach the top of the stairs and enter into anyone's holy place.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Before you is a 100-metre high cavern. Bats flitter in and out of the cave. An opening high above brings natural light into the scene. Birds flying near the ceiling bring some perspective, while the scattered pilgrims and tourists on the vast floor attest to the capacity of the place. I am glad I'm here on an off-day; it looks like the base of the cave could comfortably accommodate 1,000 people.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W6EjFQgYc44/TWHVrwfXhDI/AAAAAAAAACo/_dMdFEXUFow/s1600/batu-scale.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W6EjFQgYc44/TWHVrwfXhDI/AAAAAAAAACo/_dMdFEXUFow/s320/batu-scale.jpg" width="239" /></a> The Batu Caves have been a holy site for Hindus in Malaysia for over 100 years. The last 50 years have seen more development and ability to handle crowds, who now come from around the world. A sign indicates a cable car may be in the works. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">There's much to admire in the vast space. Hindu statues of gods and heros populate niches and crevices where the cave wall meets the concrete floor. Larger buildings house more complex statue arrangements, and pilgrims seek blessings from monks and holy men. Nature and man working together to create a place of wonder. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It's worth a quick wander around. I stop at the top of a flight of stairs of the farthest cavern, and look down. It's funny how the mind works. The cave is hard to accept as real, it looks like a special effect, a matte-painting cavern from a 1980s adventure movie. I have to force myself to register that this is really something nature can accomplish all on her own. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">All we can do is worship in it.</div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2772153024546227424.post-22116916796836857712011-02-15T20:48:00.000-08:002011-02-15T20:48:21.900-08:00Sidewalk porn<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> "Yeah," said the fellow traveller at the breakfast table. "The sidewalks in Jakarta had holes big enough to fall in."</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Anyone spending anytime in Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Vientiane or most any SE Asia city has a story about the treacherous sidewalks. For the most part, the pedestrian's needs are an afterthought in these cities. Broken brick, sand or rebar can protrude out at any time; odd angles for curbs make walking dangerous, especially with people's morning bathwater splattered all over. Flimsy grates cover holes into the sewer. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Then there's the huge random obstructions- telephone polls or trees or utility boxes, that force walkers onto the even-more-dangerous streets. Even if you get flat, open sidewalk space it's likely to be considered convenient parking for motorocyles or cars.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> It's a nice break to visit a place like Kuala Lumpur, where at least a bit of thought was made into the needs of pedestrians.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> So for those folks living in faraway lands, who long for real sidewalks, who dream of actual completed pedestrian corridors that go on for blocks and blocks, <i>Far Away </i>presents some sidewalk porn, hot off the streets of Kuala Lumpur...</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ag5dzSUVtbI/TVtUdhie0qI/AAAAAAAAACI/IesJQmFts6s/s1600/sidewalkporn1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ag5dzSUVtbI/TVtUdhie0qI/AAAAAAAAACI/IesJQmFts6s/s320/sidewalkporn1.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Yeah baby, I'm long and smooth and you can go where you want on me. I'll take you there, slow or fast, how you want to go.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4M9P-BS2-Tw/TVtUeQuEx7I/AAAAAAAAACM/QO4dABXlX24/s1600/sidewalkporn2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4M9P-BS2-Tw/TVtUeQuEx7I/AAAAAAAAACM/QO4dABXlX24/s320/sidewalkporn2.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Yeah you can go around the corner on me. But watch someone's not coming the other way. Tee hee!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZqOg9YYVpKw/TVtUfUBBncI/AAAAAAAAACQ/vNcoRbmXibc/s1600/sidewalkporn3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZqOg9YYVpKw/TVtUfUBBncI/AAAAAAAAACQ/vNcoRbmXibc/s320/sidewalkporn3.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I'm spread out for you and you can walk all over me....I'm coming and going for you.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0UZXmowBDgg/TVtUgESV6GI/AAAAAAAAACU/zBCP7bQSXOo/s1600/sidewalkporn4.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0UZXmowBDgg/TVtUgESV6GI/AAAAAAAAACU/zBCP7bQSXOo/s320/sidewalkporn4.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Just look at that textured surface, the attention to detail on the curbs... oooh that's hot!</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IlMTbMyPKWw/TVtUhc9jVHI/AAAAAAAAACY/-VJcUcMXkL0/s1600/sidewalkporn5.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IlMTbMyPKWw/TVtUhc9jVHI/AAAAAAAAACY/-VJcUcMXkL0/s320/sidewalkporn5.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">You want two sidewalks at once? Think you're man enough to handle it? Ooh baby you know you want it...</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> Anyway, we've added another example of <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rule%2034">Rule 34</a> at work on the 'nets. Our work here is finished for the day.</div>John Boivinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06263287369920364190noreply@blogger.com1