Favored Places

     The traveler can hardly name a favorite destination any more than a favorite food or play. Roast lamb does not compete with cashew-fig ice cream or a dish of just-shelled peas in butter. One might laugh with Aristophanes in the morning but be ready to cry with Aeschylus by evening. It is inevitable, though, once the traveler has wandered long enough to make comparisons, some places are recalled more fondly than others, and the traveler finds himself musing on ratings, pretending for a time that all the world was made for nothing more than a pleasure trip.
     Travel is about experiencing difference. There would be little point in visiting a destination very like one’s home. A destination may gain sensational appeal if it deviates radically from one’s home. I recall my first sight of Morocco. On my Wanderjahr, after months traipsing about Europe, thinking myself full to capacity with admiration, I was struck with that seemed a new magnitude of wonder when I crossed from Algeciras to Ceuta and found myself feeling as though I was not merely walking the streets of a medieval neighborhood (as one may do in Carcassonne if one is unbothered by small boys with wooden swords); I seemed rather to have been transported to an earlier age. All around me were the sights and smells of a preindustrial society: charcoal fires with bubbling tajines, incense of unknown kinds, street musicians, animal handlers calling warnings to those with whom they and their beasts shared the narrow lanes. From the minarets the muezzin called the faithful to prayer. On top of everything else fifty years ago Morocco held out a kief pipe with its long stem and small clay bowl to the visiting American, ideal accompaniment to a glass of mint tea, a beguiling bonus indeed. We stayed in Fes for several months, mostly sitting in cafes chatting, rarely seeking out sights. When we were not socializing with our friends, the youths of the streets, marvels came to us. We observed nomads forming a vast camp, enacting rodeo-type games (the tbourida or fantasia), firing their blunderbusses in a grand fête for the circumcision of the king’s son, now the ruler.
     Visiting India provided a similarly rich sensual assault, sometimes retaining even the cannabis as well. A week on the shore of the Ganges in Varanasi included countless rhesus monkeys snatching food and offerings and scampering over roofs, onto terraces, then to trees while holy men chanted and sang below and a constant stream of devotes came to partake of the river’s divinity. To the foreign visitor the scene is a pandemonium of marvels: Shiva-lingams on every corner, Hanumans dripping with sindur-tinted ghee, paan vendors whose trays offer a galaxy of accompaniments, scents of burning incense and burning corpses. The imagery is expressed in one of the most elaborate and variegated pantheons of mythological beings ever imagined on earth. Active temples are everywhere with chanting here, prayers there, a friendly, English-speaking priest in a third. Every evening at the Dashashwamedh Ghat a service is held, the Ganga Aarti, with worshippers exhibiting the same brand of fervor one might expect at a pentecostal service. The visitor who grew up in the suburban Midwest can hardly stray further afield.
     Difference alone is no guarantee of satisfaction, though. I enjoyed Morocco and India on my own terms. Working in rural Nigeria was exceedingly unlike home. While exciting and rewarding at times, the daily difficulties often seemed overwhelming: living apart from shops (other than the market every four days in Agbarho) in a place where such ordinary goods as cooking gas were rarely obtainable even to those who knew the ways of the black market, while playing as neophytes our roles near the bottom of the formidable Nigerian bureaucracy, all of this in steam-room temperature and humidity. It did get the better of us.
     Around the great attractions of the globe, the places that comprise people’s “bucket lists” (a horrid term), the volume of crowds can distribute the pleasure more widely, though unfortunately in markedly smaller doses. When I was last in Pisa’s Campo dei Miracoli I could view the bell tower only past myriad other spectators, half of whom seemed to be posing gag photos in which their subjects were either holding up the structure or knocking it down. It is enough to make one feel like a snob.
     If people are not standing shoulder to shoulder, though, or even if they are, some sights live up to their reputation. The mountainous setting of Machu Picchu is flat-out breathtaking as is the prospect from the far less remote Delphi. The Taj Mahal has a precise symmetrical beauty like that of Versailles. For me perhaps the greatest revelation among wonders of the world was Angkor Wat. The vastness and grandeur of the place with literally miles of unfamiliar reliefs made it an easy matter to avoid the groups and lecturing guides, the selfie-takers and vendors they attract, by simply stepping a few feet off the standard route. The grand panoramas of events mythic and historic seem never to come to an end, and it is all carved upon vast fanciful, partially overgrown structures and overseen by the massive big-lipped heads on the Bayon temple.
     One could hardly sustain being bowled over every day, though, and a mood for the monumental at times gives way to a wish to sit in a quiet cafe. Two small towns that I find utterly charming are Nafplio in Greece and Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic. Neither is in any sense off the beaten path; both are popular, yet each has a beauty that has so far survived the crowds. In Nafplio a short stroll takes the visitor from the pleasures of the town with its battlements and bougainvilleas to Arvanitia Beach which seems more secluded than it is. Český Krumlov with its medieval streets and looming castle struck me as the closest approximation of the illustrations in fairy tale books.
     The museums that remain most strongly in my memory are the ones anyone would name: the Louvre, the Prado, the Uffizi, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, the Archaeological Museums of Athens and of Mexico City.
     Smaller museums of which I am especially fond include the Musée Moreau in a little-visited street of Paris with paintings covering the walls and endless cabinets, cupboards, and drawers of intricately imagined and constructed mythic scenes. I recommend as well Teylers Museum in Haarlem, fundamentally unchanged since its founding in 1784, which bills itself as a Museum van de Verwondering. With the Illumination of daylight only, the visitor can wander the galleries and central multitier library and see a large collection of elegant eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific instruments, with marvelous fossils and crystals around the corner, and drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael in the next room. In Bangkok the walker can enjoy a green respite from the sometimes sweaty streets by entering the gate of the Wang Suan Pakkad Palace (called the Lettuce Farm), in fact a small museum with a number of objets d’art as well as entire buildings, including the wonderful Lacquer Pavilion. A pleasant attendant added a grace note, giving us woven fans, saying they were a gift from the queen, but they seemed superfluous in that leafy and refined realm.
     And then there was the Ramnagar Fort Museum in Varanasi which we reached in a pedicab passing over an unsteady pontoon bridge to reach the crumbling structures where the current maharajah resides (though his title was abolished a half century ago). Here one may view tigers killed in royal hunts during the days of the raj, now leaking their stuffing amid decayed crocodiles and the remnants of the old glory: palanquins, howdahs, ivory carvings in glass cases covered with a layer of dust. When a tourist entered a room, an aged gentleman arose from the seat he seemed to have been occupying for the last century to gesture with a whisk, raising a bit of dust and justifying his request for baksheesh.
     In hotels I look for character over grandeur, but I appreciate the Ottoman Legacy Hotel in Istanbul with its majestic central court and high ceilings. Though built originally for offices, the structure features domes on either side modeled after those of Jerusalem’s Masjid al-Aqsa and in the interior a generally princely waste of space. The window of my room overlooked the spice market, the Mausoleum of Sultan Abdulhamid, and, further off, the water. It was only a few steps to the Topkapi and Hagia Sophia.
     I loved the San Tomas Hotel just by the market in Chichicastenango. Once the residence of the United Fruit agent, its rooms wander on sometimes in irregular levels, with courtyards with macaws and monkeys and luxurious plantings, religious art on the walls, rooms without television or air conditioning. I only hope it has not changed.
     A share of every day is given to eating. I think it is true that in France the diner is likeliest to be given a memorable plate, often notable for smoothness and elegance what with butter and cream and pureed vegetables, capable, too, of the intoxicating aroma of bouillabaisse, the earthiness of truffles or buckwheat, and the simple straightforward excellence of a fresh baguette. Not surprisingly, Italy and Spain can offer comparable pleasures. Greece hasn’t the range but, using only garlic, oregano, and thyme, can prepare the best roast lamb or grilled cuttlefish with which cold retsina is the best wine, little as one would wish to drink it daily.
     India offers the most dazzling array of “aromatics,” as the spices and herbs are termed in Dharamjit Singh’s cookbook. A thali plate, like a mandala, represents a universe, including the spectrum of flavors of sweet, salt, bitter, sour, astringent and spicy. Without a doubt the finest vegetarian cuisine in the world, Indian cooking is superb at making tasty dishes out of inexpensive ingredients while requiring considerable cutting, chopping, and the assembly of grand symphonic combinations of seasonings.
     Much good criticism is at bottom appreciation, but discernment is impossible without value judgments. Britain’s grey peas are not extinct, nor is the fried bread that might await the traveler at breakfast there. Yet the U. K.’s colonial history redeems it: inexpensive Indian restaurants are often a wise choice as are Indonesian places in Holland. Generally, I found little to like in the cuisines of the Czech Republic, Nigeria, or Puerto Rico. I can recall a dish in Prague with both potato dumplings and wheat dumplings and a bit of pork, a grey-brown assemblage, filling to be sure, but with little to recommend it other than the accompanying beer. And in San Juan the second frying of the plantains in mofongo rendered them hard and heavy, resembling the carnitas with which they are served. A Nigerian meal is typically a ball of starchy tuber – cassava or yam – with some meat and hot pepper in a bit of sauce called stew.
     As I write I remember the pleasure I took in hearing stories from friends who had bummed around Europe before I made it there and the delights of reading books that allowed me a wider range of experience vicariously than I could accomplish on my own. There is an equally abstract delectation as well in recalling these details from a lifelong travel habit. They are now arranged in the house of memory like a series of objects in a cabinet of curiosities, baubles one can study and turn over in the mind, sparkling yet fixed. The living fetish, though, of travel, is always in the future; the appeal is surely in not knowing, in vacuity in fact. Before visiting a place for the first time, I entertain an odd vacancy about what I might experience. In fact no one knows tomorrow, but the future contains a promise which is only enhanced by its mystery. That next trip, the visit to a place previously unknown, beckons always from the horizon.

On the Ganges' Shore

     With even the most detailed directions, we could never have found our guesthouse on the Ganges’ shore by ourselves. A young worker from the Sita Guesthouse on the Chausadi Ghat where we had booked a room met us on the nearest street large enough to accommodate traffic other than on foot or hoof. (Plenty of motorbikes zoom through the narrow lanes, but they don’t really belong there.) We moved rapidly through one turning after another, passing a variety of little shrines, many Shaivite, with fresh offerings around the lingams. In a short time I gave up trying to set mnemonic markers so I could find my way back and simply followed my guide to the banks of the slow, dark, impassive Ganges.
     When we met the proprietor of the Sita, he proudly informed us that his late father had been a distinguished astrologer who boasted among his clients the actress Goldie Hawn. He ran off to fetch a scrapbook with photos confirming this connection to celebrity before showing us to our room. When we pointed out a few small insects in the bedding, he enthusiastically declared, “No problem, no problem at all!” and shouted orders at one of his workers who presently appeared with a spray can of insecticide which he applied liberally enough to create a noxious poisonous cloud. “There! Okay, now, no?” he confidently asked.
     Whether wisely or not, we accepted the room. It had a balcony over the river and a side view facing a dormitory for some faction of holy men. We were to see them at all hours doing domestic chores like washing clothes and cooking. It mattered little that our modern sink simply drained onto the floor, thus teaching the hand-washer to lean well forward in an effort to avoid splashing one’s trousers.
     Varanasi is without doubt a spiritual center of Hinduism, but I learned that does not necessarily lend to its appeal as a holiday destination. “Why would you go there?” an Indian-American friend had asked, “You go to Varanasi when it’s time to die.” The fact is that the burning ghats where cremations are performed leave most visitors surprised not to be more disturbed. Perhaps even the visiting skeptic is influenced by the general spectacle of religiosity, played out at all hours on every side. The constant crowds of saddhus, devotees bathing in and drinking the murky water, masseurs, yogis, both for hire and self-absorbed, diviners of various stripes (some sheltered in permanent little shaded seats to receive hopeful customers), pilgrims, musicians and chanters, apes and cattle, all create an otherworldly atmosphere in which any manifestation of mortality short of a ravening Kali with a girdle of skulls is likely to seem digestible, even one’s own poor vulnerability. Then there are the touts and beggars. Now and then a haunting flute melody would rise from the path along the river’s side. There was no telling whether the tune arose from an enlightened ascetic who had trekked down from the mountains or a hustler hoping to gather a few coins by selling cheap pipes.
     Even apart from the constant scene along the river’s edge, there was no lack of action. The rhesus macaques whom I had previously associated primarily with their beneficent role in the polio research of my childhood leaped from building to building seeking freshly offered edibles at the many shrines or a bit of tasty trash. On the rooftop restaurant of the Sita one worker stood by at all times with a stick to prevent the animals from snatching the dinners from in front of guests. After dark, we heard them thrashing around on our balcony.
     The tourist and the devotee alike can experience an epitome of the Ganges’ symbolic potential every evening at the Dasaswamedh Ghat where an elaborate ceremony is held, lasting perhaps an hour and a half, and featuring fire, incense, bells, juggling, chanting, a row of seven simultaneous officiants, and music in various tempos. In this spot Brahma himself is said to have performed the archaic ten horse sacrifice detailed in the Vedas and described in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The present-day ceremony, called the Ganga Aarti (Ganges Perfect Love) is a full-blown spectacle. As mendicants and holy men circulate, congregants clap their hands with the music; they pray; at times they raise their hands, fingers wide, and wave, looking like nothing so much as a Pentecostal service. People place votive candles in small boats of folded paper and set them floating in the river, so that, after a time, a veritable flood of luminous desire illuminates the water’s path downstream. Praise of Agni, the god of fire and twin of Indra, opens the first hymn of the Rig Veda. His transformative flames were considered to transmit sacrifices to the divine world, and the use of fire as a route to god flourishes here nightly.
     After a time the casual visitor to Varanasi may find the powerful odors of the city -- incense, cremation, excrement, cooking, sharp chemical scents and soft floral ones, charcoal and rot – to be too much, particularly in concert with the incessant cries, shouts, songs, and chants. Our own remedy was to catch a pedicab to Sarnath, on the city’s outskirts, the Deer Park which was the site of Buddha’s first sermon to the five bhikkhus. The pandaemonium of Varanasi vanishes in this airy and quiet area frequented only by monks and pilgrims. The visitor notices, though, that the hovels of the destitute still line the approaches to the temples, monasteries, and colleges, most of which are walled off and set back from the road, surrounded by green lawns and gardens. The fabulous mythology of the Hindu pantheon, the phantasmagoric sights of the holy city, the most potent of sights, sounds, and smells, all can seem in memory a lurid dream, though a dream dreamt only yesterday.

More Portraits from the Floating World: Pa'ahssysy and Spector

Pa’ahssysy

     Pa’ahssysy, we were told, was a kula or kief wino. In the mornings he washed cars, preferably for tourists, for an hour or two, and he contrived to stay stoned most of the rest of the time. Around mid-day he would enter Mufis’ hole-in-the-wall café in Fes's new town and call for mint tea. Mufis would continue reading the paper, then he might bark a few orders to his assistant Ahmed and proceed to stare into space for ten minutes, only then rising to make the tea. Pa’ahssysy could sit, then, satisfied, for half the day drinking his tea and smoking tiny bowls in an unhurried and consistent pace, blowing the ash to the floor. The slow service may have reflected Mufis’ feeling that Pa’ahssysy’s custom was a liability to his establishment, though he cared to go no further than to hedge a bit about the charity required of every Muslim.
     Pa’ahssysy resembled an amiable if slightly pixilated bear, very dark with a woven cap ornamented with stars and a black three-quarter length pseudo-leather coat tied about the middle with grimy raveling string. His eyes, it must be said, were somewhat weary and blood-shot. He often slept in the park.
     Pa’ahssysy spoke no French, so our communication was largely through gesture and expression. He delighted in repeating his name and laughing as though it were an excellent joke, but he also made sudden, apparently unmotivated, growls. If a police officer were to pass by on the street, he would assume a scowl and declare, “Yechh – police” and then laugh harder yet. His attitude must have grown from experience. He had recently spent six months in prison for accosting a woman on the street outside his carwash and making bold advances. When she resisted, he claimed to be chief of police. Ahmed told us that while he was playing cards, Pa’ahssysy had stolen his wallet (which must have had precious few coins) and vanished for a week or two.
     Once we met Pa’ahssysy in the medina and he took us on a tour of the “shnen sbil” (a garden that felt to him like home), the Oued Fes, Moulay Idriss, the Bab Boujeloud. These place names became charms of friendship that day.
     Shortly before we moved on, Pa’ahssysy made another of his periodic reappearances, now sporting a new blazer with a woven crest of Fenwick High School in Oak Park on the lapel.


Lester Spector

     At breakfast on the rooftop of the Sita Guest House in Varanasi, as the waiters stood by with sticks to threaten monkeys eager to snatch a bit of food, Lester Spector told me he had been practicing meditation for thirty-six years. “But I’m a Jewish boy from the Bronx – I don’t expect to be enlightened – still it helps me to carry on.”
     And the man certainly does carry on. During his career, apart from a year with a guru in Patna, he had been a lawyer in the US, later a law professor in Toronto and then in Western Australia where he had also sat for a decade as a Supreme Court judge and wrote a number of scholarly books on legal topics. Apart from these substantial professional achievements, he had studied Jungian psychology and had published a widely sold road novel about two unlikely seekers in India.
     Australian tax authorities were pursuing him yet with an annoying civil suit seeking to recover a considerable sum. “I’ll win eventually, but it will take years. I occupy myself by making obstacles in my life this way.” This legal entanglement may account for his avoiding Australia in recent exploits.
     He said he had spent a year doing work for a gangster-linked business in Moscow. When his intention to leave them emerged, they tried “at gunpoint” to reclaim his compensation. Though rather foggy about the details, his account had him outwitting the tough guys and making off with the money. He seemed at any rate somewhat flush.
     His girlfriend was on her way back to Australia. He said his novel had been optioned by a major studio and he was scouting, among other things, locations for filming. Whatever it was he was after, his restless eyes did move in an unusually lively fashion.

Two More Portraits from the Floating World

Jack

     “You look too prosperous to be staying in this neighborhood,” said Jack, né Jürg. (He had not been pleased to learn that his German name sounds very much like “jerk” to Americans.) He is proprietor of the Good Stuff Restaurant on a narrow lane of Varanasi’s old town. He has assimilated sufficiently to shout in a peremptory manner at dogs, cattle, and people whom he considers intruders in his establishment’s space.
     He had, he told us, in his slimmer youth been in the Kampfschwimmerkompanie of the Bundeswehr (the German version of the US Navy’s SEALs) and later had worked on pipeline construction in the field. “I would have died if I had kept to that. My father had three sons. The oldest he didn’t care for; the youngest is clearly the kind who would never fall down, but for me in the middle, he was always worried. ‘Something is not quite right with Jürg,’ he would say, ‘but I don’t know what.’ When my father died, I came to Varanasi. I have found my climate. I am 100% at home.”
     Jack had built the restaurant from a space empty of everything but debris. Surely dealing with the governmental and commercial bureaucracies must have been a greater challenge than cleaning up. His menu differed only slightly from many Indian owned eating places, but when we actually tried to order, we found that he lacked supplies. “The Titanic is going down. I made no money yesterday; I have no gas to cook today. I can do nothing but recreate. So, I will call it a good day.”
     He took little interest in the news or in politics. When I brought up the recent attack in Mumbai, he said, “I can’t worry about terrorists. A bomb is an excellent way to die – instantly and without pain.” He was, though, sufficiently engagé to note, “Of course we Germans are socialists. Is it not only human and natural to take care of one another?”
     “Going to Kathmandu, are you?” he said at parting, “Bring a gas mask. I’m not going anywhere.”

Varanasi, 2009


Gahlia

     At the outdoor pavilion of the enclosed gardens at the charmingly decayed Doctors Cave Hotel in Montego Bay is a Jacuzzi. During our visit, the only other guest to enter these precincts was Gahlia. As the lovebirds in a hanging cage peeped, she told us, “It used to be Dahlia, but my life was not what I wanted, and I was told if I changed even just one letter, my life would change.”
“And did it work?”
     “Oh, yes,” she said as if surprised at the question. Then she purred, “Mmmmmm . . . Jamaica.”
     Before long she was boasting that seven of the Jamaican “boys” she had met on her last trip had been writing to her in Tel Aviv. The hotel was holding its staff’s holiday party that night, and she had, she told us, been the only outsider invited. She had promised not only to attend, but to appear, as she told us, “nothing less than a knockout.”
     The next morning she was working on a carafe of coffee in the hotel restaurant at a table with a corn-rowed fellow half her age.
     “Keep your love forever, honeys,” she said, a rhinestone peace symbol sparkling on her chest. Her breakfast companion was silent.

Montego Bay, 2007