Friends of a Long Year is a private mailing list bringing stories to your inbox like it's still 1995. It's written in the spirit of Mary Austin. It was originally called Place Without a Postcard, which does a better job of summarizing what I like to write about. Friends is delivered roughly twice a month.
Doi Inthanan National Park, Thailand –
The light outside the windows was still a pre-dawn inky blue when the freezing cold water hit my back. A cold shower at six thirty in the morning is infinitely more powerful, albeit not at long lasting, as a cup of coffee. After dropping my body temperature a few degrees and having no towel to dry off with, just a dirty shirt and ceaseless ceiling fan, a cup of tea seemed like a good idea so I stopped in at the restaurant downstairs and, after a cup of hot water with some Jasmine leaves swirling at the bottom of it, I climbed on my rental motorbike and set out for Doi Inthanan National Park.
Chang Mai, Thailand –
The all night bus reached Chiang Mai well past dawn, the city already beginning to stir. I considered trying to nap, but in the end decided to explore the town. What better way to see Buddhist temples than in the dreamy fog of sleeplessness? Chiang Mai has over three hundred wats within the somewhat sprawling city limits, most of them reasonably modern and, in my opinion, not worth visiting. I narrowed the field to three, which I figured was a nice round one percent.
Bangkok, Thailand –
The house Jim Thompson left behind in Bangkok is gorgeous, but the real charm is the garden and its orchids. I wandered around the gardens which really aren't that large for some time and then found a bench near a collection of orchids, where I sat for the better part of an hour, occasionally taking a photograph or two, but mostly thinking about how human orchids are.
Bangkok, Thailand –
"The city is a cathedral" writes James Salter, "its scent is dreams." Nowhere in Bangkok is it more so than in the view from the top of the Baiyoke Sky Hotel.
Bangkok, Thailand –
Seasons Greeting from luxagraf. I'm in Bangkok, Thailand at the moment. I am taking a short break from traveling to do a little working so I don't have much to report. I've seen the two big temples down in the Khaosan Rd area, but otherwise I've been trying to live an ordinary life in Bangkok, if such a thing is possible.
Pokhara, Nepal –
After about forty-five minutes of paddling I reached a point where the views of the Annapurna range were, in the words of an Englishman I met in Katmandu, "gob smacking gorgeous." I put down the paddle and moved to the center of the boat where the benches were wider and, using my bag a cushion, lay back against the gunwale and hung my feet over the opposite side so that they just skimmed the surface of the chilly water.
Pashupatinath, Nepal –
On a hillside beside the Bagmati River, Pashupatinath is one of the holiest sites in the world for Hindus, second only to Varanasi in India. Pashupatinath consists of a large temple which is open only to Hindus, surrounded by a number of smaller shrines and then down on the banks of the Bagmati are the burning ghats where bodies are cremated.
Kathmandu, Nepal –
After saturating myself with the streets of Thamel I went on a longer excursion down to Durbar Square to see the various pagodas, temples and the old palace. The palace itself no longer houses the King, but is still used for coronations and ceremonies and Durbar Square is still very much the hub of Katmandu.
Delhi, India –
I have taken almost 750 photos and traveled nearly 4000 km (2500 miles) in India, the vast majority of it by train. I have seen everything from depressing squalor to majestic palaces and yet I still feel as if I have hardly scratched the surface. I can't think of another and certainly have never been to a country with the kind of geographic and ethnic diversity of India.
Agra, India –
The Taj Mahal is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and, given the level of hype I was fully prepared to be underwhelmed, but I was wrong. I have never in my life seen anything so extravagant, elegant and colossal. The Taj Mahal seems mythically, spiritually, as well as architecturally, to have risen from nowhere, without equal or context.
Thar Desert, India –
The Thar Desert is a bewitching if stark place. It reminded me of areas of the Great Basin between Las Vegas and St. George, Utah. Twigging mesquite-like trees, bluish gray bushes resembling creosote, a very large bush that resembled a Palo Verde tree and grew in impenetrable clumps, and, strangely, only one species of cactus and not a whole lot of them.
Jodhpur, India –
The next day I hopped in a rickshaw and headed up to tour Meherangarh, or the Majestic Fort as it's known in English. As its English name indicates, it is indeed perched majestically atop the only hill around, and seems not so much built on a hill as to have naturally risen out the very rocks that form the mesa on which it rests. The outer wall encloses some of the sturdiest and most impressive ramparts I've seen in India or anywhere else.
Udiapur, India –
Just out of Udaipur is a government sponsored "artist colony" for various cultures from the five nearby states, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Goa and Madhya Pradesh. On one hand Shilpogram is a wonderful idea on the part of the government, but on the other hand the "artists colony" is slightly creepy. Amidst displays of typical tribal life there were artists and craftsmen and women hawking their wares along with dancers and musicians performing traditional songs. The whole thing had the feel of a living museum, or, for the creepy angle — human zoo.
Udiapur, India –
We started out in the early evening quickly leaving behind Udaipur and its increasing urban sprawl. The road to the Monsoon Palace passes through the Sajjan Garh Nature Preserve and there was a sudden and dramatic drop in temperature, but then the road climbed out of the hollow and the temperature jumped back up to comfortable as we began to climb the mountain in a series of hairpin switchbacks. As the sun slowly slunk behind the mountain range to the west the balconies and balustrades of the Monsoon Palace took on an increasingly orange hue.
Udiapur, India –
I spent some time sitting in the inner gardens of the City Place, listening to rustling trees and the various guides bringing small groups of western and Indian tourists through the garden. In the center of the hanging gardens was the kings, extremely oversized bath, which reminded me of children's book that I once gave to a friend's daughter; it was a massively oversized and lavishly illustrated book that told the story of a king who refused to get out of the bath and instead made his ministers, advisors, cooks and even his wife conduct business by getting in the bath with him.
Ahmedabad, India –
Airport terminals are fast becoming my favorite part of traveling. When you stop and observe them closely as I have been forced to do on this trip, terminals are actually quite beautiful, weird places. Terminals inhabit a unique space in the architecture of humanity, perhaps the strangest of all spaces we have created; a space that is itself only a boundary that delineates the border between what was and what will be without leaving any space at all for what is.
Anjuna Beach, India –
Earlier today I caught a bus up to the Anjuna Flea Market and can now tell you for certain that old hippies do not die, they simply move to Goa. The flea market was quite a spectacle; riots of color at every turn and more silver jewelry than you could shake a stick at.
Colva Beach, India –
The Arabian Sea is warm and the sand sucks at your feet when you walk, schools of tiny fish dart and disappear into each receding wave. In the morning the water is nearly glassy and the beach slopes off so slowly one can walk out at least 200 meters and be only waist deep.
Fort Kochi, India –
The guide showed us Tamarind trees, coconut palms, lemon trees, vanilla vine, plantain trees and countless other shrubs and bushes whose names I have already forgotten. The most fascinating was a plant that produces a fruit something like a miniature mango that contains cyanide and which, as our guide informed us, is cultivated mainly to commit suicide with — as if it was no big deal and everyone is at least occasionally tempted to each the killer mango.
Fort Kochi, India –
Fort Cochin is curious collision of cultures — Chinese, India and even Portuguese. Many of the obviously older buildings are of a distinctly Iberian-style — moss covered, adobe-colored arches abound. There is graveyard just down the road with a tombstone that bears the name Vasco de Gama, who died and was buried here for fourteen years before being moved to Lisbon (there we go again, more Europeans digging up and moving the dead).
Paris, France –
Well it's my last night here in Paris and I've chosen to return to the best restaurant we've been to so far, an Iraqi restaurant in a Marais. I am using all my willpower right now to avoid having a political outburst re the quality of Iraqi food versus the intelligence of George Bush etc etc. I'm traveling; I don't want to get into politics except to say that my dislike for the current El Presidente was no small factor in my decision to go abroad.
Paris, France –
I would like to say that the catacombs of Paris had some spectacular effect on me seeing that I strolled through human remains, skulls and femurs mainly, "decoratively arranged," but the truth is, after you get over the initial shock of seeing a skull, well, it turns out you can get adjusted to just about anything. Maybe that in and off itself is the scary part.
Paris, France –
I've been thinking the last couple of days about something Bill's dad said to me before I left. I'm paraphrasing here since I don't remember the exact phrasing he used, but something to the effect of "people are essentially the same everywhere, they just build their houses differently." Indeed, Parisian architecture is completely unlike anything in America. Perhaps more than any other single element, architecture reflects culture and the ideas of the people that make up culture.
