Poe Traveler

Frommer vs. Frommer: First Family of Travel Disagrees About AFAR

2011-01-06T12:26:00.000-08:00

Frommer vs. Frommer: First Family of Travel Disagrees About AFAR

Three Stans - Hong Kong Musings

2008-05-15T07:43:00.000-07:00

May 15, 2008

The terrible earthquake in Szechuan province could be a billion miles away; It takes more than that from the good burghers of Hong Kong to stop their frenzied dance with materialism.

Yesterday I took a lazy harbor cruise to see the 100s of big projects which didn 't exist the last time I was here more than 10 years ago. I have always loved the Peninsula Hotel but have only tolerated Hong Kong: with the exception of its rapturously beautiful setting and some A+ architecture, the city offers less for the mind than, say, a city such as Indianapolis which is less than a tenth as big.

What HK has is shopping and the glitz of the world. GRAF (or is it Graff?) here in the Peninsula which is now the world's premiere diamond merchant has a 14 carat solitaire ring and a necklace (I had the courage to price it) for is USD $11.7 million in its windows

HK shows some better taste than Dubai (perhaps it is a bit more Palm Beach than Dallas) but SOOOO much good taste begins to cloy and then to irritate! Most locals live in egg carton apartments reaching often 40 stories in 20 identical building units (Orwell is reaffirmed) and they are definitely not in the local society magazines. Still, I get the feeling that most would like to be. That most moms would like for their sons to be tycoons driving a Ferrari rather than philosophers planting gardens. Maybe HK is the world.

The manager of the Peninsula is a Viennese guy called Svoboda (probably from the Favoritenstrasse district where most residents trace back to Bohemia) and he has a fabulously light hand. The bar has Josef Hoffman-knock off bar chairs. The new tower actually blends well and one can have breakfast at the pool on the 8th floor with an unobstructed view of the harbor...or take a helicopter from the 30th over to Macao for the tables. Still the soul of this hotel is the original 7 floors. My Porcelain Pagoda Suite is where the governor general of the Crown Colony surrendered to the Japanese generals in 1941. The hotel continued to operate through the war with Swiss management. The Swiss continued managing the hotel until very recent times which must account for the CHESA Restaurant, a Zurich-cuisine place all done up with cuckoo clocks on the 1st floor. Fondue in HK's humidity is about as appropriate as an Eskimo pie in Iqualuit. A few other lighter touches now under the Viennese management: a Demel's like pastry each evening by the bed instead of some rock hard Lindt chocolate as an example. Last night was a little Dobos Torte.

It is rather easy to be beguiled by Hong Kong when you're in the mood to be stroked. It is perhaps far easier though to be repelled. There is an earthquake with perhaps 20,000 dead not THAT far away (less than a Little Rock-Denver distance) but nothing could stop Chanel's sponsored CAMELIA (or was it MAGNOLIA?) Ball last night for the
Prada clad ladies whose grandmothers had bound feet. When is enough enough? My wallet thins.

Three Stans - Homeward Through Hong Kong

2008-05-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

Monday May 12th.....Hong Kong - who SAYS luxury isn't salubrious!!!! I flew out on a late night departure on Turkish Airlines. We flew over Bangladesh and Burma (northern Burma near the Himalayas - a long way from the devastation) then the South China sea after Hanoi.

Upon exiting the jet bridge I find a red uniformed man with a leather board with my name on it and am shown to a waiting electric cart. The distances at the airport are really overwhelming. My man takes me to baggage claim and then passport control, turns me over to his colleague who then takes me to the Peninsula Rolls where a bespoke driver (I promise there is such a thing) drives me in sybaritic luxury to the Hotel. Wingo, the Asst Sales Manager, waits at the entry and we go whoosh straight to the Porcelain Pagoda suite which they have assigned to me for the little indignity of having to register (Wingo does it all for me). The living room is larger than my flat with an enormous chandelier which could light the Staatsoper. There is a trio of juices in carafes, an assortment of fruit and an array of chocolate, pretty furniture, sort of English country house yet formal. My bedroom is lush with a wall of closets. The bathroom with 6 soaps from which to choose, every appurtenance known to man, a separate WC-bidet has a separate shower large enough for four and bathtub which could service Babar the elephant. It is all beautiful which when you think about it is rather rare in posh suites and also old shoe comfortable. When I first stayed at the Peninsula in 1964 I thought it the best large hotel in the world. IT STILL IS!

It is muggy and overcast in HK and I may (truly) never leave the hotel for the next four days! ALL IS RIGHT IN THE LAND OF INFINITE BLISS!

Three Stans - Back to Istanbul

2008-05-08T07:20:00.000-07:00

Istanbul May 8th 08....65 degrees cloudless...feeling much like San Francisco though better! Aysegul and I left a 2:30am call at the Hotel Tajikistan and of course this type A personality wakes up every 30 minutes and looks at the trusty LL Bean clock....what happens next is KEYSTONE COPS but when it is happening to me it is not remotely funny. Our wonderful driver Svengali (neat name-eh) was there...we got stopped on the way to Dushanbe Airport only once by cops for no reason. They earn STRAF which is a nifty word to know and means all over Central Asia a dirty bribe. Police in Dushanbe make USD80 per month and it makes them all a little rapacious though the usual STRAF is about 2 Somalis which is 76 cents. We arrive at the airport which has exceeded my former WORST [that was Moroni in the Comoros] and what follows is rather boggling. The check in with TK is ok...though oh-so slow. This is after security check #1. Then it is to security check #2, where an enormously bovine Russian-looking woman takes a little time from chewing what must be the largest wad of gum between Tashkent and the Wakhan Corridor. Though the gum could have been a large bale of alfalfa come to think about it. She has never seen nor apparently heard of a pacemaker and I get lovingly patted down. Aysegul stands aghast. I am determined not to give him STRAF...we have a 10 minute standoff with a huge line building....he says that I will not be allowed to board the flight because there is something missing from my visa documentation...I stand my ground though Aysgul says my face was crimson....finally the guy gets the picture.

Now we are in the departure terminal. There is one active gate and the only two international flights of the day are scheduled within 10 minutes out of the gate. The other flight is Air Ghastly going to Yekaterinburg - that is how they spell the Russian town where the Tsar and family were murdered. One can tell the TK passengers, generally a well groomed lot smelling of bottled and sprayed essences....the ruffians (a hundred of them] bound for Yekateriburg all smell like exceedingly tired cheese---that peculiarly Russian smell which reminded me instantly of the Moscow Metro. Of course the passengers are totally confused....a gang fight almost develops...but it is all sorted out. It is now 510AM and my mind is like a lava lamp....we board...utter serenity. The attendants are lovely. I am so glad I have a window seat for the Aral Sea view again. Turkmenistan looks about as inviting as E New Mexico from the air. Then we flew over the Caspian and Baku and Tiblisi and good old Ararat looming up to the far south… over Batumi. It is a radiant clear day as dawn follows our progress over the Black Sea. We had a perfectly lovely breakfast too served in 2 courses; muesli, a fresh fruit compote, lovely yoghurt and then the main course, a lovely Turkish börek (flaky cheese filled pastry) with eggs...coffee to shame Starbucks. We arrive at Istanbul’s Yeşilköy airport on a radiant morning. The driver EYTOO who drove us in Eastern Turkey is there. I’m wafted to the simple, utterly pleasant Richmond.

Istanbul seems SOOOOO welcoming and after Central Asia so WITH IT and European. Zegna has their main shop across from the hotel. Also a branch of the wonderful Viennese coffee house-pastry shop Diglas.

Eyüp, Ayşegül, Eyüps sıster, Amre and I had dınner at a Meyhane very close off the İstıklal, my favorıte walking street ın the cıty. A MEYHANE sort of translates into a neighborhood dive and thıs one on an impossibly lovable little lane ıs called AMALI. the place ıs narrow and crammed wıth old photos and other art...the clientele is exceedingly local (a favorite of author Orhan Pamuk) but it is decidedly REAL and the lace hasn't a cute bone.

Three Stans - Over the Mountains to Dushanbe

2008-05-07T19:18:00.000-07:00

May 7th 2008 - 75 degrees and sunny.

Again yesterday in Khorog the Tajik Airlines 40 passenger YAK jet was cancelled...this time because of "possible clouds".....time in Tajikistan, the poorest of the former SSRs, is somewhat illusory!...but it turned out to be a GREAT adventure to add to the many we have had (including the vodka party in the Afghan Customs Post in Iskhashim!). Aysegul and I had a very early dinner (wonderful homemade tomato soup with mountain herbs, a club sandwich and kefir...all very healthy) and we arose yesterday morning (Tuesday here) at 530 AM to meet our driver Hami...who it turns out is a miracle man with a car. He tells us the MOUNTAIN road back to Dushanbe has opened and off we go. It is again quite surreal. We go up up up from the Pyanj River 13,500 feet up into deep snowfields. It is ravishingly beautiful country though the road is rather like a slippery two lane track with 1000 feet drop-offs...but we trust Hami and are rewarded with our trust (after all I am writing these lines!). We see a Marco Polo sheep, an endangered critter with curlicue horns...gorgeous. We see a fox mother and 3 playful kits. We finally reach the summit and what has been slip/slide going up in our Toyota minivan turns out to be a modified slalom on the way down finally reaching reassuring lush valleys with the first fruit tree blooms of spring...and the first village which also seems reassuring!

At a huge road construction site being done by the Chinese we are told that the delay will be 6 hours. Aysegul takes over and somehow in Turkish explains that I am the American Consul and have an urgent flight to catch in Dushanbe a further 6 hours down the road. It works and we are let through! Hami is very impressed. Aysegul speaks Turkish to a Chinese guy who speaks only Chinese but it has worked. We now go down the worst road yet. My pervasive feeling that Chutzpah is utterly necessary in travel surges. The road now deteriorates one gigantic rock after the next. I am so happy though and the country is superb. High plains and lush valleys unfold in the first green of Spring.

This was a horribly hard winter for Tajikistan. There were threats of starvation in many villages and MUCH help from UN Agencies and the Aga Khan. Finally the road improves because we pass the president of the "Republic"'s country house. At 800 PM, 14 1/2 hours after we departed Khorog we are in Dushanbe and back to our relatively lush Hotel Tajikistan. We say goodbye to dear Hami (who along the way has reattached the muffler and also talked two village boys into washing down the car from a stream) and go to my absurd sitting room to drink Raki and thank whomever up-or-down-there that we are intact.....although jolted about rather like a smoothie.

Today is our last in Tajikistan...a country of gloriously friendly, good looking, proud but very poor people. They hide their poverty but one can feel it. I am sad to leave Central Asia. We await Chanal, our guide, who insists that we go to the Dushanbe's "famous musical instrument museum" which no doubt will rival the world's largest revolving clock in Billings in sheer spectacle. All is very well.

We had a strikingly unusual lunch today with our guide Chanal and our driver Sangalle at SALSA – what must be the only Ecuadorian restaurant in Central Asia. Lunch was a plantain salad with salsa and tortillas, arroz con pollo with fragments of mystery veggies, ice tea (outside the temperature approx 99F if my math is halfway extant) and then a brownie sundae mit schlag. It was delicious. I paid $40 for 4 people in what Chanal says is the most expensive restaurant in Tajikistan.

A truly insightful lunch dealing with lots of issues. After the breakup of the USSR Tajikistan got its independence and the troubles truly began. The Tajik language is based on Parsi (Persian) though the people are either SUNNI or Ismaili - a progressive sect of Islam. Probably inspired by Iran there was an attempt at an Islamic revolution where Taliban-like militia tried to take control. A civil war resulted and about 90,000 people died. The pseudo democrats WON about 6 years ago and order has been restored but the gross national product has been dreadfully reduced. NOW mosques are in very little evidence, it is forbidden for women to cover their heads or faces if they wish to go to school or university. I get a pervasive feeling that these lovely Tajikis, (by far the most "European" looking of the Central Asians), just want to get on with life. This might explain the horrendous roads the dire lack in the rural areas of some basic supplies and so on. I SO like these people...they are bright and I sense not very naive...I shall miss them.

Today we also went to the Modern History Museum which is a C- but has a brilliantly beautiful 14th century Mihrab. We had endless cups of tea at the local hot spot sidewalk cafe and watch the very decorative locals being observed and loving every moment of it. We went to a museum of Soviet Art.I do dig these often ghastly but ALWAYS fervid paintings. And now it is time to go to Istanbul.

Three Stans - Into Afghanistan!

2008-05-05T19:38:00.000-07:00

We finally arrive Khorog after a minor fender bender at a police post (3 hours----Tajik Time is rather abstract I discover....and the town is beautifully situated...where two rivers (one unpronounceable) meet at a sort of Pittsburgh Golden Triangle to form the Pyan. The town is VERY green with a few pretty houses...a largish bazaar...the headquarters of the Aga Khan good cause group (and he is utterly revered...these Ismailis have no mosques as such, the women are totally liberated...no head scarves....and the priest is a normal citizen a bit like someone normal to us as a Presbyterian preacher or a reformed Rabbi). Nothing would do but we head to Amahl' house where her gregarious, English speaking a rather vodka loving husband (he looks like John Garfield of eld) has set a lunch of lamb pilaf, beautiful new tomatoes, yoghurt and kefir, delicious bread, honey.....and finally to the Serena Inn where we lodge. We see Khorog...not much to see specifically but one lovely botanical garden in the hills.

The Pamiris, the high mountain people, are a breed apart from most ordinary Tajikis. They are often very tall, have the superb posture of mountain people, adore gardens and trees and with the help of his highness they have prevailed upon the world to send specimens of trees which can thrive at 6000 feet. Oddly the winters are not unbearably cold so that even some of our southern trees thrive here; cottonwoods and even hickories. NOW finally we reach the Serena Inn...it is a long slung rather lodge-like hotel of 8 rooms which would grace someplace liked Jasper or Jackson. My room is absurdly opulent of course. The local travel agent, a TERRIFIC guy named SHARGAF and his buddy, Amahl's husband who is KORAM arrive with two bottles of chilled Tajik vodka. So we sit in my highness’ room and get merrily stewed and work our way through dinner which is secondary in the priorities for sure.

ALL plans are made. This morning Aysegul obtains an Afghan visa for a $40 bribe. Koram invites his buddy, the senior Tajik customs inspector, along...and we roar up the GUND River 125 KMS to Ishkashi. We have a some rather happily spirited moments with the Tajik inspectors at the international bridge which we cross to enter the Afghan customs post where Koram spreads out chocolates, deviled eggs, dried fruit and a sweet bread...along with two huge bottles of vodka bought for the occasion. The Afghan guards, proceed to drink the forbidden nectar of Tajikistan and get truly roaring drunk.

In walks an Englishman named Andrew who is the good-works manager for the Afghan Aga Khan group. He invited us to his office where I am now. He outlines a lovely drive a few km up the WAKHAN corridor (also spelt WAKAN and VAKAN) into unbelievably rough, beautiful country which reminds me of the Big Hole in Montana. The Afghan villages ARE poorer though they DO all have schools in this region and the women are not wearing the Burkha...these Afghanis are mostly Tajiks and since the USSR dissolved are discovering family roots across the border. The stores are rather sparsely supplied but people look healthy, even robust and meet our glances with a direct and proud demeanor. It is wrenching to me to see essentially the same people living vastly different lives on two sides of a river no wider than the White at Calico Rock; and having been so horribly manipulated by foreign powers. I guess these lovely Tajiks have suffered since the day of the Great Game between the Russian Empire and the British Empire when the Wakhan Corridor was established so that the two bellicose nations would not have a common border. The map is even more absurd than the Oklahoma Panhandle......and before I return to Tajikistan later today I hope to have calmed my thoughts of imperialism at least a little.

Travel is glorious. The plane to Dushanbe is cancelled for tomorrow...the aternate road through the higher Pamirs has been closed by rockslides....and if the damned highway were not so bumpy I could read WAR AND PEACE....14-16 hours.....yeeeek. Travel is glorious.

Three Stans - Ishkashim

2008-05-05T07:25:00.000-07:00

Ishkashim, May 5, 2008 cloudy and about 65

The last 2 1/2 days define what travel is all about. Let me go backwards! Look at far SW China....running out of it is a razor thin corridor of Afghanistan called the Wakhan Corridor.....my illusion is that China is the mother, the Wakhan the umbilical cord and Afghanistan is the still attached baby. Get a good map and it will make sense. Aysegul and I are now is Ishkashim a town both in Tajikistan AND Afghanistan, the last town traveling east in this bizarre, superbly jammed with snow capped peaks utterly extraordinary part of our world. I am attempting to send this from the Aga Khan Foundation, the "lord highness' of the Ismali people who inhabit both sides of the border. We are based at the Serena Inn built by His Highness and as a matter of fact I not only sleep in his bed.

We left Dushanbe a 530 AM Sunday for the Air Tajik fights to/from Khorog high in the Pamirs have been cancelled because of "clouds".....the drive is astounding: leaving the capital on a normal road, it deteriorates into a rocky dirt track for 125 km. Our driver Hami looks rather like a wizened troll.

Suddenly we reach the PYANJ (pee-ange) River, quite a roaring stream like the Arkansas around Canon City...and on the other side of the river for 350-odd km Afghanistan is to our right....at times close enough to wave to children...the land looks peaceful though the villages are stunningly poorer than the ones in Tajikistan. The Soviet Union definitely brought a level of prosperity here as well as utterly liberating its women. No wonder there were so many Soviet sympathizers in Northern Afghanistan. Traveling with us is the very pretty late 30s wife of the best friend of the Khorog travel agent, his daughter and her friend...returning home to the mountains after studies in Dushanbe...all speaking wonderfully creditable English. At one big town we break for lunch at the university roommate of Amahl, the mother.....lovely fruits, cold roasted chicken, apricot and cherry juice, kefir and yoghurts and home made bread all around.....then on the road again which has deteriorated horribly.....at one point we drive on jagged stones under a sizable water fall...I do not exaggerate. Next: VOILA we hit a superb stretch of 3 lane cement highway built by Turkish Aid. It is surreal....in Tajikistan there are police checkpoints about each 50 km....this helps create employment and also hopefully helps stem the opium/heroin trade from Afghanistan...it IS May and the poppy fields are in full bloom red to the horizon across the Pyanj. Dusks falls and it is not safe to drive the road which has turned back into a rutted track.We stop at a little town, Kolekum, where Amahl's husband has a friend. The guy, dashing and rather suave has room for everyone but me and the driver in his house. So we large lodged in a sort of guesthouse next door....which we share with about 10-12 Tajik army noncoms who lounge around and try to use their ultra limited English with me...again, utterly surreal. Tajiks by the way are very good looking people...the women remind me often of the late movie star Teresa Wright....the men look at bit like the late Cornell Wilde.

I sleep amazingly soundly though snores come from every part of this two story wooden house. Breakfast is brought at 5:30 AM including fine homemade bread actually warm from the oven with home churned butter, local honey, kefir and yoghurt and Nescafe. Nescafe in Tajikistan seem to have a soignée cachet.....Aysegul reports that her house (where she slept in an enormous room with the three other women) was lovely and comfortable with all of the mod coms. We had no electricity in ours but I had my trusty LL Bean flashlight and lo and behold there was a western styled toilet. No hot water, no shaving.

The topography becomes wilder and wilder.....jagged snow capped peaks in literally every direction....well cultivated valleys (in Afghanistan too) and many adobe-type houses looking oddly like a Central Asian Santa Fe. Lorraine poplar by the thousands (they are quick growing and their long timbers are prized for construction). There are lots of roses in the villages, bluebonnets and huge forsythia bushes. The apricot and cherry trees bloom. I am an awfully long way from home.

Three Stans - On to Tajikstan

2008-05-02T11:56:00.000-07:00

The last two days have been utterly remarkable. Up at the crack of dawn to the Bishkek airport to our waiting Soviet-made (circa 1955!) equivalent of the old F-27, that lovely plane to fly as the wings were over the main body and flight seeing was unlimited.....but they say that a plane's age should be multiplied by 5 or a person's age so that our sturdy craft was a flying great grandmother of 260-odd years.

The flight was beyond spectacular....the heavily snowcapped Tai Shan range just out of Bishkek was utterly spectacular except the flying Great Grandmother seemed awfully close to the peaks which rose Teton-like.....THEN the fertile Fergana valley shared by THREE stans...there were the highest peaks of all, the Pamirs way off to our east with Pik Lenin or whatever they have morphed the name into rising highest the tallest mountain in the old USSR, something like circa 22,000 feet. Just as a nice snack was served, chicken-tasting chicken with cucumber on a little baguette, homemade tasting gingerbread, a chocolate bar, coffee or tea (this mind you on a flight of Air Kyrghyz which doesn't appear in any computer nor airline guide) the FAN mountains (I love the name) appear and we manage to fly over them without getting a dusting of snow from their peaks. The 40+ seat plane was full, including the Tajik national basketball team among others, and since no one including the two pretty flight attendants seemed the least rattled by the mountains Aysegül and I affected a nonchalance.

Landing at Dushanbe gave a tiny portent or what might follow. We sat on the ground waiting for the airport bus.......a good 10 minutes....we have landed it seems in Insallah-stan......then it is into a glorified shed with one customs entry for all passengers (locals in these Stans do not quite understand the Queue) with landing papers to fill out (Tajikistan has the most complicated bureaucracy save the DPRK in the world) all in Russian and Tajik........when I finally ascertained what was what my form looked like chickens had attacked the page....but we managed.......bags WERE there.....and so was our guide Jamshed....a lovely guy about 40 with 2 children a wife.

It is a warm and sunny day....get into a rattletrap Moswitch (I think it is) and drive into one of the more remarkable cities on my travels. Why? there must be a million rose bushes in full bloom...great avenues of gorgeous trees....all of this nature sort of occluding the essentially Soviet architecture only infrequently interposed with some new or old buildings. Despite the architectural miasma the effect of all of these roses and all of these towering trees in great allees down almost every street lend an air of opulence. Nature has made a silk purse from a sow's ear. We go to the VEFA Apart-hotel as among their first guests. Aysegul and I each have a huge apartment with a completely furnished kitchens, a massive bathroom, a living room twice as large as mine in the flat, a bedroom with a sturdy bed...all done in not too hideous furnishings save the Day-Glo paintings on the walls. We could have 50 up to dance in both of our units. They are SOOOO kind at registration...everyone is all smiles....and then bits of reality set in: the bath and shower in my unit has been improperly installed and doesn't work........the kitchen is serviced with nescafe and tea but no salt or pepper or bottled water (the tap water of Dushanbe is said to have more gardia bacteria than that of St P's)...little things are awry. These units eventually will be lovely for a family of 6; there is plenty of space for kids.

Jamshed came up for a 2 hour briefing. He is almost the personification of an old INTOURIST type...the usual answer being "oh that's impossible".....but we like him. Jamshed WANTS to please. Here are some excerpts: "the road to Khorog has landslides and is impassable" (not true), the state theatre has closed for repairs (not true), I doubt if we can FLY to Khorog in the great Pamirs right on the border with Afghanistan (we will see)...you get the picture. As soon as Jamshed left Aysegul and I went out exploring (it was MAY DAY...no longer a festival day of parades...but a day as Labor Day should be, everything is closed up tight...a lovely time to see a city physically)...we walk to the old Tajikistan Hotel, Intourist's finest.....half of it is open, the other half under total renovation...the Turkish speaking manager shows us the new little suites (smashing) and we make arrangements to move this morning after one night at the Vefa Apart-hotel. I do not blame dear Jamshed for putting us there...it you were in Tajikistan you would think the place was the Bel Air.......with Aysegul in tow, we tell the nice people at the Vefa that we are moving....and they promise full refund to Jamsed (which he doubted this morning when he came to pick us up (never for a second doubt the ability of a Turkish lady of regal bearing to have any hotel penalties forgotten).

NOW we begin today to be a tourist in Dushanbe....the hit (and it is a biggie) is the National Museum of Ancient Art and Relics...which has on its second floor a reclining Buddha made of terra cotta) the same medium used in the destroyed-by-Taliban masterpieces at Bamian just over the border in Afghanistan....this Buddha is the largest reclining terra cotta Buddha in the world...easily 40 feet long.....but such claims of size may be dubious. My favorite was in the fine city of Billings "the home of the world's largest revolving clock>" The Buddha IS magnificent. If the largest reclining terra cotta Buddha can not exude serenity there is no hope on this earth for any of us. There were also many GREEK relics definitely from the days of Alexander the Great...plus lots of ancient Greek or Greekish statuary (look at Dushanbe on the map...it is a hell of a piece from Macedonia I tell you).

Rather a fabulous museum....then to an ultra secret place: Tajikistan was renowned in the old USSR for its gem mines and accomplished polishers. We went to the source. Nothing really PRECIOUS except in the realm of good taste: breathtakingly pretty jade, amethyst (including polish amethyst)....river seed pearls of great size and quality. Aysegul who would rather shop than breathe was in the land of nirvana. THEN we drove out of the city (after a stop at the locally soignee coffee house for some great lattes and odd sandwiches) to a town called HISSAR (which I know means FORT in Turkish) ....and it means FORT in Tajik, a language akin to Farsi and the only STAN not Turkic. It is a local must sight...the 18th century fort and I hope no Tadjik reads this missive for I would give the fort a C- most charitably. Still we saw the countryside with luxuriant fields just sprouting summer wheat, many vineyards, hundreds of acres in apricot orchards and so on.....it is Friday and Mosques are full: our driver Svengali (I love it!) and our Ismaili guide Shonal (a pretty lady from the Pamirs) are good company...the old rattle trap does us well.

The Stans turn out to be almost nothing alike one from the other. Kyrghyzstan exudes prospertiy and a positive air...Tajikistan is much poorer (though far form hungry)...the Kyrghyz are infinitely "with it" and the Tajiks are not....the pure Kyrghyz looks a bit like a slightly-westernized MAO....the pure Tajik could be someone's next-door neighbor in Cedar Rapids......some oriental types can be seen but so can Swedes (and these people are NOT Russian)...this is about as far as Alexander the Great got east and seemingly heredity shows it.

We are off by AIR or road to Khorog about 400 kms east...Aysegul says if we go by road that she is perfectly willing to sleep in someone's barn...she means it. GREAT travelers are a rare breed and I am blest with one to put up with your irascible correspondent.

Tajikistan says hi!

Three Stans - Karakol Excursion

2008-04-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

Bishkek late afternoon Wednesday April 30th

We just returned to our Turkish high rise (with especially generous servings of good caviar at $9 a pop) from two absolutely striking and exciting days. Our driver Valentin is A+...the son of an important local functionary and the representative in Kyrgyzstan for George Soros and his foundation....a young guy of 30 with 2 children and a computer programmer wife (whose family thinks he has lost his mind for wanting to be in travel)....he has a growing organization of cars and drivers, minibus and buses....and I would trust him with my granddaughter I like him so much! We have also been accompanied by a guide named Svetlana who is agreeable. We cut out early yesterday and drive east...first through the suburbs and into steppe-like landscapes...then into a long a gloomy and very windy canyon which looked remarkably like that landscape south of Butte.....the canyon then opening to the wonders of Lake Issyk Kol.

How much can one write about a lake: yes it is 170 km long and 80 km across...something like 75 rivers and steams and streamlets run into it but nothing flows out of it....despite being surrounded by snow capped peaks (some well into the 20,000 foot range) the lake is fed by underground thermal springs and never freezes.....it is shockingly blue....and was closed during the USSR days to all foreigners as the Reds tested their torpedoes (and other horrors) here...it is shaped rather like a cucumber, it is the second highest alpine lake (Titicaca is larger, Baikal as I may have written is not alpine), supports a large fishing fleet and what locals wags call the Kyrghyz navy (converted-into-pleasure craft excursion boats now). The SOUTH side is rather arid but with marvelous copses of blooming apricot trees here and there and Kyrghyz cowboys with ridiculous looking tall felt hats sum crowned by luxurious hawk feather managing huge herds of mostly sheep but also cows and horses. Geese strut about the highway sure that no one would dare kill them.....it is other worldly in a way and yet it not totally unfamiliar ground to people who know part is our west...just substitute a cowboy hat by a chapeau which Dior might have fashioned.

We arrive in the main lake town of KARAKOL (famous for its sheep and the tightly woven wool which was fashionable in the 30s and 40s as a far coat or jacket)...it was not founded until the 1860s and the Russians (many military, many jacks of all trades discovering the wild wild east) and the Kyrghyz who drifted in from their yurts and high mountain life to give up their nomadic ways to farm and be fixed adobe cow-people... (when I think about it I would wager that ALL of our ancestors were nomads too.....but at a date far earlier than the 1806s)...we sought out a good bowl of borscht and good tea and then set about sightseeing.......the requisites here include the Chinese Muslim Mosque (the Uighers who fled from the Urumchi area when the Hans became a rather unpleasant majority a bit ala Tibet) built without a nail....with Uighers starting at Aysegul who of course knows Mosque etiquette......then to the Russian Orthodox Church which, mostly because of its absurd globular domes and interior 4th rate icons, where a lady of the church physically attacked me (picture an enraged chicken clucking at the maximum and beating me with its wings) because I had stepped into some particularly sacred space...I am still not sure what it was...but then again only the Zoroasters (Parsis) have a god which we can all agree exists, the sun. we left a nice offering at the Chinese mosque but nothing at the cathedral. Those poor people in the latter had no doubt suffered indignities more heinous than mine in the Stalin days.Our hotel in Karakol was comfortable, a new building all done up in orange and I think terra cotta, one with very pretty huge felt hangings in every room (the local craft...Aysegul, the worlds number one shopper almost bought one....big ones are circa $200...but better sense prevailed). We went to a restaurant for dinner called KENCH which I swear sounds like a soubriquet for Lotte Lenya in a spy movie...and at said KENCH was had a magnificent beef stroganoff and would you believe crepes suzette all around...dinner for the 4 of us was $38 including lashings of vodka and beer. Man, Karokol is a bit of all right and the fanciful Russian wooden houses are off a stage set. Anything of course done after 1917 or so looks like Ciudad Juarez.

After a luscious breakfast of homemade yoghurt and the local muesli and an egg certainly laid 20 minutes before (we were all awaked by the rooster), we hit the road on the VERY green north shore of dear old Lake Issyk Kul. The trees of the area are mind bogglingly beautiful and there are 10 mile allees of Lorraine poplars...then birch...then weeping willows. Hardly a mile could pass outside a village without these spectacular (and well cared for) avenues of trees....all nicely interspersed with cherry and apple trees in FULL Bloom. The country north of Kygghyzstan is Kazahkstan and you might like to know that its largest city is ALMATY which in the Turkic tongues of the region means "father of apples".....couldn’t resist the trivia.

The big stop today was at a rock strewn region at the bottom of towering snow capped peaks...above the kitschiest resort town on the lake (picture decaying Soviet era sanatoria plus new modern-than-tomorrow buildings calling themselves Meridien, Beau Rivage and of course Four Seasons (no relation). LO in this area of boulders uphill and still within sight of the resort town of Cholpon Ata was one of the greatest petroglyph sites on earth: bronze age fashioning of snow leopards and ibexes, still quite visible, amazingly intact without graffiti....the ancients kept using these huge stones as their canvases even after the arrival of the Kyrghyz in the 8th century. Some of the art, crafted by people as mysterious as our Anazasi, was done by a lost people called the Saka-UIsuns who also arranged some stones here and there in oddly shaped circles which seem to have little to do with astronomy...no one can figure out WHAT the shapes are there. It was spitting rain; deserted, eerie...the place was as exciting to me as Stonehenge or the possibly more dramatic Zoarts Stones in SE Armenia...

Now it is back to Bishkek after a stop at the Burana Tower a pre-Islamic sort of minaret in a deserted city in which lots of Scythian gold treasures can be found ...from the top of 4-5 srory remains of the tower I could make out the humps and angles of the ancient city....11th century mostly. Neat place. Scythian gold working is about as elegant as anything man has done (some good pieces too in the adjacent museum at Burana)....and the stuff keeps showing up in the damndest places like Graz, Udine and Zamosc!

Can you tell I am having the time of my life? Sure you can! I wish each and every one of you were along.....It is a true thrill to be somewhere on this earth immensely valid to visit but largely devoid of world tourists. They will come.

Three Stans - Arrival Bishkek, Kyrgystan

2008-04-28T06:43:00.000-07:00

Bishkek Monday morning April 28 80F

Deep in Central Asia, I am in Bishek the green capital of Kyrgyzstan, a nation which I award the kudo of being the "hardest to type" of any of our nations! It almost seems in some ways be Oz, to fly nonstop for five hours east from a darkening Istanbul....night falls over the Black Sea and the captain announces that the bright almost-full moon is making the shrinking ARAL SEA, the best example of ecocide on earth, is in eerie view abut an hour and a half before arriving in Bishek. With three hours time difference (later here) it was close to 200 AM when we landed.

Twenty-odd minutes later the bags show up---voila---and we meet Valentin our Russian driver....a young fellow I'd age at about 30 who has two children and a wife and rudimentary English but who somehow I like. We drive down a darkened expressway: Bishkek is having a usual power outage and various raions (or districts) are in Oz-dark...twenty MILES to the Ak Keme Hotel, a high-rise looking like a possible escapee from Dubai where the registration has never heard of us (now 300 AM) a situation which we eventually righted. I was too keyed up to sleep and today, Monday the 28th of May I have been led around like a slightly addled bull with a ring in its nose.

Today bright and early at 900 AM Valentin shows up after Aysegul and I have eaten a Kyrghyz breakfast which consists of several types of limpid rolls, delicious honey, a vaguely Nescafe hot drink, odd juices (apricot looked the least lethal) the whole thing rescued by a succulent homemade yoghurt. It's off first to meet our guide Svetlana, who is a 20 plus year old Russian-Kyrghyz dish. We like Sevetlana. She will travel with us tomorrow for our two day sojourn east.

Bishkek is an immensely green city, once a mostly treeless steppe which has proved that even a largely Soviet city can be made into a bit of a sow's ear. To the south are Innsbruck-massive and snow capped mountains, looming and beautiful....we drive through avenues of Lorraine poplars and elms and oaks and still blossoming fruit trees. We see the requisite sites, pretty much like seeing the requisite sites of Wichita...and yet a day which turned magical; proving indeed again that we were in Oz. On a Stalin-vast square in front of the nation's massive history museum (looking like a slightly soviet Memphis Airport) a great jamboree is going on....among yurts put up to hawk "crafts" (mostly Tahitian painted-on-velvet level but then rescued by the region's famous felt not only molded into yurts but into clogs and boots and headdresses complete with prominent hawk fathers. To a cacophonous blaring of over-amplification we see groups of school girls, elderly grizzled old guys who play weird stringed instruments; one looks like a huge stalk---or whatever one should call lit---of okra, elderly AARP types of Russian folk singers having the times of their lives; many with gold teeth above old fashioned prom dresses, accomplished ballerinas doing interpretive dancing; one seems to involve an endangered mountain sheep being attacked by a hawk.. At any rate you get the picture and Aysegul and I delight in two solid hours of home made fun...innocent, the entertainers having a guileless and joyous time under clear skies.....Ted Mack's Amateur Hour (for those who can remember it) come to the Steppes of Central Asia. We definitely are in Kyrgyzstan: the entertainers' families, three or four thousand of them, busily snapping photos of their loved ones who were dancing about as mountain elves or forest ogres and ogresses. We stopped then at the fuss-feathers Stalin baroque opera house though nothing is scheduled during our stay: I had quite looked forward to something like La Boheme in Kyrghyz having "done" Aida in Kazahk lo those many years ago in Almaty---with my late, dear friend Hella on the trip on which we met.

This city has a quite astonishing swatch of physical types. The pure Kyrghyz looks a bit like a young Patrick Swayze to morph into a heavy jowly eyebrowed and large-headed older man very reminiscent of Brezhnev though I don't think he had an ounce of Kyrghyz blood. The Russian minority is about 40% and the street signs are all in Cyrillic letters for them...they look like Russians....and the two majority groups seem to get along splendidly and naturally. There are others: Chinese who have escape the Cultural Revolution and wandered in over those 16,000 foot passes to the east, Germans, resettled here from the Volga by Stalin in the late 30s and 40s, Tajiks who are the Asians often with blonde hair and blue eyes and yet "something" genetic which sets them apart from your typical Dutchman......there are Kazahks and Uzbeks (I used to be able to tell them apart)....and about every other neighboring person that a Kansas-like tornado could sweep together here in Frank Baum's Asian kingdom. There is a fair sized American airbase here but these warriors are simply not seen on the streets.

I am having a hell of a good time. We set out (Valentin, Svetlana, Aysegul and I) in V's lovingly kept '94 Mercedes to drive the whole circumference of Lake Issyk Kul, the second largest ALPINE lake in the world (Titicaca is larger and Baikal is not an Alpine lake)...so no doubt odd ethnographic and geological pearls of reflection will ensue. We'll spend the night tomorrow at Karakul, a little Russian-mostly (and Chinese Muslim) town at the very east end of the great lake...one into which scores and scores of rivers and streams wash but nothing flows out.....could it be possible? Yes, for we are in Oz.

Three Stans - Istanbul III

2008-04-26T18:37:00.000-07:00

Another fabulous day with Eyüp and Ayşegül.... today with nice driver to the Archeology Museum, by far my favorite part of the Topkapi complex....and the only of the Istanbul museums built as a museum by the famous Hamdi Bey at the turn of the 19th-20th century...I just had to see my favorite pieces there, the stunningly simple statue of the young athlete, the two from life busts of Alexander the Great and his thrilling, utterly intact [and still retaining bits of color after being dug up in Sidon, North Syria by Himdi Bey] sarcophagus...an astounding and massive coffin with sculptures by the literal hundreds.... and now quite astonishingly displayed in its own vast room, quite phenomenally lighted in an otherwise dark mauve colored room.. It is I think the finest single bit of archeology to be found in this nation where the stump of every toe seems to turn up more. The Turkish land bridge of Anatolia WAS the main street of the ancient world...from the Hittites of almost pre history who left their massive basalt lions now framing the entry to the Istanbul Archeological to the Uartians, several waves of Greeks, the Romans, Seljuk Turks, Armenians and modern Turks....Every wave left something....something of dramatic importance, too. On he whole good taste which is certainly NOT a given was in richer bloom in days long gone by than in our worlds today.

We then drove to the Chora Church which was converted to a mosque with its pluperfect frescoes covered only to be revealed within the last 50 odd years with enormous help from the Ford Foundation. Sitting in a hilly, scruffy, oddly colorful part of Istanbul [itself largely forgotten by the city until well into the last century} the rather humpy looking building from the outside reveals itself on the interior as one of the truly astonishing interiors on the Continent of Europe...those frescoes with the piercing Byzantine eyes. eyes which follow a body somehow knowingly from any corner of the chapels and which lay covered by only a thin whitewash for 800 odd years only recently to be revealed as major icons still violently affecting after an equal number of years of sleep!

A Turkish tycoon has restored a nearby wooden mansion overlooking the Golden Horn through a lush garden of wisteria. peonies in riotous bloom roses and the last of the tulips and turned it into a discreet little hotel, the kind of place where a writer could retreat to write the novel, a dreamer could ponder the world, a couple could have an extraordinarily romantic tryst....We had a long lunch in the lovely club like restaurant, a kitchen famous in Turkey for recreating the Ottoman classical dishes....the cubed chicken with walnuts and pomegranates, a wonderful almond and grape soup; one of those peculiar dishes which sound too odd to be true, a sort of pinto bean with dill and wild mushrooms and garlic and celeric which is pureed and then turned into a
sort of baby brick...a taste combination and presentation of which İ had never seen nor heard and which was maybe the star of lunch.....we finished with a goblet of Turkish sparkling wine with the intense raspberry liqueur called Ahududu....a word from the land of Oz and an odd and quite beguiling dessert. Glory be!

Prices have risen here along with the strength of the Lire which has zoomed from 3 million to the Dollar to a worth today of circa 80 cents a pop. I paid for lunch for 3 and with a good tip it was
about 140 Dollars and worth every sou. To fill the office Mercedes today costs 150 Dollars [the Turkish key board has no dollar sign}...gas being almost 3 times the cost of the wicked prices at home. the Euro is king here...every fancy establishment quotes Euros for most things now.

Tomorrow Ayşegül and I fly along the Yellow Brick Road EAST...and I am psyched. A. has gotten a warning from a friend in the Turk diplomatic corps about bad times in the far North of
Afghanistan so we will see....

These days in Istanbul have been magical. the city is so clean, so much in the process of anthills of renovations mostly in GREAT taste....and I heard on the BBC that it was named one of the THREE safest cities for visitors in Europe along with Helsinki and Vienna. ZOUNDS.

Three Stans - Istanbul II

2008-04-25T18:24:00.000-07:00

Istanbul April 25, sunny and cool

Yesterday glorıous...the vısıt to the sumptuous new Four Seasons due to open June 15th...a long lazy drıve along the Bosphorus where all the derelıct old yalıs are gone to be replaced by million dollar replacements or new buildıngs mostly ın good taste...then lunch at the İstanbul Modern...a superb museum cafe overlooking the Bosphorus as ıt morphs ınto the Sea of Marmara wth the Golden Horn spıllıng out beneath Topkapi....I had a fabulous köfte wıth pıckled aubergıne and drank the ayran of my dreams...the specıal exhıbıt was on how art seems to be born ın cıtıes wıth some sort of spontanıety where they featured on a tıme lıne Vıctorıan Englaqnd, Vıenna and the Werkstatten, Dessau and the Bauhaus. Parıs and art deco, Mılan and the post WW2 desıgn of things lıke Vespa and Olıvetti typewriters and the lıke then Los Angeles and exhibits lıke Eames Chaırs and so on...really interesting...then a huge show of Russian photography of the avant garde untıl the breakup of the State...Rodchenko of course but also a fabulous guy named Grınbaum whom I had never heard of.....then a longısh walk on İstıkal past the oh so updatıng shops...a nap...and then dınner at Hamidi about my favorite restaurant wıth a groaning board of mezzes and three dıfferent kebabs...lots of rakı and home to bed...all seems very rıght ın the world...

Three Stans - Friday Istanbul

2008-04-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

A report on the Central Palace Hotel which is in a largely pedestrian only street south of Taksim about 3 blocks from the Divan and the Sheraton which is now the Intercontinental. This is a solid medium priced hotel with large rooms...mine has a huge bath with a diabolical looking shower (comeplete with a jacuzzi and steam bath feature which I cant begin to figure out)...this is largely a reworking of a late 19th century tall Ottoman era building which has been redone in what I would call Dubai Baroque...lots of guilding; lots of fake egyptian stuff; lots of brocade....but I rather like it. It is what new rich Dallas would build if they were from Adanaç Breakfast just now was a dream with homemade yoghurt, twelve kinds of Turkish breads, even little crepes with maple syrup and lots of home made jellies some from fruit which looks peculiarin its purple or mauve sheen....bring the hotel up on Google and you will get a good picture of things! Aysegul comes in an hour and we will do the latest exhibits including one on the new city which contrasts Istanbul with London, Vienna and Chicago at the Istanbul Modern...it's a great museum and this should be fun. From the land of Insallah

Three Stans - Chicago to Istanbul

2008-04-25T07:43:00.000-07:00

The CHICAGO WHITEHALL is tired and they have lost a lot of their joie...for example they ask for picture ID...my room ac roared but nothing came out and it was stuffy...but the adjacent Italian restaurant is interesting and I had a good dinner...Tony you were right on as Le Colonial is just around the corner north of Delaware of Rush and I had a grand drink there...not much else for now...I am in repose until tomorrow AM when Aysegulh as a full car and driver program which I know will be wonderful...flew OVER Munich and thought to Ellison...it is an odd world

The flight on TK was exemplary from check in at O'Hare until arrival Istanbul....Business on the Airbus has 36 seats and four attendants are assigned....lovely creatures they...the menu is handed out and my name is on it....the dinner is lengthy and glorious and the raki flows....fabulous mezze and then I elected halibut grilled with wild mushrooms...then an orange crepe cooked on board!....the seat is ALMOST horizontal...one of the Turkish stewardesses told me that their impetus in joining Star Alliance meant a whole new service level and believe me they put such members as United and Lufthansa to shame...breakfast was little lemon pancakes with sausages....the whole thing utterly professional and friendly and enjoyable. Aysegul awaited me at the airport looking radiant all done up in tartans she bought in Edinburgh...Sally this strange hotel is yes strange...sort of done up in a Turk's idea of HIGH Las Vegas with gilded this and that, a huge shower that doubles as a steam bathi jacuzzi and no doubt also a telephone and muffin maker... I managed to take a shower without wrecking the diabolical looking monster (which one encloses oneself in with a bit of prayer)...

Turkey: Lake Van

2007-05-18T08:05:00.000-07:00

On Lake Van 60F and clear

This is a spectacular lake the size of Connecticut and the largest in Turkey. The water is so full of calcium that one cannot drink it, though it is lovely for washing clothing without soap!

Yesterday we had a long boat ride to islands with 9th and 10th Century Armenian churches, those stone, forceful, almost angry looking, totally round buildings. In one there are still magnificent frescoes which escaped the Islamic iconoclasts. Faces looking terribly strong and unsympathetic with glaring eyes which follow one about. There are luxuious blue colors from crushed lapis. It was a world-class day of being a tourist!

This town is famous for its fluffy white cats each with one blue eye and one green eye. Also for it's Kilims and wrought silver jewelry made of a finer quality than sterling and lovely. There's also some enticing ancient and reproduction urartian (earliest Armenian) jewelry with fetching little stones and almost primitive pendants attached. Unique.

As our time in Eastern Turkey draws close to its end, I have so many conflicting impressions. the area is some richer than I thought with a more European-like infrastructure in places. Roads vary from pre-Interstate USA to almost-Interstate. One valley is prosperous with good farmhouses, the next rather wretched with houses of stone which look as thought they grew out of the earth. The people are largely minorities and always have been. The Laz on the coast and some ways inland from the Black Sea. The Kurds from Ardahan and Kars onwards - handsome and welcoming. The PKP - the illegal Kurdish group - seems to be absent and many places display Turkish flags as often as one sees the Fleur de Lys in Quebec.

What astounds me is the countryside. As I have written one minute it is Tirol; the next the high green plains of Nevada or Central Montana; the next volcanic scarred earth with massive obsidian strews; the next high peaks such as Ararat rising from the flat or rolling plains; and now Lake Van, the tidal inland sea.

Travelers should see this land. It cries for tourist money and again the people are nothing short of beguiling. We skirted the Georgian, then Armenian and then Iranian borders and there over the mountains is Iraqi Kurdistan - an area which badly seems to frighten the locals, as it does Ankara. Bush is so detested here that I am almost careful about admitting being American where in the recent past this was such a badge of glory in Turkey.

Turkey: Van

2007-05-16T11:00:00.000-07:00

66F and a splendidly cloudless sky. Sitting on the terrace of an nice hotel here looking at sunset...

We arrived in Kars, went to the very interesting castle which overlooks this town of Orhan Pamuk, to the stern looking 9th C. Armenian Church, which an atomic blast could not touch. The hotel is boutique and inviting and rather luxe.

Early yesterday morning, we left through high Montana-looking plains on to the Armenian border. Almost flush on it is Ani, one of the great ghost cities - like Pagan, Angkor, Ephesus or Karnak - with bronze age roots and great enrichment during the Urartian times (that being essentially Armenian). The place is on a long moor almost surrounded by a gorge, with buildings and ruins from almost all periods: from an Armenian cathedral of great unfriendliness to a minaret which rather beguiles. The place is alive with birds including storks in migration. Hardly a soul there, which added enormously to its' ghostliness.

It is a site I will never forgest as I listened to the spirits... One could see Armenian troops on the hillside beyond - all terribly fearful of the Turks (who want Armenia about as much as we want Haiti).

What a staggeringly fine last couple of days. After leaving Ani the landscape changes once again into very volcanic, vast green fields filled with billions of black rocks. And suddenly, what is that whipped cream ball in the sky? Of course, it is Ararat 100km to go and it's presence dominates the horizon. We could ask the keenest traveler where they were and Turkey might be the 50th on the list. Little dwarf chalets in teased wood abound, smoke coming out of them and perfuming the air.

Armenia is just next door and just over the river. Suddenly the border is Persia - heavily fortified as though the Turks expected something untowards. Fields are cultivated in quite impossible places. We climb higher and the slopes of Ararat are visible. We see scores of nomads with their tents. The Basques of Nevada and highland Montana come to mind. Huge flocks of sheep worked by huge, fluffy, mean looking Turkish highland sheep dogs.

Ararat is closer and odder and from each angle we watch it it changes shape and mood. The north side is proasaic. The east side is rapturously eerie. The west merely volcanic and snowy.

We overnight in an awful, spartan hotel in the town of Doğubayazit - a hotel with of all things pink TVs and plaster of paris kittens in each room. It is gagaland.

We go this morning to the supposed site of the Ark... all statistics... some fanatic from Nashville having found the probably spurious calcified coral. I thought all coral was calcified. And petrified wood. Today to the odd and beautiful shores of Lake Van, which is the size of Connecticut. All is well in this country of Kurds with Iraq just over the mountains.

Turkey: Hoppa on the Black Sea

2007-05-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

Hoppa....we have a lovely dinner of Black Sea fish and superbe mezze, including delicious Tarama, Aubergine three ways, terrific fasulya (rich local beans done to death with a tomato sauce and paprika), lost of Raki and all is very well indeed.

Set on the border with Georgia, it is teeming with women who have slipped in from Georgia, Ukraine and mostly Moldova - "ladies of the night" earning the touch Turkish Lira.

Yesterday we drove inland to high mountain country just off the coast to ruined massively strong circular Georgian churches and to the provincial capital of Artvin, which is built on the side of a steep hill. It is a university town of some charm and crazy angles: Nothing is right or left, rather, it is up or down!

A splendid lunch of stuffed peppers and aubergine, home made ayran. Then we headed into utter drama, first sort of high desert country a la New Mexico featuring side roads to old typically Georgian monasteries and churches which appear undestroyable by even the most fantic Islamist. Next we had a complete change of scenery. It is HIGH Tyrol. Much snow, wooden villages, lovely little tarns. People in Bodrum are swimming and they are skiing up here! On to Ardahan through countryside which looks like high moorland - a bit like Mongolia with high steppes. SUCH variety of topography in such a short space.

I'm writing from a boutique hotel in Kars set in an old Russian house. It is utterly bequiling and all is well. I think of Orhan Pamuk and Snow.

Turkey: Trabzon

2007-05-13T07:22:00.000-07:00

Kars May 13th.....65 degrees....Brilliantly sunny with snow in the hills

I am in the city of Pamuk's Snow and the time in Turkey has been earthshakingly interesting for me. Trabzon is quite messy and ugly, but the hotel was good. The Sumela Monastery about 2okm inland in deep green mountains with spring cascades everywhere is a stunner...14th C.... now being beautifully restored from its Greek roots bythe government.

As we drive along the Black Sea coast, we are on a new four lane highway which is made on reclaimed land and is very ugly which is such a pity becaues the coast is lovely. We turn off frequently up long valleys to alpine-like stettings with lakes and wooden chalets. Quite unexpected. The people here are mostly Laz, which is a kind of nationality which has Georgian roots but which chose Islam. We arrive at the rather scraggly border town of Hoppa for overnight in a hotel decorated off of a run-down tourist town in middle America.

Singapore

2007-05-10T14:59:00.000-07:00

May 10 at the Goodwood Park

The national museum here has reopened after 3 years of renovations and I am psyched to see it this PM as it has the finest, most definitive collection of jade in the world.

Singapore Airlines is wonderful as everyone tells us...business class was just fine....not quite filled from Bali (tourism is badly off there).

My room here overlooks the pool, is massively deco with odd torchieres, quite stunning...I can't IMAGINE staying elsewhere....compared to the Goodwood Park Raffles is so affected...breakfast is the best I have ever had in the Orient. As usual Singapore looks done to death.

Bali III

2007-05-09T16:00:00.000-07:00

Awoke today to a brilliant fierce rain storm...now everything in this luxuriant garden where I live is glistening, the humidity such that I think I am growing ferns on my forehead....

Some (typically pontifical?) reflections about Bali....really random:

Coffee: the very best I have ever tasted....ultra-rich, aromatic, seemingly able to stand by itself without a cup....yet prepared in the Italian rather than Turkish fashion...a reason for coming here.

The food: so very suitable to the climate...most cuisines are (the dutch excepted)...macerates bits of chicken, fish, shellfish, lamb, beef or pork (remember in the largest of all Islamic nations Bali is hindu of a sort) served with rice and bits of very good veggies...spinach and scallions are wonderful...no local wines but a decent local beer....also arak....not a GREAT cuisine in terms of Malayan or Vietnamese but pleasing enough.

The people: here I go being Alfred Rosenberg again: agile, good looking, smiling, quick......seemingly very good natured (I still can't fathom the genocide of the local Chinese in the 60s).

The countryside: yes, possessed by artistic touches in almost everything...ugly hindu stuff - little totems all about...hard to judge age as everything weathers quickly in the humidity. the abundance of flowers everywhere...the one I could not identify in this magnificent hotel garden is the frangipani....may 500,00 blossoms hereabouts....the smell is floral and sandlewood.

The hotels: Bali probably has more A+ boutique hotels than anyplace else, even more than London or Paris...many of them are spectacular.

The tourists: mostly Dutch, Japanese, Australian, Italian and Singaporean.....and yet in this little computer room (3 computers) a guy came in earlier, said hello, introduced himself...ask where I was from...turns out he has just bought a pied de terre condominium next to my building!! I remember my mother's adomintion to always wear clean underwear.

I leave for Singapore tomorrow AM and then to Istanbul for parts of E Turkey unknown....

Bali Today

2007-05-07T14:42:00.000-07:00

Bali Monday May 7th....it is breezy, hot and very humid....drying out is a bit of a chore.

Yesterday I hired a car and an affable driver to drive way up north...past the gorgeous (yet very isolated) Amankilla on the coast...into deep mountains on one- lane roads with dizzying drop offs. The green of this island simply mesmerizes. The flowers are rambunctious.....and, I remember reading something in an anthropology class of yore that the two peoples on earth (according to the writer) who have incorporated forms of art into their daily lives are the Tiroleans and the Balinese. Certainly the religion here, a form of hinduism in the largest muslim nation in the world, exudes art....much of it is ugly but when it is not it is a joy.

We were far away from tour buses and commerce......far away from rapacious children asking for bon bons and school pens....on back roads where a foreigner is a real rarity I felt. My driver got the spirit just right that I needed to go where few others went. His English was superficial but extant, remarkable for a guy who probably did not go past the 4th grade.

There are small signs of progress: all roads are paved, new schools (elementary for the most part) have cropped up in the backest of back country...people smile, are physically slight but very well built and a lovely light caramel color with regular features....rivers rush by, people are bathing and washing clothing in them...it is a Gaugin-ish scene. I have a hard time resolving the hideous violence which took place here in the early 60s...that period in local history as shown in that epic film The Year of Living Dangerously when a collective madness seems to have struck Bali----the Balinese going on a heinous rampage in which most of their Chinese population (at least 100,000 were murdered in mini-genocide.

I kept remembering the adage that "one death is a tragedy while many deaths are a statistic".....I suppose people with evil and effective leaders can be led to do grievous things. Bali seems a place where history should not be studied very closely. There are tiny elements in the past: a deserted Dutch church here, a Chinese cemetery there.....Still Bali absolutely enchants with poinsettias and bouganvillas, hibiscus, huge yellow flowered bushes, magnolias and the lotus dominating the landscape....where art IS a part of life from the way the watermelon slice is presented at breakfast to the way the bed in turned down at night. There are far worse places.

Reflections on the DPRK

2007-05-05T14:27:00.000-07:00

Bali, Saturday 5 May 07....80 degrees...light refreshing shower....I have had plenty of time to ruminate about the extremely intense experience of being in North Korea.

When I have pondered Korean history, there has always been a strong factor of paranoia. For a couple of centuries the whole world called it the "hermit nation" and before that the Chinese used such a term for a couple of thousand years. The question I ask myself is how much the DPRK is political/contemporary/odd and how much of it is simply Korean. The times I have been in South Korea I feel sometimes as though I am talking to people through a scrim.

I think without the USA the DPRK could not exist today. It has no real friends. China seems really frightened of a DPRK meltdown with millions of refugees fleeing into Manchuria. Putin's Russia though only pays lip service...and the poor DPRK has almost nothing the world WANTS. It is touching to me that the apex of national pride is a fabulous halftime show. It is as though America's raison d'etre came from the Super Bowl, the Rockettes or the Rose Bowl parade. They build sturdy roads and buildings, they embalm well, they put uniforms on about 1/3rd of the citizens starting with adorable little girls all lined up and marching in their cute sailors' outfits. But I swear without the USA and our imperialism there would be very little reason for the DPRK to exist. Their national unity is absolutely defined by paranoia in the real sense. Witness the canonization of the the PUEBLO....witness the hundred or more times a day we hard about "American imperialism"....and to some extent they strike me as oddly on target. What purpose do our 40,000-odd troops in the south serve for America? If the DPRK melts down, it is Russia, South Korea, China and to a much smaller extent Japan that will be affected. Why are WE Americans propping up this particular "evil empire"?

Oh lord, I guess since the Korea war we've been on an imperialistic crusade. How loathed America is in most parts of the world. How we ache for people to follow our form of democracy which shows them no elan or spirit of good.

I wanted so badly to talk to someone in the DPRK about all of this. I posed the obvious question: if America removed troops from South Korea, would the military domination of life in the North be reduced. Certainly it would be. I don't look for them to give up the atom bomb...why should they: it is the only thing that plays into their national psyche and sets them apart. Some day I figure Korea will be unified: the south will be the industrial engine, the north will provide the cadres for the national guard.

I wish everyone could see the DPRK. It is as fascinating and odd as a two headed calf at the country fair. It is like no place else in travel. It is what travel is all about!

Return from Oz

2007-05-01T23:56:00.000-07:00

The early morning departure from Pyong Yang was predictably frenzied, as are most departures from impoverished places. After much ballyhoo, paperwork, jostling about with luggage and finally check in, we headed up to the departure hall, which was decidedly serene. Of course there were only two arrivals and two departures scheduled that day, you see.

Arrival back in Beijing was culture shock in reverse! It is odd to be back in Beijing and feel like I am suddenly on Michigan Avenue......man, colors, people, signs, advertising, traffic.........coming out of Pyong Yang feels a lot to me like getting off a longish ship voyage: The earth seems unsteady suddenly. Some of our circle gather at the Club Lounge at the Peninsula for a drink to compare notes. Odd to be speaking freely again without concern for our minders! And yet we're in the heart of the world's largest Communist regime! Onward to Bali for some much needed rest and rumination...We crammed a lot into a short amount of time!

Final Day in North Korea

2007-05-01T23:40:00.000-07:00

Our last full day in North Korea took us north of the city, across more baren landscapes to the "mountains". First stop is the International Friendship Museum, consisting of two monumental concrete replicas of ancient Korean temples - each housing room upon room of gifts to the Fatherly Leader and The Great Leader. The buildings belied their contents as the cavernous rooms were just that - caverns dug deep into the hillside. There was no time to see all of the 10's of thousands of gifts - Herend china from Hungary; Czech crystal; Soviet trophies and plaques from every imaginable ministry; rail cars from Stalin; even a crystal paperweight from "the mayor of New York circa 1985".... Does Ed Koch have anything to say about that?

After lunch, we left the fresh air of the mountains - along with it's mysterious blue hues (fog?) - and headed back to the city. The afternoon was packed with illuminating visits to the "Victorious Fatherland Liberation Museum", the aforementioned Juche Tower (capped by it's illuminted red plastic flame), the Pueblo Spy Ship, a stamp shop and a book shop! The museum was predictably devoid of relevant exhibits - except an extraordinary revolving platform (!) placed at the center of the world's largest circular diorama which, of course, depicted the routing of the American Imperialist Aggressors from Kaesong during the war. And of course the Pueblo was another mandatory stop scheduled to give us our fill of the North's version of events.

Some of the group headed back to the Mass Games for another go and others went to "the coffee shop"... which amazingly enough sells western foods such as pizza and hamburgers. I opted for the opulence of our island hotel.

DPRK V: DMZ and Kaesong

2007-05-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

After our visit to the mausoleum we drive south towards Kaesong, the only large DPRK city which escaped destruction in the war. IT is a terribly good 4-lane interstate quality road.....enroute we stop at a rest stop built over the four lanes like an Italian Autogrill. Only 4 flights of stairs to reach the service area. In 160 kms to Kaesong we pass: 2 dogs, 5 tractors, 5 motorcars and 4 trucks. The country's economy is sub desparate. The land is heavily cultivated - in fact cultivated in areas which are truly not arable. It is VERY sad....exaccerbated by the fact that they haven't a friend left in the world...the USSR has disappeared, China fears a Mariel-boatlife invasion of poverty stricken Koreans...sad sad.

Kaesong...a city with some few blocks of the OLD Korea..but still surrounded by the Ceaucescu buildings of the new Korea....we drive to the DMZ...fairly dramatic! I have been on the southern side which is even more paranoid....here lots of spring flowers bloom...we go to the huts where treaties were signed...the DPRK calls it the Korea-American imperialist war....they erect vast monuments to their "victory" which is no more true of course than OUR victory (how long has it BEEN since the US has won a war...well I guess we knocked the heck out of Grenada).

An army major escorts us through the zone, spewing forth visceral propaganda the entire time, eventually becoming redundant and easily tuned out. One perk on the North Korean side is the site of the signing of the Armistice. Tourists on the south side cannot access this hallowed ground. Later we are taken (at great length) to a hillside - again passing mile after mile of parched farmland - from which we can observe through military scopes the "concrete wall". According to our hosts the wall stretches coast to coast. At least from here we can see a garrison perched on the hill opposite us, undoubtedly staffed by soldiers looking back at us!

DPRK IV

2007-05-01T20:56:00.000-07:00

April 29th in the DPRK.....the GREAT highlight today was the mausoleum of Kim Il Sung. We found out later that we were the first American tourists ever permitted to enter this hallowed place!

One goes to a secret reverie away from the city...there are a myriad of buses who have brought in 500 women naval cadets, 1000 members of the peoples' army and so on...everyone looking very tidy...marching...resolutely...the nation seems to LOVE to march....the building is low lying and involves a tremendous amount of distance..it seems awflly important that everone be prepped for the holy occurence to follow. I walk a while and then revert to a wheel chair, thanks to the accomodating guide, Pak. It is fitted for butts from the DPRK (people on this side of the DMZ are said to be 27% smaller than people in the South)...at any rate when I squeeze my foul rear into the wheel chair I strain it...when I stand the chair adheres to my butt...it is all rather funny but seems to break the solemnity of the place.

One walks about a half mile and then gets on moving sidewalks....another half mile and then a turn and another...the music builds in crescendo...it is oddly reminiscent of the Miss America pageant if staged by The World's Largest Funeral Home. We eventually enter the penultimate room....we make little obeances...we are all terribly touched...then we enter the sanctum...there is Kim il Sung looking like a waxy Herbert Hoover.

The Koreans are so touched that they weep....we form into fours and stand for exactly 35 seconds on each of the four sides of the bier....we are all solemn ...we bow....a nice, gentle bow....as though were were bowing to a minor satrap in someplace like Cooch Behar.....we walk out (I being wheeled)....we go into a room of the treasures bestowed on the great poohbah...my favorite is an honorary degree from a spurious American university (I think it was "Kensington"... the zip code in LA was listed on the certificate). It is graustark, lala land, nuthaven. It is terribly impressive and believe me deMille could not have done better. One leaves more drained than revivified...and yet, for certain, these people of the DPRK have produced effects that the Medicis never dreamed of.

DPRK III: Arirang Mass Games!

2007-05-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

What to say about a combination of Cecil B de Mille, the church of Rome, Armageddon, the Hiter Nuremburg Rallys and the Cirque de Soleil - all to the 30th power? No wonder they let us Imperialists in!

Picture a round vast stadium...100,000+ spectators, 20,000+ card turners on the far side, 120,000 (!) participants.....picture a round semi-domed, huge stadium with a deliciously kitschy chandelier.....a full house....and suddenly the card section goes into motion....they can create everything from vernal woodlands, to color codes, from steam engines and rhodedendrons and naval vessels to cute little kittens (of which we saw none in the DPRK)...it is fabulous FABULOUS mechanized kitsch on our far side. We boggle. Then come the 120,000 participants.....girl scouts, nymphettes, guerillas, bathing beauties, cows and horses, sweet little pullets, bellicose soldiers, 8 year old gymnists, femme fatales, wooden soldiers, acrobats, more acrobats, more acrobats...death defying...marvleous syrupy music plays...then marches, spirited peppy ones...the colors of the rainbow - mostly just "off" natural. Neon green is a biggie...also neon ochre. One is thrilled and thrilled again...people swoop in from every angle across the enormously vast space.....moments are full of Bambi-like touching simplicity: Aren't we dear in the DPRK?

It makes the Superbowl Halftime Show look paraplegic. It is loud. It is utterly thrilling and at the end we all are drained. We have danced and pranced and cavorted. We have been the uniting railway between South Korea and the DPRK. We are exhausted. We have seen the great single show that human beings can produce. The only problem it occurs to me is that animation has it beat and that makes it so very very sad. IT is like nothing on earth!

DPRK II

2007-05-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

We are met by our chief guide Pak, his apparent minder Li, our driver, one person who seems to watch the minder and our "group videographer." American groups are rarer than the gills on a camel. We board a good Japanese-built bus (comfortable but with typically little kitschy touches: mini-chandelier-like droppings above the windows) for the drive into the city, first through heavily cultivated rolling country, the first fresh greeens of Spring, a great number of flowering fruit trees....bucolic, pretty and welcoming. Lots of noise from the guides about this and that though no surprises.

We are told that we will be the Pak group becuase to call us the "American group" could conceivably cause hostility on the part of the locals. I doubt this but what do I know. Suddenly we are in lego land...but lego land with huge and at times obscene differences. Pyongyang looks like no other city in the world: the average person lives in apartments from 5 to 25 stories.....and judging by the balconies they are extremely spare and tiny. There are thousands, literally thousands, of such buildings to the visual horizon. They seem better built than the gruesome crumbling Soviet-style high rises of yore. At times the city seems irradiated: where ARE the people? THEN we see a line of about 1/2 mile long at tram and bus stops...all waiting, quietly, politely and there is something vaguely terrifying about the order.

There are the bumptous HUGE public buildings....usually with little bits of kitsch stuck here or there on them....great vast alienating squares (often with statues of the local legends but also of archers, figure skaters, animals...looking oddly like soap sculptures....on the bus often music plays...it is a combination of martial music and tinkly-sentimental ditties, often with female singers (or maybe they are castrati?) wailing forth.

There is the pyramidal 105 story unfinished hotel; the Juche Tower with a plastic flame on top.....there are two or three truly hideous squares; a giant arch of triumph (if one looks at the real history of the DPRK one would be hard pressed to find the triumph); the landscaping is often pretty especially in Spring.

THEN as a special treat we are taken to the "square of squares" something Disney and cecil B DeMille could hardly improve on: a bevy of martial statues and bas reliefs leading up to the 80 time larger than life SHINY brass monsterous statue of fearless leader Kim Il Sung. We buy flowers, stand in front of the statue, make a slight bow (to show our respect). I wonder then if the flowers aren't recycled to the flower seller....one will never know.....THEN to the hotel. The hotel is 47 stories and it has an apparently inert revolving restaurant on top. (My son, Tony, later confirmed it does indeed revolve- at a snail's pace of course.) It feels very late-Soviet. Among its amenities are a bowling alley, a casino (about as lively as a funeral home), several restaurants.

Most service staff here is Chinese (under some kind of arrangement with a businessman in Macao) was the DPRK does't relish having their citizens having intercourse with foreigners.,..and especially not Imperialists from America.

We go upstairs to our slightly bleek but absolutely ok rooms: two lilliputian beds, a bathroom with bathtowels rather the size of diapers, a tv (which astoundingly has BBC as an option!)....I am on the 22nd floor with a nice view of the river, the legoland beyond including the Juche Tower with the red plastic flame on top. Dinner is the first of meals in the DPRK which vary from vile to "I'm surprised that it is not vile"....beer is included....service is swift...condiments odd...some dishes we couldn't quite identify but that's our ignorance.

Something looked greatly like whale blubber with chocolate chips, another if bok choy in a sea of orange liquid which was piquant to the 3rd power...then there is pickled fish.....that night the bread was a jelly roll.

THEN it is time for the ARIRANG GAMES and these are so spectacular, so truly mind bending that I want to write a separate entry about them.

First Report from the DPRK

2007-05-01T10:21:00.000-07:00

It is May 1st, Beijing, sunny and cool.

We just arrived back on Air Koryo's Ilyushin 62 jet from Pyongyang, an arrival back from Oz as surely as Dorothy's.

Let us start at the start....all five of us had a briefing at the Beijing office of our capable tour company and also met 16 other Americans who would join our group. They were a good cross section, all younger than I am (most people are), some very young, generally tilted to the left... the type of keen traveler one would expect for Oz. ...we were given to usual admonitions: not to photograph without asking advice of our guides/minders...to dress respectfully. We later learned that North Koreans are some of the tidiest dressers on earth..perhaps with a military influence...women in suits, wearing heels and looking "Sunday going to church like". Let's just say there were variations on variations of olive drab, grey, navy and brown!

THEN Saturday the 28th was D-DAY and our Peninsula Hotel group was taken from Central Beijing to the airport....with all of us having little rushes of adrenalin. There it was: the Koryo Airlines check in counter. Then boarding the Russian built IL62, a 4-jet plane...the Air Koryo stewardesses dressed to the nines in the national dress, a billowing silk skirt which is waisted slightly oddly across the chest. Very pretty women. Tom and I get the upfront treatment: canapes (peanuts), a gelatinous rice with mystery chicken, some kim chee (the national condiment), sweet bread (almost always in the DPRK the bread is sweet), various soft drinks in lurid colors (sort of lava lamp colors), DPRK beer (slightly flat but rather good...as good as our mainline brands) or a wine which tasted like Welch's grapejuice with an alka seltzer.

We flew over the loess hills of North China....about 45 minutes out did a quick turn and were then obviously the Axis of Evil's air space.....below the land rather severe, the reservoirs looking seriously dry. We descend. Pyongyang's Airport has enormously long run ways.....we land nicely then pass several mothballed domestic aircraft. We are the only international flight at the airport: there are 8 a week compared with circa 2300 for the same period at Seoul's brilliant new Inchon Airport.

The Terminal building is about half the size of old Little Rock Adams Field with some Stalin architectural flourishes here and there. We are bussed in from the craft to the terminal building where there is one baggage carousel moving slowly, oh so slowly.....I would judge that our plane has held circa 150 people and the baggage claim took 50 minutes. Notable freight coming off the plane are numerous leaking sacks of grain! The airport terminal is rather eerily silent. I begin to sense a sort of national paranoia which is going to be reaffirmed time and time and time again. We are here!

North Korea Debriefing

2007-04-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

We headed this morning to the headquarters of our affable tour partners for our pre-trip debriefing.

Simon's briefing was humorous and enjoyable.....our hotel is on an island in the middle of the city but we're not to LEAVE the little island...and the hotel staff is all Chinese.....it gets odder and odder. It is apparently a 47 story hotel with elevators that take essentially 15 minutes to reach the higher floors but voila it has a revolving restaurant on top (I can't believe that the thing will work...but if they can build an atomic bomb perhaps they can accomplish a revolving restaurant). We are said to be able to SEND emails but not receive anything....and I doubt very very seriously if anything I might try and send will come through....so this is a goodbye missive until we get back to Beijing on May 1st---at which point I will burn up the ether-waves of whatever they are.

En Route to Beijing After 32 Years!

2007-04-24T10:10:00.000-07:00

The wonderful thing about our flight was its pattern. I have expected to fly the usual great circle over the Aleutians, but had never flown out of Chicago. The route the almost entire distance was without many clouds...and again I am always surprised when people are glued the windows...for the sights below were quite astounding: we left Chicago almost DUE north of Lake Michigan, flew over Green Bay then woodsy Northern Wisconsin...Superior then to the right, Thunder Bay and its marvelous harbour to the left....north north north....the first snow appeared before Churchill then north north and more north...over the area called Keewatin, the Arctic Ocean, the Queen Charlotte Islands and then lo and behold about 100 miles from the actual north pole. I almost got snow blindness.

I can't help it when my fellow passengers prefer to read USA TODAY and give me ugly looks for the open shade (the first class section is 100% full).....then we are over the islands north of Siberia...then Siberia, the first town of any note being Ulan Ude on the Trans Siberian...then the vast eastern Gobi of Mongolia, then the rugged loess hills and the Great Wall stretching to infinity...talk about a flight!

Beijing Airport in the old days (32 years ago) was tiny and today of course it is mammoth, rather well functioning (lots of moving walkways...friendly and quick people doing health thence passport thence baggage checks...lines not too long (there were well over 300 people on my flight alone)...they obviously are getting themselves all prepped for the Olympics. A nice young woman named Kelsy (how Chinese is THAT?) meets me and we zoom in on the new expressway to the airport.

I might as well be in the suburbs of Montevideo/Milan/Moscow...nothing is remotely familiar...then a bit is and I am at the very agreeable Peninsula with a fabulous welcome, all kinds of products and, zounds, a very large Chanel shop in the main lobby. Things have changed!

Istanbul

2006-11-09T07:44:00.000-08:00

Istanbul, Nov 9th at the superb Four Seasons my surprise from Eyup and Aysegul! It is 65 degrees and sunny.

We left snowy Cappadocia and dear Suha and his unique Esbelli Evi Hotel with a heavy heart. Lisa had told me what a superb guy Suha is.....he is enguzel which in Turkish means "most beautiful"....with our splendid driver Suad we drove across the barren landscape, going on a new beltway around ultra hideous Ankara (it didn't have that ethereal Pre-Greek museum it would rank right up there with Minsk and Bucharest and Oklahoma City as one of the capital cities to forget). We drove then into mountains which I had never realized existed between Ankara and Istanbul (I had never done this trip overland).

We drove through some heavy snow to arrive at the utterly beguiling town of Gonyok (with the umlauts if is pronounce gern-y-erk) and it is much prettier than it sounds, an Ottoman town of 5000 people with traditional houses, hugging an almost secret valley between mountains...and utterly invisible from a half mile away. We lodged in an old KONAK which is the Turkish upper class equivalent of a chateau or a schloss. The family who has lived on the site since the 1300s was there to welcome us. Great fun. We each had a bedroom (though shared one bath) around a large carpeted (of course) living room. The four of us really comfortable though in an American sense were roughing it. We had a lovely small town dinner with great grilled lamb and the usual delicious rice pudding, a dish which Turkey invented and which is as good as anything in the land.

I was festering then as we drove towards Istanbul (joining the super highway from Ankara for the last 100 miles) about where I was going to stay....the city starts about 35 miles out and now numbers circa 12 million people, a great deal more than the naiton of Greece. Eyup told me he had taken me at my words and have booked me in a small pension in the Sultanahmet quarter. What a glorious surprise after our semi rough digs of last night to drive up to the Four Seasons with everyone coming out to greet me. What a welcome - complete with champagne, fruit, pastries, a box of super chocolates etc. in my beautiful room overlooking the still-flower filled court. I love the place and have never stayed here though I longed to the last couple of times

I was here. Dear Eyup and Aysegul. They knew I would be delighted.

Capadoccia III

2006-11-06T22:25:00.000-08:00

Monday Nov 6th, Urgup, 26 degrees clear with full moon after heavy snow

I know I repeat myself but Cappadocia in winter is surreal. We were awakened this morning at 4:45 AM to drive through ice covered roads for about a half hour to our balloon rendezvous point....joined with an American guy from San Francisco, two Australian couples (they had never met), the young travel writer couple from London whom I have mentioned (and like a great deal).....to board our balloon...a freezing morning but with calm winds....we stand there in every bit of clothing we can muster (I wear Aysegul's extra mittens, Eyup's extra wool cap as the balloon is slowly inflated....then we climb up toe holes in the large basket....I feel like an elephant but the crew assists wonderfully reminding me of getting into those longboats off the ARANUI in the Marquesas.

Rebecca, the English writer friend, is terrified of heights...I am moderately.....mountains don't bother me but I can't walk over a railroad trestle comfortably....we clutch each other and ascend. Cappadocia is surreal in deep snow, the Gaudi-esque landscape looking absolutely impossible as though it were some Hollywood computer animated scene....we go as low as tree tops (at one point I plucked a brilliant yellow fall foliage leaf and gave it to Aysegul)....then we ascend and ascend more...through the total cloud cover to about 7500 feet......One could see a number of extinct volcanoes, the Taurus mountain range super snowy towards to the Syrian border about 225 kms away... utter silence... only the occasional blast of fire to keep the balloon filled....was it scary?

AT one point I couldn't decide if I were more scared or frozen....it was VERY cold.....probably about 20 in the near-stratosphere.....Cappadocia it seems has the finest thermals/winds etc (much better than our best which is the Albuquerque region) in the world...our captain is a Swede with a French wife...he is very competent thank god...there are about 8 balloons in sight across the horizon despite the freezing weather and formidable snow on the ground....I am loving the ascent....there are a coven (or whatever they are called) of foxes playing in the snow as we ascend....the combination of trees in high Fall foliage Lorraine poplars, maples, little apricot trees and the freak heavy snow is mindboggling pretty.....We are aloft for 2 hours....descend then to have champagne and warm pound cake and coffee.....all of us feeling as though we have communed with another plane somehow...I guess we have....

Later today we explore back roads of this remarkable area of the world...going into little non-tourist villages, to a charming folk museum filled with delicious naive art (including naive art mannequins)...we take salep (the delicious winter hot beveerage of Turkey...vaguely cinnamon tasting...it is its own peculiar spice and I like it)....Cappadocia is a major wine producer and we go to the Koc (the great tycoon family of Turkey) family tasting area (where Eyup and Aysegul buy 3 cases of remarkably good cabernet sauvignon-type red).....It is a lazy day after the drama of the balloon.

We motor off towards Istanbul tomorrow....Aysegul wants me to see the reworking of the pre-Greek (mostly Hittite) museum in Ankara....which I remember vividly from that visit with Fred Darragh an aeon ago....with Billy and Linda Brown too whom I think about in frigid Cappadoccia. We will stay a couple of nights in villages at little inns....then on Friday afternoon I will be put on the plane for London for a weekend at the Goring....a transition which ought to be pretty breathtaking in its contrast to where I am now.

I know I have put you all to sleep.....I am constantly revivified by the Turks, the landscape, the food, the great warmth of welcome....It is travel at its very best!

Capadoccia II

2006-11-05T20:29:00.000-08:00

Urgup, Cappadocia, Turkey Sunday.......November 5th

It is an absolutely ice palace outside here....a heavy snow has fallen making the Gaudi-esque landscape look especially surreal...and now a full moon is about to come out with what looks like a perfect halloween bat of clouds in front of it.

I am at the Troglodyte's Hotel, Esbelli Evi, and I so like Suha the owner-manager who has been so solicitous and intelligent and funny.

We just got the word of the death sentence on S Hussein. The Turks seem to think that it is oddly a bit of banality at this point and perhaps they are right. They are apprehensive about Iraq, a place which they know is not a nation in any true sense of the word and a place they ran for centuries, will divide in threes which would only bring a sense of true alarm to the Turks with their huge Kurdish population in the SE. It does appear that these Kurds were the chief murderers of the Armenians during that ghastly period (of course with the blessing of the Sublime Porte or whatever). Turks seem to only hope that their Kurds will realize that Turkish citizenship and good behavior is going to be a hell of a lot more valuable than being new citizens of a dubious new state.

The gang here is supplemented by an absolutely delightful young English travel writing couple, Tim and Rebecca Robbins and I will write more of them later and will want to keep up with them.

Sorry for such a rambling, Sunday reflection-like email...but Cappadocia does bring out a certain need to make some sort of expression....if only because the place is so astoundingly eerie. We're about to group for dinner at some village kebab place. I am panting for my favorite Turkish dish, a yoghurt kebab with grilled eggplant.....(had Imam Bayaldi, or "the priest fainted", that great eggplant dish at lunch.) GOD I forget between each visit how well people dine here. Had my first truly superior Turkish red wine too....nurtured by the tycoon Koc family, the Rockefellers of the land....delicious.

I know you all are sick of this.....but I will end by saying that Cappadocia smiles on all of us with

a sort of pock marked, enigmatic grin.

Capadoccia

2006-11-05T08:18:00.000-08:00

November 5, Urgup (Cappadocia) light snow and Mysterious!

What a trip up from South Africa: the 11 + hours flight up from Cape Town to London where BA put me up at the in-airport Hilton....Heathrow more of a potential disaster than I remember.....the Hilton is attached for example to terminal 4...to reach terminal 1 with any amount of baggage at all is a 20 pound taxi ride...no shuttle buses from any airport hotel it seems...security?

BA was comfortable coming up...a thrilling ride over the Kalahari and then Angola...clouds and then northern Nigeria and the utter vastness of the Sahara....clouds then and suddenly Lyon below and dusk over NW France enroute Heathrow. Oddly, BA is like Qantas in many ways: the glorious sleeper seat (with pajamas again given to passengers), 18 seats in first (all filled which they have been on all of my long haul flights)...food which is decent enough (with quite superlative wines) but not remotely out of the ordinary....you know, a filet in red wine sauce or a tuna steak after no special canapes...good cheese platters.....the days of caviare and foie gras are over with it seems...the food does at least leave one less bloated.

The night at the factory-like Hilton....the one, which charges something like 200 pounds for "civilians" but which British Airways gets for 60 Pounds a night...also have a dinner and breakfast voucher which I did not use.

Morning flight over Europe.....mostly cloudy but brilliant skies leaving London over the channel...and again clear over a very snowy E Rumania, Bulgaria and Thrace.....snowing at Ataturk Airport as I arrived.

To find Eyup and Aysegul and the fact that we were leaving in two hours (my surprise!) on a Turkish Airlines flight to Kayseri/Cappadocia......nice Turkish Airlines domestic service, greatly improved from the old days....even on the 1 1/2 hour flight a tuna sandwich and a brownie!...we arrive at Kayseri to find Suad, the Argent driver in a comfy VW van (all leather inside) for the 1 1/2 hour ride over here...to be greeting by DEAR DEAR Suad a travel writer couple from London whom I like...and a typical groaning board dinner of full mezze and so on....I was about as hungry as someone who has just finished a huge Thanksgiving dinner...but tried to appear starved....particularly glorious tarama, dolmades and all the things I like.

It is now 1130 PM as we go to Esbelli Evi, the in-cave hotel of ENORMOUS charm and to bed...for all of 5 hours....a 500 AM wake up call and a trasnfer to Urgup Village for the hot air balloon ride...which is cancelled because of the snow....yes, it is a lovely wonderful of the Gaudi-designed landscape of Cappadocia with a brushing of the white stuff...utterly surreal...so is my body.WHERE AM I? You all know the feeling. I am now typing on S's computer in the living room at Esbelli Evi...having returned to the hotel from the aborted hotair balloon and slept for an hour or so...a superb breakfast with those poppy seed simits, village bread, home made yoghurt and jams, beyaz penir...the works...oh glory....

Aysegul is more beautiful than ever....Eyup more solicitous and loving...they have a complete 5 day tour mapped out for me....wandering the backroads, staying in little inns...it sounds enchanting and I am finally waking up to the land of Oz.

I so love this country...beyond love! Should have some really original antics to report when we get to Istanbul on Wednesday night. With any luck Suat will travel with us.

The editor in chief of LONELY PLANET is due here today and all bells and whistles will be intoned.

Cape Town II

2006-11-01T10:55:00.000-08:00

Cape Town Novenber 1st 2006....70 degrees with strong sea breezes and not a cloud in the sky...glorious.

The Cape TIMES announced this morning the most favored halloween mask of last night: This year's winner as a replica of George Bush. In the past, the winners had been such icons as Osama Bin Ladin, Draclua, PW Botha, Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin. Go figure.

The TIMES also announced the death of Botha, that last of the APARTHEID premieres who was a die hard until death and actually believed that the races here had to be divided between white (including Japanese), Asians (Indians and Chinese mostly), Cape Malays (mostly of Indonesian descent) Cape Coloured (the total European probably-majority population of mulattos), then the various black tribes. My god, someone needed a slide rule to keep up with it all. Botha WAS a ghoul and yet Mandela (whom he imprisoned) and Archbishop Tutu have sent warm condolences to his family and have asked them if they would like for the premier to lie in State......WHAT reconciliation.....in what a glorious city.

As I wrote Spring has fulminated forth in such a riot that it is almost unbelievable. If the sea breezes were not brisk today, the roses in my cottage's little garden would probably smell like a florist shop or the cosmetics counter at Sak's. I went yesterday down to the Cape of Good Hope, that obligatory trip, one that I have now made I think 5 times....always something new: this time a number of different varieties of the extremely exhuberant Protea flowers (on bushes...looking like blooming artichokes almost), a dozen heathers.....lots of whales playing out at sea. Went on a small group tour...terrific young couple from Dublin among others, both so enthusiastic about the Cape that they are considering emigration.....even though Dublin booms as it never has in its history.

It is curious to talk to people and find out how essentially relaxed they are about their new racial reality. They greatly resent those who left South Africa, mostly Apartheid types (though they may have denied it) who would not have been comfortable in this very well working multi racial society. The locals are deeply resentful of the emigres of the apartheid and just-post era, easy to understand. I heard the same expressions of disdain in Havana for those who left Cuba. I am sure that there are still massive economic racial divides here, but on the whole things seem amazingly relaxed. The houses all have plaques from this or that security service.....but people tell me the streets are much safer than 5 years ago. YEAH!...I have seen the Tower of Babel and it works.

This will be my last missive from the gloriously blooming so-called dark continent.

Cape Town

2006-10-30T09:33:00.000-08:00

It is Cape Town, Oct 30th, 68 degrees and riotous springtime.

Alot of writers have talked about the South African Spring being the world's most beautiful and they may be right on.....the roses are outdoing themslves and I have about 10 huge fulsome bushes in my "front yard" in that this glorious Mt Nelson Hotel has given me the Honeysuckle Cottage and I feel like a kept man... In ALL THE WORLD (and this is my 5th time here) I have yet to find a hotel I like better. People come here and rave about Ellerman House and the Cape Grace....well they are merely Pleasant Valley compared to "the club"....the Mt Nelson is on about 30 prime acres right at the bottom of Table Mountain and its tramway. A good 20 of those acres are in superb gardens with not only the English sights of spring, but also the many curious bits of S African flora.

I spent some of today at the Victoria and Albert Waterfront (where the highly lauded Cape Grace is located). The Mandela memorial at the ferry terminal for Robben Island is spectacularly good. I think he is my favorite person of the last half of the last century and Ataturk my favorite of the first half, (though this is hardly original).

I am off now to the bar for a glass of Cape Pinotage, one of the best wines in christendom....(I guess there are not TOO many from muslimdom). All is well. I fly to London enroute Istanbul Friday... and haven't a clue as to what Aysegul and Eyup have in store though their emails read like the Cheshire Cat's.

Johannesburg Transit

2006-10-29T06:46:00.000-08:00

Johannesburg Airport VIP lounge...

Man, from international arrival to this place in the domestic section, I feel like I have walked to Cape Town!.

Qantas is a curious airline. The check in is BRILLIANT. Since I am riding up front, an agent dedicates himself to me from pavement arrival through check in through customs to the first class lounge...fabulous. The flight though is rather curious: MOST of their international flights are tremendously long distance and I think they have it down pat: while the champagne is vintage Dom Perignon, the food (two meals on the 14-odd hour flight in from Sydney) is not what anyone would call luxe and I think the reason is not that it would be much more expensive to have foie gras and caviar and so on, but it would bloat a person beyond reason! The first meal: my choice of a free range chicken breast with wild mushrooms...second meal: my choice of a duck confit...both delicious but not over the top. I am going to be curious to compare my two upcoming BA flights. Cape Town to London and London to Toronto.

I am remarkably awake considering. And every free computer I see simply beckons me to write something.

Canberra with Friends

2006-10-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

Sydney, October 26th, 70 degrees mostly clear...lots of flies....I didn't remember these nasty tiny buggers....oddly they remind me of Hay River, Northwest Territories...ouch.

I had a long, wonderful thorough visit to Canberra (CAN-bra) yesterday....flew on the hourly QANTAS propjet and Andrew Schuller awaits me at their little airport.....A lot of you KNOW Andrew and he looks slightly older, has a goatee, his hair has turned from that auburn to sort of gray...but on the whole Andrew is studly looking and fit.......he drove me to the highest point in the Australian Capital Territory and almost on cue we almost ran down a huge red kangaroo. Nice welcome.

Canberra sits in a landscape which is dramatically "Marin County" without the redwoods....golden fields, lots of trees but in copses rather than forests...a planned city, a sop to both Melbourne and Sydney and vaguely in between as you all know....done by an American city planner who obviously had studied Hausmann.....it is a handsome rather than a beautiful city...most post WW2.....some imposing embassies (Andrew is involved at both the British and Austrian ones. His Grandfather was a foreign minister under the dreaded Dollfuss......). We toured more and then picked up son NICK at his private and quite imposing looking school...they thought about sending Nick to the snobby, very establishment Geelong near Melbourne where all of my Melbourne friends (as well as Prince Phillip for a year) studied....but wanted him at home....then to Andrew's house, a nice slightly rambling "50's suburban" place with a gorgeous view across the artificial lake to parliament and the golden hills beyond. I liked son Nick greatly...bright red hair like a young Andrew. He's a tad taciturn but really a charmer, all boy, all Cricketeer, learning Chinese and in the 9th grade...they grade system the same as ours....He might want to spend his high school Junior Year in the USA and we talked about Exeter, Concord and Hotchkiss.

After taking Nick back to his school (Canberra Grammar) met Jenny at the National Museum, a terrifically imposing heap with a sterling collection of Australian art (what I know about Australian artists could be put in a thimble). Jenny is I believe the head of the economics dept now at the Australian Natl University. She is VERY easy, a charmer...was born and lived as a young girl in Vancouver but came to Australia with her parents (both academics and retired). She is quite proud of her Australian citizenship. Nick has both, British and Australian....a wonderful, warm lovely day with people I care for so much.

I probed and probed with both Andrew and Jenny about the thing which puzzles me about Australia: Are they feeling PART of the world of thought/politics/culture and so on...the answer is a resounding yes.......one TV channel carried the Lehrer News report daily, they have the BBC. In Canberra the whole world comes though at one time or another reminding me of what Elia Kazan told me at dinner at my house lo those many years ago: "Fred, everyone in the world will come to Little Rock at least once. Don't feel isolated". Australia is finally coming through for me a bit. It IS possible to be a part of things so far away from those things. It is NOT a vacuum at all. NOW I have to separate my thoughts about the travel wisdom of coming here: there is ENOUGH that IS different to justify the time AND money I feel... and finally I am going to be able to plan an insightful trip for people who want to come here: some takes:

YES concentrate mostly on urban places and what lies just outside them The Outback-Ayers-Rock-Darwin etc. are probably great for Europeans who have never seen such vast spaces. But they are old hat for us. I figure it costs about $1000 extra in airfare to go to Ayers Rock. It is the largest monolithic rock in the world. But I think, "There it is. Wow... What next?".

The cities are rather different one from another......Adelaide is a fine starter with that glorious wine country and hilly hinterland....Melbourne is the BEST visit of the cities, urbane, fun, delightfully user friendly with their rumbling trams and traditions. Tasmania is the one place where scenery really can bowl one over. The Gt Barrier Reef I know is very special but just because it is the longest reef in the world doesn't mean the eye can see beyond the horizon and there are many places on our earth with equal underwater fun. Sydney is very tactile, a city which is fun to touch, (though the modern architecture is curiously better in Melbourne). The people are the joy to be around: Surely no English speaking people are quite as upbeat and lilting, with a delightful regard for our language and superb turns of phrases.

OK you all will be happy that I am leaving Australia and next I will bore you with some thoughts from Cape Town.

...and life is fair dinkem!

Sydney

2006-10-24T15:34:00.000-07:00

Sydney Oct 24th, 70 degrees, overcast...

The Observatory Hotel is outstanding even though the front rooms look on to row houses and the back rooms on a semi industrial harbor. It is just above the "historic" and kicky area called THE ROCKS...it is small, Orient Express. I am not sure what Ellison did to gild my lilly but when I arrived I had an instant welcome from the manager, the GENERAL manager and since then every soul in the hotel is calling me by name.

My large room is elegant...truly elegant which happens so rarely today....lovely touches:

hot cocoa to make with milk and a heater like the one in my flat......two lavatories, 4 different soaps, a heavenly bed, the usual VCR and CD player, HDTV, wonderful bar with one dish bar foods. Last night I had a world class Nasi Goreng which means I am not compelled to go into their grand looking restaurant and don't have to dress the part. Terrific concierge.

Sydney has changed beyond ALMOST all recognition....it is smoother, more urbane, definitely more built up......I did two tours today to reorient myself....the lush suburbs on the inner harbor going away from downtown. Bondi (the water is too chilly but lots of surfers in wetsuits).....the tours are those round robin-step on step off things.....one for the guts of the city (1 1/2 hours) and the other to the Gap (2 1/2 hours) with intelligent narratives. I fly to Canberra tomorrow to spend the day with Andrew and Jennie Schuller, (old friends from Oxford), and am delighted because Andrew is going to do the full tour of the planned city done by an American early in the last century... a sop to both Stydney and Melbourne who each wanted to be the national capital.

As visual and rather sensual as Sydney is, I think I vastly prefer Melbourne and I am trying to sort out my thoughts...why? Despite seeing a couple of terrific Australian films I still feel as though I am dropping off the planet down here....and despite fabulously improved levels of cooking everything else seems just a little provincial as though the poshy shops here are full of the spring merchandise which didn't sell in the northern hemisphere during OUR spring...but perhaps I am being cynical.

Hobart

2006-10-21T14:00:00.000-07:00

It is Oct 21, it is Tasmania, chilly about 55 degrees, a brilliant ultramarine sky with big billowy clouds.......

WOW, I love this place. It is roughly the same size at St John's (which it resembles here and there though of course it is not nearly as old)....with a lovely natural habor....one to rival the great ones which come to my mind: NY, Vancouver, San Francisco, Sydney, Rio, Cape Town, Hong Kong.. Istanbul...the place just FEELS fresh...lots of early 19th century buildings (which is the stone age here) about...

The best hotel yet in Australia is the massively inventive Henry Jones Art Hotel (expensive as it is...about US$200) a reworking of a 19th century large jam factory.... a hotel which incorporates sails and the original tin roofs...I napped a bit after arrival and there was a rain which sounded so sopoforic on my naked tin ceiling....on the flight in one is given an apple, the symbol of this island....neat idea! Qantas also did a full breakfast in 55 minutes in from

Melbourne.

I have walked about in the town...often, deliciously fresh with a slight smell of fish (the smell I sometimes find in St John's)...ANY friend of Newfoundland MUST come to Tasmania I know alread...a smaller island albeit but with roughly the same population...a newer colony but old for Australia (settled in 1805...that's awfully early on down here)....tall hills surround the harbor...rising abruptly to about 2500 ft (roughly Mt Magazine, AR rising from the sea)...there must be 2000 yachts in the harbor and all manner of benches to squat upon and admire...the gulls here even look clean with bright RED beaks.

I troop off tomorrow to see the city and environs, then to Port Arthur the notorious convict settlement (where a few years ago a Columbine-type ghoul slaughtered 25-odd innocents while they ate their picnics).....The big monument in town lists very exactly the first 200-odd convicts brought here and no doubt their names are trotted out with pride by Hobart families with long memories.....I am reminded of those elderly people who take great pride in their ancestors (Aunt Jane coming to mind in a flash) and wonder how they would deal with convicts forebearers (rather than Episcopal clergymen)....I will try and restrain my enthusiasm until I know more about what I am writing.

Leaving Melbourne

2006-10-20T13:57:00.000-07:00

Melbourne, Qantas VIP lounge Tullamarine Airport 745 AM Oct 21st 58 degrees and rain

It turns out that my friend Jenny is the granddaughter not only of the AGE owners, the SYME family, but also of Rider Haggard the great English writer of the turn of last century who wrote KING SOLOMON'S MINES and was one of the first people inside the tomb of King Tut. I am in good company.

I have checked in for the early morning flight to Tasmania...and have never been able to make that statement in all of the 72 years before today!

Melbourne II

2006-10-19T13:52:00.000-07:00

I think I will wait until tomorrow to write the long "what I have done in Melbourne" blog....It has been a good stay and I like the city enormously.

There is much less "attitude" than there is in Sydney...It is the kind of city our Aunt Jane would have loved because people are talking about whose grandmother married whom....I had a terrific dinner last night with my pals Dacre (it is pronounced like "acre" with a "d") and Jenny Smyth...decidedly not Smith!...Dacre is the retired commodore of the Australian navy, Jenny the granddaughter of the Symes family which founded the AGE in 1856...she is also the daughter of Rudger (sic?) Haggard's brother...he being a prolific and wildly popular pommie writer of early in the last century....we went to a French place...a charming restaurant with terrific oysters and escargots from the vinyeards and duck and the inevitable molten chocolate dessert which seems to have swept the world sort of like those "Kilroy was here" signs of my childhood (something no doubt about which you have never heard).

Just now I am all dressed up in a coat and tie waiting for the Smyth's chauffeur to pick me up for a dinner party for 8 they are giving for me....it should be interesting!

Melbourne

2006-10-17T13:42:00.000-07:00

Melbourne Tuesday Oct 17th.....clear skies (they need rain massively!) and about 72 degrees....lovely!

I liked Melbourne more and more and it is the most user friendly big city in my experience. Examples: a central farmers' market where luxury crops (asparagus/leeks/chives even "designer" olives) are raised ON THE SPOT for sale. Fabulous old fashioned trams which, gratis, rumble about the the 20-odd block edge of the central business district. Passing about 2/3rds of the must see sights of the city with a canned, intelligent narrative...one simply gets on and off....(the city is largely in a fairly regular grid and is densely served by sleek trams...the most social of all means of urban transoprt?...though there is also a subway and train service frequently to the near suburbs)......the AGE, the morning paper which Jenny Smyth's (her family name was Fairfax) started in 1856 is one of the world's truly great papers....infinitely better than the AUSTRALIAN from Sydney. It would hold its own with the TIMES, LE MONDE. the WIENER STANDARD etc....

Central Melbourne sits along the Yarra about 3-4 miles inland from a splendid bay of the Pacific Ocean...there are lovely beaches in the near-southern-suburbs.....more parkland than any city I can think of save perhaps Vancouver....restaurants which glom together on certain streets here and there offering wonderful walks to smell, look at the posted menus and choose.....and this is Australia's most ethnically diverse place.....last night, for example, I could have in a 4 block stretch Korean, new Aussie (they call it "Oz"), Turkish, Italian, Greek, French, Vietnamese, three kinds of Chinese, Malayan, Argentine (!) and McDonalds to choose from. I opted to dine at the grand old Windsor where I am staying: local oysters served with a little jelly bean sized pellet of frozen lime/vodka......on to a rolled chicken breast around ecrevisse......lemon crepes.....a local Riesling (within 20 miles of the city are major vineyards)....about US$75 served with lovely panache....

One should travel to sniff out differences rather than similarities I figure.....Some differences here: I like the spoken word in urban Australia...(and most of Australia IS urban): it is generally richer than our argot and there are certainly more beguiling twists of phrase....ABC the Australian BBC is slightly lighter than our PBS and doesn't have those annoying long commercials by sponsors who support programs....people seem much fitter but everyone says morbid obesity is on the rise....on Sunday it was as though the whole city was working out doing SOMETHING.....there is infinitely more ethnicity than I remember before....Melbourne feels as "ethnic" as New York....just the mix is different: almost no black (the Aborigines seem to prefer to live together in the north and west)...tons of Southeast Asians, Italians, Greeks, Irish, Turks and Yugoslavs.....a large and rather powerful Jewish community (owning Myer, the largest dept store in the world today I am told among other high profile businesses).

I haven't been here long enough to sense the urban prejudices though they surely exist......the new architecture is extremely exciting....a new 92 story apartment tower, the tallest in the world, has just started receiving its tennants. Those on the higher floors admit a bit of seasickness when the wind is up: it looks like a knife blade though one which curls slightly as it ascends....like Gehry a bit but my take on him is that he doesn't deal much in the vertical...

I wandered in the Botanic Garden...artful, lovely spacious place with the damnest combination of tropical (many healthy palms), semi tropical (oleander and gardenias and azaleas...remember it is spring here) and temperate (fabulous roses, different pine trees)....all coexisting as the peoples of this city seem to. There is a "fringe" festival on...new music, experimental theatre and the like. I will try to snare some tickets to something. It is difficult to rein in my enthusiasm for this quite thrilling world city. I like it FAR best of any of the Australian places I have seen.

Hahnsdorf, South Australia

2006-10-11T13:06:00.000-07:00

Hahnsdorf, South Australia Oct 11th

Yesterday at 95 was the hottest Oct 10 in the history of the region. Wow! Did I bring it from home? Trip continues well. This is a little German settled village in the midst of the glorious wine region.

NOW for me, a subject very dear to my heart....Adelaide is a user friendly, nicely situated city with the ocean to the south and west and with lovely green hills to the N and E.... I am in those hills at a little village settled by German refugees from Silesia...that province which, after the Germans wrested it from the Austrians kicked all manner of religious dissidents out. The village is in a bower of greenery...a bit kitsched up for tourists now but not as bad as Lancaster County...it is VERY near the choicest vineyards and this has been my GREAT revalation:
the utter sumptuousness of the mostly boutique vinyeard wines of S Australia....I wrote about how cooking has had a renaissance, a change which that word does not exaggerate!

Yesterday I got up at 5:45 AM and caught the bus down the pretty Fleurieu (I hope I am spelling is right) Peninsula enroute to the ferry to Kangaroo Island.... villages with little stone cottages from the 1840s and 50s....pleasing countryside, not remotely dramatic...nothing around here is and my analogy to the Texas Hill Country is a bit apt though today in the Adelaide Hills the countryside IS prettier than that, almost up to Mt Magazine but not quite... Brad Horn told me that Kangaroo Island is an absolute must to understand Australia in that it is its own miniature ecosystem having almost all (no Tasmanian Devils) of the Australia fauna...I found it disappointing...some of the coast is dramatic in a sort of Gaspe way (but not quite) the the weather is so unseasonably hot that the animals are in hiding...did spot some Koala...some kangaroos....glad I flew back on Regional Air's 20 minute flight to Adelaide.

The island is one of those places which probably reveal itself slowly and then becomes utterly beguiling: I may be giving it a bad rap.....but today I went to a terrific wildlife sanctuary in the Adelaide Hills and saw everything much more up close...it is NOT a zoo....and is very well done...it is lunch time...everyone on my tour is chowing down on German victuals and I am typing away. My hay fever is making me flow like the Hochstrallbrunnen in Wien and I don't even HAVE hay fever usually...the tours are intelligent, mobbed mostly with local tourists, Kiwis and Japanese....As you can see I am doing nicely, feeling pretty good except for my whitewater nose....to Melbourne tomorrow...the Hilton has been great to me: free happy hour, a cooked lovely breakfast and a major upgrade.

Fred Poe's Arrival in Sydney

2006-10-09T12:56:00.000-07:00

Sydney monday morning Oct 9

I have arrived Sydney on very peaceful flights. Does First Class ever make sense. Uneventul flight LIT-DFW...but high drama from DFW to LAX...a passenger in coach (I never saw him) had some kind of violent health attack and we were forced to land in lovely El Paso...the medics came running and we sat for a long time...the patient was taken off through a cargo door and the word is that he died...pretty macabre eh?

The Westin at LAX was nicely salubrious (good beds if you like soft and cushy)....then Qantas on Saturday which is Sunday here of course: one checks in in a rather soignee first class area (there are only 14 seats), the agent then walks with bags to the bag drop and one then is shown to the First class security clearance hidden up an escalator...to a lovely lounge.....I am feeling like I have my money's worth.

Upon boarding, I find my super super seat...it artfully turns into a full sized bed for heavens sake....full sized....and pajamas are distributed.....the meal service (the flight left at 1:00 PM) is not that truly gala....rather old shoe I thought...but entirely appropriate and the staff on board (3 for the 14 of us...plane full in all three classes) terrific...little hot canapes, a delicious leek and artichoke soup, a crusted filet mignon, an outstanding cheese course of Australian cheeses...very pretty Viennese-type desserts....and a serious wine list of ONLY Australian wines save for the Bollinger vintage champagne...terrific romps all over Australia with the wines....then a long SLEEP....they have like 90 movies to choose from...I don't like movies on airplanes...but did watch Sophie Scholl about the White Rose victims of the Nazis in Munich...then a supper prior to landing here.

It all didn't seem like 141/2 hours or whatever...man a full bed sure helps alot!....Kingford Smith Airport hasn't changed since Tony and I were here 20 years ago: 300+ people get off the plane and the terminal feels sort of like it should be in Des Moines...slow slow slow but everyone hearty and affable....it is sprinkling, about 50 and San Francisco-feeling, terrific.

Mercure Airport hotel could also be in Des Moines except everyone on the TV channels sound like they have marbles in their mouths. I am feeling terrific....If I had flown coach I think I would be the next evacuated corpse from an airline.

Last Day in Bangkok!

2006-10-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

We spent the morning doing some last-minute shopping. Took the gleaming new sky train to the upscale Siam Square district, where most expats choose to live, and where the GIGANTIC shopping centers are. We checked out the staggering Siam Paragon, which features lots of international luxury boutiques, an exotic car dealer and a top-end department store.

I wouldn't bother mentioning it except to say that on one of the upper floors there is an arcade of Thai products, ranging from textiles to furniture, fixtures, housewares, gifts and more. ALL of this stuff is of premium production value - incredible craftsmanship abounds! We could have spent the whole day there! I'm particularly impressed with what I would describe as a new Thai organic aesthetic, blending traditional styles with edgy contemporary design. It is innately appealing. I could happily live surrounded by much of what we saw.

We headed back to pick up our new clothes at the tailor and pack before going on for our evening flight. A few words to the wise about this monstrous airport: You might want to stock up on any sundries (no liquids as of today) for your flight. Inside the terminal there are only premium brand designer stores, duty free and, odly myriad cofee/juice/ice-cream stations. NO newsstands at all! Luckily I had stocked up on newspapers before leaving our hotel. I'm just a news junkie and get nervous if I don't have my reading material lined up for long flights. Also note that there are no services beyond security the security checkpoints. Only gates. So spend your remaining baht BEFORE you go through security!

Upon leaving Bangkok, I reflect on the old Bangkok vs. the new. I used to refer to it as a human cesspool - a labyrinthine jumble of humanity and chaos. Today, the city is absolutely transformed! There is of course much of the "character" of the old days, but now it is a fascinating, dynamic metropolis, thrusting itself headlong into the 21st century. In spite of the notorious traffic, it is utterly managable and non-intimidating. What particularly struck me was the quality of air. It is noticably better these days - even on a Monday - thanks in part to government incentives to fuel tuk-tuks and trucks with propane combined with fantastic new public transportation - which actually seems to be easing the traffic! I wax rhapsodic.

I look forward to returning sooner than later and really getting to know this place. Watch. Bangkok will really emerge as a destination in the next few years!

Grueling flight to Los Angeles, arriving one hour after our departure of course. Crashed at the Ritz-Carlton Marina Del Rey - as Ellison calls it "The best airport hotel at LAX". Our first meal back in the states? Pepperoni Pizza and a Cheeseburger of course!

Bangkok Day 2

2006-10-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

We were up relatively early for morning sightseeing to the usual spots. The Royal Palace, Wat Pho, the Golden Buddha and the weekend market. The weekend market is a riot. 30,000 stalls selling everything under the sun. The Royal Palace is impressive as much for it's painstaking construction (200 years ago) as it is for the merciless maintenance requirements. But the"Emerald Buddha" housed here has been fought over and moved around the region for centuries. It's only been here a short while! And let's be honest. The stupas and decorative adornments around the complex are just a little tacky, okay? Sorry King Bhumibol. It's true.

Still, the city beckons! After a light lunch we said goodbye to our excellent guide, Tukkie. The rest of the day we meandered, stopped by the tailor for another fitting and relaxed at the hotel.
We repeated the Bamboo Bar - Sky Bar combination before heading over to the Four Seasons to meet Dennis one last time. After a liquid dinner and some snacks we said "see ya later" to him and made our way to the infamous Patpong Road - or, as Laine so affectionately calls it, "Ping Pong Road"! That just slays me. Good thing we were lubed up too, because it would have been ghastly otherwise. We were in just the right humor to haggle with the street vendors selling all the crappy knock-offs! Thankfully, being with Laine mostly kept the pimps-cum-vultures away. We capped the night with a riotously over-priced tuk-tuk ride home. These guys know how to work it and it doesn't help a bit when you tell them the destination is the Oriental Hotel!

On to Bankok

2006-10-07T07:49:00.000-07:00

We were up early for checkout and transfer to Bangkok. Luckily, Saturday morning affords light traffic coming into the city. I can't believe how much the city has changed. It is actually clean now. Infrastructure is absolutely first rate. We got to town in time for lunch before heading to the tailors! Regarded by many to be one of the best in the world, World Group has been around the corner from the Oriental Hotel for 38 years. They just moved into a gorgeous new space literally next door to the hotel. We both had suits made and I got a few extra shirts copied from one of my favorites. Perfect!

Checkin at the Oriental was like coming home again. I hadn't stayed here in well over 15 years. Updates have been made to keep the rooms fresh, but the lobby is exactly the same - as it should be in my opinion. Luckily we got to stay in the garden wing, (I still call it the Old Wing), with it's famous split-level rooms overlooking the pool and river... and now the towering Peninsula on the other side! I showed Laine around before we freshened up for drinks and dinner with my brother-from-another-mother, Dennis Tan, and his wife Nung. Of course we had to sneak one in first at the Bamboo Bar! Still the same!

We headed down the street to the new (to me) State Tower, which has a restaurant and couple of rooftop bars on the 64th floor. Needless to say, the view is stunning. Bangkok has metamorphosed into a sparkling metropolis! I can't believe it. Dennis is fantastic as always. Nung is gorgeous and charming - a perfect complement to a man who is the definition of "class act"!

We eventually made our way to dinner at a swell Thai restaurant somewhere around Siam Square called Baan Kahnitha. We proceeded to gorge ourselves on a multitude of unpronounceable dishes from every region of Thailand. Fish, curried duck, prawns, pork, eggplant, and on and on. We even had a couple of bottles of actually drinkable Thai white wine which was a great accompaniment to the food! Dynamite meal! Highly recommended.

Spa Day!

2006-10-06T19:37:00.000-07:00

After sleeping in again until 8 we began the day with a woogie-woogie treatment by a Canadian woman named Rhonda, called a "rain-drop" therapy. (I'll try anything once....especially on the recommendation of the Pieter) This involved a very gentle process of dropping about 8 very pure essential oils on one's back...in a precise sequence all along the spine. The idea is to draw out toxins while listening to next-generation Enya-type hoo ha blah de blah. I prefer getting beat up during a massage. I'll try anything once.

In the afternoon, we went ahead with some more terrestrial treatments including chalk and coffee scrubs, massage and, for me, a coffee scrub along with an Indian head massage. The last cured me of a head cold I'd been carrying for a couple of days... seemingly within minutes!

We took it easy for the rest of the day, if that makes sense at all. After dinner at the comfy "living room" pavillion in the hotel we went back to our villa for one more moonlit swim.

That was when the call came from my sister, Ellison Poe, back home that our itinerary to New Zealand had WON the vote for NBC Today show's couple, Molly and Jason, just minutes before! What a fantastic reward at the end of a stress-free day! They would be heading off on their grand adventure in mere hours!!

Relaxing Day in Hua Hin

2006-10-05T18:42:00.000-07:00

Slept in today until 9:30! That was glorious. Went for breakfast and checked out the Earth Spa at the Hideaway. It's a series of earthen structures variously enclosing steam, massage, yoga rooms and a pillow-lined "chill-out" room. It was in the chill out room where we mulled the spa menu for what we'd do tomorrow...

In the afternoon, I dutifully headed out to make a site inspection of the Chiva Som spa resort in town - definitely worth it. This is a property focused entirely on cleansing and rejuvination. Alcohol and smoking are strongly discouraged. It's a first rate sanctuary with world class facilities. I met with the GM Paul, who gave me lots of insight. Chiva Som is a place where one goes to detoxify using an organic approach incorporating legitimate scientific support - all in ultimate comfort. I'd love to come back for three weeks!

In the evening we met the GM of the Hideaway for a drink before making our way into town for dinner. Stopped at the Sofitel Resort for a quick look before dinner at a swell Thai-Western fusion restaurant on the beach called Let's Sea. The owners were feverishly completing a modest hotel complex off the beach in time for high season, so there were almost no guests at the restaurant. Excellent meal. We headed home for another solid night of sleep before our spa day!

Transit to Hua Hin

2006-10-04T20:59:00.000-07:00

Got up painfully early at 6 for our flight to Bangkok. Both Laine and I were hurting pretty badly. She indulged in a foot massage at the airport - witch I ought to have! Should mention the scam the Cambodian authorities have going - $20 on-site visa issuance on arrival, yet there's a $25 exit tax! Huh?

We were met in BKK by our fantastic A&K guide, Tukkie! She whisked us away (facilitated by our nameless driver) in a swell black Benz sedan to Hua Hin, some three plus hours away. We chatted about lots of things along the way including, of course, the recent coup, changes in Thailand over the last 15 years, etc. We stopped along the way for lunch at an authentic Thai restaurant catering to local tourists from Bangkok - spicy!

On our arrival at the Evason Hideaway we were shown to our Villa Suite where we unwound before dinner. After dinner (at the end of a very long day) I made my way to the library to write a press release which turned out to be most timely - about the Today show honeymoons I put together. That paid off in the next days because our New Zealand itinerary won a couple of days later!

Angkor

2006-10-04T19:51:00.000-07:00

Up at 5:30, coffee and off in our black Amansara tuk-tuk "limo"! Our guide, Sen, was "sensational"! Ho ho ho.

First we headed to Angkor Wat before it got too hot and crowded. The worlds largest religious building is as intricately designed as one can imagine. The scale and precision boggles the mind. I'm sure lots of people have written gobs about it which I could never match. Definitely worth the trip - though I'd do it in low season next time. I was surprised at how much access we had to the entire structure, surely incurring more erosive damage to the sandstone masonry. Bas relief miraculously preserved for ages as if brand new....simply a must-see for anyone even remotely interested in archaeology.

We moved on to the "jungle temple" which has been completelely engulfed over the ages by creeping jungle, moss, lichens and it crumbles before our very eyes! Spectacular. A sculpture literally under natural construction by way of it's own destruction!

We took a noontime break for a shower, swim and lunch before heading back out in the waning heat of the day to see the city of Angkor Thom, including some of the less visited sites away from the crowds. We ended the day atop one temple where our friend Donald met us with a sundowner bottle of Tattinger - not bad at all....until we were gently asked to leave by the ever-diligent police! No harm done. It is just a requirement that civilians leave the complexes by dark!

We made our way back to the hotel for another shower before meeting our friends, photographer John McDermott and his wife, Narissa at John's world-class gallery. They then took us for dinner at an amazing, otherwise nondescript, restaurant (the name of which eludes me) in a part of Siem Reap which is undergoing a renaissance by the minute! Call it contemporary Cambodian with hints of western influence. After dinner, we walked down the street to check out their soon-to-be-opened gallery... which will be special. Somewhere along the line we indulged in multiple night-caps darting between a cool, styly bar and another gallery across the street which is topped by a cool, much-touted one-room hotel (!), entitled "One Hotel".

Needless to say, we tumbled (or stumbled) into bed for a long nap before our early departure in the morning back to Thailand.

Transit to Siem Reap

2006-10-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

Slept in 'till 8:00 today before breakfast, site inspection of La Residence (fab spa), breakfast and transfer to the airport for our flight to Siem Reap, Cambodia.

It was a long day of traveling which would be otherwise uninteresting, except that we transited through the new airport in Bangkok. Luckily our baggage made it through, inspite of the newsworthy problems they had been having. Most notably, asside from confusion at every level, there are no ATM's, no banks with credit card swipe machines - though these are promised in the near future. That was a and the fact that past security there are no services made it a little frustrating and unnerving. No big deal. Just beware when in Bangkok that if you have electronic banking needs you should take care of them before you go to the airport. Oh yeah, it is a beautiful building - an engineering feat. Still, we were glad to get through unencumbered.

Arrival at Siem Reap's new airport was at first exciting, but the visa-issuance and customs hall was utterly chaotic. These irritants quickly faded into memory upon our arrival at the stupendous Amansara hotel, where, true to form, the manager and friend, Donald awaited our arrival. This might be one of the most perfect hotels in the world - certainly in my jaded experience. We got in fairly late - 8:00pm or so. So, we showered, enjoyed a few glasses of champagne and snacks before collapsing into bed early in anticipation of our one full day of sight-seeing beginning early in the morning.

Luang Prabang - Day 3

2006-10-01T20:16:00.000-07:00

After a (late) breakfast we headed out to numerous villages - this time by some very bumpy roads. Again, each village is known for it's individual agrarian produce. Coriander, Ginger, Watercress, Green Onions, etc. Along the way we passed some of the slash/burn fields we might have seen on the flight in, where large plots of pineapple plantations and "mountain rice" were growing.

We also stopped at a couple of villages situated literally at the end of the road which are inhabited by the Hmong, who immigrated to Laos from Mongolia ages ago. These villages were most notable for their obvious lack of initiative. These villages were notably silent. Apparently the Hmong are better known (with obvious lack of Lao respect) for opium smoking and procreation. Children were running rampant, gleefully chasing ducks, goats and chickens for entertainment. Humbling to be sure. Being at the end of the "road" also got me charged up to come back and go trekking further afield to see what we might encounter. Alas, the time premium holds us back....for now!

On the way back to Luang Prabang, we diverted to a tiny weaving village to check in on some of the most elaborate silk work imaginable. We watched one woman finishing up one of her weavings and were quite taken with it. She was an apprentice and couldn't believe it when we asked if we could purchase her just-finished work right off the loom! I won't quote, but it was embarrassingly inexpensive. Gorgeous, intricate silk work which I cannot validly describe.

When we got back to town, Phoung met us again to take us for an introduction to a fascinating place right next to the L'Elephant restaurant, called OckPopTok. The gallery-cum-foundation was established six or so years ago by a bright young British expat and a local Lao weaving legend. The idea is that they are training locals from weaving villages to improve their techniques and market their products to the West. Very cool!

I made several hotel site inspections before we made our way back to the temple for another dose of the etherial chanting! We meandered through the night market for some shopping before dinner at the Villa Santi and then off to bed.

Luang Prabang - Day 2

2006-09-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

We were up at 5:00am to go see the monks again, this time during their morning pilgrimage through town. Along the way they accept offerings of rice from the public. The procession lasts an eternity as hundreds of orange-clad monks walk along, single-file down the road from their dormitories to the temples.

Next we headed to the morning market, which is decidedly NON-touristy! I suppose markets are a staple of any trip like this (so to speak) but this one was fun. What was most striking about it was the variety of things Laos find apetizing. These people will eat anything! Bamboo worms, frogs, crickets, stinky fish heads, foxes, guinea pigs, cats, snakes and of course all manner of delicious looking parts in the mix! YUM! Great way to get the appetite going before breakfast.

After said breakfast we headed out on a full-day on the Mekong River. We stopped at a couple of villages, whereupon we learned that most villages in Laos are simply known by their individual cottage industry. Today we visited the Pottery, Decorative Paper and Rice Whiskey Villages! The latter was where we witnessed a full-on throw-down going on at 2:00pm. The town was rockin'! We were invited to try some of the more potent rice liquor imaginable - spiked with some unidentified root. I thought surely we would begin hallucinating but alas that was not our fate.

The highlight of the day was our stop at the Pak Ou caves, filled with ages worth of buddhist detritus. Much looting has occurred here, but it was worth the trip. The three-hour round trip cruise on the Mekong was a delight and a welcome respite from the stiffling heat! The river has so little development along its banks that it must appear as it has for millenia. Images of Conrad's Kurtz inevitably entered my thoughts.

Back in town we snuck in a quick nap and swim before meeting our colleague, Phoung, from Trails of Indochina - a preferred business partner. Phoung is a super nice guy who took us to a fantastic restaurant, known for it's Mekong Fish - called 3 Nagas. It is owned by the attractive hotel (guest house really) of the same name directly across the street.

Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang

2006-09-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

We began the day with an official site inspection of the Dhara Dhevi resort along with my buddy Savas, the inimitable resident manager. It is just impossible to detail the scope of this place. We saw the new Colonial Wing scheduled to open on October 1 with much fanfare. The resort will be complete (for now) at that time. I decided the Dhara Dhevi is the destination. The owner designed it in concert with rising star architects whom he sent all over the region to study the styles and techniques of those who came many many generations before. The entire complex is laced with antiquities and art - surely priceless. His whole idea was to create an homage to the rich history of the region - a living museum.

The finished product is astonishing. As cliche as it sounds, they a have achieved a resort which comprises of something for everyone. Swell kids' club including activities such as rice farming (!) weaving, etc. The aforementioned spa speaks for itself - etherial! There is a stellar cooking school on premises as well. This would be the perfect destination resort for a small family or, even better a couple wishing to truly get away from everything while having all manner of culture at immediate disposal. The library alone could keep me busy for weeks! Years!

We took our flight to Luang Prabang on this partly cloudy (remarkably unbumpy) afternoon. It was poignant flying over rugged, jungle-coated mountains, speckled with tiny, isolated villages. Tragically, patches of obvilously slash-and-burn agricultural clearings dot the landscape.

Landing in Luang Prabang was striking, as the red-roofs of the town emerged from the greenery along with the odd gold-gilt stupas scattered about. After a comical (endearing really) visa-issuance and customs experience we were greeted by our perpetually broadly smiling guide, Som Phone (Sum Pun). We checked in to La Residence Phou Vao around 3:00pm but still crammed in the Royal Palace and something like four temples (mostly on foot) in the next few hours. In spite of Som Phone's easy, charming, and low-key demeanor, the afternoon was precisely planned choc-a-bloc and executed minute-by-minute! Luang Prabang truly has a "Shangri La" air to it, and even though we rushed about (including a sweaty 300+ step climb to the top of Phousi Hill for sunset) it all seemed so so relaxed!

The highlight of the day - and possibly the whole trip was our visit at dusk - to a temple on the main drag to watch the novice monks chanting for some 45 minutes. Words cannot describe how magical it was. I felt self-conscious intruding on the space of these young men in at their most spiritual time. Still, the senior monk conducting the proceedings came out afterwards to engage us in 20 minutes of conversation - thrilled to know about us and to tell us all about what we had just witnessed!

We then sauntered through the night market perusing various tourist swag and (extremely well-made and inexpensive) handicrafts before heading to the hotel for a much-needed shower and dinner before crashing hard!

Chiang Mai in a Day!

2006-09-28T19:40:00.000-07:00

People wax rhapsodic about Chiang Mai and I fail to understand why. After a delicious breakfast of rice soup with minced pork dumplings we headed out with Van to see the main temple of the city...less than awe-inspiring but we felt we were doing the right thing anyway... it's claim to fame is a Buddha that has traveled the region more than Buddha himself ever dreamed. We next headed up to a garish temple several thousand feet and many curves later above the city most notably featuring a spectacular view of the valley below.

Chiang Mai resembles any semi-modern Asian town - featuring row upon row of concrete low-rises garnished with garish signs advertizing anything from tire patching services to noodle shops. The noodle shops were the next stop where Van took us for a magnificent bowl of bits and pieces I'd rather not identify. Fantastic!

We took the rest of the afternoon to work off the remaining jetlag back at "the complex". Laine had a manicure and I lounged around our luxuriant villa contemplating just how surreal this resort is.

We headed back into town for dinner at the stylish renovated hotel, Rachamankha. Great space, great dinner. I figure this is a good hotel for those who like style on a budget. Not bad. Walkable to the Night Market which we could not muster the strength to visit. Shopping must wait until Bangkok at the end of the trip! a

More Enchanting Chiang Mai

2006-09-27T19:33:00.000-07:00

Well, we did indulge in the spa at the luxuriant Dhara Dhevi. WOW. We had a traditional Thai massage in an oppulent reproduction of a Lanna style temple complex. Someone described it as "lazy yoga", an apt description to be sure! Who could imagine that these tiny women could beat us up so! We ended the day dead asleep by 7:00pm. Up again at 5:00am for delicious coffee before heading out with our superior guide, Van...

Arrival in "The Land of Smiles"

2006-09-26T23:39:00.000-07:00

After a seemingly endless 37 hour journey, (including a welcome layover visit with friends in L.A.), we finally arrived in Chaing Mai. The transpacific flight was uneventful. Security is normal...everything is normal in Thailand. A few soldiers brandishing weapons roam around, but certainly no more than in many places. Everyone in the land of smiles seems to be smiling a lot these days.

Curiously, as we transited through Bangkok, we quickly learned that today was the last day of operation at the old airport! The new airport, Suvarnabhumi, is due to make its full debut tomorrow. The new terminal claims to be the largest single terminal in the world...and they will have the tallest control tower in the world....until the next one comes along! Trivia. We were there. Yay.

Chiang Mai of course is enchanting. We really breezed through before checking in to the STUNNING Dhara Dhevi and our embarrassingly opulent villa, overlooking the working rice farm at the center of the complex. The spa beckons, thus ending this update. Tomorrow we'll tour and make even more use of this lucious specimen of a resort before heading on to Luang Prabang!

Poe Traveler Heading to the "New Thailand"

2006-09-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

After closely watching the events of the last two days in Bangkok I have decided it is perfectly safe to press on with our planned journey to Southeast Asia on Monday the 25th. Stay tuned here for updates from the theater! Hopefuly we'll figure out how to upload photos for the first time. Stay tuned for the first report on 27 September from Chiang Mai!

Ciao
t

A Summary of Recent Days

2006-01-09T07:19:00.000-08:00

Krakow Saturday the 7th, 24 degrees, very windy and snowy and really bitterly cold.....though interiors nicely toasty.

I got up at the crack of dawn Wednesday and took the train to Lodz, super heavy snowfall delaying trains all over southern Poland....1 1/2 hours late into Czestochowa only usually a 1 1/2 hour trip....Lodz has two stations and I arrived at the rather distant Kaliska, nicely rebuilt....the NEW Poland is trying its damndest to be handicapped friendly. The Grand Hotel is a circa 1900 building, fuss and feathers, located right on Piotorkowska, the longest pedestrian street in all of Poland about 2 miles long and filled with students operated pedicabs which makes for great fun.....I can't believe how the super ugly city (the Butte of Europe though with circa 700,000 people) has brightened up!....it is still a visual horror but a lot of attention has been given to restoring the dozens of major town villas of the late tycoon families...this one mock gothic, the next curiously renaissance, the next glorious Judendstil (which they call Sezession in Poland)....I spent lots of Wed at the former Israel Poznanski palais, the largest of them all and now a well conveived museum of ths history of the city.....there is a wing dedicated to one of its favorite sons, Artur Rubenstin, with his recorded music playing and a thousand mementos of his life (a man said to have loved more women, drank more vodka and played better piano of anyone of the 20th century)....there are wrenching photos of the Lodz ghetto....and the story then emerges that until Hitler the city was a showcase, almost an eden, of religious tolerance between the three elements of the city, a strikingly anti Nazi German minority, the Polish minority, the Jewish minority...no one was in the majority which might explain the harmony, great photos of the oligarchs all enjoing each other with names as diverse as said Poznanski, Scheibler (the German tycoon of tycoons), Ostrowski (the polish).....I pondered a long time about the huge fortune places have when they have many different peoples.
It is only when one MAJORITY oppresses the other than things get sticky.

I then went to another great villa (these mansions quite pre- Chenal when I think about it) to Europe's first modern art museum.....It is a thriller really...heavy on Chagall, tons of Polish valid painters (of the type collected in the Hotel Wentzl dining room) whom the west does not know, lots of Max Ernst and current through people like the German Expresisonists (a great Heckl) and a few American modernists......It says so much about Lodz....and my next, last, museum is devoted to the Lodz film school, the place that produced great directors such as Wayda and Pollanski.

Lodz still has a tiny Jewish presence and I went to a really warm, chic little restaurant called Anatewka where the welcome is lovely, the food has much more spice (and garlic) than the average Polish dishes which I find quite tame, a place where a young Jewish girl violinist sits on the top of a ladder and plays old shtetl songs (slightly "fiddler on the roof" sentimental but nice all the same)....a second good dinner at the Grand, typically polish with the incomporable Zurek (the white borscht with quail eggs and mild wurstl) great duck.....Lodz is a bit of all right and most people on Planet Earth will hate the place. Certainly Poles do and yet the people of Lodz have a certain spritz which someone mute in Polish can feel.....it IS my favorite place in the nation...though Krakow is the beguiler. It is a shame that country collecting tourists seem content with Warsaw...certainly a vibrant place but one with essential the antiquity of Oklahoma City after the wartime destruction.

Yes, Poland turns the mind on.....the people are SO kind....the train trip back from Lodz ran on time...I had a sentimental dinner at Wentzl last night and only felt homesickness from my family...remembering the fabulous dinner you hosted, Ellison.

This afternoon I am going to the Galleria (yes, that is what it is called) in Kazimierz the once Jewish quarter...it is supposedly Poland's Cats' Meow (Chanel opened there yesterday)...and it should be a curious experience.

Hello to all....

FRED

Back in Poland

2006-01-09T07:17:00.000-08:00

The Poe Family was in Slovakia and Poland during the holidays. Fred stayed on in Poland - traveling from Krakow to Lodz. Stay tuned for an update...

Sopot IV

2005-08-12T10:07:00.000-07:00

We drove into Central Poland, a land of less beauty, of more war time destruction and awful-communist era rebuilding (I swear to God if they COULD make anything ugly they did)....gray apartment blocks, concrete factories often abandoned...even the storks' nests began to disappear.

The village and towns are largely forgettable until a great Teutonic castle on a hill, a real travel poster candidate at a place unlovingly named Golub-Dobrzyun....and then entry into what ought to be an ultra-major European tourist goal for the GRAND TOUR, the great small university city of TORUN, the birthplace of Copernicus, a mostly brick Hanseatic era town on the Vistula. Its old town section, egg shaped and I would say roughly a mile and a half in length and half that in width, is utterly pure...yet not SO perfect in a gruesome Nantucket- Williamsburg way as to be itsy poo and cloying. There are some ugly buildings here and there (only a few) and the shops actually sell things like brassieres and hockey sticks and grapefruit....not just amber to the horizon. The town IS famous for the gingerbread (some recipes go back to the 14th century) and certain streets smell wonderfully of it baking.

The absolute gem is St Mary's, not the cathedral...St Mary's has no tower (the Dominicans were aghast as such ostentation the local legend says)....but the stained glass absolutely rivals Notre Dame or Strasbourg and is worth a trip to Europe....the altar is a great sunburst (Copernicus again?....a glowing orb in a somber building...thrilling, utterly thrilling..

Torun actually was THE center for all of Central Europe in glass staining and this craft is still practiced today in many local workshops...although most of them make things like parrot or smile-symbol plaques to hang in a window. Ugh. Torun is a magical place to prowl....there are three lovely hotels

Adam and I ate gingerbread (he ordered 16 different kinds of cookies which we split and ate in a diabetic orgy)...we poke into courtyards, into a couple of student bars (including one replete with ghastly momentos from the DDR including a TRABANT auto)....Adam does NOT drink alcohol (he says his Polish friends think he is a freak)....but is hardly a born again prohibitionist.

Torun has all manner of cheerful curiosities: a leaning tower, little bronze statues here and there of Polish folklore creatures (sort of like the papier mache pigs which were put for a merry short time around central Little Rock...and which were, of course, vandalized)....I did not want to leave yesterday to drive north to the THREE CITIES.....Gdynia (the Polish port creation...now the richest burg in the land), Gdansk and inbetween Sopot with its Germanic villas and this heap of a late Jugendstil hotel....

the Grand Hotel here is a gas...the beach is wonderful. The dining room has fairly repellent but important looking food, the breakfast is the worst I have had in Poland but immensely abundant...it is a place which has not QUITE awakened from the recent Communist past although everyone could not be nicer. My room would no doubt please Eva Braun....the hotel DID please Hitler.

Fred

Sopot III

2005-08-12T09:08:00.000-07:00

We head from positive-feeling Sejny through more lakelands, lakes connected by artful lock-filled canals, through Augustow (a sort of Bemidji, Minnesota in summer filled with people carrying rubber beach toys and kayaks) then through deep deep forests into Bialystok. Somewhere around here my aunt and uncle (I called Pawpaw and Aunt Byrd) had purchased a forest after Pawpaw, quite a rich man, had been forced near bankruptcy by prohibition (and the end of the stave business in which he had made a fortune)....they were bound for Montreal to board the old liner STEFAN BATORY when they received the news that Molotov and Ribbentrop had divided Poland...that their forest was now in the USSR.....and somewhere, perhaps on our drive, it must still stand. If I could find the deeds somewhere I could perhaps make a Bialystok lawyer's day to try and reclaim!

Bialystok (the "l" has a cross on it so the pronunciation is essentially
byaw-is-toke) was the Tsarist equivalent of German Lodz: a great textile center. The noble Braniscki family had a large palace here around which the town grew....mostly Jewish (something like 80% at the beginning of the end)....It has a wildly extravagant history.....from being Tsarist, it was for a short time at the end of WW1 the "capital" of Soviet Poland...ruled by the local biggie Red Felix Dzierzynski (who was the head of Lenin's first and perhaps most dreaded GPU-NKVD-KGB and other morphs)....his rule (he spoke to the masses from the balcony of the Branickich Palace, was replaced by that of Pilsudski, the Polish patriot from who actually mostly Lithuanian by roots from up the road......The nicest person I could find who was BORN in Bialystok was Ludwik Zamenhof the creator of ESPERANTO, which surely is one of history's most noble failures.

Polish people seem to laugh at Bialystok folk for their accents and for the fact that their city (much like Lodz) is unlovely. Unlike Lodz, it IS a backwater though it has a university. We stayed at a mammoth former state hotel which has a tropical theme park with waterslides (all inside...this is the coldest part of the whole nation) and an olympic pool. There is not much to see but we made the best of it. The ARMY Museum has THE Enigma Machine which the Polish underground found and which helped immeasurably in the Allied cause in WW2 breaking codes......There is an absolutely wrenchingly simple monument where the Great Synagogue, one of the largest in the world, was burned with, it is said, 2,000 of the religionists inside it.

Bialystok made a great base though for travels towards the Belarus Frontier. Poland and Belarus are sniping a good bit at each other. Belarus has a largely denied Polish minority (their large city of Grodno has a Polish majority) while Poland is giving its Belarus minority full rights: education, religion, etc. It is tense feeling at the actual border and one feels at the end of the earth there. We drove EAST and then on ghastly country roads, some of the only ones in Europe I can remember with no paving, through absolutely the TAIL END OF THE KNOWN EUROPEAN WORLD....past a goose collective which must have had 10,000 of the winged beasts....and into Kruszyniamy, a tatar-muslim village. We were lucky in finding the imam at the mosque, a dour, asiatic looking though rather welcoming soul who opened the mosque, walked us up the hill to the cememtery (for Tatars from all over Poland come to be buried...it is huge, beautifully situated under linden trees).....These mongol peoples have been around the area for a long time....the village traces back to 1386....and here they sit still, unmolested by Nazi, Polish fascist, Soviet or do-gooders.

We drive north to the local big town, KRYNKI...and the little villages, mostly with wooden houses with an enormous number of huge stork nests, feel like shtetls...they WERE....a land right out of I.B. Singer, a land now of ghosts. Krynki is a spooky place. The imam told us that before the 2nd world war it had 10,000 people, 8,000 of whom were Jews. Today the synagogue building is a disused cinema with an old poster for GONE WITH THE WIND in tatters but recognizable. Back to Bialystok and a swim....

We leave in the morning to the famous synagogue town of Tykocin: it is one town where the synagogue (a slightly baroque-looking late gothic heap) is larger than the church. The Radziwill family came from around here and some of these Polish magnates apparently paid the Nazis NOT to destroy the edifice when they murdered the local Jews....so here it sits: a great building serving no purpose than to be a pilgrimage site for Israeli youth coming to Poland.

We arrived about 20 minutes early and the renitent shrew who is the director would not let us in. I had a bit of a malefic fit.....then cross country to one of the most chilling sites in Europe, the small town (it is larger than a village) of Jebwabne. Here, in total contrast to the townspeople of Sejny, a group of vigilante-Ku Klux Klan type of local farmer/trouble makers committed one of the most horrible acts in a period of horrible acts. The town had been awarded to the USSR by the Molotov Ribbentrop pact...but was almost on the border of the General Government, the part of Poland which was under German control. When the local Vigliantes heard that the Germans were attacking Russia and BEFORE the Germans got there, they rounded up over 100 of the town's Jews, herded them into a barn and set it ablaze. For many years it was assumed that the Germans had done this....for the Nazi Einsaztgruppen did such things with abandon. Only when some honest townspeople began to tell the real story did the truth come out. The story was greatly publicized all over Poland (and the world...but the world doesn't listen very closely I fear) and the story has done much to teach the Polish people of those times....I hope that the gruesome happening (a mass lynching if you will) will be a historical purgative. There is absolutely no doubt that the Polish people are becoming intensely interested in their lost Jewish fellow countrymen today. At Jebwabne (and it is far from a main road) there were scores of Poles who had come to the simple, stirring monument (including a shard of the burned barn) to pay their respects. It was somehow an intensely personal place to visit and while my reaction may be illusory I came away feeling better about Poland.

You are probably deep in sleep...but one more follows!

FRED

Sopot II

2005-08-12T07:22:00.000-07:00

Swieta Lipka was for me a different kind of mental purging from Stutthof.
The church in retrospect is this: a lovely baroque shell then done to death (it is the religious equivalent of a new Las Vegas hotel) with the wrong colors (blue and green to replicate I suppose malachite), gold which is too shiny, overrestored ugly religious paintings and frescoes.....I am sure that the Polish Americans from Hamtramck or Ypsilanti or wherever love the place.

Now we drive through the pretty lakelands, through the town the Poles call Kestrzyn (pronounced ken-shin more or less) to Gierlos....this in the Nazi times would have been through the Prussian town of Rastenburg to the Wolf's Lair headquarters of Hitler. I had pictured the area unpopulated, deeply forested, possessing a feeling of never never land. It isn't quite that.

Of course the headquarters site is in a thick copse (rather than great forest), one across which nets could be strung as camouflage to change with the seasons. The actual site of the Stauffenburg attempt on Hitler's life is a great pile of concrete....a rock crusher-like feeling...and what one makes out of it is what one brings to it. I was chilled. Even though the attempt was too little vastly too late (no one much tried to slay him while the Nazis were winning), had the attempt succeeded maybe a million people or their descendents would still be alive. Lodz, for example, had still over 100,000 in the ghetto when the attempt was made.

We drive down to the road to a tidy, rather suburban looking villa on a pretty lake: here was the house of Eva Braun. where Hitler could sneak away to from that farrago of military/political buildings....where Hitler could exult in his vegetarianism, play with his dog, possibly have sex with Frl Braun and be his other self. It was just odd as hell to sleep where SHE slept. From all reports she was a colorless little entity possibly with a bust size larger than her IQ....still, it felt odd to sleep in her house and to eat a Wienerschnitzel where Hitler had his mass of greens. Adam went swimming in the reedy lake and I ruminated.

The next morning we drove away on especially back lanes, stopping at the German actual MILITARY headquarters where there are still intact bunkers to explore and towers to ascend.....I ascended one, Adam several....then almost cheek-jowl along the Russian border (remember East Prussia was divided between Russia and Poland...) through Goldap (a scraggly place full of Russian whores who have come over for the day for the Polish largesse)....through intensely pretty countryside, rolling...out of what WAS German into what WAS Tsarist Russia and later intrinsically Poland....The area knmown as the Suwalszczyna...the land of the great writer Czeslaw Milosz, my favorite Polish author, for me a sort of combination of Faulner and Welty but in a highly agrarian Polish sense.

His NEW YORKER stories are fine, his novels magnificent, (he is a Nobelist), his poetry pretty damned obscure (but maybe it is the translation?)...at any rate, I felt him, FELT HIM as we wandered along.... passing a great double railway viaduct that the Germans had built in expectation of having a rail line east, now serving as a cynosure for picnics, etc. We head along the now-Lithuanian frontier to the remarkable town of Sejny.....the seat of a lovely mostly baroque church and one of the prettiest classical synagogues which remains in Poland.

I liked Sejny: the people of the town came together to restore the synagogue (which the Nazis had turned into a fire station) in deference to their slain Jewish compatriots.....a site perhaps unique in Poland....and today Sejny is the headquarters of the Borderland Association, a group to foster ties and exchanges with the Lithuanians and Belarussians for both borders almost abut the town....the town also has a well known Klezmar band which apparently (and to the pride of the town) came in second in a Klezmar competition in Brooklyn!.....a klezmar band minus Jews of course.

-Fred

Northeastern Poland

2005-08-12T05:06:00.000-07:00

Sopot, August 12th...it is about 930 AM, the sky is steel colored as is the Baltic out my window: they seem to merge...and maybe Copernicus was wrong?

These notes will start a longish report and I figure it will bore you to death. I write these lines for myself...for future writing....and you, dear friend, just happen to be stuck with my musings.

Adam Serbinowski and I started out at 900 AM and drove to Stutthof....the particularly heinous (and somewhat forgotten) camp which the Nazis in Gdansk had actually started (as they did with their list of intellectuals- socialists-all Jews etc) while the city was still under the protection of the League of Nations. On the way, we drive past the former villa of the local gauleiter, FORSTER, with great hunting grounds. He was the malefic type of guy who would stock the woods with deer and wild boar and then kill then along with guest Nazi factota from Berlin. Stutthof, like the other camps I have seen, sits in pretty countryside...in this case on a long sandy spit with weeping willows and Lorraine poplars all over the place...And yet, (perhaps it is what we brought to it) the place exerts a chill as we walk up to the main gate. No "Arbeit Mach Frei" here...merely a couple of watch towers and then barracks stretching almost to the horizon.

The ground here is particularly sandy and devoid of nutrients and this contributed to the general dysentary experienced by the prionsers. The "hospital" block was merely a killing field. A series of films are shown, oddly dispassionate for no adjectives are needed. After the initial complement of Gdansk Free City prisoners, others started arriving deracinated from as far away as Vienna....and slowly, methodically, the place turned into a killing center. When the Red Army had taken Koenigsburg (Kaliningrad) and were headed towards Stutthof, the living prisoners were marched out into still wet snow (many barefoot) for forced marches toward Germany. Again, I wonder at my motive for coming to such a place...but I feel like I am making a memorial to the victims. Stutthof must be remembered. It is probably the largest death camp where the majority of those murdered were not Jews.

We drove silently (Adam possesses the great quality of not having to make
conversation) south....on oak-tree lined country roads...He absolutely understood that I wanted only the back roads and little hamlets. These were mostly German until 1945, red brick, Hanseatic-looking with towering village churches, severe...once protestant of course, now catholic. We drove past some remarkable ones....to Frombork and its great Teutonic Knight castle (which our family had visited in our funky little rented Fiat from Sopot 30-odd years ago) and then deeper into Masuria, that land of East Prussia with Minnesota-like lakes and tidy little brick towns.
Terrific churches here and there (Ornata particularly)....and it is gratifying to see that the Polish inhabitants (many here came from what is now firmly Lithuania when the Germans were expelled) are as prim and orderly as the Teutons. There is an absolute noticeable absence of litter.

We head for the great Polish pilgrimage site of Swieta Lipka. Isn't it rather interesting that great miracles happen mostly in Roman Catholic regions? Hmmm......This site has to do with some poor clod who was a prisoner of the Teutonic Knights but who was released and who in gratitude placed a statue of the Virgin Mother on a lime tree...to which subsequent people came and were cured of this and that. The site is between two pretty little lakes....and is a baroque explosion, almost shocking after the inorante brick of the villages. There is a quite wonderful wrought iron gate (which has been painted a sort of nile green...the church hereabouts has no more taste than it does in LR where they put astroturf on the steps)..Inside is the predictable throng of mostly older women with Pillsbury Doughboy faces all looking reverent...a huge organ (fanciful too...done by a famous Jewish organ maker from Koenigsburg in the early 18th century) is playing with many objects on it jumping about not quite in synch....ah, a baroque Disneyland....and I feel a little guilty at being so fractious about a place which pleases the local masses so.

- F

Arrival in Sopot

2005-08-11T18:53:00.000-07:00

Sopot Thursday evening Aug 11th, 65 degrees and drizzly...

It is so dejavu all over again to be here at the Grand Hotel (where Hitler lounged after he took Gdansk to start the 2nd world war). I have a huge old fashioned room with a balcony overlooking the steel gray Baltic. A bathroom big enough for a convetion and the oddest bidet of my travels. So all is still right in the world.

I will write about my trip to Northern Poland in sections.

I feel as though I have been as close to the edge of the earth as I felt in Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas. Northeast Poland is a glorious/evocative/often troubling/quite riveting place. First of all, the driver was a friend for life. His name is Adam Serbenowski, 36, who is recently separated from his wife and 10 year old son, a guy working now as an actuary (and making semi big bucks) but who was an English teacher for 3-4 years and misses using the language. He showed up in a splendid Nissan hatchback....all up to snuff. Adam is average height, slighter but with a strong build, a roman nose, a shaved head, good strong eyes...good looking but modest.....and his English knows all of the idioms and even latest sayings like "designated driver" and older ones like "move it or milk it." The only caveat is that his sense of direction is terrible...but we had good maps and I am a dandy navigator. We took only BACK roads...little 1 1/2 lane (at most) pavements which wandered through the Masury lakelands and into the borderlands with first Russia (the Kaliningrad district), Lithuania and finally Belarus. We saw sights from Hitler's assassination spot to the memorial for the Jewabne pogrom to the largest muslim village in Poland and I want to write about these places in a day or two to come. MASURKAS did a fabulous job of hotels...and in finding Adam....I really NEED to sleep and reflect before I can be remotely cogent. It is fun after just over 30 years to be in Sopot again...all grown up and oddly chic (especially after the ultra boonies of the last few days)...and I so remember such a happy family time here then. All goes awfully well...the Grand is dedicating a computer room to me at no cost (Poles continue to floor me with their frequent little courtesies)...so prepare to be bored beyong screaming.

- FRED

August 6th Gdansk

2005-08-07T17:50:00.000-07:00

August 6th Gdansk....cloudless skies...then biting cold rain...then a sky and light right out of Vermeer....

The Dominican Fair in Gdansk is the local equivalent of LR's Riverfest with lots of people walking around eating waffles topped with schlag....the locals call them gofrys....(from gauffre?)....all kinds of folk groups entertaining...I am drawn to an authentic Sioux American troupe...all dressed out in buckskins (which looks like ultrasuede) wearing lavish headdresses of birds which probably never were. After their odd performance on Polish Radio, I speak with one of the real Americans: He can only speak Portuguese and one wonders if Vasco De got up the Missouri.

Everyone good natured. A lovely young woman stops me on the street (I am wearing a slicker Ellison gave me 20 years ago with SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE on it) to announce that she has applied to Sarah Lawrence, is Lithuanian and hopes that they will receive her in 2007!

Dinner tonight...the last splurge:

Amusement: A salmon carpaccio with dill...a vodka with a good Hevelius local beer...
First: Ecrevisse in a saffron sauce with little puff pastry doo-dahs
Main: A veal breast wrapped around feta, wild mushrooms and spinach (maybe
kale)
Dessert: Wild raspberries on a vanilla ice (not ice cream)with schlagobers and diced mint espresso and the obligatory Danziger Goldwasser (the latter makes me sneeze...I walk across the street to the Marina and sneeze for 20 minutes)

Poland is not what you think.

Fred

Gdansk Aug 5th

2005-08-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

Gdansk Aug 5th, sunny, chilly.

A quick note or two only today...Took the train west just to sample the Pomeranian countryside: rolling, pleasing,deep forest copses, rich looking land with wheat and what looks to my urban eyes as peas....but surely not vast fields of them? Went to Slupsk which is pronounced SWOOPSK and is right enjoyable to say! It's a formerly mostly German town (and looks it), one of the few in the area which seems relatively unscathed by WWII....a rather nice local museum with the usual armor, stuffed birds, farm implements...but this one having a good picture gallery with early 20th century Polish stuff, some nice pieces, lots of portraits somehow greatly influenced by Egon Schiele.

Came back to Gdansk and wandered the streets...for the Dominican Market, a street market which is supposed to have gone back to the 13th century....who can count?...which explains all of the kitsch in every visible direction...lots of buskers about though which is fun. I had thought of buying my beloved granddaughter Jane something nice in amber but there is so damned much amber around that nothing looks very pretty. We'll see.

In Gdansk they are making a huge thing out of the 40th anniversary of SOLIDARITY and well they should...some terrific political posters around...I learn too that they are going to open the house of the Nazi boss of Danzig (Forster) to the public as a sort of chamber of horrors...He was a particularly bad one: He had helped organize a long list of locals (socialists/poles/jews of course/intellectuals to be arrested immediately when the invasion (he was in the loop)....they had already staked out the notorious STUTTHOF camp, one of the really worst ones, which I will visit on my way Sunday to the Wolf's Lair at Rastenburg....I am keen to stay there in Eva Braun's bungalow....maybe there are ghosts...(Unity Mitford said that Eva had absolutely "no conversation.").

The question for the day:

Czy moj polski jest tok zly????

Fred

Gdansk, August 4th

2005-08-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

I woke with heavy rain and cold, Arkansas-like late November cold, weather. A good day to spend in museums and a good day to be in a city and not in the hinterlands. First to the Narodowe Museum, a great gothic heap restored from ashes.....lots and lots of gothic madonnas (after a while they look a bit like medieval barbie dolls), a Wal-Mart full of precious porcelain (though the early Delft...and not all blue...was something)...but what knocked me on my ass was the first Hans Memling Triptych. The huge thing was commissioned by the Medicis' banker...and was hijacked on its way to Italy by the Kapers, those Danzig pirates underwritten by the local oligarchy (they were Scots, Poles, Prussian, Kashubian and Lithuanian pirates.....the 15th-16th century equivalent of Air America/)...the great hulk of this triptych languished in Gdansk until Napoloean stole it after Tilsit...it was returned to Danzig...then stolen again by the Nazis...only to be found in the DDR deep in a Thuringian air tight cave by the Russians...and returned again. It is larger than life and is bound to give anyone a nifty frisson....The center panel is all about the Second Coming of Christ, to the right is hell...to the left is heaven (a nice twist)...the angles and archangels are massive, the normal people lilluputian. I sat there for such a long time that the guard came up and asked, I think, if I were ill. The museum's other biggie is the only round painting Breughel Daddy ever did...and it, too is a glory. Afterwards I went to the mass at the Dominican Church, a great gothic heap, the only big builidng not blitzed in the liberation....a fine organ but a rather saturnine and definitely jejune congregation considering it is Poland.

Coming out of the mass the skies cleared almost biblically and again we are dealing with a sky which looks irradiated....again Magritte sans hats.

I spooked around the other good hotel, the HANZA, which rather artfully blends into the Hanseatic facades along the waterfront....and inside is a very successful blend of fake gothic and Lipschitz-like sculpture....I had a bar dinner....a vodka and local Hevelius beer (gassy but ok the beer)...then a chlodnik, a soup of veal reducation with almost hard boiled egg and smoked ham all nicely served in a lovely bread basket....then chicken somehow....and a good espresso. Again I am struck by how inately chic these people have, especially when I consider that the Gdansk guy is a sort of NEW Pole, the equivalent in the USA of someone living west of Ft Smith, with few aristocratic blood lines.

I can see why the Viennese treasure their Polish friends while the Germans, the non-Viennese-Austrians, the Russians all seem to loathe the Poles, very possibly for this natural if cositive chic. I sit by a window and the sky has turned cerulean with the pinkish clouds looking unlike our pinkish sunset clouds.

The day's malaprop on a poster involving the Polska Philharmonika Baltyka; an English transation. "The September premiere will reveal a punctuated Bartok."

So much for Gdansk today.

FRED

Gdansk 08/04

2005-08-05T12:05:00.000-07:00

When the sun shines, the city shines with an efullugence which makes the spots jump around in the eyes!....Gdansk/Danzig was never very large....when it was the League of Nations Free City it barely had 400,000 people...and yet its historical role is mammoth....and not just the 20th century years. The Gdansk merchant class were as rich as pompous as the Spanish court in the 15th and 16th century, building great mansions and guildhalls, the renaissance rooms being lovingly restored and stuffed with the oddest things.

Neptune of course was huge and the fountains/bricabrac/furniture with Neptunian themes abound. Red was the color of choice in things...perhaps because winter up here is no doubt extremely monochrome. The city had huge minorities then: there are two sections of town called "Old" and "New" Scotland...a large and rather patrician Jewish community which the Nazis of course obliterated...even the odd Arab and Chinese: Such was the city's trade.

The inventor idiot-savant Fahrenheit invented the mercury thermometer here (and gave the United States of America a way of telling the weather which separates us from every single other bit of the known world). Schopenhauer was born here but his allegiance oddly was more to Poland than to Prussia which irritated Potsdam to the quick. I am a little chary of too much Malthus talk about place vs personality (how in God's name to explain the Zulus?) but some things seem for sure. Danzig/Gdansk produced rebels/heretics by the score. Look at Lech Walesa as the most recent example. He who is unfortunately alive and not martyred, he who was chucked out much as Churchill was. It's in the soil? It's in the air? One thing is for damned sure, the light here is wrenchingly beautiful when the sun does shine.

OK that's Gdansk for the moment. All is not bliss. The more highly restored areas are frantically popular with Polish tourists as ugly as any...street martkitchstands-and people do wander around rather distressingly eating ice cream cones and carrying balloons. There is enough amber to turn the world a hepatitis-yellow and much is sure to be fake. (The test: rub a kleenex on a piece of it...if light paper then adheres magnet-fashion, it is real). There are no antiques though: Too many wars, rapes, expulsions. The Soviets tried to move as many of the Poles out of their "liberated" city of Vilnius (Wilno) as possible and leave it to the Lithuanians. Many of these people ended here. One hopes in this century that these horrible sweeps of people might stop...I thought they had with Hitler and Stalin...but then came Bosnia and then came Rwanda. The Poles though have no one much in their borders to hate and I am sure it rather bewilders them.

- FRED

Gdansk 08/03

2005-08-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

Gdansk Wednesday Aug 3rd......700 PM.....the day has been in the 70s and alternates sunny (that Rene Magritte "umbrella" sky without the umbrellas) and moody....just right!

Today has been discovering the past, often the recent past. I took a little ferryboat to Westerplatte, the lovely green spit which guards Gdansk's harbor where the Nazis in their huge battleship Schleswig Holstein fired the first shots of the 2nd World War, September 1st, 1939.

Gdansk, lying where the mighty Vistula River which comes from the Tatras above Krakow and goes through Warsaw, empties into the Baltic. It has been a major place for a thousand years and Frederick the Great said whomever owned Danzig owned Poland. Hitler must have read his mentor. Today at Westerplatte, around the quite gruesome Socialist-realist monument to the martyred Polish defenders, there were two large German tour groups.....both noisy (endemic to groups) but particular hideous and largely pinquid. I was reminded of Japanese tourists on that boat trip I took to Pearl Harbor. The nerve! Not only were the Polish Westerplatte troops martyred, so were the workers in the city's Polish Post Office....an event so well done by that German-Kashubian (a local minor Slavic tribe) great Grunter Grass. Poland excels in martyrs.....Grass was born in Gdansk when it was the Free City of Danzig (a League of Nations invention) and even though German was his language he is revered here and he is not even dead---yet. The Poles like the Viennese do seem to prefer their heroes to be dead though a fair number of them are alas also chronic.

Aside: I also went to about a half dozen major churches today including St Mary's said to be the largest brick building in the entire world. It was ashes after the Soviet Liberation.....and the restoration as commented before is beyond brilliant. I wonder though about the role of the church. I noticed in Quebec that the almighty church has essentially become a tool of just weddings and funerals after the Anglicanization threat passed. Now that the Polish Pope is dead (and the mightily unsympathetic...and Bavarian to boot....Benedict rules), now that Communism is gone, I wonder if slowly the Church here will become just baptism, weddings and funerals.
It seemed to be me possible. Where once in Polish churches at almost any time of day there were throngs praying, today the crowds were sparse and remarkably prolish looking. If Rome loses the Polish spirit there will be a gap as big as Texas.

See, being in a city full of thoughts sure turns the juices on more than such vapid pits as Singapore and Dubai.

When the sun shines, the city shines with an efullugence which makes the spots jump around in the eyes! Gdansk/Danzig was never very large. When it was the League of Nations Free City it barely had 400,000 people, and yet its historical role is mammoth - and not just the 20th century years. The Gdansk merchant class were as rich as pompous as the Spanish court in the 15th and 16th century, building great mansions and guildhalls, the renaissance rooms being lovingly restored and stuffed with the oddest things. Neptune of course was huge and the fountains/bricabrac/furniture with Neptunian themes abound.

Red was the color of choice in things, perhaps because winter up here is no doubt extremely monochrome. The city had huge minorities then: there are two sections of town called "Old" and "New" Scotland, a large and rather patrician Jewish community which the Nazis of course obliterated and even the odd Arab and Chinaman: Such was the city's trade. The inventor idiot-savant Fahrenheit invented the mercury thermometer here (and gave the United States of America a way of telling the weather which separates us from every single other bit of the known world, a situation not likely to change with our present yahoo government). Schopenhauer was born here but his allegiance oddly was more to Poland than to Prussia which irritated Potsdam to the quick. I am a little chary of too much Malthus talk about place vs personality (how in god's name to explain the Zulus?) but some things seem for sure. Danzig/Gdansk produced rebels/heretics by the score. Look at Lech Walesa as the most recent example. He who is unfortunately alive and not martyred, he who was chucked out much as Churchill was. It's in the soil? It's in the air? One thing is for damned sure, the light here is wrenchingly beautiful when the sun does shine.

OK that's Gdansk for the moment. All is not bliss. The more highly restored areas arerantically popular with Polish tourists as ugly as any...street martkitchstands-and people do wander around rather distressingly eating ice cream cones and carrying balloons. There is enough amber to turn the world a hepatitis-yellow and much is sure to be fake. (The test: rub a kleenex on a piece of it...if light paper then adheres magnet-fashion, it is real)....there are no antiques though: too many wars, rapes, expulsions. The Soviets tried to move as many of the Poles out of their "liberated" city of Vilnius (Wilno) as possible and leave it to the Lithuanians. Many of these people ended here. One hopes in this century that these horrible sweeps of people might stop...I thought they had with Hitler and Stalin...but then came Bosnia and then came Rwanda. The Poles though have no one much in their borders to hate and I am sure it rather bewilders them.

-FRED

Arrival in Gdansk

2005-08-03T08:09:00.000-07:00

August 2nd...arrival in Gdansk....

Magic has returned to my life. When I last saw Gdansk it was still largely in ruins...and that was I believe in the early 70s...well, the Poles have done an astonishing job. They are said to be the finest RESTORERS in the world...just look at what they did in Warsaw...and in moving Abu Simbel...but what is here will take anyones' breath away: the old Hanseatic angles, the lavish red brick (the largest red brick building on earth is the St Marys here), the odd wonderful colors....it is quite breathtaking...and I haven't really had time yet to prowl.

My little Podewils Hotel is a find...located right on the old Marina (with lots of pretty yachts and schooners from around the world) overlooking the skyline of Hanseatic facades across the narrow river....my room is sort of chintz with a big portrait of someone's gt gt grandfather and huge furniture which is vaguely Biedermeier....the staff falls all over itself...sensational malaprop after malaprop in English..."your boat tomorrow goes from here is leaves. Understand?" all with a huge smile. "Yes your laundry can be done for clothes must be closed."

Dinner in a few minutes and that will be interesting...hope that they have something Polish. I remember a famous dinner with Tina with friends in Warsaw: it consisted of a few slices of smoked salmon and gallons of Wyborowa....and I remember Tina Poe sitting at the Bristol Hotel the next morning swearing that we were indeed having an earthquake...hmmmm.....The elan is all here, the lovely Polish wryness...but add to that a new outlook: my GOD a huge IKEA store is across the street from the tidy little Lech Walesa Airport.

I am trying to figure out Polish diacritical marks...how LODZ can be WOODGE...how Walesa can be valennsah...so far I have not prevailed...the name of a nearby Gdansk suburb defeats me: wreszcz with a diacritical mark on the e to created an "n" sound...hmmmmm again...

off to dinner...

Now a report on dinner....

Well, it turns out that Podewils is famous in N Europe for its kitchen....some Parisian food writer said that there were "two great restaurants east of Liege"...one is Stikalai in Vilnius which I know well and the other is Podewils. Here is dinner:

5 breads are brought with an "amusement" which turns out to be a perfect little quenelle of Marsurian pike (The Masuria area of former E Prussia is just SE of here and is much like Minnesota in the lake dept)....three butters...one with dill, one with garlic, one with beetroot....the breads ethereal...

I order the Polish soup...not a borscht but rather a very intense veal stock with wild mushrooms and bits of smoked ham. Then the pork with boletus. I ask what in the hell a boletus is. I get the same answer Elisabeth Spiola gives when asked "what is tarhanya?" Elisabeth's answer: "Tarhanya IST tarhanya!". Well, Boletus is a local cepe and unlike some which are greasy and limp this one is huge and assertive and takes of the wild. The pork is a thin skirt steak which has been marinated in vodka and some kind of berries known only to Balts....and it is served with fresh white asparagus and pommes anna (ala Antoine's in their glory days)....

Dessert is another mysterious northern berry in a custard flan....with coffee and a local liqueur made of yet another berry. The whole dinner quite green in the current parlance...and sensational. It also ain't cheap...with a glass of Wyborowa and a glass of a mid priced Cabernet from the Cote du Rhone dinner tops $100 minus tip - barely. Will dine here ONCE more on the trip....this time to try his idea of the "fusion of Japan, Provence and Vienna".....(sounds like our buddy Micheal Coudenhove Kalergi whose grandfather was the emperor of Japan's brother...and who knows lives in Tokyo).

Fred is amused...Fred is happy.....Fred is drunk but reeling instead from calories...my fellow diners were from Hamburg, Neuilly sur Seine, Warsaw and Vienna and they were a trencherman lot...and, dear friends, Poland is not quite what you think.

- FRED

Au secours...Imdat...Hilfe for I am surrounded by Bavarians

2005-08-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

Munich Airport Aug 2nd...Lufthansa lounge....it is about 70 degrees and clouds and after Dubai's wretched air and awful heat I feel that God smiles on the world even if it IS Bavaria!

More about Dubai; The opulent vulgarity of the Bellagio like Taj Palace being the high point, everything else was heinous. The airport is unbelievable...and not just the policy of having to pay baksheesh to get through passport control quickly...it having taken me 1 hour and 18 minutes surrounded by bad air conditioning and much deodorant failure....one walks and walks...goes inexplicably up stairs and down others...yes there are escalators and moving sidewalks but it is like boarding mechanical devices to get through a maze.....departure is worse....there was no snorkel for my airbus so a full complement of passnegers had to cram into a bus and then sit here and there broiling for 20 odd minutes....whereupon, at the arrival of the plane, those A type Bavarians knock one out of the way to reach the steps.

Emirates is badly overrated...the airbus used on most flights to Europe has a very cramed 2 3 2 seating in business....as opposed to everyone else's 2 2 2.,...first class has 8 seats and everyone sitting up there was of the "more equal than others" crowd....the menu looked good, the nice steward whom I think was Egyptian TRIED but the food had little taste....more for show.....even though a lobster tail is daring airline food....and the cheeses were first rate....the champagne was from an unknown house though it WAS champers....acidy tasting....the reds were C minus....I can hardly wait to spread the word about ego mad Emirates.

CHANGING planes in 'Dubai might not be horrid...but a couple of guys I talked to said that Emirates had a lousy lost bag record and these guys are stuck with flying it often.

It was a fine flight from a viewers point: Baghdad off to the right in a haze of dust-sand...Aleppo, maybe the oldest city in the world, I place I like enormously, sitting in its natural bowl in the semi desert...then the fabulously wild Taurus Mts of Turkey....east of Ankara and over the Black Sea...then Transylvania looking green and cool. Vienna looking bright and ravishing in the sun....and now to Munich to its new and physically imposing and especially workable airport, arguably now the best in Europe. The Kempinski, cool and Teutonic with a sort of take of mock-modern-biedermeier furniture, very decent. It's the best airport hotel I know other than 'Vancouver' Grand Fairmont....all right in the world.

Again I puzzled at the people who didn't look from the plane window...even over Iraq.....maybe they think they're over Chad.....Off to Gdansk in an hour and knowing that the people will be ever so much more sympathetic than these Putzi Hanfstaengls who surround me now.....

-FRED

Yes Dubai Does Exist

2005-08-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

Dubai....it is Aug 1st, I am in the Emirate's VIP lounge....it is 650 AM and already over 90 degrees going up to a purported 110....sure it is dry...but an egg will fry on your egg.

I arrived at the Taj late late late but it was all rectified by the most opulent suite since the Noel Coward in Bangkok's Oriental....a HUGE living room (maybe 750 sq ft) with everything electrical known to Edison and Bill Gates....a bedroom almost as large with a mammoth sultan-sized bed...in the bathroom, a complete 4 person SAUNA (a first), a huge jacuzzi tub big enough for four, enough products to stock a Walgreens....all complimentary on top of the minimum rate I was paying...they sent up a fruit basket (ugh) though it had lovely local dates in it (the one thing which Dubai seems to actually produce)...and then at 500 AM a guy who whispers softly for a wakeup call (no phone call) and has laid a great breakfast on my dining room table off the living room...it is all quite absurd, appar. very Dubai....and I felt like the highest roller at "poshest" Las Vegas hotel.

GETTING here:

Left singapore on time and flew wrenchingly over the Aceh tip of Sumatra...I could almost peerceive of the swath of the tsunami...then the fun started as we approached India (which is having the worse monsoon in 90 years): we were a bucking bronco in the sky. It certainly was not SQ's fault and they managed to serve a lovely oriental luncheon....part of which ended up on the ceiling of the plane in one of the big downdrafts...people PAY for such a ride at the State Fair....I was not totally amused....then arrival Dubai: the storm had somehow jammed the cargo doors on the Boeing....and after the heinous hour of going through passport control here (it is wickedly unpleasant....one can PAY a type of baksheesh to be "edpedited" but I heard George Orwell whispering to me about "more than equal" there was a 3 hour wait as they jimmied with the door and finally opened it manually which takes forever....like winding up a 120 day clock the nice Singapore rep allowed....YES dear Yasir from Peshawar was waiting still after all of this time to whisk me to the Taj Palace and the rest is history per above.

I did not walk in Dubai..I had been here once before....what's to find in a city built more quickly than Cammack Village was. The whole thing is so ghastly that it will take me a bit of time to ingest the horrors. In my living room were the local publications...the SOIREE/Town and Country types...all involving cosmetic surgery, renewal spas, dentists, new restaurants and useless consumer goods.

Nice Yasir told me that of the 700,000 people living here (there are over 3 Mil in the Emirates...and Abu Dahbi is still the capital) opnly 20% are real Emiratis (or whatever they call themselves)....as a class they don't seem quite as obnoxious as the Kuwaitis up the sea....but Yasir says after 5 years here he hasn't ONE local friend. The entire economy seems based on multi nationals at the top (no European looks over 35 years old), about 5 times as many serfs (Paks, Indians, Sri Lankans, Banglas, Philippinos)....and the whole thing strikes me as one big sickness.

I am sure if I lived here I would find good company (there were awfully nice people from Dubai on ARANUI...French) but the weather is so ghastly, the scrim of sand seems to semi-obliterate the sky, the architecture is so silly.....I would require every Duabi-ite to read THOREAU....

I am about to fly to Munich...that place which seems to have given birth to everyting rotten in German history (remember Hitler the Austrian was a shocking failure in his own land)....but there one can breathe.....

All of this costs a lot of money and I need a bit of sangfroid to justify it.

-F

A Second Take on Singapore

2005-08-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

Singapore July 29th....it is 945 AM and already about 85 degrees with the humidity of a soiled diaper.....

Before getting into Singapore some final thoughts on the vastness of
Australia....especially when flown across on the bias! I know that from
six miles above, not much of a land can be felt. Those prevailing colors of kaolin-ecru/beige/a muted burnt siena were pretty sopoforic...and yes below were aboriginal settlements (blenging organically into the whole), no doubt roos and dingos and emus and camels (imported). Still, despite the visual torpor of things I can't not take my eyes from an airplane window. I remember so many stunning sights from 5-6 miles up: the most amazing aurora borealis, Kabul burning, Venice from on high. I don't understand how anyone can NOT look out of the window. What if we crashed and LIVED (and the solipsim in me suggests I would): how would one know where they were? The Captain mentioned AYERS ROCK way off to the south...that rocky monolith which so many travelers go 2000 miles to see (possibly because it is the only thing of prominence to see in the boring landscape ala Sedona, Arizona?)...the guy across from me didn't even look out. It sure reminded me of one of the better moments between clients in the old days at Poe Travel:
"Where did you go on vacation?"
"The Cayman Islands"
"Where are they?"
"I don't know, we flew."
It is one of my oft told stories but one which is true true true.

Yesterday I was determined to find worth in Singapore. The Brits took these marshy bottoms at about the same time Little Rock was being founded (1820), drained some stuff, built their great city to protect their routes to the spices and the opium....the Portuguese and Dutch had sailed past for almost 300 years but never bothered for the landscape was daunting. The Brits found a people who were Malay-Indonesian (the two languages seem as close as Danish to Swedish) and as the city was founded attracted masses of Chinese from four distinct areas, they are now the chief population.

Through the years the marshes have been drained....a great deal of land has been added (I don't say "reclaimed" because how can something be "re" when it never existed in human history?).....the rest is history. the Japanese came in the back door of Invincible Fortress Singapore, surprising the Brits (I am reminded of those Arkies who were massacred by the Mormons at Mountain Meadows in Utah 80-odd years earlier)...and the Japanese were typically beastly to everone except the large Indian population (as they tried to set up that Axis-friendly state under Bose).....after VJ day Singapore and Malaya joined to form MALAYSIA....Singaore pulled out....Malaysia still has the rather inexplicable "sia" in its name (revanchism?) and here we are.

I was determined to find something of value in this dictatorship. Daddy Li who ruled forever it seems is gone and Baby Li has taken over....sounds like Papa Doc and Baby Doc in Port au Prince except the plumbing works here thank you. The place has been a semi-benevolent dictatorship (OUR kind the CIA might have said in its glory days?) ever since. It is a nation with ridiculous laws, thousands of them....possessing more than 5 stick s of chewing gum is a felony and chewing one is forbidden...one may not drive over the causeway to Johore in Malaysia without a 2/3rd full tank of gas:
buy gas at twice the price in Singapore (Baby Li owns some stations?).....Paul Theroux has written extensively that his forced years in Singapore (to earn a living) were the most painful of his life. Daddy Li had a NPD problem as big as Bill Clinton, Orson Wells or Bolshoi Catherine though Baby Li seems less narcissistic.....and things DO work. I am reminded often of Switzerland (although in that nation most people can not NAME their head of state...if you do not believe me poll some Swiss) but like a perfectly poached egg it is pleasant but gives us relatively little to ponder.

So yesterday was my day to be what my late friend Chris Kazan called a "Kulturmensch": the national museum is closed for renovation but alot of it has been moved into a pompous, wonderful Victorian building called the MUSEUM OF ASIAN CIVILIZATION (how is THAT for a name to put you to sleep?)...it's a good place with some very good khmer stuff (I figure local movers and shakers got it all pretty cheaply), some lovely early Chinese porcelains particularly celadon. There was also a traveling show of VATICAN ART but much as Victoria send second rate stuff to the colonies the Vatican seems to follow suit: lots of "ascribed to" stuff, a lot of trash...but nicely displayed. Typical of Singapore: nicely displayed. There is a terrific Singapore History Museum....with only a bit of political cant in it.....a rather darling museum of world philately (I love weird little museums...like both the clock museum and the museum of "medieval anatomy" in Vienna.

One gets easily from one place to the next. Taxis are plentiful and air conditioned. The subway is spotless (and it is s MIRACLE when you consider that they excavated through porridge to build it) yet I never thought I would be anyplace where I rather missed graffiti). Lots of buildings look like they had pharoahs as architects. Costs are reasonable, the GOODPARK HOTEL is a find of finds (but the cognescenti of Singapore know it...Raffles is for LA and Texas)...people are pleasant....though a little grizzled Chinese lady tried to charge me double for a liter of water in her vile little shop).....Reading the STRAITS TIMES in the morning has about the oopmh of reading the Pulaski Heights Junior High TIP TOP TIMES of my youth....but if you come to Singapore I will have some A+ notes for you and you may even like the place. I would sure rather live here than in that other dictatorship up north with the golf loving-marilyn monroe-loving monster ghoul in Pyongyang.

Cheerio, FRED

A Perfect Day in Travel

2005-07-28T06:40:00.000-07:00

Singapore, July 28th 2005...it is about 930 AM and it is already 88 degrees and feels like a Turkish Bath....

RARELY does a day happen when one is far from home which is truly perfect and I want to report that such a day happened to me yesterday, one which could have been fraught with unpleasantness.

At Auckland, dear Chris (the transfer man in his rather bizarre Cadillac with the right hand steering wheel) called for me on a gorgeous Auckland winter morning, about 50 degrees and clear.....whisked to the quite pleasant Auckland Airport and into the VIP room at Air New Zealand. They have done away with First Class but their business is A+, absolutely up to what First Class used to be (though never WAS on American carriers) minus only the Beluga.....the flight to Singapore was a daunting 12 hours....one leaves azure-green NZ and flies across the Tasman Sea for three hours...Brisbane and (even from the air) its ghastly looking "Surfers Paradise" coast south (ala Cancun)....and then astoundingly for 5 straight hours, roughly the distance from Miami to Seattle, the outback: infinity to the horizon..looking from the air like those hideous parts of Wyoming short of the Tetons...but going on for bloody EVER...perfection: a window seat to myself, a steward and stewardess devoted to the 24 Business Class seats on the Boeing 767....only 15 passengers up front, back jammed....

Meal number one: lunch out of Auckland:
a platter of smoked snapper, lightly seared tuna, tiger prawns a feta...
a braised duck with star anise
a coconut panna cotta
lots of fruist
lots of NZ cheeses

and 12 bottles of NZ wine to choose from...I went with a lovely Chardonnay to a very good pinot noir to a local port which wasn't half bad....

then Australia....the whole damned panorama of it.....

we crossed the coast heading towards Lombok and Bali...Lombok clear and we could see that massive volcano which had been occluded the whole time Ellison, Tony, Joe and I cruised around that blessed island....

then dinner: a venison and veal terrine
a onfit of chicken with pureed kumara, warm leeks and water cress salad an apricot bavarois more cheeses more great wine....I ran the gamut.....

and in between they served tea with pretty little tidbits...

Arrived Singapore....first off plane and at passport the inspector (Indian) gave me a pepppermint (mmmmmm....?....) bags off plane FIRST (priority checking in business) and in exactly 14 minutes from step off-plane to being whisked by the Goodwood Park driver into their hugely air conditioned big mercedes.....

through outrageously well landscaped city....sweltering of course....it is ALWAYS Houston-New Orleans here....to the Goodwood Park, one of my favorite hotels on planet earth....the old private club where Ellison-Tony and I stayed..(the joyous upgrading ith lots of light, a new pool...and Fred upgraded from a standard to a supernal poolside suite with enough rooms to ask 40 people in for drinks (if I knew 40 people here)....I know that Singapore which spreads around me is one of the most massively boring cities on planet earth (read Paul Theroux on the subject...he lived here for years)....but I am off in a minute to see that fabulous jade collection and to walk in the botanical garden...

You see....perfection in travel!....and today something just must happen which isn't.....though I haven't consulted by horoscope.

-FRED

Goodbye from Auckland

2005-07-27T06:28:00.000-07:00

Auckland, Jul 27th, 63 degrees, sunny and blinding

Sam Porter returned yesterday from Queenstown...having smoothed the feathers of a VIP client. He then devoted a wonderful day to me, taking me to his birth house in Parnell (ultra poshy....a bit like Vancouver near UBC), then for an anthropological jaunt to the with-it quarter called Ponsonby (lots of counter culture-gays-trendy boites etc) then to a marvelous volcanic caldera overlooking the city with astonishing views all furrowed with former Maori fortications. Remember the Maoris fought brutal intercine wars long before the Anglos arrived. Then we went to lunch at the OCCIDENTAL, a wonderful pub off Queen St (the main drag) for spectacular mussels - huge ones the size of marshmallows at home done in garlic and something which tasted vaguely like fenugreek. Ultra down-home atmosphere, great Steinlager beer (or boutique belgian brands). Sam showed me Auckland Univ. which is the poshest currently...all spread about through the city a bit ala Harvard.

Sam was a GREAT and NZ-known athlete: rugby (all national team), tennis, windsurfing champion and on and on. He was competing in a tennis final at the Royal Auckland Tennis Club last evening. It is such fun to be with a great jock in that everywhere we went everyone wanted to speak with him....perhaps the equivalent of a minor Lance Armstrong? THEN Sam broke his leg and decided to go into travel instead of into sweats.

We then drove through a marvelous forest of indigenous trees and ferns to Phia...a wild beach where the film THE PIANO was shot where despite the temperature and yesterday's rains there were tons of surfers out...glorious day.

They are about to call my flight to Singapore....11 1/2 hours of it. I hope it is clear over New Guinea and Borneo! I leave NZ having accomplished rather a lot. It is maybe the best country in the Pacific if one is into the outdoors. Less good for those who find their joys within walls. The utter jock nature of the place is rather amazing.

-FRED

More from Auckland...

2005-07-26T06:23:00.000-07:00

Auckland, July 26th AM, 57 degrees and blindingly sunny

I had a chilly breakfast on my balcony overlooking the pretty harbor (kiwi fruit here has essentially the same green taste per home) and now await the arrival of our friend, super-agent Sam Porter to romp someplace for lunch.

I have had good peaceful times, a great deal of them spent in the world class Auckland museum, a rather stolid (it looks like the Albert Pike masonic temple in LR although is vastly larger) Auckland Museum.....in the city's DOMAIN, the equivalent of other brilliant city parks such as Central in NY and Stanley in Vancouver. Knockout Maori stuff....maybe too much of it...an enormously touching pantheon for all of those New Zealanders lost in so many wars...in the now almost forgotten Boer War (why in God's name these locals were pressed into action there defies logic) onwards. The exhibits all start with the civil wars with the Maoris in the 1850s and 60s...for those English emigrants, often "second sons" as opposed to the early settlers of Australia (it shows today) who arrived with their own feeling of manifest destiny. The Maoris were fierce warriors, more bellicose than their rather more languid polynesian cousins and even today one sees amazing physical types. There honestly seems to be a working biracial society if I can judge by that most key factors: school kids and the peers they choose to hang out with....seemingly color blind here.

Later, just for the hell of it and just because I love trains, I rode the commuter line south for an hour or so from Auckland's dramatically modern new rail-centrum.....a few miles of ticky tacky houses, suburbs which seemed largely Maori, then that brilliant green countryside with the oh-so-bright skies which almost blind. NZ seems to be a paradigm of good ecology. Visiting with the conductress (Maori)and the brakeman (Punjabi) I am struck by another lovely part of life down here: I believe the New Zealander is the gentlest of all English speaking people. He is famous too for being the best read and a remarkable number of passengers had serious looking books. The English used is a treat...and we so often forget that great gaps in our language have gone into desuetude in America.

So it is off to an oyster feast with Sam...then an 11 hour flight on Air New Zealand to Singapore....and a few days in a well run dictatorial turkish bath. Singapore does have the one plus of being utterly safe (like dictatorships usually are)...as I am sure Pyongyang is.

-FRED

A first word from Auckland

2005-07-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

Auckland July 25th 845 AM....56 degrees and chilly...pretty day

It was sad to leave Papeete and I have developed a sort of affection for the place. Royal Tahitien very good to me. The flight out at daylight (Air New Zealand was 4-5 hours late...but their employee slowdown appar. is ending) was oddly a plus: I got a little more sleep and got magnificent views of Moorea (it is pronounced Mo-O-rea by the way...) and Bora Bora at a distance...landed at Rarotonga, a happy little airport on that pretty volcano (with a reef around it) which I had visited 25 or so years ago....trio playing Cook Island music at arrival...festive. The plane then flew on to Auckland absolutely jammed because Rarotonga is where New Zealanders in their winter (now) glom.....

Auckland Airport is tremendously civilized and it is fun to hear the Kiwi inflections again. The clue (and listen for it) is the letter "e" making "Fred" FRAY-ud)....Sam Porter's great transfer man met me in a classy ancient cadillac....from the air NZ looks so pastoral, neat...almost as pretty as a Cotswold scene.....on the drive in, through rather poshy parts of Auckland (now population 1 1/2 million) reminds me of Vancouver (though it is granted utterly detestable to be someplace and say it reminds one of another)....Downtown has been completely, radically updated....apartments are located on long piers into the harbor...and the Hilton is actually rather a boutique type hotel with water on 3 sides....Sam was right: it is a winner...my room has a large balcony with uninterrupted harbour view...a view lovely though rather a far cry from the best. Took a long nap, walked some deserted Sunday streets, liked the feel. The city still seems at first impression to have one foot in the provinces and another in the world.

The Hilton has a wonderful wine bar (had a magnificent local pinot noir)...Trevor, the head barkeep gave me a couple of tastes too including a world class Chardonnay, a wine I usually detest which which was delicious. Dinner was an avocado and chicken sandwich and then to bed for 9 uninterupted hours...bliss. The room is comfy, large, bright (but with good black out curtains), view as mentioned lovely....breakfast very positive in the Bristol Hotel Wien tradition with succulent smoked salmon and proscuitto...grand breads....

I have a feeling that Auckland (having done my homework) is not a city in which one would dig up many layers if one tried although it IS biracial and the Maori presence is pervasive. Rather, it strikes me as infinitely livable. I have the feeling that tourists shouldn't come to NZ unless they are somewhat passionate about nature, tidiness, lovely manners....but with some anthropological interests (the Maori again). I like it enormously really but admit that Peter Lorre, Paul Muni....
Eric Ambler and John le Carre....Gaugin or Derain or Rothko are NOT all lurking around the corners unseen.

That's it for now.....I can see why some find the city a tad dull....it IS....but sometimes dullness is terrifically salubrious when you think about it. Will write again with more balanced impressions...

-FRED

Fatu Hiva

2005-07-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

Fatu Hiva is the only populated Marquesan isle without an airport....but internet is everywhere...and as I type this two dogs (one vaguely looking Newfoundland, the other rather like a hyena) are at my feet. It is about 75 degrees and on the whole trip it has not gotten warmer than 83 nor cooler than 74...pretty sublime!

I hope not to repeat myself with my budding Alzheimers!.....The voyage continues to be very interesting for me. The people of the Marquesas had a definite caste system until Christianity intruded. Even today one can see the physical differences between tall, rather aquiline, stunning looking (to our eyes) people....and heavier, more ursine types with rather squashed faces...seeimg almost inuit (Eskimo)....

They developed interestingly in the arts: rock carvings abound (petrographs), figures on tapa cloth, and, perhaps in the absence of real paper and real paint (even locally produced paints seem almost absent), tattoos are HUGE....when there was no canvas, there was the human body...and the highest castes have the most all encompassing and vivid tattoos...quite hideous to my eyes...but body mutilation (and I am sure they call it adornment) has never been my thing. I think of all of those young women with tattoos when they are grandmothers...but in the MArquesas most older women have a good many of them. I watched tapa cloth being made....the second bark of a readfruit tree is pounded for about 3 hours, constantly dampened and then allowed to dry. Some of the tapa (which was used as clothing as well as for art figures) is pretty with a pleasing texture. The people came to the Marquesas it seems from Taiwan and SE China...via Borneo thence Papua New Guinea and the Solomons, starting to develop the Polynesian features much later. IT is estimated that the MArquesas, the farthest island group from ANY continent (an interesting fact I think) came about 2-300 BC...astounding I think.....

The islands are hugely irregular with erose countryside, many crevasses and startling pitons....one bay here on Fata Hiva is called "the bay of Phalluses" and when you see my few photos you will see why. The missionaries changed the name to the "bay of Virgins"....I feel that the folk have taken up catholicism rather half heartedly but the church dominates in a way and has incorporated many tiki designs and patterns from tapa into their culture. The statue of Jesus in the cathedral on Nuku Huva looks very much like Don Ho.

The FLOWERS of these islands are almost astonishing in their variety....hibicus are used often as hedges and bloom in at least a dozen colors. Bougainvillia, frangipani, ylang ylang (this island smells greatly of vetiver), red ixoras, red ginger (vibrant!) and jasmine prevail plus lots of varieties which I have never seen. People use the flowers almost supernally....with flower crowns, leis, with flowers to stick into every possible visible orifice - it is social and pleasing!

The island handicrafts are predictable: carvings (I wonder what those people from Reims are going to do with a 4 foot high tiki when they get home?), rather pretty and sometimes elaborate bone carving (most of the bones are from cows...shark bones are rare, whale bones non existent)...they do some rathe pleasant super crafty looking jewelry....those ubiquitous black pearls again..rather alot of it is rather meritricious..printed tapa cloth and cotton yardage which is locally designed and printed and which can be pretty. Most women and most men wear a one piece "paro" (a sort of sarong) wrapped in a dozen different ways.......the island dancing (at almost every port kids are trooped out to perform) is as rather tedious as most folk dancing...though on a slightly higher level than that I remember at Nome where old ladies shuffled about for an hour of dada....the dancers though have a good time and are fun to watch with their unisex palm frond skirts. On the other hand, the best dancers seem to be obese 60 year old ladies and they are a joy to behold because they are having as much fun as the born again at a revival meeting.

The ship continues to be very satisfactory and of course I have made a few friends whom I think I will nurture and keep: Dacre and Jenny Smyth from Melbourne (I may have written about them...he is the former admiral of the Australian navy...she a SYMES which is one of the oldest names in Australia, a family which published the AGE which is rather a national newspaper....Jenny's best friend is Rupert Murdoch's mother) and they were friendly with Louise and Graham Hall once upon a time...an awfully nice guy (Uwe Rahn) from Hamburg (I list these names which I know must bore you because I want a record of them), two terrific women from Sullivan County in the W Catskills...one, Janice van Nostrand, was heavily in publishing...an interesting guy born in London on a Canadian passport managing circuses and has worked all over the world and comes from a Georgian jewish background...A couple of super pleasant French families, one resident in London (ex Bronxville of all places) and another in Dubai..

Food is very decent....and, considering that it is cooked for 125 passengers plus crew, rather inspired...last night, a lovely poisson cru (the best food in these islands), a magret of duck, a tiramasu....wine flows gratis...acceptable bordeaux, rather horrid merlot, rather bad chardonnay....the bordeaux gets one through the few turgid menus....there are pretty good lectures, a happy cocktail hour (at wretched Tahitian prices and the Europeans drinking all manner of elaborate vile looking libations made with 3-4-5 liqueurs and potions.)...oddly most fruit juice is tinned, save lovely pampelmousse and pineapple...we don't starve.

It is a healthy routine, up for 700 AM breakfast usually....coffee after dinner until about 1000 PM and early to bed. My stateroom has a TV but I have never turned it on....getting into the whale boat (which carries us for wet landings at some anchorages), I hit a wave wrong and scraped my shins pretty badly...though nothing alarming: the doc on board is a terrific young guy from Toulon (half Corsican) who insist on giving me alot of attention and demanding that I stay out of the water (a bummer)...the crewmen who assist people in and out of boats were so alarmed...but it was not their fault...getting ME in and out is sort of like landing a rhinoceros.

So all goes well in paradise...and I am so happy to be here...

-FRED

Nuku Hiva

2005-07-12T10:55:00.000-07:00

Thank GOD an AMerican keyboard! NUKU HIVA the largest of the Marquesas...with a total population of 2200...it is July 12th and it is about 845 AM and already 90 degrees...but the wind blows...sometimes.

ARANUI: She is comfortable...the passenger list is not what I had expected at all: 130-odd French, about 20 AUstralian, 8 Germans, 7 AMericans, 4 ITalians, 2 Austrians and one Swiss (from Lausanne who knows the Lobkowiczes well and who went to their fancy dress ball when they regained ownership of their castle at Melnik!)...small world...wear clean underwear. The Americans consist of 4 women traveling together, two from Sullivan County NY, two from St Louis and 1 school teacher, a plucky lass from South Bend...all nice, very nice people....I have teamed with the Australians one German (from Hamburg) more often...Dacre ("acre with a d") is the retired admiral of the Australian Navy and is an amateur and quite good painter and his wife Jenny is a love, very Melbourne and pukka sahib....My cabin is nicely large on the very top STAR deck...meaning a fair amount of motion but that is not entirely unpleasant...it has a huge TV (which I have not watched), a large head with a tub and hair dryer and other modcoms...a queen sized bed...a tiny balcony...a big picture window...it is first rate...the dining room is nicely decorated, lots of fresh fresh flowers (bird of paradise which I think terrifically ugly and some different kinds of orchids and some flower which looks like a chenille bedspread)....the cuisine is admirable...a pleasant breakfast with lovely flaky croissants, eggs to order, odd cheeses (including very good braunschweiger which may not be a cheese at all)....lunch and dinner both resolutely 3 courses, appetizers (terrines or soups or anti pasto) a main course (often nicely cooked fish...last night en papilotte (sic?) and especially delicious.....a good desert (last night ile flotant and I had two)...open wines, decent bordeauxs or curses of curses merlot (which the flick SIDEWAYS makes me loathe perhaps), a decent chardonnay.....not THAT much better than our Arkansas POST Chardonnay which believe or not is drinkable!

The reason for this trip in French Polynesia is certainly not the ship, the hearty ARANUI, its affable staff or the very decent chow...it is the Marquesas.....

Our first stop out of Papeete was in a group of atolls called the TUAMOTOS....by definition low-lying with a barrier island around a lagoon...in their case, a huge lagoon...the industry of the atoll is the black pearl: the Polynesians stole the craft of creating these from the Japanese (lovely that SOMEONE stole technology from them rather than the usual vice versa)...the resulting pearl comes in shades from Beluga-caviar-grey to coal black...the very best ones have an inner essence a bit like an opal (which they look not a thing like) and are prized....most of the women on ARANUI have bought one...or more.....I sort of wonder why.....I swam in the lagoon (very few fish)...and then pondered the rather vacuos life of the locals)....on board the ship we have a French artist who seems rather respected though I haven't really caught his name.....he lectured yesterday on Matisse...and what he said was interesting.

Matisse came to Papeete in 1930 (sort of in the steps of one of his mentors, Gaugin, who by then was dead) to paint. Matisse was already a rich man, famed etc.....and he simply could NOT paint in Polynesia saying the light was vastly too bright, the colors possessing no nuance etc....he only did a couple of drawings, illustrated some letters to his wive and did a minor painting...yet on return to France showed the influence of Tahiti for the rest of his life.

Curious. Our on-board painter echoed some of the same thoughts more or less saying that French Polynesia was so in-one's-face obvious and the sky is SO bright that one is robbed of creativity. I feel somewhat the same: my analogy is like a lump of dough which has been kneaded once, has risen, but still isn't right and needs to be kneaded again and again. The mind tends to go to sleep, not uncomfortably in the last.....the torpor is rather delightful.....but choose someplace else (Greenland?) to write the great novel. Perhaps this is why I find the Polynesian novels of Melville so tedious and without flair.

The Islands are astoundingly different...great erose peaks and needles, a sense of a precocious land, nothing looking quite like anyplace else. The villagers are friendly and a bit shy but their faces (much like Turks) break into great smiles upon real contact.....speaking of locals I met a youngish guy at the bar on the Aranui last night....he had wandered the world, had help build the second Bosphorus Bridge at Istanbul of all things and we spoke limited Turkish together.

I have not quite gotten the rhythm of the islands yet....I know there IS one....everyone talks of manana and that sort of thing....not unexpected.....the staple foods are breadfruit and taro and pork....sort of like eating bacon with mush and tapioca...not inspiring. But the islands are so outrageously beautiful that any complaint dims. I think there is nothing on earth QUITE like the MArquesas, these islands settled early on by the Polynesians but only discovered in the 16th century by Europeans...

The only word I can find which COMES from the Marquesan is "tabu".....but very little seems tabu as I watched the locals who were commuintg from Ua Pou to Nuku Hiva last night on board dance....pretty sexy....quite awfully innocent: I guess most sex IS....at least if it is by mutual assent.

With that odd thought I say goodbye and hope everyone is in a great way.

FRED

From Ua Pou

2005-07-11T17:30:00.000-07:00

This message has been decoded by from mumbo-jumbo written on a "diabolical keyboard".

The Aranui is dandy...my cabin is large and very comfortable with a queen sized bed and plenty of storage space...a very nice bath with a tub and a shower...the passengers, as it turns out are 80% French; 10 Australian only 7 Americans; Canadians, Germans and Austrians....

I have simply got to find an English KEYBOARD...but just to know I am alive and well and Ua Pou is lovely....will try at the next port to find an American keyboard...

FRED

Papeete v. II

2005-07-06T14:02:00.000-07:00

Papeete July 6th 1000 AM

I rode "le truck" downtown (these are flatbeds with seats and serve as the prolish transportation around the island)...fun....was deposited in a steamy Papeete near the market which I so remember from many years ago (though now it is rather sanitized and even boasts an escalator)....stopped in the RC cathedral to cool off (most underwhelming....it would disgrace a small town in Louisiana)...but like the spirit of the streets: people saying hello, people smiling though not stupidly (the Russians could never understand why we smiled all the time)...hot...not oppressive.....

More about the circle island business: the island is shaped like a schmoo which those of us old enough to have read Al Capp remember....essentially a little circle on top of a big circle with almost no neck (a copy of T. Williams' NO NECK MONSTER?)....one goes around the BIG circle...but ala Kauai there is no road around the little one. My driver, William, is a buddha shaped man (most men here have terrifically thick prolish ankles), a man who loathes the French, loathes the present government, loathes Tahiti (he is a native...father was a German jew, mother Tahitian and he said something about an irish admixture...typical of the flotsam and jetsam which prevails in this port. He adored Elvis Presley. The driver around the island is at times distressing (because it is shocking how little the French have done to enhance the scene: NO good museums, a kitschy privately owned aquarium etc)....there is literally nothing but nature and nice people and riots of flowers, at times so abundant that they look ever so slightly lascivious......still there are lovely stretches including the light house point (named Point Venus) where Cook landed....Lots of houses fly a blue flag which is the sign of the independence-from-France movement...and the French, who make up something like a 38% shortfall in the Tahitian budget, seem actively disliked by the masses. It is sad somehow because said masses have largely taken up a French persona....

One shops here madly for black pearls. I think that they are moderately pretty....prettier at least than a similar sized ball bearing. Isn't it curious how people seem fixated on buying local things here and there around the world which they then display with a bit of embarrassment? Think of all of those matrushka dolls from Russia (though I saw a wonderful Blessed Virgin Mother once who disgorged various stages in the development of the baby jesus)....think of all of those camel saddles from Morocco, alpaca odd wraps from Peru, third grade opals from Australia, petit point bags from Vienna and, perhaps the worst of horrors, those vile little Hummel figures from Deutschland... No French tourist leaves Tahiti without black pearls often displayed in slightly rather ugly settings.

I am sorry to prate on so much...but when one travels alone in a land where English is not spoken, I think one has a tendency to prate....and also, alas, to divigate!

I am liking my hotel more...it is about 15 minutes from town, a good distance (although Papeete has its moments) and the staff is very kind to me. The bar, all open air and playing that nasally Polynesian music with lots of amplification, is pleasant. The dining room is rather accomplished. Last night with a pichon of decent Rose I had a cerviche (or whatever the name for that dish is in Polynesian), a magret of duck cooked wonderfully with grapefruit (I ordered it because I love to say pampelmouse).

A few things here ARE distressing: There is an accomplished tourist center built in pre-European-like buildings (rather ala R. Crusoe) with a lovely staff....but what IS sad to me is that they have so little to talk about other than what is in the water (a life time of study albeit), flowers (another life's work) and the like. Where is the so-called "human culture?" Papeete is about on the level of Malvern, Arkansas when it comes to glorifying human beings and what is sad is that the Polynesian is SUCH an interesting person! Those people who apparently spilled out of SE China and Taiwan in prehistory came LATE to Tahiti....they were almost a THOUSAND years earlier in the Marquesas, the islands I leave for tomorrow which are only 800 miles away. The language utterly beguiles in my opinion and, a bit like Serbo Croat, it seems remarkably easy! The locals have a finely developed sense of color, of carriage, of design at least in simple things. OH there needs to badly to be one of those Canadian-like museums of the common man here! Perhaps the French are too haughty. Perhaps their own manifest destiny precludes such an idea?
Should someone come to Tahiti? At least to the specific ISLAND of Tahiti?
Perhaps.

This is not a resounding affirmation I realize and perhaps by the time it is all over I will do a big volte-face... I know that Tahiti is NOT Polynesia but it is where I am now....and it ain't half bad.

FRED

Hello from Papeete

2005-07-06T06:49:00.000-07:00

July 5th....Papeete.....635 PM about 75 degrees

Dear Ones: Who knows how many odd keys there are on a French computer...we will see......

Air New Zealand (when it finally left) was good....even though we departed a bit after 130 AM, they served a full dinner on the flight to Tahiti:
I gave up after the bay scallop salad...moved on to some great NZ cheeses and a glass of port and wafted to the land of nod.....seats ok, not great...but of course infinitely better than in steerage (the orlap deck?)...Dawn brought me awake with a sky the color of the right hibicus on my terrace...sort of pinkish, voluptuous and ever so slightly vulgar....then landing at Faaa (every vowel pronounced), a happy little airport looking like a series of A-FRAME buildings...customs a breeze and the nice guy from Tahiti Nui met me....and began to catch me up on the few people I remember from the momentous days here. A lovely drive through a totally changed, almost transmorgified Papeete for FAAA is on one side of the town and Le Royal Tahitien out on the other.....The hotel is perfectly ok and a bit better...a sort of twisting two storey motel built around a wildly lovely garden, a pool with a sexy waterfall, a stretch of ugly black sand beach looking across to beguiling Moorea (which is pronounced mo-OR-AY-a please).

I crash into bed to be awakened local time about noon by a guy in a strange looking uniform (a bit like that one Nixon designed for his Marine guards in those awful days before the current awful days): said stalwart hands me an invitation with great aplomp: the president of French Polynesia, one excellence Oscar Manetehi Temera is requesting my presence at 700 that evening for a reception in the garden of the presidential palace...to honor the American national day and the innaugation of Tahiti Nui Airline's nonstop flight to New York.....I thought I was having DTS...but accepted...and was picked up at 545 PM in a limousine (along with 3 people already in tow) and driven to the palace.

Said palace is a lovely colonial heap, looking somehow whimsically New Orleans-Jackson Square-like...the garden is alive with a sound show with American flags playing around the palms and exotic plants...a hundred blue and red balloons are festoning the high palms, a group of 20-odd dancers (the women all dressed up in what looked vaguely like Mormon going to church clothing, the men in tux shirts and black tie)....the group from the Tuaomotos danced and danced and champagne was passed around and then a lavish buffet was unveiled (the people did not rush it like I remember certain buffets being rushed during carnival season in Vienna...everyone very decorous)....The president, a fellow who looked like he might be a phys ed instructor in the Rio Grande Valley (one with a very retrousse nose) spoke for a while....I don't remember much of what he talked about but he did let everyone know he loved American because he was mad about playing golf in Oregon.....yes, the whole evening (with my jet blahs) is greatly Alice -down-the- hole...I look dolefully at my plate of glorified puupuus and just as the American consul general starts speaking (he looks like the the late bandleader Kay Kyzer (sic?).

I can't take another moment of the pageantry and leave, telling the guards at the gate I was not well (I think the jet blahs qualify)....and flee down the street to find a taxi a mere 10 blocks away....I treading gingerly in my expensive Zegna yellow shoes feeling a bit like Cinderella though one who walked out in slippers....odd all of it...very good.....the strangest first day I have ever spent anyplace. How did they find me and why?

At any rate, I slept in, had a lovely breakfast this morning looking at Moorea on a terrace over the ugly beach, did a circle island drive (much like Tina and I had done oh so many years ago)...and all is right in the world...it feels like about 650 PM and it is 645 PM......My impressions of Tahiti are odd at this point...I am struck by the many androgynous waiters (?) not only in my dining room but also at a place we stopped for coffee...perfectly cheerful types who are greatly more feminine than any woman....they put the Gabor sisters to shame......The population of the island has grown like topsy...there are still lovely stretches though which are not peopled....the people are friendly...the weather is hot but not terribly humid and so far I am not suffering from the usual hebetude...

Costs are high, beer is good...and this might be (oh shout hoorah dear long suffering reader) the last communique for a bit...though I am tempted to try and write something a tad more scholarly at some point.....(Tahiti as everyone knows does NOT particularly inspire scholarship.....and, also as everyone also knows it is merely ONE of the islands in French Polynesia...one of the Society Islands....not the name of the nation)....but I leave you with that pedantry....and looking terrifically forward to a dinner ALL BY MYSELF save for the adrogynous staff.

-Fred

The First Epistle

2005-07-04T06:51:00.000-07:00

LAX....the Air New Zealand Lounge....Sunday July 3rd....
Happy Birthday America!

It is said that a journey begins with the first step....I will rework the cliche and say that a round the world journey begins with a 50 minute flight on a Beech prop to Kansas City! Actually, a pleasant plane and despite it being one of the heaviest travel days of the year, exactly 5 passengers. I have packed about 20 books so nestled in at the city's extremely odd airport and read the time away. MCI is vastly overbuilt, it has three distinct terminals and is today a surprisingly minor airport with little jazzy services, lots of those commuter jets (which I rather like) and I suppose mud on its face. They built the place halfway from downtown to Winnipeg too and I can just hear the porker oinking as I look around. Among the oddities: one clears security for a given airline.....finding, once through, no toilets, no food services, nothing. To get a snack I am fussed at by supremely underworked (on a busy day) cretins....yes, the next cliche: with iqs smaller than their chest/bust sizes. United to Denver was packed and unpleasant and Denver Airport is a bit of a horror although I was able to race on the moving sidewalks from gate, let's say 1, to gate, let's say 90 in a record 20 minutes and make my plane....Lo and behold, the flight to LAX was terrific: an Asian steward who knew WHAT service was, only 4 seats in a large jet in first class, a reasonable dinner with a cold terikayi salmon on a bed of pretty lettuce.....good attention...astonishingly pretty views right over Aspen then Telluride...then that always surprising nothingness of the arid SW, the Grand Canyon someplace off to the south. One starts arriving LAX as you know about thirty minutes before you get here....at 500 miles an hour.....and LAX is if anything a bit worse for wear.

Embassy Suites was VERY accommodating....giving me a 500 PM check out at no cost...I had missed the manager "reception" (meaning popov vodka and miller lite) but did chow down on their bountiful and quite nasty breakfast: croissants (surely they will be good in French Polynesia?) with the consistency of Wonder Bread, sausages which surely did not come from an animal cloven or otherwise, an omelet in the traditional ring pillow mold. I don't think anyone in America really understands omlets. But they couldn't ruin a banana. I like Embassy suites a lot: it is pleasurable to have a living room to close off from the hall in order to make a bedroom essentially soundproof....the amenities are very decent....and again the staff is almost always affable and helpful.

Just arrived at the lounge...my 1015 PM plane for Papeete is scheduled for 130 AM because the copilot is very ill and they had to rustle up another who was in Hawaii.....It is not SUCH a tragedy actually: Tahiti is 3 hours earlier than LAX so 130 AM will be 1030 PM local time, a pleasant bedtime....and arrival in PPT will be at a respectable 730 AM which no doubt will please the transfer agent from Tahiti Nui! I am not sure if I will have email capabilities at Le Royal Tahitien...but will try...and promise that my lines from there should be vastly less prosaic than these....

Fred

Fred Poe's World Tour '05

2005-06-20T09:12:00.000-07:00

Get ready...Fred will soon be on the road again. He will be updating us along the way and we'll be posting his musings here. Stay tuned!

Here's a preview in his own words:

I leave on July 2nd for almost two months and while I am gone I will send a sort of round-robin letter to be posted on our blog. Prepare to get the latest news from such disparate places as the Marquesas Islands, suburban Auckland, Singapore, such Northern Polish sites as Rastenburg (Hitler’s command post where they tried to kill the bastard) and Tykocin (with the best preserved synagogue in Ne Europe), St John’s and various bird sanctuaries. These epistles will probably bore you to death!