Luxagraf: Topographical Writings

Things Behind the Sun

My grandparents left the home they lived in for 60 years today. They can no longer afford to live at home with the level of care they now require.

I don't know how much of my life was spent in that house, probably well over a year if you added up all the holidays and family gatherings.

I can smell the house, I can see the bedrooms though I haven't actually walked down the hall in many, many years. I remember trying to fall asleep in the front room to the red glow of the candle bulbs my grandmother put up at Christmas. I remember listening to Neil Diamond 8 tracks in the same room. I remember my cousin walking around the kitchen with the fantastically long, coiled phone cord trailing behind her (still the longest phone cord I've ever seen).

And now I'm thousands of miles away and someone is clearing out the house. Moving out the furniture, dividing up a few possessions among children and grandchildren and all I can think about is that I've never even taken a picture of the house.

I'd like to stand in the street one last time and look at the low, brick house, the curved curb and the perpetually dead lawn, to take a picture, not to remember it, I'll never forget it anyway, but simply to have done it. To have taken the time to do it because I recognized it meant something to me; but I didn't.

I'd like it to be evening when I take the picture, the sort of desert evening that is pure relief, when the sky sighs a light grey-blue glow at twilight and the temperature finally falls below a hundred. The dry air is still, the clouds silent in the distance, behind the mountains. I'd like to frame the photo on the left with the junipers that aren't there any more, but were when I was younger. In the center I'd like to see the old brown Datsun truck (long since sold) that used to meet us in Utah, Arizona, Colorado to go camping for a week each spring. Zion National Park, Canyonlands, Arches, Natural Bridges, the wild southwest desert. The small brown truck with its white camper shell, tent and stove tucked in the back, fishing poles in long tubes hanging from the roof inside the shell, the silver washpan my grandfather poured scalding water into every morning to shave, a little mirror hanging from the camper shell hinge. My grandparents slept in cots in a tent. They were well into their sixties by then.

I'd like to get Pepper in the picture. I only saw him a few weeks of the year, but he was the closest thing I ever had to a dog when I was young. And perhaps Honcho, the ornery cat I never really liked, but he was tough and I always respected him.

I can see this image in my mind, see it quite clearly, but I'll never be able to take it. It's just a house, a structure made of brick and wood. Nothing more. Everything else is your mind, where you can keep it forever. I'm not sure if I keep saying that to myself because I believe it or because I want to. It's true either way. Everything else is in your mind. Even if you didn't think to remember it until the memories were all you had.

Image adapted from Dusk by Kevin Dooley, Flickr

Street Food in Athens Georgia

We went downtown today to the first (so far as I know) Athens Food Cart Festival. Athens is not a huge place. It's not what I'd call a small town either, though the downtown area manages to retain, for now, that feel. That, combined with the U.S. Government's seeming dislike for street vendors in general means that there are, to the best of my knowledge only two or three street vendors in town and none of them have anything like a regular presence anywhere.

It used to be different. There used to at least be JB, who had a sausage cart that could be counted on to be outside the 40 Watt every Friday and Saturday night. Sometimes JB would even follow the crowds to house parties, slinging sausage, beans and "comeback" sauce into the wee hours of the morning. I miss JB. I wrote about my experience with JB for Longshot Magazine a while back.

JB was irreplaceable. He left a vacuum that's never been properly filled. There is a 24 hour diner downtown, but there's something about eating on the street at night. It draws you out, makes you part of the city. It's a shared experience, street food. More communal and more intimate at the same time.

Cheap food, made fresh, in front of you. Served hot, wrapped in newspaper. Street food is the people's food, it removes the mystery of the kitchen, lays the process bare. It's the staple diet of people around the world.

I've had everything from fish and chips to deep fried water beetles from street vendors and it was all good. Yes, even the beetles. Part of the beauty of street food is you can see it all before you commit, so if it looks bad, well, on to the next cart.

For me places often come to be defined in large part by the food I ate. Especially looking back. Sites rarely stand out in my memory, but that delicious mystery meat I ate on the banks of the Mekong? Clear as day. When I think of India now I think of trains and chai. I think of little red clay cups piled beside the tracks, slowly dissolving in an afternoon thundershower. I think of little push carts clattering by, selling samosas and Chaats.

In Bangkok I lived for a month eating almost exclusively skewered meat grilled in a tiny cart with only a handful of glowing charcoal, tended by an old woman who spoke no English, but knew my order after two nights¹. Six pork, six beef, spicy sauce, one bag of sticky rice.

In Paris I ate oysters from street vendors. In London fish and chips. In Laos noodle bowls. In Nicaragua empanadas and plantains. At home in Athens there used to be JB. Now there’s pretty much nothing.

In Athens this weekend that changed, if only for a meal or two. The deep friend Korean Hot Dog from Streets Café was amazing. As was the sausage from La Fonda. Several of the Atlanta-based trucks were great as well. But none of it will be there tomorrow. In fact it probably won't be there ever again. That's what was sad about the experience, it was great big tease. It was a reminder: you could have this. But you don't.

On some level my love of street food isn't really even about the food. The food is just the catalyst for something more. It's the common tether that brings us all to the same table in the end. There are huge gulfs between cultures, beliefs differ in ways that you’re never going to move beyond, but everyone understands food.

If you want to get to know someone, eat with them. It’s the universal social language.

And that's what makes a community, people coming together in collective spaces -- owned by no one -- and setting aside whatever might divide them for long enough to share a table, a taco, a noodle bowl, some rice.

In order for people to come together, in order to establish the kind of commons that form the basis of a healthy community, you need some kind of anchor. You need something to tether the whole thing to the ground. Street food carts and trucks offer that anchor, that basis for bringing people together in a communal space.

That’s missing in Athens and it has been ever since JB stopped pulling into the 40 Watt parking lot. Athens has world class restaurants. Athens has world famous music venues and more bars than many cities twice its size. That's all great, but none of it brings us together the way street food could if we let it.

According to a friend who was in Bangkok last week she's still there, plying her trade.↩

The Worst Place on Earth

It was nearly two in the morning. It was hot, but I had been jumping in the salt water shower every half hour or so and that, combined with the oscillating fan on the floor at the foot of the bed, made the heat tolerable.

I lay on the bed, legs sticking to sheets. I had been lying there for several hours, with my tiny laptop on the bed next to me, trying to figure out why the Gili Islands disturbed me so much, trying to put my finger on what about this place made me so uncomfortable. I never came up with a precise answer, which is why I've never written anything about Gili Trawangan.

I tried writing about everything I thought was wrong with the Gilis, but in the end it wasn't the hordes of hippie tourists, the Australians behaving badly, the ridiculously overpriced food and lodging or even the cats -- the only thing I'm really allergic to -- everywhere on the island, nor was it even all of those things combined that bothered me.

On the face of it Gili Trawangan is quite nice. It's small enough to walk around in a day and is surrounded by crystal clear water with a reef that could, with a bit of conservation effort, be quite remarkable. Sadly, it isn't remarkable^[1], but the few moments I did enjoy on Gili Trawangan were all moments when my head was underwater and I could willfully ignore everything on the beach behind me.

It's taken me months to realize what bothered me, but in the end it was clear. The problem with the Gili Islands is that they don't really exist.

What I mean by that is that the Gilis are not islands you go to and experience, rather they are ideas about what islands ought to be brought to life. The Gili Islands exist as a backdrop on which tourists can act out their fantasies about what "paradise" ought to be.

It's tempting to say there's nothing wrong with that, and maybe there isn't, but it isn't what I look for when I travel. Don't get me wrong, I didn't mind the crowds of the Gilis. The Gilis certainly aren't off the beaten path, but that's also something I've never been too interested in.

What interests me when I travel is the normal. It's been my experience that while the world is huge, it happens in very small, ordinary moments. I'm interested in seeing how things are done in all nooks and crooks of the planet. I enjoy seeing the daily life that happens on every street everywhere around the world. It's been my experience that every street, every park, every square has it's own form of ordinary and that any of it exists at all is extraordinary.

Looking for the ordinary has shaped the way I travel over the years. It's taught me to avoid the guesthouse when possible, to rent apartments where I can and to try to get to know blocks rather than neighborhoods, neighborhoods rather than cities. It's taught me that guidebooks are generally wrong and what you'll remember afterward are usually not things you'd planned to do.

I have no problem with popular tourist destinations, some of them are quite amazing -- there's a reason Pompeii and Angkor Wat are popular, because they're amazing places -- but they aren't what motivate me to leave home.

I realized months after I'd left the Gilis that I've never really been interested in the quest to find paradise. I own a house in what I consider a paradise. Athens GA is not perfect, but it's pretty near to paradise for me. If I were looking for paradise I wouldn't leave town much^[2]

And that in the end is what the Gili Islands have to offer, a collective idea of what paradise looks like. The Gilis are a collection of paradise fantasies culled from decades of hippie travelers, scuba divers, honeymooners, and the rich, lost children of the West.

I eventually realized that the thing that made me uncomfortable, the thing that kept me up on what turned out to be our last night on Gili Trawangan, was the realization that this exists because I am here. I am, however much against my will, now responsible for this. My money has now helped perpetuate this place. I would not want to deny any paradise seeker the opportunity to act out their fantasy on the Gilis, but I prefer to be left out of it. Places like the Gilis can get along just fine without me.

1. Constantly dropping anchors on coral destroys reefs and, despite no shortage of mooring, nearly every boat that I saw pull into Gili Trawangan dropped anchor.↩
2. By the same token if there comes a day when I no longer think Athens is a paradise I will pick up and leave.↩

The Best Snorkeling in the World

Nusa Lembongan is only a few miles off the southwestern coast of Bali, but it might as well be another universe. Here there are few people and no cars, only a few motorbikes that navigate the narrow dirt roads, none more than two meters wide, and your own feet are the dominant way to get around.

From Ubud we caught a bus south to Sanur, a beachside town where we thought we might spend a night or two. Unimpressed by the trash strewn beaches and overpriced resorts we went ahead and caught the afternoon boat out to Nusa Lembongan, one of three small islands off the coast of southwest Bali.

The pace here is more my speed. Little seems to happen. People work. People fly kites. People eat. People sit in the shade.

Most of Lembongan's inhabitants are seaweed farmers. At low tide dozens of farmers make their way down to the shoreline where they load their partially dried seaweed in small outriggers and flat-bottomed boats which they pole out through the shallows to the seaweed fields that line the inland the edge of the reef half a mile from shore. At low tide the seaweed plots are often above the waterline, and even at high tide the expanse of water between the shore and reef is rarely more than a meter deep.

While the farmers are out planting and harvesting seaweed (most of which I'm told ends up in Japan, used as a binding agent in various cosmetics), old women walk the shallows gathering up dropped bits of seaweed or prowl the shoreline plucking worms -- which are sold as fish bait back on Bali -- from the wet sand.

In the evenings, when the sun dips into the clouds and the air begins to cool, the villagers come down to the beach to fly kites in the evening breeze. Kites are something of an obsession for the Balinese, nearly everyone has a kite and you see dozens littering the sky from any vantage point on the island. There are fewer kites here on Lembongan, but only because there are fewer people here.

These are not the kites you grew up with, small triangular affairs with a bit of ribbon on the tail and a few meters of string. Balinese kites are massive, some with tails hundreds of meters long and they fly them so high the government had to ban them around the Denpasar airport for fear they would clog the engines of 747s. The Balinese are serious about their kites.

Of course flying kites is fun too, but there's also a religious aspect stemming from the belief that the Indian god Indra was a kite flying aficionado. Legend holds that Indra taught local farmers how to fly kites and today the Balinese believe the kites to be whispered prayers to the gods, which explains why they fly them so high (well, that and the fact that actually getting a kite 200-300 meters in the air is just cool).

While Lembongan is a relaxing place to pass a few days, or even weeks, the main appeal of the island for most visitors is either the surfing or the snorkeling (and diving, but I've never had the patience or desire to learn how to dive, the vast majority of what I find interesting in the ocean is in the first 3 meters of water anyway). I went on two snorkeling trips out of Lembongan, neither of which spent much time at Lembongan's reefs, opting for the far superior reefs around the two neighboring islands, tiny Nusa Ceningan and the much larger Nusa Penida.

The first stop was a mediocre reef just off the dense mangrove forests of Nusa Lembongan. The reef was okay, but the water was murky and crowded with a dozen other boats also dropping snorkelers. After maybe ten minutes in the water the two Australians also on the trip and I asked the boatman if there was anything better to be found. He kept saying drift snorkel, which left us scratching our heads, but we agreed and set off for another ten minute boat ride to the eastern coast of Nusa Penida.

The backside of Nusa Penida is separated from its much smaller neighbor, Nusa Ceningan by a narrow swath of water maybe a kilometer across at its widest. To the south is the open ocean, to the north is the Lombok straight, a very strong current that moves between Bali and Lombok at speeds of up to eight knots. The shallow reef-covered shelfs just off Nusa Penida, have similar currents where the water is suddenly forced through the narrow channel between islands.

Drift snorkeling is a bit like snorkeling in a river. The boat drops you off at one end of the current and you drift for a couple of kilometers down to the end of the current, where the island swings to the west and there's a small beach where the boat can pick you up again.

In the mean time you drift, like tubing down a river. The shoreline is a limestone cliff, carved inward by the sea. Underwater a shelf slopes off sharply. The first tier is maybe two meters, the second more like four and then finally the shelf drops off into the unknown deep, a rich turquoise blue that is alive with fish. Fish I have previously seen perhaps two or three at a time are swimming in massive schools. Dozens of Moorish Idols, schools of deep purple tangs, so dark they look black until you get up close, parrotfish in clusters, munching on the coral, bright, powder blue tangs, yellow-masked angelfish, countless butterfly fish, wrasses, triggerfish, pufferfish and even bright blue starfish that crawl slowly over the reef. The deep blue depths are filled with myriad triggerfish, angelfish, clownfish and hundreds of others swimming slowly along in the current. There are huge schools of fish that I have only previously seen in books or aquariums back in the States. In fact there are so many fish that just last month a survey done not far from here discovered eight new species of fish.

And I just drift along, occasionally kicking to slow down. Drift snorkeling is like watching fish float by the window of an underwater train. When something catches my eye, like a massive, meter-long lobster tucked back in a small cave of jagged limestone and red brown coral, I kick as hard as I can simply to stay in place and watch.

All too soon it is over. I am too amazed by what is without a doubt the best snorkeling I've ever done to even ask if we can do it again. Only some time later, as the boat rounds the corner of Lembongan and begins the treacherous journey back through the seaweed farm shallows, does it occur to me that perhaps we could have asked for another drift. But by then it is too late, and perhaps it would be too greedy, too much all at once, to do it twice in a row.

I am, however, a greedy person, so the next day I signed on to another snorkeling trip, this time out to Manta Point to see the namesake Manta Rays. This time it's a much longer boat ride all the way around to the southern shores of Nusa Penida. Contrary to what you might think, the waters of Indonesia are not particularly warm, so long boat rides mean a lot of chilly salt spray, and, despite the name, I was not optimistic about our chances of seeing any Manta Rays. But I was wrong.

When we arrive there are a half a dozen of the huge creatures, with their massive rippling wings, circling around a cove, surrounded by shear limestone cliffs. The water is rough, three foot swells blow in from the south, breaking against the cliffs, but in spite of the slight murkiness, it's impossible to miss the Manta Rays. Mantas are massive things, more than a meter across and at least as long, they don't so much swim as fly, slowly flapping their wings through the water with a sense of timing and grace that few animals possess. There is something hypnotic about their movements.

Once again I simply floated, bobbing about on the surface of the sea, beaten around a bit by the swell, while the mantas rather gracefully swam through, under and around us, like some proud eagles investigating these curious new onlookers. The rays themselves are so massive, so foreign in shape that it takes some time to come to terms with them. You think at first that they have no eyes. Or no eyes where you might think there should be eyes. Their bodies are black and it is difficult to make out the eyes -- which are also black -- amidst the darkness of their skin, but then some ray of sunlight breaks through the choppy water and you see the unmistakable glint of a dark eyeball, not at all where you thought it might be and then it dawns on you that they have been watching you all this time, never doubting for a moment where your eyes are. And then the way they have been swimming, the curious pattern of back and forth, becomes clear and you realize these are not simply fish, but something else, something very curious, inquisitive even. They swim at you head on, slowing as they approach, as if they are perhaps near sighted and need a closer look at your floating form, and then they dive about three feet down and slide under you. Once they are clear of you they turn around and repeat the process. Sometimes I dive under them, watching from below as their vast white bellies move overhead, white wings beating slowly, rhythmically through the water.

Mantas are creatures of great grace, they move with poise, like underwater dancers, slowly flapping their way through the depths. If you ever have opportunity to swim with mantas don't pass it up there is little else in the world like it.

After a half hour or so with the Mantas we head back, stopping off at Crystal Bay, which doesn't have as many fish as the drift snorkeling area, but has never been fished using dynamite or cyanide -- two coral-destroying problems that have ruined many a reef in Asia -- and has more coral and intact reef than anywhere else I've been.

We spent a mere four days on Lembongan, but in hindsight it was worth much more. In fact, we should probably still be there, since where we went afterward was truly awful, but that's traveling, you never know what's up around the corner -- sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, you never know until you arrive. I feel lucky to have enjoyed Nusa Lembongan and its neighbors while I had the chance.

Note: Sadly, I don't have a waterproof camera, so all the underwater images above were taken by others. The school fish along the shelf and the flish in the coral are both by Ilse Reijs and Jan-Noud Hutten, Flickr. The blue starfish image comes from Stephane Bailliez, Flickr and the manta ray image is by Motoya Kawasaki, Flickr. All are reproduced under the fair use provision of U.S. copyright law.

The Balinese Temple Ceremony

Everything in Bali is two hundred meters from here. The island itself may in fact only be two hundred meters wide and two hundred meters long. To get from here to wherever we are staying? Two hundred meters. To get from here to the temple ceremony we were supposed to be at twenty minutes ago? Just two hundred meters more. The Balinese are either really bad at judging distance or unclear on the English words for numbers larger than two hundred.

We've been walking up this hill for at least 2km and we still haven't caught sight of the temple, though now we can hear the drums, which is encouraging. One last local walks by, "Excuse me, it this the road to Tegallantang? Yes. How much farther is it? "Just up the road. Maybe two hundred meters."

As it turns out, he's the only one to say two hundred meters and literally be right about it.

Two days earlier we were out wandering the streets when it started to rain. We ducked into the nearest restaurant for lunch. Toward the end of the meal, as the rain was dying down and we were getting ready to leave, the owner came over and started talking to us about Ubud. We ordered another beer and in the end he invited us out to his temple to see the temple's anniversary ceremony and procession through the city.

At the time we were thinking of leaving for the islands east of Bali, but we decided to stick around for a couple of extra days to see the temple ceremony.

Ubud grows on you. Sure, it has a lot of traffic and touristy elements and most of the shops sell things at prices roughly equal to what you'd expect in the States, but despite all that there's something about the place. Maybe it's the way every morning the streets are littered with tiny offerings, small banana leaf trays filled with flowers, bits of rice and other food, along with a few sticks of burning incense. Maybe it's the immaculate, constantly tended gardens that grace the courtyards of every restaurant and guesthouse you enter. Maybe it's the really awful, overpriced beer. No. Probably not that, but it does grow on you. Ubud that is, not the beer.

With a few extra days on our hands we rode the motor bike around some more. We also walked around the temples of the sacred monkey forest where we saw one of the namesake gray-haired Macaques (small monkeys) re-enact the opening scene of 2001 with a battered old aerosol can. Eventually it stopped banging the can on the ground and just turned it around, upside down, shook it, bit it, threw it and otherwise seemed to be saying, how do you work this thing?

After four and half days though I'll admit I wasn't expecting much when we walked a couple of kilometers out of Ubud to the village of Tegallantang where we, along with a couple friends we met a few days earlier, met up with our friend from the restaurant.

I've been to a lot of Hindu temples. Enough in fact that I don't feel the need to see any more, but Balinese temples are considerably different than Hindu temples in India. While Balinese temples look partly like Hindu temples in India, there are other elements that come from older religions. Bali is what happens when Hindu beliefs collide with animism. The Balinese seem to embrace the basic tenants of traditional Hinduism, but then add plenty of their own animist flourishes to the mix -- like frequent and elaborate temple ceremonies.

By the time we arrived the temple portion of the ceremony was already over, which is just as well because it felt vaguely intrusive to be the only white people standing outside the temple, and would have felt even more so if they had invited us in. And I have no doubt they would have, as we seemed to be the only people uneasy with our presence. I'm always wary of being that guy, the obnoxious tourist thrusting a camera in everyone's face. I even carry a long telephoto lens just so I can avoid being that guy.

However, despite the fact that the ceremony was not a public spectacle by any means, the procession most definitely was, since it was headed for the heart of Ubud, down to the meeting of the two rivers which is both a sacred sight for the locals and tourist central for the city. Perhaps that's why no one seemed to mind us standing around the temple.

When we arrived only the men were at the temple. Most of them were turned out in immaculate white sarongs crisply tied without a fold out of place, topped with white shirts. Boys as young as five or six on up to teenagers were lined up to carry giant umbrellas, flags and various silk emblems which towered high above their heads on bamboo poles. The brigade of youngsters and the fluttering banners made up the front of the procession back to Ubud. The umbrellas and banners were used to shade the effigies of gods and demons that made up the middle of the procession.

The older men came next split into two groups, those warming up on drums, flutes and other musical instruments, and those still inside the temple, loading up the various offerings and even stone shrines, all of which they carried in groups, the weight slung between two long bamboo poles that rested on the shoulders of eight and sometimes ten men.

Once the men had all taken their places, as if on cue (though more likely via the walkie talkies some of the elders carried), the women arrived dressed in elaborate sarongs of rich gold and red silk. Most of the women, even the very young girls, wore thick coats of makeup on their faces, giving them a doll-like appearance reminiscent of Japanese geishas, though I'm pretty sure that wasn't the image they had in mind.

Then, as with any parade you've ever seen, the band struck up a song. The children moved out in front, the older women placed their baskets on their heads, the men picked up their offerings and shrines and the whole affair began the slow walking march through the hills down into Ubud. We brought up the rear, the token tourists trailing the procession through the rice paddies and down the hill, past shops and restaurants, houses and even a resort or two until the street widened and eventually reached the main road through Ubud.

At that point we broke off and went up to a second story restaurant to have a beer and a bit of a snack, content to watch from a distance. As we sat upstairs in the fading light we watched as the river of white shirts hit the main road and flowed right, turning toward the city center, gradually growing smaller until the last white shirts disappeared down the hill.

Motor City is Burning

I’ve been out all afternoon on a motorbike. Now I'm sitting on a marble balcony, sipping lukewarm beer, listening to the gregarious chatter of various European languages, all of which could only mean one thing -- I've finally made it back to Southeast Asia.

It was a 36-hour plane flight to get from Rome to here. Or rather a 36-hour series of plane flights and layovers, including considerable time spent in the lovely Qatar airport, all of which meant that, thanks to the wonder of layovers and planetary rotation, we got to see the sun rise and set twice in one day. It'll do a number to your head, that.

We arrived in Bali in a jet-lagged daze and promptly hired a cab for Ubud the so-called cultural center of Bali, halfway up into the hills that fall away from Mt. Agung, the volcano that dominates the southern half of Bali, down to the seaside somewhere south of Ubud.

Ubud was probably once a small village in the hills, but these days its more of a tourist mecca, thanks to some really awful western travel books that shall not be named. Ubud now sprawls out from the central crossroads up into neighboring villages pretty much erasing any discernible difference between Ubud and the dozen or so villages that surround it.

I won't lie to you. Ubud is crowded, in fact, all of Bali is crowded, with traffic like I've never seen anywhere else in Asia. Snarled roads mean incessant horns and shouts are the primary sounds of Bali. Interestingly, Ubud isn't nearly as crowded with tourists as I had expected, at least it wasn't while we were there. During the days the streets would fill up with tourists on day trips from the resorts down south in Kuta and Seminyak, both about 20-30km from Ubud (if you want some idea of the traffic in Bali consider that a 20-30km distance will take anywhere from one to two hours by car or motorbike), but in the evening, after the resort goers were safely back beach-side, Ubud seemed nearly empty.

The traffic and congestion of Bali isn't something you can blame on tourists, it's mainly just the Balinese going about their lives. It made for hectic bike riding, at least until you could get out of the center of Ubud. There was a lot of choking on diesel fumes and waiting or weaving through, traffic.

Once I got through the two main intersections of Ubud the traffic mostly gave way and I had the road to myself, save other motorbikes and heavily loaded down trucks. The countryside around Ubud is well worth riding through, beautiful terraced rice paddies that spill down the mountain sides, glowing a verdant green in the evening light. Over the course of four days I think I rode about 120K, in one case halfway up the side of Mt. Agung.

The smoky wind alternates between choking and enticing as it whips about my helmet. But any choking is offset by the gorgeous soft twilight of the tropics, which kept me riding through village after village, each with it's own craft theme. One village would be all stone work, concrete fountains, sculptures of Buddha and countless pots and urns. The next might be wood carving, intricate masks, totem pole-like sculptures and ornate arched doors. The best were the weaving villages, brilliantly colored fabrics flowing out of a dozen small stone buildings, all of them eventually making their way down to Ubud for sale.

But awesome as it was to be back on the Asian version of a motorbike, it wasn't quite the relaxing riding I did in Laos and elsewhere. You can never recapture the magic, and I wasn't trying.... Okay, maybe I was, but it didn't work. regrettably Honda seems to have phased out the Dream in the last five years, replacing it with something called the Nitro, which just doesn't have the same ring to it. But the bike is irrelevant, was always irrelevant. I missed my friends, especially because I just saw Debi in Paris. It just wasn't the same riding by myself. Debi, Matt, where are you? There are roads to be ridden, locals with ten people on a bike to be humbled by. Six fingered men to be seen, by some.

It wasn't the same. It never is. But you know what, it's amazing anyway.

Cooking in Rome

Rome exists on a scope that I've never encountered before in a city. It's big and massively spread out. There's really no downtown and everything you might want to see is miles from wherever you are. And it has all the attendant traffic, noise and confusion of humanity you would expect from a big city. It also spans several millennia of history with ancient Roman ruins butted up against Gucci and Armani stores.

I'm pretty sure Rome is a great city. I'm pretty sure you could have an awesome time exploring Rome, but by the time I got there I was already done with Italy. Done with Europe. I was ready for the beaches of Bali, our next stop on this quick jaunt around the world.

My exploratory motivation was low by the time I got to Rome. We went to the Colosseum and marveled for a moment before an ATM machine ate my card on a Sunday afternoon^[1]. We didn't quite have the money to get in and even if we did there was no way we were going to wait in the line that wrapped nearly all the way around the Colosseum. Ancient sites are pretty amazing in my opinion, but that amazingness diminishes considerably when the line to get in is five hours long. If I'm going to wait in a five hour line (and I'm not, ever, but if I were) I want a new iPad at the end of the experience.

When you're burned out on traveling the best thing to do is nothing. Which is what we did for three days. We explored a little, wandered the Trastevere area, ate some cacio e pepe (simple noodles with a sauce of pecorino and black pepper), a bit of pizza and even made it out to the Pantheon, which was an utterly disgusting experience. I know the Catholic Church is pretty much like the Borg in Star Trek, absorbing and destroying everything in its path, but to turn a place whose name literally translates as "many gods" into a catholic church is the sort of bullshit that just makes me despair about the future of humanity.

So instead of really getting into the sights of Rome we got into the food. Not the kind you get in restaurants, but the kind you find at the local market. Every afternoon we walked half a block down the street from our apartment to a small produce stand. It wasn't even a nice produce market, just an ordinary produce stand in a residential neighborhood with a mediocre selection. And it was the best damn produce I've ever purchased.

Each afternoon we bought nearly 2 kilos worth of zucchini, eggplant, lemon and greens. For under 2 euro. At the worst exchange rates that's about $2.80 for 4 pounds of produce. You can hardly buy a dozen bananas for that price in the U.S.

The only spices at the apartment where we stayed were salt and pepper. There was also some ordinary, cheap olive oil, which happens to be ten times better than the most expensive olive oil I've seen in the United States. But you don't need extensive spices and fancy oils when the ingredients you start with are high quality. I sauteed everything in a generous splash of olive oil with a bit of salt and pepper and it was the best zucchini, eggplant and beef I've ever made, or had for that matter.

And I'm far from a great cook. I learned a few things working under talented cooks like Hugh Acheson and Chuck Ramsey, but even if you barely know how to scramble eggs, you could make the same thing I made in Rome. Good ingredients are all you really need, and the raw cooking materials of Italy are the best I've seen in all my travels.

In the end Italy and I didn't really get along, but the food redeemed it for me. The restaurants are good, but if you really want to experience the glory of Italian food you need to head to the market, grab some utterly amazing raw ingredients and whip up something yourself. This is what food is supposed to be, simple, fresh and great.

Now hold my calls, I'm off to lie in a hammock somewhere in Indonesia.

1. I know I know. Terrible. Never use your ATM card after hours. The lesson here is that even if you spend years wandering the globe, you're still, at the end of the day, an idiot. Luckily I got it back the next day without too much hassle.↩

Natural Science

There's no way around it; Florence is crowded. It may well be that Naples is the only Italian city that isn't overrun with tourists in the summer, but after three days of hardly seeing another traveler, I wasn't really prepared for the crowds in Florence.

Florence is, admittedly, more of what tourists expect Italy to be. There's no graffiti, the streets are free of trash and the city looks like something out of a fairy tale cliché -- narrow, winding streets, beautiful river walks and plenty of English-speaking waiters. And so they come.

Luckily it's never that hard to dodge crowds. Sometimes you head out to Angkor Wat in the sweltering midday heat. In Florence you just need to get up early and the streets will be deserted. Once everyone else is up, head over to "La Specola", the Museum of Zoology, which is part of the Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze. Zoology isn't something near the top of most must-see lists and in my experience, you'll pretty much have the place to yourself.

Of course how much you'll enjoy La Specola depends a little bit on how much you enjoy wandering through rooms filled with dead animals. My father taught biology and zoology for many years, so I grew up around dead animals, but clearly, La Specola is not for everyone.

Part of the appeal of the museum is simply the antique wooden cabinets used to house the various lions, leopards, monkeys, birds and butterflies. The old, uneven and warped glass ripples as you pass, distorts the view from the corner of your eye, giving all the animals a shimmering hint of movement, as if there were still a bit of life left somewhere behind the glass.

Beautiful glass aside, what makes La Specola special is how amazingly old the specimens are. La Specola records the very beginnings of natural science as we know it. The visible specimen tags I could read ranged from the early 1700s up through the late 1800s and into the 1900s. A few specimens come from the Medici family's private collection and are even older. That means the vast majority of the animals in La Specola date from well before Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, and some were brought to Florence even before Linnaeus had come up with the means of organizing them.

Of course stuffed specimens from 300 years ago aren't going to be in the best of shape. Feathers have fallen off many of the birds, scales have dropped from the fish, the large mammals have badly dried and cracked hides and the natural coloring has long since faded from many.

What's fascinating isn't so much the specimens themselves, but the glimpse they offer into the curious minds of the time. When La Specola was founded in 1771, western culture was just beginning to shrug off thousands of years of religious dogma, dropping a vision of the world where everything was the province of god, for a vision of the world in which the human mind could explore on its own. La Specola hails from the very beginning of that yearning to know more about the world, to reject doctrine and discover first hand the creatures that share our planet.

In the late 17th and early 18th century there was an explosion of exploration, travel and discovery. The "age of discovery" as it's commonly called in hindsight, was the age of people like you and me, curious about the world and determined to see it for themselves, stumbling around, finding what they found. In the case of zoologists much of what they found was sent back here, to La Specola. It was a unique time, there were no professional scientists yet, no authorities or academic review boards, everything was new, everything was a discovery.

Yes, there's something perverse about heading out into the world, discovering exotic and fascinating animals and then killing, gutting and stuffing them. It's gruesome business if you go into the details. There's no reason to do it now, but circa 1700 it was the only link between those who could go into the field and those who stayed behind to make sense of it all.

La Specola is a link between then and now. A record of the conversation between those who discovered and those who took discoveries and turned them into something meaningful. Stuffed carcasses are not particularly meaningful in and of themselves. Colorful perhaps, exotic and even alien in some cases, but finding and recording is only half of what creates the store of human understanding. La Specola lays that conversation open for anyone to walk through and experience.

If stuffed and canned dead animals aren't enough to keep the tourists at bay, then the last two rooms certainly are. The last section of La Specola is nothing but wax models of dissected human bodies, flayed open to varying degrees to show muscle structure, viens, organs and even nerves. The models were created in the 1800s from real human bodies and were used to teach anatomy to medical students. The models are remarkably life-like and cover the entire spectrum of human existence from stillborn, syphilis-riddled fetuses to otherwise healthy adults and even larger-than-life skeletons.

At first glance the wax models are a touch disturbing, not necessarily because they're life-like, but because they put us on the same shelves, in the same warped glass cases. Otherwise, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? We are after all just one more animal roaming the planet. But a curious, inquisitive animal that can dream anything it wants, including a natural science to explain how curious inquisitive animals can dream anything they want... just remember, it's turtles all the way down.

Forever Today

There is something utterly amazing about walking down streets that are millennia old. Your feet are stepping on the same stones that someone more or less just like you stepped on thousands of years earlier, hurrying to work, or out for an evening stroll, perhaps stopping into some restaurant, some shop, some market, some temple.

I've been fortunate enough to wander such streets in several places, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Teotihuacán in Mexico City and now Pompeii here in Italy. What's remarkable about the experience is not the age, but the gap between then and now, which feels simultaneously immense and yet very small at the same time.

It feels small because when you wander around places like Pompeii you realize that human beings have changed very little over what seems like, to us anyway, vast expanses of time. Pompeii had the same elements of cities today, a central square, markets, temples, government offices, even fast food. Not much has changed over the years, though togas aren't much in vogue these days.

Fast food, Pompeii style.

At the same time you can't help but notice the chariot ruts in the stones, the smooth polish of well-worn streets that obviously saw centuries of use even before they were buried.

Chariot ruts. That was a long time ago. So close, and yet so very far away.

There are two remarkable things about Pompeii that make it different from the crumbling ruins of other civilizations I've been to. The first is that Pompeii was not some religious site, not a sacred place at all. It was just a town. Something of a resort town, but still a commercial center. People made and sold wine and garum. Government offices kept track of grain and fish and people frequented fast food joints and brothels. In a word, Pompeii was ordinary, and when it comes to archeological sites open to the public, that's unusual.

The other reason Pompeii is different is of course that it was preserved by the very thing that destroyed it. Pompeii lay buried under ash for nearly 2000 years, preserved just as it was on the morning of August 24, 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius erupted.

The vast majority of the some 20,000 people that once lived in the city were able to escape the blast. Around 2,000 people, for whatever reason, did not run away and were killed by poisonous gases from the eruption. When the ash descended it buried them where they lay, under twenty five feet of debris.

Thanks to an ingenious idea by an Italian archaeologist in the mid 19th century, their final poses have been preserved in plaster. When the bodies at Pompeii were buried they decayed, eventually turning to mostly dust, as all of us will, but that left empty spaces in the hardening ash. Archaeologists found those empty spaces, poured in plaster, let it set, and then excavated around it -- a perfect mold of the dead body.

The creepy thing about the plaster casts is how perfectly they capture the expressions of terror, horror, and sometimes, what looks like resignation, on people's faces. It's yet another bizarre way that Pompeii manages to both bridge time and remind you how vast that bridge between then and now really is. The casts are people, nearly 2000 year old people, but they could easily have been formed in some disaster today.

Sadly, the perfectly perserved version of Pompeii that archeologists found in 1748 has been in steady decline ever since. The minute they began excavating it, Pompeii began to fall victim to the forces of time that it had so neatly avoided under all that ash. Weathering, erosion, light exposure, water damage, poor methods of excavation and reconstruction and introduced plants and animals have all taken their toll, to say nothing of tourism, vandalism and theft.

Italy being Italy, Pompeii is in a steady state of decline. Just last year an entire house -- admittedly, not one open to the public -- collapsed thanks to water seeping under it.

That's why, at this point, Pompeii is largely just walls, stone roads and a handful of marble structures. The frescos, statues and even most of the plaster death molds have long since been carted off to the archeological museum in Naples where you can see elaborate mosaics and the ever-popular "Gabinetto Segreto", otherwise known as the erotic art of Pompeii.

Some of the erotic frescos and sculptures were pulled out of the brothels, while others were in private homes and baths. To say the ancient Romans were a sex-obsessed bunch would be to, as most guides at Pompeii seem to do, apply current sexual mores to ancient times. There were brothels in Pompeii, that much is indisputable. But beyond that, to suggest, as many guides I overheard did, that the more (currently) taboo frescos of gay and lesbian sex (or the sculpture of a man having sex with a goat) were jokes intended to make brothel patrons chuckle, seems a stretch -- pure conjecture really. Who knows what they were for?

It's all guess work at this point. Even if you turn to writing from the time, well now you have one more opinion, one author's take on the times, but still no real sense of what the culture thought. It is a long way from here to there, there's just no getting around that.

Yet, maybe it isn't. Beliefs change, morals change, but people, they seem to stay basically the same. Suppose Charleston or even New York were buried under ash tomorrow, left as they are today for an eternity. Would people 2000 years from now accurately reconstruct our way of life?

They might get the gist of it -- we lived in buildings, we had other buildings for worshiping gods and still others for buying kebabs, but they would miss the finer points. Yet, even without the subtleties they would know one thing for sure: these were people, human beings, and they lived more or less like us.

Whether you drive chariots or scooters doesn't matter, something is always marking our passing, something is always making ruts in the road. And sometimes that's all you need to know.

The New Pollution

Naples is a big, crowded, graffiti-filled city. It's an intimidating place that is by turns a bit like Philadelphia, a bit Mumbai, a bit some post-apocalyptic video game and, in the end, something else entirely.

The rest of the world abandoned Naples long ago, left it to find its own way, fumbling through some darkness of its own making toward a light it can't yet see.

The old Centro Storico area is a maze of narrow stone streets swarming with scooters dodging shoppers at the morning markets where fresh fruit and dried pasta hang alongside lanterns and trinkets, fishmongers crowd the sidewalks and the smell of pastries and coffee choke the air.

The sun rarely makes it down through the five and six story facades to the streets below. The shadowy world of dark granite streets gives the impression that you're strolling through canyons of carefully cut stone blocks and marble doorways. There are no trees down here, hardly any plants at all. Higher up,, on the second and third stories, a few ferns, some moss and grasses grow on the balconies of abandoned buildings.

Even if there were light, there's no room for trees. There's hardly any room to move, save when a street opens up into a piazza, where in the evening crowds gather to drink beer or wine, or perhaps to eat in the restaurants that line the edges of the larger squares.

Naples is it's own world. I sit outside the hotel watching as people on a balcony down the street lower a bucket down from the fifth story with a few euro inside. The man at the nearby tabac runs over, retrieves the euro and throws a pack of cigarettes inside. The bucket retreats back up into the heights of the buildings, disappearing into a tiny sliver of night sky. Naples, the city time forgot.

Naples is not tourist friendly, it's not even pretty. It's just a city. Most of it is covered in graffiti, and, thanks to strikes and general city mismanagement (read: mob control), garbage. Or at least the city proper is, the old town area is largely trash-free, if only because the streets are so narrow there's simply no room for any trash. The graffiti though is universal, perhaps the one thing that links the old town and the newer portions together.

Pompeii, just thirty minutes away and 2600 years older, was also once covered in ancient Roman graffiti. It's just how they do things here apparently, it's in the blood, in the soil, in the wind. Speak your mind with spray cans -- or whatever might be the tool of the era -- out in the open, for everyone to see.

The main reason any tourist, myself included, comes to Naples is its proximity to Pompeii. Beyond the quick and cheap train out to Pompeii, Naples doesn't have a lot to offer. That's part of it's appeal. Perhaps best appreciated in hindsight, but appeal nonetheless. Still, given the tourist epidemic that sweeps Italy every summer, Naples is a place worth appreciating for what it is not, even if what is isn't, perhaps, enough to ever bring you back.