Quarter Year

The kids were young. They appeared to be managed by another young man on shore. I don’t remember exactly how much they asked for the half-hour ride there and back, it was something like one dollar, but we decided to pay five. We immediately regretted it. On the one hand, spreading the wealth is good, but on the other we were encouraging them to be reliant on (and to rip off) tourists, which can ruin a culture in the long run.

When we handed the kids the money they didn’t really give a look of “Thanks!,” rather they seemed to look at the money and say, “How do we hide this from our manager so he doesn’t take a cut?”

You might remember that kids from Bagan were the ones who served us at a tea shop in Yangon when we were contemplating child labor. So I guess, when I put the two situations in perspective, I’d rather give money to the boat kids who can remain home (even if working with tourists) than to tea shops who have taken kids from their families to live and work in the big city because they have no apparent prospects.

Obviously the better solution would be that the government provide adequate education, but that’s not the case right now.

(Then again, if I wasn’t so obsessed with money then maybe it wouldn’t be a central part of this story. That, itself, is counter-productive, I think.)

People fished. Another boat appeared to be dredging the river, its pump making a tremendous noise that didn’t travel too far in the humid air, but was plenty loud close up.

Throughout the trip I worried about my ankles being exposed to mosquitoes in the bottom of the boat, so we lathered up in bug repellent. Myanmar hasn’t rid itself of malaria and dengue fever, so we were constantly conscious of risky situations. Though it’s easy to look back at the pictures and romanticize the trip, a lot of energy in third-world travel is spent on minimizing risk and paying attention to your body. Am I just a little dehydrated, or is this the start of an illness? Though I’m hungry, is this food safe? Can you catch anything from drinking river water? And so on…

Of course the monk isn’t going to ask straight out for anything, because he shouldn’t want in the first place (he should just present himself without expectations)… but the kid wanted money. We were uneasy giving him money because the practice isn’t supposed to be about that, we thought. That’s more like begging.

Wasn’t it the point that Buddhist monks be happy with whatever they’re offered? Wasn’t it the point that they not be choosy about food, that they only accept alms to keep their body going so it can house the life-force?

We were getting a little upset about the apparent corruption of what we thought were pretty straight-forward Buddhist values – and the fact that we’d met some unimpressive, certainly unenlightened monks a few nights earlier. One was possessive of us, which is again out of sync with what we understand to be Buddhism.

Azure and I spent the morning trying to figure out if we had misunderstood the practice or if we were seeing it misapplied somehow.

Sitting at another tea shop, an English teacher – I don’t remember his name, but it starts with Oo Oo – noticed I was wearing the traditional Myanmar longhi, and he commented on it. He sat down to talk with us. His long white hair was in a top knot and there were long, white wisps coming off, as I imagine a schoolteacher from the 1820s old west might look. He had a whiskery mustache and no beard. His white shirt was buttoned up to the collarless top, and he wore the same traditional longhi, of course. I asked him why he dressed like this while few others did. He said that he wanted to keep the traditions alive. Yes! Why are there so few who understand this?

We took advantage of his English-speaking to ask him about the Buddhists. He said he was a Buddhist, though he only lasted as a monk for 10 days. He said that we should give money to nuns – they need it. They’re not well-taken care of by the monasteries, monetarily. They only receive raw rice then have to cook everything themselves.

On the other hand – and we sensed this – monks don’t need the money at all. They get donations and eat very well, everything is prepared for them, so they don’t even take food when it’s offered. He said there are a lot of "fake" monks who only put the robes on then don’t change anything. They have a plan to start a business or something, so they throw the robes on, collect money while taking English classes and internet classes, then when they have enough they quit and start some computer store or whatever.

People (and all the monks) can tell the difference between genuine monks and fake monks. Some genuine monks – as I suspected – become forest monks. It’s just in their nature, he said, to go and be alone and meditate in a cave or under a tree. Some genuine monks will stay in the temples as teachers. Monks are not respected here unless they deserve respect, it seems, and people know the difference.

When the animal is dead, the Mazzeri rolls it over and looks into its face. They recognize a person they know in the face of the animal, and the next morning, they announce to the town that the person they saw will die within a year. Even if it’s a family member, they are compelled – by Quellu Quassu, the Corsican “Some Thing” more vague than the Christian God – to hunt it and kill it, against their own will. The Mazzeri do not choose the person, they’re simply death’s messengers.

The hunt takes place in dreams, but Corsicans consider dreams to be a parallel and relevant world: the prophesied deaths occur within the year.^{1}

Of course, this tradition died out half a century ago.

I arrived on Corsica among the skeptical majority, the rational liberal who doesn’t necessarily believe in something he can’t see, like God or dream-hunters. To each his own, of course, but if I can’t see it, I don’t believe in it.

Then, in mountains that had been presented as ogre- and Mazzeri-filled, where dreams had been dangerous, we saw kids in Yankee baseball caps and Nike tennis shoes listening to 50 Cent.

We have lost something, I could see.

The world is poorer for the loss. Much poorer. What richness is steam-rolled by skeptical media, employment-focused education, the medical establishment and our science-centered faith? What creative force was extinguished by the Church or ignored by tv-addicted posterity? And how did MY money encourage it?

I wondered, “Really, what does it hurt to open myself to believing in dreams and magic? Am I skeptical only because I have so much pride that I think it matters that I be right or wrong?”

I chose to open myself to the possibility probability that there’s much more going on than what I can see. At the very least, it will make my world richer.

But science and money, the twin pillars of Modern religion, crush cultural niches, the pockets in which creative wealth can accumulate. The Corsican mountains are flat. The Snoqualmie run casinos. Modernism has its cellular talons in Africa.

Then we rolled into the valley of the Christian Back-to-the-Landers, and everything lit up. Nowhere else had I seen a cultural cauldron like this: the kids were singing songs to entertain themselves, they talked about natural phenomena, they believed in the supernatural, the Christian God, they believed that Mary was there and helping them. They had stories. They had a world that was immediate and rich, and legends of their own creation were growing in its garden.

I could see how this might be the kernel for a culture. It wouldn’t take many more generations, or like-minded families, for this to develop into a web of myths and practices that the world has never before seen.

So, what does this have to do with food?

Rugged independence persists in modern Corsica.

There are groups of people among us that are making an effort to live in this fashion. They don’t have TVs and don’t read the newspaper. They’re trying to live in a way that allows them and their kids to sharpen the impression of their characters^{2}, that the force of their creativity be unrestrained and untarnished by mass-commercialism, that they can channel their unblemished centers and create with its texture. And for their efforts our world will be richer.

These are the people we need to support with our money. Whether they’re making clothes or constructing homes with local materials or growing food, our money needs to go to those who are creating culture, not steamrolling it.

If we’re going to buy food, let’s buy it from these people, the farmers, the independents who are making this place richer. Let’s buy from the small stands at the farmers’ markets, to help the fragile ones nurse quiet lives.

And we need to stop supporting the steamrollers, the brand names – Coke, Safeway, Costco, Monsanto, Dole, and all the others. There is no spirit in money-centrism, and I’m tired of hearing their voices in humans’ mouths.

Money is the agent of the modern world’s evolution. Spend wisely.

—
^{1} Dorothy Carrington in Granite Island, describing the Corsican fishing community:

“A week he was missing with his boat and crew…. I heard only a single comment on the situation: ‘His wife came down to ask for news. You should have seen that woman! Her face was black; she has drunk the blood of his heart.’ Blessed are the illiterate, who can spontaneously express themselves in such apt and opulent imagery! But perhaps this was general in the days before universal education began mass-producing minds. I have often wondered how far the Elizabethan writers were indebted to the virile, vivid speech of an illiterate majority.”

She wrote about the Mazzeri and other Corsican folklore in The Dream Hunters of Corsica, in which she reinforces her point:
All this, one might say, belongs to the past. Rational French state education and materialistic values have discredited the evil spirits and reduced the legends to curiosities of folklore. The ogres have vanished; the Devil no longer roams among the rocks. Nor, indeed, does Saint Martin…

^{2} “The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character… Under all these screens {brands to which a person subscribes} I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”

– Ralph Waldo Emmerson

Reading Emerson makes me want to overturn cars.

The most unexpected part of holding the fowl was that it was warm. I guess I don’t know what I expected, but the feet felt like human fingers. It’s kinda like when you imagine kissing a person, but you forget to imagine saliva, and it totally changes everything.

City boys have written about killing their first chickens before, so I won’t go into it. It wasn’t an emotional experience for me. But as we were plucking the feathers I told Didier how amazing it was that I’d only killed my first fowl after 30 years.

“I got a good education in high school and college, I’m happy about what I learned and it was relevant for what it was… but it wasn’t…”

“…essential.” He offered.

“Yes.”

“The root of the word ‘essential’ is ‘essence’ or ‘truth.’ You weren’t educated about the truth…”

“… of how our bodies mix with the earth.” I said.

“Exactly.”

Didier and I were on the same page a lot, some of his rants could have come from my mouth. The ones about how companies have a stake in keeping their employees powerless, how it’s good for capitalism that people be vaguely afraid about the future, and so on.

When he taught us about the medicinal herbs in the garden I took tons of notes, but I had a hard time accessing what I’d been taught. I’d look at a plant and look closer at its leaves and compare it to my notes and would be too unsure to declare it Citronelle! or Lemon Pepper! or whatever. I said this time and again, and I’ll repeat it here:

“Learning to identify plants is like learning to read for the first time.”

People ask us often, “So, the kids could leave school at 15? How did he educate them?”

I was curious about this too. One day we went for a ride with Didier and his oldest son. They sat in the front seat, we sat in the back. As they drove, Didier pointed to the sky and talked about the movement of the clouds. He pointed to the hills and talked about the rock formations and the fossils. He talked about the fields that the neighbors were sowing. His son pointed to a sea gull that was out of place here. His son talked about the history of some old structures on their land. His son talked about planting by the moon and how it was a good guide but not the last word. His son talked about finding fennel by looking for a larger reed, because fennel grows at its feet.

Azure with her wild salad.

In other words, Didier taught his children about the land and the plants and the weather and the animals and natural systems and Catholicism. He taught them the things that he considered essential.

They might not know a lot of the academic stuff we consider foundations of knowledge, but they’ve learned how to have a relationship with the earth, and I think that’s fundamentally healthy.

Many of the people in Myanmar wore this face paint, which doubled as sunscreen. Some wore it in very exact patterns, some wore it messily (as this girl is), others would just put a line, and some people didn’t wear it at all. All the little kids wore it, but of the adults only the women wore it, for the most part. The people on TV didn’t wear it, and I wonder why that is. I’m sure there’s all sorts of codes and implications having to do with the design people make out of the stuff. I forget what it’s called. The paste is made by rubbing a piece of pigmented wood against a stone and adding some water to the powder. It’s hella charming.

As Azure said, “SHE doesn’t have to worry about GMO seeds!” In fact, in Thailand they found a field “contaminated” with GMO plants. That’s the word they use, contamination. Anyway, I like the touch of the girl having tied her flower stems together with a little palm frond or something.

Wrapped in some big leaf for easy carrying. Notice the plastic bag hanging from her finger? There was plastic everywhere, and at one point we watched a cow eat a plastic bag. It was quite a scene – A cow innocently eating, which elicited an alarmed response from us three big white people, which elicited a confused response (“why do they care so much about that cow?”) from the dozen kids who were following us around the village. Good times.

Ah, Johann.

So he set up a ladder that didn’t QUITE reach its intended destination, and he managed to reach to the low end of the beam and grab it, hands only, feet dangling. This was all part of the plan. He hung from the beam with the pulley system in one hand and a chronically bad shoulder attached to the other. He would walk, hand-over-hand, along the beam to the peak of the roof, hanging the whole time, then after the rope was attached he’d walk himself back down to the ladder. Right?

Wrong. It turns out he wasn’t as strong as he thought, in fact I don’t even think Siren from American Gladiators could have done it. His hands quickly gave out and he and the ropes crashed onto a lower beam and then crashed again to the ground, where he landed on his head and hip. There was blood everywhere. In shock, he got up and dragged his broken body to the house. Through the gate, past the table, he managed to open the door. He saw the family in the living room and explained, “!wosdln;lksir.”

Suzanne saw the blood and called the ambulance.

After a couple days of blissful country living, skirted children and dinner prayer songs, quiet family meals and hand-picked salads, quiet nights with talks about religion, a helicopter roared into the valley. A few sturdy-looking paramedics jumped to the ground with a stretcher in their hands and ran to the house, putting out their cigarettes on the way. In the meantime the well-endowed pilot hopped down from the cockpit wearing a single-pieced jumpsuit that unzipped from his neck to his thigh, and he lit up his own cigarette.

Fifteen minutes later they loaded Johann into the chopper. The neighbor took pictures. The family watched in unison as the helicopter rose into the air and took off for Montpelier. Didier prayed for his idiot son; in the helicopter’s downdraft the women’s skirts flapped at their ankles.

It was a culture shock. Azure was shaken out of the trance of this peaceful valley by one of the paramedics who looks like her cousin Todd. “These are our people,” she thought. What are we doing here pretending to be anything like the family when our lives are much more like those of the paramedics? And tonight they’ll go home and tell their wives or husbands, “You’ll never believe this weird place we went today…”

We decided to give the family some space, so we took off for the afternoon. It was a good excuse to check email in town.

The next day we had a little surprise: an ambulance pulled up to the chalet and unloaded a morphine-soaked Johann into our living room. It was unbelievable that he was out of the hospital so fast, let alone that he wasn’t still in ICU. And now here he was being wheeled into our little candle-lit bubble. Would he turn on the lights at night? OH NO! Would he bleed on our food? At first we thought he was going to take our room, and we balked, so instead he was carried into the neighboring room. He groaned as the paramedics – with help from the family – set him on the bed. The paramedics took off and we were left with a roommate who couldn’t move, who would need help going to the bathroom and whose head was partially shaved and sewn like the ass of a sick cat. But we all know what it’s like to fear we’re a burden, so I sucked it up and broke the ice with a smile, “If there’s anything you need…”

It turns out – miraculously, really – that he didn’t break any bones, not even his skull. They think he has a concussion, but if that’s the only chip in his enamel then he’s incredibly lucky.

We helped him walk that first afternoon. He couldn’t believe that this happened to him when he had so many horses to shoe the next day, not figuratively. He said he smokes 50 – FIFTY! – cigarettes a day, and now he’d gone two full days without.

“Every crisis is an opportunity,” I chirped.

He looked at me with knowing eyes. “It is, it really is.”

Johann cried in the hospital, apparently, he cried about his life and how nothing ever really seems to go right for him, how he screws up good things. His dad said, “Johann had everything here ten years ago – he had this farm, he had his horses, he had family and he had God, he had good food and a quiet life. But he wanted to ‘see the world’ so he threw it all away….”

(From their little paradise the outside world looks like a mess, it looks like an ocean of people who take comfort in other people’s weaknesses to justify their own addictions: identity, status and craving, not to mention the more obvious daily addictions of narcotics, processed foods and mindless spending.)

Anyway, Dad continued his thought: “In the ten years since he left the farm he’s gone from crisis to crisis, he’s crashed 22 cars. He’s no longer a practicing Christian, he’s lost.”

The night I said the crisis/opportunity thing, I popped into his room to ask him a question and then backed out quietly: his room was candle-lit and he was in the middle of the bed on his back, counting rosary beads on his chest with his eyes closed. His legs stretched thin and fragile under the sheet.

Later that night he sat with us at the table, slumped. “Do you know where my car is?” he asked.

“No, we haven’t seen it.”

“It was up on the road but when the paramedics came they parked it over by the horses, it’s a little white car,” he said. I could sense where this was going.

“Oh, really? No, I don’t think I’ve seen it.”

“I have two cigarettes in my backpack in the car. I just know that if I can get them I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

I changed the subject.

I was astonished to watch him find a pair of jeans and start to put them on. Then he scared up a pair of shoes and painfully fit his feet inside. He winced as he put on a jacket. This guy could hardly walk, he’d just been airlifted out of the valley, and here he was getting ready to drag his broken body into the unlit night just for two cigarettes. He limped across the room and opened the door.

“Wait!” I said.

He paused and looked over his shoulder as cold air tumbled in. I walked to within arm’s-length and handed him our flashlight.

Didier, the father, said, “I don’t want any part of this modern world,” which was amazing to hear because it’s almost a direct quote from Claude, the proprietor of the last farm we were on. I guess we find people who have something in common. He believes that when every Jew accepts Jesus as the lord, he’ll come back and create a heaven on earth for the believers. I think I got that right. For him it was like Christmas to have a Jew show up at his house who was eager to learn and listened to every word he said, even taking notes. A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to call people like him crazy, but I think that our job as travelers is not to paint with broad strokes, but to listen, to try to understand what are the core values of the people we meet and how do those values shape their lives. To them, their lives are consistent with their values. Everyone looks crazy to someone else. Frankly, I don’t see how their beliefs are any crazier than – say – someone buying their food at Safeway. :)

Enough of that.

We stayed in a little house on their property that’s reserved for guests, so we had an awesome bedroom, fireplace and kitchen, then a bathroom that didn’t have running water. We collected all the water we used doing dishes and used that to flush the toilet. To wash, we boiled some water and added it to a basin, then mixed cold water. I loved washing (my upper half) outside in the morning with the sun coming up through their olive trees, the guinea fowl squawking everywhere, the water steaming in the sunlight… I don’t think I got very clean, but whatever, I don’t have to smell myself. It was a wonderful way to start the day.

There’s so much to write about…

One day Gabriel, the 17 year-old, fired up the tractor and loaded five of us (me, Azure and three girls) and the family dog in the bucket. He drove us high into the hills. We hopped out, followed a path between bushes and up some rocks, then found what we’d come to collect: a wild-growing weed called Rocayrol – I believe it’s Shepherd’s Purse – that grew between the rocks on the south-facing slope. We each took butter knives and dug them up by their roots and tossed the whole plants into a basket. It was sunny, there was a breeze and there were old stone walls crossing the hillside. The girls sang songs from Church with tunes that reminded me of serious medieval music. The girls braid each other’s hair and wear ankle-length skirts.

We filled a basket with the salad then headed down the hill in the bucket of the tractor. On the way we passed a pine tree and the 11-year-old grabbed a branch and ate the little pine cones growing at the tips. We copied her : they were sweet but full of resin. At the bottom of the hill we got out and picked more wild greens that went into the salad, another plant that I wrote in my notes (which aren’t at hand now).

It’s a polyculture farm, which means that they grow many different things. This is opposed to monoculture, which is what you see on large for-profit farms. Their primary purpose in farming is to feed themselves, and they only sell something if there’s a surplus. He said several times, “We farm to be free.” They also practice permaculture, which is the idea that each thing they grow has multiple purposes and everything supports everything else. For example, the chickens are for eggs, their poop is for compost for the potatoes, the leftover potatoes are fed to the pigs and chickens, and so on. Of course everything is completely free from artificial pesticides and herbicides.

Each night Azure started the fire with old grape vines that had been pulled up and are sitting in heaps around the property (many vineyards here are switching crops because the wine prices are dropping). She’s a skilled fire starter – most nights she managed to start a full roaring fire with a strong core without even using matches or a lighter, just the leftover coals and some branches. At the same time I’d walk down to the garden and collect greens to flavor the salad – spectacular wild celery leaves (people: our whole lives we’ve been lied to about celery), tender fennel fronds, peppermint, lemon balm, lima bean leaves, thyme, comfry, cauliflower leaf, spinach, chard and so on. None of these were actually growing in the beds – they were the “voluntary” plants that grew between the beds.

We decided not to use any electricity at night, so we often found ourselves putting together the end of the meal by candle light. We sat on the couch in front of the fire in the dark, we read and wrote by candlelight and we went to sleep around 10pm – 9pm their time (they don’t change their clocks on the farm).

There are so many other interesting stories…. An older son (from another marriage) fell on his head from 25 feet and had to be airlifted out by helicopter; we killed guinea fowl for the market; we went to the cathedral on Sunday for Mass; we had a traditional Cassoulet; they sang before every meal… and so on.

Anyway, Azure has uploaded a bunch of pictures from this week – at our Flickr account.

The free haul!

We came here expecting meals that were pasta-heavy, or maybe collages of whatever they could scrounge together. Lettuce sandwiches for dinner, that kind of thing. But the truth is that I don’t know if I’ve been around a family that eats better, in all senses of the word. The food is fresh and free from chemicals. It’s very local. It’s cooked slowly. It’s eaten with the whole family. It’s appreciated. It’s often nurtured from seed to table. It’s balanced. And it’s DELICIOUS. Last night we had a sheep’s heart that was roasted in pork fat with an herb & red wine sauce. Sides were mashed potatoes, fresh salad with dijon dressing, cauliflower with champagne-cheese sauce, bread and wine and cheese and a yogurt-honey dessert. Much of this was food she actually produced herself. The pork fat & bones were left over from the night before, when we had pork ribs cooked in that same casserole. That pork was cooked in the chicken drippings from the night before (which was cooked in the same casserole). And so on.

Mom (an awesome American ex-pat from Shelton, of all places) has something on the burner all day. Despite spending no money on food, there’s always plenty, so much that they give food away to some needy neighbors (this experience calls into question the meaning of “poor” – is it someone with little money or someone who lacks what they need?). During the day she and her 3-year-old daughter work in the garden, feed the chickens, cook, preserve fruits & veggies, forage. Her husband works 18 hours a week, a full load for teachers here (and they assume another 18 hours will be worked at home grading papers, etc). State health care covers 85% of the medical bills, while supplemental private insurance (which costs $65 a year for the family) covers the last 15%.

After spending a couple weeks with Claude and Margarite on the olive farm, where they’re stingy with everything from heat to water to food, it was a shock to come somewhere where they’re even cheaper with the money but are so much more generous with everything else. We were invited to have all the homemade jam we want (including sour cherry and rose petal jam, orange-watermelon jam, fig chutney, etc), pickled veggies and salads from the garden. In fact she invited us to eat anything we find here – it all comes back to her somehow. We’re staying in their house for free, in exchange for what’s been very little work. They don’t just believe in abundance, they live the abundance.

Preserves!

Last year, through a storm that killed hundreds of people, I clung to the handles as snow slapped my face. Snow froze my hands, cold cramped my calves. I asked, “Is there anywhere you’d rather be?” And each time I asked it I still answered, “no.” Beauty can starve away pain.

This wall builder chooses warm shoes for wet mornings. He nurses weak embers in detailed notes. He sleeps with the sun and sows with the moon, then listens in bed for his pulse. He’ll talk in his sleep to the knocks of the rocks who keep knocking for most of the night. They measure the silence – he finds that it’s long – because presence is slow, almost stopped.

While pruning the vineyard I channeled the vision of walls that were weaving through woods. How much is it worth to work without sensing? I’d try to work in awe if I could.

I turned off my words, forgot about home, and abroad, and my story and plans.

I watched myself standing and noticed this grass and followed the arc of my hand.

I started to sense, as my vision got tighter, “I’m working with land just to eat, though my body is keeping my consciousness shining, it too will soon die and be meat.” I was dirt moving dirt, food moving food, earth moving earth, just to be. And as long as I work with the dirt and the food I’m letting the earth move in me.

In this place where land’s fingerprints run from its veins, he strains to extract a large stone. The rocks knock together to punctuate breezes, each heartbeat measures each breath in his throat. The wind and the rain will weather the stones, this land, his body and work. But I can still sense them, and I’m still trying to tell him I’ll listen as long as he talks.

That afternoon, I took a nap and he worked for a couple hours before the family went to town to pick up the third sister from the airport. Mike and I used the time to go into town and get a few things. The freedom of being able to just go to town was a huge deal to him. He had to take the bus to Nice a couple times. It only came twice a day and came back once a day. He had taken a different bus to a town down the road and had to hitch hike back.

Since all of the sisters were in town, we ate lunch by ourselves. It was fine, a simple meal, some vegetable soup, corn and beet salad and some bread. It was probably the nicest meal we had the whole time I was there.

My feelings about going back to the olive farm were these, I was neither excited nor dreading it. I didn’t feel that we had left on the best of terms, but they weren’t horrible. I went back because Mike was there and from what I understand, he went back because he had a respect for the place and felt a connection with it because it was the only farm that we had worked on.

Needless to say, I didn’t have the same nostalgia about the place that I did before. I was prepared to do crappy jobs and work alone and not really get a lot of positive interaction with the family, so it was fine when that happened. The first morning Mike went off to do the hard labor that he had requested and I was to make confiture (jam) with Claude. Mike had told her that I wanted to learn how to make jam and I was really excited and sort of shocked that it would happen. I was actually skeptical. And I was right, it was too good to be true. Claude showed me the process. You sit in a room with no heat (there was still snow on the ground outside), by yourself, washing the oranges in water that is barely above freezing level. Then, you cut them open to find no juice, but many seeds and you dig the seeds out. If there are too many seeds, you take the whole inside out and keep the orange rinds. They were the saddest of the sad oranges in the saddest of the sad settings.

I finished the whole bunch right at noon and we were off for lunch. After lunch we went back to work. I never got to see the end of the confiture-making process because I was too busy ramassaying (picking olives off the ground). This wasn’t my very least favorite job, but it isn’t too high on the list. In fact, when I got sick last year and Mike had to pick olives off the ground by himself, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the reason we ended up leaving so abruptly. It isn’t so horrible of a task if it is sunny and there are people around to talk to, but when you are sent to do it, it is almost degrading. It is monkey work and you feel less important.

That being said, I didn’t let it bother me much. I think coming to the farm with low expectations and the knowledge that I was only working for 2 days made anything bearable. I suspected that I would have these tasks, mainly because I knew how much time it took to earn Claude’s respect and I knew i didn’t have that much time OR the desire to do so this time. I just did my job until the bells rang 5pm, then went on my way. (we would later find out that WWOOFers were only supposed to work 4 hours a day, 5 days a week–we would work 6.5 hours a day, 6 days a week)

Mike was doing something else that afternoon, moving branches around or something and he would pass by and whistle at me. Even that quick exchange made me feel like someone cared about me and it made picking olives not so bad.

At one point, Claude needed me to cut the blackberry bushes back, so that Mike could dig them out. This job required that we work together, something which I believe Claude tried endlessly to avoid. It didn’t slow our work at all, but it did make it MUCH more enjoyable. In fact, we would have been much happier doing all the tasks together and probably would have worked better and faster.

That night we ate dinner with Claude in her place. Despite the fire, it was cold inside as usual. She wasn’t feeling well. When we got to her living room, there were only two comfortable chairs by the fireplace. I pulled over a regular chair from the table, but she said something and went off into the other room. She proceeded to take an electric saw and cut the legs off of a broken chair so that it was at the same height. I sat down. Claude told a story in French that I understood 1/3 of, then she went to bed.

On that night, we thought of the word for Claude–martyr. There is no other way to describe her. The sadness that we felt for the place the year before, I can’t help but think that is how she wants us to feel. The place doesn’t have to be sad at all. It is what it is because of what Claude and Margerite make it.

Mike later told me that Claude had told him that “people idealize this slow way of life, but it is hard, you are constantly fighting against nature.” Her life is a struggle because she makes it a struggle.

The next day was easier. I ramassayed alone in the morning and after lunch. They told me to go find olives on the ground and pick them. Most of the trees had been picked, so I had to hunt for them, but I filled two baskets full. I was a ramassaying machine. I was literally digging them up out of the ground to fill those baskets. This year I wasn’t doing it for Claude and Margerite to succeed, i was doing it so I could succeed at not being sucked down into their misery. At lunch, Claude came to the table with Margerite and Monique (the youngest, prettiest one, who we found out had cancer last summer). Monique seemed nicer this time. She was personable and real, still distant, but I think that’s how she was raised. Claude sat at the table with her head in her hands. She was so sick that she couldn’t even eat, but she still came to the table. It was a scene, people trying to talk without paying attention to the woman bent over in pain at the end of the table. She should have been in bed, but it was in her nature to suffer, and I think, have everyone else know she was suffering.

At 4:30, I took my full basket up to the house. Margerite gave me another quick job of pulling weeds in her garden. I could see Mike now, he was finishing up with pruning the Kiwi trees. It was a hard job and I didn’t envy any of his hard jobs. At 4:55, he came over and watched me work. He was done because it was close enough to 5pm to be done and he reminded me of that.

Mike took this picture when he quit at 4:55 and watched me work for 5 minutes.

Neither of us have jobs like that. We don’t quit at 5pm, we work until we finish or get to a stopping point and it felt incomplete to just walk away.

Before we went down to the apartment, Margerite told us that Claude needed us to work on Saturday. Mike had told Claude that we were going to go to lunch in Italy on Saturday and we needed to leave early. But, she needed us to work in the morning, so we did. Mike dug holes and planted fruit trees, I weeded a garden that I didn’t even know existed. We didn’t make it to Italy in good time. It didn’t matter, though, the place was closed for for repairs and we ended up eating elsewhere, but it was still bitchy. We could have been upset, but we really weren’t. I remember thinking as I was pulling up the lawn of weeds that covered the few puny lettuce leaves that I was just so happy that I was not sad. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it isn’t. I didn’t have to live like Claude and I didn’t have to think like Claude and even though she could keep us there working, when we wanted to be eating delicious Italian food, she couldn’t make us feel as miserable as she felt. It was a win. Wow, this is kind of a mean blog post!

And we did end up eating good Italian food. And the Italian people were nice to us and invited us back for a party! Which is one of the reasons we thought, “Why do we want to move to France instead of Italy?”

Riana carried the chicken back to the house and gave Azure a lesson on cleaning it – feathers, guts and so on.

We were going to redo the dishes after this, but you know, it was lunch time and we were all tired from the events of th day… whatareyagonnado?

In the meantime, Benji and I followed the dog back to another neighborhood then lost the scent. Riana later tracked him down and the owners gave her 40 Euros and a bottle of champagne in apology, a nice gesture in my opinion. They could have been jerks about it. Apparently the guy (a Brit) goes for walks with his dog off the leash, then his dog disappears for an hour. The guy returns home assuming the dog will behave himself, but he’s suspected in some earlier chicken murders as well. Now they know.

Tonight we had coq au vin.

The borscht was unbelievably good, I got the recipe. We never made the schmaltz, apparently an old Jewish dish of cooked chicken or goose fat, apples and onions (probably with some spices), cooled and blended then spread on bread like mayo. The pumpkin pie was made from scratch. On Saturday it says, “Fish Guts” – the fish guy comes to town and Riana collects the guts for the chickens.

Sam believes that genetics, essentially, make black people less intelligent. He called it “instincts,” but he implied that these “instincts” couldn’t be overcome, so I thought of it as genetics. He said instincts, like how Jews are two-faced and women are untrustworthy, are “hidden” in people and there’s just not much anyone can do about it.

In America it’s an unwritten rule that people have the same capacity for intelligence (happiness, pain, love, compassion, etc) regardless of their race (sex, sexual orientation, religion, etc). Another unwritten American rule is that you don’t openly question the first rule. Don’t worry, this post isn’t going there.

This story is beside the point, but it will illustrate Sam’s dedication to Buddhist practice. Sam lived with a nagging, painful neck injury caused by a car accident. Finally, eleven years to the day after the accident he decided to get rid of it for good, so he sat down and meditated for three consecutive days. He didn’t eat, didn’t drink, didn’t move from the spot upon which he sat. He focused all his attention on his neck, visualizing it healed. When, 72 hours later, he finished the meditation, he could move his neck freely – he twisted in either direction to prove it. Healed. Hearing this story before the questionable comments, I thought, “Wow, to meditate that much means this guy must be a river of compassion!”

Sam’s phobias seem inconsistent: Buddhism teaches you to love others unconditionally, I thought, so how does he reconcile the practice with the lack of respect? (Well, there are plenty of people who manage to hate despite their loving leaders, so perhaps Sam is to Buddha as America’s anti-gay Christians are to Jesus and the Taliban is to Muhammad).

Sam asked Ali what he believes happens after we die. Ali responded that he feels this is it – there’s no afterlife. Sam said, “So you don’t even believe in re-incarnation?” (which, I suppose, is an afterlife scenario halfway between “this is it” and “there is a heaven”). Sam does believe in reincarnation, obviously, in which one’s karma determines their station in the next life.

So I wonder, Does Sam believe a person’s race is determined by karma from their previous life? In his beliefs, would a good dog be reborn as a Jew? Would a bad Eskimo be reborn as a Latino? It all seems ludicrous to me, but who am I to judge? I have no evidence either way.

I never asked about racial hierarchy as dictated by karmic law because I wanted to be polite: I was in his house, after all. The more relevant topic to come out of this exchange is how a guest should relate to their host. I was brought up to be polite (which in our culture means not talking about touchy subjects) in someone else’s home, but that could be just as much a culture-based practice as the one about not questioning racial equality.

About being a challenging guest, one view is that we travelers can claim “ignorant’s license,” which allows us to say or do things that might be rude in the town we’re visiting but can be written off as cultural differences. For example, Ali suggested that Sam’s hellion of a son (my words) needs more attention from his father, especially considering that Sam splits time between his two families in different cities. It would be inappropriate to say such a thing in England or America, but Sam doesn’t know that, so it might as well be said and written off as a cultural difference. And to be fair, we don’t even know if such a statement is inappropriate here in Thailand. So Ali chose to say what he was thinking and put the onus on Sam to blame the cultural difference if the statement does prove to be insensitive.

(I have a British client who says, “I don’t know why American parents are always gushing about how much they love their kids… I mean, my kids are alright. They’re just kids.” Who knew parental gushing/pride was cultural?)

Anyway, back to the story at hand: So, can a guest challenge their host’s opinions? Mathew says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks (Sam’s in his late 50s), so you might as well just listen politely and even goad them, then later blog about how fucking crazy that guy was. To all the old dogs reading this – can you teach an old dog new tricks? Have you been open to major philosophical changes as you’ve aged?

I’m coming to the conclusion that if you can manage to cleanse your argument of judgment, then these topics are fair game. The key – as is the case with any communication – is to avoid taking anything personally and think about whether you’re making unfair assumptions when you’re speaking. For example: ‘having unconditional love for all people’ and ‘thinking that Jews are two-faced’ aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

Here’s the argument that won me over: I’ve spent 30 years wandering among millions of people on this planet, starting on North America. Sam has spent almost 60 years wandering among millions of people on the opposite side of the world. Finally, after all this time and all these people, he and I have come together for one night to talk face-to-face on his porch, and it will never happen again. The odds are astronomical that we should be here! With that in mind, it seems like a waste of an opportunity that politeness prevent us from discussing important topics. To me, the devil is in the intent.

As for Sam, his views are consistent with Buddhism in this way: he says that they all come from careful observation. I imagine (assume) he’s dealt with a few Black people he found to be dumb and a few Jews he found to be two-faced. We asked him whether he would ever visit America and he said that even if he was given a free ticket he wouldn’t go. “Too dangerous.” He’s afraid of the guns (of course) and thinks Americans hate people from other cultures (he mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan). In response, Azure showed him pictures of our house, our chickens, the Demeules’ lake house, our friends cooking and smiling, and Sam said, “You must live in a really nice part of America.” Well, yeah, I guess we do.

Either way, it’s hard to trust the opinion of someone who learns about the world through observation but would refuse a free ticket to a place they’ve never been. Not that we’re even close to understanding how his version of the world operates, but is his observation of race so different that he had to ask if Obama was as smart as Bush?

I like this about Sam – an in-the-moment simplicity developed through attention.

We scored an awesome situation, yesterday evening, relaxing on a wooden porch that reaches over the water on Ko Lanta’s eastern shore. The wide, parallel floorboards run from the porch railing to the house, then up the wall to the high metal roof. The tide was just creeping over the rocky beach. As Az and I laid there we heard boats motoring in the distance, rolling waves and chirping birds. We heard hammers tapping metal, people talking, people walking, people singing, cooking and crying, a Muslim call to prayer and occasional wind. The loudest sounds bounced off an island across the channel. The sun was just pushing through the clouds, though it was late enough that none reached the east-facing porch.

Sunrise the next morning

Three years ago we drove past the traditional wooden houses on this, the less-touristed coast. They seemed to glow with lives busied by projects unrelated to us Westerners, and I was hungry to see it. I remember hoping that, if only we looked curious enough, if only we drove slow enough, we would be invited in. It’s harder than you think to get inside someone’s house when you’re traveling: most locals assume you want to see the tourist sites, and we don’t commonly invite ourselves to dinner. And I remember, years ago, peaking into one of these houses and wondering about the natural light climbing from the sea-side back porch, up the hallway boards and through the front room, where families live open to the street. How to get invited inside? For years now I’ve tried to imagine rhythm of this traditional Thai life. What would be inside that house?

Yesterday, when we drove slowly along this road, a simple sign read, “B&B.” We had to stop. Kim welcomed us and called her husband, Sam. Sam had the idea for the B&B: he fantasizes about a worldwide network of homestays welcoming travelers, who later repay the good deed to travelers in their own town. It’s the exact same idea as Couchsurfing.com, but in its infancy and without a website.

Finally, we were invited into the house.

It’s open and airy, constructed completely of wide wooden planks, except for the metal roof high above. It’s like sleeping in a Wild West saloon, or so I imagine. The kitchen sits in the dark, unpainted entry, where only a little natural light drips in through the front door. This is the front half of the house. We walked down the hall toward the sea. The back of the house is dominated by one enormous room, separated from the hallway by a slatted wall. In this room the whole family sleeps on wicker mats and keeps all their possessions.

The bedroom.

A wall panel opens to the outside to let a breeze roll through. Off this bedroom is the main bathroom, which consists of a gravity-flush toilet and a wash basin. The Thai shower two or three times a day to keep cool, so the bathroom floors are always wet, which we find kinda repulsive. The hall opens onto the sea-side porch with solid, waist-high railings. The high ceilings theoretically keep the house cool in the summer, though I’m sure there’s only so much you can do.

When at home the family splits time between lounging on the front porch, lounging on the back porch, and, in Kim’s case, working in the kitchen. On another home’s porch I saw people sitting or laying on the floor. We did the same in Sam’s. He said they sleep in different rooms depending on how they feel. Sometimes it’s the bedroom, sometimes the back porch, sometimes a little loft in the “attic” (the space above the hallway). Most families have their kitchen and toilet in the back of the house and they throw all their natural waste onto the beach for the high tide to reclaim. He said the waste would feed “the animals,” meaning crabs and fish.

At one point in the evening Ali, a very nice Brit who arrived at the same time, suggested we turn on some music, but I noticed that nobody else in the town was listening to music. We could hear everything along the shore – all the motors, dishes and discussions. No music. In fact, Sam said that the villagers prefer to listen to the waves rolling under their porches and the wind stroking their metal roofs.

Just then, though, bass started booming from a couple doors down. On my walk to the store I found the culprits: a group of Westerners, who were renting the house, played music without noticing they were the only ones doing it. I later asked Sam about the religious makeup of this little fishing village. The main town is Chinese (slash Buddhist), and this half is Muslim, but in a few years it will be Protestant.
“Why Protestant?” I asked.
“Because Westerners are buying up all the houses: the five at this end of the street have already been sold.”
“What will happen to the Muslims?”
“They’re moving into the hills.”

Krabi also has a fairly large night market in relation to its size, which was right across the street from our hotel, so each night we would go and get some cheap treats, banana pancakes, fresh squeezed juices, fried dough pieces with coconut jam and of course phad thai. On our third night, we heard loud music playing outside our room and went out to find an enormous weekend night market. It had a stage and many clothing stalls in addition to the food vendors, so we walked around to look at everything before we sat down to eat. There were more options at the weekend market, so we got papaya salad and stir fried vegetables. Also, there were cute outdoor bars that served fruity cocktails by the glass or jug. A jug cost 99 baht, or $3. A great deal if you are ever in Krabi on Fri-Sun.

The whole ‘having a driver’ business is new to us: Mul didn’t even mention Alex, sitting behind the wheel, when they picked us up at the airport. After a while we understood that it’s normal to ignore the drivers, maids, nannies and cooks, to talk as if the person that’s there is not there. When we went for a drive, Mul said it would be just the four of us – him and Michelle, me and Azure. Alex drove us.

On that first day in Jakarta, Azure needed a dress for New Year’s but the mall’s parking lot attendant didn’t like that our car was trying to force its way in through the service entrance. Mul can handle any problem, though, and he ignored the workers’ NOs and used the service entrance anyway. Another time he told us it was illegal to drive in the bus lanes, people got in big trouble for it, then he did it anyway. We asked what would happen if he got pulled over and he said nothing would happen: he knows the police chief. He said that success in third-world countries is determined by who you know.

Mul runs a number of businesses, his main income coming from cell phone products. In addition to running phone auctions, he sells ringtones and wallpaper, so he’s constantly using his two phones – one was a really nice Blackberry. They had an extra phone for us, which was really convenient, and Michelle had two phones as well. So many phones!

One time Mul was on the phone as he drove us through the gates of his complex. His maid was waiting farther ahead at the curb and he waved her across to the driver’s side of the road. She hesitated to cross in front of his moving car, but he waved insistently, so she went, assuming he’d stop. He didn’t, and he almost ran her over, still talking on his phone. She handed him whatever we were there to pick up, and as soon as it was in his hand he pulled away and almost ran her over again. She had to jump back. I don’t know if he saw her.

Mul and Michelle were very generous, taking us out to some very nice meals we wouldn’t have experienced otherwise. The first night we had a Korean BBQ dinner that he said cost $400 – the meat was amazing and the service spectacular. The next day we went to a hole-in-the-wall noodle joint that he said cost $40 for the five of us. He said it was too expensive, and I agree considering you can find noodle dishes everywhere for $0.50. These noodles were very good, and Mul again generously paid. Sometimes the kids came with us and had their own simple food – Azure noted that Sebastien, the youngest, craved the same thing kids in the US crave: fish sticks and french fries.

When the kids got loud or fussy Mul & Michelle would pass them off to one of the nannies who would take the kids away to eat. Though it’s certainly foreign to us, my impression was that the kids’ needs were being met all the time. At restaurants the nannies sat at a different table and ate food brought from home. A number of nannies sat in the lobbies, all dressed in similar ill-fitting pastels made for dirty work, taking care of kids for the busy parents inside. When we tried to talk to one of the nannies they were surprised and usually didn’t answer. They were the background.

The kids’ nannies live at Mul’s apartment and spend all their time with the family, on call 24 hours. I asked if the nannies had families themselves and he said, “Of course,” but I’m not sure how that works. The nannies eat what Mul buys for them. In-home helpers are cheap because Mul provides a room for them to stay. He said a nanny costs $80 a month.

Mul said his bar tabs sometimes reach $1400 on a big night, but that’s the price of playing the game among the Jakarta elite. “It’s who you know,” he says, and Mul knows a lot of people. On drives Mul would point out the latest immense real estate developments and he would drop for us the owners’ names. More often than not, Mul knew the owner and had done business with him or was somehow related. Mul instructed his driver to take us past the mall with the most cell phone sales in Southeast Asia.

Mul is really excited about getting into the mining business. Mul knows which companies are successful and why. He’s ambitious, quoting a Chinese proverb that says, “Above every sky there is another sky.” He said everyone cares what brand of clothing you wear, what cell phone you use, what cars you have, what neighborhood you live in. Mul rolls with the high rollers, everyone he hangs out with is someone important. In Jakarta, they practically worship successful companies and brands.

Mul said his family is Christian. They are Chinese-Indonesians and retain strong Chinese traditions, living in the city’s “second Chinatown,” the most exclusive gated community in Jakarta. The stunning houses soar, standing testament to the community’s business success. Apparently, in 1998, Jakarta’s Muslim majority rioted because they believed the Chinese-Indonesians controlled all the wealth and withheld it from the rest of the country. Mul retorted that there are poor Chinese-Indonesians, too. He said, for example, that their driver is half-Chinese, and he only makes $150 a month.

Mul put us up in the brand-spanking-new, $130-per-night Bandung Hilton. The pure white sheets attracted me, they were so clean and luxurious. Azure and I never stay in hotels like the Hilton. Mul obviously appreciates the luxury, service and respected brand name. While rain rolled off the floor-to-ceiling self-cleaning windows, we watched the Rose Bowl on a flat-screen tv and I took a very hot shower. The next morning featured the most extensive breakfast buffet I’ve ever seen, broken up by cuisine. Az and I eagerly sacked the American section’s eggs, waffles, cereal and toast. The Chinese section had noodle soups, hum bao and other stuff I didn’t recognize. There was Indonesian, Japanese and even an ice cream bar for kids of all colors.

We ran into Michelle’s family at breakfast. They’re very genuine people – her dad develops organic fertilizer and is lobbying the government to endorse its use. Her cousin is helping. This was encouraging to hear.

Mul and Michelle skipped breakfast because the maids dropped off their kids and they’d played late into the night, the maids returning to their own hotel across the street. I imagine that hotel is filled with the maids for families staying in the Hilton, all dressed in ill-fitting pastels. The kids seemed tuckered out the next morning, and the maids accompanied them with their grandparents while the five of us toured Bandung with Mul’s friend.

We had a wonderful Sundanese (people of Bandung) lunch in a stunning, unique restaurant called the Leaf Village. We ate in outdoor huts that wandered up the misty hillside among enormous ferns and leafy trees. Azure was sick, so she layed down in the hut while the rest of us enjoyed the food without her. Afterwards, Alex drove us to a lookout where we watched the sun drop behind some nearby mountains. This part of Java is magical. I hope Az and I get a chance to tour the countryside someday.

On the next-to-last day Mul had a special treat for me – he took me to a gorgeous spa with four different pools, temperatures ranging from hot tub to icey. We relaxed in the steam room, jumped in the ice bath, then shivered to the sauna. After I brushed my teeth and shaved we got hour-long massages. Mul treated me to the whole evening and I appreciate his generosity.

The next day Az and I were on our own so we went to Pizza Hut, desperate to rebuild our stomaches with some Western food. Michelle joined us shortly after, having put her daughter down for a nap. Michelle is interested in photography but doesn’t know how to use an SLR, so we treated her to a tutorial, introducing ISO, aperture and shutter speed, and how they affect a photo. She seemed to appreciate the instruction, I hope it could start to pay back their generosity.

Mul showed up and we finally said our goodbyes. They were off to a surprise party, so they had their driver take us to the airport. On the way I tried to ask him some questions, remembering a conversation we’d had with a taxi driver in Bali, but it didn’t go anywhere. I don’t think he felt comfortable talking freely with his passenger.

I went for it, belting out words far outside my range: I set my voicebox free, unrestrained by keys or tones. And though my timing was good I wouldn’t blame anyone for failing to recognize the song. It was horrible-good, I was smiling, and I proved I could shed self-consciousness to fit in with the new group. Even dancers in the club down the hall probably wondered who was this singer with so much misplaced confidence. That’s what it takes, I thought – show them you can be loose and play.

I put the microphone down. I looked around the table but nobody would make eye contact with me, people were kinda quiet. Instead of applauding, some stood to get a drink while others had already left the room during the song. Azure’s face was in her hands. “What the hell?” I thought.

The following performers ranged from good to spectacular, Mul leading the way with a soft, skilled voice that I didn’t even notice because I thought it came from the karaoke track. Other guys sang well, too, and the women were impressive. The highlight of the night came from a Chinese woman whose performance was so captivating that it snapped me right out of the slog of pretending to enjoy myself. Her style was completely un-Western, a high-pitched, nasally song that might be folk Chinese, performed with the kind of talent that deserved a nationally televised concert on a patriotic holiday. It was like her voice was stretching glass. Friends applauded and cheered. I had totally misjudged the values of this group, a social strategy that’s quickly becoming my signature.

Mul leaned over to me, “She was Miss China a couple years ago.” What?

From the second Mul’s driver opened the door for us, this whole night – our first in Jakarta – would surprise us. Miss China was married to the guy who handed me the microphone, an oil company founder and the Secretary of State’s son. The guy on the other side of Mul was head of Citibank Indonesia. Mul himself is related to, among others, a former head of Lehman Brothers who now leads Barclays Japan. Mul’s uncle owns a distribution company in Indonesia with 60,000 stores, something akin to 7-11, and the uncle’s other company produces 70% of the products available in those stores. Another friend owns Forever 21 and someone else is head of the largest mobile phone service provider in Indonesia, a country with 200,000,000 people, fourth most populous in the world (after China, India and the US). Some guy’s dad is running for Governor of Seoul, South Korea. Another guy has a $50 million credit at a casino in Macau.

The numbers he threw out were staggering. The most staggering, maybe, was the story about his friend’s wedding. It wasn’t the fact that 3,000 people attended, though that dropped my jaw. It was that they hired a world-famous florist to fly from LA to Jakarta to do the flowers. The price: $500,000.

Not surprisingly, I have some opinions about this that I’m going to have to let cool before pouring them on the blog. Can a blog melt? For now, I’ll just say that this was only a preview of the status-pursuit that would be put on display for us over the next five days.

We landed in Ubud to find an artsy town that had succumbed to tourism as well, though not in the dirty-grime, back-alley drinking sort of way that the affordable areas of Kuta are. Ubud has tons of touts on the main (Monkey Forest Road) drag. We followed one to a hotel and rented the scooter that would be ours for the next three weeks.

Had we not done this, I would have been on my mother’s doorstep again this Christmas. I’m sure of it. But we did rent it and the very next morning (our second morning in Bali), we rode up and away from Ubud. We took risks, turning down roads we knew went nowhere, that turned into poorly paved, or unpaved trails through the hills and the rice fields and we really never came back. We would spend hours away from everything that we would have been sitting in if we had not had the scooter. We did stay in Ubud, but we would wake up early and see what we found to be the most beautiful time. It was the time when the Balinese people were still untainted by tourism. The women went to the markets early to buy and sell produce, kids walked to school, men and working women carried their scythes in their belts and walked or biked or scooted to the rice fields. There was no one shopping in the Polo stores or eating in the cute, upscale cafes. The people who walked at this hour did so without shoes and without mixing with us at all except to wave or smile as we passed by. We didn’t change them and that felt good every time.

I know now that Colombia probably wasn’t that bad. Fred claims that Colombia is still his favorite country that he’s visited. This could be a result of it being the first of his big trip or it could be that he got away from it more than we did. I’m not sure.

Writing this next part, I know that many of the things that I will say are probably wrong, but I will write them anyway. Bali and Colombia are both what we would consider third world. The average person makes about $4/day in Bali and I would assume at least that in Colombia. Bali and Colombia were both colonized, Colombia by the Spanish and Bali by the Dutch. However, it seems obvious that the hold the Spanish had on Colombia was much stronger than that of the Dutch. There are very few traces that they ever existed on Bali at all, save for the fact that there are brick houses in some places, and one building in Munduk appeared to be slightly European looking. Other than that, the hold the Dutch had on Bali outside of the main city, Denpasar is non-existent.

I see this island more like Corsica than I do like other colonized places. It still holds its own values and traditions despite the populations that have held it, including Indonesia. It is Bali.

The people here seem happier than they did in Colombia. They wave and smile as if we are a funny novelty riding through their towns, which we are. They are very peaceful. At no time have we felt at risk here, not even when we took 20 wrong turns and ended up in towns without electricity or running water. Violence does not appear to be in the blood of the Balinese, not with animals, not with children, not with us. There aren’t guns here like there are in America and it feels safer because of that. Also, no drugs.

Whereas I was very angry that the Colombians didn’t take care of their people or grow enough food to support the population, the Balinese do. Not with health care (it is very similar to the USA in that respect), but within communities it seems like they make do. There is an abundance of food growing here and people work with and in it all the time. They eat.

The frustrations that I had with Bali were the social level issues that I would probably have with most 3rd world countries. They are the ones that I expressed in my post about Iluh. Why can’t people create work, why is the education so lacking. Why don’t they figure out how to rise above 3rd world status and charge what they are worth?

I know these are entitled thoughts. I can’t help it. Lately I have thought to myself as the 13 year old girl hands me my rice and gives me $.20 in change, KEEP IT! This rice is worth more to me than what you are charging. But, those are the things that I find so endearing about it. Most people are so honest. When we got off the tourist path, we would pay $2.00 for both of us for dinner. We saw everyone else paying the same.

Breakfast was the most depressing meal of the day. We ate at the hotel because it was free and who are we to pass that up. It was depressing in the same way a retirement home is depressing. Not that everyone there is old, but we were slow. The Bali around us was colorful, fast and dirty and so unlike us, sitting, sipping tea and talking about what we’d do that day — sit at the pool or go to the safari park. We wanted to get out and get going as fast as we possibly could.

Sometimes when we came back from the market we’d do a jalan jalan (tour) through town. It was sort of a victory lap through the main streets of Ubud to look at the people sitting in restaurants eating and drinking and not ever knowing what Bali looked like. They sat in colorfully lit open air restaurants that we were suckers for in real life, but couldn’t seem to stomach when they charged the equivelant of 5 days wages for the wait staff for one meal. We could never resolve our feelings about such extravagence. We’d been to a restaurant for dinner three times. The first two nights we were in Bali, we ate out, not knowing where else to go. The third and final time we ate out was on Christmas. Restaurants aren’t real here, MAYBE in Denpasar, which is a legitimate city, but not in the rest of Bali. If you see one, it is for tourists or tour buses to stop. Once for lunch we drove for about 2 hours our into the rice fields. To our joy, we found a cute roadside joint. The menu was in English and the prices were high. “Do tourist buses stop here?” Mike asked. “Yes, of course,” the girl said. We ate there anyway because we were really hungry, but we didn’t stop anywhere again. We spent that lunch talking to her about how Balinese men were “playboys.” It was one of maybe 300 words she knew in English and I found that funny.

Instead of restaurants, they have food stalls and push carts. Sometimes they will have mini restaurants on the backs of scooters that stop to sell small plastic bags of homemade snacks to workers in the fields. This is where people eat, if not at home.

The Balinese live out in public in ways that we don’t. Whereas PDAs are not ever seen here, it is not uncommon to see naked people bathing in the river at sunset or washing their clothes in front of their houses in the mornings. You see people eating in the foodstalls, with their hands (this is traditionally how it is done, Aviva showed us how before we left). You can see people napping in the roadside stands that are really covered huts with platforms. These things made me uncomfortable at first. I was taken back by the privacy that I was invading each time I saw someone doing something that we do behind closed doors at home, but eventually I realized they didn’t mind and neither should I.

When we left for Jakarta, we were happy with our time spent on Bali. We couldn’t say that we ever went to the beach. I never went in the waves or got a tan, but we were satisfied with what we had leaned of Bali. We got to see people who worked hard, long hours and who worked with their families. They worked together to make their lives function and I really felt that we got a back-end view of Bali. I thought we understood what it would be like to be from Indonesia.

When we got to Jakarta everything changed.

There are bugs in the room, and this evening I came home to the nastiest spider I’ve ever seen, relaxing next to our lightswitch with an air of entitlement. It’s definitely not the paradise Lonely Planet promised, but I reminded Azure, half-encouraging myself, that if we could overcome our dependence on nice rooms we would save a lot of money (and therefore travel longer). She reminded me that nobody at home would consider any of our rooms “nice,” and we do save a lot of money because of it. Oh yeah. Azure wrote a hilarious post about the hotel here: http://www.quarteryear.com/us-vs-bugs

Right now, at 8pm, prayers are echoing in our room from two separate mosques, one voice from the east, one from the west. It’s beautiful, if haunting, and it’s a little bizarre that one muezzin is a child. This area does feel different than other parts of Bali. The young men leer more. Hindu locals have told us that this is what Muslim areas are like. I’m sure Muslim locals would say the opposite. I don’t know the religion of the young men, but, compared to the rest of Bali, Medewi is much less welcoming.

Two miles past Medewi beach we rode toward the water. Groups of young men perched on their motorcycles hanging out next to the ocean beaches, tons of men. There were some women here and there, but mostly just young men staring at us, calling out, “HEY! HEY MAN!” I don’t like when people yell at us. When we first encountered this in Kuta I wanted to ask the touts, “How would you feel if someone yelled, ‘HEY!’ at you?” Maybe not that bad, it turns out. At a homestay in Ubud the owners did exactly that to get a family member’s attention, yelling down to the courtyard, “HEY! HEY! HEY!” It really rubs me the wrong way, but that’s how they do it. A nasty old woman there was responsible for both the yelling and the loogie-haucking outside our window, several times a day.

Back in Medewi, to the west along the shore, a series of pens at the edge of the beach hold cows who graze the trees and grasses. Across the road rice paddies sprawl under the most plastic bag scarecrows I’ve seen anywhere in Bali. The bags are tied to strings that run across the mature rice, and when a farmer notices birds eying his field he yanks the strings and the bags jump. If that fails, a lady standing in the field yells and swings a large flag toward the flocks. From here a number of Hindu shrines dot a village road that lead us inland. We stopped to watch two cocks start a pickup fight.

We crossed the main road and drove toward the mountains, an hour before sunset, surprised that the small towns here aren’t as poor as we expected. The brick houses are well-constructed and the neighborhoods are cute and clean, even deep into the hills that roll down from the national park. The road pierces the jungle for miles and just when we were convinced it would cross to the opposite coast, it petered out to gravel. We turned around.

High in the hills we ran into a mobile vendor who sold us some tasty fried tofu snacks wrapped around beansprouts. The people were nice, most smiled at us, as is usual outside the cities. We were so deep I’m sure no other white people had been up that road any time recently, and the people who didn’t smile at us gawked in surprise. One side of the road teased glimpses across a valley that’s raw and thick with coconut palms and primary growth, jungle toppling onto itself. I wanted to take a picture of the natural beauty, but it would have been a picture that demands a pre-delete button, Azure and I joke. You know your next picture will be a throwaway, so you press “pre-delete,” then take it anyway.

We coasted down the hill and stopped at a grocery store for some carb snacks – chocolate bread, jackfruit chips and peanuts. At a gas station Azure offered a chip to the driver behind us, and he happily took her up on it. Everyone lol’ed.

We stopped at some food stalls and ordered bakso (soup with balls of “meat”), though after watching a lady make an egg-filled, veggie-rich soto ayam (chicken soup) we second-guessed our decision. The bakso held its own anyway. While deciding where to sit we did the usual smile-at-people routine, and one little boy called, “Tourist! Tourist!” but his mom shut him up quick. It reminded me of something that happened regularly when I said something stupid as a kid. Specifically I remember the Canadian Exchange – a yearly event when players from a Canadian soccer team stayed with families from our American team, then a couple weeks later the roles reversed. I welcomed the Canadian kid to our home, saying, “Welcome to the lifestyles of people on Somerset!” imitating Robin Leech. My mom shut me up quick, even though it was just silly in my mind, because of course we weren’t rich & famous. It was just another house, to me. Maybe we were rich compared to that kid, though, I don’t remember.

One of the years I stayed with a Vancouver family who lived in an apartment. They ate french fries with gravy and had a toddler daughter named Sidney – I felt sorry that she’d grow up in an apartment. I called my parents collect (they were proud that I could pull that off), but I was homesick and scared because the family was unexpectedly different. I don’t know if I felt sorry for them or uncomfortable about being outside my bubble – probably a combination – but I remember crying.

Today, in Bali, as we drove through some of the poorer neighborhoods and watched the pickup cock fight, I thought about how last year we passed similar Colombian poverty and felt sick from a distance. This year we’re in it, on a bike of course, but we face the differences and keep pushing ourselves to understand it. As we went deeper and deeper into the mountains I started feeling nervous. I glanced at the gas, we had plenty, so I had to ask myself, “You’re not nervous about the scooter; do you trust the people?”

On this trip I’ve come to the conclusion that fear is not a good reason to not do something. Fear is an emotional response to perceived risk, and our perceptions are so often wrong.

Back at the food stalls Azure ordered a delicious pancake thing heavy with chocolate, peanuts and condensed milk, and the cook battled flying ants as dusk dropped to night. We drove home through a storm of flying ants, they were all over the road, maybe attracted by the headlights. They floated thick like Seattle’s cottonwood blooms in truck headlights, then rolled like dry leaves as the trucks passed. As we crossed the bridge into Medewi two swarms of larger bugs pelted my neck and chest, at first I thought it was gravel. It was disgusting. As soon as we got home, and I snuck past the enormous spider, I washed my face and hands. Not much you can do about that.