BedBugs!

These are my feet & legs after a night at the Salvation Army Red Shield Guest House in Chennai. Welcome to India! I got about 100 bites. In the heat, they flared up and itched insanely; I applied copious Tiger Balm and my legs felt as if they were on fire, which was actually an improvement. Oddly, Amanda did not receive a single bite, but did not seem to be bothered by the preferential treatment...

For more info on these creepy-crawlies, check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedbugs ...

Interstitial

As I grew up in the U.S., I always sought out and found what later William Gibson would call interstitial space -- the extra space at the edges of formal systems of property, logic, and propriety -- so it was the odd-shaped back lots with fences all around them, slowly filling with trash, attics, parking lots, backs of the big stores, abandoned public parks, condemned buildings - I have always loved the way that texture abounds in forgotten places, the way that ancient gestures, that would ordinarily have been forgotten, frittered and diffused into the shifting background, here are frozen in time, captured, and in the calm insignificance of forgotten spaces they grow into epic monuments to the forgotten, trivial past, mysterious without their previous context. In SF, we have interstitial people -- such as the homeless, and their creations and dwellings have that overwhelming texture as well.

But in general, in the places I grew up in and inhabit -- in the U.S., and also in the "developed" world, most spaces are stitial -- entrenched in the system, minded, cleaned and kept current. In India, almost everything is interstitial; the press of population times time has worked over every molecule, and few resources are spared to erase the decaying past, texture runs out of control, multiplies, rumples and folds back on itself in eerie, beautiful decrepitude, spilling into everything -- the lichen growing in a black cascade down a concrete wall etched by acid rain, the heavenly lightness of plastic ripped so many times it loses all its shape and form and flutters in the tiniest breeze, bizarrely delicate but unnoticed in the blaring, urgent chaos.

Hello Money!

Children tend to be the most direct members of any society; in their innocence, they sometimes directly state unacknowledged but fundamental truths. As a white person roaming the streets of India, we were constantly hailed with cries off "Hello!", generally followed by a one-word summary of the business they hope to transact, resulting in "Hello boat!", "Hello massage!", "Hello hashish!", and so on. The children, with nothing to offer but their tragic faces and outstretched hands, cut out the commerce part and go right for the essential, exposing the fact that foreigners are generally seen as walking, breathing ATM machines.

Thus: "Hello Money!"

Endless entertainment ensues. We try out this new exclamation on each other as comic relief in tense situations; confronted by a squad of particularly sleek boys employing this greeting began to laugh, run about, and shriek in joy as I thrust my own giant arm at them, repeating Hello, Money! and lightly poking unimpressed ones in the belly until they "got it" and ran just out of reach, their own trade transformed into a bizarre contact sport.

On Kadhu

My body rolls in time with the loping slow stride of graceful legs, carrying us along on great padded feet through scrubland and a wind farm (how 21st century, each one labelled SUZLON 1250 in letters ten feet high), rolling, stepping, as the sun rises in its broad arc, I envision the lime green cacti topped by celebrant turbans of tiny red flowers, the branchy leafless bushes, through the densely-lashed eyes of the great, slow beast named Kadhu that bears my weight with such aplomb.

Traditional geometric patterns are clipped into the fur of their flanks and tails. Long-haired black goats and black-headed sheep wander about, lost lambs complain to their mothers, climbing up on a bush to reach the fresh-growing shoots on top. Our camels eat these too - distinguishing them, I think, by color - snatching them on the hoof by swinging their powerful necks to the side.


Revenge of Kadu

Kadhu and Amanda's camel, Patang, have a feud going on, apparently triggered by their mutual recent interest in a girl-camel some days ago, such feelings resulting in an incident in which Kadhu drew first blood, sinking his teeth into the taller, but slender and generally more graceful animal. Patang is in fact a gorgeous creature, lithe and smooth, a cush, photogenic ride for Amanda, wheres I am astride a testosterone-addled beast. For their fighting they are both now in a boys-only group (note: who knew camels pee backward?), so the hormones build and build. Chuchi, our third and otherwise quite predictable animal, attempts to run off with any close-passing caravan containing females.

At irregular intervals Kadhu makes a deep, grunting, burble from deep inside himself, then rears back his head, opens his foamy mouth, and unexpectedly lols a livid, massively-inflated tongue, bouncing it on the spit-frosting of his lips, culminating in a sustained plopping sound which Amanda describes as a mixture of The Bog of Eternal Stench in the movie Labyrinth and Jabba The Hut. To camels this is in fact a sexy and virile sound, a "come hither" emitted spontaneously when health and testosterone reach certain levels, when female camels are present, presumed, or hoped-for.

Amanda, on Patang, followed behind me. After a few of these outbursts, Patang decided to give his own editorial on the subject. At a moment Amanda of wasn't paying attention, Patang made his move. According to her:

"When I opened my eyes from the sound of camels wailing and grunting, I immediately saw that Patang had buried his head in Kadu's ass; a few seconds later, as I pulled Patang back, I could see the wetness of Patang's saliva on Kadu''s balls. By Kadu's cry I was sure he had been chewing on them."

From my point of view, what happened was, Kadhu came to a lurching halt and reared his head his head back over my shoulder with great and sudden indignation, scaring the crap out of me.

This happened early on, so for the rest of the trip I was able to apply the knowledge that camels are kinky, mean, and get right to the point.

A much of their body language is similar to that of horses, another furred ungulate of similar stature, this is only due to the mere physics of such a body; in personality they are more like giant, hoofed monkeys.

Warning: if you were made queasy by this last bit of camel antics, you might want to skip this section.

After this, Kadu had his eye on Patang, even though he continued to emit his characteristic grunt-burble-lol from time to time; and when they were feeding and being de-saddled at camp that sunset, they apparently met eyes, at which point Kadu made a gesture of his own.

Rearing up, he stood with his rear legs straight but distinctly spread, then began to simultaneously urinate and defecate, spinning his club-like tail to send these offerings in every direction, while looking meaningfully at Patang. After this, Patang watched Kadu like a hawk. When we all, out of range, laughed our own asses off (only in my case, literally, see below), I could see how the observation of camel antics might provide some insight to the normally-hidden parts of human nature, as well as a lot of entertainment in an otherwise serene place.

Now that we've eliminated the squeamish folks, I can tell you a bit more of my personal experience on this safari. I set out with a troubled tummy, and in the course of ouyr two-day and one long night adventure, crouching underneath innumerable spiny bushes, I lost all the contents of my gastro-intenstinal tract to explosive diarrhea, with releases of gas comparable in volume and odor to those of the camels.

This experience, in combination with the resulting diaper-rash rubbing on the back of a robust, sexually-frustrated animal, taught me one unexpected fact likely to be of help to future travellers: that when in the saddle, it is a comfort to wear multiple pairs of underwear, regardless of whether you have other reasons for doing so.

Despite this distraction I had a great time, and the guides were kind . I recovered fairly quickly by eating a lot of yogurt and porridge, re-building my intestinal flora with the tougher Indian ones, and I haven't gotten sick since (knock on wood)...

The Cham: Lingams, Yonis, and a martial tone in a tonal language; Communism: My Son, The World Cultural Heritage

When I used to hunt for thrift-store vinyl (whole LPs were going for about 25 cents each in the late 90's), I always looked for albums which made a strong stand for some clear aesthetic, but without any (effective) irony. This resulted in a record collection replete with cowboy and Christian music, with a distinct peak somewhere in the early sixties, where a certain kind or lack of self-consciousness reigned, that strikes the post-modern mind as nakedly psychotic.

This was what our tour guide reminded me of. We had reached My Son by private buses, en mass, about 150 tourists; and I am fairly certain that his shrillness was an adaptation to the sheer crowd size who arrived now to see the ruins of one of the great temple complexes of the Cham people. An adaptation by way of Viet Cong drill sergeant, with the guttural intensity of a samurai, attacking us with facts, leaping about and hacking the aair with an intensity that recalled Bruce Lee at his best, when he had made his martial art, Jeet Kwan Do, JKD, into a lifestyle, a momennt-to-moment philosophy, quick-footed and adaptable, unphased by the presence of powerful adversaries.

And so he bristled with energy as he gesticulated and adressed us in Tour Guide Vox Yakuza, bringing a high-school basket ball coach intensity to Cham factoids. He betrayed his military background by referring to our visit as an "exercise".From what he shouted I gathered that the Cham were a people of Javan descent, who ruled a sizeable chunk of the center part of modern Vietnam for almost a thousand years, beating back the in turn the Han, Viet, and Khmer empires while worshipping a muscular and fertile Hindu-inspired pantheon, their lust for life still bursting through the eroded stone.

Inside each temple with its tiered, stone animal and green plant-bedecked roof, was a table-like altar with a holes in the centers, the building's yoni, which our guide joked was realistic-looking but he could not say for himself due to being single. Outside were several ceremonial stone lingams which would be carried into the temples and inserted into the yonis to bring the various gods and spirits into union, perhaps to re-start the cycle of fertility. Not surprisingly, our guide made a big show of getting women in the group to touch one of these hefty divine dildos.

Vietnam's south: Hue - a mellowing, and a veteran...

Hue is a bit less hectic than Hanoi but still deep in the grip of the horn-blowers, a noise that one's brain learns to screen out and ignore -- I stop noticing how my ears have pulled tight like fists, but at the moments you walk into a secluded courtyard, or emerge from a bus into the countryside the silence washes over like a cool, ethereal drink, lusciously the fists uncoil, the channels open, and not just the ears. We visit the emporers' tombs west of the city (great tombs are always placed west of cities, so that the sun sets over them), and the dense calm inside the walls is almost crippling, one wants so badly just to lie down and soak it in.

We were headed out of town on rented bikes, dilapidated big-wheeled cruisers that everyone rides there, and an older local on a scooter pulls uup next to us and strikes up a conversation. Whispy beard, North Face jacket. Now Vietnam, like most ppoor countries with a tourist trade, is a land of perpetual come-ons, but After a little while I felt that he was being genuine, and in any case spoke pretty good English (somewhat unusual in Vietnam) and had interesting things to say (unusual anywhere...). His name was Yung, pronounced like Jung the psycho-analyst, spelled Dung. Dung had fought in the war, for the South with American training, and it seemed he wanted to talk about it, as it was not something he could safely discuss with most Vietnamese. He had fought in this area for the U.S. Army, and he wanted to show us around the battlefields, which happened to include some impressive ruins and scenery. These included the tomb of the great king Thieu Trii, who (according to Dung) was a great king because he didn't place much burden on his people (esp. compared to the wild extravagances of Minh Mang's later reign, which we had seen the day before). One of the evidences of his munificence was the fact that the tomb itself, a round, walled zone about a hundred meters diameter, was left open to the public, for anyone desiring peace and quiet; Minh Mang's tomb was grander but entirely sealed; in fact, the doors were never opened, and his body was introduced to the tomb through an underground passage which was then filled. One can infer a lot about how many close-at-hand enemies each emperor had.

But the openness of the tomb had an unexpected consequence. Hue is close to the DMZ, the border staked out between North and South Vietnam by the UN, and so the region was the first to be attacked by northern soldiers. A group of these sneaked iinto the tomb and began using it as a sort of giant bunker, a base for guerrilla attacks; and Yung was part of the ARVN group who surrounded and stormed it. Mute witnesses to the violence, all the statues showed bullet holes and bits of shrapnel.

As he showed us a crater from a 300 kg bomb dropped from a B-52, (seen in the picture), I began to see that for Dung the war had been a terrifying experience but also an exhilarating, world-opening one.

I realized that most of my media experience perception of Vietnam has been through war fiilms -- Apocalyse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon. Now I had to expand my notion of the war as a tragic, bloody blunder, a terrible mistake; and instead see that even something as generally destructive as a war can have a completely benign side, that some of the inadvertent participants had ultimately enjoyed it, even treasured the experience, at least in retrospect. Weird, but the kind of thing you learn from traveling -- the world is much richer, more complex than you can imagine.

Hanoi -- plunging into communist chaos, dust, cold and The Tet

Apparently our Thai travel agent hadn't known that we would be arriving in Hanoi right at the beginning of the Tet -- kind of like arriving on Xmas day, but even more so -- and the already authoritarian planes of marble that defined its architecture to me -- already reminiscent of Moscow airport -- were rendered colder by the dim cloudy sky, the lack of people, and actual cold -- a real shock after Bangkok's sweaty shorts weather -- the driver who was supposed to meet us is missing, and we are suddenly surrounded by a frankly predatory knot of grinning taxi drivers trying to get every last dong out of their holiday overtime. We got into the cab of the lowest-bidding driver and he immediately began talking about how we were going to pay him more money; then he started honking his horn continuously to an empty road, only increasing his auditory antics and wheeling-dealing as we began to hit traffic, completely disregarding lane markers and any rules of the road as he hurtled through the dusty, noisy, dreary city. He was quite upset at only receiving several dollars more than the price we agreed upon, would not help us with our luggage, and was still demanding more money as we walked away.

This turned out to be an appropriate introduction to Hanoi, and soon we were just trying to figure out how to get out of this deafening, dusty dystopia, heading north in a gray train dimly lit by green fluorescents, sitting on wooden slats for eleven hours as all other berths were taken due to Tet, surrounded by locals clearly wondering what the hell white people were doing in their car.

In the cold, misty mountains we met sweet, mostly shy folk from hill tribes -- the Black Hmong and Rainbow Hmong mostly, who wear their traditional clothing made by hand from scratch -- including large panels of shiny, iridescent purple cloth that I was certain must be some sort of synthetic, but which they make by repeatedly banging the cloth against the limestone rocks of the region. Came back with a big bundle of their gorgeous handicrafts, greatly refined haggling skills, and great hopes for the warmth of the South.