The Way of Wanderlust

by Don George

  I went back on my last day to pay homage to Sari Organik and to see if it could possibly be as magical in the harsh light of midday. Happily, it was equally lush and glorious and vibrant at noon, pulsing with the peaceful energy of the land around it. I savored an omelet of organic mushrooms, tomatoes, and onions, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and delicious strong coffee, and struck up a conversation with a smiling, energetic woman who turned out to be the restaurant’s extraordinary founder and owner, Nila, who told me that her goal is to help the local farmers grow a diversity of crops organically, so that they can preserve the environment and become economically self-sustaining.

  After that serendipitous encounter, I walked back through the rice fields, feeling singularly content. I had gotten to do just about everything I had been hoping to do on Bali, I was thinking. There was just one exception—I hadn’t heard a gamelan orchestra. I’d caught snatches of gamelan music at a couple of different performances during the festival, but I hadn’t had that soul-transporting immersion in the music that I remembered vividly from my first trip to Indonesia.

  Just as I was having these thoughts, approaching the end/beginning of the path, the sounds of a gamelan orchestra drifted on the air! I could hardly believe it—it was as if my thoughts had conjured those notes.

  I reached the sign for Sari Organik. To my right was the wide, paved driveway that led to the main street, but then I noticed to my left a narrow, hard-packed dirt path that paralleled a rock wall twice my height. The sounds of the gamelan were coming from somewhere beyond that wall. The wall disappeared into a densely vegetated interior, with a couple of red-tiled roofs visible in the distance. I figured that if I followed the path, eventually it would lead to a break in the wall where I could enter and discover the source of the gamelan music. I wanted to see the orchestra with my own eyes.

  So I set off down this winding path, following the sinuous curve of the wall and the music’s tantalizing rise and fall.

  I startled two workers who were on their way to restore a magnificent old house set among the paddies on the other side of a stream that paralleled the trail. They laughed and welcomed me to the forest. A few minutes later, a lone and lanky Western woman with a backpack passed me and pressed on into the green. After fifteen minutes of ambling, I came to a lush setting where palm trees, twining vines, giant ferns, and slick bushes with propeller-like leaves tangled the air. Still there was no break in the wall, and the gamelan music was sounding fainter and fainter.

  I stood in the shade of that jungly patch, puzzling over what to do, wondering if I would ever find the break in the wall, when suddenly it hit me: I had already found the break in the wall; it was in my mind. Listen! I didn’t need to see the orchestra—my wish had been to hear the gamelan. And there it was, all around me. What more did I want?

  I walked back down the path and the sounds of the music swelled in the shadowed air. When I reached a point where it seemed loudest of all, I stopped and closed my eyes. Gongs, flutes, and drums gonged and trilled and boomed in layered patterns, lapidary high notes skipped like diamonds across a pond, bong-gong-gong-booming low notes reverberated in my ribs, rising and falling and rising, staccato and slow, each note like a drop of water from heaven, submerging me in a pool of otherworldly harmony. Time stopped.

  After a while—ten minutes? twenty?—the music ceased, and the forest echoed with its silence.

  Then the harmonies flowed anew, and suddenly I felt released. It was time to move on; I had a taxi to catch, a plane to board.

  I realized that all day I had been regretting my imminent departure, despairing at having to lose this blessed place. Now Ubud had answered that need, bestowing one last canangsari-lesson that would allow me to leave: I didn’t need to see the gamelan to hear its music, and I didn’t need to be in Bali to have Bali in me. It was already there, gonging and trilling and booming, rice paddy blooming, and it always would be.

  Spin the Globe: El Salvador

  Because I’ve been a travel writer and editor all my life, I like to think I have a pretty good grasp of the world—which is why the assignment described in this story was especially confounding. AFAR magazine has a regular feature called Spin the Globe, where they dispatch a writer to a place with only twenty-four-hours’ advance notice. In my case, I was told two weeks in advance that I would need certain immunizations, one of which was for malaria, so I ignorantly assumed that I was going somewhere in Africa. Twenty-four hours before my plane was to leave, I received the email announcing my destination: El Salvador. I’m supremely embarrassed now that my initial reaction was, “Where?” I knew nothing about El Salvador—and that, of course, is precisely why travel is so wonderful. Once again, the classroom of the world had much to teach me, and not just about El Salvador, as I hope this story shows.

  EL SALVADOR. THIS WAS EMBARRASSING. Despite twenty-five years as a travel writer and editor, I was barely sure the country was in Central America. Yet in twenty-four hours I would be headed there on an impromptu magazine assignment. My ignorance, it turned out, was shared by all my supposedly worldly, well-traveled friends. None had any information for me.

  Except one. “Don!” wrote an executive consultant who works in San Francisco. “That is my country! My sister still lives there. I will introduce you!”

  So, on my first morning in El Salvador, I found myself sitting across from a kind-faced woman who told me, “Actually, I’ve put together about a dozen books on many aspects of El Salvador—the ruins, the nature preserves, the flora, the fauna.” We were in my hotel’s open courtyard, looking onto a garden of green vines and red and yellow blooms—unexpected fecundity and tranquility in the mostly grimy, clattering capital, San Salvador. My visitor swept an arm toward the green highlands and volcanic peaks far beyond. “I love my country, and I would be very happy to introduce you to its riches over the next few days.”

  I soon learned that my breakfast companion, Claudia Allwood, not only had published books about El Salvador but also had been the first secretary of culture after the civil war ended in 1992, and later served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for years. In other words, by sheer serendipity I had gained one of the most knowledgeable people in all of El Salvador as my Spin the Globe guide. For the next two days, Claudia led me deep into the countryside and culture of her homeland. On that first afternoon, she drove me south to the port of La Libertad, where we walked past stalls selling lobsters, crabs, and a dozen varieties of flopping fish.

  Later, as we gazed over a sweeping—and noticeably tourist-free—sandy beach near El Sunzal, Claudia sighed, “One thing you must know is that our recent history has been very difficult. In the 1930s, the government massacred the indigenous people. In the 1970s and ’80s, the rebels and the right-wing government forces waged a devastating civil war. These were very dark times, and virtually every family in El Salvador was affected in some way. But now,” she continued, her face softening as a smile broke through, “we are looking ahead. We are determined to make the future better than the past.”

  The legacy of that brutal war underlay every encounter during my weeklong stay. It cropped up in my conversations with Carolina Baiza, the environmental projects manager of Árbol de Fuego, the wonderful eco-hotel where I stayed in San Salvador. Almost everyone in her hometown, located in the worst of the war zones, had fled or gone into hiding during the war, she told me.

  “My grandmother was one of the few people who kept their businesses open,” Carolina said with a rueful shake of her head. “She had a general store, and she was a master of discretion. One week she would sell to the leftists; the next week she would sell to the partisans of the right. Her business was booming! But even for her, those years were awful.”

  I met a taxi driver who had lost a brother, a shopkeeper who had lost a son, a waitress whose brothers had fled abroad. On a visit to Suchitoto, a colonial town of about 25,000 people, an hour’s drive north of the capital, it all became real to me in a new and personal way.
A one-room exhibition in the Centro Arte para la Paz showed an enlarged photograph of a dozen teenage boys standing in a semicircle and grinning widely. Immediately I thought of my son’s high school soccer team, who had struck just such a pose, all excitement and hope, before a championship game—except instead of soccer balls, these boys were holding automatic rifles.

  And yet, despite the heartbreak and horror of that period—which ended with the signing of a peace treaty in 1992—brilliant smiles greeted me virtually everywhere I went. From hotel clerks and office workers to backcountry cooks and wizened weavers to the everyday entrepreneurs who walked the streets selling fresh-plucked papayas in woven baskets and handfuls of cashews in neatly tied bags, everyone I met exuded resiliency, determination, and hospitality. In every interaction, there was visible pride in El Salvador today and a resolve to show the country in its best light.

  Embodying this effort, Claudia—who seemed to know every person of importance (“I’m so sorry the minister of tourism is away,” she said at one point, “I would have loved for you to meet him.”)—had arranged for me to meet with Fernando Llort, an artist revered throughout the land for his simple, buoyant paintings of rural scenes and for the gift of art and hope he has given to his fellow Salvadorans. On my third morning, we met in the living room of Fernando’s humble one-story home in San Salvador. It was just around the corner from his two-room museum, where I had immediately fallen in love with his primary-color, Picassoesque renditions of animals, birds, flowers, women balancing baskets on their heads, and white adobe houses with terra-cotta tiled roofs.

  “I get my images from the Savior,” Fernando said, “and I think I am his instrument to bring hope and joy, inspiration and healing to the people.”

  As part of this healing, Fernando created a series of workshops to teach the residents of his wife’s hometown, La Palma, how to paint in his vivid, childlike style, and also how to create intricate colored carvings in wood and on seeds of a legume called copinol. Those same workshops now employ hundreds of artisans who turn out folk-art bowls, plates, tiles, and, yes, refrigerator magnets. From the craftspeople who make the art to the shopkeepers who sell it and the restaurateurs and hoteliers who serve the tourists who come to see it, Fernando has sparked an entire town’s economic revitalization.

  That’s one tile in the mosaic of modern El Salvador. I discovered another that evening in Suchitoto, when I joined the weekly Friday procession of the Stations of the Cross. Some 350 townspeople, ranging in age from elementary school kids to bent-over elders, gathered in the cobbled streets of the town center.

  A half-dozen boys in medieval cassocks, one swinging a smoking censer, others holding flaming torches, led the procession. Four sturdy young men carried a wooden figure of Christ bearing the cross. Drawings depicting the stations were hung on different street corners, and the faithful shuffled slowly from one illustration to the next, chanting as they walked. When they reached each station, they stopped, and a nun or priest read the relevant verses from scripture. Then all intoned the Lord’s Prayer.

  As we walked in the torchlight through the darkened streets, I felt like I was moving back through centuries—until I noticed some bored teenagers surreptitiously checking their cell phones. Still, the sweep and resonance of the past carried us into the cathedral, where the ceremony swashed into an incantatory sea of prayer.

  After the procession, I stopped for a Pilsener beer at the only bar still open on the town square and joined three U.S. visitors, who were volunteering locally, and one of their Salvadoran friends. The volunteers’ idealism was inspiring, but what stayed with me was the very end of our conversation, when I asked the Salvadoran what his dreams were for his life. After a pause, he spoke haltingly: “I want to have a wife. I want to have a family. I want to give my children an education. I want to have a stable income. I want to have a home.” He stopped. That was all. Suddenly the night was suffused with gratitude and hope and despair and pain and wonder. Five bottles clinked; five voices rose in a single cheer: “El Salvador!”

  As I walked through the silent streets to my hotel, the Salvadoran man’s aspirations mingling in my mind with the timeless prayers of the torchlit parade, I remembered the night before in San Salvador, when Carolina had taken me for a ten-minute walk to her favorite pupusería. As we approached the neighborhood square, we came upon a group of mostly twenty- and thirty-year-olds in shorts, T-shirts, and running shoes, stretching and jogging in place.

  We watched, amazed, as more and more people, old and young, all dressed to run, joined the crowd. Carolina asked a passerby what was going on.

  “Ah!” she said when she heard the response. “Of course! A couple of nights a week, people gather in the square and run together through the town. The police accompany them to make sure one lane of traffic is open for them to run.”

  She paused for a second and then turned to me. “I love this!” she said, and her face glowed with a moon-bright light. “During the war years, people couldn’t even go out at night. Now, look at this! This is the new El Salvador.”

  French Connections in Saint-Paul-de-Vence

  I’ve been in love with France since my first visits in the 1970s. Something about the French language, culture, and approach to life connects on the deepest level with me. As the site of my first infatuation, Paris will always occupy the primary place in my heart, but the region that has enchanted the (slightly) more mature me is the Côte d’Azur. When I explored Nice, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Villefranche-sur-Mer, and Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the mid-1990s, these seemed like heaven to me—and they still do. The climate, the landscape, the art, the sensual ease, the abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables—the light! The Côte d’Azur embodies so many of the quintessential riches of life for me. And that’s why my stay in Saint-Paul-de-Vence meant so much, because for a day I was able to indulge a deeply held dream, and make a home in that fabled place.

  I OPENED THE WINDOWS OF MY THIRD-FLOOR hotel room in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Before me spread a view of green hillsides dotted with straw-colored, terracotta-roofed homes, sloping toward the distant, glinting Mediterranean Sea. I took a deep breath and the faint scent of lavender wafted over me like a balm. Suddenly it hit me that one of my deepest fantasies was coming true: “For a day,” I proclaimed to the stony square below, “I’m a resident of Saint-Paul!”

  I’d visited this rocky hilltop village in the hinterland of France’s Côte d’Azur twice before, but both times I’d been forced to stay well outside the medieval ramparts and to explore the town only on day-trips. This visit was different: I had procured a room in the elegant hotel Le Saint Paul, a 16th-century Renaissance mansion in the heart of the village.

  I had fallen in love with this region’s rare mix of sun and sea, herb and bloom, art and architecture, craft and cuisine, soul and sense, as a fresh-out-of-college wanderer more than thirty years before, and it had enchanted me ever since. Now I resolved to make the most of my time in Saint-Paul.

  Immediately I took to the cobbled streets, now my streets. Visitors thronged them, but no matter. “Bienvenue à Saint-Paul,” I graciously greeted them in my mind. Welcome to my village.

  As on previous visits, I quickly realized that the real magic of Saint-Paul unfurls when you simply wander without plan or destination.

  I began at the 17th-century Place de la Grande Fontaine, a market square distinguished by a monumental urn-shaped fountain. The town market used to be held here, and for centuries residents would come to fetch fresh water for their drinking and cleaning; as I watched, two children ran up to cup a sip from the dripping spigots and a trio of backpackers gratefully filled their bottles. From this square I ambled up winding alleys to the town hall, located in the medieval castle and in whose stony hush French movie stars Yves Montand and Simone Signoret married in 1951.

  My wanderings took me beyond the ramparts and through the Porte de Nice to the cemetery, where an Iron Age settlement thrived more than 2,000 years ago and where I pai
d homage to the simple stone tomb of artist Marc Chagall, who lived in Saint-Paul from 1966 to 1985. Then I re-entered the ramparts and came upon the stunning Chapelle des Penitents Blancs, a spare 17th-century chapel that was luminously re-decorated by Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon and re-opened in 2008.

  These routeless ramblings revealed the village as a happy marriage of old and new: a meandering medieval maze of cobbled lanes and well-preserved battlements, whose dwellings now house galleries, restaurants, crafts shops, and cafés. While the ramparts don’t dissuade the hundreds of tourists who squeeze through the narrow streets, because cars are limited to residents, Saint-Paul still seems supremely livable. Green vines arch over alleyways, jasmine clambers up sun-splashed walls, crimson flowers burst from window boxes—and visitors and residents come and go in easy harmony. The village seems to embody tranquility and tastefulness: The galleries are artful compositions of colorful canvases and provocative sculptures; in the shops, the platters and bowls, scarves and shawls, reflect the rich, earthy tones of the hills and gardens outside; and in the alleyways, the fragrances of herbs and perfumes mingle with the scents of garlic and pizza.

  As a temporary resident, I had a schedule-free afternoon and evening to explore Saint-Paul, so I was able to spontaneously accept when a last-minute cancellation liberated a luncheon table at La Colombe d’Or, a place where I’d dreamed of dining. This restaurant-inn was founded in the early 1920s by the perspicacious and congenial Paul Roux, son of a local farmer, who befriended many of the painters who moved to the region for its salubrious climate, sunlight, and clear air. When these painters didn’t have money to pay for their meals or nights at his inn, Roux is said to have accepted paintings instead. Over the years, he accumulated a museum-quality collection of works by such artists as Bonnard, Dufy, Utrillo, Chagall, Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Miró, which are still on display for diners to savor.