Rather remarkably, the guy is true to his word and shows up at our hotel with decent mountain bikes. So once again, for the second time in three days, we set out on a long bicycle journey through the villages of Pemba. I don’t think it’s possible but the road on the second journey is even worse than the first. Imagine the most difficult mountain bike course possible with steep down-hills, jumps, sand traps, potholes, mud holes, rocks and everything else. Then throw in some hundred degree African heat and you pretty much have the scenario. Not only that, this time, the villages we go through are even more and more remote. The farther we get from Chake Chake, the less and less they seem to have. I mean; these people have nothing. Nothing but straw houses and food and hot sun. But shit, they sure can smile. And they can shout muzungu very loudly. And they all wave and jump up and down. A crazy muzungu on a bicycle riding through their remote villages is an uncommon and very exciting occurrence.
But it seems like a lot longer distance than twenty kilometers from Chake Chake to the ruins. It feels like the peninsula points out into the ocean forever and ever. “This has to be the last village.” “No, there’s another one up ahead.” And then another one and another one. On and on we pedal, through the heat, the intense unbearable heat. I sure hope there’s a place to swim near the ruins or I will never be able to make the return trip.
Finally, we reach the last village and people in the village point towards a path that leads to the Ras Mkumba ruins. As we head towards the path, two teenagers follow us. We keep on going as they run along beside us. After a while, the trail splits into two trails and the teenagers have to show us the way. We keep on pedaling. Again, the path diverges and the two chasing teenagers show us the way. After what seems an eternity, we reach the spot. Truthfully, the ruins aren’t much, just a couple of fallen down stone walls. I like ruins and all, but this is pretty mediocre. Nicely though, there is a small but perfect beach right next to the ruins. So we go for a swim and relax as the two teenagers try to make conversation with us. They don’t speak English and we don’t speak Swahili so the conversation is rather limited. Mostly they just point and laugh as crazy Marius goes through his karate routine in the sand. After an hour or so, it’s time to head back. And that’s when the miracle happens.
Marius has the idea so he deserves the credit. As we head back the way we came with the teenagers running along beside again, he stops his bike and offers one of the teenagers a ride on the crossbar. Accordingly, I offer a ride to the other one. Have you ever experienced a spontaneous eruption of pure joy? You know what I mean: A baby is born, you discover love, you sink the winning shot in the championship game …Something happens that is so wonderful, so terrific, so fantastic the good feeling bubbles forth and expands until it seems to take over the entire universe. When we ride into the village with the two teenagers on our bicycles it is truly one of the most amazing experiences of my entire life. It’s like a parade or carnival and we are the stars of the show. The entire village comes running out of their huts. They are all jumping up and down and laughing and smiling and God …I can’t explain it. I’ve never seen anything like it. I feel like a hero coming home after victory. Joy …happiness …glory …Can the world really be this wonderful? They shout out the names of the teenagers. They shout out “Muzungu! Muzungu!” The old people are laughing, the adults are laughing, the young people are laughing. It’s like some kind of miracle and that’s all I have to say.
Sure enough though, all that goodness, something is bound to go wrong afterwards. After we leave the village behind, we still have a long ways to go. We are descending a steep, bumpy hill when the accident occurs. Truthfully, I’m not really sure how it happens, but a complex thought runs through my head as I fly head first over the handlebars …fuck …it’s a long goddamn ways to a hospital if I break a leg. The bicycle flips over on top of me and the gears slam into my shin as I crash more or less head first onto the ground. The pain is intense and I think for a second that it might be broken …oh shit oh shit …very bad place for a broken bone… . But it’s nothing; just a flesh wound. I have a nice big gash below the knee and the blood looks rather gruesome as it drips down my leg but nothing is broken. Yeah sure, I spilled a little blood on African soil …but at least it didn’t kill me.
So the last 15 kilometers of the ride back are quite a challenge. If I was a crazy muzungu riding through the villages before, just imagine how much more crazy I look as blood drips down my leg. But we make it back. And the gods reward us for our efforts with some double bonus points. As we return the mountain bikes to the guy, thank him and express our surprise at the quality of the bicycles in such a remote place, he responds, “No problem. You want mountain bikes. I get mountain bikes. This my island. I born here. Anything you want or need, I can find.”
“Anything?” I say, thinking about the fact that we have been marijuana and alcohol free since we arrived on Pemba four days ago.
“Anything!” he replies with a knowing smile.
It sure is a beautiful universe. God damn I love this island …
Pat Ryan works seasonally in upstate New York doing landscape stonework. Because of the snow and ice that comes in the New York winter, he works only from early April until early November. In the winter months, he goes traveling for four or five months a year. In the last thirteen years, he’s been to forty countries on five continents. Visit his website www.patryantravels.com.
RICHARD STERLING
Negrita
It’s more than just paint on a Saigon wall.
More than half a century ago, sometime in the 1950s, a small triangle of vacant land lay at the confluence of Tran Hung Dao and Nguyen Cu Trinh Streets. Its address today is 148 Tran Hung Dao, on the way west to Cho Lon. Sometime back in those olden days, it might even have been in the waning days of French rule, a billboard size advertisement was painted on the eastern wall of the adjacent building. The ad was for Negrita Rum, a very popular tipple here from earliest French days to Reunification in 1975 when it pretty much disappeared. But until that time it was the drink of choice for many Foreign Legion soldiers, their heirs the American G.I.s, and who knows how many hard drinking journalists. The ad features Chinese script, which is appropriate to one’s destination should you see it driving westward down the street.
Negrita Rum (the French spell it “rhum”) was first blended and labeled in 1847 by the Bardinet Company of France. And Bardinet still produces it. It’s the most popular rum in Spain and high on the list in other European countries. It’s a blended rum, being made in distilleries on Reunion, Guadeloupe, and Martinique islands. It’s the Martinique element that gives Negrita its distinctive taste. Rums of Martinique are “agricole” rums. They are made from sugar cane juice, not molasses, a by-product of the refining process.
The painted ad on Tran Hung Dao (in the French time known as Rue Marine, or Sailor Street) would have beckoned thousands of soldiers and sailors as they headed into Cho Lon for nights of debauchery at the House of 500 girls. It would have stimulated the thirst of gamblers flocking to Le Grande Monde. The dark lady on the label might have winked at Graham Greene as he scoured the steamy streets for atmo to spice up The Quiet American. She was part of a neighborhood and a city whose former character is now almost entirely gone. But she has been (temporarily) preserved. In 1960 the Metropole hotel was built on that triangle of land, hard against the adjacent building, sealing up the commercial art as a time capsule. Through all the subsequent decades of war, upheaval, high times and low, change, change and hyper change, the painted Negrita slept.
She had not been seen for fifty years, until December, 2010. With yet another tower in mind, developers demolished the Metropole, revealing that shrouded bit of bibulous history. I stopped in my tracks when I saw her. I must have stood and contemplated her for ten minutes, imagining all the people and events that she had witnessed, and those she had slept through. I resolved to have a drink of Negrita. I had to have a sip of Saigon history. But where to find something that
disappeared decades ago?
I called my bibulous buddies. Michael Kloster, formerly of Black Cat fame and now with The Vine Group wine merchants; Linh Phanroy of Gringo’s Bar; and Charlie Wong the Hot Dog King of Saigon: all went to work and did their best. But the search seemed to be in vain. Kloster managed to locate a bottle in Phnom Penh and was standing by to have it “transferred.” Phanroy promised to invent a dedicatory cocktail for it upon arrival. But King Charlie’s network of informants and operatives proved unmatched. As we sat despondently one night nursing our suds at the Drunken Duck, a dusty and battered old xe om arrived at the door. Both driver and vehicle looked hard-ridden. A barman was dispatched to meet him. A fat wad of cash changed hands. A bottle of Negrita rum was set before me. It was a thing of beauty.
We four repaired to my quarters. With due ceremony I cracked the bottle. I poured four measures. We toasted Old Saigon. We tasted. How was it? Well may you ask. “She weren’t a goer,” as an Aussie might say. But she weren’t bad neither. I didn’t care. I tasted Old Saigon, and that was more than enough for me. Phanroy made good on his promise. He combined equal measures of café sua da, Kalua and Negrita. He calls it the Negringa.
I plan to make that bottle last until the Negrita ad is once more consigned to darkness, no doubt for good this time. I pass by that echo of Old Saigon every day on my way home. And every day in my mind I drink a silent toast to her. And she replies, “I just came back to say goodbye.”
Richard Sterling is the author and editor of many books, including a travel memoir The Fire Never Dies, the Lowell Thomas award-winning anthology Food: A Taste of the Road, How to Eat Around the World, and numerous Lonely Planet guides. He served in the United States Navy for seven years during the Vietnam War, and now lives in Saigon. (Editors’ note: The Negrita ad has since been covered up again, but you can see it here: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/46830955.)
JESSICA WILSON
What the Trees Try to Tell Us We Are
Injuries. Mountains. Love.
…Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain …
—John Ashbery, “Some Trees”
It started in the White Mountains. I don’t mean the tumor—that came later, or at least I found out about it later. I mean the rest of it. My myth of disunion.
It was summer camp and we were eleven and there were twelve of us, and two counselors, and one overnight trip. Does it matter where we were? It wasn’t about specificity, we didn’t know about wildlife, we couldn’t name plants. But we threw ourselves into the rocks and the dirt and the green, we gasped our way down southern slides stone-strewn and northern ones steep and bald. We loped along summit ridges and watched our skin grow dust-matted, turning the precise copper-brown of the duff beneath our feet, and then streak with beaded and rolling sweat. The loping and gasping brought the pleasure of novelty, carried out by limbs grown gangly so that every step was to some degree an experiment. We carped at each other for picking the chocolate chips out of the trail mix; we dangled our feet red and swollen into icy streams; we exulted at every peak. Green, green, green. Light on the glittering lakes below.
A week later my knees looked like water bladders filled to bursting. If you want to prevent muscle strain, my counselor had said, lock your knees. She demonstrated. I practiced. So I had spent those three days, up and down peaks, popping my knees violently in and out of lock with every step. Assiduous like only a sixth-grade overachiever can be. The advice, my doctor told me afterwards, was the worst advice I could have taken. There wasn’t any way of knowing what I’d done to my cartilage. I hobbled around for another ten days, and eventually the swelling went down. Ever since: the specter of knee pain, hovering ready, sharp and gummy. Ever since: dreams of the mountains. Fevered dreams, subtle dreams. Dreams that lie in wait. We are wearing each other down, the mountains and me.
As for the tumor, it started on a train platform, fifteen years later. I mean the awareness. I had just left the orthopedist with a backpack full of knee braces and an appointment for an orthotics fitting. This after three years of pain on city streets. Foot pain, this time, but that story comes later. I wanted to go back to the mountains so badly the only way I could say it was offhandedly. It was that or cry. Too girly. On this particular day, though, I wanted to celebrate. The braces, the orthotics: the scallop shell of my Camino, the rising hope.
While I wait for a train back into the city, my phone buzzes with a restricted number, and when I answer it, the physician’s assistant is on the other end. “The X-ray we took,” he says. “Of your knee. The radiologist looked at it. Your knee is fine.”
“Oh that’s great,” I say.
“But,” he says.
But? I think.
“But the X-ray turned up a bone lesion,” he says. “In the left tibia.”
“A lesion,” I repeat. “In the left tibia. I—what? What does that mean?” I ask. (The tibia, I am thinking, and trying to remember back to seventh grade anatomy. That’s the shin?)
“It’s a small tumor,” he answers. “A bone tumor. We call this an incidental finding. We’d like you to get an MRI.”
I have a tumor?
I have to write this down, I think, but I don’t have a pencil so I am patting my pockets with my free hand as we speak, trying to find one; and when my pockets yield nothing I start patting the rest of my body, like I think I might find a pencil hidden in my ear, on the top of my head, like there must be something in arm’s reach to hold onto. A train car rumbles by on the other side of the tracks, so now I am yelling into the phone and my coat is whipping across my thighs.
With my phone hand I am pressing the cellphone into my cheek. It will leave a mark. He is talking. I am patting my nose, my shoulders. This tumor. It’s in the bone, a permanent brand. Two centimeters by one and I don’t know how thick. A spot, a smear. A warped dime, or a torn-off bit of gaff tape, littering the canals of my shinbone. I want it to erode. An MRI, he says again, there are any number of reasons for such a lesion, something something better to be sure, small chance of malignancy. The probability, he says, is slim.
Possibility, that’s a wide word. A spread-your-arms-in-the-sunlight word. Probability, though—probability’s just waiting to fuck you.
Bodies. Landscapes. Stories we invent thereof. I was twenty years old and I left college and I went back to New Hampshire, back to my mountains. Nine years since summer camp but I’d returned most summers, kayaked in the broads of Lake Winnipesaukee and picked blueberries from the squat bushes running over the grey granite tops of Mounts Welch and Dickey. But then I got older, I took summer jobs, got distracted with School and My Future, and the mountains fell away. Two years into college I was sick of theories. I wanted something I could touch. I wanted the woods again. I moved to a state park and spent a year as a service volunteer, living in a cabin with no electricity and eighteen other volunteers. We chopped wood, served soup, taught school, built trails.
Again I fell in love, and first it surprised me, the suddenness, the absoluteness. Then it surprised me that it surprised me. It was the most inevitable thing I knew, this love. I was in love with the workings of rock, slow leverages. With wind on my face and arms growing strong and trails opening below our picks and mattocks. With the deep silence of white snow on white pines under midwinter moonlight. In love with the gaudy, baptismal chartreuse of the first leaves of April. We were building a turnpike in the park, embedding flat stones alongside a muddy trail to hold in a gravel fill that would raise the tread above the water running below; and my friend Josh, who was on the same trail crew, brandished a rock bar in the direction of the spring woods all around us and flung his arms open. This is my job! he yelled, and it echoed job ob o
b through the wooded and reverberate hills, and then we were all whooping, stomping in circles around our worksite, dancing a berserk sort of spring dance in our work shirts and yellow hard hats, waving a scattershot assortment of unwieldy hand tools like offerings to the spirits of the place, the odd pair of safety goggles flying off into the baby oaks.
I was careful with my knees, but twisted my foot that summer one week up on Mount Monadnock; it swelled so each morning I could hardly flex my toes. An hour into the day, I could walk around, gathering stones for drainage and cutting timber waterbars, but by evening I would be lame again. I had to ease it into my workboots the rest of the season. It took a good two years to heal completely, long after I’d rolled up my sleeping bag and gone back to college.
The climbing of mountains is a love that shows itself in motion. Every step whisks a fine layer of earth away, even as the ground presses upward, grinding my joints into one another. There is no love that does not damage us both at least a little bit, no matter the clattering joy of scree tumbling down the mountainside, no matter any catalyzed desire to watch over and protect the land. Meanwhile peaks crumple upwards where plates collide, bubble in magma where they separate. This is the mountains’ own motion, a metamorphosis too grand and slow for human eyes to see. Still, we are both moving. Perhaps all it takes to become like a mountain is to live long enough. Arthritics become tectonics. Tumors become tremors. The world shakes, and the world shakes. But it’s been over two hundred years since the last great earthquake in New England. The only fault lines are my own.
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