A Travel Junkie's Diary

by Dina Bennett

  This is the first gompa I’ve ever visited. I’m excited and circumspect in equal measure. Pemayangtse means “perfect sublime lotus,” and the monks here are ta-tshang, of pure Tibetan lineage, celibate, and devoid of any physical abnormality. But Pemayangtse also simply is home to them, since many of the monks have grown up here from the age of nine or ten. As I mull over the niceties of how to be reverential while also feeling at ease, a boy with a shaved head appears around the side of the building. He freezes like a deer in the headlights, startled to see me, giggling. Then he bolts around the next corner, his blue Crocs slapping the walkway as his maroon robe flutters and balloons about him.

  I’m unfamiliar with gompa protocol, an absolute greenhorn in matters of what I can do, and where I should do it. Can I can wander around freely? Do I need someone’s permission to explore the grounds? While I stand at the steps pondering where to go next, a small car crunches to a halt on the gravel. Out tumbles a hodgepodge of middle-aged Sikkimese, dressed in neat pastel slacks and blouses. The women begin chattering, bustling about their menfolk like shepherd dogs corralling skittish sheep.

  Edging away from their commotion, I enter a small, whitewashed building, each wall cut by an archway. It houses only one thing: a giant wood mani (prayer wheel) perhaps twelve feet in diameter, garlanded with small prayer flags in primary colors, embellished with carved inscriptions, gilded holders filled with prayer scrolls trimming its edges. It is said that the larger the prayer wheel the more powerful it is, because it can hold more prayers. If so, I am in the presence of one mighty mani.

  Another adage about prayer wheels is that they are used to accumulate good karma and to purify bad karma. I’m all for that, so I start my slow circle around the mani’s perimeter, choosing, for no particular reason, to walk clockwise. This turns out to be fortuitous, as later I learn that a Buddhist practitioner spins the wheel in the direction the mantras are written, which matches the movement of the sun. In a word, clockwise. There’s no one around for me to ask whether nonbelievers are allowed to touch it. I walk studiously, hands clasped behind my back, so they don’t get me in trouble.

  It’s a relief to have gotten in ahead of the large group that just arrived, whose babble nevertheless filters through the foot-thick walls. Finished with my circumambulation, I emerge to see the Sikkimese in various ungainly poses, like a flock of chubby storks, wobbling on one leg or the other to remove their shoes. They stare up at me in shock followed by flickers of, dare I say it, anger and disdain. What have I done? Perhaps nonnatives are forbidden entry here? I stand in the archway, my face feverishly overheated from a wave of self-consciousness that leaves me unable to move even if I could decide where to go.

  But they’re ready to come in, so I have to come out, which I do on tiptoe, smiling meekly. They all stare at my feet. I follow their gaze while one of them holds up her shoes and motions vigorously for me to step outside. For the nanosecond before I understand what I’ve done, I’m thinking she wants to trade her tiny, faux-leather loafers for my hiking shoes. What could she be thinking? Her shoes will never fit me. And that’s when I realize the nice lady isn’t trying to swap shoes with me. She’s pointing out that I’ve just desecrated the prayer wheel house by failing to remove my shoes before entering, an obeisance which should have occurred to me, this being a sacred place, but which somehow never entered my mind. What could I have been thinking? Or more precisely, why had I not been thinking?

  I hop briskly over to the threshold, bowing and nodding my head in shame as I go. Even though I’ve already been around the prayer wheel and am now back outside, I don’t know what else to do besides remove my shoes then and there. It’s after the fact, but it’s the only gesture I can think of that might assuage the group’s indignation. Now barefoot, I stand humbly while they file into the prayer wheel temple and begin slowly, prayerfully making their way around it. Then I scamper, clutching socks and shoes in hand. Padding barefoot down the cool stone walkway feels divine.

  At the main entrance of the gompa I hear chanting from behind monumental heavily carved wood doors. The deep, haunting drone, cut now and then by a lilting soprano call from one of the child monks, gives me the shivers. No fool, I place my shoes with the pairs already scattered in a corner of the portal. A young boy peers around one of the curtains that shield the monks at prayer from the outside world. It’s the scamp who scooted around the building earlier. He disappears for a second, then pops his head around the curtain again, this time gesturing for me to enter.

  Sticking to the shadows on the perimeter of the prayer hall, I sidle around to a low wood bench behind that of the young novice monks. The boys are beside themselves with excitement at my arrival, twisting to look at me every few seconds, followed by elbow nudging and whispering. This is an important occasion—one of the Nyingmapa lamas is here to bestow blessings—yet I seem to be upstaging the venerable man just by the novelty of my presence. I feel I am looming like Gulliver in the land of Lilliput.

  Despite our weeks in India, I had not grown more at ease with my foreignness. If anything, I’d grown less so. Having covered several thousand miles of road I’d observed how even a woman living on the street managed to keep her hair well-braided and her sari clean. The more stained and wrinkled my clothes became, the more unkempt my hair, the more overtly different I was from those around me. I had come to despair of the conspicuousness inherent in being a stranger and a foreigner and I was weary of how isolated it made me feel despite the throngs around me.

  Turquoise drums are beaten, accompanying the braying of fifteen-foot-long brass and copper horns. The tones flow over and through me, a vibration at once ancient and alive penetrating my body. There’s a faint scent of butter, sugar, and incense, slightly sweet, slightly sour, centuries old. The boys keep peering over their shoulders, a nod and smile, followed by the eruption of bashful giggles as they turn to one another and comment on my presence. For a time, the chants lift me outside myself as the spirituality of the three-hundred-year-old building seeps into my bones.

  One of the boys leaps up, scurries into the obscurity at the back of the hall, and returns with a tin platter heaped with gaily wrapped candies, peculiar-looking Indian chocolate bars, and assorted twin-packs of biscuits. Smiling, he bows low, lays the platter on my knees, mimes eating, and scuttles back to his cushion, where he pulls a candy bar from under his robe, raises it in a toast, unwraps it, and takes a surreptitious bite while his brethren continue their chant. His innocent acceptance soothes my mortification like a balm.

  When the prayers and blessings are complete, the monks heave themselves off their cushions, and visitors are invited to approach the lama. Feeling I’ve already trampled on their welcome, I stick to the wall, where I can admire intricately petaled flowers carved from butter for the occasion.

  Back outside, I see the Sikkim group again hopping about. This time, they’re putting their shoes on, each with a fluttering kata, the white silk scarf which the lama has blessed draped over their shoulders. They’re all abuzz with the pleasure of their close encounter with holiness. I lean against a far wall to tie my shoes, a safe distance from these people I have so offended. They look up. Though I have no kata of my own, it appears nonetheless that I’ve benefited from divine intervention. One by one they smile at me. All is forgiven.

  Garbage and Dogs

  USHUAIA, ARGENTINA, 2008

  Avis in Santiago de Chile has caused us another headache. This one is in the migraine category, a real showstopper. Our journey through Patagonia, with its attendant distractions of coastal ferries, food fairs, even impromptu hospital visits, has taken us nearly two thousand kilometers from Santiago, if we were crows. We’re not crows. If you were to plot our vehicular path it would resemble that of a puppy in a new neighborhood. We’ve been easily distracted, tugging hither and yon to nose everything in case it’s interesting. It’s likely that by now we’ve covered enough terrain to get us to Santiago and back again, if we wanted to go back there. Which we
don’t.

  The night before the calamity there’s no inkling of the troubles to come. We spend it in San Sebastián, Tierra del Fuego, on Chile’s side of its border with Argentina. It’s quiet here for one significant reason: San Sebastián is a town in name only. The hush is actually noisy, wind gusts pressing on my ears like hands shutting out bad news, before booming across the road to slam the half-hung doors of dilapidated wood-sided sheep sheds and swirl uninvited through gaping glassless windows. There are no services and no inhabitants in San Sebastián aside from the owners of a solitary hosteria a hundred yards from the border, where we rent a room.

  A few cars pass before the border closes for the night. After that, there’s nothing around but wind, stars, us, and our hosts, who, from what we could see through the guesthouse windows on the way to our room, appear to have recently invested considerable sweat equity renovating their café. The low clapboard structure has a fresh coat of white paint. The wood strips separating multiple panes of glass in each window are scarlet. Door and window frames are a bright egg yolk yellow. “This looks like a nursery school,” I say to Bernard, as we hop through dry weeds back to the café for supper. We skirt a red and white jungle gym made of steel pipe from which hang two swings with blue wood seats, a low-slung yellow trapeze and a blue plastic slide. “This isn’t a place where there will ever be masses, children or otherwise, lining up at the door.”

  “I know. And everything in our room is new, too.” The wind whistles, hollow and lonesome.

  “Yeah, we’re it. We better give them some good business.”

  “They might not see more for a while.”

  The café has a long white counter, white linoleum floor, and ice-blue walls. Echoing the exterior motif, the counter stools are plump orbs of cherry vinyl. The name Coca-Cola emblazoned on the plastic chairs snugged up to each table explains why they, too, are cherry red. Even the frames of photo montages decorating the walls are red. There’s so much red it reminds me of the day my father’s ice skate snagged in a fissure on Twin Lakes, our local skating pond. What with sun during the day and frost at night, the exposed ice heaved and buckled, creating a ragged surface that only kids in the 1960s could adore. Unless you were my father, who loved anything he did out of doors with his children. One moment he was gliding, gloved hands swinging along, a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale come alive, and the next he was sprawling, hands unavailable to save him from hitting the ice face first. I saw it happen, in that comedic slo-mo that all skating falls seem to have. I gasped out a laugh, gulped back the second cackle about to explode from my mouth, watched in fascination as droplets of blood spangled the ice, their warmth melting the surface to form a soupy red map resembling the state of Texas. I was perhaps eight years old and knew two things clearly. One, I could not lift him up to get him back to shore, and two, my mother would be displeased if I stained my white skating gloves trying to block the blood gushing from the laceration on his forehead. Instead I did what any self-respecting kid would do in a situation like that. I covered my eyes with barely parted fingers, like I would when watching zombie movies on TV. Then I closed my fingers hoping it would all go away. I opened them to discover my father sitting up, soiling his own gloves to staunch the flow of blood, and then I started to cry. I feel a similar giggling melancholy suffuse me now. The effect of the overly bright café is one of such brave, wistful hope it makes me want to cry on their behalf.

  Señor and Señora are elated to have us, though the mask of joy on their face is betrayed by the anxiety in their eyes. That we’re here is cause for relief. That we’re the only ones here at all is cause for despair. They’re both middle-aged and so earnest we want to hug them as if they were our own parents. Señora, in her white butcher’s coat trimmed with red piping, plastic shower cap covering her hair to illustrate how sanitary the premises are, falls all over herself serving us. She plies us with plates of mysterious cuts of lamb, all equally tough. True to his word, Bernard orders a bottle of red wine to bulk up our tab. The elation on Señora’s face when she brings it to us is a sign that not many people have been ordering anything in her new restaurant for some time.

  Photos decorating the walls clue us in that Señor may have an airplane, may even be a pilot himself. “Repeat after me,” I tell Bernard while we both chew the lamb leather and try to clear it with gulps of vinegary wine. “Piloto, avión, helicóptero. Now go, and make airplane conversation with the man.” Eventually all four of us cluster around a table, as I scroll through photos of our ranch on my laptop. Sharing the wine with them loosens all our tongues and when my Spanish fails, they smile charmingly, pretending to understand our English.

  The next morning, we complete our exit of Chile within a few minutes, cross a short stretch of no man’s land and enter the Argentinian border offices, where the first tentacle of disaster reaches out to strike, but is neatly dodged. Or so we think. Reviewing my documents, the border official politely reveals that our car insurance papers, the ones provided by Avis Santiago, which we need if we’re to cross back and forth between Chile and Argentina as planned for the next six weeks, expire at midnight that day. “No es posible,” I declare, as much to myself as to him, shocked at what he’s saying.

  “Si, señora, así es,” he replies, ever mannerly, pointing to the offending date. He proposes that we return to Santiago to correct the problem. Backtrack two thousand miles? I don’t think so. I thank him profusely for his time, smack my forehead to mime shameful forgetfulness and foreign stupidity at leaving the correct document in the car, and stride purposefully out the door pretending to scrutinize my papers to avoid further eye contact.

  “Let’s go,” I tell Bernard, shooing him forward with my hand. “Onward. Down the road. Into Argentina.” He eyes me doubtfully. I never tell him when to drive, so my eagerness to move forward is suspicious.

  “Everything fine?”

  “Well, no, but it doesn’t matter,” I say. “We have no choice. Unless you want to drive all the way back to Santiago. Two thousand miles in the wrong direction.”

  Bernard has little patience for my sarcasm, especially since I haven’t explained the problem.

  “Santiago? Back? Why?”

  “No insurance. The papers lapsed. Today.” The more distressed I feel, the less my lips want to cooperate by forming words to explain the situation. “Anyway, just go. Go,” I hiss. “I don’t want that border guy to think he should come out and check if we really do have valid papers. We’ll figure things out while we drive.”

  Bernard’s face becomes a stop-animation cartoon as he alternates between wanting to know every detail, needing to be in charge, and having to trust me. I busy myself storing our obsolete papers back in their waterproof pouch. Finally, he starts the engine. As we drive down the washboarded road I explain that we’re now in Argentina with lapsed insurance papers. There’s no way to get back into Chile with what we have on hand. We either have to get corrected papers or a different car. And we have to do so that same day or we’ll be driving without any insurance at all.

  Instead of the leisurely perusal of Tierra del Fuego we’d planned, we hightail it the three-hundred-fifty-mile length of the island in one day to reach Ushuaia, where, in theory, a well-run Avis office exists. Stopping briefly in Río Grande enroute, to fuel up, we ask the Avis agent there to speak to the Santiago office on our behalf about proper insurance papers. “Yes, yes, I will call right now. Please, sit,” and he gestures to two gray metal chairs in front of his gray metal desk, a man whose need for company is not satisfied by the wilting potted plant in the corner and whose need for more business is evident from the uncannily empty desktop between us.

  We perch on the edge of our seats and listen. From our side of the phone it all sounds civil. Indeed, Avis Santiago promises to fax the correct insurance documents to Ushuaia that afternoon. Or so he assures us. I’m suspicious, but can’t pinpoint what’s wrong. The way he rubs his hands together should have been a clue that all he wants is for us to be ha
ppy, that he’ll say anything to make it so. The clock with thick black hands tocking on the wall above him should have been a further clue that his main interest now is to get rid of us so he can leave for lunch. I need him on our side, don’t want to agitate him, because none of this is his fault. And I can tell from the large belly challenging his belt that lunch is an important element of his day. I flash him my best fake grin, which I perfected by imitating the rictus of a corpse on CSI.

  “Por favor,” I plead. “Could you possibly call them again, after lunch, and make sure they’ve done what they say?”

  “Yes, of course I will call them. Of course. I do my best to make sure they do what they say.” He pats his belly a few times, clasps his hands over his paunch. “Ay, those Chilenos. You know. Our work here is very difficult.” And he heaves a sigh that ripples through his body, from his curly brown hair down to his scuffed imitation-Gucci loafers. “Because we don’t control them. They are a separate company. We are a separate company.” He shrugs, is embarrassed, raises his hands in helplessness. “Argentina. Chile. Very separate countries.” This does not bode well.

  We all wave goodbye. I am quite certain that he’s off to a long, leisurely Argentinian repast, before, during, and after which nothing will be accomplished. We press on. My mind is racing like a dog chasing its tail, fretting because the darn thing keeps getting away, which causes me to lose track of where we are. We get lost, right on the outskirts of Río Grande. Bernard winds up driving halfway back to the border before we find a spot to turn around. I sit hunched, shoulders tense, neck rigid, waiting for Bernard to erupt about how I need to pay closer attention to map, GPS, street signs, landmarks, anything, everything, to keep him on track. How that’s my only job and it’s a pretty simple one compared to his, in which he has to contend with the difficulties of watching traffic, avoiding pedestrians, swerving around cyclists, all while maintaining the proper speed limit, a job in which a lapse of attention could cost someone’s life. He says nothing. It seems our agreement for the P2P, that he would not lose his temper with me when I messed up directions, and I would not bellow when he got too close to another car, still holds.