A Travel Junkie's Diary

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A Travel Junkie's Diary Page 14

by Dina Bennett


  After a couple hundred yards the priests point across the forested gorge below us, to a cliff tinged honey and coral in the late afternoon light. Near the base of that cliff we see two wood doors inset in the rock face. Their turquoise color flashes through the trees like a diving kingfisher. For a moment, a ray of sun pierces the patchy clouds, illuminating the door and its red and white frame, a celestial floodlight making sure we understand that we have arrived.

  To reach the monastery we have to descend a steep boulder slope, cross the densely forested floor alive with birds and monkeys, then climb a narrow path part way up that intriguing cliff face. It’s fantastically isolated and hidden. Bernard and I confer and I offer to wait while he enters the hallowed doors of this remote monastery. I’m not being generous. The remainder of the trek does not concern me as I’d get no further than the entrance doorstep. I’m female and as such forbidden from entering the monastery anyway.

  We have a problem though, and it’s not one of gender. In our absorption with the priests, along with the distraction of dodging thorny things on our way, we’ve lost track of time. Staring into the west, the sun blinds me as it dabbles playfully with the horizon. It’s already low and the twilight that follows its setting won’t linger long. To retrace our drive, we’ll need light to distinguish the right rocky road from tempting rocky ditches and rocky footpaths. The priests motion us to follow. “Come on,” they seem to urge. “It’s past tea time.” We bow and shake our heads. They bow and nod their heads. We shake and nod at each other until they turn and go. The last we see of the priests they’re hopping down the boulders like long-limbed frogs, sticks, umbrellas, and crosses bobbing as they go.

  As we drive back to Axum where we’re staying the night, our quest feels incomplete. Seeing a monastery door doesn’t seem to qualify as seeing the monastery itself. It’s like saying “I read about Fashion Week” and expecting that to sound as titillating as, “I was front row at Michael Kors.” What we yearn for is a full-on monastery experience, not just an exterior.

  The next day we walk through the outskirts of Axum town, along quiet lanes where chickens scratch, and goats help themselves to the free thistle buffet sprouting from rock walls. A faint path draws us up a hill dotted with flowering euphorbia trees, which look like upturned leggy broccoli florets brushed with red nail polish. After half an hour, we reach Pantaleon Monastery, at fifteen hundred years old, one of the elders in the monastery population. The royal blue steel gates are open, and even though I doubt I’ll be allowed far, I resolve to walk until somebody stops me.

  Entering a dry, sandy courtyard, we are greeted by two immense trees. Their smooth bark is a pallid, silvery skin slicked to trunks that bulge like a body builder’s heavily muscled arms, rippling with sinews and twisted veins. The air is still, except for blue-green starlings trilling, and doves hoo-hooing in the broad span of leafy branches above us.

  Within minutes a small priest in a beige robe of rough muslin hurries over to greet us, his flip-flops slapping down the stone steps. Instead of pointing sternly at the gate to shoo me out, he leads us to a low stone building. Inside, pillars of light blaze through openings in the wall, striking a woven grass mat on the stone floor and throwing everything else into deep shadow. Using the sort of key you’d think was made for a Harry Potter movie, the priest opens a door behind which I can see burlap sacks of grain, some with their contents leaking onto the floor. We hear soft rustling and shuffling as he putters about, then reemerges cradling several items in his hands with infinite tenderness, as if, should he walk too fast, they’d disappear in a puff of dust. He hands Bernard two tarnished silver crowns, gently places in my hands two exquisitely filigreed Coptic crosses. As we stare at the antiques, too stunned to move, he disappears once more into the side room, rummaging further among the sacks from which he extracts two religious tomes, each as thick as a loaf of bread. Opening the illuminated manuscripts with tenderness, his chapped fingers lovingly caress page after page of the most richly detailed scripture paintings I have ever seen. He traces out a “6” on the mat, to explain this trove has been with the monastery since 600 CE. I watch his fingers swing back and forth over the goatskin pages, exposing dense calligraphy and delicate illustrations lavishly painted with gold leaf, vermilion, and indigo.

  That’s it for me. I’ve done as much as a woman can be allowed to do. The priest escorts me to a bench under one of the Mr. Universe trees and indicates it would please him if I would stay right there while he and Bernard adjourn to more manly endeavors. They depart for a steep path improved by crumpled sections of stone steps, up which they clamber a good few hundred yards to crest out on a modest nob where squats a simple buff stone structure, perhaps sixty feet square, where St. Pantaleon lived out his days.

  I refuse to complain or in any way taint my religious experience, superficial though it may be. Besides, I soon have company of my own. Three school-age disciples begin going through their lessons. A droning ennhhhnnnaaaa, zhuuuuyiiiiii, pehhhhhtzohhhh as they sound out the Ge’ez alphabet competes with the birds for thrilling sound of the moment. There are two hundred twenty-four Ge’ez symbols to master along with all their combinations, which means these youngsters have a lot to learn. They sit on the steps of a small storeroom, fourteen, twelve, and nine years old, heads shaved, dressed in shorts with broken-zipper flies and short-sleeve shirts missing most buttons. Their voices ring out from behind a nearby building, a nasal hum of letters and hymns. Every once in a while, however, they’re consumed by the mischief that grabs boys that age. They ditch their books, giving themselves over to fits of wrestling, giggling, and pebble-flinging. Then, their energy temporarily spent, they eye me as if confirming a tacit understanding that I won’t report them and, of their own accord, return to their books. The monotone chanting and repetition resumes, the doves hoo-hooooo, the dry leaves overhead swish in the breeze.

  A small flock of brown and white sheep leave through the main gate, and a lone cow wanders in. Outside, young voices sing out behind the hill, children shepherding their goats. A wizened woman robed in homespun white cotton peers around the blue steel doors, then enters. Her brown face is a mass of wrinkles and deep indigo tattoos. She clomps into the courtyard, raising one hip high at each step to swing a lame leg. A bow before the church and she pulls her white shawl over her head, making the motions of the cross. She’s so tiny that when she kneels in devotion she’s hidden by the rock in front of her. She disappears, gone, like a churchyard ghost.

  Getting Down with the Locals

  CABO VIRGENES, ARGENTINA, 2008

  Dirt is relative. There’s the dirt that’s avoidable and there’s the dirt that you become one with.

  I don’t go out of my way to seek dirt when at home, but then, mine is no longer an office job. After twelve years in the software industry, preceded by six years in various aspects of public relations, I now live on a ranch, where much of my time is spent out of doors. Between riding horses and ranch work it’s a given that I will end most days digging dirt from under my nails. This is not a bad thing, as the dirt speaks of everything I love: nature, animals, and being physically tired at cocktail hour. Still, words like bedraggled, unwashed, and unkempt do not apply when I’m at home. I accept that they’re conditions that might occur during the day, but I’m confident they will be banished by night. Being dirty at home is a temporary state, mitigated by the simple fact that I can relegate it to the laundry bin or the shower in time to pour myself a glass of wine at day’s end.

  My view of dirt changes radically on the road. It’s just not worth fighting the dirt of the world. There’s too much of it and only one of me. Better to loosen up, breathe easy, and let grit and grime do their worst. Take, for example, the onslaught of earthen elements that blows through an open car window. Drive down dirt roads and the road material will find its way onto and into you. Sometimes it’s helped along by a large truck belting down the road toward us, spitting gravel and belching black diesel smoke. Bernard will jerk me
out of whatever daydream I’ve sunk into with a sharp, “Look out! Roll up the windows!” But the devious dust plume behind the truck seeps into the car anyway. It sneaks in through the air vents, creeps through gaps in the door seals, ambushes me with a dust puff in the face when I open the hatchback to extract a bag. Even though we take preventive measures, we still wind up coated with the stuff within a few hours of departure each day.

  I’ve learned to relax about unavoidable dirt. It’s like giving myself over to the percussive clangor of a rock band. Rather than fight it, it all becomes more enjoyable if I let myself sink into an altered state. So I’ve made peace with my dirty condition. I could say that dirt is sometimes as close to me as a second skin, and as with any friendship, I have to put up with it, despite those times when it becomes unbearable.

  Then there’s the avoidable sort of dirt, the kind you encounter after making a distinct choice. Thus, one day in the eastern reaches of Patagonia, a full day’s drive from Ushuaia, we find ourselves crawling on our bellies, military-style, through thick patches of penguin guano. Bernard and I are alone in the shoreline expanse of Cabo Virgenes—that is, if you discount the presence of one hundred thousand curious Magellanic penguins with nothing to do but waddle, primp, and poop. Penguin fluff drifts around our heads, little white down feathers released by the molting chicks standing in droves around us. Barely reaching fourteen inches in a proud moment, the young birds are temporarily stranded, unable to cavort in the frigid Atlantic like their parents, because they don’t have water-proof feathers. They’re reduced to loitering around scrappy shrubs and nest burrows, trading gossip for days on end until their new feathers grow in.

  The chicks are so obliging, so fearless, that we can’t help but take advantage of their good nature. The guano-speckled gravel beckons. Bernard doesn’t hesitate. “You know, the best way to see them is from the ground,” he says. I’m astounded to see my normally fastidious husband, a man for whom “fresh white shirt” is a life philosophy, suddenly drop on his belly, camera snugged to his face, and then inch his way forward on his elbows. Now he is at beak level with the chicks, who stare at him for a second in mild alarm. However, the typical chick predator comes from the sky, so, after a brief confab, they deem it safe to ignore him.

  Bernard wriggles closer, snapping away, while I hang back, reluctant to smear guano on my recently cleaned T-shirt. “What’s it like down there?” I inquire, just to stall. “Shhhhh!” Bernard hisses at me. He’s five feet away from a chick and doesn’t want to scare it. As I watch him, the attraction of getting nose to beak with a penguin overwhelms me too. I plop onto my stomach, feeling only momentary revulsion as the small blobs of dung squash onto my clothing. Immediately I have attracted my own coterie of penguin admirers, who preen their mangy-looking bodies, peer at the sky, cluck to each other, and saunter about. Now I, too, am in my element, as there is little that gives me as much pleasure as being in the midst of wildlife.

  Within a few minutes I am engrossed in the penguin life around me and become oblivious to the ordure in which I am lying. Bernard and I spend an hour on our bellies before reluctantly pulling ourselves away from the penguin’s-eye view of life. By then, having guano on us is nothing to wrinkle our noses at. Which is what makes any contemplation of, or attempt to categorize, things as dirty or not dirty so interesting.

  Whether in the pristine wilds of the Carretera Austral or the windswept expanses of the Gobi on the P2P, the impact of dirt on my life or my sense of well-being is altered simply by the fact that I’m away from home. Gone is the expectation that I should be clean at the end of the day. Replacing it is the sense that my clothing now has two purposes only. The first is protection from the law, which enforces certain societal expectations of routine modesty. It simply would not do to get out at a gas station buck naked. The second is protection from discomfort. My clothing has to be comfortable to sit in for hours on end and to keep me from getting scraped, sunburned, and scratched. If my shirt and slacks can also be reasonably flattering, I’m happy.

  As we wander through the penguin colony toward the beach, I feel a perverse pride when I survey the guano bits drying on my shirt. The dirt on me is a badge of honor, a sign that we’re really on the road, living the itinerant life, being flexible about things that we’re rigid about at home, accommodating uncertainties in a way I never could on the P2P. Each stain proclaims I’m succeeding in altering things about me which years ago I would have said are as firmly a part of me as my ten fingers and ten toes. It says here’s a person who’s not afraid to shed the veneer of polite society and get down with the locals, even if the locals are penguins.

  Our Land Rover, Brunhilde, has carried us from the depths of the upper Rift Valley, to the highs of Peru’s Andes. Danakil, Ethiopia.

  In some places, just having a cot to sleep on is a luxury. Hamed Ela, Ethiopia

  Plucking eyelashes for beauty’s sake, in a Mursi village near Jinka, Omo River Valley, Ethiopia.

  The road to Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park sometimes disappeared. Sagaing Region, Myanmar.

  Tea for unexpected visitors is a hallmark of village hospitality, en route to Pinyaung, Myanmar.

  Me, sitting on an anchor, a sign I was tired of driving. Puerto Montt, Chile.

  Molting Magellanic penguin chicks, ready for their moment of fame. Cabo Virgenes, Argentina.

  Unsure about local customs, I took this photo with my camera at my hip as we walked by. Ishkashim, Afghanistan.

  Below Torugart Pass nomadic herders leave summer pastures for lower altitudes. Naryn, Kyrgyzstan.

  Even sky-blue highway railings can’t dispel the dense smog from coal-fired power plants. Taklamakan Desert, China.

  The rocking lull of a camel cart is a rhythm perfectly suited to village life. Kesroli, India.

  The Zagros Mountains define Iran’s western border with Iraq. I like that the highest point is Mount Dena. Kuh-e Takht, Iran.

  A young Brahmin bride goes through hours of rituals on her marriage day. Hampi, India.

  Sometimes a wedding seems more like a tragedy. Hampi, India.

  Horses, small and hardy, are vital to Tibetan life. Rongbuk Valley, Tibet.

  A young couple move house, kettle and all. Ngari Prefecture, Tibet.

  ETIQUETTE

  PREAMBLE

  Six months passed after completing the P2P in July 2007 before we took to the road again. While our first road trip choice, Patagonia, sprang from my desire to see the mountains of Fitz Roy and Torres del Paine about which my mountaineering father had raved, it quickly grew to encompass the chance to drive one of the great roads of the world, the Carretera Austral. That it was in the Southern Hemisphere was a major draw, driven by Bernard’s desire to reduce the number of winter months he spent plowing and shoveling at the ranch, and constrained by my desire to be at the ranch during the prime summer months of horseback riding. And since these were driving trips, it behooved us to select a destination where the weather was conducive to seeing something out the window other than snowflakes. That it would be summer in Patagonia to our depths of frigid white winter in the Rockies was all to the good.

  The problem is, once you become addicted to something, as we have to road trips, you start to see opportunities everywhere. Since 2008, our time away has crept incrementally upward, swayed by geopolitical shifts allowing us into formerly inaccessible places and the occasional can’t-turn-this-down invitation to join others on a drive after we’ve already planned a specific drive of our own.

  Before we leave for a long road trip, my friends relieve themselves of the burden of their worries and pile them on me, like so many lead-weighted quilts. They think they’re being helpful. I know they’re just laying the groundwork so they can mouth “I told you so” when I get home. I would be able to empathize with their concern if they questioned me about diseases I might catch, like dengue fever; personal wisdom on how to get rid of head lice since my bout with same in Kolkata; or whether I like spicy curries, injera, or corn
mush and if I don’t, what will I eat for two months. But no. Their concern is more focused than that. Isn’t driving in India the equivalent of being inside a pinball machine with fifty balls on the loose and the flippers stuck on overdrive? Are we mad or just naive to consider driving through the Ethiopian desert, which some say is melt-your-tires hot, not to mention the dunes that can stop forward motion better than the Denver Boot? And the emptiness of Peru’s altiplano … isn’t that a recipe for a long, cold wait without coffee if we break down with nothing but alpacas around for help? If anything confirms to me that I have become a traveler with tremendous experience, it’s that what my friends perceive as discomforts or threats are, at worst, the least of my worries, and at best, aspects of travel I’ve come to particularly enjoy.

  There’s a world of difference between what you read about a country and its reality. India is a good case in point. It is correct that, should a Hindu die encased in a fiery tangle of metal, that would be karma, time for him or her to start a new life, and therefore nothing to get upset about. If the same happened to me, it would be a lawsuit. When considering the charms of driving in India, those who’ve never experienced it think there are no rules, that it would be like riding a bucking bronco through the streets of Tombstone while being shot at by the Earp brothers: regardless of which way you turn, you’re in trouble. Not true. What’s happening on Indian roads is rational and normal by local definitions.

  Yes, being a foreigner trying to meld with local customs becomes ever more complex the farther we go, but also ever more satisfying as I weave uncertainties into a new coherent whole. There are rules. The difficulty, and therefore the charm, lies in figuring them out.

 

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