Oops, There Went The Scenery

The ground roars and trembles, tipping the surging crowd down the narrow escalators. The train to Guangzhou rumbles into Hong Kong station. We obstinately hold our ground and move steadily towards our cabin. The uniformed woman gestures irritably. ‘Upstairs’, she says.

I, personally, am anything but irritable. Upstairs. And facing forward. We’ve expressly requested that we face in the direction the train is going so China won’t go backwards.

We sit down victorious and look across the table that’s more like a railing to the two empty seats facing us. What poor sods will be staring at us while they reverse into China we wonder.

As if summonsed, here he comes, the first one; a massive Norseman in a lightweight grey suit with long wispy grey hair tied back, an enormous swaying girth and pale giant’s feet clad in Teva-type open sandals – a modern take on Viking footwear.

“I can’t believe zey have zis upstairs ,” he breathes precariously, all his weight and substance struggling to lose momentum.
“I haven’t seen one of zees before”. His ‘zees’ randomly remind me of California, Schwarzenegger , and Scandinavia in general. He has a giant chiseled face you could clamber over and large pooling eyes that look out of his face like a trapped child. They are kind eyes, kind and mildly astonished, like he’s been let out of school early and told to go play.

Seat number two arrives, a dapper, only slightly portly Irish man, pink around the edges. He navigates past the Norseman squeezing himself down for a heartbeat before attempting a wild-eyed escape.
‘I think I’ll, uhh, I think I’ll just sit down over here until someone comes’ he says, barreling across the aisle and collapsing into a single renegade seat I am sure has a rightful owner.

Two minutes later the escapee is back in the fold, a Starbucks coffee in his hand.
‘ I veesh I could get one of zose’ the Norseman annunciates soulfully staring at the Starbucks coffee cup as though it were a miracle.
‘There’s one downstairs where you walk in’ the Irish man says, marginally irritable, still struggling with the space allocation.

The Norseman beams or rather radiates, rearranging the chiseled landscape of his vast and beautiful face. His stomach lies on his lap like an anesthetized animal, large but no longer posing a threat. Could he be a lecturer at some university? He looks like an academic. His suit is light and ironic, not a businessman’s suit.
The Irishman has adjusted. He unzips his brown leather jacket and pulls a spiral bound notebook out of his briefcase. The notebook says Calessa.

“I work in textiles. I sell women’s clothing. “
Michel and I close our kindle apps on our iphones and settle down. This could get interesting.

I’m Patrick he says. I’m Christian says the Norseman. I’m Gail, I say. This is Michel.
The train chugs and takes off.
I forget to look at the scenery.

Do you do this trip often then? Do you live in China?

“Aw no. This,” gestures disparagingly out the window with his thumb.
“THIS is work! Hong Kong? Now that’s home.”
Sits back. Leans forward. Carries on.
“ See I was born in Ireland. Went to school there, then with unemployment at 25% I came over to the United States. Lived in New York City for 15 years. Met a girl there. Filipino. Married her.

“I’m 42, but I look 52. She’s 32. We were OK in NY but here in Hong Kong, everyone has something to say. I look” he glances around for comic effect, “I look just like one of those old guys who come over and get themselves a local girl half their age. She could be my Filipino maid! My wife’s American. Makes her crazy”

“I can see you travel all over ze world,” The norseman offers sagely, “ but vere” he brings two giant pale hands together in an oddly feminine gesture, “ does your heart live?’ He holds his palms against his huge pillowy chest where his heart most likely is. He twists in his seat and surveys his neighbor with sad damp eyes. Is he a priest, I wonder? Is he a man of the cloth?

Patrick turns down the corners of his mouth but his eyes are laughing. He is bubbly, loquacious, is our pinkish Irishman. Loves to talk.

“So I worked in Manhattan. Women’s clothing, design you know. Multimillion dollar company. Right hand man to this crazy rich guy. Been going to China now for twenty something years.”

“Last three years, my own company. Clothing. Doing pretty well, I have to say… Prett-ty well.”

“So what ez it like – you know, working with the Chinese? How ez it? You have been doing zis for zo many years what is zis experience like?” Perhaps he is a researcher, an anthropologist…a philanthropist? An ist.

“I can’t tell you. Have you read this book Mr China?

“I’m looking at this book and I’m turning the pages and I’m doing, “ he nods his head over and over.
“I’m going like, yeah.”
Nods the head
“Yeah”
Nods head
“Yeaah”
“I could have written this!”

“I tell you they will cheat. They will lie. You can’t turn away for a minute.”
He’s whispering now. Fiercely. He’s looking around. We all are.

“I’m an Irishman. I come from Ireland. We’re the most un-PC country in the world. We know what our shortcomings are. We know how to laugh. These people!” Throws up his hands. Smile never leaves his face but now his eyes are two fierce buttons.

“They just…I ...they’re bloody impossible,” Falls back, exhausted.

“But what can you do? You have to play the game. You just can’t be straight. They say one thing they do another you say one thing you do another…it’s what you have to do to survive.”

“Do you ever go back to Ireland?” The Norseman asks.

“Ireland. Awww…” He softens up again.

“At least five times a year. I have to go and see my customers in New York. I do everything you see. I’m the salesman, the accountant. I do my own sourcing. I go to NY then I come home via Ireland. I’m a bit of history buff you know. World war II especially, for some reason. I collect things. I have this collection and I keep it in this, this facility up in the mountains in county Wicklow. I like to go and visit it.” Beaming now.

A collection. A collection of what?

“What sort of things do you collect?”

“See this, you see this.” Thrusts a cell phone at us with a photograph of an army vehicle.
“This is a kubelwagen!”

Huh.

“The real thing. I collect them. I do ‘em up. Keep them in this warehouse – temperature controlled. There’re 43 so far, all circa 1940’s, forms of transport, tanks, guns.”

He goes pink, pinker, right to the rim of his hair, lifts his hand scratches his head. Is embarrassed. Is in love.

“What can I do? My wife knows I’m crazy, she knows it’s my thing.

“When I go to Ireland I phone my brother, I have five brothers. I tell him, y’know…” he giggles.
“I say, ‘Come, we’ll take the tank out’.”

“I’m busy building this bunker thing. This great big facility right into the side of the mountain – it’s an army thing…” The blush continues. We are all of us delightfully aghast.

I turn to Christian who has been interrupting sagely but inappropriately all the way through. What kind of gigantic academic can be this socially obtuse I think.

“So Christian, what do you do? What brings you here to Hong Kong?” I am certain he has a story.

“Well I’ve been out of ze world for two years.” There is a long, rather odd pause while we all digest this.

“Out of the world?” I ask.

Again a pause.

“Well it’s like India.” And I know this can’t be the answer.

“You went to India?”

“I liked it zere. I am going to move zere.” Uncomfortable pause full of something like gravitas.

“ Norway -- my country.” He makes a sweeping gesture of disgust.
“It can go to Hell.” His eyes look mildly surprised as though they are watching from the sidelines and can’t quite believe themselves.

“Yes, but what brings you here?”

“My vader.”

“Your father?”

“My vader is somezing of a historian and, well, China is ze oldest civilization in ze world,” he says, hands up, protesting the banality of such a persistent need for explanation.

He leans forward, elbows planted on the geography of his considerable knees. His rhythm is just out, so you can’t read it.

“I have zis psychiatric problem, you see.” He nods, looks me straight in the eye.
“My government doesn’t vant me here. They don’t vant me out of ze country.” He looks away.

“Zay tried to stop me…zay didn’t vant me to get out…but I did. I am not supposed to be here.”

“Oh well,” another dismayed gesture.

“When I was there zay, the government, zay were a trouble for me. Zay were a trouble for me, and I… I, was a trouble for zem. The last time I was zere… I burnt my house down. “ This time the gesture is nonchalant; what to do? What to do?

“But, you see, in India – I like it zere -- I take my medication, and if I can stay away from alcohol I can be okay. I can be okay. Ze mania is not so bad.”

The train slows down.
Is this our stop?

We shake hands. Have a nice life. The Irishman moves quickly and away. He comes back

“In all the excitement, I forgot this,” he says, waving his briefcase.

I turn to the enormous Norseman, standing now.
“Enjoy your adventure”, I say, retrieving my tiny hand from his.

I look into his eyes, I still see the child trapped there, adrift in an unruly tumble of dreams.

Scotland: Whisky... With A Dash Of Water

There are things you should do in Oban; drink whisky is one of them. Local whisky, single malt, conceived hundreds of years ago and matured in American bourbon barrels(!) for twelve reverent years.

The distillery is just there, off the main street, right in the centre of this picturesque little harbour town.

I woke early that day, sunrise it would have been, if the sky had not been leaden with clouds plotting their downpour and my imminent downfall. Visions of fish and chips floated through my prone, early morning mind. Fish and chips followed by my hips, all of them stodgy. I could have, should have, stopped then but the vision called up action.

I made myself upright and in the considerate dark of the bedroom -- not wanting to wake my slumbering husband -- I fumbled for my dormant active wear. Minutes later I was out the door of the dear little stone cottage and gazing, dazed, around me at the slick-wet cobbled street leading down to the harbour. The air was wet but I chose to read it as damp, just a little.

I set off, and because the first part was dramatically downhill, I felt brave and exuberant. The fish and the chips were separating from my hips. I ran on, almost like a runner, past closed corner stores and sleepy terrace houses. Down, down, down to the deserted waterfront.

The air was wetter. I saw the glorious dazzle of a white swan floating among the fishing boats in the dingy morning light. The waterfront curved and I ran around it, now just a little bit damp, like the air. Ahead of me the path swept away towards a misty, distant headland. Fabulous mansions turned bed and breakfasts, reared up on my right. A lanky boy, singular and sullen in a dark hoodie sloshed past me, head down. I smiled broadly.

That was the way there.

On the way back the rain that had been drenching the oblivious back of me addressed itself to my face and the more wide awake front of me. Delighted with the vulnerability of its quarry it proceeded to pelt down. I wore a jacket with feathers in it, a bit like the swan but with black nylon. It was not waterproof, not even water repellant. We, my jacket and I, were officially water absorbent and the running, which turned to walking often, felt more like swimming. I started thinking of what the downhill would be like going up. I looked around for a cab. There wasn’t one. Just as well, I had no money on me, so lighthearted and carefree had been my departure earlier.

When finally I stepped into the civilized quiet of The Manor House I left a damp trail behind me on the thick blonde carpet. My hair and jacket feathers were wringing wet, my face red and glistening. I was as victorious as one ought to be, surprised by the miracle of home and dryness.

The whisky happened later that day, bless its little heart. We did a one hour tour of the centuries old Oban distillery culminating in a sacred sipping. It was fascinating and dry and smelled of magic that takes infinite patience and care to conjure. I limped a bit, in fact I limped a lot, and for three weeks after. The rain, the distance, my lack of runninghood had done something odd to my right knee that it wasn’t going to forget for some time.

Fish and chips and whisky can’t be avoided in Scotland, shouldn’t be, if you really want to experience the place, but the run? I’d go ahead and give that one a miss.

Sleep Overs: Cologne And The Schloss Effect

A schloss -- a german castle -- is not necessarily all it’s made out to be. This one seemed to gobble up guests. I couldn’t find anyone else staying there. At times I couldn’t even find myself.

In the end, we ran away from the schloss the next day, canceling our second night. The getaway cab cost us 35 euros, the necessary price to get back into the center of Cologne. The schloss wasn’t really close to anything but the schloss itself and, of course, rumours of other guests. But there were some good things...

Here are some good things:

• The stone walls must have been more than two feet thick.
• It was a real schloss even though it seemed pristine enough to have been built yesterday. It was built way back in the 1700’s a gift from a very rich man to his, hopefully, appreciative wife.

• 
  
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• Despite it’s 'castleyness' the room still managed to be small, warm and cosy.
• The restaurant we had to eat in, as we arrived late and were close only to the schloss, was Italian and full of all the missing people. Not what you’d expect given the enormous architectural assertions of the schloss itself. The restaurant was a surprise buried down a long imposing hallway. It was warm, intimate, low ceilinged with lots of wood accents, walls of wine bottles and of course some expensive but delicious food. We ate in a pub the next night to balance the budget.

Here are some bad things:

• The schloss ate the guests.
• Marooned in the schloss the next morning, far from everywhere but the schloss, I tried having a breakfast that would not cost an arm and a leg. I wanted a pastry and a coffee. Apparently no-one had ever wanted anything but the full breakfast before. I ended up in the deserted foyer that should have displayed telltale signs of life. No such thing. Just me and a barman and incredulity that I should be wanting a simple coffee and a pastry. I had wanted to be inconspicuous but this wasn’t possible. I was the only visible human that was not employed.
• That thing you get from expensive establishments where collective aloofness, arising from the monumental architecture and its dazed human counterparts, results in an uncanny but profound separation from life itself.
• Vast, echoing, staircases that would have seemed more appropriate in opera houses, although I have reason to believe that castles made this error repeatedly.

Here's the link: Grandhotel Schloss Bensberg

When In Hong Kong -- Get Out!

Well, what can you do with an island? It just floats there wanting nothing much from you. It’s possible it doesn’t even need you, that’s how unequal the relationship is. If it shrugged you’d fall in the sea. But if it’s a small one, like Cheung Chau, there are edges everywhere and you can walk right around it, circumvent it, tickle the edges so to speak. In the end you’d be back where you started and that’s not easy on one of those continent things.

And Hong Kong’s deadly crowded. There are people down the front of your shirt, in your nose, tucked behind your ears. Escape is necessary. You’ll need a ferry to get off the bigger, taller, more vertical island, away from the masses. Unfortunately a large percentage of the masses have their fashionable young heads filled with the very same idea. You start to get that feeling at Central ferry station. Well, at first there are just a few of you, a couple of plastic moulded seats and some giant antiquated looking fans aggressively attempting to make tiny dents in the heavy, wet heat while simultaneously blowing the hair off your head.

Then the city takes a ragged smoggy breath in and as it exhales a multitude of daytrippers tumble past the blow of the fans to join you as you wait weakly imagining your escape, toying with the idea of making something else the object of the exercise. There is the mere seed of an idea that maybe something else needs to be the object, as getting away from it all is starting to look like going towards it.

The ferry arrives and an impossible number of us pile on as though there’s a war and we’re evacuating. We bob and weave our way to a place at the window. Fifty five minutes pass, fifty five minutes of deep blue South China Sea, the strewness of hundreds of little land masses and the sheer fabulousness of being passed by the more expensive ferry, the faster one that flies by on a cushion of nothing. If you were on it, I tell myself smugly, you’d not know just how fantastic you were.

Less than an hour from the bustling verticality of Hong Kong we’re back in China how she used to be. Not a highrise in sight, flocks of old fishing boats, serious ones, the kind that really catch fish and are not just for show. It’s only as we pull into the dock that we notice that the surface of the little island, with it’s quaint settlements along the waters edge, is moving like ants on a muffin crumb, crawling with merry making tourists.

Cheung Chau is known for two distressingly disparate things: suicide and buns, an almost mystical association beyond the grasp of the ordinary mind. The first half of the last decade saw an alarming spate of macabre ‘charcoal burning’ suicides in vacation rentals on the island; death by carbon monoxide poisoning.

And then there’s the contrasting conviviality of the annual Bun Festival. My companion for the day assures me that then there are real crowds… and 60 feet high towers of buns. At this point I begin to feel a little like I do about Christmas trees and easter bunnies; murkily mystified and just a little roughed up. The place is alive and positively festive, I can’t imagine what it would really be like when it comes alive during the bun festival, I can’t imagine it as a suicide destination either for that matter.

We dodge through the weekend crowds and head out on the path along the water past the long, low profiles of the resting dragon boats. We join the people attacking the walk with gusto. Occasionally we wind off the path and curve up into the hills, through the suburbs, along roads so narrow the main modes of transport are feet or bicycles. Up here its another world, quiet and lost, a little like we become, even with our Hong Kong born guide. We try this road then that, not panicking because we can see the edges of the land we just can’t find a road that leads directly down there.

We pass solemn cemeteries and deserted stone benches under glowering banyans. It is impossible to imagine the masses of eating, jostling, laughing escapees down in the village.

But they’re still there even when the sun isn’t any longer and when we finally wend across the last small crescent shaped beach with our flip flops in our hands. And the crowds leaving are much bigger than the crowds were arriving. Fifty five minutes across the dark South China Sea and we’re back home safe and sound in the relentless and familiar chaos of Hong Kong.

Copyright 2010 Gail Walter

Shamian Island: Lost In Time

Perhaps it’s the absence of direct sunshine, the oblique, halfhearted way the frail light falls that makes this island seem ephemeral as a bubble, seem to float in and out of focus like a mirage on the opaque waters of the vast Pearl River Delta.

You have to cross a bridge to get there, a solid concrete arch over the slow khaki- colored canal separating the island from the ancient, crowded alleys of Guanghzhou alongside it.  Many of the city’s over 10 million bustling inhabitants trade in much the same way as their ancestors did centuries before them; dwarfed by shoulder high sacks of dried starfish, seahorses and enormous brown rolls of papery cinnamon thick and long as a man’s arm.

Behind us hawkers on the pedestrian bridge above the sprawling modern day traffic nightmare hunch over their foul-smelling claws, horns, and other gruesome paraphernalia. Ahead an abrupt and astonishing colonial sanctuary of sorts.

Once over the bridge we turn sharp left along a narrow paved road that circumnavigates the entire island. Now the sounds are different. I hear voices in leisurely conversation, sharp heels clicking on pavement, birds singing in the gnarled branches of ancient Banyan trees lining the street, a remarkable slow peace seems to hold the place. It’s uncannily hushed, compared to the chaos across the bridge.

But then, this island has a history of setting itself apart. After the notorious Opium wars in 1859 this sand mass was split in two giving 4/5ths to the British and a mere 1/5^th to the French.

During that colonial period the island cut itself off from the mainland at 10pm sharp every night, a security measure to keep its cluster of European traders safe and separate from the churning masses of the mainland.

Once we deposit our luggage at the Guangdong Victory Hotel – an old colonial-style outpost that has had some glorious ups and sincerely shabby downs -- I waste no time. I’m out on that street, this time on foot in flat sandals. I follow the canal on its way to its final surge into the Pearl River itself.

There are some empty restaurants with empty chairs spilling out onto silent jungle-like gardens hung with rows of red lanterns hinting at busier more festive evenings. Even in China, particularly here on this somewhat un-Chinese outpost, this is the quiet time between meals. It is late afternoon and the blear of sun represents scant opposition to the oncoming night.

My plan is not a plan. I simply weave my way up and down random side streets leading off the river road. In places the quiet is broken by the surprising cacophony of school children at play in a street otherwise deserted.

I round a corner coming to what I imagine is the shady green center of the island; a series of picturesque formal gardens. Things hot up here a bit. People stroll by at an island pace and everywhere I turn brides in white seem to appear. They are posing everywhere, dainty and perfect as china dolls and surrounded by attentive entourages of photographers and family.

Further down the road I come to a major bridal hub, photographers and brides are streaming out of the main door. Through the windows I catch glimpses of serious pre-wedding tête-à-têtes, brides and grooms sitting stiffly across the tables from glamorous young wedding consultants, between them piles of hard covered catalogues. A part of me thinks it wonderfully odd that this tiny island, full of remnants of European colonialism, should be so popular a background for well heeled Chinese bridal couples whose history and traditions could not be more different.

Back on the Pearl River, right up near the White Swan Hotel, famed as the preferred accommodation for Americans adopting Chinese babies, I turn left again and follow the river. Its getting dark and the multi-storied buildings across the water light up in bright ripples of changing color.

I come across one of many recreational areas, cement tiled but broken by the green sweep of some very old trees. I hear music, old fashioned sounding music, loud but distorted. Couples, men and women, women and women, straight-arm formally in the fading light. Red lanterns bob overhead.

Such a strange place Shamian Island, quaint and old fashioned. If it weren’t for the very contemporary animation of the school children I would think it belonged mainly to the couples who earnestly dip and sway on this outdoor dance floor. I try to imagine the couples that must have danced here a hundred years ago. What is the same, what persists and what is different.

Montreal Without Clothes

I’ve never been to Montreal before. I had planned many things. I had not expected to be worried about basics, Montreal is about so much more than basics. I thought I had those covered. Here we were,  touch of France in the north American continent, such a charming juxtaposition, historic hotel, everything perfect, except for those two black things on wheels I get used to traveling with, the ones I take for granted; my luggage i.e. my underwear, my overwear, my toiletries – my life!

And everyone in Montreal wears black in so many edgy, elegant ways. I was wearing a smocky sort of grey flecked thing that was comfortable for traveling and could pass for stylish from a distance on a dark night. I felt incurably like a ‘girl’. Like I wanted to burst into tears at the airport, then later at the hotel, then on a street corner after paying $15 for a single tiny pair of unnecessarily saucy underwear from the only store open when I finally realized my luggage and I would not hook up this particular trip.

Finally I managed to tame my surprisingly adamant emotional response so that at least it looked house trained. I got used to bathing in a cloud of luxurious fragrance thanks to the those little bottles in the hotel, and then putting the same old clothes back on. I tried standing on my toes to look up and over my obstinate drabness, at least catch a glimpse of the glossy charm of the place.

The day we arrived was a perfect early spring day, clothing aside. A perfect spring day that succumbed graciously to a perfect spring evening. I thought I’d wear the speckled grey thing. We wondered where to eat and wandered out into the throngs out celebrating the end of a grim northern winter.

After mingling conspicuously with the fabulously young and glamorous along the winding roads of Old Montreal we ended up doing a T.S. Eliot in Little Gidding and arriving back ‘where we started’. The hotel we were staying at on the St Lawrence river had a lovely, intimate little wood and glass bistro we had noticed on our way out, floor to ceiling windows opening out onto the street. Sheer chance and good luck cleared the perfect table for us at an open window overlooking the passing show on the riverfront.

We shook out our heavy white napkins and I used mine to help minimize the amount of grey-fleckedness visible. They had all the important things you learn to rely on in a French restaurant like escargot drenched in garlic, and everything with frites all served on simple white crockery on the crisp white table cloth. The warm tones of a saxophone played not too far in the background.

Later that night I stretched out on the comfortably deep stone window seat in my room at the hotel. There were things outside there capable of distracting me from the grey flecked thing I was wearing. Below me the cobbled street glistened. I watched as people thronged to eat at the pavement cafes lining the narrow street below and wondered at the stridently festive sound high heels make on cobblestones.

Montreal is a beautiful city that needs more than four days, and one set of clothing. I will definitely go back there but, next time I’ll bring clothes. I’ll take a suitcase small enough to fit above my head in the cabin. Small, yes, but big enough to take a little more than a grey flecked thing and one pair of saucy underwear.

Uncommontravel Tips:

Stay: Auberge du Vieux-Port, 1882 inn on the Old Port, riverfront, Montreal, Quebec.

Eat: Narcisse Bistro-Bar.

Waking Up Santa Fe

Now you can try the plaza in the midday heat, you and swarms of other tourists, or you can sneak out of your bed at sunrise and catch Santa Fe before she’s quite ready for you.

The slope of Canyon road, the air fresh and light like kisses. Morning yellow bees humming around the purple sage spires, the curved folds of adobe draped across the top of stone walls and everywhere fleeting moments captured in wood, metal and stone.

A bronze horse seems to pause for a moment as you pass by. Wisps of human forms seem momentarily frozen, arms high and wide to the blue of the sky.

The art galleries that line this street look different in the early morning, more contemplative, somehow stripped of their normal self conscious sophistication, reduced, perhaps expanded, to the naked art without the artifice.

Curve all the way down Canyon following the sound of the church bells. Take a right on Paseo De Peralta and then left onto Alameida. Follow the ghost of the Santa Fe River tiptoeing past the quirky wooden angels all the way into downtown. Turn right at Galisteo with the cafe on the corner blasting throaty Sara Bareilles into the still sleepy air. Inside the shadowy staff sway and scrub counters, prepping onions, peppers and mushrooms for the daily omelette special.

Continue on past an Aladdin’s cave bursting with thousands of magical flying carpets. Pause at the doorway of a small, dark restaurant, silent and closed for business even as the morning sun dances on the yellow painted front door. Make a mental note to call later, make reservations.

Turn left on Water, away from the plaza. Right on Sandoval and duck into Burro Alley where there are some signs of movement. Step invisibly round the sleepy staff setting out umbrellas and wiping down bright colored plastic tablecloths. This is the Café Paris where, later in the day, you’ll enjoy the fluffiest French omelette in recent memory and a man in a straw hat and a striped shirt with a large French nose and an accordion will whisper to you that he’s actually from Ohio and you’ll barely believe him. At least he must be Quebecois, surely?

Now turn right past more silent, slumbering stores towards the plaza and the Palace of the Governors, still, as perhaps it was on a morning four hundred years ago.

Along the white Palace wall you notice subdued movement. An orderly line of several people come into focus. Everyone holds a folded cloth or rug waiting as they have been waiting hundreds of years for that same signal to spread their wares and begin the day's trading.

You leave the square and walk up through the dappled shade of the elongated garden next to the St Francis Basilica. Ahead of you, on the grass next to a wooden bench, lies a small splash of color. There, laid out as if on a bed in a morning bedroom is a complete outfit; thin cotton striped shirt; faded blue denims, a pair of shoes where the feet would be. On the bench two balled up socks next to each other.

A middle-aged couple scamper in through the backdoor of the church. On a whim you follow. Inside is Spain. Well, at least, there is Spanish. Everything said, everything sung, a whole community awake and singing. You are in a foreign land. Sit awhile trying to imagine what is being said, or rather intoned. It sounds so rich and full when the content is left to the imagination.

Ten minutes later use the full weight of your body to push the heavy front door open, just enough to squeeze through. Down the steps you go and round towards where you’ve come from. Follow your nose, walking uphill back past the sleeping adobe homes, the rolling foothills in the blue distance.

Walking up Canyon road the galleries still look less sophisticated and more themselves, like someone just woken up before they’ve had time to put on makeup.

Back in the dim interior of the low, sprawling adobe house everyone is still sleeping. Still sleeping! And a whole world has passed by.

Here is more of what you see when you wake up Santa fe.

What You See When You're Lost in NYC

I’ve done it before, mastered them. I’ve traveled beneath the earth’s surface in Hong Kong, Paris, Rome, other places. Just have to make that clear, you know. Mitigating circumstances for finding myself in NYC for a day and needing to remaster the subway because of my annoying habit of forgetting basic things.

So here I am looking at the hole in the bustling sidewalk like it’s the one Alice fell down. Dare I? I mean, once you step into it can you change your mind, turn around, resurface?

My legs are going there it seems, despite my irrational fears. The three of us, my legs and I, descend into the Middle Earth of Manhattan me telling myself I can always reverse, no matter how silly it looks. I need to cover a lot of ground in one day and this is the only way I can do it.

I manage to get down the stairs and sidle up to the ticket window.

I’d like one ticket to 59^th street, please. The man behind the window snickers insolently. Yes, I realize the tickets cost the same for everywhere. There’s something a little pathetic about my insistence on sharing my destination with him. But there is method in my madness.

“And I’d like to know which one of these”, I mouth at the opaque glass gesturing over my shoulder at the three turnstiles that all seem to say the same thing but in different ways.

“which one of these I need to take to 59^th?”

The man behind the window speaks indistinctly, in a surly West African accent. I in barely disguised, slightly panicked, South African. He is saying something in West African that I can’t understand, something that borders on confrontational, or so it seems. We repeat this a few times. The only thing that becomes bleakly obvious is that he is not going to sell me a ticket. There is a reason why, but my South African brain can’t decipher his West African reason.

I won’t go away, though. I notice this. So does he. I mean where am I going to go? There is no way I can follow his directions, they’re as opaque as the window.

There are absolutely no subway maps on the walls, the way there are supposed to be. A small, slight, dark haired woman wafts by and I fall upon her. She opens her mouth to reply and my worst fears are confirmed. We can’t understand each other either. Melting pot becomes Tower of Babel.

I turn back to the window filled with a subterranean desperation: “So you’re not going to sell me a ticket then!” I shout at the sullen shadow, attempting to somehow bully it into saying something I can comprehend.

He lilts something at me defiantly. It sounds final. I glare at the window. We‘re having some sort of face off, I gather. It feels oddly intimate.

Nonplussed I turn to the machines against the wall, they seem almost sympathetic by comparison. Standing there in front of them, no shadow of an irascible fellow foreigner lurking, I manage to figure it out, the purchasing part.

Next are the three turnstiles. I pick one. Randomly. I drop further into the bowels of the earth, find a platform, wait on it. My method is not yet foolproof. Lets just say that I overshoot my destination once or twice on this particular day. I sail nonchalantly past my goal more than a couple of times. When I emerge into the sunlight, here and then there, I wonder around brand new in various surprising locations and in various versions of lost. It’s a spontaneous way to see the city.

And, somewhere along the way, I begin to enjoy myself.

You see the NYPD watching over you on Columbus Circle.

You see children doing what children must in Washington Square.

You see adults doing what adults must when temperatures hit 90 degrees.

You see a shocking pink scooter in a french restaurant in the Theater district.

You see a family of five all trying to find themselves on their respective Smart Phones

Singapore: Trying On The Sari Self

There are two vastly different ways to buy a sari, maybe more, but as foreigners in Singapore, there are two: In a posh store where the silk is diaphanous and the dollars several hundred; or at the covered market where the selection is vast and the prices less voracious.

My daughter and I know exactly where we have to go. We take a short cab ride from our hotel in downtown and jump out at a recently rained on street corner dotted with steamed up bus shelters and general market stalls. The hot, heavy Singapore air is shamelessly leeching liquid from us so we stop briefly to apply chilled coconut juice. From the outside the market looks nondescript, just two long escalators disappearing into a place that spits out people with plastic bags at regular intervals.

We step onto the up one and step off at the top into a riot of rich color, nothing wishy washy here. Except for a very occasional pale blue, pastels are nowhere to be seen. If I wasn’t tumbling towards ecstasy I would have breathed a sigh of relief, I’ve never liked washed out colors, always relished the strong, deep arresting ones. This place looks like Aladdin’s cave.

Bryony and I do what women so often do when faced with inordinate temptation, we dither, get confused. We have to rally and consolidate. From our position on the threshold of sari heaven we can see several competing paths into the cave. Silk shimmers, sequins drip light.  We are drunk on reds so rich it is like falling into cabernet, swirling purples, greens, blues, colors we never dared dream of. We mumble about ‘a plan’ then think better of it. We fall upon the line of least resistance and promise faithfully never to leave the other to languish forever in this maze of possibly fatal shopping options.

Buying a sari in a Singapore market is not a private affair. We tell one enquiring attendant that Bryony’s looking for a sari to wear to a friend’s wedding and within moments women in other stalls are looking at us, talking, gesturing, offering helpful advice.

We seem to have fallen into some ancient trading ritual, a shopping womb filled with gracious women eager to nurture us into the perfect purchase. It feels like something safe enough to float on. Favorite aunts, sisters, distant relatives seem to emerge from behind endless racks of flowing feminine garments, steering us gently to the stall that holds Bryony’s sari.

We take our shoes off at the entrance and Bryony strips down to her underwear right there on the raised store floor. Back home this would feel unbearably vulnerable here its what you have to do to be initiated into the art of wearing a sari. A fan blows desperately at the stubborn air, music blasts, and everyone who walks by has an opinion they express without an ounce of self consciousness, just the way a maiden aunt would.

When we leave with all our parcels we have to pass more flowing skirts, tapered tunics, more saturated color, delicate prints, textures so fine you can barely feel them with your fingertips. I look down at my western woman’s clothing, so restrained, so un-undulating, so lacking in celebration and brazen feminine magic. So careful.

“Why don’t WE dress like this, mom?”

And I simply, for the life of me, cannot think why.

Country Birds Hit Bright Lights Big City

They were young, flown the coop early. Off to seek their fortune in the big city but the place was a shock, and they were huddled together, frozen with fright, singularly unprepared for high flying Manhattan.

Forgetting their wings they chose to wait for the same bus we were all lined up to catch...

New York State of Writer's Mind

Mohonk Mountain House looms like something Seussical, a castle birthed by a truly audacious imagination.

I challenge you to break the spell, it says. And you can’t, despite the potentially prim staff at the front desk who teeter precariously on the brink of stuffiness.  The eccentricity of the place wins hands down, takes your breath away; the perfect place to topple the mind’s carefully constructed defenses against the fantastical.

Natalie Goldberg called it ‘Wild Mind” and this was the kind of space we were about to enter in this extraordinary otherworldly place. It was perfect. It was also scary, scary because writing anywhere other than alone feels daunting and because writers with considerable word clout were going to be present.

Never mind, I said to myself. It’s the experience itself that matters. No expectations, right? I reached out and took my hand. I’d looked at the link Greg Correll had given us for Kate Hymes who was running the workshop/retreat.

I noted that the writers’ process she taught, allowed you to ‘pass’. What this essentially means is that, as well as writing, you can also not write. I mean you can fail to write even when given the perfectly provocative prompt. You can fail, go blank. No pressure.

This mattered enormously. I had a horrible history of performance anxiety despite my efforts to lecture myself thusly:

“No-one cares that much, really. Not enough to stone you for poor performance, pelt you with rotten fruit. Remember, even. That’s the truth of it.”

This implacable fact should have resulted in a relaxation of the knot in the solar plexus. It did for the morning.

There were three opportunities to write and to read to the group. No criticism was allowed. If all else failed that life saving ‘pass’ could hold me until the trembling stopped.

I made it through two. I failed at the third, but who cares. What happened had nothing to do with the mind’s tendencies to measure and judge. What happened leapt clear over the mind, transcended it. Had we all not been listening to each other so intently, we might have looked up to catch a glimpse of its silver arc.

Yes, there were words, extraordinary words, and voices, images that scooped out our insides and stole our breath away. We sat in a circle, facing each other. As we wrote and we spoke we could watch each other’s faces, see ourselves reflected in what happens when defenses drop and words touch what is inescapable about the human experience.

The day went on and lasted a week, a lifetime and at the end of it we, none of us, wanted to leave. We’d opened up and put that in words and it felt so liberating.

We were drenched in the sheer brilliance of what human beings sound like when they feel safe enough to fly.

There. I didn’t think I could put it into words, this experience, but there it is.

Huge thank you to Greg for setting this up and baby sitting all our writers’ idiosyncrasies and limitless capacities for many inventive versions of dithering.

There was Sunday morning for example. We’re all checked out of the hotel. We’re standing at the entrance attempting to negotiate a feasible exit, the logistics of getting Lea and her husband, Nikki, Greg and I to Poughkeepsie where we’ll join the others and hop on a tugboat to conquer the unsuspecting Hudson.

There are not many of us, not too many variables, you would think, but we manage to dither, quite comically really. Monty Python comes to mind. In the end Lea and I are in full giggle.

“Do call us. Be sure to stay in touch,” we chime as we wave goodbye and head off in separate cars on the very straightforward 30 minute drive to Poughkeepsie, something we’d prepared for as though it were a three week expedition into unexplored regions up the Amazon.

Being with other writers is magical in so many ways. Writers, good writers, take you to places you never even know existed then they help you recognize them. They can make you laugh from your belly, they can reduce you to tears. All of this is amplified when writers feel utterly safe, when you diffuse the anxiety and the competition and allow them to simply play their instruments, sing their songs.

Lastly thank you to Kate for creating a safe birth space with such grace and gentle authority.

Thank you, too, to each and every writer present who, without exception, exposed their brave and brilliant selves with such daring. It was worth the risk. It is always worth the risk.

Stanford, South Africa: Endless Lunch With Our Men In Africa

We’re talking about writing, old style journalism. I’m sitting with three veterans of African journalism; two ex newspaper editors and one foreign correspondent. 

Right now it doesn’t matter what their names are, what matters is that their brand of journalism is little more than a wistful memory for those of us who followed after.

They’re tirelessly exploring yet another unofficial investigation of an old, very gruesome murder, sniffing around like old dogs. The new facts that have recently emerged cannot be divulged here but the FBI, the CIA and the notorious South African security organization BOSS are mentioned.

One of the editors is my father, Rex Gibson seen here with my "man in Africa", Michel Walter

You get the sense that these men have never stopped, that their curiosity and nose for ‘what really happened’ refuses to lie down and take a much earned breather.

They were a close knit, pen-toting band of fearless print warriors in those days, talented people from everywhere landing in darkest Africa to cover the juiciest stories, always exciting, often dangerous, facing impossible odds and deadlines to get information out to the rest of the world.

I sit back in my chair and give the local white in my deep glass a casual swirl watching the way the light refracts, thinking back on the good ol’ days when truth was still a prize worth fighting for.

We’re in the Art Café on the main street of a tiny little town called Stanford nestled in the Cape Overberg mountains a couple of hours from Cape Town.

We’ve done a quick recce, driving up and down the short, narrow streets looking at the beautiful Cape Dutch cottages, many of them lovingly restored, much as they were over a hundred years ago. Harvey Tyson used to be the editor of South Africa’s biggest daily newspaper but now, in the back seat, he’s the self appointed tour guide, sitting forward like a kid, pointing wildly: “Go here. Go here”.

We have the windows down so we can crane our necks and catch glimpses of quiet open doorways and warm wood flooring, curved antique stools and chairs at casual angles on deep stone porches. There’s even a grassy village square, says Harvey, eyes alight with a mixture of pride and wonder. We watch as a dark haired girl in jodhpurs fights to calm a spirited horse. If you look up above the rows of low, white washed houses you see the blue shadow of the looming Overberg.

          Peaceful Streets of Stanford, village time forgot, over the mountains from Cape Town

A stone church, hundreds of years old, stands sentry on a street corner, off the square, watching as the years slide by in a slumber and the people come and they go.

A year ago the town was rudely awoken by the crack of gunshots. The low slung Stanford Inn on the main street is open for business again but the proprietor is no longer there. Two gun-slinging robbers took his money and his life and disappeared with them into the night.

People still leave their doors open, unusual in South Africa, even before the murder. They still prop themselves up against the wooden door frames and survey the still air and the very occasional passers by.

                        Main Street, Stanford just up the road from the inn where the shooting took place.

For a town this size there are several choices for lunch, signs that the murder created only a momentary hiccup in Stanford’s transformation from it’s sleeping self into a modest little center for artists of all kinds.

This is probably why the fabled Peter Younghusband, gravitated here some years back. One day it might become just another self-consciously cool destination but for now it has its understated history set in this quietly magnificent landscape. Part of its attraction is the fact that it’s still a little rough around the edges, still oozing character.

So is Our Man In Africa. When I notice Harvey call him over from his position leaning against the dark wood counter, I’m embarrassed the way I always am when people make overtures I wouldn’t have the courage to make in their position. Maybe he doesn’t want to join us. I mean we’re cool, right, from my perspective, but he looks cooler, a lovingly crafted caricature of the type; literally honed, grooved and shaped by decades spent gathering scoops over drinks at hundreds, maybe thousands, of different watering holes across the continent.

But on the second beckoning he lumbers over, settles his large frame in a chair he pulls up from the empty table behind us.

A deep glass of cabernet for him too, we indicate to the English lass who has also found her way to this unassuming South African hamlet and is waiting on our gathering of ever more exuberant ex-journalists gabbing about old times.

Now its officially entertainment. I can’t sit back further but if I could I would. I’m taking notes, literally. These men have lived. They have done things I don't have the imagination to dream up. I remember, as a child, never wanting to go to bed when they visited, these correspondents. They had opinions on everything, even the few things they knew nothing about, and they’d throw their considerable intellect and unbridled passion behind them. They were born storytellers with a lifetime of material.

Harvey Tyson (right), with Peter Younghusband. Remember when...

In many ways nothing has changed. Decades have passed it is true. They are no longer working for newspapers but the memories transcend time. All of them in their late seventies, early eighties, all still writing, all having published several books between them.

And now my middle aged self can see more clearly than ever that they will never get old, that they’ll die before they do that. Life is still very much alive for them, they’re still prostrate at its feet, still arguing about every aspect, still lighting up with the sheer adventure of it, still drinking a river.

I see what it is I want to be when I grow up. I want this ageless energy, this enthusiasm, intellect and wit that has turned these men into people you just want to hang out with; all afternoon, into the night, drinking and talking and eating and laughing. Discussing, arguing, calling up life so that life cannot resist and meets us right here in this place where time has stopped.

The UK Spectator on Peter Younghusband HERE