What Happens in Asia

There was the bustling moment as we climbed onto the train, trying not to fall into the gap, squeezing our backpacks through the narrow doorway, me banging my ukulele against things. We found seats, but there was nowhere to put our luggage. We pulled it close, trying to make sure people could still move comfortably up and down the aisle. This was our first train ride; we were excited. The train was simple, but comfortable, and relatively quiet.

We started moving. A woman walked the length of the train with a basket of snacks for sale. The car was mostly empty. A few seats up and on the other side of the car sat several monks in bright orange robes, chatting amicably with one another. One of them had a tattoo on his arm. Directly across from us was a boy, late teens, stretched out across several seats, with his feet propped up on a handrail. He napped sometimes, woke up. At one point, he took out a wallet. Then another wallet. He looked through them, and put them back in his pockets. Then he fell asleep again.

One of the monks got up and poked him, waking him up, and saying something angrily in Thai. He sat back down. Later, the woman selling snacks came back. The monk got up and poked the boy again, said something. The boy looked embarrassed and awkward. He bought a bottle of water from the snack lady and gave it to the angry monk. The monk went back to his seat and to chatting with the other monks.

Months later I realized where the boy’s propped-up feet were pointing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We were heading downstream for the very last time. A few children we knew stood on the shore looking sad and confused. I felt like I should be about to cry, and maybe I was. A man from our village was also catching this boat. He was bringing a dog, which he picked up using a pole which was attached to a rope which was tied around the dog’s neck. He tossed her into the back of the boat by the engine and got in next to her.

We pushed off from the shore out onto the swollen river, under a gray sky. I wanted to be quiet; I didn’t trust myself to speak. For about two minutes I quietly thought about how I’d never see the village or the children ever again. Then the woman in the back of the boat, the driver’s wife, started shouting in Lao. The boat slowed. Twenty feet off the stern, in the water, was the dog, swimming across the flooded river towards the shore. She didn’t seem likely to make it. It was the rainy season, and the current was tremendous. I wondered what she thought she was going to do when she got there, with that big piece of wood tied around her neck and no one to feed her. I guess she thought it was better than the alternative.

 

The driver turned the boat back, and steered it close to the dog. When the dog came close to the boat, the owner reached out and grabbed the pole and scooped her dripping out of the water. We headed back downriver, and the driver stopped at the next village. The owner got out of the boat with the dog, and, splashing through the shallow water by the shore, carried her, soggy and hopeless, toward the front of the boat. Her rear feet didn’t touch the ground, but she moved them like she was trying to walk. It looked like she was riding an invisible bicycle.

 

The owner now tried to sit on one of the chairs in the front of the boat, with the wet dog, but there were a couple of white people sitting in the seats, probably tourists, and I suppose they didn’t approve of the idea. He carried the dog back again, her feet still pedaling uselessly. They both got into the boat next to the noisy engine. This time, I’m sure he was watching her more closely. I don’t think she was a pet.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Between the trees I caught a glimpse of a truck going by. Hundreds of large rubber balls, pink, blue, and green were stacked in the back of the truck, eight or ten feet high, held down with netting. I suspected that somewhere there would soon be some happy Vietnamese kids.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The bus stopped in a busy gravel parking lot. The night was humid and heavy, full of cigarette smoke, voices, bus horns honking imminent departures. I had been sitting like a sardine, bolt upright in the back of a small bus with my legs dangling into the stairway, with no footrest, for six hours. My feet felt like melons. I needed to pee.

I walked through the restaurant, brightly lit and full of midnight diners. I gave my coin to the man sitting at the table with the metal box. He smiled joyfully and said, Hello! People were looking at me. No one was white.

I walked down the ramp, towards the women’s room. All but one of the twelve stalls were occupied. I soon learned why: a neat pile of human feces was standing on the floor a foot away from the squat-toilet. So close. A shame, really. I wondered how they could have missed when the toilet itself took up fifty percent of the space in the stall. I considered waiting for another stall, then realized I didn’t care. I was careful to avoid the shit. I squatted, urine splattered all over my feet, as usual. I faced backwards, toward the wall, because that way it splashed less. I dipped water from the bucket to flush. I didn’t rinse around the toilet. I was in a hurry, and it seemed like a losing battle, anyway.

I got back on the bus and nightmared through the next six hours as the driver whipped us violently through the mountains across the island of Sumatra. In the early hours of the morning, we arrived in Maninjau. A new acquaintance of ours, a German boy, had his wallet lost or stolen as he got off the bus. Kristian and I waited while he and another recently acquired acquaintance, an Indonesian guy who lived in Maninjau, tried to chase the bus down on a moped.

In the pre-dawn dark, we crossed the street and piled our backpacks on an old wooden table that was standing on the sidewalk. Nothing was open, and no one was in sight. I was hungry, and ate some cookies. Dawn slowly broke over Lake Maninjau. I was slowly surprised as the steep green mountains materialized out of the dark, bits of drifting clouds clinging to them. A little girl came out of a house across the street, smiled, waved, and said, “Hello, how are you?” I said, “fine, thank you.” We practiced counting to ten in English. Pointing at her head, she wordlessly asked me if I had a head scarf. I shook my head no.

It got lighter, and soon two young Indonesians, brother and sister, walked up to us and introduced themselves with nervous smiles. They were there visiting their grandmother for the Ramadan holiday. They spoke English and told us about their studies. While we waited for the German guy to come back, we played ukulele and they taught us words in Indonesian. They let us use the bathroom at their grandmother's house. We waited for a couple hours, but the German kid never came back, and we wanted to find a place to stay. While we’d been hanging out with the brother and sister, an old man had opened his small shop behind us. We left a message with him for the German kid. We ended up seeing him later that day. He’d never gotten his wallet back.

 

We walked several kilometers down the shore, looking for a guesthouse. They were all full because of Ramadan. Several people stopped us and asked to take pictures with us. Indonesians always like to take multiple pictures. I guess they’re worried some wouldn’t turn out. A whole family came to take photos with us. They spoke in English and the parents introduced their teenage daughters. Eventually we found a bungalow by the lake. It had no electricity, but the food was cheap and delicious. The owner said we could use the dugout canoe if we wanted. The water quietly licked the shore. Right in front of the bungalow, an old man sat out on the dock of one of the fish farms for hours, trying to catch fish from the nets with a fishing pole, but they kept fumbling out of his hands and splashing back in. The water was a mirror, reflecting the mountains and the clouds. At night it reflected the stars and the lights from the fish farms. I hadn’t forgotten, but I didn’t mind the bus or the shit. I loved Sumatra.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The interior of each city block contains a whole world, a maze of miniature apartments, convenience stores, and restaurants piled on and around each other, occupying every conceivable cubic meter. Only pedestrians and the most precise moped drivers can navigate the labyrinthine alleys of Saigon.

The mundane is a forceful presence here. Two feet to the left and two feet to the right are the apartment windows and open doors that press large and close like theater screens. It’s impossible not to look into the apartments, narrow but deep, extending back into the dense living tissue of the block.

A dog barks. A family sits cross-legged around a table, eating dinner. A moped is parked in one living room. On the walls are sometimes small shrines, framed pictures of Buddha. A girl lies stretched out on the floor, watching TV. Some families have couches, but no one sits in them.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Buy a book. Here.” An eight-year-old with a heavy basket of assorted books comes up to the table where the three of us are drinking beer. She waves a book at us. “No thanks,” we all say. Marcel smiles and shakes his head. We look very deliberately down at the table, or pick up our beer and stare out towards the Mekong. We look anywhere but at the girl, who stands only a tiny head above the level of our table. “Here. This one.” “We don’t need a book.” “This?” She holds up a bracelet of wooden beads. “No, thanks, we already have some.” Kristian shows her his wrists, loaded with bracelets. “But this one is different.” There is a touch of desperation in her voice.

More of them have materialized around us. A Canadian father and his teenage son are sitting at the next table. They come here every day for pizza. They know the kids. The kids don’t try to sell them books anymore. They give one of them a piece of pizza.

A few more try to sell us books. We don’t buy; but for some reason, they don’t leave. The son at the next table is playing a game with one of them—rock, paper, scissors. Somehow, all of these kids with their old clothes, their heavy baskets of books, their relentless attempts to sell, they all speak English. You can even joke with them. Kristian tells them they should stop selling books and go to school. They all insist that they do, they do go to school, but only in the morning. The kids don’t leave, but they don’t try to sell us books. Kristian goes back to speaking German with our Swiss friend, Marcel. I don’t understand German, and focus on trying to find out where the kids live. One of them speaks enough English to tell me what her favorite class in schools is—math. She lives outside the city with her sister. Her parents are “angels.”

An adult somewhere in the pizza restaurant gives the kids a stern look, says a few words in Khmer and they guiltily wander away from our tables. It seems like the adult knows the children, but I can’t figure out what the relationship is. The booksellers will come back a couple beers later, play some more rock, paper, scissors, be shooed away again. The father at the next table says they stay out every night until ten or eleven o’clock, walking up and down the street, trying to sell books. I wonder when they have time to do their homework.

 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We entered the tunnel through the old city wall, pressed against the bricks to avoid the traffic. We were busy conversing. On the other side of the wall, on the bridge that crossed the old city’s moat, I stopped talking, and said, “Look!”

A man was pushing a cart with ranks of fish tanks stacked five tanks high. There was water in them, and fish, all different types and colors, and they sloshed back and forth as he pushed the cart over the bumpy bridge.

“I’ve seen a few things on wheels, but wow.” A moment of surprise, and deep appreciation. I managed to get the camera out and take a few fuzzy pictures in the fading light. Eventually, one of us said, “What were we talking about?”

 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For the party, the villagers slaughtered a young cow. Afterwards, somehow, our family acquired some of the leftover meat. They cooked it up for dinner that night. I didn’t eat it, but I know from the photographs. I was upstairs under the mosquito net, asleep, in a rice-whisky-induced oblivion.

The next day, there were bones above the hearth—a cow jaw, cow leg bones. They were there the following day as well, and for several days after that. They became dark from the smoke, and the bits of flesh clinging to the cow’s jaw dried into a deep red-brown. One day they were gone.

 

 

An Apology and a Preface

Wynne Hedlesky
1214 local time
Düsseldorf, Germany

Beloved readers, I am deeply sorry for my extended absence from the “blogosphere”. I will apologize for Kristian as well. Sadly, he is currently working on a novel and may not post here again for a while. One might think that hitchboating around the world is basically an extended vacation, but you would be surprised at how busy a person can get. We have also been in some fairly remote places, where even electricity is a luxury. Hard to blog if your computer is dead. As for the internet—well. When we had it, I was frantically trying to complete graduate school applications so that I could submit them before I got on a sailboat to cross the Indian Ocean. Turns out there’s not internet out there, either.

Excuses, excuses. I have been burning to say something about the eight months we spent in Asia, and only now, in the comfort and leisure of a snuggly first-world Christmastime, am I finally finding an opportunity to post some words on our experiences there, the highlight of which was, by far, the time that Kristian and I spent living among the emerald mountains and kind-hearted people of northern Laos.

As a preface to the post that follows, I would like to briefly describe what we were doing there. Kristian and I spent four months volunteering for Bambusschule, a German non-profit organization that focuses on improving education and health care along the Ou River in northern Laos. We lived with a Lao family, in a Lao village, three hours away by boat from the nearest town with automobiles or the Internet. In most of the villages where we worked, we were the only English speakers. Our job, roughly, was to teach English and carry out some maintenance projects on the buildings—three schools and a boarding house—that the organization has built in the region. 

  
For the first few weeks, we had some small degree of guidance from the organization’s Field Manager. He acquainted us with the key figures in the villages where we would be working, and helped us plan the summer’s maintenance projects. He provided next to no guidance about the English teaching program, however, other than showing me a box full of paper, pencils, and other school supplies and telling me this was what I had to work with. No book, no syllabus, no notes from previous volunteers, nothing. He seemed completely unconcerned at the lack of structure or guidance—“Bo pen nyang, relax, this is Laos!” he said. He was never particularly interested in that part of the organization’s work; he focused more on plumbing projects. He had a love for building things out of little blue PVC pipes. After about a month, he went home to Australia on vacation. Shortly thereafter, he was fired.

So Kristian and I were left more or less alone for three months in rural Laos to find the best way to accomplish the organization’s goals and represent its values. For the building maintenance projects, we had to get by with our meager knowledge of the Lao language—we had no translator while purchasing and transporting supplies, or negotiating with village leaders. We were also supposed to incorporate as much English teaching into our schedule as possible, but with the added complication that school was out of session for most of our time there, and so we had no scheduled time for English class, and no classroom in which to teach. And yet it could hardly have been better.

We took advantage of our lack of direct supervision and the open-ended directives to begin designing a new English program for the organization, based on the knowledge of second language acquisition that Kristian gained during his university studies in linguistics and his participation in a research project about the subject conducted by the university of Cologne in cooperation with the Max-Planck-Institute in Nijmegen. Throughout everything we did, we worked closely with the organization’s founder in Germany (or as closely as you can when you can only communicate every two weeks or so). The core of our new program is informal interaction—that is, play. It was not difficult to convince the village kids to get involved. By the end of the summer, some of the kids we worked with had gone from robotic repetition of “How are you?” “I’m fine, thank you” to the ability to express their likes and dislikes, ask questions, explain aspects of their daily life, and open up the all-important highways of communication between people from vastly different worlds.

I hope that the opportunity to interact with us ends up playing a positive role in those children’s lives. Learning about their way of life was certainly a valuable experience for me. More than anything, I continued to be struck by how so many aspects of Lao daily life stubbornly remained unexplained, regardless of the fact that I had lived in such close contact with Lao people for several months. The richness of cultures is such that people as different as me and my Lao hosts can find vast areas of common ground, while there always remain differences that make each group unique, and incite in us curiosity about our fellow human beings. I hope that the exposure to foreign people and language both instills in the children I interacted with a desire to learn about the world outside their village, as well as an understanding of the value of their own unique way of life.

P.S. If you are interested in volunteering with Bambusschule (Bamboo School), contact Bodo Peters: info@die-bambusschule.de, or visit die-bambusschule.de

 

Same same, but different

May 21, 2012
Nong Kiau, Luangphabang, Laos
1736 local time
Wynne Hedlesky

            I have neglected to post a blog entry for several months. My reasons (otherwise known as excuses) are many. First, I was studying for the GRE. Now, as a volunteer English teacher, when I’m not trying to entertain several dozen highly energetic Lao children, I’m working on grad school applications. But, really, the reason is that I have not been able to think of how to condense four months of experience being geographically and experientially on the other side of the world into a thousand words.

            The answer is that it is not possible. So I won’t try. Instead, I’ll write a quick summary of the emotional arc of my time in Asia, alluding to experiences and interesting anecdotes which I will not share. I hope that many of them will come out in later blogs.

            It’s quite a collection, all together. Truly, I’ve gathered an embarrassment of brief tales of the odd and unusual. Not a day has gone by that didn’t present some curious sight, some enigmatic event that left me scratching my head, laughing out loud, or scraping my jaw off the ground. The people who live here would say, “welcome to life”; I tend to say, “What the hell is going on?”

            I will describe our first twenty four hours in Asia. Even after what I have seen since then, that immediate impression is still strong. Never had I experienced such a sensation of bafflement at things that presented themselves as ordinary.  Perhaps it’s a bit like falling on your head, coming to, and no longer being able to recognize your own friends and family, though they smile at you familiarly. It was surreal from the moment we stepped out of the taxi from the airport into the general neighborhood of our guesthouse. Kristian and I spent our first night futilely trying to sleep in a room right on the raucous, nocturnal booze trough that is Khao San Road, where drunk tourists come together from all over the world to suck down “buckets” of the world’s cheapest cocktails until they entirely forget they are in Bangkok. In the morning we sallied forth for our first daylight stroll in Asia.

            We soon got marvelously lost among the busy streets, shady canals, and tiny, winding alleys of Bangkok. Everywhere people went about their business. You could tell by the comfortable looks on their faces, the casual jokes shared with neighbors. But what was their business, exactly? That I could not determine, try as I did. They all bustled about, or sat and did what they do, in a world which, though it contained people and streets and motorized vehicles and buildings just like the world I came from, made very little sense to me. What’s the deal with these dollhouses on pedestals, covered with fruit and rice and flowers and opened bottles of orange soda with straws? The second floor of that house is about to fall off, and the walls are made of random bits of plywood. Do they not have building codes? Shit, I didn’t know you could fit a moped there. It’s hot, let’s sit in the shade. There’s a bench. Wait, that’s in front of a house…no, a store. What if it’s a private bench, here on the public sidewalk? Well, it’s not really a sidewalk, I guess. People are driving mopeds on it. That bench is right next to that rusted-out, abandoned car full of trash…Let’s find a park instead. Oh, there’s one. No, it’s a trash dump. I mean, someone’s back yard. No, trash dump. What’s that mass of gold and sparkly stuff over there? Ah, a temple. Let’s go in. Oh, wait, I’m wearing shorts…I can’t go in, right? Where am I not supposed to point my feet when I’m inside? Oh well. Let’s get some lunch. Wait, is this a restaurant or a house? There are people sitting inside at some tables. They don’t look interested in helping us. Maybe they’re just the residents. Maybe it is a restaurant, but it’s closed. Is it because it’s Sunday? Why would it matter if it’s Sunday, they’re Buddhists. Ok, right. Ok, let’s try the street vendor. Yeah…can’t read the menu. Let’s just say, like, “noodles,” or “rice,” and see what they make. We could point to the stuff in the case. What is it? I don’t know. Intestines?

            And on it went. Everywhere was strangeness. Every basic activity had to be relearned, in some way, at least. Drinking water, going to the bathroom, crossing the street, buying things, it is all done significantly differently in Asia. Or so it seemed to me.

            Kristian, on the other hand, frequently pointed out that, although the way things are done in Asia surprised us not on a daily but on an almost momently basis, a city like Bangkok, for example, is more similar to a city in the West than it is different. People hurry everywhere; there are streets packed with cars, buses, and other vehicles; people buy and sell their goods. They catch trains, buses, and boats. They work in shops, restaurants, in the tall buildings full of offices. They think about fashion, about money, what’s for dinner, about their friends and family. They sit and have drinks after work. The friendly ones greet strangers on the street. Beggars and bums curl up in alleys. Humanity pulses on, being human, as it does in every place on earth.

            The difference in our reaction to Asian life got me thinking about a couple of well-worn phrases in wide use across Southeast Asia. When asking for a price comparison between two food dishes, a vendor might reply, “same same.” When trying to convince a handicraft vendor that you don’t need their goods because you already have a bracelet like that, they will probably say: “But this different.” If someone struggles in their limited English to point out the subtle differences between two items, they might say, “Same same, but different.” So common are these phrases, and somehow so fundamental to the tourist experience in Asia, that they are plastered across t-shirts in every souvenir shop in every country we have visited. Even locals wear them. As much as a cliché as they are, they represent a patch of common ground, an idiosyncrasy of Asian English that exists neither in English, nor in any Asian language, but is a valuable tool for communication across cultures, as well as being humorous. It is recognized as such by people from both sides.

 I think neither “same same” nor “different” adequately describes my current impression of life in Asia as compared to my homeland. Not surprisingly, cultures resist being crammed into one or the other end of such a dichotomy. I’d describe Asia as a t-shirt with “same same” on one side, and “but different” on the other.

            Over time, though, the “but different” part stands out less and less. That original sensation of bafflement, of wide-eyed wondrous confusion has subsided. For some of the things I have seen, I have since found definitive explanations. For others, Kristian and I have inferred what we think to be a probable account, and have left it at that. For many, many other strange events and observations, I have simply not sought an explanation, or hardly even noted their occurrence, because to live in a state of constant wonder is impossible. This is not because it is exhausting, or difficult to maintain; to live every moment truly appreciating the strangeness of things you do not understand is contrary to a basic law of human existence, that we, as human beings, stretch and flex and adapt to our surroundings, without even needing to try. Now, I simply perceive what goes on around me as “normal,” even when I do not understand it. I notice an anomaly, shrug, and go about my business, because, at a certain point, what you do every day starts to feel “normal,” even if what you do every day is see things you’ve never seen before in your life. 

            What lies at the root of our ability to adapt to life in a different culture? Would I be able to adapt to life with space aliens who have tentacles and no faces, communicate telepathically, and get their energy from plutonium reactions rather than the combustion of carbon-based molecules? Probably not. What makes it possible to be less startled at the “but different” of life in another culture is that, as humans, we really share a lot. You could even say that the differences are superficial matters of etiquette or practicality. Even though we speak different languages, I can read the emotions of my Lao hosts here in Sopking by looking at their faces. Children here still like to play, love attention, and dislike being disciplined. Boys and girls flirt. People work during the day. Meals are central to the organization of time. At night, people eat, socialize, then go to sleep. Any human could get into that groove.

            But these observations, again, attempt to corner a culture into one end of the “same same but different” dichotomy by attempting to boil all perceived differences down into mere trifles, which they are not. These differences are precisely what makes traveling worthwhile and life-changing. Why travel if you don’t want to experience how things are done in other places? If you want the same food, the same beer, and the same company while you travel that you get at home, then stay home.

In addition to being inherently interesting and making a person feel like he or she is part of a vast and fascinating world, these differences provide a priceless opportunity, the opportunity to reset our eyes, to be able to view the familiar as something new, something strange. During that window where wonder is alive, before our ability to adapt turns the strange into the normal, I hope to learn from and think about my own homeland in ways I have never been able to before. I hope that in a year and a half, I’ll write a blog entry about my baffling first twenty-four hours back in the United States.

Paradise Without Toilet Seats

Taioha'e, Nuku Hiva, French Polynesia
1610 local time

            Kristian and I have been in Nuku Hiva for a month now. The first two weeks we spent traveling around the island, camping, hiking, fishing, and enjoying the company of the locals. The past two weeks we’ve been back in Taioha’e, the island’s main town. I have been here long enough to make what I hope are a few accurate observations about the people and their lifestyle.

I will begin by describing Taioha’e, a sleepy little tropical town nestled in a bowl-shaped valley, which serves as the administrative capital of not just Nuku Hiva, but the whole Marquesas island group. It boasts a population of about 1700 people. When we returned to Taioha’e from our wanderings around the island, it actually felt busy, with cars, shops, restaurants, tourists, and all those big-city things. This impression of Taioha’e is only possible to have by direct comparison to the quiet, undisturbed, undeveloped bays elsewhere on the island. “Back to the Big Apple,” we said. “More like the Big Napple,” Kristian corrected. “The City that Never Sleeps…between the hours of 7 AM to 11 AM, and 3 PM to 5 PM.” This is not an exaggeration. Business hours are flexible, and people enjoy an extended siesta mid-day. In addition, most folks on Nuku Hiva strictly follow Benjamin Franklin’s sage advice, “Early to bed, early to rise.” The only exception seems to be Friday night, when groups of young people cruise on the beach in their pick-up trucks, blasting heavily auto-tuned, foreign pop music and drinking into the wee hours of the morning. To get a better sense of the pace of life on Nuku Hiva, let me describe our first day here.

            We went ashore in Taioha’e on a Friday, and we needed to take care of our customs paperwork right away, since all the offices would be closed for the weekend. We went to the gendarmerie, the local police station, which also deals with customs and immigration issues. We found out that although the horaires, the posted hours, said that it would be open, neither of the two officers scheduled to be there were around at the moment, and we should come back at 11:30.

            In the mean time, we decided to find the tourist information office, which our guidebooks said had useful maps and a helpful staff that could answer all our questions. We had quite a few—about camping, fishing, transportation, and so on. But the tourist information center was locked up tight. A big piece of yellow poster board with a block of hand-written French text indignantly declared that the staff had gone on indefinite strike until the government in Tahiti decided to allocate the funds to properly run the tourism department on Nuku Hiva. So much for all our questions.

            In order to orchestrate our day, we needed to change our watches to the local time in Nuku Hiva. This was more difficult to accomplish than one would think. The clock on the bank’s ATM, the clock inside the bank, the German cruisers we talked to by the gendarmerie, and the random local guy I asked in the bank parking lot all said something different. Later, when we related our attempt to find out what time it was to the officer in the gendarmerie, he said with a knowing hmph, “Oui, c’est difficile ici.”

We spent most of our first day in the gendarmerie and the bank, where everyone was helpful, friendly, and laid-back about details, but not in much of a hurry to get the job done. Generally speaking, Nuku Hiva is not ruled by the watch. Day one taught us that store and business hours are flexible, that sometimes places close if opening is inconvenient or there isn’t enough demand, and when things are open, people are never in a rush.

            When we went to find a place to stay for the night, we got our first experience of a Marquesan home. We had to leave the boat and we didn’t have time to find a campsite, so, following the vague and inaccurate directions in our travel guidebooks, we finally found an inexpensive pension, or family-owned boarding house, Chez Fetu. We wandered past a large, aggressive dog tied to a tree, under mango, papaya, and palm trees, to a house near the end of a muddy dirt road. It was small, and had a porch-like living room open to the air and adorned with a television set and many images of the Virgin Mary. Just as I was about to try to ask where Chez Fetu was, the old woman sitting at a table in front of the house, no doubt recognizing us as tourists by our pale skin and the looks of utter confusion on our faces, got up and asked us if we needed help.

            After the most incoherent French conversation in the history of French conversations, we finally managed to obtain a room for the night in what was in fact Chez Fetu, right in the main house, sharing a bathroom with the family. The room doubled as a storage area, and the mattress was thin and sprinkled with a few dead bugs. Spartan, I thought, but a place to sleep. Little did I realize that this was a pretty solid house, by Nuku Hivan standards. The walls were not made of plywood, and there was glass in the windows, unlike many homes here. But when the temperature is never below 70 degrees, why bother with walls and windowpanes? As long as your house is tolerably waterproof, that’s enough. Just sit back and enjoy the comforts nature provides.

            We didn’t (and still don’t) have enough money to stay in pensions every night, so the next morning we set out to find somewhere to camp. Cleared by customs and ready to rumble, we packed our affaires (a word I learned in that most confusing of conversations with the proprietress of Chez Fetu, and which I will never forget), all eighty kilos of them, huffed and puffed them onto our backs, and set off toward Baie Colette, one valley over from Taioha’e. We’d asked around, and everyone said it was a good place to camp. We heard nothing about any rules or regulations regarding camping, and decided that we’d just give it a shot, and hope we wouldn’t upset anyone.

Before we got out of town, we decided to buy a bottle of water at one of the town’s four little grocery stores. When we walked in with our mountainous backpacks, we drew stares from the clerk, and the one customer in the store. They asked us where we were from, and where we were going, and I nervously tried to respond in French. Turns out Nuku Hiva doesn’t get a lot of backpackers. Most tourists arrive on sailboats, and therefore have a place to stay. Anyone who has the money to get here by plane probably doesn’t have to camp, hike, and hitchhike around the island. As we would learn in our travels, American tourists, and especially American tourists carrying everything they owned on their backs, were a rarity.

While I tried to carry on a conversation with the two men in the store, Kristian realized that he didn’t have any coins in his pocket to buy the water, and had decided to take off his backpack to get some out. I think that the other customer anticipated the logistical nightmare this would become, and he offered to buy the water for us, but, unaccustomed to such generosity toward strangers, I turned him down. I now regret this decision. Knowing, as I now do, that people here are extremely generous, the customer probably thought we had left our marbles in the United States or wherever we came from when he saw us purchase the water and then wrestle to get Kristian back under his backpack and up on his two feet, when it would have been no big deal to just buy the water for us and avoid the whole situation.

            When it became obvious that I couldn’t speak enough French to chat with them, the two men silently watched our struggle, and eventually we said “au revoir” and left the store. Unused to the weight of our impossibly heavy backpacks, we dragged ourselves up a winding dirt track full of switchbacks, gulleys, and rocks over the ridge and down into the next valley. When we reached the valley floor, there were a couple plywood shacks back in the brush off the road, and a sort of disorderly little ranch/orchard area with a haphazard collection of lime trees, noni trees, and some bananas and a few coconut palms way off the road, almost hiding another plywood shack. On the thin strip of land between the ranch’s fence and the pebbly beach, a horse was wandering around, dragging a piece of rope that was supposedly once used to tether it to a stationary object. A half-feral dog with a litter of puppies also called the waterfront her home.

            We set up camp in a tree-shaded spot on that same strip of land by the beach, and ended up staying three nights. In Baie Colette, we gained a better understanding of the lifestyle and character of people on Nuku Hiva, which further affirmed that most people’s lifestyle is relatively simple, but their character is very generous. Those plywood buildings we saw on the hike down were in fact inhabited, and before long we got to meet the people who lived there. On our second day a pick-up truck showed up at our camp, and a woman got out and greeted us warmly, as if we were old friends, with a kiss on each cheek in the usual Marquesan fashion. Confused by her friendliness, and hindered by the fact that like many people here, she had two names, her Marquesan name, and her Christian name, it took a while to understand that her name was Tahia, aka Gabrielle. She lived in the valley, she explained, and it was her grandmother who owned the orchard/ranch we were camped next to. Her family owned most of the land in the valley, and a few of them still lived there.

We were afraid we were in trouble for camping on someone’s land, but apparently that wasn’t the case. She and her husband, Gabriel, came and hung out at the camp like they knew us, and taught us to fish out of kayaks, eat raw crabs and snails they caught on the rocks, and roast breadfruit. They encouraged us to catch the big crabs we found living in holes in the sand by the creek. They were good eating if you boiled them for a few minutes. Tahia gave me shells, and insisted I wear her sweet-smelling flowers in my hair—“Marquesan perfume” that would make my honey fall in love with me all over.

Hanging out by the ocean, eating raw crabs and looking at the impossibly bright southern constellations, trying desperately to respond appropriately to Tahia’s warmth and friendliness in French, I had my first full-length conversation in another language. I actually felt like I was sharing meaningful information, relating my history, learning about their lives here on the island. Afterwards, I felt giddy. Suddenly it was possible to have significant relationships with millions more of the human population—the entire French-speaking portion. Since then, my French has gotten better. I’ve gone from being terrified to ask for a cup of coffee, to being able to more or less carry on a conversation with anyone I meet, and even impress the French cruisers with my ability to speak their language. My biggest limitation wasn’t my lack of knowledge, but my timidity. But here in Nuku Hiva, very few people speak English, and, as they say, necessity is the mother of language acquisition. Or something like that. Random business hours, horses wandering around the streets, strange new foods everywhere, the almost confusing generosity of the inhabitants, and myriad other foreign sights and sounds make the ability to ask questions quite important. I advise future travelers to Nuku Hiva to at least carry a French phrase book and dictionary. That, and friendliness, will get you pretty far.

On our last day in Baie Colette, we had an epic Polynesian feast. I had the privilege of seeing Tahia’s home up close, when I went with her to make rice on her gas burner. The house was one room with a couple windows (no glass), and a bed. Out in the yard there was a sink attached to a hose that pumped water up from somewhere or other, and two roofless structures made of scrap plywood, one of which housed a toilet, and the other a cold-water shower. While we made rice and hung out, Kristian and Gabriel, Tahia’s husband, were off fishing in kayaks, and when we returned to our campsite, they’d caught eleven small fish. Since then, Kristian and I have tried many times to imitate various aspects of Gabriel’s technique, with modest success. Let’s just say I’m glad I didn’t spend too much time researching a cardboard-box smoker construction.

After we cooked the rice and caught the fish, a breadfruit magically appeared, presumably from one of Granny’s trees, and we roasted it over an open fire. Some of the fish that the boys caught Tahia and Gabriel grilled, and a few they cut into small pieces and soaked in the juice of some limes also gathered from Granny’s trees, to be eaten raw. Tahia spread some coconut fronds over the rough table, and, surprisingly quickly, a feast materialized—rice, soy sauce, grilled and raw fish, home-made BBQ sauce, fresh basil, and roasted breadfruit dipped in rich, delicious pork lard. We sat around the fire and ate with our hands off of big leaves.

Tahia and Gabriel said they wanted to go have a little siesta (a common afternoon practice here). Before they left, they offered to give us a ride back into town the next day. I didn’t understand this at first, since I was confused not just by French, but by how generously they were willing to carry us and all our “affaires” into town. We set a time, and the next day we got up early and broke camp. At about 8 AM we chucked our backpacks into the back of their banged-up truck, and ourselves into the cab, and bumped up the rocky road to Taioha’e, listening to American music on Tahia’s cell phone. Here on Nuku Hiva, we’ve encountered generosity like this many times. People here have offered us food, given us rides, invited us into their homes, showed us their towns, and taught us to fish, open coconuts, and find fruit. Hospitality is not a rare or occasional thing here. People here are curious about travelers, want to get to know them, and easily give whatever they can to friendly strangers.

In addition to the flexibility of time here and the generosity of the inhabitants, I have noticed some interesting preferences for certain technologies, and priorities of spending, here on the island. For example, like Tahia, many people here choose not to put glass in their windows, or they construct their houses with thin plywood walls. Many homes don’t have hot water heaters. Most toilets do not have toilet seats. I haven’t seen any microwaves. Yet most people still have cell phones, and most homes have a television. You see kids hanging out in pick-up trucks on the beach or in parking lots, drinking (notable because alcohol is quite expensive here) and blasting the latest hits in French and English through their portable sound systems. Many people have vehicles, often new and shiny ones, though there’s a pretty high ratio of banged-up pick-up trucks as well. Having a four-wheel-drive vehicle is more of a necessity if you want to get anywhere on the island. Cars, phones, televisions, and music are some luxuries that Nuku Hivans seem to prioritize.

In the United States, these items tend to come as part of a package. If you have enough money to have a cell phone, a television, a nice stereo system, and a car, you probably also have a microwave, toilet seats, glass windows, and a house made out of something besides plywood. I couldn’t get over how strange it was to be rocking out to American pop music that was piped through the cell phone of someone who lives in a one-room plywood shack on a muddy dirt road, in a valley with no public services, on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. Yet I kept seeing items like this in the most surprising places. I watched part of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie with a kid on his family’s laptop. He lived in a little village of about six homes on a remote bay accessible only by boat, horse, or on foot. I’ve hung out with a family in their plywood, windowless kitchen/dining room/bedroom, looking at photos on their daughters’ cell phones, while the parents half-watched television. The oldest son had recently acquired a brand-new, sparkling 4x4, which we saw him lovingly bathing in the front yard the next day.

You see these apparent contrasts everywhere on the island. Not surprisingly, the longer I’m here, the less weird this seems. People simply have different priorities here. Why bother ridding the streets of the fornicating packs of feral dogs, or the scavenging wild chickens? They’re not causing any harm. What we would consider the essential comforts of a bug-free, sterilized, hermetically-sealed home are not important here. People here are more comfortable with nature. Although some people do prioritize cookies, cheese, and Nutella as luxury items in the same way they choose to buy cell phones and new vehicles, most of what is required for basic nourishment can be grown in their backyards. There’s no shortage of fruit, seafood, and even wild chickens, pigs, goats, and cows, as Kristian and I know from experience. On Nuku Hiva, nature is your best friend. While it produces your food and a generally comfortable climate, it also occasionally lets loose a little wind or rain. But that never hurt anyone, and there’s not much on the island that is poisonous or bites, except mosquitoes, nonos, and centipedes. So why bother with window panes?

Kristian and I don’t even bother with the walls. Our tent is waterproof, and that’s all we need. After our first days in Taioha’e and Baie Colette, we spent another ten days exploring the island, with the blue sky as our ceiling and the lush mountains as our walls. We camp, with the ocean always a few meters away, and the sound of the surf in our ears at night. It’s pretty easy to lose track of time, especially in beautiful nooks like Anaho, the village only accessible by boat, horse, or on foot. Entering that valley was like falling off the end of the world into the domain of eternal chillaxitude, where the gentle swaying of the coconut palms, the break of the surf, and the rising and lowering tides are the only things around to beat out the rhythm of passing of time. We have enjoyed making friends with the people here, and give what we can in return for their generosity. Although no place is free of problems, I don’t think it would be inaccurate to say that despite the lack of many luxuries, the closeness of nature and the relative simplicity of life here contribute not a little to people’s happiness. I don’t blame the inhabitants one bit for not letting themselves live by the clock.

Crossing the Line: Wynne's first post

1519 EST
Brooklyn, NY

For the last month, Kristian and I have been busy. I’ve dragged him up and down the east coast, visiting friends and family. In between the landscaping projects at the farm, long drives to and around the Northeast, siblings’ graduation ceremonies, and visiting with friends we won’t see again until we’ve passed through more than a few time zones, Kristian and I have been trying to prepare for our circumnavigation. One strange law of traveling is that when preparing for a trip, you always come up with something else you need. The list seems to grow tauntingly ahead of us as we near the end. Perhaps this has something to do with a constant redefinition of the word “need.” We should be happy we didn’t have more time to prepare, or our careful over-thinking of this word would have had us packing way more than will fit into our combined 150 L of backpack space. The truth about what is necessary and what isn’t will only be clear in Nuku Hiva, I suppose.

It’s difficult to prepare to travel to somewhere like Nuku Hiva. There is little information about it on the Internet, at least in English. When we describe our plans to family, friends, acquaintances, and people we awkwardly meet at siblings' graduations, almost no one knows where Nuku Hiva is. You can tell by the look on their face and their shifting eyes that many people are just pretending to know where French Polynesia is, or the Marquesas. This is nothing to be ashamed of; I didn’t know where it was either until I decided to go there. I am convinced that about all that comes to mind for most people when they hear place names like Tahiti, Tonga, Antigua, Barbados, Canaries, Azores, Sechelles, or Maldives, is warmth, palm trees, coconuts, white beaches, cerulean bays. Like I was, they may not even be sure which waters these islands are in—Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean, Indian. All that exists in the mind’s eye is the mythical Tropical Island, more a fiction than a place.

To get to the particular island of Nuku Hiva, we must cross the Equator, which also possesses a mythical aura. For hundreds of years, mariners from many countries, on everything from naval submarines to cruise ships, have commemorated individuals’ first equatorial crossing with elaborate “line crossing” ceremonies. As Wikipedia, mother of all wisdom, tells us, these ceremonies were often quite brutal, even resulting in occasional deaths. Today, mellower versions are popular among various mariners. I myself have enviously heard stories of my friends on tall ships undergoing mild hazing at the hands of a crew member wearing old oakum on his head and pretending to be the god Neptune, in order to earn a certificate which officially declares their induction into the order of Shellbacks.

I doubt there will be any fraternity-style hazing involved in our line crossing on Le Pelican with the Gillot family, but I’m still giddy, as if it were my first day in college, or the first time I had a beer, or my first night sleeping on a sailboat. The Equator is a line beyond which our Tropical Island lies. Beyond the Equator, things like the seasons are upside-down, and even the sky is unfamiliar.

I won’t pretend that the world isn’t so small these days that what we’re doing is unheard of, that no one travels to the emeralds scattered through the warm southern Pacific. It’s safe to say that almost everyone has heard of Tahiti, and many go there regularly. However, most of them probably travel by airplane, and are therefore not entitled to Shellback certificates. Even among those cruisers who sail there, few have the pleasure of being as delightfully unprepared as Kristian and I. We have no boat, and not much money. We won’t be able to afford a flight out of Nuku Hiva, so we’d better use our charisma to hitch another ride, or become exceptional swimmers. Kristian insists that purchasing food at a grocery store is out of the question, and that we’ve got to perfect surf fishing and the slaughter of wild goats, or sleep with growling bellies. It’s hard to picture my immediate future consisting of a month surrounded by blue sea and blue sky, followed by days spent fishing with a stick I found on the beach, trying to speak pidgin French, and sleeping under a foreign sky—yet this is the only image I have to help me prepare myself.

Now that we’ve started a blog, and even got a sponsor (thank you, Back Country Ski and Sports), I feel like I need to be able to verbalize why I’m doing this, what I hope to gain from it, and the attitude in which I approach it. First of all, I would like to say that I’m somewhat of a coward and a worrier, and that it is not easy or comfortable for me to undertake something like this. It’s not as if I’m going grocery shopping, or brushing my teeth. There is something terrifying about stepping toward a place that is a myth, a fiction, crossing the line into an unfamiliar and hence unimaginable way of life, and hoping that there will be something under your foot when it lands. Preparing for it makes me anxious and cranky sometimes. I worry about student loans, vaccines, visas, and language barriers; what books, electronics, musical instruments, fishhooks, and sunblock we ought to bring for our indefinite vacation to anywhere. I stress over how to efficiently box up and store my whole life, cars, clothes, friends, family, everything that doesn’t fit into 50 L of backpack space. I hope that practice will help me overcome my fear of traveling in the same way that exposure helps people overcome their fear of spiders or heights. May it be so simple.

I mean this to be encouraging. When people say, “Oh, what you’re doing sounds so amazing, I wish I could do something like that,” I would like to remind them that no law of physics is preventing them from doing whatever they want. It’s not as if Kristian and I somehow learned how to fall up, and everyone else is still constrained by the law of gravity. Preparation, sacrifice, and perhaps a bit of self-overcoming are required, but even travel-shy people like me can make these things happen. We hope that this blog will provide an informative resource to help other people transform their vague, half-baked travel dreams into realities.

Posted by Wynne