Common Sense and Whiskey

Where to Go, Why, and What to Read.

Travel ferociously. Get out there. Engage people. Witness events. Explore the world. Bust a move. See all you can see. But when you’re at home and calm, sanguine and reflective, back in the part of the house where people don’t come unless you invite them, in that one little spot where only you rule, that’s where you can see most clearly.

Back there in that room, I saw our trip to Sarajevo as a conceit. We decided we’d go and see the aftermath of war and then we would think about it. And we saw the burned out houses on the airport road. We saw children at play beneath a hand-painted sign warning of “snijper” fire over there, in that direction.

We stood on a hill above town with an old woman and her little granddaughter and a vast field of Muslim graves behind them. We took pictures of SFOR soldiers (NATO’s ‘Stabilization Force’) taking pictures. And in the end, we didn’t really understand it any better. Or at least, we didn’t Glean Wisdom.

I read and read, before and after Sarajevo, and we went to see it, and we had a view of the bombed out parliament building from the Holiday Inn hotel, where we paid in advance, in cash, in Deutschmarks, right up front, for our entire stay.

The parliament building from the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo.

The elevator opened to carpet ripped by gunfire.

The main reconstruction work in Sarajevo was in busting down curbs and rebuilding them with wheelchair ramps.

We walked up and down the open air Markale market where a random, direct shelling killed 68, wounded two hundred on a rainy Saturday in February, 1994 – the bloodiest attack in the then twenty-two month long conflict. We saw bricks and mortar blasted from the side of the hotel next door. People bustled about the market that day, selling flowers, buying fruit, and we took it all in, but still we didn’t Glean Wisdom.

Common Sense and Whiskey: The Book

Common Sense and Whiskey, the blog, was born less than two years ago to compliment the photo site EarthPhotos.com. From time to time since, we've published stories from the eventual book, also to be titled Common Sense and Whiskey. It's a compilation of short stories about the photos that found their way to EarthPhotos.com.

We're happy to say that finally, we think, Common Sense and Whiskey is only a couple of months away. Here's a mock-up of the cover, which will immortalize a gaucho and his sheep on the very desolate road to the Torres del Paine in Chilean Patagonia. Below is a short bit of the Patagonia story from the book. Watch this blog for the publication date.

 

 

The Alps are massive and majestic. The Torres del Paine only reach three thousand something meters versus Mont Blanc’s 4260. But the Alps have been domesticated, everywhere you go, all the way up onto the slopes. Cowbells tinkle so farmers can keep track of their livestock in every prim village.

It’s the vastness around the Torres, the silence. There are no houses, no farms. Land isn’t delineated by perpendiculars. No fences to keep anything in or out. Nothing, except for the snow and the big rocks, and the water and the animals and the silence.  That’s just what you’re after when you come to a place like this, but too often you find yourself in the common room with strangers, hearing about Kurt’s blister.

“It’s out to here,” Kurt said several times, showing a distance between his finger and thumb. Each time the wife of Kurt would chirp something like “He’s not very athletic,” the more galling because she clearly never auditioned for Buns of Steel.

There’s always people like that, though, and Kurt was a good enough old guy, running a party of five, some of them sullen kids.

Maps was what Kurt liked and he’d sink his head farther into his maps to ignore his wife. The wife of Kurt liked showing people things. She’d go back to the room (“Wait right here,” she’d command) to get some page that she’d printed off the internet. Or she’d inflict her sack of trail mix on a very dubious little boy.

Each time Kurt would move his face closer to his map and trace lines on it with his finger.

The wife of Kurt had a running disagreement with Kurt over the price of gas, or benzine as they called it here. Kurt had heard they were getting six dollars a litre out of jerrycans back at Posada Serrano and the wife of Kurt wouldn’t hear of it.

She worked herself up to high dudgeon (although high is pretty much the only way dudgeon comes) as she asked the dubious little boy’s father if he knew the price of benzine, and he allowed that he’d got some and it was close to the normal price.

“See Kurt! Six dollars a litre is impossible! I thought six dollars a litre was impossible. Did you hear that Kurt? I told you six dollars a litre was impossible. Kurt, this man says it’s not any six dollars a litre. Kurt thought gas cost six dollars a litre!”

And Kurt pulled the edge of the map nearest his wife nearly to his ear and the little boy’s father, who had a naturally puzzled, disheveled look, tried to find somebody else to talk to.

•••••

From Common Sense and Whiskey: Modest Adventures Far from Home, available soon.

Fiji: A Story

Last month I posted a story about our visit to the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. We visited Fiji on the same trip, a few years back. Here's a little taste of that trip from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey:

The only sounds at Koro Sun, Vanua Levu island, Fiji are four: The palm fronds, the birds, the overhead fan, and if a truck rumbles by. Sixteen bures sit in a ring around a garden and the sea is across the road.

Tony and Paula, our proprietors, greeted us, Tony with that just slightly perplexed look I swear is endemic to Kiwis, and Paula, a Dutch woman with a slow, rigid manner and huge round eyes, unblinking.

Paula fixed us a vodka welcome drink, “Strong - I thought you might need it,” and we settled in to introduce ourselves. They knew we’d been traveling some 27 hours. They knew we’d be frazzled, and sunburned Tony offered again and again to arrange anything we’d like - or nothing if we’d like.

Nice folks, they set us up with bure #1 and sent a six pack of Fiji Bitter beer to the fridge, then followed that with fruit and cheese platters. We alternately sat on our porch, gazed at the sea and poured sweat, doused ourselves in the freezing shower, and napped, and that was all we did on the first day.

*****

Dew dropped from the roof, the sea lay gray and smooth as ice, and birds called from the tops of the coconut palms. The first pickup truck of the day lumbered by and color began to return to the earth as the sky lightened on the morning of the second day. The yard boys collected last night’s fallen palm fronds.

I sat with coffee (poured under the watchful eye of a gecko perched on the wall) on the front porch after I could sleep no more, and Mirja caught just the last few minutes of sleep. I had lain in bed trying to store the feeling of the pre-dawn cool, under the ceiling fan, to summon back later in the day.

A British couple who stopped to commiserate about our long flight (everybody knows everybody’s business here, apparently) said yesterday had been the hottest of their six weeks here, and indeed I took a reading of 90 degrees in the cool of our bure, in air hanging with humidity. The fan had a mighty five speeds: 1, 2, 3, 4 and on, and “on” would whip the air furiously but to little cooling effect.

*****

Vanua Levuans have the time and disposition to be open, affable and curious. And honest. We asked a waitress what she knew about Vanuatu.

“Oh, they are MUCH blacker than we are,” she told us, and laughed uproariously.

The Southern Caucasus Part Five: Baku

 

Today, the final installment in our series about travel through the southern Caucasus states. Next week, a trip to Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. Earlier in the Caucasus series: Part One: From the Eventual Book, Part Two: Yerevan to Tbilisi, Part Three: Tbilisi and the Georgia Military Highway & Part Four: The High Caucasus & the Russian Border

*****

They would have you understand that Baku is crawling with western oilmen. Besides the Hyatt, where harried, unhappy or uneasy young guys in ill-fitting suits rode elevators to meeting rooms, we found neither Texans nor cowboy hats.

In fact, Baku, of the three South Caucasus capitals, easily filled the bill as the most Soviet city. With a bonus – head scarves.

Down at the waterfront, atop the Maiden’s Tower (originally dating from the 11th century, complete with an inside-the-fortress well), there’s a fine view of the old town and the harbor, and a ferris wheel enclosed in a strip of trees.

A concrete bund stretches down the Caspian waterfront, the waves in full chop, and families promenade. Beside an amusement park full of kids and moms, you could enjoy Efes beers from Turkey under shade trees in the fine sea breeze.

Maybe not explicitly, outwardly, but Baku’s still a company town. Oil wealth provides a fine mix of consumer "stuff" and ethnic restaurants. Baku has built an urbane and modern pedestrian plaza called “Traders Street,” reminiscent of its glory days. In the 1890’s, Baku pumped half the world’s supply and Europe’s finest architects clambered for commissions to build signature buildings.

Stay close to Trader’s Street and you’re in Europe. Head out of town, though, and it’s a little different.

The Southern Caucusus Part Four: The High Caucasus & the Russian Border

Earlier in this series: The Southern Caucasus, Part One: From the Eventual Book & The Southern Caucasus Part Two: Yerevan to Tbilisi & The Southern Caucasus Part Three: Tbilisi and the Georgia Military Highway

The sides at either end of Kazbegi square comprised nothing much, with a road wandering off in each direction, one the direction from which we’d come, from Tbilisi, the other to Vladikavkaz in Russian Ingushetia. On the fourth side of the square, opposite the hotel, a half dozen desultory kiosks all sold the same things, the petty little consumer goods necessary for life. All had tissues and matches and drinks, but not cold – there wasn’t refrigeration anywhere in the whole lot.

The wares on offer jammed all the window space, inside and out, so that the salespeople sat back invisible behind a little open window in the middle. You wouldn’t call the collective attitude among these six tiny kiosk capitalists sullen. Crestfallen might be the better word.

Kazbegi itself rose on a low hill behind the kiosks. A morning walk among the houses revealed bright flowers on windowsills and suspicious, smoking men in caps seated on low benches with a wary eye and a nod of the head to a stranger. No vehicle traffic. Massive amounts of trash just cast onto the ground in the street, and pigs snuffling through it.

A dump truck sized Kamaz truck lumbered by, an unlikely family vehicle which disgorged a scarf-clad old woman and a basket down at the bottom of the hill.

At any particular time, six or eight or ten old Russian-made cars congregated at the center of the makeshift square, their drivers in little knots smoking and waiting for the odd passenger to here or there. Zaza hired a red Lada Niva, strong with a high undercarriage. Just the right vehicle to haul us up to the Holy Trinity church, way up at 2200 meters. We’d drive up and walk down.

The Southern Caucusus Part Three: Tbilisi and the Georgian Military Highway

 
Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia

Earlier in this series: The Southern Caucasus, Part One: From the Eventual Book & The Southern Caucasus Part Two: Yerevan to Tbilisi

The Marriott Tbilisi offered an island of luxury, and we took them up on it for a while before a stroll along main street, Rustaveli Boulevard, down toward the massive old Soviet telephone and telegraph building on the far end of the street. From there  a warren of cobbled streets led down to the river Mtkvari.

On the way pensioners sold their family artifacts and whatever else they’d got their hands on, old swords and telephone parts, cutlery and cigarettes, all spread out on mats on the sidewalks, below the leafy canopy.

Never was the sun more brilliant. The air was crisp, the sun hot and the light, somehow, had a northern-latitude clarity.

Impossible to read the Georgian script. The sign outside the first building across the river was doubtless once in Cyrillic, but now it wasn’t in Russian, or in English, but only, proudly, Georgian. Couldn't read the sign, but looking inside, it was a restaurant, and we went inside.

Sometime in Greek antiquity, Jason, in his quest for the Golden Fleece, sailed safely with his Argonauts through the Symplegades, rocks that crushed anything that tried to pass between them, to land in Colchis, the Black Sea coast of present day Georgia. After a series of heroic feats, Jason seized the Golden Fleece.

In the Argonauts' honor we enjoyed Argo beers as groups of men sat at wooden tables, drinking and enjoying khinkali, sort of the Georgian equivalent of pelmini, Russian meat pastries. Three men in costume wandered out of the back, sat on low chairs and played the traditional Georgian reed instrument called the duduki.

An old man in a bright orange jumpsuit with BP on its breast took our picture from a table across the room, so we took his too. He grinned, got up and left, and came back in a minute with ice cream bars for Mirja and me. He showed us the pictures and said something like, “Souvenir for me, gift for you.”

The Southern Caucasus Part Two: Yerevan to Tbilisi

 

Yerevan streets were rife with remnants. Leftover communism wasn't Armenians' fault, but it was their reality: remnant autos, housing, and remnant attitudes.

Traffic and shops and change booths filled Mashtots Avenue, and young people stood everywhere talking on their phones as we drove around town. Men without shirts mowed the parks, forlorn. Couples, aging and young alike, sat under trees and flirted.

A month before, a new Armavia A 320 Airbus crashed on approach to the other side of the Black Sea, to the Russian resort of Sochi, killing all 113 aboard. Today, teens on cell phones congregated around the glassy Armavia building not seeming to remember.

We bought a little something from the artists market across from the philharmonic and enjoyed fine Kotayk (“Co-Tike”) beers at terrace cafes. At one, a café associated with the adjacent Palace of Culture, a former Peace Corps volunteer remarked how Armenia had grown sharply more European in his five year absence.

We took a spin around Republic Square, and watched the wedding processions. Newlyweds, preceded by a car video-taping their antics, stood through the sunroof in their limousine, as they took turns around the center of the capital. 

*****

We went to pay our bill at the travel agency and Noune, travel agent, sat us down for remarks. She kept pulling a shock of gray back into her black hair. She told us about her sons, in photos behind her. This one was in Boston! A medical student! The other? Oh, he lived in Moscow. She was dismissive. He was in television.

The Southern Caucasus, Part One: From the Eventual Book

Over a few installments, here comes the tale of our trip across the southern Caucasus. Here's part one:

The Wein Flughafen stood disturbingly deserted at night, all the shops stocked like Christmas but you couldn’t play with the toys. They glittered and blinked coquettishly behind glass doors pulled shut.

Our old buddy Austrian Airlines, the official airline of strange destinations east of Europe, left Wein on a beeline toward Budapest, Timosoara, Bucharest, Costanta, over the Black Sea to Trabazon and on into Yerevan, all of it in blackness below, the flight tracking screen cheerfully showing our destination tucked right in between Grozny and Baghdad, once showing the stark, lonely, “Local time in Jerewan 4:31 a.m.”

It was the tiniest Airbus, a little 319, five rows of business class without a soul in ‘em except us. We called it Murray class. The corporate color scheme was brilliant red, the national color, and the cabin crew was dressed red hat to sensible (but red) shoes. Fetching, I thought.

We taxied out (“We are number one for takeoff”) and a wail arose behind us. A woman was screaming “Go back, go back and check!” Crimson crew rushed to her and the cockpit continued on “Blab la bla, we’ll be airborne in one minute….” While the cabin crew kneeled and huddled round our distraught Armenian.

From the Eventual Book: Lake Malawi by Steamer

It's the next chapter in a series from the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey. Previous entries: Madagascar, Greenland, Patagonia, Sri Lanka, Tasmania, Paraguay, Climbing Mt. Kinabalu, Tibet and Cambodia. Today we sail Lake Malawi along the coasts of Malawi and Mozambique. Click the photos for larger versions.

“On your right is area 50. This here is area 28, a light industrial area. Across the road there is fertilizer factory and tobacco factory. That is heavy industrial area.”

The national police headquarters came into view on the right.

“That is area 40.”

Just across the street, “Area 43,” Everlasting explained, “Is low industrial. It used to be only area ten, and area ten is still there, but it is full, so they have made area 43.”

“We also have names but our names are too long, so we just say, say, area 12.”

Malawi’s Ministries stood on the left.

“So, is that area 1?”

Logical, I thought.

“No, that is area 20.”

This went on all through Lilongwe.

“Ah, that is area 47. Up there, that’s area 49. National Bank. Bank of the Nation.” The tallest building in Malawi is the central bank.

“This is the Jehovah’s Witness headquarters in Malawi.”

When we met, our guide told us, “I am Everlasting.” We looked away. Then we realized that was his name.

From the Eventual Book: Blazing Across Tibet with Noodle Boy

Got a long story for you today. As we continue proofreading and polishing up the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey, we're posting the chapters here. Previous entries: Greenland, Patagonia, Sri Lanka, Tasmania, Paraguay, Climbing Mt. Kinabalu and Cambodia. Today we're Blazing Across Tibet with Noodle Boy. Click the photos for larger versions.

Ashray Raj Gautam waited in the dark before dawn. Men worked under the hood of his Toyota Corolla while we stuffed our things in its trunk. We pushed the car down the hill to get it started, and little Gautam took us to a town called Banepa, north of Kathmandu. Mirja bought junk food, I bought cheap Indian whiskey, and Gautam disappeared.

We waited for a long time, and when Gautam came back he had a confession. He did a sheepish, dusty little shuffle.

“We came here with no fan belt.”

He was sure we could get one in Banepa but he couldn’t find one.

“Excuse me sir, we have to wait for new car from Kathmandu one hour.” He went to find a phone.

So we were off, sort of, driving from Kathmandu to Lhasa. Our Tibet travel permits would be waiting at the border. The fellow who booked us said don’t bring pictures of the Dalai Lama (I had five), and don’t be surprised if the police follow you - they’re not too used to private visitors. 

From the Eventual Book: Cambodia

As we continue proofreading and polishing up the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey, we're posting the chapters here. Previous entries: Greenland, Sri Lanka, Tasmania, Paraguay and Climbing Mt. Kinabalu. Today we're in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

There’s not much to say about Phnom Penh, really. You’ve seen one hardscrabble, impoverished, backward,big, poor, provincial city in Southeast Asia, you’ve seen Phnom Penh. Except this one is a national capital.

Phnom Penh is the place on the globe most exactly opposite in every way to Vienna. It’s haphazard as Vientiane, the capital of Laos, but it’s ten times the size. It has a sort of genial, low-rise sprawl that wanders on into the outskirts until you find yourself in uninterested rabble and uninspired local markets with livestock in between.

We hired a Corolla and pointed our way down Preah Monivong onto Mao Tse Tung Street. The official street signs look official, but behind them on the sides of buildings you get an occasional peek at the French colonial “Rue Mao Tse Tung” versions, in peeling paint.

Mao Street itself, as we swung right onto it, greeted us as a warehouse district stocking steel bars, tubes, channels and shapes, and then PVC pipe and tubing. It stretched several kilometers this way, away from the river, and while most businesses were open air, there were occasional enclosed A/C restaurants, the odd “hand phone” shop, and a bright new sleek Intercontinental Hotel. We pondered the Suki Soup Wedding Hall.

The drive was more of an amble even when the road was flat, never more than about thirty-five kilometers an hour because of the crush of scooters and the vague driving rules. The Cambodian left turn across traffic is really a gentle, gradual veer into oncoming traffic. It can take up hundreds of feet, forcing oncoming traffic directly into the lane of the vehicle behind you.

The third road off Mao Street didn’t really qualify as tarmac, exactly, and with rainwater filling the pot holes, it’s a marvel how the scooter riders’ clothes stayed spotless.

I’m a little disturbed how under-disturbed I was by the Cheong Ek Genocidal Center. Cheong Ek is the site where some 17,000 civilians were massacred and buried by the Khmers. The monument is a simple place with a glass stupa filled with 8,000 exhumed skulls in sections labeled “elderly woman” and “young man” and so on, and clothing in the bottom.

We took pictures of monks taking pictures of themselves. There was a souvenir shop. How garish. It just had all the usual stuff, and “Beware Land Mines” t-shirts and “Pol Pot Money.”

It took almost an hour to get out the fifteen kilometers to the Cheong Ek Genocidal Center, and the same to get back.

*****

(Photos from the Cambodia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

From the Eventual Book: Greenland

As we continue proofreading and polishing up the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey, we're posting the chapters here. Previous entries: Sri Lanka, Tasmania, Paraguay and Climbing Mt. Kinabalu. Today we're in Disko Bay, Greenland.

    You know those gauzy coffee commercials where cozy people savor their morning brew, steam rising in circles from the cup? In the midst of one of those, we were cradling our cups in our hands in Silva’s kitchen when, with a great low rumble, an iceberg broke apart just offshore from Ataa camp, Greenland.

    Boulders of ice plunged into waves around the berg, now off balance, as it rocked side to side in slow motion. Silva stoked the commotion, cursing and scurrying for his video camera (he did this more than once). He was sure someday he’d be in National Geographic.

*****

    Silva ran the Ataa Holiday Camp. The tourist service down the coast in Ilullisat cheerfully recommended it, because Silva was a Man Of Some Repute in Ilullisat.

    He was in year eighteen in Greenland, first as an itinerant musician from Denmark, invited up here to play hotels for a month, then three, then a year and one thing led to the next. Now he ran Travel Nature Touring Company and he was having a go at redeveloping the abandoned trading post at Ataa into a tourist camp.

    In 1915 Ataa boasted 59 residents, 58 Inuit and the station chief, the only Dane. They lived in six houses and three tents, with a school, the manager’s house, a workshop and a storehouse for seal blubber.

    Seal hunting kept Ataa alive, and that year they collected 137 barrels of seal blubber, 42 barrels of shark liver, five blue and eleven white fox skins, 70 seal skins, eight and a quarter kilos of tusks and four and a half kilos of eider down.

    Nobody lives here full time now. The nearest settlement today is at a place called Qertaq, thirty kilometers away. Ataa camp sits at the base of ancient, rounded low hills under 1000 meters, Precambrian gneisses finally exposed only 7000 or 8000 years ago, when the ice cap most recently melted away. Ataa means “its lower part” - the base of the hills.

    Mirja and I got there by speedboat. A Quicksilver 3000 Classic bounced us across choppy water, under a lowering gray, 70 kilometers from Ilullisat to Ataa. Its pilot, Jergen, with his broad, expansive head, buzz cut and ready smile, was Greenland Man.

    The wind kicked up. We spied the spray of a finback whale, spun around and saw him dive, and in the spinning spotted a seal.

    Jergen pounded the Quicksilver’s butt into the tiny harbor at Ataa, where Silva bobbed aboard a zodiac, perched uncertainly and growling. He wore the only clothes we ever saw him in, Nikes and a running suit.

From the Eventual Book: Sri Lanka

As we continue proofreading and polishing up the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey,  we're posting the chapters here. Last week's entry: Tasmania. Before that: Paraguay and Climbing Mt. Kinabalu. Today we're in Sri Lanka.

There are certain things a guidebook ought to level with you about right up front, before all the gushing about the exotic culture, pristine sandy beaches and friendly people. Number one, page one, straight flat out:

YOU ARE FLYING INTO A COUNTRY THAT CAN’T KEEP THE ROAD TO ITS ONE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT PAVED, AND LINES THE ROAD IN AND OUT WITH BOYS WITH NO FACIAL HAIR HOLDING MACHINE GUNS.

Lurching into and out of potholes on the road from the airport to the beach, dim yellow from the headlights illuminated scrawny street dogs, sneering from the road, teeth in road kill. Mirja and I took the diplomatic approach and decided, let’s see what it looks like in the morning.

*****

In the pre-dawn gray the fishing fleet already trolled off the Negombo shore. The last tardy catamaran, sail full-billowed, flew out to join the rest.

Sheldon had already been out and back. A slight fellow, just chest high, with a broad smile under his tight-clipped mustache, Sheldon showed me his catch, in a crate, a few gross of five or six inch mackerels.

He took me to meet all the other guys and see their catches, too, stepping over nets they were busy untangling and setting right for the afternoon. He led me to his house, just alongside and between a couple of beach hotels, shoreside from the road, among a sprawl of a dozen thatch huts.

He’d built it himself. It was before the 2004 tsunami and I don’t know if it, or Sheldon and his family, are there anymore. 

A Namibian Tale

Paths cross, and random people spend a day together in places like this. In the pre-dawn, everybody mustered by the coffee pot, and on the way to the safari truck I shook hands with the man next to me.

"I’m Bill, hi."

"Hello, I’m Reto."

"Sorry?"

“Reto. R – e – t – o,” he said, grimly enough to back me off.

Just freezing at first, until the sky pinked up and gave form to the landscape, and we all leaned in toward the center of the open truck and out of the wind. Reto sat with the driver, a Damara with the English name of Bernard. A mom and her two kids huddled in the seat behind them, Mirja and me next, and dad, a bluff and hale South African, claimed not to be freezing in the back, in his shorts, by himself.

We stopped at a lookout before the sun presented itself and he dismissed the cold, “Aw, in ten minutes time it will be hot.”

There was a stop at a particularly daunting sand dune, and Bernard put out a light breakfast. I slipped away to take pictures and so I was last to the picnic table, a seat made white with bird droppings. Didn’t much want the cold cuts and yogurt but I took more than my share of coffee and I perched, next to Mirja, sort of half on and half off the bench, which put my back mostly to Reto, who hadn’t said a word all day.

We prattled about the South Africans’ home city of Durban.

“Oh, you’re going there? I was actually hijacked in the center.”

“You must go shopping at Gateway, biggest mall in the southern hemisphere….”

“The Queen stayed at the Royal Hotel – it was five star then, hardly four now, I’m afraid.”

And so on.

After enough of the happy talk I felt my back to Reto, down at the end, and I turned to ask him where he was from.

Zurich, living in Geneva. International trade lawyer.

Naturally thin, prematurely graying but a youthful looking kid in his 30’s. He’d lectured on international trade law in Windhoek and arranged a four day extension to here and then, later in that day, to Swakopmund, and he called it once in a lifetime.

Back in the dark over, hovering over the coffee pot, when he sort of grimaced as he spelled his name, R – E – T – O, then fell silent, we couldn’t make anything of him, but as we drew him out we saw he was quite shy and alone, but with a razor-sharp wit.

In the late morning, as we walked across a dune just barely not lethally hot, Mirja asked one of her perennials, “Do you have snakes?” Before Bernard could reply the South African kids lovingly described the sidewinder and Bernard helpfully mentioned the spitting cobra.

Not something you run into in Geneva, I ventured to Reto.

Quick as a sidewinder he replied, “No, only the two-legged version.”

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com. See 100 more photos from Namibia are in the Namibia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And read more stories From the Eventual Book.)

From the Eventual Book: Tasmania

As we continue proofreading and polishing up the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey,  we're posting the chapters here. Last week's entry: Paraguay. Before that: Climbing Mt. Kinabalu. Today, it's our driving tour of Tasmania.

View from Mt. Nelson, Tasmania

There’s a wild, end of the earth feeling at the top of Mt. Nelson, looking across Hobart and Storm Bay to the Southern Ocean beyond. Next landfall: Antarctica.

As far back as 1836 they relayed semaphore signals from the penal colony down at Port Arthur on the coast - via right here on this spot on Mount Nelson - to Hobart, up Storm Bay in the harbour.

Out Sandy Bay road, and up the Mount Nelson Road, there are seven switchbacks, all with a name and a sign, "Bend 1" to “Bend 7." Names like "flat," "grating," and "steep" bends.

Cold for summertime. A high of just 14 degrees (58) due to "cold air from the southwest," and much colder at the top, where two guys from Tokyo, here on a research ship, took our picture with Hobart as a backdrop. The sun obliged just then by lighting the valley.

Japanese gentleman number one: "What you say before you take picture?"

"Cheese," we replied.

"What you say?" I asked.

Guy number two: "Cheese."

From the Eventual Book: Paraguay

We've spent some of this winter-that-won't-end proofreading and polishing up the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey. As we take the edit pen to the various chapters, we thought we'd post them here. Last week's entry: Climbing Mt. Kinabalu. Today, enjoy a longish chapter about a drive across Paraguay.

The farthest back water washes to a national capital must be Asuncion, Paraguay. It’s as if its residents didn’t ask for the honor, but the capital had to be somewhere and so they amiably accommodated.

 Maybe parts of Africa are less vital. Think Ouagadougou, maybe, or Bangui. Even somnambulent Vientiane, which is in Laos, shows more vitality than here, smack in the middle of South America.

 They’d rolled up the streets by the time we installed ourselves in the Sabe Hotel. The front desk spoke not so much as “hello,” no English. Here in the national capital.

 The TV wouldn’t work until tomorrow because it was New Years Day and they couldn’t get anybody out to fix it, but it was a nice enough place. Except a picture hung partly over the window in the hallway.

 I was out early, through the business district and down to the Paraguay River. It’s not very big, downtown Asuncion, and it wasn’t very busy.

 The main Plaza de los Heroes, down a few blocks. Asuncion has a building modeled after the Pantheon. Birds were loud and it was hot hot hot by 8:45.

 Sales ladies’ tables along Avenue Palma offered up the usual languid market fare: watches and underwear and (allegedly) Nike clothes and plastic toys.

 Down at the river, General Fransisco Solana Lopez’s white-washed mansion, started in 1860, stood shuttered. Beyond it, children pumped water at a clutter of squatter shacks. A sand spit stretched out to two rusting shipwrecks, resting just on the edge of the water. Here in the national capital.

 

But let’s start at the start:

The Arrival at Casablanca

Excerpted from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey:

7:48 a.m., Saturday Nov. 20, Casablanca: I’d have never believed we’d have left on time. At 7:40 there wasn’t a train in sight along quai deux. At 7:45 we were underway from Casablanca Gare de Voyageurs, right on time, on the express to Marrakesh.

Gare de Voyageurs was dark but not foreboding at 7 a.m., friendly and do-able, with a short queue for billets and hot café available. Pictures of the new, young King Mohammad hadn’t yet replaced his father in the magasin.

At least at first, we were alone in our premiere classe compartment for six, the sun playing cat and mouse with clouds in a tropical-style rain, big drops but cool, a torrent that looked to occur only here just onshore. The low eastern sun made the clouds in the western sky foreboding blue.

Premiere classe cost 100 dirhams, ten bucks, for the three hour ride into Marrakech, and the Sheraton Casablanca wanted seven dollars per LaBatts. We drank two and a half round trips on the Marrakech Express in an hour last night.

*****

Royal Air Maroc’s 747 had delivered us right on time, six hours forty minutes flying time from New York Kennedy to Casablanca Mohammed V International. A twenty dollar grande taxi would surely be the most expensive in Morocco but it was a long ride, more than 45 minutes, at first through the Oulad Salah Zone Industrielle and alternately, fallow brown land. Just after dawn, with the sun so low, the fair weather clouds were lit orange from below in a definite November chill.

Horse-drawn buggy drivers in distinctive Moroccan pointy-top hooded djelaba robes and pedestrians alike stamped their feet and blew into their hands. Scooters and funny French transports. Kids with backpacks surprised us on their way to school on Friday, the Muslim holy day (they go a half day).

People stood in ones or twos on the roadside, it seemed like at random, and since we saw no buses or bus stop signs, we couldn’t tell why.  Most of the women wore head cover. Given that you see people standing absently at the roadside all across the developing world we didn’t take their loitering as indolence - it just looked that way.

A Post in Which We Begin with French Toilets and End on Lake Malawi

"Sarkozy spends £250,000 of French EU budget on shower he did not use"

Well this is fun. That headline, from the Guardian, comes from a story reporting that during the French EU presidency, the French president "sanctioned an elaborate upgrade of the Grand Palace in Paris for an EU-Mediterranean summit – one of his pet initiatives to mark his turn at the EU helm.

"Nearly £300,000 was spent building a conference podium, nearly £200,000 upgrading the gardens and grounds, and a total bill for the Sarkozy shower of almost £250,000.

"The audit report said the cost soared because of the complications of installing a state-of-the-art shower to the president's specifications in a listed building.

"The president never used it – instead going back to the Élysée palace during the three-day summit to freshen up. The shower has since been dismantled."

*****

But, um, the elaborate facility in the photo is NOT the French president's. It was ours, in the owner's suite, on a trip across Lake Malawi on the MV Ilala.

Not to give the wrong impression - the Ilala cruise was a great deal of fun, sailing across placid, inland Lake Malawi from Monkey Bay, Malawi for a couple of days alongside the Mozambican shoreline to Likoma Island, which is part of Malawi.

The Ilala was an authentic, agreeable experience and the trip was served up in inimitable African style. Here's the Ilala at anchor in Monkey Bay (left, on the left), and below, a man paddles his canoe toward Cobue village in Mozambique, a photo taken from the Ilala that was the EarthPhotos.com most popular photo for a while on our return from Malawi.

Read a story about our drive through Malawi, called Everlasting: Malawi here. And see more photos in the France Gallery and lots more of the MV Ilala, the Mozambican shoreline, Monkey Bay, Likoma Island and the Malawian capital Lilongwe in the Malawi Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Christmas in Patagonia: A Story

A band of freezing rain swept over the Hotel Cabo de Hornos, turning the waters of the Strait of Magellan dirty gray. Puerta Arenas’s “oldest and grandest” hotel was, well, it was just a hotel. All of its walls were painted a determined mustard. A bare minimum of staff kept the Cabo de Hornos open and we all watched cold squalls spray over the strait.

The Pan American highway stops at Puerto Montt, 816 miles of Chilean coastline to the north, so there are no roads to get down here and there is little tourism, because you have to be damned determined to get here.

Feliz Navidad. Punta Arenas was closed tight, for we came in on Christmas night.

*****

I think I snared the last car for rent in southern Chile.

In the morning I stopped for coffee and touched Magellan’s shiny toe (this was so destiny would bring me back), on the plaza, then I found Hertz.

“Buenos dias. You have a car?”

“No.”

A happy smile.

“If I go to aeropuerto?”

“No.”

I looked across the street. “Budget?”

This “no” betrayed a smug certainty, and at the same time a creeping regret that he wasn’t helping. He allowed that I could always “ask the question” across the street at Budget and furthermore, the man down the street at Santander might have uno auto. He wouldn’t open until ten and it was scarcely 9:30. Still, that was something, so I bid him and a man washing cars adios.

At Budget they had big smiles but no cars.

“For today!?” He acted amazed.

And... They're Off. Eventually.

We're heading to Namibia in a month. Let's hope we get off to a smoother start than last time. Here's what happened then:

If you fly from Johannesburg to Windhoek, you mostly fly over Botswana. After an hour the clouds stop in a line and below it’s scrub and salt pans, no roads. Before noon you find yourself under a blazing sun, 45 kilometers east of town at Windhoek Hosea Kutako International Airport.

No difference between this patch of scrub and any other between here and Windhoek. Except maybe this particular bit of land used to belong to somebody important’s brother-in-law.

We had a voucher for our rental car that read, “Thrifty Car Rental, Windhoek airport” across the top, but walk past the Avis and Hertz and Imperial counters in the arrivals lobby and hmmm, no Thrifty.

Once we worked out that in fact Thrifty only had a city office and we found the man they’d sent to haul us in, and once we waited just that one quick additional hour for another flight carrying another client – once we made it to the Thrifty Car Rental office in Klein Windhoek, they were happy to ask for another hundred NAD (Namibian dollars) for the transfer back to the airport when we dropped the car off, it being so far and all.

We declined to pay extra for that.

When we finally left Windhoek, at the first police checkpoint on the Rehoboth road  south of town, we had the chance to perspire for the better part of an hour with a stout, entirely agreeable police woman at a shed by the road. There was no registration on our windscreen, you see, a fact noted by the astute policeman at the roadblock (but news to us) and so we’d have to go back to the car rental office.