Burma: photos of the impact, the impacted

More of PACT's photos from Burma are here.

PACT is on the ground in Burma, please help their relief efforts with your donation.

c

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

ts eliot, from Four Quarters

Burma - help

The news from Burma, what little can get out, is appalling - it is now estimated that over 100,000 have died due to the cyclone. Rangoon is without power, many regions remain - days since the cyclone - still submerged, there isn't adequate drinking water and petrol is in short supply. Despite this, Rangoon's airport sits practically empty - most relief teams have not been issued permits and planes filled with disaster-relief experts and desperately needed supplies remain grounded, the Burmese government will not allow them to land.

Sarah Newhall (my step-mother) runs PACT - a global community building, aid organizing and community-level impacting organization of enormous reach and integrity. PACT also happens to have been working in Burma for over a decade, with a number of development projects already flourishing including HIV/AIDS prevention and micro-lending programs specifically in the delta areas hit hardest by the cyclone. While the access of most organizations remains, for the time being, blocked by the military government, PACT is in place and so uniquely positioned to truly effect change and implement the aid immediately.

Please contribute what you can to PACT's initiative and pass this post along to friends and colleagues so that they may do the same. (For PACT's tracking purposes, please mention this blog.)




(In Burma in 1997, I trekked outside government boundaries into Shan State; I spent time in a Palong village. The Burmese were to a man/woman/child: kind, hopeful, resourceful – they stole my heart. The tragedies they've known, perpetrated by their own people - ignored by the world, have wrought a nation of all-too-human souls. Demanding aid without implementers, the Burmese government has essentially charged us as global citizens to get step in. The Burmese people must know the world cares deeply, and right the wrongs of our historical inaction.)

By hand

"It is almost as if the decline of the idea of eternity
coincided with the increasing aversion
to sustained effort."

- Paul Valery





Too often I forget the back-story of the throw-away: "hand made".

(Fair Trade,
Organic,grain-fed,
locally sourced,
Unique, Authentic)



We're trying very hard to be good these days and to return to right values -
I've got to keep before me the journey of the piece and
the labor, expertise and generations that constitute its existence.

c - working on getting it, starting with blocks

dry

sheltered cow, kalimpong (india)

A roof of ones own,
in India.
Where the sacred is the everyday.

C - thinking now about cows

Book travel

Because there's not been a trip recently, I've gotten my geography locally...


This from a remarkable Books auction at Stair Gallery in Hudson (the little auction house that, almost weekly now, ROARS.)

Burma

Novice monks in front of monastery,
village beyond May Myo, Shan State Burma (1997)

Burma takes your heart.

In the fall of 1997, my Biman Air flight from Bangkok arrived in Rangoon's Mingaladon Airport a half-day delayed and full of backpackers. We were an earnest crew - un-linked but collectively buoyed by the budget traveler's hubris that, moving low to the ground, our presence in Burma wasn't in direct opposition to Aung San Suu Kyi's wishes. Mounting a noisy front against the enforced changing of currency at the airport, we vowed to get our few dollars directly into the hands of the common man.

More than the dollars (we had few, their impact would be spotty and sparse), we hoped our presence - as we fanned out on our Burmese adventures - would communicate a universal acknowledgement that yes, Burma still existed to the outside world and we - badly dressed + largely unemployed idealists, would bring their stories home with us.

At least, that was the hope.

I left Burma 4 weeks later smitten and saddened - with no idea where to begin helping the people I'd met and harboring the naive assumption that a kind people in a naturally blessed region couldn't possibly in our modern and connected era be saddled with the oppressive military regime for too much longer. Thus did I excuse myself from responsibility and look to the world and ASEAN to right the wrongs.


And now, of course, the world is again standing by - its attitude and actions stymied by the oil interests of enormous nations, the weighting of political stakes and an appalling inconsistency of our standards for what, in this world, can be called acceptable.

I have no authority to write about Burma but here some recent pieces (thank you R for forwarding "What Makes a Monk Mad")

From today's NY Times: You are no longer monks.

And, "What makes a monk mad"

things not bought

Cult Rev flyers, glove forms, gut-strung snow shoes and other items not soon seen in Circa Trade's inventory.

Round Top trip photos here

And actual inventory photos to come.



C

Round Top, TX

I'll fill in details tonight but the gist is: I went to texas and, on a strip of highway 237, found pieces for Circa Trade amidst antlers, figurines and really big grills.

Elsewhere on offer

What I offered.

A little while back, striving to introduce narrative-rigor into my choppy blog voice, I tried to write a piece for the travel site BootsnAll.com.

Drawing heavily from observations made here and doodly notes, I compiled something I'd hoped read as a loosely-joined series of lyrical a-lightings across the sub-continent. The editors of Bootsnall were not lyrically set-alit and beside taking a heavy editing hand to the piece, they also roundly told-me off for thinking myself bigger than narrative conventions.

Here's what ended up going live - my India grab-bag: Pieces of India on Bootsnall.

(Mea culpas made, I do challenge anyone to "write" India as something that could be consecutive...)

c - admittedly not that linear in the west either

Is this a fair use of the blog? Yes, I do think so - roundly self-promoting but travel-related after all and for the worthy end of a trip to Thailand...

Vote objectively but kindly, forward and in the spirit of competition, enter yourself.

More travel tales soon - a busy summer of Circa Trade shop and not enough on-the-road adventures. But now there's the fall and all the momentum that comes with it and stocks are, well, running low.

view and rate this entry in the Novice Monks, Lachung... by circatrade

Thanks to all readers - sign in for travel requests...

ctp

Morocco Photos

Morocco Photos

Photos from the Morocco trip

- a zoom tour of a country that requires less zoom, more wander.

C - perennially zoomer

Trivia

Publishing such a document (Bowles' diary) demonstrates
the way in which the hours of the day
can as satisfactorily be filled with trivia
as with important events.

- Paul Bowles on his Tangiers Diaries


Bus rest stop, Cafe El Atlas, Marrakesh to Essaouira -
- Now there's a troop of piping Berbers with a goatskin tambourine.
- My hair feels like a bush - no conditioner and matted from train and bus seats
- Back amongst the backpackers - wondered what Moroccan gone-ethnic looked like. Talked to aussie couple - 6 months west africa, german with 2 french girls. They're sitting on the deserted side of the cafe and obstinately not ordering.
- Should know better than to think every town on a map is romantic. They're tiny dustbowls.

Hotel Riad El Medina, Essaouira
- Sure once charming, horrible now. Clue from name - dumbly redundant ostentatiously claiming an entire quarter. That it's a riad I don't doubt but with crumbled and frayed nautical/grotto theme rooms, cot mattresses on cement platform, watered down fruit salad. Cafe au lait and baguettes keeping it from the brink.
- Tourists have over-run. The town's for sale. The fish market is full of tourists taking fish pictures.
- Overcast and my room is a cave. Point of beach visit not clear.

Marrakesh - various places
- My god this fruit salad is good
- I think some women pack their smallest shorts in anticipation of a muslim country. Maybe in fez I'll see them flogged.
- Some of the younger girls in the djellabas (no head cover) look so relaxed it could be a beach cover-up.
- They've set a single place for me at breakfast. That I'm writing about it as I'm sitting at it is sad.

Sefi Fatima (Berber barter market)
- Men kiss 5x here.
- Berbers descend with their wool blankets and rugs to buy rubber shoes, polyester tops, soap and tin teapots. Only vegetables retain the authentic.

Fez - train and arrival
- This tour guy may be legit and I may be mean but he should leave a single woman alone.
- Fez seems depressed - repressed? Packed in and layered - voices from below amplified so run the tap.
- Attar of roses. I don't know what that is but that sounds right. It's cloying.
- Nothing's not carved or crenelated here, or tiled.
- 4 kinds of breadstuffs - rolls and puffy crepes, sweet toast and a croissant. Interchangeable starches.

And so on.

C - all minutia, all the time

Lost

...that the more one was lost in the unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there..

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities


I was lost twice in Marrakesh (in Fez I had a guide):
First, lunging alley-deep into the medina with a confidence unmatched by knowledge, skills. I was led home by a child who demanded DH 20.
Second time I was made lost by a fellow who said he'd lead me to the Berber auction. I found my way back amongst the tourists by true directions finally canceling the untrue ones.

I emerged unscathed, of course - but it wasn't the worst feeling. To be spun in circles brings a clenching and all of a sudden the future, just briefly, is rendered unsure.

C – in a land where even the unfamiliar's on a grid

Sunset at Jemmna al Fnna, Marrakesh

Place Jemmna al Fnna, early eve

Marrakesh is the great market of the south,
not only the feudal chiefs and their wild clansman,
but all that lies beyond of heat and savagery:
the Sahara of the veiled Touaregs, Timbuktoo...
here come the camel caravans...

-Edith Wharton, In Morocco
(Whom I almost wish had traveled to Algeria instead so I wouldn't feel inadequate. Ms. Wharton owns this country, with the slight advantage of being a guest of the Governor General wherever she went.)

The Place Jemmna al Fnna - handy during the day as a center point, assumes its true character at night.

Dusk and out come:
Henna ladies. I got hi-jacked - assaulted with flowers up my arm. I made her rub it off, which seemed harsh till she demanded money.
Snake charmers - ubiquitous.
Witch-doctors/healers with ostrich eggs, herbs, dust of ___ and potions. The popular ones make a big to-do of their powers and draw large crowds with their claims and diagrams of intestinal tracks.
The man with a tray of rubber dentures and a mound of teeth
The numbered stalls of the white jacket men who serve kabobs and fish



Orange and date men (pockets of calm)
Dancing West Africans - various colors and hats and rhythms
The Water Men in funny hats who became redundant around the time of bottled water and now would like you to take their picture.

High above, third floor of the Cafe France, the flash bulbs go off.

C - amidst and observing, trying to take pictures without paying

Balance

Dar Vedra (my riad, Marrakesh),
the courtyard 'neath my room

As riads sprout, an assessment:

The Europeans eagerness to buy such wonderful buildings (riads)
is matched only by the local Marrakesh's willingness to dispose of them.

- Tahir Shah, The Caliph's House

C - fan but wary of french invasion deux

Spanish ate French

grand choix en el medina

Moroccans are taught arabic and french in schools. They switch mid-sentence, they switch and you almost don't register it.

Some also speak Berber - of which there are 3 dialects.

A few, I'm going to guess more in the north, also speak Spanish. Morocco is close after all, a few kms.

I speak English, crummy but animated Spanish and gruesome french.

The sad part's been that my French might have had a fighting chance - given me a little go at navigating this country - but my Spanish ate it.

My Spanish eats every last French word that might live in me.

(Blind cannibalizing the blind)

C - je ne peut pas comprende usted.

Seaside medina

Essaouira, Morocco

Brighton-on-the-beach except with a souk.
Or, Fez's darkest alley except it's one that ends in a beach side cafe.

Odd this: that the ladies are taking the promenade in the djellabas and the men hovering by the fish shack are hooded.

Arrive at Essaouira this evening (from Fez -6 hours on a train then 3 this afternoon on a bus) and it's unsettling me.

My heart might still be in that dark alley, and can't reconcile the call to prayer going out over thatched beach umbrellas...

C – seaside

Fez: doesn't bite

a minaret, a lamp - fez medina

Now that I've left I can say that
many people (Marrakeshis) warned me against going to Fez.

I would get:
Kidnapped from the train station
Knifed en route to the medina
Dragged across the cobbles of the souk
Thrown across a mule
Made into tea

They dissed Fez big time - the two have been going at it for 1,000+ years.

Assumed defensive: antennae up, important papers(!) tucked in close, covered to ankles and wrists, mean to everyone genuinely trying to be helpful.

What I found was:
Absolutely nothing untoward.
In fact, felt safer (Marrakeshis take that) in the Fez medina for the simple fact that everyone there was going about their business. I was not on their list. They did not give a flying because they needed to buy a pound of lamb and pick up the re-soled slippers.

Not that the tourist trade has skipped over entirely (Marrakeshis would love that), but the medina's so big, so old and so essentially working that tourists - even groups of them - are absorbed in just as traders and berbers and heathen have been for centuries.

So - Fez is a yes.

C - no longer there

An olive and a loaf

Loaf vendor (off with dustpan vendor), medina Fez

You can make a respectable meal of a dish of spiced olives and a round loaf of bread in Morocco.
No one will look askance.

(Which is not to diminish a culture's justly famed cuisine, just to highlight its flexibility.)

That you can't have a beer in public is get-aroundable.

C - mint tea-toasting hors-d'oeuvre meals

Muezzin

Church bells and chanting processions and elephants held aloft.
I haven't traveled in a Muslim country in ages.
What I'd forgotten - but here you can't forget - is the call to prayer.

You (I'll speak for me) are a passer-through.
The faithful are called and the faithful gathered in.

It was a strange relief to hear it begin
allahu akbar...
and the veil drops
allahu akbar
and we turn back to tasks impermanent.




C - humbled

Midieval

Buildings, people, customs,
seem all about to crumble
and fall of their own weight:
the present is a perpetually prolonged past.

To touch the past with one's hands is realized only in dreams;
and in Morocco the dream-feeling envelops one in every step.

- Edith Wharton, In Morocco

What Marrakesh is no longer, Fez remains: inwards turned, spooky feeling...
Or so it's seemed in the few hours I've been here.

Its medina is the oldest continually operating medina in the Arab world...
modern around the time of the Crusades.

A Star Wars market cast by Lord of the Rings, propped by Indiana Jones.

I'd braced for the medina in the morning - a better map, day light, a guide -
but seeking a couscous, it was inevitable.

The vendors atop their wares looked through me,
the shrouded forms pushed by me
and only the men at the cafes
(aside: it's creepier to be watched by men drinking tea than beers)
registered me with indifferent disdain...

(This medieval place eats little travelers for breakfast)

I found the gentlest face, attached to a cafe with the highest perch and had my couscous. I looked on with my mint tea.

Tomorrow, I tour.

C - in the medieval

the trick

Horse cart shadow falls across an Audi
coke can beside the thali,
burkha-ed beside the over-exposed,

such ia the modern world and all being dragged along with it.

To these I add another.

With my guide the other day to see this place (Seti Fatma)

What's your favorite music?

(I hold out. It's always loaded, my list never ever overlaps and I'm a loser either way.)

Okay.

And he puts on the Koran, on his iPod.


C - juxtapose

Mint tea protocol

A shopkeeper (of antique jewelry that probably ought to be in a museum) told me there was a new protocol.

Shopkeepers no longer offer mint tea at the beginning of discussions.
This was too forward, implied a debt.
Now they close a chat or sale with the offer of tea.
You choose to buy, you choose not to - we are hospitable either way.

It's a bright and shiny new souk protocol.

Amidst

Varanasi's deepest Papua New Guinea,
Siem Reap's Easter Island.

A few thousand Europeans (French happily following a proper baguette) -
all of whom right now in the medina -
have Marrakesh squarely in their holiday sites.
Americans not yet, not so much - it's still a bit glossy magazine stuff.

Though it's embarrassingly easy to get lost in the medina if various factors are in play (more on that),
the medina is signposted if you follow paddles held aloft by tour shepards,
or stick to alleys densest with leather items and decorative tangines,
or close your eyes and follow the "ooh, that's a lovely lantern..."



A culture/country is a big hit with a world scrambling for the foreign;
that I can't except myself is only tempered by the fact that I take up no space on a tour bus.

Your storieed souk is neatened, chickens hung elsewhere, shopkeepers only mildly wheedling, come-ons mild even as jezebels roam in Ibiza-attire, prices are firmed, nothing suspect's underfoot and ATMs are located in the main Place Jemaa-el-Fna.

Still the burnoosed figures hug the souk walls, the odd donkey cart, dates being bought but little mystery really. (until you get lost as I mentioned).



C - amidst them all (and adding to even as she gripes)

In Marrakesh

In Morocco since Friday but challenged to get online. Now on hybrid french/araabic keyboard. Ny already bad typing to gibber.

While I track down the the "w", a breather:
Voila The Dar Vedra

My riad - Moroccan turned-inwards-to-a-courtyard house - 2 stories, balcony around and a marble fountain in the center, rooms narrow but with high shuttered windows and french doors; all the cooling tricks of the tropics in play.

Riads are like safe houses tucked through the medina (logically, people live somewhere) - indicated by no more than a small sign. In the unlikely chance you've re-found your own, you must be directly in front of it to confirm arrival.

Run like bed and breakfasts but by French people - ever so slightly disdainful proprietors. A teddy bear on the bed cushion about as likely as pancakes at breakfast.

My Dar Vedra is wonderful, all that said. Proprietor Sebastian greeted me with a pot of mint tea and small cookies. I got a kea to the secret door. The courtyard fountain is bright pink with roses and there's a small turtle who wanders the tiles. There's also a plunge pool but it's in the midst of everything so I haven't plunged.

Pictures when I sort out wi-fi and so return to a familiar keyboard.

C in the medina

Do not require

Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail.
The description does not describe them to you,
and tomorrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.

- Emerson, The Over-Soul

C - stopping reading

NG Bias

Morocco 4x
India uncountable...

I have inherited (grandmother and paper-recycling bin at dump) an incomplete collection of National Geographics. They live, spine-side out, as wall-stacks in my library, just in case.

Just in case I'm going to Morocco and would like to find out what the respected traveler has said.

Imagine.

India this, India that, Hindu Kush here, Rajputana there. Morocco? not so much.

Mysterious land of berbers and medinas? not during the years in my library. 80 years - none during the years in my library.

Imagine the National Geographic editor's office
(lined in maps of the sub-continent).
Assisant Editor Graves: Sir, I was thinking __________ for our May issue.
Editor Grosvenor: Nonsense Graves, we'll do India.
(repeat)


C - looking elsewhere

Maghreb el Aqsa - at Africa's edge

Almost on Morocco time.

Studying before Thursday departure: today, by showy gesture and self-evident observation, the establishing of Islam.

Maghreb el Aqsa:

When General Oqba Ibn Nafi rode fully armed
into the Atlantic in AD680 to proclaim,
with sword raised to Allah,
that he could go no further,
it marked the dramatic arrival of Islam in Morocco.
Henceforth, this newly conquered Islamic frontier
would be known asthe Maghreb El Aqsa
'the land furthest west'.


C - a little less in awe of a mansion built,
and state established,
just 300 years ago.
No swords were raised or uniforms wetted
as our forefathers rode into the Hudson.
Young us.

Packing

“You have no right to go about Africa
in things you would be ashamed to be seen in at home.”

Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa 1897

(in stayed black silk, black button boots and a hat for her travels)

c - amphibious sandals or the button boots

My trip (photos)

Finally into a lumpy package - photos from my travels...

A Travel Slideshow

None are labeled, but within you'll find (somewhat ordered)

In India
Darjeeling,
Sikkim,
Manali,
Dehli,
Jaipur,
Pondicherry,
Cochin,
Bombay,

In Nepal
Bhaktapur,
Jomsom,
Kagbeni,
Kaligandaki Valley,
Muktinath

In Cambodia
Angkor Wat
In Bulgaria
Koprivshtitsa,
Old Plovdiv,

In South America
Rio
Uruguay
Argentina

and, bruefly to the Carribean for
Antigua and Harbor Island.

seek peace

FERNAND KHNOPFF

I feel the least enlightened of my fellow meditators.

Trying to make light of my fallibity, I share with the short banged woman.

"My mind wanders," I admit, "and my focus is drifty."

"I don't judge myself," she replies.

And puts on her socks in peace.

C - imperfect

Unfamiliar quarters, distant cities

"Marco Polo imagined answering...
that the more one was lost
in the unfamiliar quarters of distant cities,
the more one understood the other cities
he had crossed to arrive there;
and he traced the stages of his journeys,
and he came to know the port from which he had set sail,
and the familiar places of his youth,
and the surroundings of home,
and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child."

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

C

Be monsters

At the ruined cities of Tulum, Coba, Uxmal: monsters with a taste for insects and talons indicating otherwise.

The trees are too young and the relics beneath glass -
but the iguanas were here when the pyramids were just fresh-built and Mayans walked the Yucatan.

C (the Yucatan's more than pretty haciendas)

The homesickness

For a vacation passed
Is not made better
When yesterday I had mango in my cereal,
And today I run past frozen fields,
and contemplate
my leaking
boiler.

C

Hacienda Uayamon

My family likes other hotels. We declared our Puerta Campeche stunning, then drove east to its brother Hacienda of Uayamon.

To our contained and ordered Puerta Campeche, Hacienda Uayamon was drama and tantrums, flaunting angles good and bad.

The Hacienda's aristocratic facade devolved backwards into the jungle yucatan-i angkor-esque (oy). Its signature attraction: 2 columns risen from a perfect rectangle of blue pool. Point made.

(The hacienda waited, beds made, towels rolled on the chaises at the pool.)



We inspected, cocktailed on the balcony, ate - an island of action amidst a sea of empty place-settings - attended by a skeleton staff.



Evidence of one guest in a room of large chairs and chess edged up to the jungle: a desk, a computer, and an ashtray filled.

Here be writers (stalked off).

The place breaths drama after all.


C

And with its much handled pages, another sign

Many months with absorbtion.
Outside the C train, freshdirect, the post.
Out loud.
With pen.
Holidaying done.

C - thanks to R, whose subscription almost overwhelms, but which sometimes we tumble through.

Range of playfulness

From The Notebooks of Robert Frost - 40 notebooks-worth of 70 years of musings...


"Range of playfulness
proof of real culture."

- Robert Frost

C - pushing playful this year

Bahamas, reflecting

So close to Cuba! So many islands! So like Bermuda in its flora, pastels, shutters and stepped roofs except warmer, and without Bloomberg. How enomrous the cruise ships, and seedy the shops on hand to serve the passengers spewed ashore.

No matter R's excellent preparations - the maps and articles at my dispodal - I landed in Nassau pathetically informed. I'm vacation-lazy; beaches smother my cultural instincts. I may deserve Cancuns and senor frog...

Since our hotel was on the main island of Nassau rather than cloistered on the trippy confection of Paradise Island and its Atlantis or pristinely precious Harbour Island (a Caribbean Nantucket), we were ostensibley in contact with the island's life.

That our little cabin-room at Compass Point had a kitchenette spurred us to grocery shop, to buy rum and beers at the local liquor store, hitch a ride with a British resident, and thus toe-test the rhythm of a Bahamian day.

We did new year's eve amidst the bacchanalian grandeur of Graycliff Hotel - a Maugham-ish villa perched behind Nassau proper. We dined on 8 courses of decadence: foie gras gave way to kobe beef, dense bison steaks, cream-smothered tortellini and a desert of chocolate a-sea in more chocolate.



Between courses we walked the hotel's jungled gardens that, like the mansion itself, teeterd on the edge of seediness, wantoness - the lady flamboyant in dress and manner a whiskey-sour from embarrassing herself and the party. As if the garden, left to its own, would grow right back through the mansion to twine its bannisters and reclaim balconies and so revert Graycliffe to some Garcia Marquez set for a senile colonel.

The night was punctuated with entertainments - a fire-eater/dancer in the living room and a feathered troup – the Junkanoo Parade - that lead us to the roof for fireworks. We gawking guests were their warm-up; the Junkanoo players joined the main event of Nassau town's parade when their exhibition for us was done. Their performace surged through the hotel's halls, just barely sanitized for the our gawking, digital-cameras-aloft consumption.



Obligingly, un-ironically, the dancers linked us party-dressed tourists to the actual Bahamas until the time came for the real party of the parade to begin. And when the tourists were nestled snug in our hotel beds, the Bahamas would, for the night, be reclaimed for Bahamians.

Thinking about it now, I suppose this is what "cultural performances" are made of but the proximity of the 2 performaces, and that the players celebrated in a sense, for us - so that we might have an exuberant New years - were something new.

C - nearly done with Bahama postings as the tan fades out