There is hardly any place name, with the possible exception of ‘Shangri-La’, that is quite so evocative as ‘Mandalay’. Nearly all of its associations for the West are Kipling-esque ‘images of oriental kingdoms and tropical splendor’*. Dozens of book titles, songs and hotel names have ridden the crest of those images to fame and riches. […]
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Tsunami: What Terror From the Deep Can Leave Behind. (I)
Tsunami: What Terror From the Deep Can Leave Behind. (I)
In these last hours, video has captured a tsunami rolling ashore in the town of Palu, Sulawesi, Indonesia. Ten-foot waves can be seen in the background sweeping structures, palm trees and debris before them. The death toll, sure to rise, stands at 830. The images recalled what the world observed in horror on December 26, […]
Temples to Tea, Shrines for the Traveler
Temples to Tea, Shrines for the Traveler
Camelia sinensis: the wind beneath the traveler’s wings. ‘Cha’, ‘sah’, ‘chay’. Known to the West as ‘tea’. Across Asia and now the planet, this infusion of legend and mystery is on offer, be it in the exquisite tea houses of Kyoto and Dushanbe or in the humblest roadside shelters. Whatever its shrine, tea commands a […]
Hole-In-The-Day: Manoomin, Treaty Rights and Deferred Harvest
Hole-In-The-Day: Manoomin, Treaty Rights and Deferred Harvest
Come November 22nd this year, discriminating families at Thanksgiving tables will sit up – unawares – to turkey stuffed with the makings of an epic and delectable tale. It is the tale of ‘manoomin’, the sacred wild rice that grows across northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the prairie provinces of Canada. Stand on the cat-tail fringes […]
Makgadikgadi: Soul Depths On A Salt Flat
Makgadikgadi: Soul Depths On A Salt Flat
If the Okavango Delta resembles a primordial Eden, then the neighboring Makgadikgadi Pans may be a picture of a climate-changed future, at least for the drought-prone swatches of the earth. Larger than the entire state of Connecticut, a baked crust of white clay stretches virtually without a single landmark, one of the largest salt flats […]
Safari To Dislocation – And Time Immemorial
Safari To Dislocation – And Time Immemorial
Safari (meaning ‘visit’ or ‘trip’ in Ki-swahili) has been a staple of Western travelers since Victorian times when outsiders with prodigious ‘kit’ came on tour to the bush country of Africa’s wild interior. Teddy Roosevelt figures high on the list of notables who tried their luck on the savannah. The tally of trophies taken in […]
Manhandled By Africa’s Beauty: The Smoke That Thunders*
Manhandled By Africa’s Beauty: The Smoke That Thunders*
Beauty in these wild places of Africa comes in two guises. There’s the filigree of a camelthorn tree against the dawn. Or in the rainforest the old-growth trees holding up in reverence a canopy that suffuses the underlay in green light. The only sounds: the rapping of rain from a shower striking the giant leaves […]
Royalty of the Thirstland: Is It End Game For The Baobabs?
Royalty of the Thirstland: Is It End Game For The Baobabs?
It’s the baobabs that will follow you home. Mysterious, massive, silent, on gnarled pillars they dominate the Kalahari thorn scrub, and the imagination. Ancient beyond telling, they are the grand elders of Africa’s arid hinterland, sentinels of the passing millennia. Now they’re dying. And no one knows why. news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/oldest-tress-africa-baobabs-dead-climate-science/ The San say that the creator […]
Lamps in the Night
Lamps in the Night
In the winter of 1984, a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India malfunctioned in the morning darkness. Poor maintenance and disabled safety systems took a savage toll as a cloud of toxic gas blanketed a sleeping city. More than 2,000 nearby slum-dwellers never woke up in their shacks. And a further 510,000 who survived, […]
Lohit River Poetry
Lohit River Poetry
Master bard, T. S. Eliot, once confessed that his poetic sensibilities he owed to life on the banks of great rivers. His cadence, images and rhythms were borrowed, it seems, from the Mississippi and his adopted Thames. A meander up the dramatic mountain course of northeast India’s Lohit River begs for powerful poetry, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohit_River […]
Christmas Counterpoint on the Far Side of the World
Christmas Counterpoint on the Far Side of the World
Vexing religious issues, sometimes triggering savage cruelty, now figure weekly in world headlines. Indonesia (home to Bali’s refined culture and world-class beaches, the astonishing Borobudur temple complex, Java’s version of Angkor Wat, and a thousand natural wonders) has suffered its share of turmoil. One winter, my wife, Mary Kay and I flew to visit our […]
Doorway By the Sea
Doorway By the Sea
Beyond a sea of springtime desert flowers on a bluff overlooking South Africa’s Saldanha Bay, there stands an inn. Its entryway is a colossal wooden door whose carving and rough iron bolts whisper tales of Tuareg caravans plodding the Sahara. You cannot help but wonder what travelers once found shelter from marauder or harmattan (West […]
Once Upon a Train (part 2)
Once Upon a Train (part 2)
Intrigued by Daniels’ narrative, and by what if any after-story might await discovery, I set out to learn more. On a winter afternoon, 38 years after the events in the story, I boarded the afternoon train in Kandy bound for Gampola and Nawalapitiya. As I sat awaiting departure on a jewel-like day, I could imagine the figures […]
Once Upon a Train (1)
Once Upon a Train (1)
Some years ago over afternoon tea on our back porch, Mary Kay and I heard from a guest the outlines of a story set on one of the earth’s storybook islands: Sri Lanka. Its former Dutch and English masters called it ‘Ceylon’, a name that has become synonymous with delicate tea, temples with Buddhist relics […]
The Dalai Lama’s Pistol
The Dalai Lama’s Pistol
It must surely be one of the oddest bits of historical flotsam cast up by India’s exotic, but restive northeast. The artifact in question – seldom seen by outsiders – now holds pride of place on a wall in the Shillong* headquarters of India’s paramilitary unit, the Assam Rifles. There in a regimental ballroom, surrounded […]
Sundown on the Chobe
Sundown on the Chobe
Few scenes in southern Africa are as life-brimming as Botswana’s Chobe river. To leave the sere thorn scrub of the Kalahari and stumble upon such a plain – an alpine-like pasture with a sheet of water slipping eastward toward the sea – that is rare refreshment in a thirstland. Life of every form, from the […]
#2 – River Lullaby: A Boatman’s Night Cry
#2 – River Lullaby: A Boatman’s Night Cry
If you should have the good fortune in winter to visit the northeast Indian town of Bishwanath Ghat on the banks of the Brahmaputra River, you would find it much as it has been for generations: groves of bamboo, a hilltop dak bungalow (government rest house) where my best chum, Lokhi, lived, a Hindu temple, […]
Sacred Cover, Sacred Gasket – #1
Sacred Cover, Sacred Gasket – #1
The coffee table picture book of the upper White Nile is all drama. Across this confluence of Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda and Congo stretches the savannah and its stupefying wild creatures, bejeweled lakes, the summits of cranky volcanoes, a gash of the Rift Valley, the course of the Nile, longest river on earth, and […]