The Sound of Silence

America is silent - some hollowness in city building walls, something lost with the mufflers on car engines. When I flew in the sun was still hidden but the horizon leaked colors like a lover's bruise, red, yellow, green, aquamarine, blue. When the plane wheels hit, my stomach fell through and I just felt like something was gone.

Closing down the blog. This is probably the last entry. Had a few things I wanted to write about, but the more I try to finish them the less they seem like things that should be said.

The Culture and Traditional of Koh Phi Phi Island

Facts about the culture and traditional of Koh Phi Phi:

• It is culturally acceptable to walk around half-naked on Phi Phi if you are white.
• Only about one in three bicycles on Phi Phi has a bell. Therefore, if you are in someone's way they will say, "Bring-bring" or "Beep-beep."
• One man on Phi Phi has installed a custom horn on his bike. It goes, "Hu-wai! Hu-wai! YaGiGiGi!"
• The traditional foods on Phi Phi are Pad Thai, various types of meat shish kebabs, pineapples carved into spirally shapes, and hamburgers.
• An event of great historical significance and civic pride, The Beach starring Leonardo DiCaprio was filmed at Phi Phi.

Thailand: Perilous Dreamscape

Some of the young women really were attractive, and many were accompanied by what would pass for attractive men. However, for each partially naked attractive woman, nature demanded a balance. For each beautiful flower, a dead wolverine that had been mauled by an alpaca. For each lovely sunset, a horrible dust storm. For each right, a wrong. Action and reaction, if you will. Or, as Yeats said, "In balance with this life, this death." As I sat wondering how nature might exact her revenge for the lovely ladies, I was witness to one of the most horrific scenes I have ever witnessed.

I was in chest deep water, minding my own business. It was about 1:00, and I had just come back to the water. There were small bait fish schooling around my feet. There were perhaps another two or three dozen or so people in the water with me, some topless, others not. The water was beautifully clear. There were perhaps a hundred people along the two hundred yards of beach we had for the resort. Few were prepared for what would happen next, and it will haunt my dreams, likely for the rest of my life.

Lurking just out of sight was nature's equalizer. Those who have been to remote areas or spent much time in the ocean have perhaps seen one of these, although they are mercifully rare. Others have only seen the results: people fleeing the surf, racing for help, screaming for their spouses, hiding their children's eyes. The lifeguards, powerless to stop the carnage, often just sit, wide-eyed and helpless, wondering what to do. But, of course, by then, it's too late. These nightmares often seem above nature, as they are the product of a long, hard-fought evolutionary process. The apex of their world. None of us in the water or on the beach were prepared. We had no warning. There were no waves. The surface of the Caribbean was a smooth as glass. No birds flew overhead. Near-total silence. Then the first scream. I turned away from the open sea, the playground of barracuda, moray eels, sea snakes and sharks, and I froze. Moving up the beach, without regard for others, was the ultimate beachgoers' nightmare: the MANKINI.

My head swam, and I thought I might vomit. There, for all the world to see, was a full grown man wearing what appeared to be a solid black mankini. A speedo. A man who'd normally wear pants with a waist of 34 or 36, wearing approximately three square inches of material. Certainly not enough to make a respectable thong. I could feel my lunch churning. Everyone on the beach now knew this guy better than his own doctor did. The lifeguard tried to clear the beach, but it was too late. Strong men fainted. Women screamed and children wept. The mankini ruled the beach. We were all but subjects to its foul power. I tried sticking my head underwater, but I could only hold my breath for so long...

- Sean Cole

We landed at Railay Beach about 9:30 in the morning.

Jazmine, being a rock-climbing instructor, left to go find a private instructor to belay her, and I, being broke, went off to find a nice beach. After about fifty minutes of searching around between restaurants and mini-marts, resort entrances and private resort pools, I managed to find the secret alley to Pranang Beach hidden between some limestone caves and a resort's walled-off AC complex, behind the Railay Rock Climbing Club's snack bar. I did some exploring in the caves, found a mattress and a pile of take-away containers and decided the beach would be more fun.

I entered the cool water, floating in the shade of a giant rock. All the islands in Thailand are giant blocks of harder rock that managed to not be worn away when the ocean moved in millions of years ago. Consequently, they are mostly giant pillars, smaller at the bottom than at the top due to erosion, and it is only sheer luck that some of them have enough sand piled around them to build fly-traps for tourists on. What this means it that almost every beach around here is a lagoon surrounded by giant bluffs topped with tufts of trees. Staring up into the sky, the clouds flow distantly over the ridges and you get the distinct feeling of hanging from a stony zeppelin soaring through the sky. I floated around through schools of tiny fish, enjoying the scenery, when disaster struck: several silverback mankinis strolled onto the beach and started a landscape-razing battle for dominance of the troop, whereupon I fled for the cliffs.

Nestling myself in the safety of the cliffs, I resumed my earlier cave-exploring ways. Following the sound of a pounding bass, I found a foot-and-a-half wide rabbit-hole reaching into the stone. I crept in, the sound of the waves compressing the air at the far end of the hole growing deafening. Suddenly the suction became quite intense and I had to haul myself back to the entrance, the words BAD IDEA BAD IDEA BAD IDEA suddenly a litany in my head.

I again fled into the ocean, willing to take gibbering madness over a bashed head and a lungful of brine. I felt a sharp prick in my leg, peered in the water and found a sea flea there. Clearly this was my Maloyaroslavets. I swam over to a bunch of boulders in between a break in the cliffs and did some exploring (gingerly stepping on the bloody sharp rocks) of the stalactites melting out from the overhangs. After passing some distance into the quasi-canyon, I emerged on the other side, where a man was drilling holes for climbing bolts. I stared up at the sky, streaks of white and blue mineral deposits melting down from holes in the rock face like angelic shitholes. The driller and I briefly acknowledged each other, and I decided to take a plunge. Spotting an island about a half-mile distant, I set out for it, thinking of how cool it would be to carve FOOD = LOVE into one of the caves located about five feet above the waterline.

About halfway there, I heard the buzzing of two boats. Knowing I was not in a traditional swimming area, I tried to hide my head between the waves, then figured I would rather be sent back than be run over. Fortunately no one did, and no one cared that I was there, and as the boats sped into the distance I resumed my swim. When I made it there, I made the shocking discovery that the rocks at the island's base were just as cruelly sharp as the rocks at the base of the island I had left. Plus the crabs scurrying around seemed simply opposed to my presence. So I set back, and about halfway there I remembered that the last time I swam a full mile, it was summer camp and there was a lifeguard around.

Unable to change my location without more swimming, I ignored the pain in my shoulders and arms and doggy-paddled back home. With the diminished pace, I noticed something I had shockingly been unaware of when I set out for the island: cactus trees. Growing from the tiny rock islands dotting the ocean's surface were tree trunks that, about halfway up, suddenly became cactuses. I simply did not know that could happen. At any rate, I made it back, crawled past and over five-foot-wide blocks of rose quartz till I made it back to the domain of the mankini. My mind has erased all events after that, but I appear to be having no lasting mental disturbances.

Welcome to the Jungle

I’ll post a link to the leech video Jazmine took once she puts it on YouTube – nasty little buggers, just one gets a taste of you and then they all can smell a feast. Got a fat one in my sock, and every five minutes after that I would find a few more sucking at the blood-soaked fabric.

Things we saw in Taman Negara: ants marching in highways unfollowably long, bats, snakes, monkeys, a yellow-tailed chicken-like bird, and an abandoned tourist resort. There, done with that.

The things I found most interesting in Taman Negara: the riverboat restaurants. The only restaurants in Kuala Tahan float at the juncture of the Tembeling and Jelai rivers, conveniently located just across from the entrance to the park. In addition to their food services, all the restaurants support a population of river taxi drivers sitting around and smoking cigarettes who will ferry you across the river for one ringgit.

The first night we got in, we ate at a cheap (about average for Bhutanese standards, Malaysia’s an upscale place) restaurant with a bumbling waiter and a “crazy” clock which merely showed an odd time. I ordered Tom Yam soup (“Yes, it’s Malaysian” said our nice but misinformed waiter (It’s Thai)) and Jazmine ordered something she couldn’t remember the name of. I can’t speak for the quality of her soup, but mine was deliciously Tom-Yammy (a flavor I lack the culinary chops to describe) and was chock-full of chunky vegetables and chicken and was the first meal in Malaysia I feel like I couldn’t have gotten in New York or India. Most of the food in Kuala Lumpur was street Chinese food (might have had something to do with the fact that we were staying in Chinatown) and our breakfasts, though authentically Malaysian, were all roti somethings – roti canai, roti telur, etc. – varieties of of spun flatbread with various sauces and curries, and never anything I felt was qualitatively different from the roti you’d get in India.

So we came back the next morning and, not remembering exactly where our previous restaurant was, went into another joint. My meal was unmemorable enough that I just don’t remember it. We boated off to the park, spent two days hiking and sleeping in a house on concrete stilts, listening to jungle as the noises changed at various times of day. Once we returned we were ferried across to “Family Restaurant.” Figuring we'd give it a shot, I ordered Kadung fried rice. This was a mistake, as it turned out to be bleh fried rice at an inflated price. We spent a bit trying to figure out exactly where our original restaurant was, only to conclude definitively that it was not where we had left it: turns out, the restaurants aren’t moored anywhere, and periodically the taxi boats have to push them back to one of the parking spots across from the park entrance. And in addition to the confusing wandering, they all have bland and indistinguishable names, so when we returned for dinner we had to spend a good thirty minutes going to each one before finding our baby. My fourth and final meal was a delicious Bundun soup – somehow they made the cuttlefish tender and juicy, something I had never seen anyone make normally-rubbery cuttlefish be, and the clock was still off by a random amount of time. Quite charming.

So, to sum it up: I can't give you directions to the place, but the orange restaurant is the one you want.

Where in the World is

Quick post, for all those people who are afraid I've made an Apocalypse Now-esque jaunt into the heart of darkness: I'm in Krabi, after hiking in Taman Negara and then a 2-day-long series of bus rides up through Malaysia into Thailand. Got some posts on tap, but I want to polish them until they shine. Until then, enjoy life in that city on a hill and your humble narrator will be enjoying his by sipping 10-baht real Red Bull and watching the muddy walking fish they got over here. Tashi Delek.

I am a Nephilim

Zeb: Do you have this cheap shoe in a larger size?
Malaysian Shop Keeper: No, the cheap products only come in small sizes. Perhaps you would like an expensive neon green hipster basketball shoe?
ZEB: No thank you, I happened to look at that shoe earlier and it only comes in American size ten. Do you have a shoe that could fit me?
MSK: No sir, no one has ever had a foot as large as yours.
ZEB: Perhaps you could check in the back?
MSK: Unfortunately I am checking in the back and nothing will fit your monster giant feet. Let me climb up into the ceiling and look there.
MSK: Oh no, no one has left any large shoes in the ceiling where I apparently keep all my specialty merchandise.
ZEB: That's fine, I am not going to go check somewhere else because I have had this conversation already three times.
MSK: Okay, thank you!

Look!

Look! This agricultural product comes pre-packaged!

Look! Chain restaurants!

Look! It is 3:30 a.m. There are people out drinking! Restaurants are serving them! One of them is a woman!

Look! Lamps that light the streets at night!

Look! A variety of types of the same product!

Look! A condiment that is not chili sauce!

Look! No haggling is there!

Look! The food preparation area is sanitary!

Look! A public display of affection!

Look! These tourists do not have tour guides!

Look! This image took me only five seconds to upload!

Look! Cave roosters!

Look! Jazmine Da Costa!

Look! A city growing out of the jungle!

Look! Distortion of space and time!

First five pictures by me, sixth by Jon Feyer, all else by Jazmine Da Costa.

Malaysia

Trading a thousand of one thing for sixty of another hits you right in the gut. I had been proud that we had each managed to save over a thousand US dollars in a year despite making $13 a day, but I’m running through money at an expected but frenetic pace. Rickshaws drivers simply do not live in the magical fairy land of Bhutanese taxi economics.

So while I’m still reeling from blow to my wallet and my belly (and fuck, I’m hungry, eaten only doughnuts and an airplane meal all day), Malaysia itself comes and dislocated my jaw. I’m just amazed. The first thing we notice is how modern everything looks, and by that I mean it looks exactly like how I remember the United States looking – though I have now concluded that my memory of things is completely corrupted: every step along this journey, from buying penny tamarind candies from pre-adolescent shopkeepers in shacks to the, so to say, bustling streets of Thimphu to the smog-encased, bus-rickshaw-car-motorcycle-bicycle-cow-cart sprawl of Chennai to the packed city streets of Kochi has been a series of reminders that most of the world is not like the world we’ve been living in, and in ways that we’d forgotten could exist.

So the first thing we notice is the modernity – glossy ads, chain shops, cleanliness (had thought that my repulsion at some of the things in India, especially the smog so thick we couldn’t get tanned spending hours at the beach at 10 degrees latitude, was due to the fact that, while Bhutan’s city’s streets are covered in grime and garbage, the country itself is pristine). The second thing that hits is the smell. And the smell is just weird – it smiles nice, real nice. Sweet, even. The third and fourth things, respectively, are the lack of hordes of people everywhere and the utter lack of anything by the sides of the roads. When I say the country looks like the U.S., I mean it – the’ve efffing mown the grass by the side of the highway. There is no one walking on the shoulder. The roads are not covered in a weaving quilt of makeshift vehicles. There are no hawkers with blankets of things yelling at you as you thunder away on a tin-can-concealed croaking two-speed engine.

And the fifth thing, by far the most shocking though it has taken me the most time to realize it, is the absence of animals. No animals. There are no cows sleeping on the highway. There are no stray dogs, no ownerless horses, no chilling monkeys . This has never happened since, hell, forever. I had forgotten that humanity has cut itself off, the only sentient beings alone in the universe. The man next to me in this bus has fallen asleep, his iPod earbuds pulsing.

Crackeraphobia

This is going to be a very un-Buddhist post, since typing it is doubtlessly going to result in the circuits of my computer frying a couple dozen of the ants who have quite understandably mistaken it for the untouched jar of jam sitting right next to it in my backpack. At any rate, I am not troubled by this anymore as we are not in Bhutan anymore. And how. For instance, there are white people here. Lots and lots of white people. More white people, in fact, than we have seen combined over the entire past year, sometimes sitting in a single restaurant.

Now, of course, all the usual questions one has when one sees a white person are going through our minds: Where are they going? Are they married? Do they take chilies? But all of these questions have taken on a deep and unprecedented weight and ominence (is that a word? A white person would know, but I dare not ask) in India. I am, in short, deeply unsettled by the presence of all the honkies here.

This is in part due to the fact that they are almost all The Wrong Kind of White Person. Having had the opportunity to study and analyze the entire chilip population of Bhutan, I have concluded that all white people lie upon a scale, and can be sorted into three basic gradients. At one end of the scale, you have The Wrong Kind of White People, who do little more than watch movies upon their Apple Macintosh computers and eat extremely expensive imported Nutella. While their behavior is irrational and confused, it is at least understandable in Bhutan because they have clearly only ended up there by mistake and will be leaving as soon as they realize that there is more to the culture and traditional than shopping for handicrafts. At the opposite end of the spectrum are The White People Who Are Trying Too Hard. A silly breed, they awkwardly wear ghos for the purpose of blending into the environment as obviously as possible and sometimes decide that their names are Tashi when in fact their names are Ron. In the middle of these two extremes are The Right Kind of White People, a genus I am pleased to say consists entirely of me, Jon, Jon, Eric, and lost Canadian teachers wandering far from their home villages in the East. The Right Kind of White People can be easily identified by the fact that they all are twins and have beards, something the Bhutanese are not capable of, except for Ugyen Wangchuk, the first and most awesome king of Bhutan.

So while The Wrong Kind of White People can be pleasantly ignored for the most part while living in Bhutan because they spend 90% of their waking hours either in their plush apartments or eating at the three gentrified restaurants listed in the Lonely Planet guide to Bhutan, here they cannot, because they are everywhere, doing weird white people things like being old and frumpy, paying five US dollars (or more!) for a meal, looking bored and confused, and not slathering everything with rice. I am not sure exactly what is so unsettling about this, other than that they are clearly not supposed to be here. There are more than enough Indian tourists to go around. I am absolutely certain that something sinister is just going to happen; I just cannot figure out what it is, because I can no longer fathom a mind that has not ever wondered, “Is it?” We have crawled deeply into the rabbit hole, and I need to book a ticket out of Bangkok very, very shortly.

So, at any rate, disaster. Adi missed his plane flight to Cochi, leaving us without the opportunity to see how Indian people react to a 6’ 4” Indian man, the chance to find out exactly how much we are being ripped off on things, and a very dear friend. Feyer and I tried to make the best out of a bad situation, however, by going to the beach. I doubt that this strategy has ever failed anyone once put into action, but we faced some very serious obstacles to its implementation today. Namely, the fact that the people on Vypin island have not had any drinking water for the past two days and have started striking and putting up barricades all over the roads.

I had been quite nicely surprised by the apparent success of the Keralan communist government till now. There are far fewer beggars around here than in the other parts of India, and there seems to be little if any strife generated by the heavy presence of three major religions of Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. And the omnipresent poster of a man raising his hand up in a vain attempt to stop a man swinging down a communist hammer upon a burning city turns out upon closer inspection to simply be a poster of a boy making a weird hand gesture in front of the communist hammer man superimposed over a background of a city tinted red with the cheerful spirit of communism. But yeah, water is kind of important. It didn’t seem like we could do anything to aid the protest that the barricades of burned-out fires, piles of sticks and women sitting chanting under tarps couldn’t do on their own, however, so we cobbled together a strategy of walking between barricades and taking rickshaws as far as we could, and ended up 25 kilometers later at the gorgeous and pleasant Cherai Beach, where the water is only four feet deep as far out into the ocean as you want, Indian couples bust out nude children and digital cameras, and fully-habited nuns frolic in the waves.

Trivandrum to Allepey

Catholic idols enshrined behind oily glass - lime-green mosques with speakers poking out of minarets - Hindu temples with air conditioning units jammed in between the concrete slats, cold stone goddesses guarding the entrances - stern swamis or gurus or politicians, I couldn't tell you which, preaching to bored crowds - Brilliance college, Futureplus Institute of Tech, dozens and dozens of diploma mills at every turn - hammer and sickle, sickle and grain tattooed upon the walls - an ad for mango pickle, the model licking her wrist in delight - Office of the Circle Inspector - slightly weak-jawed girls, thin noses, full lips walking by, many pretty but none beautiful - a boy hacking apart a refrigerator, strips of white insulation scattered about - my stomach climbing into my heart, more ravenous than sick - goats high-stepping through reedy grass underneath coconut-laden palm trees, palm trees upon palm trees every rising up green firework head and smoke-tail trunk, waving timelessly in the breeze - slick rippled backs of skirted men lifting boulders onto trucks - Kalyan silks - Malayam script loopy and fanciful, or solid and blocky - Arabic words like the doodles of a bored child - the thin horn of the bus, angry buzz of the rickshaws forced from the incoming lane to shoulder - Famous Power Tools - sad rusty bicycles - sacred cows veins coursing popped dragging carts led by old men with withered legs - young boys carrying computer towers on the back of motorcycles - a lonely politician's statue in the tall weeds - druggists, chemists, ayurvedics - a pretty girl gets on the bus at the next stop - I wink at her and she smiles back: the world is never as foreign as it seems.

I Had Been Swimming in the Ocean and Was Extremely Tired

1 medium-sized crab + 1 large crab fried and covered in garam masala: 100 rupees

Cheers

I write this having faced approximately 7 shots at the Bagdogra security checkpoint. I had thought that it would take approximately 20 minutes to feel any effects, but my knowledge of esophagol and stomache absortion rates is apparently lacking, as this is only 5 minutes after having gone through.

At any rate, Indian security has bought into the ridiculous liquid-explosives scare, and I had stored a little more than a third of a (750ml) bottle of Coronation Silver Jubilee Rum in my Nalgene before coming to the airport. CSR is smooth and light, with a hint of sweetness and a nice mellow finish. It is by far our favorite liquor from Bhutan, surpassing even K5, the 5-times-as-expensive whisky brewed in honor of His Majesty Jigme Singye Khesar Wangchuk (not to say that K5 is bad. It is a light, slightly tart liquor that goes down pleasantly while delighting the tongue with hearty overtones, to approximate the literati’s liquor review-speech). And, at $3 a bottle, it is by far my and Feyer’s favorite bargain-rate liquor (though, to be fair, in Bhutan 130 Nu is a little more than half a day’s wages for a significant portion of the population).

At any rate, we have made it to Bagdogra Airport. We are set to fly to Chennai, the southernmost tip of India [sober ed. note, not the southernmost tip at all, just very southern], in approximately an hour. Though I said earlier that there are no gates or fences on the border between India and Bhutan, I happened to be wrong in my exact wording. There is indeed a large fence lying on the border between India and Bhutan (though it has nothing on the US-Mexico border fence, that abomination), but the border is exceedingly porous. We managed to find the Bhutanese immigration office in order to get our passports out-stamped, but it took talking to both the Bhutanese exit police officers and the Indian police force, not to mention our coolie driver to find the Indian Immigration Office, where a man did not check our bags to see that we were not, in fact, bringing contraband into India.

Before we even checked our visas, however, we had another crisis. Our next stop after Chennai is Karela. Strass had booked our tickets from Chennai to Karela on an Indian train through a friend of a friend of his (and ours) at Kuenga. We spent Sunday afternoon fruitlessly calling said friend, and ended up concluding that the whole thing had been a scam, and were resigned to trying our luck at the Indian bus system in order to get to Adi. Surprisingly, our man called Strass at 8am this morning to inform us that he had the tickets and that we could pick them up at his office, which we did the moment he walked in. The timing of the whole thing (we had planned to stay overnight in Silguri instead of Phuntsholing and thereby avoid timing problems in getting to the airport) worked out however, as we had failed to take in to account the fact that Bhutan is 30 minutes ahead of India. At any rate, here we are.

I have memories of my scoutmaster, Mr. Mullens, staying awake the entirety of our Boy Scout trips through the western U.S. because, as he put it, “[He] paid to be on this trip and [he] was gonna see it.” Consequently, I have taken a liking to staying awake on long taxi rides and taking in the scenery. The drive here was exceptional. The minute we walked into India, the landscape was transformed. Bhutan is clean, respectful, quiet. The government obviously has a lot of money and concern for keeping Phuntsholing nice. India, on the other hand, does not have the resources to cover its sprawl, and Jaigon (the name of the Indian border town) reflects this. While in Bhutan there are cattle wandering the streets and people on pilgrimage occasionally ask for handouts to give to monasteries, in India the cattle eat the garbage littering every wayside and the beggars are quadrupled (we did give small children some noodle soup packets though, it is not to say that people do not experience hardships). The masses of people crowd the streets, and the rickshaws (called coolies) and construction trucks tread not-so-delicately through them. Once we caught a taxi for Bagdogra, we too threaded our way amongst the fray. Leaving Jaigon, the landscape is covered by tea farms. Tea apparently grows on squat hedges, tended ceaselessly by old women and hacked to harvest by young men with machetes. We passed by tea plantation after tea plantation, occasionally driving through small hamlets populated by women in sarees selling roadside baturas, children with their arms wrapped around each other, and full-teated bitches dragging their asses along the ground. The word for India is burgeoning: in every square foot there is either someone or something growing, from the people hustling street food, faux designer goods and a startling array of services to squads of monkeys and dark-grey-blue-throated crows eating every bit of food and fruit that falls by the wayside. Even the alluvial plains left dry by the end of the monsoon season are covered in rocks that construction trucks load up in order to expand the roads. The people pursue every possible road of commerce, and no minute is wasted. I imagine India to be what the U.S. looked like before we became nationalistic and fat: a nation devoted to improving itself through every possible means. We passed truck upon truck of young men in sweater-vests clinging to the luggage racks on top of buses, old men dragging on bicycle carts of grain, 15-year-old girls hauling along their infants to work, private school-signs advertising themselves as (literally) Harvard. Nowhere in Bhutan did I see people as devoted to making it as I did in my first drive through here.

Also, did I mention there are troops of monkeys everywhere in the jungle? India is awesome.

And there are lobster in Chennai.

Heading South for the Winter

Being quite cold, Jon, Jon and I have decided to roam around the warm parts of Southeast Asia. First we are going to enjoy Indian beaches and Indian food, then we are going to enjoy Malaysian beaches and Malaysian food, then Thai beaches and Thai food, and lastly Cambodian beaches and Cambodian food. Apparently there are large lobsters that cost fifty cents everywhere. My stomach is going to rupture.

Currently we are in Phuntsholing, a Bhutanese border town. There are hordes of people. I have not seen this many people since we were last in India.

Tomorrow: we try to find wherever the hell the border visa officer is (the border has no fences, walls, nada. You just walk across) so we can get our entry stamps, then on to Bagdogra airport, and lastly a four-hour flight into Chennai, the southernmost province of India. Where there are beaches. And lobsters.

Driving in Bhutan

The road to Phuntsholing

The Sky Catches Fire, the Rivers Run Red, and It Snows

A day before New Year’s, and our last days in Bhutan: the perfect time for auspicious and inauspicious signs. We walk out of the grocery store at just the time the sun set. Normally in Bhutan all that happens when the sun sets is that it gets dark, because there is no pollution in the air. Jon Strassfeld, in Paro, happened to catch a picture of the sun set this particular day:

In Thimphu this phenomenon appears as a dark-orange streak that covers more than half the sky. As we watch it, the sun manages to break through the haze and briefly stares at us, a blood-red ball. I run into my student, Yeshey Samdrup.

“So, is this auspicious or inauspicious, do you think?” I say.
“There was a forest fire today, sir,” Yeshey says.
“Ah, inauspicious,” I say.

Haa continues to burn the next day, but the sunset is only a mild purple color. However, the smoke has seeded clouds that roll in during the night. Now, in addition to there almost never being colorful sunsets in Bhutan, there is almost never snow, because precipitation falls mainly during monsoon season. In addition to this, while it gets damn cold during the night, during the day the fact that we are at 27 degrees latitude kicks in and the sun heats things up to around 70 or 80 degrees, even in the dead of winter. However, this New Year’s day, because the clouds were thick enough to block out the sun, we awake to snow falling gently over cypresses.
Pictures to come as soon as I ask Feyer’s dad to send some, as he was the only one taking pictures that day that I know of. At any rate, New Year’s day also happens to be the day that we hike to Taktsang.

Quickly I break off from Jon and his parents. Completely alone in the woods, the only sound I can hear is the sound of Bhutanese hollering down from Takshang. All around me snowy wisps of old man’s beard moss trail from the trees, stirring gently in the breeze. As I climb over ridges, the only thing I can see is a grayscale sky. The clouds are all around, the soles of my worn-out shoes let in the snow, and I sweat as I climb as quickly as I can.

By the time I reach the monastery, the sun has burned through the edges of the haze, and a light-blue sky advances slowly over the ridge. I turn and look below. A valley-sized cloud blows in, writhing and boiling. It melts like licked cotton candy, and then it twists and writhes, elongating into the form of a dragon, its gaseous horns crowning a featureless face. It slams pressurelessly into a ridge, and rolls over as mist. A minute later, I hear the thundering of a jet flying into Paro.