Potato and Toothpaste Travel

Amber is fossilised tree resin, a yellowish, pellucid gem washed ashore by the waves of the eastern Baltic Sea. Sometimes there are ancient insects within it, or parts of leaves to decorate it. Amber is a souvenir-laden Cretaceous traveller, and precious. Amber is said to be protective, happy-go-lucky and helpful in making the right choices. In Latvian, amber is called dzintars, from which the name Dzintra comes.

I’d nearly not stayed there but fate granted a second chance. As I’d walked away north on that day I’d randomly met Dzintra at the doors of the Science Academy in the Latvian capital, I thought to kick myself for turning down her offer to stay at her home and worse, for not getting any contact details. I knew enough to know I should know more.

It was in the days before mobile phones. My only hope might be to try to re-find her at the Academy, but I didn’t like the chances of dealing successfully with the German-speaking Russian receptionist. It was a very big building and we hadn’t even exchanged surnames.

Yet there was a sliver of hope: I was due to meet her daughter Antra on the following morning. Dzintra had said there was a castle not too far from Riga, that it was worth seeing and I could take the train there. Without any alternative plan it certainly sounded like a plan. She had to work, she said, but if her daughter was not busy with university she could meet me at the entrance to Riga station at 9 a.m. because her daughter would enjoy the trip too. Maybe.

‘How will she recognise me?’ I asked. It wasn’t as if I stood out in the Latvian crowd.

‘She can find you,’ Dzintra assured.

It wasn’t a meeting arrangement to inspire any confidence but there was only to wait and see. What did my intuition say? Unfortunately, it said nothing.

Anyway, there was a more immediate and pressing concern: would I really find the private apartment I’d left that morning, without really taking in properly where it was?

Eventually I did happen to happen upon the right street.

At 9 a.m. on the following day, at the busy Riga station, I thought it quite impossible anybody could find me in the crowd. But sure enough, as I stood waiting, a young woman approached, saying cautiously, ‘Excuse me, you are Andrew?’ It was Antra.

‘How did you recognise me?’ I asked, quite shocked.

‘You look like a foreigner,’ she said, ‘a bit lost.’

The day at the castle was like a meandering flute melody, made easier by Antra’s English skills. The offer to stay was repeated by the daughter. This time I accepted. I fetched my luggage from somewhere North Riga and returned the house keys to the apartment’s owner. By evening I’d been whisked over the Daugava River and up that flight of stairs in the middle block of three.

Events in the Stalin-era apartment were amusing. There was quite a bit of fussing that went on, unexpectedly, over Dzintra’s dinner.

‘Did you eat?’ I heard her school-going younger daughter Anta, ask.

‘I had my dinner,’ Dzintra replied.

‘What did you eat?’ the daughter pressed.

‘Oh, you know…’ the mother said.

‘What about your dinner?’ her older daughter Antra also asked, upon coming home again later.

‘Yes, I ate.’

‘It wasn’t only potatoes, was it?’

‘No,’ Dzintra said, calling me as a witness.

It brought a smile to see the two daughters questioning their mother in the way a mother might normally question a busy daughter. It wasn’t that Dzintra suffered any horrible malady; hers was rather a wonderful disorder: she was a nomad at heart, a jajabor and it was this affliction that encouraged her to save.

About the potatoes: they were cheap and plentiful, a ready match for the generally modest public salaries of Latvia. Well back into the Soviet era potatoes had allowed Dzintra to put a few roubles aside, as she could, as a travel fund. And what did it matter if dinner meant potatoes, now and then, if one could dream of a pending destination? That was the pay-off.

I agreed to help Dzintra with her English: she was nervous although she shouldn’t have been. With the world’s most delightful accent she could have, frankly, gotten away with anything. And she did.

‘Latvians eat much potatoes,’ she told me once.

‘Many,’ I corrected. ‘Many potatoes. Potatoes are countable.’

‘Not in Latvia!’ she said.

If I’d been more observant I could have seen that jajabor sparkle in her eyes when we’d first met, but it was the potato-talk that confirmed her status. Travel hadn’t been easy in the Soviet era but she’d managed to join tours to various places across the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc. Later, she’d visited a relative in Melbourne and her apartment featured Australian souvenirs as evidence. The extended trip was also there in Anta’s English accent: it seemed so out of place in Riga to be hearing the Australian sounding English she’d been young enough to absorb.

‘Most Australians had never heard of Latvia,’ she said, ‘So I would explain where it was.’

But it was her tour to Poland that took my fancy. ‘Toothpaste was always more expensive in Poland,’ Dzintra said, so she’d stocked up and seen Warsaw and Krakow on a finance of Soviet toothpaste, stopping off at a Polish market between sites to pay for the trip.

Passion for anything is rare in this world and I admired hers. It was clear we were predestined to get along. It’s perhaps the reason why every minute we’d spent together felt as a month.

She spoke of her daughters, Antra and Anta, explaining that the elder Antra was supposed to be Anta except that Antra’s grandmother was fond of the letter ‘r’ and changed her name; so Anta was born later. 

She spoke of the other family member, the cat called Puncis which in Latvian means stomach; an accurate name for the robust feline that lounged about. 

We spoke of Australia and many other things besides, as the hours meant years.

And of course more than anything we spoke of travel. It’s a well-known fact that the next best thing for any traveller is to receive another traveller in their home city. It brings with it as close as can be the feeling of travelling, without going anywhere.

‘You can’t leave Latvia without seeing a Latvian forest,’ Dzintra said and I could hardly disagree.  I had no experience with Latvian forests.

‘I have a small car,’ she said, ‘It has some mechanical problems, so if I take a day off work, and it might not get us all the way there and back again without breaking down, but would you like to take the chance?’

We left in the little grey Ford that whistled along to every gear change for the length of the chat and laughter that was the way to the Latvian forest and back again.  I’d say the whistling Ford enjoyed the day out too; it didn’t break down.  And there was another trip to Jurmala and the Baltic Sea, so I could see a Latvian beach.

The days of my planned week in Latvia passed quickly in the way only enjoyable days can. Everything went well, more than well and without complaint until... Well I wasn’t to know how it would be, taking myself off for a day, independently, on that fateful tour to Bauska… It seemed such a simple idea.

But the amber wasn’t with me then.

The story continues here: Was There Any Chance of Wolves?


The first part of the Latvian story is here: The Latvian National Academy of Science.


Follow the Baltic Way, along the sea on a trail of amber...




Or something different? Head for Bangladesh!

This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Potato and Toothpaste Travel

The Latvian National Academy of Science

Be free. Align yourself with the rhythm of the world to go far. Be as the jajabor, the nomad. Arrive somewhere from the soul, due to the appealing curl of its name or because it feels right or because we know nothing. Go because the time has arrived, sense it.

The Baltic States beckoned in such a way. I went because the idea surfaced. I went because it was there. Other than that, the reason for the journey was left to present itself as a revelation of yes – that must be why I came. Intuition would make the arrangements.

Due to the circumstances that had led to the meeting of a Latvian folk musician on an Estonian road, I had a private apartment in Riga, the Latvian capital, from the first evening. My pocket had keys. It gave perhaps a stronger sense that the brand new city was mine to explore; but it wasn’t the being somewhere new that brought meaning – it was a basic decision between old and older.

On that first morning, I’d locked the door of the apartment I was unexpectedly borrowing. I set off on foot down the busy street that judging by the traffic must lead somewhere; and it wasn’t long until the distinctive roofs and church towers caught sight of me. The famed old town was away to the mercantile right. Yet to the left a different type of building caught my eye: a stark, stalwart tower in brown, which seemed the very essence of the Soviet Union days. It was intriguing.

I knew I would see both pasts. I had the time. The question was which to go to first and on the thought that at the top of the tower I could take photographs over the old town I was inclined towards the left. In this way the communists won the moment. Yet, as it turned out, it was a decision that would bring me right to my sentimental Latvia.

I heaved those enormous doors, of the heavy wooden kind, and inside was an enormous Spartan lobby with proletariat looking lifts to the front, and to the left was a functional-looking booth with a sign that read ‘Enquiries Counter.’ In it was an equally functional-looking Russian woman, elderly and overweight. It was as though I had walked into one of those Hollywood films designed to promote a view of life in the Soviet Union that made one pleased to live in the ‘free world’. It was behind-the-iron-curtain in a clichéd way and I was excited.

I imagined Soviet citizens in the film, stooping to speak through the slot at the window of the booth, to make enquiries that ended in an inevitably firm ‘Nyet!’ I thought to try it out.

‘Excuse me, what is this building?’ I asked as prelude to my planned request to reach the roof.

‘Sprechen Zie Deutsch?’ she said, do you speak German?

‘Nein,’ I replied, in German, and for some unknown reason tried again in English.

‘Sprechen Zie Deutsch?’

‘Still Nein.’

We stood smiling at each other, at a loss, and she certainly seemed too friendly to play the role of Soviet receptionist in the movie. She would have been very helpful to a German.

With a dash of disappointment I headed back across the lobby to those gargantuan doors. I heaved one of them open again, wondering if the inevitable door-people in the Soviet era had developed shoulder injuries from the task. I was thinking I might never know what that building was, when a woman came in the door I’d just opened. On the off chance…

‘Excuse me, do you speak English?’

‘A little,’ she said in an accent delightful enough to flavour ice cream. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

‘Australia.’

‘It’s my favourite country,’ she said, ‘I lived in Melbourne for six months!’

We stood chatting in the doorway for a minute or two. The building was the Latvian National Academy of Science, her name was Dzintra and she worked there as secretary to a senior official.

I didn’t know then about the strength of her intuition. Nor was it clear I had met a Latvian jajabor; and yet the initial connection seemed unusually strong.

‘I finish work at seven,’ she said, ‘I want to show you some nice buildings in Riga that you won’t find on your own. Come back then.’

We must have spoken seven sentences but it felt as though we’d known each other for seven months. Latvian time was speedy, I was learning, Dzintra was teaching me. She continued into the building and I went out; and as I walked up the street I felt certain it was for that moment in the doorway that life’s course had brought me to the Baltic. I’d come to meet her.

On the Daugava River not long before it reaches the sea, the Latvian capital is the big city of the Baltic States. Of course its old town is well-endowed with cobblestone squares, churches and secret laneways; with faces, with golden roosters four floors up watching the sky; and a black cat, back arched in protest at being left out there on the peak of a roof. Of course there are streams through parks and on the railings of the little bridges are the permanent padlocks the Russians affix as a symbol of binding love; there’s a small castle and crowds on the streets, hopping on and off the sky blue trams that cross the Daugava bridge like scuttling insects. 

After a few hours with the usual trappings of Rigan life, wandering around, I made my way back towards the Academy. I was early by two hours and thought it’d be a bit boring to wait, although there was the Soviet-style market to look through, on the left side of things, where they still sold milk scooped up by apron wearing women, with ladles from big metallic urns. Nor was I entirely sure where my apartment was, so to go and wait there would have been a gamble. I only hoped I’d find it later. I had the keys.

I met Dzintra before I got to the Academy, under the railway bridge. ‘I left work early,’ she said. I suppose she’d felt I was on my way, I can say now. It was our second chance meeting.

True to her word she showed me beautiful streets of grand old buildings that I wouldn’t have found, up around Elizabetes iela to the north of the old town.

Now, when she tells people how we met they say, ‘You shouldn’t have done that! It might be dangerous!’ I’ve told her I agree and she shouldn’t do it again. But what people don’t properly imagine is how well we knew each other by then. If the first seven sentences were seven months, by the time we’d seen the best of the buildings at least three years had passed in speedy Latvian time. We were not strangers when she issued the invitation to stay at her house, as long as I didn’t mind if it was small and Soviet and featured a marginally malfunctioning bathroom.

It was a tempting offer but I had keys in my pocket and it’s not every day a private apartment for ‘whenever you are in Riga’ finds you. It was not something I wanted to quit, so I said ‘No’.

But of course, if you let it the world has ways to correct the decisions you get wrong. Wilful interference of the human-brain kind can only destroy the far better plans. Especially in Latvia, let the season take you by the hand.

This story continues here: Potato and Toothpaste Travel




The meeting at the Latvian National Academy of Science can be a nice precursor to finding memories in a waterfall, sort of eating dog due to a lack of fishing net casting skills, or meeting the Chittagonian whistler.



This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Latvian National Academy of Science

A Place to Stand

Village near Mongla, 1996

with guest writer Reja Ali Mobarak.

Bangladesh has changed, but we remember 1996.  Reja Ali Mobarak wrote his part in Bangla and the writers together translated it.

It was of cottage and mansion dripping with subtropical weathering, Khulna Town.  Soil and earth, the old buildings brought charm.

A simple archway on the footpath read ‘Hotel Sun King’ in metallic letters.  Before entering, I invited the guy from the bus to share tea and samosa, behind a curtained doorway across the street.  It was Ramadan.  We had endured his constant chatter for many hours; from the long, unbroken journey from Chittagong we were unshaven and exhausted.  He reclined and talked as I went to the counter to deliver up the few-taka bill.

***

I used to transport live baby chingri from my home in Hatiya to Foila.  We are lower middle class although my father was the union chairman.  The chingri business used to see out the winter months.  It was seventeen years ago.

I bore the yoke of village politics that caused my father’s strokes and the burden of maintaining the family that belongs to the eldest son was weightier than my age.  Sometimes life must run against the current.  While waiting for the commission agent in Foila to pay me, I came to Khulna.  My business partner Nazmul, from Khulna, had invited me many times; yet I chose the independence of a cheap hotel called Sun King.

In the mornings Nazmul would come.  By night, at his house, his mother would feed us.  I’d seen the pens of his chicken establishment.

The Sun King manager was old with thin, grey hair and gaps in his teeth.  We’d found the habit of sharing iftar together, the evening meal to break the fast.  It was still a few hours but I was counting, relaxing on the sofa under the window at the top of the stairs, in the small space that was barely a reception area.  The manager sat on a stool behind his pint-sized bench in the corner.  

I was sitting, with nothing to do, when I saw two fair-skinned foreigners and one Bangladeshi come up the stairs with too much baggage.  They asked the manager for a room and I stood, moved a few paces closer.  I was curious.

***

Language was a frustration.  I wanted to bargain with the manager directly but the non-stop-talker had the advantage.  I didn’t trust him much so after a few sentences I did what I wanted to do all day.  I told him to be silent.  I asked for a room, the koto, the how much, we’d already learnt.  The manager wrote a figure on a paper scrap: 150 taka for a double.  It was cheap; but we nonetheless went into auto-bargain.  It was South Asia and we believed that’s what one did.

As usual we turned to walk away in faux outrage.  But the old man didn’t shower our retreat with better offers.  We didn’t proceed beyond the first landing on the way to the ground floor.

***

It was strange: the manager told them the price and they walked away!  We always thought bideshis stay five-star, like at the Sonargaon in Dhaka.  I hadn’t had much experience with bideshis but because my father was Chairman they used to come to the house sometimes from the Red Cross.  I remember they’d sit at the table on the veranda and chat in English.  From a young age I was expected to serve their tea and my father would encourage me to speak English.  But I felt shame so mostly I was silent.

I remember how awkwardly they sat, straight-backed and serious, their faces tense.  It was nothing like when the neighbours would visit.  But these two, there was something different about them: they’d come to such a standard hotel, they were unshaven with messy hair.  I wanted them to stay there.  Fortunately they came back and I looked one of them in the eyes and in poor English said the room rate was okay.

***

That guy who’d been hanging out in reception said the room rate was okay.  I took a brief moment to study his face: he had very green eyes. 

But I was looking for honesty and we couldn’t rely on the non-stop-talker.  It’s really very odd but examining his face it wasn’t only that I thought he was probably honest: in some way I recognised it.  I told myself not to be stupid.  But we took the room.

***

I don’t know why he believed me and didn’t bargain further, but as they filled in the book at the counter I couldn’t help it, I read over their shoulders to know where they were from.  In the ‘Citizenship’ column he wrote ‘Australian.’

***

He read over my shoulder as I filled out the Register.  It was a bit rude.

***

When we talked to foreigners we felt as citizens of a poor country and because of the language problem in communicating, shame; but when he was bargaining with the manager I did not feel like that. When I saw him at first I felt as though I already knew him. I don’t know why.  He finished the work around taking the room and wanted to go there.  I don’t know much English but I asked him to share iftar with us.  He understood my offer easily, without even trying.

It was astonishing.  After about an hour he came from his room wearing lungi!  My eyes fell open at the sight: inside I was thinking, ‘maybe this foreigner doesn’t hate Bengalis.’  He sat on the sofa as the adhan sounded for iftar to begin.  The manager had chopped onions and chilli, mixing oil with muri.  I’d brought a few sweet jilabis and some piazu.

It was all laid out on a sheet of the day’s news. Nazmul was late and the bideshi’s friend was still sleeping.  He didn’t know how to eat with his hands and bits of the muri mix were sticking to the sides of his fingers and falling on the floor; although he didn’t understand Bangla he helped me to communicate.  He spoke slowly and understood my meaning when I knew the English words were wrong.  It made me so happy!  I wished to speak to him more after iftar but I didn’t know what he felt.

***

It was the only day in Bangladesh when I had a strong desire never to speak to another Bengali: a product of the non-stop-talker and the long journey.  Sleep was made complicated by the mosquitoes that came in through the big hole in the wall.  I decided to fight them no longer and got up, still with zero desire to connect with locals.  I didn’t want to start with the ‘country?’ and work our way up to the amount of my father’s salary.  Yet the idea of travelling was to meet people and learn something; and if I’d always maintained such a negative attitude we would have missed out on so much.  So when I saw him sitting on the sofa under the window and there being nothing else to do, my objections softened.  I decided not to judge him solely on the rudeness of having looked over my shoulder as I’d signed in. 

It wasn’t my first iftar. I saw him watching how I ate with my hands and was embarrassed for my lack of skill.  Afterwards we heard shouting from the street below.  Through the window we watched a really angry mob pass.  They were punching the air with fists clenched, chanting slogans, holding banners I couldn’t read.  It must’ve been related to the upcoming election.  Many Bangladeshis had spoken about politics. 

***

BNP was attempting to hold an election but Awami League was set to boycott. We watched an opposition protest march down the street.  I did my best to explain things from my perspective. He shared his experiences of Bangladesh, good and bad.  I felt so much shame when he said some Bangladeshis asked him for a visa, or tried to cheat him, that I could not look him in the eye. But it was great to hear that despite his young age he had visited many countries and it was rare how hospitable Bangladeshis were. On average he had quite a good idea about Bangladesh. What was stranger was that some ideas coincided between us.

Near Mongla, 1996

***

He told me about his family, his village in Hatiya and his business.  I’d seen Hatiya from the ship.  It was an island lit by dim kerosene light in the darkness.

We spoke of Australia but his questions came like a river, naturally and without being boring.  When he spoke about local politics without invitation water rose in my eyes and I only hoped he wouldn’t notice.  It wasn’t that he said anything new but as we were nearing the end of our stay in Bangladesh I suppose I had already started processing and there was this insurmountable disjunct between what seemed to be the suffering of poverty, and on top of it the political tensions, with the hospitality, even happiness that seemed in Bangladesh to be as common as earth.  In Sydney it is rarer.

The strangest part was that although his English wasn’t great, to comprehend his meaning was without strain.  In some things we thought similarly.  It made an impression: how could two people with entirely different backgrounds see the world so much the same?  I knew him.

He invited me to dinner but said we’d have to wait for his business partner Nazmul to arrive because they’d planned to hold a business meeting first. 

Nazmul was a young guy dressed in impeccable neatness from hair part to polished shoes.  Surprisingly he said I could sit in on the business meeting; I think he didn’t wish to leave me waiting alone.  So the three of us went to his room and found space between the bed and the chair that belonged to the little desk.  The room had no window; but it also had no hole in the wall. 

I thought it would be boring; but as they started conversing in Bengali I discovered a smile:  how absurd it was to be at a meeting between a Bangladeshi prawn seller and a chicken farmer.  The unfathomable Bengali language wanted to make me laugh!  I felt so privileged and fortunate and I had not overcome those feelings when he said quite suddenly their meeting was done.  ‘Are you sure you’re done?’ I laughed.  The meeting had lasted less than five minutes.

Dinner was biryani something at the hotel across the street.  I tried to pay the bill but there was no way he’d let me.  ‘I’ll get my own back,’ I thought happily.

***

I wanted to talk to him all night but I thought he would think badly if I talked too much, that I would disturb them. So we decided instead to visit the Sundarbans together and I would meet them at Mongla port the following afternoon. Afterwards I imagined I should have gone with them in the morning but mistakenly I thought they would mind it, as if I was a loafer.  I told them I had other business meetings, thinking I should go to Foila for money. 

***

I’d wanted so much he should come with us to the Sundarbans but it could hardly be expected he’d be able to just drop his business.  I asked a few too many times but lastly decided to press further would be rude.  But he agreed to meet us in the afternoon. I hope he hadn’t felt obliged.

A clod of earth was Khulna Town, earth connecting, the earth that brings a new place to stand.

find the elements
                          air
                     fire
             water
      earth
ether


This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: A Place to Stand