Showing posts with label jajabor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jajabor. Show all posts
Potato and Toothpaste Travel
Amber is fossilised tree resin, a yellowish, pellucid gem washed ashore by the waves of the eastern
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
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
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.
‘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 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.
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
Returning to Simplicity
Elliptical stones in granite, curved shadows tracing the
movement of the sun and parading across the dusty ground, 95 monoliths up to
3.5 metres tall, in concentric circles and first arranged six thousand years
before the Christian era: at the Cromlech of the Almendres, the value of
simplicity shines.
Tell me of lines and radial designs, of the flat top on
menhir number 8 that with the assistance of small stones may have enhanced the
observation of the equinox. Tell me of a newly agrarian society, of
hunter-gatherers exploring their megalithic selves. Tell me of religion and of
the stars looked upon with astronomical awe; and then say something of the
rocks that have faced unaided the sun and rain through the seasons of the
millennia. Tell me of the megalithic wonderland in the low hills and plains
just west of Evora, in Portugal ,
in the most rock monument-adorned region in all of the Iberian
Peninsula . Tell me how it was, four and half thousand years before
Stonehenge .
And I’ll tell you of a bicycle in that most popular design,
the Chinese pigeon that we are all familiar with today. I’ll mention the radial
spokes and wheels, pure circles; and the mechanical advantage, so clear and straightforward,
of a cog set and chain. The power of the pedal, through sun and rain can take
one back to the inspiration of simplicity.
In Evora the bicycles are gainfully employed, at least the
ones that wait in line at that shop with a prominent street view not far from
the Roman aqueduct that moulds into the buildings of the town. The bicycles are
transport sector workers, though it’s not worth mentioning a wage, but they
have accommodation and the health care, covering everything from puncture to
rusty pedal, is comprehensive. It’s a very silent, stationary touting they do, true,
but to be expected when it is well-known that bicycles have no ability of
speech; and despite having a good pair of wheels neither can they move
independently. Yet they beckon the tourist with a promise: ironically of
independence to be realised in an alignment with the rider, in moving out to observe,
in circles, the world.
The bicycle must like the prospect of an afternoon beyond
the shop; and although a minor jaunt around the sites of Evora must please, for
Evora is a world heritage site and one of Europe’s oldest cities, a longer
journey into the countryside, with that sense of freedom from flying along a
country road and off into the dirt laneways beyond the villages must be
preferred. The bicycle must like the name of Cromlech of the Almendres with its
promise of fresh air and fast, fulfilling, tiring pedalling. It’s a thirty
kilometre round trip at the least, a good run, unless the Zambujeiro dolmen is
included in the tour in which case it’s further than that.
The bicycle was used to the ways of the tourists. Often it
had to stop briefly at a random grocery store before leaving town and wait for
its rider to buy a few snacks and drinks for the day.
In the fields beyond the city, tell me of the cork oak, robust
and stunted, wrinkled and crumpled, an old man waiting at a bus stop or an old
woman too weary to share the wisdom of longevity. Tell me how the cork oaks in
the grove live for up to 250 years, how the first harvest of bark will be
twenty five years after its sapling age and how each subsequent harvest will be
at a gap of nine to twelve years thereafter. Tell me of the harvest done with
simplicity, without machinery, by hand, for the wine bottle and the cork tile
and remember to include that the Mediterranean dweller, the cork oak, cannot be
chopped and is protected in Portugal .
And I’ll tell you of the olive: that small elliptical fruit
on its silver-grey bushes lined up across the fields. For salads it’s simple
but the olive comes with a history and I’d mention that Homer’s Odysseus
crawled beneath two olive shoots and Roman poet Horace included it in his diet.
In the Quran it is a blessed tree. I’ll have you note it too that the olive
tree can live on for two thousand years.
The bicycle liked no doubt the landscape of low hills, cork
groves and olive plantations. It can be assumed it was grateful for the
megalithic pathway laid out for comers to the Cromlech and relished the chance
to pose for the camera, there on the little bridge, here by a menhir. It’s not always that the bicycle kept record
of its tours.
One hundred menhir stones, eight hundred tombs called
dolmens and four hundred and fifty megalithic village sites: there are a lot of
numbers to take in as the bicycle reaches the village of Guadalupe
The country west of Evora, no doubt is favoured by its
megalithic jewellery which came to that place perhaps because of its potential
for astronomical alignment or perhaps because it’s in that country where all
the watersheds of the Alentejo region’s three rivers, the Tagus, the Sado and
the Guadiana, meet.
The bicycle does not neglect the largest menhir, 1400 metres
to the northeast, standing isolated and alone, and at 4.5 metres, standing
tall. The bicycle continues to the Anta Grande do Zambujeiro near Valverde
village, knowing what to expect: a basic chamber, a room of rock slabs that
might have had burial or religious purpose.
As the sun descends and the elliptical shadows lengthen, the bicycle has learnt its solar signal and turns its back on the cromlech and with an ever heavier turning of its wheels heads for home. It arrives at the bicycle shop bearing that weariness of the accomplished kind that actually feels good. The sort of reward for the day of the returning to simplicity is a sense of clarity brought about by circular wheels and pedalled satisfaction.
* S * O * M * E * T * H * I * N * G *
* S * P * E * C * I * A * L *
Reminiscing with a River
O Mamoré, generous sustenance giver,
tributary, great earthworm of a river: I see you from above, pushing off and
pushing on, northwards flowing, northwards growing, like an uneven, winding hem
across the landscape. I see you from the plane, ever the direction shifter, you
turn and return, loop and loop once more – almost full circle, several times,
before you go about switching course again. Of the Beni, of the lowlands of Bolivia
O Mamoré, do you remember when we met? It
was as that open-air truck, the camion
from remote San Ignacio de Moxos, cautiously sidled down your muddy bank trying
not to overturn in a rut, as it took to the ferry on its way eastwards to the
Holy Trinity, Beni’s capital, La Santísima Trinidad. As you well know that was
towards the end of the few-hour journey, for of course Trinidad
was first established on your very bank, until, it seems, you tired of the
dizzy distraction of the town-dwellers and urged them on, was that it? Through
flooding and disease you pushed them back, not far, to relocate in 1769. What
you might not know is how in the wild ranch-and-mission country of San Ignacio
that morning I’d gone to meet the bus only to be confronted instead with that
camion, arranged with loose-fitting wooden plank benches to sit on; and it was
before we met I faced the dirt highway. But there were blue and yellow macaws
in a towering dead tree and caimans lying in the open by the ponds in the
cattle paddocks – not sure how the cows could drink there beside all those
teeth – and rheas, those South American ostriches, with purpose they went
strutting through the grasses beyond the road – and to find these animals
without even trying made Beni seem a wildlife wonderland. So it didn’t matter
about the patchy rain that fell on us or the dust kicked up that teased our
eyes. When we met, if I wasn’t smiling it’s because the wooden plank seating,
after hours, bumpy road, does little good to the posterior.
O Mamoré, what do you really think of Trinidad ? The low buildings around the central plaza, the
palm trees and the melting in the day’s heat, is it to your liking? It can be the
sound of the town – the groan of pick up trucks and the buzz of moped and
motorbike that swarms the air is unsettling but the Benianos are resourceful people,
in tank tops and jeans, removed from the centres of Bolivian power in the
Andes, neglected they may say, and proud of their lowland camba Spanish and their camba culture that inherited more from El
Andalus than from La Paz. And I need a hat for the sun is fierce. Do you know
that in the evening when the locals promenaded and moped-buzzed around the
plaza I pondered how it would be to run a little English school there?
O Mamoré, tell me how it was, the Beni, for
you saw the Spaniards arriving late, one of the last blank spots in South
America on the European maps. You knew the pre-conquest civilisations, the
people without a name who built vast canals and mounds across the savannah in a
system of agriculture unique to the Amazon basin – they fooled the scientists,
didn’t they, who thought that because Amazonian soils are infertile, despite
the jungle, humans in any numbers could not subsist there. Isn’t it strange how
they’re trying those old ways again, the farmers growing crops on mounds,
raising fish in the canals, facing the annual flooding with that prehistoric
methodology that reduces the need to slash new areas of jungle every few years
when the soils become depleted? You saw the indigenous peoples who came later, you
watched as they faced the missionaries and their languages merged, as diverse
groups they were reduced to the singular Moxeño people, old ways forgotten. Did
they really benefit from Christianity? You saw the nineteenth century rubber
boom and best of all you must know the truth of El Dorado El Dorado
O Mamoré, do you remember my little
adventure in Guayaramerín? You’ve become the Brazilian border by then, isn’t it?
And apart from that little disputed island it’s clear that on your far bank the
Portuguese starts, in the Brazilian co-town called Guajará-Mirim. So I took the
boat, do you recall? I saw how broad and fine you are –and from the heat I
wished to, ill-advised, dive into you. There was ill-ease, did you sense it? I’d
read I could enter the Brazilian town for the day without a visa and return but
it wasn’t certain what would happen. I tell you, when I went inside the
immigration building on the far bank I paused with a kind of dumb, innocent
smile waiting for the official to acknowledge me, wanting to humbly ask if
Brazil wouldn’t mind much if I slightly entered its territory for just a short
while. The official quite deliberately turned his back which I took as quiet
permission to wander past the desk and out onto the street – I’m sure that’s
what it was about – overlooking the formalities, just as he’d undoubtedly done for
foreign tourists before. I liked Brazil
O Mamoré, I found a mid-range hotel, for
water, not to stay, and inside there wasn’t a soul at reception but after some
minutes a uniformed maid, attractive, came, and all I could say, the only
Spanish I found, that I knew, that she would understand was ‘agua’ – water,
aside from the hello and thank you I managed in Portuguese. She took a bottle from a trolley, a bottle
that must’ve been destined for a bar fridge and I only wanted a glass of tap,
and I showed her, I couldn’t pay unless she would take the Bolivianos she
didn’t seem to want. She put her finger to her lips, O Mamoré, it was secret,
without language, between us – and there wasn’t much I could do. I was more
than hot and more than thirsty – she could see that. Back at the riverside I
boarded your ferry to Bolivia
Do Horses Bite?
Shhh! Do you hear it? Barely
audible? Wait… Yes, the thurram-thurram-thurram, that terrible sound, is
growing, coming, gaining ground. Onto the horses! The thunder of hooves is
ricocheting off the canyon walls. Lightning speed: they’re coming to catch us;
no time to lose!
Did you ever imagine how it would be, in
the American Wild West, in the movies? I did. Robbing a bank or a stage coach,
flying away on horseback in a hail of bullets, red-check handkerchief over the
mouth, disappearing in a cloud of desert dust? And if the trail ever became too
hot, if the sheriff was too close or the Pinkerton Detective Agency too diligent
in their hunt for the stolen loot, for the thieves and the bounty for capture,
one could always do as the infamous bank robbers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid did in 1901, and escape to South America.
What better way to experience Tupiza,
where Butch and Sundance finally met their ends, than to hire a horse and
gallop like a train, fly like the wind, through a desert canyon, past a cactus
or two? Thurram-thurram-thurram: that was the idea.
Helpful hint: of course it would be
better to know beforehand how to ride a horse.
It was just yesterday, several years
later, I was remembering that afternoon on horseback, how it had been. It was a
world away from Bolivia ,
with the steamy, monsoon Mekong idling by,
beyond the cabana. Tourists gathered to chat and sip on drinks, to take the
edge off the Thai afternoon humidity. Across the river were the distant houses
and tiny motor cars of Laos
Come to think of it, Tupiza, my first
full day in Bolivia
Still, I clambered boulders at the edge
of town, followed a goat trail past the Stations of the Cross to a hilltop. The
mountains are thousand-pleated like the inside of lung, ironic given the
altitude’s shortness of breath. To the south, three red rock houses with little
stone goat yards clung to a canyon wall; to the east, a cemetery of white
crosses, artificial flowers and tinsel. To the west, traffic uninterested in
Tupiza’s bridge drove instead along the dry riverbed.
I followed a veinlike gully that
zigzagged into the hills, in parts so narrow you could touch both walls at
once. The rocks were pebble-filled, the olive green willows lit by the shard of
late afternoon sky contrasted with rock red. Shadows climbed canyon walls. The
air was still.
There was a stand-off in that canyon, but
it wasn’t a pistol-toting Pinkerton detective that found me; rather a Doberman that
suddenly appeared from around a bend, barking ferociously and running wildly in
my direction. The canyon walls too steep to climb, I tried to recall all I knew
of dogs and did the only thing worth doing. I stood still.
Fortunately, seconds short of my leg
entering its mouth and needing several rabies shots, the dog baulked. My bluff
worked. Soon its human arrived, yelling, managing to ward it off. Did they have
wild Dobermans in the Wild Wild West?
Like me, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid started their South American adventures in Argentina Bolivia
At San Vicente outside Tupiza in 1908 came
the showdown. Trapped in a house, three soldiers of the Abaroa Regiment of the
Bolivian Army’s cavalry, the police chief and local officials sought to arrest
the fugitives. The bandits opened fire. There was a gunfight until, at 2 a.m.,
from inside the house two shots were heard, minutes apart. Two dead,
bullet-ridden bodies were later found. It appeared that one had shot the other,
who was probably already mortally wounded, before turning the gun on himself.
Tupiza: there should at least be a bit of
galloping.
Like
Butch and Sundance we were two: there was another Australian tourist, Richard. The
hostel offered a lazy triathlon: a first leg by bicycle, all downhill, the
second on horseback and the third by jeep, along a dirt road far up into the
mountains.
I had
only one question. ‘Do they have a really docile, placid horse available?’ I’d
barely ridden before. They said they did: a dirty-white horse with a kindly
disposition and his name was Sanchez.
We were
led into empty country, from a stretch by the railway into just the kind of
dry, rocky terrain where an American movie about the Wild West could be filmed.
It was picture perfect for galloping, flying off in a trail of dust. But of
course, there’s a difference between how things are imagined and reality.
Thurram-thurram-thurram,
imagined, is not always how it turns out.
Sanchez
was quite good but it wasn’t without trepidation that I sat up there on his
back. I was pretty strong on the reins, thinking he should know I was in
charge, and far short of galloping, if Sanchez even attempted a light trot,
much less a canter, I became nervous and pulled him back. In the country of
Butch and Sundance, there was a lot of slow walking that went on. On that day,
Sanchez may as well have been a donkey.
Yet
there was something more worrisome about his behaviour. He kept trying to twist
his head around towards my leg. I didn’t mind if he only wanted to sniff it but
I couldn’t be sure of his intentions so I pulled his head back to the front
with the reins, just in case. If Sanchez is the placid horse, I’d hate to try
the other ones.
‘Do
horses bite?’ I wondered.
It’s not
often that one needs to consult a horse expert. They’re not like doctors or
hairdressers that everyday people visit time to time. Even the tom-tom owning
Dhakaiyas probably know enough about horses not to spend much time consulting
experts. Indeed, should I require a horse expert I wouldn’t know how to go
about finding one.
So it
was odd that as I was re-considering Sanchez and the day in Tupiza, Annie sat
beside me. She was a British horse-riding instructor living in Hong Kong , where she taught at a riding school. She was
on holidays in Thailand
She was
polite enough not to laugh when I explained the afternoon I spent onboard
Sanchez. ‘Horses do sometimes bite,’ she said, ‘but it’s usually when you’re
standing in front. It’s very hard for a horse to twist its neck to bite when
you’re sitting on it. Maybe you were pulling on the reins too hard?’
Of
course there are rumours about Butch and Sundance. It’s said they didn’t actually
die in San Vicente. There are people who said they met them, years later,
living discreetly back in the United
States
Travel by...
or camel...
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