Photoblog

Empty Dorm Beds

Joel — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:36:25 -0500

Funny, how even six empty beds in a dorm room, filled the night before with people who said hello and meant it, can leave one with a deep sense of hollowness, loss. Across the globe—and across the heart that dwells on the globe, beating in rooms and with people— there are myriad forms of pain. Empty beds are but one.

Michelangelo in all of us

Joel — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:19:01 -0500

You wouldn’t know it from the photo, but the girl and guy above don’t care for each other much. The scene is the West Bank village of Bil’in, and the protestor (probably from Europe or the U.S.) is trying to take a shield away from an Israeli soldier. The picture almost seems gentle, and so it is not representative of what was actually happening. On the other hand, it reminds me of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” and so maybe it actually is representative of what was happening. What do the Sistine Chapel and the outskirts of a Palestinian village have in common? They are places where hands create.

Speaking of hands, just a few miles from Bil’in and many centuries earlier we’re told that Jesus, during a confrontation of his own, used his hands to create. Face to face with religious leaders and an adulterous woman they had cornered, Jesus listened as they said, “In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

What the men said was true; the law commanded that a stone, perhaps many stones, fly at this woman until she was a bloody corpse. In response Jesus bent down and used his finger to write in the earth. Straightening up a moment later he said to the leaders something like, “If any of you have lived a pure life, go ahead and hurl a rock at her.” He then bent back down and continued writing. We’re never told what he wrote, but when one by one the religious leaders had walked off and only he and the woman remained, he asked the woman, “Has no one condemned you?” No one had, and so Jesus continued, “Neither do I. Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Throughout the ages and in every place, the movements of hands—and sometimes their stillness—have left lines in sand, in history, and on people’s faces. Like the soldier and the protestor, or Jesus and the adulterer, all of us are participants in an ongoing creation, which is to say that there is a little Michelangelo in all of us. Or maybe there is a lot?

In any case, our hands create, and they are at their best when connected to a mind and heart that cares. Just ask a 2,000-year-old adulterer.

For an image of a man throwing a stone, this one a Palestinian in the village of Bil'in, click on "Anger"

Shusaku Endo's Silence as a Travel Book

Joel — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 21:25:48 -0500

One of Japan’s greatest novelists is Shusaku Endo (1923-1996). A Christian in a country where less than one percent of the population is Christian, Endo’s search for identity shaped much of his writing. He felt rejected in both his homeland (because of his faith) and then in France during the three years he studied there (because of his race). He was intimate with confusion and depression. Those who travel, whether spiritually or geographically, may relate to this man.

On his return to Japan in the 1950s, he made a stop in Palestine and discovered a Jesus who, rather than triumphant and ensconced in cathedrals, knew rejection and betrayal. Here he saw what he had been unable to see in either Japan or France, and the experience transformed him.

In 1966, Endo published Silence, a historical novel many consider his best work. Set in Japan circa 1600 (during one of the worst persecutions of Christians in history), it tells the story of a Portuguese priest journeying from Europe via Macao to Japan, where the Christian faith has been outlawed. Eventually imprisoned—and thus given a unique perspective from which to see the world—the priest observes things, including:

"These guards, too, were men; they were indifferent to the fate of others. This was the feeling that their laughing and talking stirred up in his heart. Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind."

Near the novel’s end, the weary priest has a new way of looking at the world and theology, for he has seen torture and execution and has withered under the silence of God. He has not lost his faith, however; he has only lost the faith he once had in a comfortable environment, and he now burns with a righteous anger toward a Church that judges the actions of people who live in a context that those who live in a better place simply cannot comprehend:

“What do you understand? You Superiors in Macao, you in Europe!” He wanted to stand face to face with them in the darkness and speak in his own defence. “You live a carefree life in tranquility and security, in a place where there is no storm and no torture—it is there that you carry on your apostolate. There you are esteemed as great ministers of God.”

Silence isn’t found in any bookstore travel section as far as I know (it’s usually categorized as literature or religion/spirituality), but it addresses themes found in good travel writing: dislocation, surprise, evolution of thought. It teaches us about a place, and it shows us the new eyes with which a traveler sees home.

___

My thanks to a security guard in Girón, Colombia for posing for this photo.

In the quote above, the priest offers one definition of sin. For a definiton by a character in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, click on “There is Only One Sin”.

Melting Ice and the Shape of Life (or, "Ice Ice Baby")

Joel — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:53:05 -0500

If at dawn you walk the streets of Nha Trang, Vietnam, you may see blocks of ice being hauled by modified bicycles, bound for paying customers. In looking at this you may remember your grandfather, who mangled his legs as a kid in the 1920s when he got drug behind an ice truck (if I remember the story correctly, he was trying to nab some free ice). His injuries were severe enough that when later he tried to join the military during World War II, he was refused.

Also, you may recall a footnote in David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas, in which he details how ice made its way to Panama in the mid-1800s. It’s fascinating:

The ice was supplied by the Boston and Panama Ice Company and it sold for as much as fifty cents a pound when first introduced on the Isthmus. One ship from Boston carried seven hundred tons of ice packed in sawdust all the way around the Horn to Panama City, with a loss from melting of only one hundred tons. But in the process of getting the ice from ship to land to the Panama icehouse, a distance of two miles, another four hundred tons melted. Yet such was the demand that the sale of the remaining two hundred tons paid for the voyage. Within a few years, ice on the Pacific side was being supplied by ships from Sitka, from what was then knows as Russian America.

Finally, in looking at this scene—particularly if you notice the dripping—you may consider ice as symbolic of the human condition. The ice does in a matter of hours what your body will do in a matter of decades. What begins as defined blocks commences a change of state from the moment it is released into the world. The race is on.

The scene conveys a sense of urgency, speaks to the value of time, mirrors things about yourself. You stand and watch the ice drip till the driver returns. Then you walk on toward the beach, stretching your own block of flesh and spirit further into space and time, feeling it drip. And as you settle into the sand to watch a blazing sunrise, this is what you hope: that you will have more value than even the best cargo from Boston or Sitka, and that one day when you finally die all the way, you’ll be nothing like the wasted puddle on asphalt.

Then I Pray, in Saigon

Joel — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:35:24 -0500

In the photograph above, a young Vietnamese woman prays in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Saigon, built by the French in the late 1800s. In her face we glimpse something about prayer. And in the lines below, excerpted from a poem entitled "Six Recognitions of the Lord" by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, we also glimpse something of prayer:

I know a lot of fancy words.
I tear them from my heart and my tongue.
Then I pray.

What Fortune-tellers Cannot Predict

Joel — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:23:25 -0500

In his book A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East, Tiziano Terzani recounts a scene in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in which he is at a fortune-teller’s house, sitting in a dark room lit by one oil lamp. Over the door and written in chalk (in Khmer, I presume) is, “Carnal passion, jealously, violence, drunkenness, intransigence, ambition: if you cannot rid yourself of even one of these ills, you will never be at peace.”

A woman, accompanied by her young daughter, has come to the house seeking the fortune-teller’s advice on how to go about selling a plot of land. The fortune-teller offers his thoughts. Next, the woman asks him to say something about her daughter’s future. Terzani writes:

The [fortune-teller] said that for this they would have to return the following week: it is not easy to predict the fate of so young a girl. That struck me as fair: the less past one has, the harder it is to predict one’s future. There are no signs; the face is without any history, and the fortune-teller, who is often nothing more than an instinctive psychologist, has little to go by.

Terzani’s book is a delight for how it weaves together local culture and history with his own wisdom and reflections. In this section the unwillingness of the fortune-teller to speak of the child’s future struck me as poignant. I could picture the smooth face and bright eyes of the little girl, reflecting a future yet to be written, too vague to be guessed. We who are older may wish to help shape the future of those who are young, but we cannot predict what lies ahead. There is a great mystery here.

The picture above is of a young boy, not a girl, but he too is in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. His face is smooth, his future uncertain. He is being formed by a place and culture that he didn’t choose—as none of us do, at least in our early years—and his face, his manner of speaking, and maybe even his gait will increasingly reflect what is around him and how he responds to it. Perhaps, like the child in the wheelchair being pushed behind him, he will lose a leg. Or perhaps, like his relative whose bicycle rickshaw he is sitting in, he will spend his days using his legs feverishly to make a living. All that is certain is that his face will change, and that it will increasingly tell a story. And, of course, that those around him will help shape it.

For my recent Cambodia blog entry at vagablogging.net, click on "Meeting the maimed on the road".

Refugees: People who know Travel is rooted in Travail

Joel — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:33:24 -0400

Indonesia’s Krakatoa may have had its most historic explosion in August 1883, but thanks to years of civil conflict in Sri Lanka it managed to find its way back into the news this week. “About 260 Sri Lankan asylum-seekers detained in Indonesia have threatened to blow up their wooden boat if the navy forces them to disembark,” reported the AFP. Their vessel, which had been en route to Australia, was stopped in Indonesian waters near Krakatoa.

Reading this story—and any number of other stories about people undertaking dangerous journeys out of desperation—may remind one that many of the world’s travelers aren’t backpackers, explorers, or jet-setting businessmen; they are refugees. Other writers have pointed out the etymological connection between the words “travel” and “travail”, but surely few understand the link better than refugees. Travail, according to one dictionary, is

1.   painfully difficult or burdensome work; toil
2.   pain, anguish or suffering resulting from mental or physical hardship
3.   the pain of childbirth

The UNCHR annual report released earlier this year put the worldwide refugee population at 42 million. Most are internally displaced, meaning they’ve not left their country of origin but have had to move within the country. For example, there has been mass displacement in Pakistan this year because of internal conflict.

The photo above wasn’t taken at a refugee camp, on an overcrowded ship, or in a war zone, but it does represent the pain of displacement, the pain of travel when it is not entirely a voluntary undertaking. The girl is Tibetan, protesting outside the Chinese embassy in Washington DC on a spring day in 2008. I don’t know the story of her own experiences, but she was protesting with other Tibetans who would have known that travel isn’t always cruise ships, beaches, and the occasional stomach bug. For some more than others—for at least 42 million people this year—travel is firmly rooted in the word travail.

For a quick overview of the current global refugee situation, click on Mapping out refugees and asylum seekers worldwide.

The Role of Cafés in Life and Travel

Joel — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:20:08 -0400

Eric Wiener, is his simultaneously humorous and thought-provoking book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, writes:

It is a fact of human nature that we derive pleasure from watching others engage in pleasurable acts. This explains the popularity of two enterprises: pornography and cafés. Americans excel at the former, but Europeans do a better job at the latter. The food and the coffee are almost beside the point.

Like many of you—and like the Korean grad student in this photograph, taken in Bangkok—I spend time in cafés. For me it’s because I need the stimulus of caffeine as well as the stimulus of people and sound (there’s nothing so unstimulating as being isolated in a library and seeing, in a blank Word document on a computer screen, your silent reflection bouncing back at you). In the café, you can eavesdrop on conversations, ask attractive women to watch your computer while you venture to the bathroom, and, if you wish to be obnoxious, try to snort the aroma of coffee (or other things, I suppose, depending on where you’re at and what you want in your body).

The café, then, is about more than coffee. It is about people, connection, and inspiration. It is about not feeling alone even when you’re working alone. And on the road it is sometimes even about refuge. In Kathmandu, for instance, the soft chairs and rich smells were a refuge from weeks of grueling travel through northern Yunnan and Tibet (July 2004). In Istanbul the café was a refuge from hours of walking in numbing winter wind (Dec 2004). In Bangkok cafés have frequently been a refuge from midday heat (2000, 2004, 2005, and 2007). Once in Bogotá, while photographing with an expensive camera, a café served as refuge from the threat of being robbed on the street. And in Jerusalem a café even offered the opportunity to sit beside a large plate glass window (two days after a suicide bombing two blocks away) and suspiciously watch passersby on the sidewalk, imagining glass and screws ripping through your flesh and scattering it against the back counter (Jan 2002). If this last example doesn’t seem to fit the refuge category so well, ask me in person one day and I’ll explain.

Some modern travelers bemoan the current lack of blank spaces on the map, since everything is now pretty much mapped and charted and has left us with nothing “unknown” to explore (or so they say). But at least we have cafés.

Thailand's Full Moon Party

Joel — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:27:21 -0400

If you’ve ever backpacked in Southeast Asia or have undertaken casual research into the global party scene, you’re familiar with Thailand’s Full Moon Party. Whenever that lunar ball is all lit up in the heavens, alcohol and travelers wash ashore on Ko Phangan, an island in the Gulf of Thailand. Even well into the evening, vehicle headlights bear witness to the masses streaming down the steep mountain road from other parts of the island. Out to sea boat lights stretch like planes lining up at O'Hare, ferrying the anxious pilgrims from Ko Samui and the mainland. From the east and west they come: prostitutes, undercover cops, sexual predators, Russians, Thais, Europeans, and on and on and on. By midnight a stretch of sand a few hundred meters wide will fill with thousands of revelers.

And so it was that while reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, my mind fell back for a moment to the sights and sounds of Ko Phangan. I'm aware that Conrad is speaking here about the upper reaches of the Congo. Yet I couldn’t help but think, even if a little in jest, of the Full Moon Party:

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly, yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of their being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.”

If interested in learning more about the Full Moon Party, click on my story "The Backpackers' Pilgrimage: Ko Phangan", published by Perceptive Travel.

The Nablus Casbah and a Region's Violence

Joel — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:52:05 -0400

Walking through the Nablus Casbah, or Old City, was an eerie undertaking in late 2006. The reasons for this are too complex to flesh out in a photoblog, but suffice it to say that here, in the West Bank’s largest city, six years of the second Palestinian intifada and Israel’s response—on top of four decades of abusive military occupation—had left the city tense and broken. The years of violence made the air heavy, and the ingredients for the next storm—a shooting, a kidnapping, or a lethal military raid—could be felt on one’s skin. One local man bemoaned that Israel had imprisoned or killed all the “clean” fighters. Now there was no real resistance, he said, and those gun-carrying Palestinians you did see during the day were more about showing off for girls than anything. When Israeli solders entered town, they always melted away.

This photograph, taken in the heart of the old city, shows a memorial to recent “martyrs,” including men who had been involved in terrorist operations against Israel. An armed man initially refused my request to take a picture but then agreed, so long as he was not included in the frame. For numerous reasons I didn’t like this memorial. For one, the multi-dimensional humanity of the dead had, to me, been obscured by a one-dimensional glorification.

But even more I didn’t like it because it said nothing about peace, and when you are visiting a city like Nablus you yearn for things that give hope for peace, which includes (to say the least) an amount of moderation in the celebration of death, killing, and brutality. This memorial was part of a spiral, whirling around with its counterparts on the Israeli side, driving deep into the gut of one who walks streets in both Israel and Palestine. The acceptance and even extolling of violence plagues both communities. The Israeli writer David Grossman, for example, recounts in his book The Yellow Wind the following conversation with a fellow Israeli in the late 1980s:

Once, when I was on reserve duty, there was a terrorist attack in the Old City in Jerusalem, near the Rockefeller Museum, and we set up a detainment area for Arab suspects in the police headquarters. We picked up all the Arabs we caught. We brought entire truckloads. How I beat them that night! There was another reservist, a young guy, with me, and I saw that every Arab he catches, he bites hard on the ear. Actually takes a piece. I ask him why he did it, and he answered me: “So that I’ll know them next time we meet.”

And in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz earlier this year there was an article that included this paragraph:

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques—these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."

If interested in the multi-dimensional, check out the film Paradise Now, which was released in 2005 and is actually set in Nablus. Click here to see the Paradise Now trailer.