A Musical Travel Tribute

First, a caveat: the contents of this post are in no way intended to persuade people to listen to any of the below-mentioned songs, artists, or bands. I am not pretending to be a music connoisseur. In fact, before you read any more, you should know the following in order to judge accordingly:

1. The only Christmas songs I will willingly listen to are by Wham! (and I write Wham with an !) and Run-DMC.

2. Lately, I cannot stop listening to Jay-Z's 'Dirt Off Your Shoulder" and Run-DMC's 'It's Tricky' because I think both songs are awesome.

3. Regarding the Ray LaMontagne songs 'Hold You in My Arms' and 'You Are The Best Thing': I think any guy who sings them to me would be subjected to my immediately getting down on one knee and proposing.

So there ya go. That's me and music. Well, not exactly. Some music becomes inextricably linked to places. I hear a specific song, 'Cliffs of Dover' for example, and I am immediately transported back to my adolescent self sitting in my Isuzu Trooper in the parking lot of Baird's Store  (no, it's not that kind of parking lot memory) where a friend and I were hanging out listening to music while waiting for another friend to arrive. Music can make memories rise from the dusty storage of my mind. That's what this post is about.

Most people around my age remember their first-ever album, and I am no different (The Muppet Movie soundtrack on vinyl; before you laugh or judge, I was only 7).  I even remember the first CD I listened to in my then brand new portable CD player. I was living in Tokyo at the time, the city where people breathe technology, where I had a cell phone that was years more advanced than any cell phone my friends had back in the U.S. But, foregoing music technology, I listened to music on a Sony Walkman.  I was finally convinced to take the plunge into the 21st century (it was 2001) and retire the cumbersome, outdated Walkman.  One day, I took the Yamanote train line to Akihabara, the neighborhood to buy electronics in Tokyo, where I purchased a Sony Discman.

Akihabara (photo from Wikitravel)

And then I bought the newest G. Love and Special Sauce CD: Electric Mile.  I put it in my Discman, pressed play, and immediately heard this: "It could be so nice but the world is not ready, yeah. It could be so nice but the world is not ready yo. Whether you're a black man, or you're a white man, or you're from England or from Japan." As soon as he sang "or from Japan," I was hooked. Since I actually was in Japan, the song had some meaning to me, as lame as that sounds. Thus, the song became my Tokyo-train-platform-walking song. And my walking-home-from-the-train-station song.  I felt so cool to have a new Discman and jam out in line on the crowded train platform. Yea, you don't need to tell me just how uncool I really was; just let me have the memory.

 

There I'd be, bopping along to G. Love, right before being shoved into the most crowded space I ever willingly entered on a daily basis, a train car on the Saikyo-sen. Below is an example of exactly how crowded it was. And, yes this did actually happen. Everyday.

 

Before I became an expert at napping on packed train cars in Tokyo, I took my first trip driving solo across the United States. I was 22 or 23 at the time, freshly graduated, with a DJ friend who made me several mix tapes for the ride.  I had a brand new car, gas was as low as $1/gallon, and the entire country stretched out before me. I listened to his tapes over and over again; how could I not repeatedly listen to a tape he had titled 'Cuts For Ya Butt'?

I listened to it so many times, and I drove by so many cornfields in Nebraska and Iowa, that now when I see this:

from: http://www.ecofriend.com/

             I hear this:

 

Nearly everyone listens to music while driving, so I'm assuming we all have similar types of associations with places we've driven by or to or through.  I also assume that all runners who listen to music while running can hear a song and remember a place they ran. When I lived in Costa Rica, I rarely deviated from my usual running course. The reason for that was because my running route looked like this:

I didn't want to run anywhere else. Ever. So every other day, I made the easy downhill run to the beach, ran the length of the beach and back, and proceeded to run back up a really steep hill to home. The hill was so brutal, in fact that 1) I never took pictures of it, and 2) I made a special playlist on my iPod entitled 'Hill to Home,' with songs competing for my billing as the best song to listen to while tackling the hill. The winner?

 

 

 

I made it up that hill  every time.

 

 

Nightmares and the bear that almost got me

What makes us wake up one day and begin living our lives differently than the previous day? Sure, maybe people don’t stick with their New Year’s resolutions or to the promises made to loved ones that today will be the last cigarette. And maybe our public announcements that we are writing a book (um…why yes, it is continuing to write itself!) don’t quite act as the catalyst of change we were hoping for. But sometimes, for some reason, something clicks and we change the way we are living. For real. And for good.

I imagine that a near-death experience might be an impetus for change. Or an actual death – of a loved one or even a stranger, someone you saw every morning at the newsstand as you walked by with a coffee on your way to work.  Then again, like so much of life, there might be the ironic twist that perhaps such events cause a person to remain static, stuck like a deer in headlights, in life.

While traveling and living abroad, I’ve had enough experiences during which I thought I might not make it to see the next day’s sunrise. Any time I was in a car in the Philippines, I considered the possibility of death. My boyfriend at the time and I would sit in the backseat, stare straight ahead in fear and hold hands tightly. There was one point where we leaned in and confessed our love to each other, whispering intimately amidst whatever chaos we felt was going to soon kill us.

Then there was the time in Japan. I was living on the north island of Hokkaido and decided to go hiking alone one weekend. I drove to a trailhead where I saw a lot of signs posted around the parking lot but no other cars. Since I was just learning to very slowly read only simple Japanese, I didn’t want to spend the time to decipher the gist of the signs. So I ignored them. It was about 30 minutes into my hike that I heard the first sound. A low grumble that proceeded to get louder and louder until I realized: there was a bear in the woods on the right side of the trail. Slowly, I turned around and without looking back walked the very long 30 minutes back to my car. I got in, locked the doors, and realized my entire body was shaking. That’s when I read the signs, which stated emphatically: Warning! Bears! People don’t enter! (Or something like that.)  Death-by-bear escape #1.

There was only one time abroad as a child that I felt death nearly grab me. I used to go to the Caribbean with my family when I was growing up. I played on the beach a lot and adored the water. But once a wave hit me while I wasn’t paying attention, and I was hurtled and spun around underwater without knowing which way was up. At that time, I could feel my body moving fast but my mind slowing down. It was like watching baby bunnies slowly hopping about while listening to hardcore music: totally disparate and unexpected yet oddly heightening the senses. I thought I was going to die. Clearly, I didn't.

For me, the actual momentous impetus didn’t happen with any of these or other near-death experiences; it came in a dream. Well, more like from a series of nightmares over the course of a few nights. And no, I did not finally let my love of Frankenstein and Mary Shelley get the better of me. Because, again, this isn’t about the changing of my writing habits at all -- “I write when the spirit moves me”, ya'll -- but rather about my financial future. And let me be honest and tell you this: those were some dark nightmares I had. Like locked in the basement of a nursing home at the age of 5 kind of dark.

However, we all wake up, don’t we?  After my subconscious found a way to turn the idea of my financial planning – which consists of little more than cotton candy and crayon drawings – into horror-filled scenes of the future, I woke up: literally and figuratively. I tend to forget that the catalyst to any change I ever want to make is simply me. We have the control to remake our habits, to take at least some step to be the person we want to become, to act in ways we admire. “Our own life has to be our message.” We shouldn’t rely on other people to propel us toward this, shouldn’t wait for an accident to push us into action. It takes effort to change and to start that change now. But I want to live in a way that won’t give me nightmares.

---

Quotes courtesy of William Faulkner and Thich Nhat Hanh

Bad vs. Good, Travel Edition

Anyone who has traveled knows that setbacks can occur. Sometimes flights get cancelled or luggage gets lost. Sometimes the hotel is so noisy that you're awake all night. Or maybe the person next to you on a long flight is snoring so loudly that you can’t get any sleep yourself. Also, there are those rainy days when a bus window just won’t close all the way and you get rained on for hours.

Indeed, everyone has had a little setback when traveling, right? But, has anyone had all of the above (and more) in just a few short days? My last couple of blog posts have been showing you the honeymoon side of traveling; I mean, I seduced you with baby elephants and lion-petting. But now it's time to see how the seduction of the honeymoon stacks up against the ugly. That's right, it's time for a match of Bad vs. Good, Travel Edition.

Saturday, 10 December 2011

With bus ticket in hand, early this morning I walk the 10 minutes in the rain to the bus station from the hostel in Livingstone. I spent more money to buy a ticket for the ‘executive’ bus today (which basically just means I get an assigned seat instead of having to get to the station hours early to grab a good seat). I board the bus, hand the conductor my ticket, and sleepily watch him change my seat number. “Huh…I wonder why he did that,” then sit down in the new seat which is completely wet. I jump up, look at the window; it's opened a bit and when I try to close it, no luck. It’s stuck. So I take my towel out of my backpack and put it on my seat. Problem solved. I think I’m pretty clever…

And then…it doesn’t stop raining. I’m getting wet, with the rain coming in the window that won’t shut all the way, but I think it’s not so bad: my iPod is charged, and I had coffee this morning. All is good, albeit slightly wet. And then, at another bus stop, I get a new seat neighbor. He smiles, looks at my towel on the seat, reaches across me, and shuts the window. Huh. So it closes after all. Imagine that.

He is a Lebanese guy who lives in Zambia; he talks to me most of trip, buys me Pringles and loads of chocolate, and is genuinely nice. (Did I mention he bought me chocolate?)

Nice guy: 1. Rain: 0.

Once in Lusaka, I go to the hostel where I stayed just a few days earlier, when I was on my way to Livingstone. However, when I find out my room is the same room as last time, I almost leave. It’s early – just 2 p.m. at this point – which means a few hours to find a new place before dark. Seeing me about to leave, the staff member assures me – in fact, she promises me – that it will be quiet tonight. Last time wasn’t too too bad; it’s just that this particular room is a stone’s throw distance away from the bar (actually, more like a feather’s throw). With no A/C or fan in the room, the windows need to be open, just to cool down the room enough to sleep. 

Once she makes the promise, I trust her – mistake of my life #193,400,201. So I stay. I make arrangements with a taxi driver to pick me up at 3:30 a.m. to take me to the bus station the next day, for the 5 a.m. bus to Lilongwe, Malawi. Thus, by 10 that night, I want to be able to get some sleep. But there’s loud dance music playing and people talking at the bar. It is Saturday night after all. I close the windows, but it doesn’t help much. Around midnight, the music stops. “YAY!” I think for about five seconds, right before the huge TV above the bar is turned on to a soccer match – and based on the continuous yelling and booing and cheering from the people at the bar, it is quite a soccer match.  Around 2, it finally quiets down, just in time for me to get an hour of sleep. Except at this point, I can't sleep.

Noisy hostel: 2. Sleep: 0.

Sunday 11 December 2011

A couple hours later, at 4 a.m., I am on a bus slated to leave at 5. But it doesn’t wind up leaving until 6:30. Now that’s the Africa I know! I’m super grumpy for most of the morning (no sleep + no coffee + an extra 2 ½ hours on a bus does that to me…okay, mostly just the lack of coffee), so I just try to nap and listen to music. At the Zambian/Malawian border, with most of the trip behind me, I start to perk up and actually talk to some people. But first, I discover something sad. Really, really sad. 

At immigration, there is a huge book that each person must write in before showing his/her passport to an official. The book is like the biggest wedding guest book ever, if guest books asked for passport numbers and nationalities and addresses and length of visits. And, because I’m on a bus with a lot of other people, there’s a chaotic mass of people waiting to write in the book. No line. No order. You just sort of politely nudge your way in when you can. Except, because I went and peed when I first got off the bus, I’m now behind about ten nuns and five old ladies, and I don’t feel right about nudging them even slightly. So, I give up and assume I’ll be the last to sign the book. 

I’m trying so hard to be patient, but it is taking so long, and I start wondering why it's taking so long. As I get closer and watch several people trying to write their information, I realize something: they can’t read or write very well. Or at all. So it takes them at least five minutes apiece to read and write what I am able to do in seconds. 

You'd think that realization makes me more patient. But sadly, no.  Not wanting to wait any longer, thinking the bus will leave without me, and wanting so badly to get out of the cramped little room that houses this book and away from the realization (and guilt) that I’ve been getting impatient because of illiteracy, I do something kind of rude: as an elderly woman is slowly writing her name on one page of the book, I find a space at the bottom of the opposite page, draw in my own boxes, and write my information. It takes me less than 30 seconds. I leave as the woman is still writing her name. A couple of people look at me and smile. But I think the whole thing is sad.

Illiteracy rate: 10. Language teacher: 0.

But then I meet Ru-shan.

Funny Dutch guy: 1. Bad day on the bus: 0.

And I find out my friend (also an English Language Fellow, or ‘ELF’ if you will) will pick me up at the bus station in Malawi…and I discover that the Dutchman is staying at the same lodge in Lilongwe that night, as is the other ELF...and I get completely dissed by a Brit later that night (if you’d talked to the guy, you’d agree this is a plus).

Late night drinks with an ELF and a Dutchman: 10. Exhaustion from staying awake for over 40 hours: 1.

And then, after a very lovely Monday spent in Lilongwe, I assumed the competition was over. Until Tuesday. When the opposition came back. And came back strong.

Over the hills and far away

12 December 2011

Settling down. Most of my friends have given up on the idea of my doing this and instead have begun to advise me to find someone with as much wanderlust as I have, as if that would fulfill the societal obligation of ‘settling down’ in at least the coupling part of the equation.  It’s a good idea – in theory.  Because trying to date someone when you know either you or he will be moving on soon is difficult to do, especially without sounding psycho and needy:

“Hey, so, I know we just met an hour ago, and today I’m heading back here and you’re heading back there, but, um…wanna jump into a long-distance relationship?”

“Uh…(I would anticipate a long silence here)…uh…(if he’s nice, he’s probably thinking of how to break it to me gently that I’m completely insane)…uh…”

Exactly. So, although I know my friends want me to be happily coupled while moving around the world, it’s just not going to work out.

Plus, the non-coupled me finds it quite lovely to be able to say, “I want to go to Botswana tomorrow” and know that I can. And will. Which is exactly what I did the night I came back to the hostel in Livingstone after walking around the Zambian bush with lions all afternoon.

At 7:00 the next morning, I was sitting in a van with five other people (1 from the U.S.,  1 from the UK, 1 from the Netherlands, and 2 from Japan), being driven to the border between Zambia and Botswana. Going from Zambia to Botswana is fantastic for a few reasons. First, it’s crossing a border, and I get a little thrill every time I set foot in a new country. Second, the border crossing at this location is done by boat. In Zambia first, zip across the Zambezi River, and then set foot in Botswana. And finally, this is the area where four countries meet: Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. Although there is no actual legal quadripoint, it’s pretty satisfying to be in a boat on the Zambezi and have the driver point out the landmass of each of the four countries.

The boat to cross the Zambezi River between Zambia and Botswana

Once on land in Botswana, our guide whisks us through immigration quickly – we don’t even have to wait in line. We pile into a safari jeep and get driven to a little café that seems like it could have been in the US: Led Zepplin is playing on the stereo, and coffee and muffins await us. We eat and then walk a short distance to the boat that we take for our river safari. 

 We immediately begin to see flocks of birds, birds perched on trees along the banks, and lots of hippos which are of course still much loved by me. They're just so big and cute (and vegetarian!). And I think I like anything that is related to whales. Plus, random hippo fact: hippos can hold their breath for 5 minutes underwater.  

Snake bird -- named because its neck can resemble a snake

"Eating 150 pounds of grass each night makes me sleepy."

We also encounter many crocs during the trip and always get a little too close for my comfort. Sure, I'll almost get the group of us trampled by elephants by leaning out of the jeep to try to pet one as a herd walks dangerously close to the jeep, but I still cringe at being five feet from a croc.

 

Random croc fact: crocodiles open their mouths (like in the above picture) to release air. Crocodiles don't have sweat glands, so this is the way they cool themselves down, by panting and releasing heat through their open mouths. They sometimes even sleep with their mouths open.

After the river safari, we head back to the café where lunch -- and more Led Zepplin -- awaits us. I've reapplied sunscreen about five times already, but when I look in the mirror in the bathroom at the café, I can already see myself starting to get sunburned. The sun is hot and powerful in this area of the world.

The afternoon is a driving safari in Chobe National Park, which is touted as having one of the largest concentration of game animals in all of Africa.  Halfway through our safari, and I don't agree with the statement about game animals. What I think is meant is: highest concentration of impala in all of Africa. Because that's what we see a lot of. And not much else. At this point, the highlight has been the huge dung beetles seen rolling dung. The males do this to attract the females. From our tour guide, random dung beetle fact: the larger the ball, the more attractive the male is to the female (yes, we all started laughing when he told us this); if the male rolls a tiny ball, then the female thinks the male is lazy.

Our guide tells us that we are halfway done and will be heading back, taking a different route than the way we came in. The guy from the Netherlands is really disappointed, as he wanted to see at least one animal from the 'Big Five' today.  I tell him that I feel our luck is about to change; why I say this, I'll never know. But I'm right. Our luck is about to change. In a big way.

First, we round a bend and find a herd of elephants that begin to walk straight toward the safari jeep. And there are babies which sends us all into oohing and ahhing because those things are just super cute.

 

  

We're all happy after that, but like I already wrote, our luck changed a lot, and as we're heading down one of the dirt roads to exit, we meet another safari jeep with a bunch of women who only say to us in as an excited tone as I've ever heard: "TEN! TEN! TEN!" Not even knowing what we're about to see ten of, we insist that the driver turns down the road they just came from. And we quickly discover that they mean lions. Lounging about.

They are all lounging until one hears something, perks its ears up, and starts stalking off, after an impala that we have spotted. We're enthralled already but when a hyena begins to creep up behind the lion, waiting for his turn after the kill, we're nearly ready to camp the night there. Our tour guide reminds us that the immigration office at the border has a closing time and that we now really have to go, so we reluctantly leave the scene, assuming that the lion got fed in the end.

Our guide is speeding down the dirt trails, racing his way back to the park exit, but we yell for him to stop when we see two young giraffes on the side of the trail, almost posing for us. 

 

We really have to get to the border at this point, so we race back out of the park, down the road, through the Botswana side of immigration, into a boat, across the Zambezi River, through the Zambian side of immigration, and into a jeep that takes us back to Livingstone. 

All in one day. All from a whim decision the night before. And from this whim and this day, I'm just not sure how I could factor in the 'settling down' part of life that works so well for so many of my friends.  Because I really like having these kinds of days.

Lions vs. Daydreams

7 December 2011

I don’t want to get soft. And I don’t mean physically. My distaste of getting soft is what led me to take a bus for 13 hours. Then another one for 7 hours, just to get to a place where I’d stay for merely a few days, after which I’d repeat the 20-hour bus journey going back. I don’t want to become a person who can’t stand to ride a bus for that long or who can’t sleep in a tent or who can’t pee in nearly any ‘toilet’ imaginable.

(Okay, there was the time at a bus station in China where I couldn’t use the public toilet, but that was only because there were no doors on the stalls and women waiting to use the toilet would stand directly in front of the stall a.k.a. in front of the person squatting over a hole peeing. Yea, not pretty. After not standing directly in front of a stall – to obviously give the person privacy – for about 30 seconds, I realized that I would never get to pee due to the fact that women were moving around me in order to stand directly in front of the stalls where women were peeing. I was getting cut out of line. So, I moved in front of a stall which meant I was standing in full view of an elderly woman struggling to steady herself as she squatted over the hole in the floor. I left. Quickly. And without peeing. Yup, that was a dreadful 4-hour bus ride.)

Getting back to bus rides: I took a bus from Lilongwe (capital of Malawi) to Lusaka (capital of Zambia) which lasted 13 hours. The bus left on time (so unusual in my experience of public transportation in parts of Africa) at 5:00 a.m.  And, although it was an uncomfortable, cramped, bumpy, and often interrupted (police stops, border stop, stops for cow crossings) ride, it wasn’t really that bad. For me, a bus ride means: naps, daydreaming, and music. It’s not often that I allow myself a really long stretch of time to do only those things. And by ‘not often,’ I think I mean ‘never’ unless I’m on a bus. So aside from the lovely opportunities to see the countryside, meet locals, fear a crash or breakdown, and impose self-dehydration, riding a bus gives me the opportunity to indulge in three of my favorite things. And when I meet a lovely person on the bus who insists on buying me multiple chocolate bars, I have all I need for a lengthy ride.

My night in Lusaka was fairly uneventful (this time – my hostel-from-hell experience in Lusaka came later), and I got on a bus to Livingstone, Zambia the next day. I must admit that it was a bit difficult to get on another bus again. But the visions of Victoria Falls kept me motivated.

I arrive in Livingstone in the evening, take a cab to the hostel, am greeted by a very friendly staff member who insists on my having a beer (okay, maybe it wasn’t hard to convince me at this point) and looking at all the available activities that I could join during my short two-day stay in Livingstone. Half a beer in, I read about petting baby lions, and they’ve got me. So the next day I make a plan to go see the Falls in the morning and go pet some baby lions in the afternoon. A quick dip in the pool and a much-needed shower later, I’m ready for sleep. 

The next day, I head to Victoria Falls. I know it’s the dry season, so I am aware ahead of time that the water levels will be really low. And they are. But the Falls are still spectacular.

The dry season and low water level allows people the opportunity to walk on top of the Falls, something that isn’t an option (without death, and I’m told by a somewhat unreliable, unprofessional ‘tour guide’ that seven people died trying to do that last year) during the rainy season. My guide, who just sort of glommed onto me when he saw me walking alone, turns out to be rather interesting, and we talk about Zambian politics and the economy for most of the time that he shows me around the Falls. With plenty of time, I get back to the hostel to eat lunch and then leave for the baby lions.

Turns out the baby lions aren’t so ‘baby.’ There are two 12-month old lions that we’re able to follow around the bush and pet when they are calmly lying down. The non-profit organization is trying to increase the declining population of lions by breeding them and then training the bred lions to survive. The lions are on a huge tract of land – not fenced like a zoo but actual African bush land – and a trainer goes out ahead of us to find the lions, walkie-talkie back to us so the second guide can then bring us to the lions. We then follow the lions wherever they walk, and we do this all afternoon, watching them climb trees, get lazy and lie down, and play with each other. 

I’m absolutely terrified at first. I mean, I’m walking alongside a wild animal that could kill me if she wanted to, and I could do very little to stop her. The guides are carrying very thin sticks, no guns. So when one of the lions turns and stares at me while I’m petting her, I want to scream like a baby and run away. But I just keep petting her, thinking, “good kitty, good kitty, good kitty." 

After what seems like way too long, she lazily turns her head back, gets up, and walks away from me. And I'm still alive. Which is very obvious to me because my heart is pounding fast and loudly. But after that, I'm no longer scared. It's kind of like getting lost. Once I get lost trying to find a place, I always know how to get there after that.

So you see, even more than being on a bus listening to my iPod, eating a Mars bar, and watching the Zambian landscape move by me, this kind of experience is what keeps me from getting soft.