Musings of a Birthday Boy

This is my birthday BLOG since I have remiss writing one last year! Busy with the woes of touring and rediscoveries!

It has been a month since i have been almost out of the country each day and today is my birthday, August 5 – I really never expected to see it, but, here I am!

A good friend from high school shares the same day and year with me so we have been joking that next year, we will have a “Hawaii 5-0” themed party. She has been a friend for more than 15 years now and A LOT of fun even just to talk to – her sense of humor is soooo off-the-wall and unexpected – you HAVE to laugh.

Another friend, gay, yes gay, sent me a beautiful birthday card reminding of all my obstacles met with perseverance which he admired and then enclosed another small handwritten slip of paper:

"The Will of God will never take you
where the Grace of God will not protect you."

I was absolutely taken back by his gesture, because my friend never seemed remotely religious or spiritual. His gesture warranted a heartfelt thank-you telephone call by me and we had a lengthy conversation about life in general – mainly how it twists and turns; never going how we had planned like back in our tweenies. We have been friends for 4 years and never once discussed religion or spirituality until 2 days ago. It was nice but I then wonder – is it age that makes people, my friends namely, more spiritual? Or, as he stated so kindly – me?

This quote is now my favorite and has become my mantra, so that I can hope to understand the direction my life has now taken. And, please remember, this is my personal belief and how I am dealing with my lot in life and as I am always saying, I would never presume to pontificate my personal spirituality on anyone. I only wish to let people know what has given me that little extra ‘umph’ to keep going.

Happy Birthday to all the August babies…and everyone else too!

Life is what you make of it no matter what has happened and I for one, have a lot to conquer in this big whole wide spectrum called L-I-F-E!

Global Mendicancy

I was always considered a softie because of my ‘promdi’ ( I come from Davao City) upbringing. No street-smart Hong Kong kid would worry about bringing leftovers to poor people or dropping coins into a beggar’s cup.

I toughened up after my first childhood visit to Mainland China in the 1980s, when urchins clung onto my ankles outside Guangzhou’s train station. “Just keep walking,” my parents said. “Don’t look at them. Don’t say anything. Don’t move your hand near your pockets or bag.”

To this day, I never give money to Hong Kong street people, as many are reportedly controlled by triads with a knack for taking advantage of the disabled and geriatric, mostly from the Mainland. These victims are placed on busy street corners, where they sometimes bang their foreheads on the ground in the traditional gesture of subservience. At the most, I’ll drop off some basic food, like fruit or buns, which at least they can eat and not pass to their “bosses”.

Most awful are the “fake monks”, beggars who don robes and shaved heads, and roam the posh bars and eateries of Hong Kong’s Soho and Lan Kwai Fong areas, hoping that foreigners won’t know the difference. Not only are they dishonest, but they also give real Chinese monks a bad name - the last thing they need right now.

Hong Kong is one of Asia’s more affluent, and therefore relatively beggar- and hawker-free, cities, but they are still there, e.g. those annoying Tsim Sha Tsui fake-watch people.

What to do? How do other travelers balance being safe and not being cheated, with not being totally heartless? Do you bargain down to the last dollar with an obviously impoverished vendor? Do you give a bit of money after snapping a shot of that beggar with your expensive digital camera? What has been your worst experience?

Occasionally, I’ll get a really good local guide who will do more than drive me to tourist spots. Recently, I had the pleasure of traveling with Gede around Ubud, Bali. He redid our schedule so we wouldn’t be at the Gunung Batur volcano lookout with all the other tourists (there’s a mobbed buffet lunch to avoid), and also warned us about the aggressive hawkers. He said they were getting so bad that some guides were reluctant to bring visitors to see the volcano at all.

In Bali, they are gentler than their counterparts in parts of India or Thailand, but I still don’t like it when I feel a strange hand touch my arm, or when people crowd around so I have to make a concerted effort to ignore them. Both here and outside the beautiful Tirta Empul temple, we were followed by cries of “One dollar! Everything one dollar!” Bali’s Kuta beach was worse. Gede had the same advice my parents gave me 20 years ago. It might seem rude to ignore someone who seems both genuinely friendly and needy, but it’s worse to encourage them by oohing and aahing over their sarongs or wood carvings, and then not buy anything. Having to shoo them away after wasting their time and getting their hopes up would be ruder, and harder.

Easier said than done. One colleague told me about being mugged in India… by a monkey. An American friend was pursued so aggressively by desperate girls in Hong Kong’s red light district that he had fingernail scratches down his arm. Travelers aren’t even safe while seaborne. In Vietnam’s Halong Bay, a lady with a young child rowed up to us in a dingy and tried to guilt us into buying overpriced bananas.

I’ve never been robbed in countries I visited in Asia (knock on wood — and that’s more than I can say about New York), but my most disturbing experience happened one evening in northwest Beijing. We were getting into a taxi when two young boys grabbed hold of the open car door. They looked to me like western Chinese migrants and were in rags. They did not touch, threaten or talk to us; they just hung onto the car with one hand and motioned for money with the other. The driver inched the vehicle forward and looked to me for guidance. We drove slowly along, hoping the kids would jump, but they clambered onto that swinging door for dear life. Should he drive faster? No. I did not want to encourage kid beggars, or whatever adult had sent them out there, but I didn’t want them to be killed on the side of a dark highway either. So I gave them a wad of small bills from my pocket. (There was no way my wallet was coming out).

Francis

Travel Bugged and Bogged

Most of us are good at a few things and bad at a longer list of other things. I am a bad traveler and I wonder if others share my infirmity.

In the past few months, I have taken trips, one to New Zealand, another to England and Ireland, India and am currently in Peru.. These were the result of invitations to give a talk or participate in a conference, but in each case there was ample time left over to do the things that travelers do.

I tried, but I just couldn’t get the hang of it.

The manifestations of my incapacity were physical, although its root causes were not. In the course of a week’s touring of Ireland, all my usual little ills returned — ­mouth sores, intestinal difficulties (a euphemism), clogged nasal passages, and what one might call “strategic fatigue.” Strategic fatigue sets in whenever I enter a museum (when I saw that the display case containing the Book of Kells was surrounded by other tourists I didn’t have the strength to push myself forward) or when I approach an ancient site (at Clonmacnoise, the location of an ancient abbey, I retreated immediately to the coffee shop and never saw the ruin) or when the possibility of getting out of the car to enjoy a scenic view presented itself (I protested that it would take too much time, or that we needed gas, or something equally feeble).

The one time I tried to be a good sport and a good tourist was at Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery in Sligo, which, as far as I could tell, consisted of clumps of small rocks placed at inconvenient distances from one another. These rocks were, I was told, tombs and significant stone circles. It was lost on me, but I dutifully trudged around a large circle taking pictures. The reward for my efforts was the discovery later in the day that, sometime during our exercise in archaeological reverence, a backpack containing my ex-boyfriend's clothing and techie gadgets had been stolen from our rental car. That’ll teach me!

It was the fact that my ex-boyfriend was with me on this trip that alerted me to the extent of my problem. Hhe was supposed to have accompanied me to New Zealand, but couldn’t make it at the last moment. I attributed my inability fully to respond to the considerable glories of New Zealand to his absence. Had he been here, I told myself, I could have fed off his enthusiasm and taken pleasure from his pleasure. But in Ireland both his enthusiasm and his sense of pleasure were abundantly visible and still I couldn’t do much more than go through the motions. It’s not that I didn’t recognize the beauty of the landscape or the majesty of the monuments. I couldn’t rise to the level of appreciation they deserved.

Why not? What’s wrong with me? There are two answers to these questions. First, I just don’t care about seeing sights. In London, I ended up at Milton’s burial place by accident. I was there for a concert. Churches, famous squares, wide rivers, forests, cobbled streets, scenic vistas, castles, grand gardens . . . I go Spiro Agnew one better: when I’ve seen one, I’ve seen one too many.

But behind the lack of interest in sightseeing is something deeper and more unsettling. When I ask people what they like about traveling, they usually answer, I enjoy encountering different cultures and seeing how other people live. I am perfectly happy with the fact of other cultures, and I certainly hope that those who inhabit them live well; but that’s as far as it goes.

By definition, a culture other than yours is one that displays unfamiliar practices, enforces local protocols and insists on its own decorums. Some of them even have different languages and are unhappy if you don’t speak them. To me that all spells discomfort, and I don’t see why I should endure the indignities of airplane travel only to be made uncomfortable once I get where I’m going. As for seeing how other people live, that’s their business, not mine.

For a while, I tried to attach my feelings about travel to some honorable moral or intellectual tradition. I recalled some poems by Ben Jonson in which he praises Sir John Roe for the Roman virtue of being always the same no matter how extensively he traveled (”his often change of clime, though not of mind.”) But I had to acknowledge that the springs of my own sensibilities had more to do with parochialism and sloth than with some noble capaciousness of mind. In the end, I just have to admit that I was born without the travel gene, which probably means that I was also born without the curiosity gene, and that I’ll just have to live with it.

Or, rather, my ex-boyfriend will.