I Tend to Wander

And We're Off!

2007-03-06T02:05:00.000-08:00

We're off to Liverpool to get sleet down our necks and Guinness down our gullets.

All year, Liverpool is celebrating her 800th birthday. It's a surprise party in a lot of ways.

Packed as this battered city is with creativity, it's going to be quite a party. Dancers, artists, and musicians are already performing, frequently in public spaces, pirouetting through bus stops and train stations, suddenly and charmingly bringing zest to an already pretty springy city.

The shopping streets are full of attractive bescarved and booted people going to plays and to see the Liverpool Philharmonic, talking on tiny telephones in cafes and art venues. They're also whooping it up in magnificent pubs with great histories, where the ales are made in the basement, and at high tide, the casks are floating.

She's lived through a lot. A clammy bog founded by King John (in 1207 as a good place to launch boats with which to harry the Irish, later a good place from which England launched its trade empire on which, as you know, the sun never set, and the merchants and industrialists went out and hauled back enormous wealth and stuffed Liverpool with grand manses and turrety summer homes and vast train stations and parks and museums and univerisities and enormous Dickensian warehouses.

And that went on for at least for a hundred years and then, blimey, set that sun did. Like the turning of the tide, by 1907, fortunes turned, in World War 2, Liverpool was bombed harder than London, there are still air raid shelters like gnome holes in the wood at Otter's Pool park. The world changed, colonies were rethinking the whole benevolent master thing, the river was silting up, and pretty quick the huge and magnificent warehouses slammed closed, the tobacco warehouses (with "Tobacco Warehouse" written in beautiful sooty brick work) where 6,000 or 10,000 people had worked shut nearly overnight.

By the 60's there was a little glimmering reminder that Liverpool is a real bubbling pot of creativity when the Beatles rocketed out of here and Alan Ginsberg said dryly, "Yes. Liverpool. It's like San Francisco with greyer weather", but really, everybody's dad was out of work and by the 80's, the police busted one head too many and there were riots in the streets of Toxteth in which a thousand police officers were injured and when the mob burned the Odeon, its ten ton ornate copper dome glowed all night before collapsing in a big wrecked horrible mess. The slightly charred Georgians in Toxteth are today being snapped up by investors. The now-excruciatingly posh neighborhood around the gargantuan Roman Catholic cathedral - really it's like the Hoover dam in red sandstone - where, only ten years ago, so derelict and rife with prostitution was the street, the church, and its wilderness of a cemetery, that little sofas were set out in the driveway where customers could wait their turn on the mattresses under the bushes. Oh. My. God.

Like Roman's in 477 sort of just wandering around, snapping chunks off the statuary to grind up for fertilizer, and living 10 to a turret in the once-grand and gracious manses, stringing the wash from ornately carved lintle to pretty balcony, and lighting fires on the parquet and parking their muddy bikes in the conservatory. Peeing everywhere.

Then the sun came out in the form of gouts of European Union largesse and real estate investment from Irish property developers. Everyone I've talked to says, "Ye, 'twas 'about tin yees agoo, Ah'd see", which I took to mean "Yes, it was about ten years ago, I'd say", that money and services began trickling back in, and now, Liverpool's birthday year is just h'ors d'oevre, the pint before the curry, the foreplay before the real kick-out-the-jambs getting jiggy run-up to 2008 when the city will serve as the world's 2008 European Capital of Culture. And we'll be in the city centre, frequently off-cenre, and launching our boats from the once-scuffed, now-buffed shores of the shining River Mersey at www.merseyandme.blogspot.com

Map Sap

2007-01-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

Dear Washington Post Travel:

Fer cryin' out loud! Not once but twice have I set off pink cheeked and bright-eyed in search of amazing, mysterious, and "how could I not have known about that?" sort of spots printed on officially distributed tourist maps, only to find that the reason I didn't know about them, is because they don't exist, leaving me knee-deep and and fuming in icy bogs or barbed wire-gouged and explaining fast to the State Trooper why I hadn't seen those No Trespassing signs.

The first time was a swampy slog to "Ancient Indian Caves" in Caroline County. Doesn't that sound neat!? Well, it would, unless you think about it for thirty seconds, or if you call the Virginia Office of Archaeology, they'll tell you that, because Caroline County is on sandy coastal plain soils, there aren't any caves, ancient, Indian or otherwise. The second was a (and, really, the weird preoccupation with Indians should have tipped me off) "Ancient Indian Burial Mounds" outside of Mt. Jackson, Virginia. Had I spoken to the nice people at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources first, I would have discovered that native Americans in the Shenandoah valley didn't bury their dead in mounds. So there.

OK. So, be brutal. Am I the only person on terra more or less cognita who once believed that the glossy maps printed and handed out by big, grinning county economic development directors were meticulously researched and approved by state historical societies and archaeology committees who made sure they weren't just churning out Candyland game boards and advertising copy?

Thanks very much,
Liz Kirchner, Annandale, Virginia, which is just beyond the Gum Drop Mountains, you can't miss it.

Alexandria, Virginia: Nautical and Natural

2006-12-18T07:22:00.000-08:00

It's 66 degrees on December 18th! Let's Bike!

Well-groomed parks, art studios, historic houses, and a pretty impressive swamp line the Mt. Vernon Trail along Old Town Alexandria’s Potomac River waterfront.

Fifteen-minutes from downtown Washington, D.C. a languid stroll or bike from Old Town north to the Washington Sailing Marina and back is a fine way to unwind for the day or just the afternoon.

If you stroll, start from The Torpedo Factory in the heart of Old Town at the bottom of King Street. This cavernous World War II weapons factory now houses the studios and shops of painters, weavers, sculptors, potters, and photographers. Set off north from the wharf behind the studios.

If you’d rather, you can rent bikes just one block south of The Torpedo Factory at Big Wheel Bikes at (2 Prince Street). While they’re not giving them away ($5.00/hour with 3-hour minimum or $25.00 for the whole day for a basic adult or kid’s bikes), they do have a large stock and wide variety including tandems, bikes with baby seats, and Trailalongs. The comfort and agility of an aluminum hybrid with a front shock, at $7.00/hour or $35.00 for all day, might be worth the price, but the gently rolling, paved trail and mellow street riding don’t call for the expensive top-end, full suspension mountain bikes or aero-shifter road bikes.

Inexplicably, the official Mt. Vernon Bike Trail map insists that riders maneuver down car-clogged Union Street, across a working railroad track, before allowing them to escape to the river. Our advice: ignore the official decree and hug the river from the very beginning by carrying your bike up the stairs of the Torpedo Factory and out the back to the wharf, and set off past the Chart House restaurant (famous for crab cakes) and onto the gently winding riverside path.

Whether you walk or bike, the path winds through Alexandria’s history as an early American canal and river port (Orinoco Bay Park), past the Alexandria Seaport Foundation, and over recently unearthed chunks of 19th century canal (Tide Lock Park). In only a few miles, the length of this ride bristles with historical markers at each of the parks and vistas.

Remember that this is a city trail, and, like a highway, becomes crammed after work and on the weekends with other bikers, walkers, joggers, roller-bladers, kids, and dogs. Wear a helmet.

The kudzu-covered bridge beneath the wheezing and rusted hulk of the Alexandria Power Plant is narrow and full of blind curves, but carries the path right out over the mud flats for broad Potomac views of egrets and sailboats.
The path rises up out of the mudflats to a boardwalk snaking through the marshy edge of Daingerfield Island, not an island at all, really, only a soggy curve in the river forming uncommon tidal marsh and swamp forest habitat full of cattails, frogs, and blue herons, round the bend to the Washington Sailing Marina and its Potomack Landing restaurant whose umbrella’d deck offers post card views of sailboats in the offing and the Washington skyline beyond. Tool back to Old Town to lunch or dine at the casually sophisticated Chadwick’s between Big Bikes and The Torpedo Factory on Prince or merely reward your efforts at Ben and Jerry’s on Union Street.

The entire Mount Vernon Trail runs 18 miles from Roosevelt Island at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial to George Washington’s Mount Vernon home. Easy biking south of Old Town is impeded by gargantuan Woodrow Wilson Bridge reconfiguration until 2006.

Southwestern Missouri: An Eden in So Many Ways

2006-12-13T05:52:00.000-08:00

It could very well be that you are all well aware of snake migration and are, even as you read this, watching your step. Reaffirming in a quivery, slithery way, the weirdness of Nature, here is an explanation of Snake Migration, which as if once weren't enough, is a biennial event and has been for a long time. The description is from a Missouri herpetologist named Wayne, who, under his GardenWeb "Bio" does not flog the same old "School, Family, Secret Abiding Love for Decoupage" screed that we all spout when "Bio" is required, but instead he lists his 2006 "Snake Total to Date" Look at this: "579 snakes, 70 venomous, among them 68 Eastern Yellowbelly Racers and an Osage Copperhead" that he describes as a 'lifer'. This of course, tells us all a lot more about Wayne than anything anybody could say about secret trysts with varnish in the basement, and we say, "Now, that's an interesting guy."

This is what he writes about autumn migration:

"The fall is when the snakes begin traveling back to their winter dens from parts far away (and in the spring, of course, it is when the snakes leave their dens and begin traveling to parts far away).
He continues, "Snakes overwinter in the same den year after year and some of them will travel several miles in the fall to return to their dens. Migrations mostly happen in central states like Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, and Kentucky and places farther north where snakes spend their winters in large communal dens in bluffs.
Farther south snakes can den almost anywhere (a stump, a rodent hole, etc.) and thus they don't den in large concentrations.
In some places if you are between a denning bluff on one side and good habitat on the other you can walk along and actually see the snakes migrating. The snakes will all be coming from the flats and heading to the bluffs and all will be on the move in the same direction.
On a good day during peak migration you might see as many as 50 to 60 different snakes in a three hour walk. On a more typical day during the peak migration you might see from 12 to 25 snakes in three hours. At the early and late ends of the migration (which lasts for about 2 months) you might see just 4 or 5 snakes. It's really a neat thing to observe!"

And who can deny it?! Certainly, there are Worlds within Worlds. Here is a person striding along between our world and the one that evidently exists between flatland and bluff. What luck it is that he reports back to us as he scuffs through Yellowbelly Racers and Osage Copperheads in their single-mindedly commute as the nights turn chilly, anxious to return home to writhe down and knot up with the gang -some won't have made it, though, and there will be new, uh, faces, too - in the craggy pits and cave shelves, where they'll all hunker down, to snooze until snow-melt.

Maybe I'll Just Order The Chicken

2006-12-01T05:56:00.000-08:00

Things to do Today:
Go to Post Office
Buy new mascara
Be more civically vocal
Go to dinner

"Exactly how shrill was I?"

"Pretty shrill. I think he didn't know whether to laugh or get mad. Then when you picked up the fork, he looked kind of scared. Here, run cold water on your wrists and fix your face. We have to get back out there."

"And then! Good ol' Lindsey didn't exactly diffuse the situation: "No No, Liz. It's good for you. Full of omega-3s. It lubes your brain." Good God, I could have sunk those tines right into her white, flaky belly. Am I the only goddam one paying attention? They're gone. We've eaten them all. They were good, delicious even, but now they're dead. That's it. We ate them all. Lindsey's brain, soon to be parched and lubeless, will begin to fray like the husk of an old coconut."

"Ha. Good ol' coconut-noggin Lindsay. Here is lipstick, it's Coral Bisque. Put it on.....I'm sure you're not the only one paying attention."

"Who else?! You? You're like an otter for God's sake. You'd lie on your back wrapped in sea weed, and whack oysters on your belly all day."

"Who wouldn't honey? People pay attention, you're just the one getting her knickers in a twist."

"Oh yes, you'd lie on your back and gobble grouper gobbets in your gnashing little cat teeth and slurp up little baby sea turtles, their little flippers flapping between your smiling lips. May I use your blush? Sorry. Ooo Lancome. Thanks."

"Here. Yes, Lancome. It's called Mundo Perdido. That sounds rather lovely actually: bobbing about wrapped in seaweed smashing oysters on my belly and slurping up baby turtles. Gnash, gnash, gnash. But grouper gobbets, really, I draw the line. Honestly, Liz, knicker-wise, you still sound a little het up. You had better take one enormous breath and remember who you are. Now, swab your mascara off, you look like the Green Hornet. And put on this lipgloss."

"OK Jeez. You're right. Sorry. Oh wait. I can't. It's bronze. It'll make my teeth look, you know, all camelly carmelly...No, you're like not an otter, you're all like a pod of those whales spewing out nets of bubbles to round up thousands of little silver smelty fishlets and then shoot up through them with your cavernous maws agape. And you'll gobble them all and look around for more..but, oh that's right! Ha! We ate them all! They're gone. All gone. Doesn't that bother you?"

"Now I'm a pod? Jeez! Be nice to me. That's my Shiseido, you know. More gobbling. Yum. Little smelty fish. Put on that lip gloss. You won't be carmelly. You will seem festive. No one will be looking at your camel teeth anyway. They probably won't look at you at all, unless, of course, they all stand up and cheer. Let me see you. OK. You're ready. And, actually, you know, I think it will be OK. While you were waving the fork and screaming about responsibility for the planet, and voting with your wallet, your hair looked really good."

Route 11: Artfully Artless

2006-11-30T07:55:00.000-08:00

No one believes me when I tell them that little, meandering, unassuming, Route 11 runs from the bellowing aligator-and-nutria stew of Bayou Sauvage National Wilderness Area in Louisiana 1640 miles to the breezy porches and turreted Victorians of Rouses Point, New York on Lake Champlain and the Canadian border. And in between, what a road!

Ah Cumberland! Gateway to the West!

2006-11-28T11:05:00.000-08:00

This summer, at the absolute pinnacle of the real estate tsunami that blocked out all light and sense, we thought we'd buy a house. We drove in the little Prius and dreamed, up and down the Shennandoah Valley from painfully lovely and oddly-named Rockfish Gap outside of Charlottesville to the coffee shops and alpaca farms of Strasburg.

In May, I went to the wooded wilds of western Maryland to interview people about wild ginseng, its history, mystery, and immenent demise for the magazine Maryland Life. On the way, I scooped up Maryland Life's delightful photographer Dave Romero of Vibrant Image from his once-pigeon-filled-and-abandonded whiskey distillery and warehouse now light-filled-spectacular Cumberland artist loft overlooking the coffee shops and bookstores of Cumberland's downtown.

On the way to ginseng, Dave regaled me with the wonders of this pretty town."It's the Gateway to the West," he said. "One hundred and thirty miles from Washington DC and BaltimoreandPittsburgh. It's on the upper Potomac River. It's where the Chesapeake to Ohio canal ends and the Western Maryland railroad line heaves over the Alleghenies, and the National Road begins."

Ripe for the plucking, Brian and I bought a lovely, sooty little 100-year old Georgian townhouse on Fulton Street just across the railroad tracks from Value City with a view of a town bristling with church steeples and Alleghenies looming like shoulders over everything.

We bought it because it has a second story porch where we plan to sit on summer evenings with our
long, booted legs on the rail smoking thin, black cigars.
We plan to do this after ripping its filthy innards out (we pulled down the drop
ceiling in the kitchen and the mouse droppings fell like rice) and
seeing whether it has secretly lovely bones - we hope so, but think,
not. It has sturdy, broad-hipped washer-woman bones.

Mysteries abound. There are paw prints in the mud of the basement that we
can't identify.

Cumberland is indeed the Gateway to the West and is an old, once grand, now
pretty battered town on the Potomac. It is full of railroads and old
distilleries with huge windows and old banks full of pigeons that are
being bought up by artists looking for light and air and space and
and tax incentives to come pioneer, and lots of churches, coal trains, fetal alcohol syndrome, bingo, corbels, column, marble, brick, steel, silk and coal. Driving west, the highway passes over the whole town lifting you up among the
steeples and into the Appalachians.

Well, Max, Where haven't I been!?

2006-11-28T06:46:00.000-08:00

Cumberland, Maryland:Mountain Hikes, Fine Art, and Cut-Rate Liquors

My friend Max Hartshorne, editor of the action-packed travel Web site Go Nomad just wrote me a note to say, "No post since May!? Where have you been, and what are you doing?!

Well, Max, you excitable, italics-waving boy, since May, a whirlwind of Americana has swept me through ginseng-hunting in West Virginia, tracking wild goats in southwestern Missouri, the procurement and resuscitation of a lovely sooty little 100-year old Georgian townhouse in the equally sooty and magnificently mountainous Western Maryland town of Cumberland, and so much more, the question becomes,"Well, Max, where haven'tI been?"

Window Ornamentation in Western Maryland

Well. It seems I Knit

2006-05-02T05:27:00.000-07:00

Oooo Lengthening Swath..... In spots, you might recognize K2 P2 ribbing. Knitting has un-bunged creative juices, it seems, and I am sloshing around in heretofore unplumbed Creativity Depths. Like suddenly accessing all that brain you usually don't, all of this juice plumbing has yielded surprising results. I was unaware, for example, that I knew how to increase and decrease, but at times, having cast on 22 stitches, I have shrunk to 18, swelled to 30, and am now holding steady at 26. I am hoping that this sort of flappy scallopy pattern will be much coveted by chilly little Mongolians (did I mention the Dulaan Project?) and the edges can be pulled up around little ears and will be all the rage and mostly warm.

Leit-Motivation: Mindful Meandering or Know Before You Go

2006-05-01T11:37:00.000-07:00

All who wander are not lost. At least they shouldn’t be since the best wandering is done when you know where you’re going. Good travel is well researched, and great travel follows a theme, a goal, a quest. In fact, it doesn’t just follow a theme, it chases it, dogs it. It rolls around in it. It revels.

Good travel, like good sex, and mango harvesting, is an experience, an opportunity, to rub your face in your chosen theme; an experience in which every second is revelatory and means something delightful and juicy, and you come staggering away from the whole thing a better, if somewhat stickier, person for it, tied in one more way, more tightly to the Universe.
“Good God, honey. What about spontaneity?” says my husband. And I’d say, spontaneity happens when you’re prepared for it, darling. In fact, what could be more spontaneous than setting off for the the Aegean because you’d like to know more about the millennia-old currant harvest there, reading up on Celtic burial mounds before hiking the Cotswolds, or setting off to seek the origin of the burrito?

With a theme, say…'Mexican Textiles', conversations are struck up with the Zapotec ladies at the market wearing blouses embroidered with a pattern you (what a nice surprise!) recognize; or, thanks to a knowledge of 'Coastal Defenses of the Western Mediterranean', you happen to know a little town on Malta with an old castle and outstanding tapas above a magnificent beach.

Knowledge is the difference between being a tourist and being a traveler. What a difference there is between going to Mexico, and going in order to harvest mangoes in Guerrero; between hiking in Spain and re-enacting Hannibal’s march over the Alps. You can wander the brooding streets of Prague, wishing you could meet somebody interesting, or you can research it and wind up knocking back absinthe at three in the morning with smoldering Czech filmmakers. There’s a difference between sitting in your cubicle gazing at your screen-saver of the Altai mountains and galloping across the steppes with shaggy Kazahk falconers. Face it. Those Kazakh falconers, Mexican mango farmers, and drunken Czech moviemakers aren’t beating a path to your door, you’ve got to beat a path to theirs.

Step one: conjure a theme, list all the classes you’ve ever taken or thought you’d like: History, Architecture, Art, Physics, Engineering, Cooking. Think of what you like to eat and drink: grapes, tamales, mezcal, barbecue, dumplings, sheep eyes; think of music: throat singing and opera; Think of folklore: scary stories and romance tales; think about sports. Then ask who else is thinking about your pet theme, writing about it, rubbing their faces in it. The Internet is a huge resource for contacting experts and letting people know about your interest. Seek out University professors, students, writers, artists, tourism bureaus, importer/exporters, businessmen, farmers’ associations, women’s groups, bands, architects, libraries, governmental agencies, embassies, non-governmental organizations. Connect with them. Go. Meet them. Eat burritos. Let people know you’re interested in more than buying a t-shirt and a hammock (although as it happens you know quite a bit about that particular Yucatecan knotting technique). Then, when you get back, share what you know and what you found out. Ron Mader, host of the Eco-Tourism Center of the Universe, Planeta.com, says, “Share your impressions with tourism boards and media, particularly that which you consult during the planning stage of your trip.” Always sign guest books. Mention your theme. Now you’re the expert.

Warm Mongolians

2006-04-25T11:09:00.000-07:00

Well, I've taken up knitting. I am throwing my mittens in the kitty for the Dulaan Project, an effort to supply warm, well-made clothing to Mongolian children spear headed by FIRE, the Flagstaff International Relief Effort, Mossy Cottage, Knits, and the Kunzang Palyul Choling Buddhist community of Sedona Arizona. 'Dulaan' means 'warm', they say. Not just 'warm' like 'toasty- cozy', but 'warm' like 'kind'.

When one thinks of Mongolia, one sees, perhaps, shepherd ghers on a vast and grassy steppe in the spanking wind under a bottomless sky, Silk Roads and silver, shaggy ponies and galloping hordes. Like parts of Kansas,one thinks, but with really awful Soviet architecture all buried under mounds of mutton. One would be pretty close to right about all of those things, but might need to add to that bright and windy vision, that, in December and January, just before the spring time dust storms, the temperature plummets to a lunar - 30 degrees. One might also fail to toss into the mix homeless Mongolians huddled in the subterranean heating ducts of Ulan Bataar for months. Dreaded "dzud' disaster blizzards so brutal and relentless they freeze shepherds' eye-balls and kill not just the sheep and dogs, but the wolves.

In knit-ins across this country and possibly others, the Dulaan Project is supplying warming, even life-saving, mittens, scarves, hats, tuques, baclavas, afghans, and sweaters.

42% mountainous and .7% arable, this is no place to be without a scarf.

Nuggets

2006-04-11T11:45:00.000-07:00

At Survival 101 school, we heard piles of terrific stories, one happy one in which an unassuming, but industrious little lady, having gone down in white-out conditions in her Sesna on the way to a Girl Scout jamboree, drew a huge and successful distress signal in the snow with Kool-Ade.

Another was a morbid nugget of physiological trivia. Did you know that, when a person freezes to death, in the last moments, when all the blood has retreated to the core in a last ditch effort to surround and protect the heart and brain, in a sudden and final flash, all heat is suddently released giving the sensation of being on fire and the victim leaps up and runs around tearing off his clothes. People would be found half naked and dead. Rape or some horrible molestation was suspected until more was learned about the physiology of hypothermia and this stage is now called "paradoxical undressing."

Gosh. Makes me shiver just to think.

Hike Massanutten: Pine, Stone, Fog, and Death

2006-04-11T11:08:00.000-07:00

An hour west of Washington DC, the northern prow of Massanutten Mountain rises up like a fifty mile long ship plying the Shenandoah River. This northern prow end is called Signal Knob. It rises above the Shenandoah Valley and the little town of Strasburg which has the worst Mexican food in the most beguiling restaurant on the planet with mounds of lush palms and Latin American-y coleuses whizzing and banging and fiesta-ing all over like sirens luring you onto the rocks and a horrid and pointless death by insipid salsa. Luckily, it is frequently closed, or at least is on Mondays as are all the restaurants in Strasburg even the one that said, "We treat you like family", but when we pressed our noses to the chicken wire embedded glass in the bolted door there was a sign in the vestibule above a basket of improbably red geraniums that said, "Premises under video surveillance for your protection."

Monday must be the day before the supply ship comes, and Strasburg was down to seige rations and every single one of the restaurants were battened down shut and the only one that wasn't should have been. Sitting down, I leaned my elbow in a puddle of Pepsi and a girl with yellow rubber bands on her braces (I hope) handed us a menu and said, "There's really no sense in looking in there, ma'am. We only have the Country Baked Beans and the Tuna Melt? Do you want that?" and a little girl from the next table with a lazy eye came over to our table and wanted to eat our pickles.

I too love Fort Valley/Elizabeth Furnace. We bike there and I have a really spectacular scar from a cataclysmic crash from bombing down a fire road near Elizabeth Furnace on a lovely summer day.

Once, we were chased by grouse.

This Black bear may have fallen from a tree, which does happen, but was probably killed by poachers for its gall-bladder. Those jerks.

Ordnance Survey Map 80/90, a Hunk of Gloucester Cheese, Several Pints of Bitter, and Thou in the Wilderness: A Valentine's Ramble in the Cotswolds

2006-03-13T09:41:00.000-08:00

Oh look. How nice. The swash-bucklers at

Go Nomad

published

our Cotswolds story

. Really, a fine time was had by all. We stayed in Bisley-with-Lypiatt, that toddlin' town, an essentially English village containing a church, a shop, a school, and two pubs. With our Ziplocked OS map, we walked from tump to pub in an icy drizzle. We learned a great deal about tumps, burial mounds, rollright stones and Iron Age beacons from the piles of information at the All Britain All The Time web site

Britain Express

as well as the humble and encyclopedic Ralph Green who writes at

Cotswolds-Did You Know

.

This photo of "Windmill Tump" is not ours, but taken by someone named Hamish in the spring of 2003 and posted on the web site

The Modern Antiquarian

a pool of probably pretty jolly and nap-sacked people who roam the fields clambering over Iron Age burial mounds and through thickets rumored to contain piles of rocks that were once Roman villas lying about in them to document them and sit on them in the sun and have a sandwich from the nap-sack.

But we never found Windmill Tump. Zipping to Bisley in our rented Fiat Panda (which fit in our suitcase, when we didn't need it) we became tangled in a particularly tricky round-about and shot off in the wrong direction, toward Rodmarton, a great manor house with a beautiful roof full of crags and turrets and an impressive yew hedge twenty feet tall and perfectly pruned even the top. Just the hedge made us want to knuckle our foreheads. Rodmarton is where Arts and Crafts design was conceived and nurtured (Arts and Crafts' clean, nearly Oriental, lines inspired Frank Lloyd Wright.) but is currently keeping ends met by opening its snowdrop gardens to the yoemanry on Saturdays or so said a hand-written poster at the mouth of the sweeping drive.

Rocketing through English country-side in the wrong direction, we consulted our highway map. What luck! The delightfully named "Windmill Tump" should be just right there in a field at the manor. With great hopes, and no idea what a tump might look like, clutching the map and hanging out the window, I kept up a steady and distracting string of exclamations like, "What's that!? That's it! Stop the car! That's it! No Wait!...That's not it. Is that it? What's that!? That's it!", Brian down shifted with his left-hand from fourth to first, and we cased the fields rolling away from us on this, one of the first sunny days of the English spring, but saw nothing that looked like what might be either a tump or a windmill.

We turned in at the village of Rodmarton, which is just a cluster of cottages washed up at the foot of big house and its hedge with lots of budding rose brambles and snowdrops coming up and people in their gardens shoveling mulch. And we asked three people who said they'd never heard of Windmill Tump, so we became discouraged and gave up, trailing in to Bisley like we'd lost the first game of the season, only later did we discover that it had been right across the street with a tunnel you can climb in and an official sign, but we didn't know that then.

That Dress is You! Documenting Mexico's Past Present and Future Through Its Textile Art

2006-03-01T12:44:00.000-08:00

The

Mexican Textiles

web site and the life, it seems, of its author Robert Freund weave (and that's really the best word for it) anthropology, history, art, and travel that is exhaustive in its documentation, scholarly into an insightful and beautiful to look at site. It's photo- and story-rich, a tapestry itself.

Freund has lived in Mexico City since the '70's and dedicated his time to identifying and documenting not just the textile styles of Mexico's indigenous groups, but the lore attached to them.

His biggest fear: Art, history, and culture sewn into dresses gets lost as tourism (no matter how eco), t.v., and jeans seep into a village and tribe's cultural reality.

He's catalogued Mexican indigenous group alphabetically from the Amusgo of Oaxaca to the Zapatec of the Sierra Juarez, recorded audio of basic language, and video of dances.

Pashto

2006-03-01T09:06:00.000-08:00

This photo of is from the photography site

TrekEarth

and was taken by Hadi Zaheer in Bamian, Afghanistan.

The language Pashto is written like this: پښتو

and is also called: paʂto, Afghan, Pathan, Pushto, Pashtoe, Pashtu, Pushtu, and Pukhto. It's the language spoken by the Pashtun people in Afghanistan and the western provinces of Pakistan.

It is thought that about 45% of people in Afghanistan speak Pashtu, although it's hard to know exactly how many because Pathans are nomadic and tribal have a habit of secluding their women.

It is speculated that Pashtu originated in the south of Afghanistan in what is now Kandahar province. Kandahar is, maybe, originally 'Alexandria' since the capital was founded by Alexander the Great around 400 BC.

Kandahar is known for its pomegranates, grapes, and Taliban warlords. Oddly, there is a Kandahar in Sasketchewan, Canada by Big Quill Lake.

Wikipedia says, "Some believe its name is derived from Gandhara, a nearby kingdom along the Kashmir Afghanistan border or even Gandar the seventh satrapy of the Persian Aechminid Empire." And who would argue?

This Central Asian trading center, no matter what it's called, has been a strategic plum to a colorful stream of invaders: Abbasids, Turks, Muslims (although conversion didn't completely take and many Pashtun tribes still live by pre-Islamic codes), Arabs, Turks again, but different ones, Genghis Khan, Babur the Mughal, whose son lost it to Persia, but whose grandson won it back, the Sikhs, the Brits a couple of times with grim consequences, the Soviets, the Taliban, and now....the Afghanis?

Just Looking...

2006-02-28T06:09:00.000-08:00

Migratory birds probably feel like this, or burglars trying to stay clean but finding themselves driving by Securitas cash depots that aren't on their way home.... A longing. A pang. Some insistent pheromonal whiff calling, and, like a little kid hopping up and down with his hands between his legs, I gotta go.

With my office door shut, furtively at my desk in suburban Virginia, instead of reading about hyperbaric medicine or deciding what we're having for dinner ( Turkey Sausage might be nice...it's easy and those squishy Martin's Potato Roll buns. Oooh. Yes. Those are good. Do we have buns? Hmm. Maybe I should get some buns. It's all about the buns, really.Or maybe I'll try stir-fry again. God. Am I up for another a mound of swampy disaster and all those murdered carrots? I don't know if I can stand it. Turkey sausage. That's the safe way to go...), I am seeking Adventure.

I am just noodling around the edges of Adventure, really, trailing my toes in The Bubbling Pool of Adventure where well-muscled, Chicklet-toothed, and tuque'd people beam at me, their smile lines, etched by squinting into a Serengeti distance, are beautiful. They beckon bobbing in that pool, that Rocky mountain campfire where they monitor wolf migration or a hundred feet into an Amazonian jungle canopy where they take notes on the courting ritual of purple toads the size of nickles who live their lives in the tops of trees."Come in and bob around with us and our perfect teeth," they say, "We are so handsome and fulfilled."

I find myself perusing web sites suggesting Surveying Aid/Technician position intriguingly described as being located in "Back Country/Wilderness." I am pulling the little phone number tabs off the bottom of "Roadie Wanted: Heavy Lifting. Must Have Most Fingers"

Walkin' the Wolds

2006-02-08T07:04:00.000-08:00

The journey is the reward, they say, and planning a walk in the Cotswolds is a journey in itself. There are a number of long (>100 miles) walks to choose from and several enthusiastic hiking web sites to get you on your way. Oddly, it's not easy to find a useful (and free, since I've waited til the last minute, of course) map of the entire region on-line.

The All Great Britain-All the Time web site

Britain Express

has lots of history information and links as well as great map links to rental cottage sites.

There is the jaunty

Go 4 A Walk

and its cousin,

SherpaVan

provide real muddy walking guides, maps, and insight. Sherpa Van provides hiker and biker back-up on long-distance footpaths and bike trails.

Go 4 A Walk, on which someone's dog wrote, "Suddenly, and usually about ten minutes before sunset, that "only half a mile to go before we get back to the car", becomes a brutal two hours of deep heather, falling into holes, blasphemy, bad language, heresy, disloyalty to the Crown and emergency sardine eating frenzy," provides walking maps and hill climbing advice with an Electrolyte Energy Gels and verve.

The steadier

Ramblers

and

National Trail

are full of steady advice and historical insight.

The Toadsmoor and Me

2006-02-07T11:28:00.000-08:00

It being February, and having been waved frantically away by every sensible Tour Britain web site, we're off to England to roam the drizzly Cotswolds in the sleet. We'll be staying in a 17th century stable on a stud farm, and hiking the whimsically dubbed Toadsmoor Valley from pub to pub.

A K-Bar Fixed Blade is a Girl's Best Friend: Survival Training in Virginia's Blue Ridge

2006-01-31T05:00:00.000-08:00

You wouldn't know to look at me: Female. 43. Eyes: kind enough, but squinting to a wince, wearied by reading in bad light, cheap mascara, and bi-focal contact lenses. They are green originally, my eyes, but hazed pink like a cheap Chablis or the liquid in a packet of raw chicken; permanent laugh lines, and a once-fit figure, now sedately spreading like chocolate chip cookie dough on a warm cookie sheet. No, you wouldn't know it to look at me, but I can do several amazing things because of a week-end I spent in the woods.

The Trip: The Mountain Shepherd Wilderness Survival School

Where? The George Washington National Forest, just west of Amherst, Virginia

Who? Liz and dashing husband, Brian, 43, who, despite his rugged good looks and ability to find crawfish under unassuming rocks like an otter, doesn't mind spending the night in the woods for the romance of it, but prefers to curl up beneath down and flannel with his cat (and wife, presumably) at home.

We joined the vigorous Reggie Bennet, surprisingly youthful and cherub-cheeked for someone who has spent a significant part of his life instructing military types (including Navy SEALS) in survival, evasion, resistance, and escape techniques, and who himself had survived really harrowing wilderness scenarios from polar ice cap crash-landing/freezing to death/being eaten by bears situations, to bobbing in badly supplied life-raft on open sea and catching birds with fish hooks, to roasting in a hole in the Gobi nursing the half cup of spit-hot water collected from the condensation pit, emerging in the cool of the night to recon by the stars and dig more wells.

It could be however, that Reggie Bennet is buoyant not in spite of, but because of these very experiences. Dropped into the rather pleasant temperate wilderness condition of Virginia's Blue Ridge with anything resembling a sturdy knife and some string, he can erect a snug shelter, light a fire, strangle and roast a rabbit, smoke extra meat to tasty hickory smoked jerky, sanitize water, rig a sauna for a pleasant sluice, and floss his teeth. In the evening, he can either signal for rescue, or melt into the woods.

Why Go? To flex our self-sufficiency muscles, sleep under the really lovely stars, learn how to tie some useful knots, make a fire in the rain, roast foil packets of potatoes, rosemary, and onions in capably-tended campfire coals, generally ratchet-up our "Confidence in the Woods" scores nearly snuffing out for good our (Liz's) long smoldering Fear of The Dark in general and werewolves in particular.

How long? a January week-end: 60 degrees and sunny on Saturday, 42 degrees and steady, soaking rain on Sunday.

Favorite Forest Food: Ghiradelli 60% cocoa bittersweet bakery chocolate by the chunk, and pecans and dried cranberries by the fistful in camp while learning really basic orienteering. Coffee in the morning.

I would have like to have roamed around a lot more. In longer classes (4 day) they break camp and move using their new orienteering skills. The landscape is steep and forested. It takes two hours to go three miles.

Thing I wish I'd brought: a pilfered airline pillow or the smarts to stuff my jacket into my sleeping bag sack to fashion a quite serviceable pillow. A $29 Black Diamond headlamp with a retractable elastic string to hold it on your head that is, all together, the size of a Nilla Vanilla wafer.

Cheapest Thrill: Stomping through the woods, in a long, cold, steady rain to rip apart, using a K-Bar fixed blade knife, the stump of a lightning-blasted pine tree for its dry and pitch-packed wood, then whittling with cold hands a fluffy mound of the impressively flammable pitch resin onto my fire platform, grating the knife down the flint, and having the the little shavings burst into flame, which I fed with larger whittlings into a fire big enough to warm up my hands.

Sleeping in the Snow with Bears

2006-01-25T05:22:00.000-08:00

Marie Antoinette liked to dress up like a milk-maid all breasts and bodices and buckets to spend a day at the royal country estate and pretend to milk cows that had been perfumed and powdered for her (and presumably debriefed afterward) and frolic with the happy, dancing peasants.
In what we hope is not the same hapless spirit (when the Revolution really heated up, the French queen fled to that same country estate, where she was caught by now scowling peasants, and sent back to Paris to face the music.), Brian and I will spend the week-end at Survival 101 training camp in a southern Virginia town called (and if this doesn't raise suspicions, I don't know what will), Pleasant Valley. My friend, Katy, knitting and jollying away at kamsarmer.blogspot.com would say, "Don't do it! It's a trap!"

The Lion in Winter: The Cotswolds and London in February

2006-01-24T10:10:00.000-08:00

We're off. To get roses in our cheeks and sleet down our necks in and around London in February. Our plan? Escape London straight away by train, trek the Cotswolds through drizzly copses and over deserted Iron Age barrows to firelit pubs for Ploughman's lunches, a pint of bitter, and Gloucester cheese.

We'll stay in Stroud, that whirling astral center from which radiate all things Cotswold. It's not easy to choose an astral center base-camp, and we may have things all wrong. However, Stroud is on the train line, an hour and a half and L20 from Paddington Station, and harbors an inn called, brace yourself, "Little Owl Cottage" that appears in its web site (http://littleowlcottagebedandbreakfast.co.uk) photos gazing gently down over sward and weald, its honey-brown stone characteristically Cotswold, stone, by the way, which becomes paler as you go south down the Cotswold limestone, glowing vaguely in the evening light.

At some point, we are required to wipe our muddy boots and return to London, where Brian will talk to construction people about construction topics, principally, how to keep construction workers from falling off tall things. In the City, we can't agree where to stay. I'm stumping for Epping Forest Youth Hostel which is described as being easily accessible, only 10 minutes on the train from London and then two and a half miles "down unlit forest roads." I think that sounds great.
Brian would like to stay somewhere a little more central.

Indigo Walk and Talk

2006-01-13T06:32:00.000-08:00

E.L. Doctorow, who is a great writer, if also a know-it-all-smarty-pants, once said, "Thinking about your writing, researching your writing, and talking about your writing is not the same as writing." This snippy condescending hectoring can also be applied to epic journeys. If you're going to do it, do it. Think about your trip. Figure out where you're going and the real nuts and bolts about how to get there, from how you're goiing to rent a truck in Oaxaca when you're in Virginia and how much is it going to cost, to how you're going to contact the mayor of Quezaltepec in order to win safe passage through maybe the most fractious and remote swath of Mexico to keep from being macheted by desperately frustrated peasants whose goats are dying of thirst, and suspect that perhaps you are in cahoots with the neighboring town that, everyone knows, is diverting the streams and poisoning the wells, to figuring out how to keep your delightful/overly-cautious husband who would rather be having a coffee and sleeping in beds that clean, safe, and dry, on-board by knowing enough of the nuts and bolts to satisfy his "Rationality-of-Plan" Requirement, as well as paint for him the fantastic story of the whole grand 700-year old Pre-Hispanic Trade Route to fill his "Coolness-of-Plan" Requirement when he knows all of your story-telling, sales-pitch tricks and could at any moment choose to drag his feet and mope and refuse to participate on the quite tangible grounds that it will be too hard, too expensive, and we all be killed.

I am currently collecting nuts and bolts ammunition.

Go GoNomad: A Whirlwind Tour

2006-01-08T18:11:00.000-08:00

Like somebody you'd like to go on a long trip with, the alternative-travel web site GoNOMAD at www.gonomad.com is both no-nonsense knowledgeable and packed with a giddy enthusiasm about the trip it's going to help you take. On top of that, this web site tells great stories.

More than just a vast clearinghouse of travel nuts and bolts (which it is) of flight price comparison calculators, huge vacation/cruise package lists, find-a-car/rent-a-car links, and hundreds of hostel sites, Go Nomad provides off-the-beaten track themes that run the inspiration gamut from French ethnobotanic culinary vactions and pink Brazilian river dolphin tending, to nude hiking and freighter hopping advice that make this site worthy of being a home base from which to launch even the most improbable foray.

Like a good traveling companion, it's tidy. Easily navigatable: even the Special Interest vacation search engine Booleans you through 14,000 vacation packages and 1300 top travel suppliers. You can imagine the editors and interns giggling manaically as they add yet another Bike Togo link or more guidance on riding Javanese ponies in Lesotho; whooping it up as they find ways to help you reserve beds on trains, barges, organic farms, castles, join wolf and grizzly bear safaris, or (way off the beaten track) build trails through Siberian taiga.

Like an unflagging travel companion, its very url eggs us on with its frolicing feature articles. "Go, nomad," it calls. Go! You can do it,' it says in David Rich's report from beyond-remote Kashmiri valleys full of strange and stunningly beauty on "knees past their 'use by' date" (http://www.gonomad.com/destinations/0507/spitivalley.html). Those stories and amazing photos call us to loll in the rose-scented bathtubs of Tuscan spas, storm the ramparts of thousand year old Syrian fortresses, and meander through Croatian Zinfandel vineyards.

Go Nomad!

Cholul: Go for the 16th century church, stay for the roast chicken:

2006-01-07T11:24:00.000-08:00

Cholul is the roast chicken mecca of Merida. Just as London would vanish each evening beneath the coal smoke of tea time fires, every afternoon Cholul, once a vast sisal hacienda, now devolved into a small town, five minutes north of downtown Merida, is awash in a succulent barbecue fugue. Every house sells roast chicken.
In our rented and plucky 1990 Nissan Sentra, we rocked through mud puddles into town behind a glossy Mercedes from Mexico City. In parade, we made our grand entrance by going the wrong way round the shady church square. Ludicrously, both the Mercedes and we, after passing the second one-way sign and two police officers leaning on their car, we realized our mistake simultaneously, slammed on our brakes, then stepped on the gas in unison veering out the first side street. Luckily, city-slickers who couldn't read street signs were so common they elicited no great surprise, and the shady square was quiet, ringed with, on one side, a venerable colonial building fronted by a stone cloister facing the 16th C. church, which is now chained shut, but handsomely built if moldy. We only glimpsed a blur of the other sides, escaping in shame as we were, where there were the equivalent of the Family Dollar, a grocer's, and a pawn shop. Interestingly, very different than Mexico's southwest, the Yucatan is full of pawn shops.
The square was empty except that, round the battered flanks of the old church, a fair was being set up for the evening, and truly piratical-looking people, whole families, were uncrating the rusting go-carts and stopping to eye us appraisingly and picking their teeth with the crow bars.
The little street down which we fled was lined with the tidy, concrete, flat-topped houses of modern Yucatan: like Kleenex boxes in magenta, teal, and aqua, a concreted yard relieved by a mat of bermuda grass, and possibly a palm or hibiscus and a concrete lion. Propped on the gate post at each house was a hand-written"Pollo Asado" sign, which was extraneous since smoke billowed from every car-port or undershirted dads stood in driveways wielding spatualas, turning dripping spits of skewered birds. This was a horror for us who are incapable of making even the smallest decision. We circled and bickered, "Do you like this one?" "No. You said you like that one." "He thinks we're stopping." "Honey, which one do you like?!" "Just choose!" until we were faint with hunger, embarrassed go around the square again, and afraid of the piratical circus families, we stopped at a house from which Nortena music thumped and a young brother and sister team in the concrete car port, manned the grill and the volume knob. She turned the birds and mopped them with sauce and took orders. The woman ahead of us, lived down the street, and had called her order ahead and waddled away lugging four grocery bags of steaming loot. We ordered two chicken halves and paid $40 pesos. The boy flung smoking poulty onto a splintered block, hacked it expertly into four chunks, piled them into a styrofoam box along with a knotted and swollen baggie of chipotle salsa, another of vinegary cole slaw, and, inexplicably, a sack of spaghetti. Maybe this jaunty pasta was pitched to a more global demographic.
In the little car, we ate on our laps with no utensils sloshing chipotle like ox blood right from the sack onto the luscious, tender birds charred to a barbaric crunch, pinching cole slaw from the bag to top the chicken with a cool tang to foil the smoky chipotle, we sucked our fingers and gnawed the bone knobs gazing at the church and the pirates. Only I ventured into the body-temperature spaghetti which was tomatoey and sweet. Returning to Merida to hand in the car, Jorge, the Avis rental car guy said, "Sure. Cholul for roast chicken all week, but on Sunday, everyone in Merida goes to Cholul for roast pork. It's a tradition. Tomorrow you should go." But we would be gone. For that, I was sorry to leave Merida.

Bike Yucatan:

2006-01-07T10:22:00.000-08:00

In mountainous Mexico there are burros; in the Yucatan, tortilla-flat, there are bikes. In the Yucatan, everybody bikes.
Driving from Merida to Tulum.

Young men with carbines slung across their backs tool along
remote and empty highways cut like channels through the matted, spiny brush. You can see the lumber truck coming on your side of the road from miles away. Or the police barracade.

Or on the old road, which winds and noodles through towns of thatched roofed houses with tidily swept dooryards, errands are run. The back seat of a bike is broad enough to haul a shock of alfalfa to a horse picketed in the forest or for a girlfriend to ride side-saddle and chat pleasantly with a basket of masa on her lap.

There are bike taxis with tassled striped umbrella roofs over the cart with a wooden bench seat. When the girl is married and really broad bottomed she'll ride in a taxi with a few children and a basket of masa chatting pleasantly to the old man hauling them down the hot road full of white butterflies with his sinewy legs turning the crank, and his feet like a turtle's in plastic sandals who she's known all her life.

or along urban streets and intersections taxi and SUV carroming like pachinco balls through urban streets and intersections,

The infrastructure bike paths and wide-shoulders, is well developed for biking.

Bike rentals
Places like Tulum and Cancun of course, but surprisingly too in Merida (rent the helmet) and Valladolid.

Shaggy-chic Cabañas Copal, Tulum Yucatan

2006-01-07T10:08:00.000-08:00

In a world full of resorts dedicated to fine wine and fine dining, a stay at Cabañas Copal, the palm-thatched, Caribbean inn and spa in Tulum, Mexico is like fine camping.

Breezy. Moonlit. Shaggy-chic. Five minutes from the grandeur of the Tulum ruins, Cabañas Copal wraps the adventure, romance, and mystery of the Maya Yucatan in candle light and mosquito netting and presents it amidst kayaks, toucans, and a magnificent sea.

Designed like a terraced garden, the 47 cabañas are bunched in little groves that have sea views, or are snuggled into the forest; and, while they’re called “eco-rustic” (all cabañas are without electricity), the spacious beds, tiled showers, adequate hot water, and gobs of mosquito netting in most of the Hobbit-y huts is simple, but nothing like primitive. For the minimalist, though, there are two sand-floored abodes without baths served instead by the tidy bathrooms down the path and the communal showers for a pleasant sluice under the coconut palms.

So well laid out is Cabañas Copal, the winding paths make the little nooks seem at once secluded and well attended. Palmetto glades hide pillowed hammocks for two, and, Look! there among the hibiscuses, lo and behold, you come upon, just in time, your Coronas clinking, two beach chairs perfectly placed for reading your Peterson’s guide, gazing at the Windex-blue sea, or, bare legs entwined, at each other.

The path from reception and the vegetation-walled restaurant noodles past the spa which offers a body loving pamper fest of yoga, wraps of mud, aloe, or chocolate, a variety of therapeutic massages – some at seaside - aroma and crystal therapy, and traditional Mexican temezcal steam baths. Each service is performed by skilled masseuses and Maya shamans dedicated to their craft.

Cabañas Copal is a spa, after all, and the things-to-do menu balances the yin of lying in corpse pose under your sun hat all day with the action-packed yang of biking to the ruins or into town, snorkeling the cove, or kayaking the mangrove lagoons of the Si’an Ka’an Bioreserve (http://www.ecotravelmexico.com/visitorscenter.htm). Si'an Ka'an, the knock-you-ecologist-socks-off bioreserve is just down the road by taxi or hotel van, and crammed with wildlife like spider monkeys and 350 species of migratory and native birds, with tours led by knowledgeable, passionate guides.

Cabañas Copal is one of three “sister” resorts strung along the beach. The restaurant, spa, rental, and transportation services of all three are available to spa guests. Each sister has her own well-honed, vertically integrated personality. Next door there is the vivacious Azulik: “Adult” says the brochure and you can’t see inside their gates; then there is, Zahra, dowdy but serviceable, with a nice little cove and electricity til 11 pm. By comparison, Cabañas Copal is the coltish sister: as tangy a surprise as a fresh-off-the-tree mango.

Undoubtedly, even Paradise has logistical glitches. Although the paths are dreamily candle lined at night, it’s easier to avoid garroting yourself with a hammock or mashing an anole if you’ve remembered to bring a flashlight; and, in the morning as the sun comes thundering up, it may take a while for shower water to arrive, but, hey, relax, you’re only a few slow-motion, hair-swinging lopes from the Caribbean Ocean. The water’ll come. Everything’s fine at Cabañas Copal.

High season rates: Sea view casitas for two with bath from $75 to $150; Sea view for four $85; Garden view $60; Sand floor and shared bath in the palms $35.

How the other Half Lives: History, hot water, and lots of really nice pillows at the Ex-Convento San Pablo

2005-10-27T15:19:00.000-07:00

“Honey," coached my husband straightening my coat collar, "this place is pretty nice. Try not to wipe your nose on your sleeve when we’re standing in the lobby.” With that, we were gracefully decanted onto the sidewalk and the driver swept our bags into the elegant gloom of Ex-Convento San Pablo Hotel on Fiallo and 5 de Mayo in downtown Oaxaca. Deep inside the hotel, from the candle-lit patio, the stone fountain purled, diners murmured, and glasses clinked. Sleek women with eyes like deer, and very pointy shoes clicked past us. I dug in my coat for Kleenex.
We had waited too long to make hotel reservations, and Oaxaca was stuffed with Christmas and New Year’s revelers. They had filled up our traditional digs where nose wiping, while sort of icky, is not scandalous, candlelight means the electricity’s out, and muddy Merrells are haute couture. This trip, Ex-Convento San Pablo offered us the last room in town and a glimpse of an up-scale Oaxacan hospitality we may never have seen of our own volition. We stayed for two, high-season days between Christmas and New Year’s for a whopping US $190 a night and then, four days later, both the season and the price plummeted, and the tab for even greater gobs of luxury was barely US$90.
Radiating Old World ambience, the Ex-Convento San Pablo was built in the early 1500s for Dominican nuns and retains a lot of that half-creepy, insane asylum-slash-convent, candle-lit tranquility juxtaposed nicely with modern indulgences like breezy patios and gouts of hot water in cavernous showers. The architecture is a granite and wrought iron chunk of Oaxacan history. Five years ago, restoration painstakingly preserved the convent’s sixteenth century design. Now, three stories of greenery-bedecked balconies rise up from the fountain’ed patio. In the vaulted cloisters, the convent’s original confessional booths are still there, worked right into the massive brick walls, and guests sit on sofas drinking coffee from little cups.
The gracious concierge is happy to show you the original little chapel just off the former sacristy now cozy bar, under the stairs. The chapel he says, was a “a nice surprise” when workers cleared away 400 years of rubble and stucco to reveal green and red curlicues of original murals and adornment on the chapel’s three foot thick walls and lofty ceilings. Today the chapel is used for weddings.
Up broad stone staircases with glimpses of sky and the huge verdigris dome of the neighboring Oaxaca Opera House, pots of geranium and bougainvillea gush over balconies.
Our room was a vast expanse of flagstone that led to a vast expanse of bed. Mounds of pillows rolled away to the horizon. In fact, on top of the mini-bar, beside the caligraphied parchment beer list, was a Menu of Pillows offering the pillow stuffings of your dreams from down to foam.
The Ex-Convento’s bathrooms feature delightful details like hand-made herbal soaps and bedside lamps. The first squares of the Kleenex and the toilet paper were origami’ed into peacocks. We are such proles, we tore them careful off and nestled them among the complimentary organic shampoos on the (also vast) gleaming marble vanity.
In the afternoon, the rooms at the Ex-Convento invite you to slip through the sitting room curtains to the breezy private patio to read and snooze as the hummingbirds nuzzle the bougainvillea. You can hear the hotel staff filling watering cans from the stone sinks and doing the laundry in the old convent kitchens. Gurgling and chuckling echoes pleasantly through the stone tracery. Room service is touted as being available all day, but no one answered the phone in the kitchen. Reclining in that pretty patio, it didn’t seem very important.
In the morning, the breakfast buffet in the central patio offers Oaxaquena cuisine chiliquiles, entomatadas, and black beans, as well as corn flakes, granola, and scrambled eggs with ham. Waiters wield jugs of fruit juice and coffee. As you savor a mug of Oaxacan breakfast chocolate, you can toy with the notion of hiring a hotel car and driver for $13.00 a day.
The Ex Convento’s only sin is noise. And, really, it can’t help it. Despite its best intentions and the installation of not only formidable, rough-hewn wooden shutters, but French doors and then a layer of sliding glass doors to get to the rickety ledge of a balcony, Oaxaca’s streets are noisy, full of putt and clatter, and bus brakes screaming all night. At nearly two hundred dollars a night even peccadilloes like street noise and a five- minute wait for the hot water to show up in third floor pipes, are hard to forgive, but at off-season prices, the ambience and service are fine. Ask for a room in the back, away from the street.
Until now, for us, a hotel room was just a pit stop to stow backpacks and rinse undies while traveling around lovely Oaxaca. Fifty bucks more for sluices of hot water, a vast, clean, and voluptuously pillowed bed, and a breezy little patio make the hotel room itself another example of Oaxaca’s graciousness.

Meanwhile, far to the East: Car Pooja in Suburban Virginia

2005-07-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

In which I go to get my car poojah'd, but don't bring nearly enough bananas.

Tucked like an exotic rose behind the aluminum-sided ear of this suburban neighborhood, the Rajdahni Mandir Temple is a pale pink pyramid blooming out of the woods and housing developments of Chantilly, Virginia. I had come to have a poojah, or blessing, said for my new car. There are a variety of occasions in a Hindu person's life in which a poojah is warranted. Some people perform a spiritual cleansing poojah every morning, other poojahs mark pivotal life events performed to show thanks and to protect the new things from disaster, thus, there are engagement poojahs and new job poojahs, there are house-warming poojahs (there's a special one for rebuilding a house that's been clobbered by an earthquake), there are new car poojahs, and poojahs for new babies. The priest can come to your house, or you can go to the temple. Sort of carry-out or delivery.

But here's the thing: I'm not Hindu. So, mostly, even as I was parking in the space labeled "Reserved for Car Poojah", I was hoping I wouldn't be thrown out as a nut or imposter or some kind of wannabe Hindu groupie. Coming in from the blazing hot parking lot, the temple was quiet and dim and smelled terrific, like sandalwood and carnations. The air conditioning was on full blast. I stashed my shoes in a cubby with everyone else's and pushed my way through the double doors into the huge pink prayer hall. Standing there in my socks, Protestant lineage, and L'oreal highlights, I was as out of place as this pink temple was, popping up among the split-levels.

The prayer hall was ringed with large milky marble statues of Hindu gods sitting, sometimes on tigers or black peacocks, in their own little booths in the walls. I only recognized Ganesha, who has an elephant's head and is not hard to spot, and Hanuman who is a monkey. They were all draped in gold embroidery and necklaces and ropes of chunky glass jewels with little gold crowns hovering over their heads. There was an impressive and festive amount of plant material mounded up and flung around. Each god was festooned with wreaths of fresh marigolds and his niche is full of vases of chrysanthemums. Ganesha had a hank of onion grass and fescue in his lap and there were rose petals and big, happy Gerbera daisy heads flung around at his feet. There was fruit everywhere: D'anjou pears, nectarines and piles and piles of bananas.

For as ornate and ritual-packed and symbolic as the room was, though, things were rather informal. For one thing, the cleaning lady was vaccuming up from last night's goings on, which must have been something, since the vaccuum was sucking up what sounded like rice and bolts. A lady in an orange sari was pottering about up on the main dias tidying up the the big pale blue statue of Shiva, pouring milk from a gallon jug of low fat Shenandoah Pride over roses in a pot and arranging white chrysanthemums, and stacking bananas around his feet.

Hopping over the the extension cord and dodging vaccuum jabs, a few women in saris with big pocketbooks, and a man in a peach golf shirt who had suddenly prostrated himself, startling the woman beside him, were milling around the big empty room queueing up for the young priest in a white robe who was sitting on the edge of the dias at the front of the room doling out quiet blessings and scoops of what looks like trail mix. The priest spots me and interrupts the last lady who is talking to him in what sounds like urgent undertones, and says to me, "Yes? You are here for?" and I say, "I'd like a blessing said for my car. Is that ok?" and he says something in HIndi to the urgent undertones lady who picks up her pocketbook with a jerk and leaves.

He says patiently, "I may be wrong, but I don't think you're Hindu. Why do you want a car poojah?" He has a saffron yellow dot, or tilak, and a yellow line drawn acoss his brown forehead. His temples are greying, but his eyes are young, and I say something completely lame like, "Well, er, no, I'm not actually Hindu, but, um...I like the idea of a blessing ceremony. I think it's a good idea and nice...really...and I am rather fond of Ganesha....and Durga is (I suddenly recall that Durga is the blood guzzling Goddess of Destruction whose followers ritually strangled thousands) well...she's nice..." He did not say, "Oh for heaven's sake, why are you wasting my time?" What he said was, "OK. Let's go. I'll have to get a few things."

So he takes me to the office where I give him $21.00 and he writes out a receipt that says "Paid: $21.00 for Car Poojah" and says, "Do you have anything else?" which threw me at first since all I had, really, was some cinnamon Altoids and gum, but I thought fast and it was a complete coincidence (or was it?) that I had bought a bunch of bananas, Fig Newtons, and a bottle of Smart Water all of which was at that moment sweltering in the trunk of the little car, and I said, "Well. I have bananas." and he seems to look a little weary but said, "Alright. More bananas."

Then he glanced out the window at my little red car in the "Reseved for Car Pooja" parking space wavering in the heat, and stands up and says, "There are things I must get." and then looks at me and says, "Turn to outward facing," which at first I took to be spiritual advice, but which actually meant, "Back the car in, please." So I put my shoes on and went outside where it was broiling hot and the cicadas were roaring in the woods. And he comes out in his wooden sandals clacking across the parking lot looking very cool in his white robe carrying a copper tray aloft loaded with little copper bowls of burning candles and pots of yellow saffron, grain, pink carnations, canary yellow marigolds, a mound of rice, a pot of water and a whole coconut.

The parking lot was volcanically hot and we opened all the car doors and he sat in the driver's seat and turned the car on, and dipping a yellow marigold in the water, and began chanting a pleasant mantra and splashing the dashboard and the gear shift and the seats with the wet marigold. He scooped rice from a bowl and mounded it behind the steering wheel and daubed vermillion in a swastika and an ohm on the dash and ripped the petals from the marigold to sprinkle them on the radio. Then he got out and walked around the car blessing it and wrote an ohm and a swastika on the hood and mounded on more rice and marigold petals.

And then he called me to come over and told me to say "Ohm." and then something that sounded like "SriSanverashnikum", which is what I ended up saying and he winced, but continued bravely, and told me, with his yellow tilak sweating down his nose, "This poojah is done when a person gets a new car or a new job or a new house. It makes people remember their good fortune in having this new thing and their responsibility. So you will be safe when you drive. Also, sometimes there are people who are jealous of your new thing. So this ceremony keeps out the bad things and keeps in the good things." Then he daubed a tilak mark on my forehead with saffron.

With that, he scooped up the coconut and Ka-blammo! smashed it on the pavement and said, "OK. Congratulations." and I laughed and said, "Thanks very much." I gave him my bananas and Smart Water, and I drove back to work with rice and marigold petals flying from my hood.

The Shrine of the Hot Pink Virgin

2005-07-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

In which we drive north first through desert and then through mango groves along the Rio Salida, the Salty River then through high desert again, to a little town in the mountains around Huatla, the hallucinagenic mushroom capital of the world.

The scenery was like a movie set. The little mango growing town of Cuicatlán movie set of: "Prosperous Oasis and Well Watered Groves"

TECOMAVACA

LOS MANGALES DE CUICATLAN

lndigo Walk

2004-02-09T07:40:00.000-08:00

I know, I think, where there is a road that was once an indigo trade route in Oaxaca, southwestern Mexico.

This would be the same path down which, 700 years ago, traders hauled feathers and jaguar pelts from the dry central valleys even as far as the Caribbean, over the Sierras and down their river valleys and along the folds of mountains named things like The Mountain of Wind, past towns, some once large, but small now, like Quetzaltepec, The Place of the Quetzal (when were there quetzals here?) and Guevea de Humboldt (was Humboldt here or were the villagers so impressed, they tacked on this homage?) trotting along, loaded down, all the way to the miasmic Pacific coast, and then trotting back again the 175 miles lugging indigo and cacao: crops for which this sluggish, kidney shaped backwater has been reknowned for millenia.

We think we know one of the trade route, now recently blasted and widened to a road through the beautiful and troubled Las Chimalaps rainforest, and we'd like to walk it, or at least follow it, through small towns like Quetzaltepec and Guevea de Humboldt to the once great indigo producing town, Niltepec at the bottom of The Mountains of the Wind.

The central valleys of Oaxaca are like a bowl. We'll start from the southwestern rim at the town called San Pedro y San Pablo Ayutla at the brink of the Sierra Mixe just beyond the Zapotec ruins of Mitla. Ayutla clings a wide curving slope above a green valley. The road winds though it past the market against the church wall, prosperous pink and yellow houses with tile roofs facing the road, their back ends propped on stilts over the valley. As you drive through you and the hillside curves, you can see the far end of town like a train going through a switchback. You can also see, Ayutla's neighboring town, Espiritu Santa Tamazulapan with whom Ayutla fueds bitterly and bloodily principally over water rights. Federal police line the road we'll take out of town living in tents, cleaning their rifles, and doing their laundry in the ferny waterfalls.

The idea is, we'll walk 40 miles from Ayutla to Quetzaltepec where the road snaps off and the forest begins. Then we'll follow a path that runs through deciduous pine and oak forest for about 30 miles with a few hamlets along the way. Then, we'll clamber up out of the woods where the road starts up again and walk 30 more miles down to Juchitan on the steamy coast. Then we'll collapse in a heap before taking the local bus a little further to Niltepec where the last indigo of Mexico is made.