St. Petersburg 1994

Posted on October 2, 2016 by admin

After Moscow comes St. Petersburg. Of course it does. We spent the last days of our Russian visas in St. Petersburg after taking an overnight train between the cities, and after hearing stories about how thieves would pump knockout gas into our train cars and proceed to rob us naked. Somehow that didn’t happen.

If the Russians had been less prickly about extending tourist visas, we might have spent a few more days in the country, spending some of the hard currency we had that they wanted. But no.

It was a balmy October day when we boarded the Aurora. The vessel survived the Battle of Tsushima and later of course had her part to play in the October Revolution. Since the mid-Soviet period, Aurora has been a museum ship.

Also balmy outside the Hermitage. Much spectacle on the exterior, many fine works of art inside, but dank and crummy amenities, especially the bathrooms.

Scenes of Post-People’s Republic Mongolia

Posted on September 11, 2016 by admin

The part of rural Mongolia that we saw in September 1994 — in and near Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, 20 or so miles from Ulaanbaatar — looked a lot like this. Ulaanbaatar wasn’t a sprawling kind of place in those days, unless you count the large neighborhoods composed of thousands of ger (yurts).
In places the trees were fairly dense, with streams flowing through the land. Most of all, though, it felt remote. Even more remote than the arguably further-from-absolutely-everything Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia, because the infrastructure was so much more developed there, as far SW as you could go on the entire continent.

Ulaanbaatar didn’t feel so remote, though in ’94 sometimes livestock were seen wandering the streets. I wonder if that’s now a thing of the past for the Mongolian capital, as traffic inevitability increases. How do I know that traffic has increased in 20-plus years? That’s just one of those things that happens.

These prayer wheels were at the Gandantegchinlen (Gandan) Monastery in the city.
From the looks of more recent pictures, some restoration work has been done since then. At least, I’m fairly sure that the stock photo I linked to was taken at about the same place I stood; it certainly looks like it, taking into account various renovations and additions over the years.

In the city, we also visited the Mongolian Natural History Museum, known the world over for its dinosaur artifacts. “The museum is particularly well known for its dinosaur and other paleontological exhibits, among which the most notable are a nearly complete skeleton of a late Cretaceous Tarbosaurus tyrannosaurid and broadly contemporaneous nests of Protoceratops eggs,” Wiki says. I remember those eggs.

And, of course, the big skeletons. You could go up on a balcony for a look at them.

Photography involved paying an extra fee. Or so the museum staff told us at the entrance. None of us paid such a fee, and pretty much everyone in our group took pictures, though as you can see, the light was lousy. I don’t even think any staff were in the big dinosaur room with us, keeping an eye on us. Things were lax. Hope nobody over the years took advantage of that to take anything besides pictures.

Yogyakarta

Posted on August 14, 2016 by admin

Yogyakarta is a city on Java than few North Americans ever seem to have heard of. But I won’t use that as evidence of any egregious geographic ignorance on the part of Americans, though in fact we aren’t known for that kind of knowledge. After all, how many Javanese, do you suppose, have heard of Memphis, Indianapolis or Kansas City?

We went there in August 1994. One important reason for going to Yogyakarta was that Borobudur and Prambanan were located nearby; in fact, they were reason enough to go. But the town itself also featured some other sites of interest, such as the Kraton of Yogyakarta, a palace complex that also featured a museum, as well as some interesting ruins whose name escapes me, and a few other places in town.

One day we witnessed a large parade through the heart of town, or would have, had the authorities had any notion of keeping the street clear. As it was, the street filled completely with people, and the parade — a lot of men on horseback, as I recall — had to push its way through the throng. This got tiresome pretty fast, so we didn’t stay long.

Then there was the time we were walking down the curiously named Malioboro Street (Jalan Malioboro), which is a major shopping street, past a lot of shop stalls and booths. As I walked past one vendor, a man perhaps about my age at the time, said, “Keep smiling, friend. I kill you.” Maybe he was just tired of tourists, who so obviously could afford his wares, wandering by without buying anything. Or maybe his psychosis was deeper. We didn’t go that way again.

He was the only bit of hostility that we encountered, however fleeting. On the other end of the spectrum, a couple of teenaged Javanese girls buttonholed me on the street one afternoon, and wanted me to pose with them for a picture. Maybe I had novelty value. So I posed.

Another fragment of memory from Yogyakarta: sometime before dawn one morning, a rooster woke me up, because, cartoons notwithstanding, roosters crow whenever they feel like it. I lay awake for a while, and then off in the distance, I heard what must have been the pre-dawn call to prayers. Unfamiliar, mesmerizing, reminding me that I was somewhere else.

One evening, we had got a wonderful chance to enjoy Ramayana ballet at the Ramayana Open Theatre Prambanan.

It’s something tourists do. Some people might sneer at that reflexively, but they’d be thoughtless. I’m glad that Ramayana ballet has some audience. I don’t, however, remember much about it now, except for a notion of colorful costumes and stylized movement.

Prague 1994

Posted on November 8, 2015 by admin

Earlier this year, when I read about Prague in Patrick Leigh Fermor‘s A Time of Gifts, I found myself wondering, did I really visit the same city as he did? The answer is yes and no. He was there in 1934. I was there in 1994. That makes a considerable difference. But more importantly, he had a sharper eye for detail than I did, than I ever could hope to, and was informed by a better education and an all-around aptitude for the road.

But at least I’d heard of the Second Defenestration of Prague, which made it a really cool moment when we saw the window from which it happened.

And I knew about the Golem. Or at least the concept. So I was interested in Prague to pick up Golem by Eduard Petiška, a Czech author and poet in a country that seems to take its poets seriously (and who managed to have an asteroid named after him). The book is his own telling of the various stories about Rabbi Loew of Prague and the creature he created to protect the Jewish population of the city. What is it about the Czechs and automatons? After all, another Czech author, Karel Čapek, gave the world the word robot.

Speaking of authors from Prague, we also made our way to one of the places where Kafka lived. It’s the little blue-hued structure on this pedestrian street. At the time you could buy his works inside. Probably that’s still true.

Kafka seems to be fairly well known in Japan, which might be something of a surprise, except when you consider the Kafkaesque elements of a salaryman’s life. Anyway, Yuriko was familiar with him.

And why is it always Kafkaesque? Guess Kafka-ish or Kafka-like or Kafka-oid don’t convey that sense of dread in the face of anonymous, malevolent functionaries.

The Kremlin 1994

Posted on September 27, 2015 by admin

You can’t very well go to Moscow and not pose with St. Basil’s and the clock tower (Spasskaya Tower) of the Kremlin. Pedants might point out that Moscow’s Kremlin is only one of a number of kremlins in Russia, but I say common usage re-enforced by years of Cold War reportage means that the one in the capital of the Russian Federation is The Kremlin.

This was probably the afternoon of the first full today we were in Moscow. Note the clock puts the time at 3:15; in late September at that latitude, the sun would have been edging down pretty low by then.

It would not have been our first visit to Red Square. We arrived in Moscow in the afternoon, and Yuriko and I and most of the other people we’d traveled with on the Trans-Siberian went to the same guest house. Early in the evening, most of us met up again with two goals in mind: to go to Red Square because it’s Red Square, and to find something to eat. I remember our group — about a dozen people — walking down one of the thoroughfares that takes one to Red Square, turning a corner, and seeing it all at once. A place I’d heard about all my life, and there it was.

We ogled Red Square a while, but then got down to the business of finding food. The group settled on the Moscow McDonald’s, said to be the largest in the world at the time, and the only McDonald’s I’ve ever been to that had bouncers.

There were some English lads, a couple of Australians, a Swiss woman, a Dutch couple and I don’t know who else or remember any names. I was the only American and Yuriko the only Japanese.

I didn’t appreciate the enormity of the Kremlin until we went in for a look the next day. Not everything was accessible, but I know we visited a number of palaces and churches (or maybe church-museums), such as the Cathedral of the Annunciation. We got a closer look at the clock tower, still featuring its red star. But within sight of the fluttering Russian tricolor.Speaking of enormity, there was also the Tsar Cannon.

And the Tsar Bell.

Just outside the walls is Lenin’s Mausoleum, which we visited, and then the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The likes of Stalin and various old bolshies were easy to pick out, since they were marked by busts. I didn’t see John Reed’s plaque, though I knew he was there. I didn’t know until later that some of Bill Haywood’s ashes are there (and some are near the Haymarket monument in suburban Chicago).

Prambanan 1994

Posted on August 16, 2015 by admin

Candi Prambanan, or Candi Rara Jonggrang, is a 9th-century Hindu temple compound near Yogyakarta in central Java, though it had lain in ruins for centuries before reconstruction in the 20th century. UNESCO asserts that “the temples collapsed due to earthquake, volcanic eruption and a shift of political power in the early 11th century, and they were rediscovered in the 17th century. These compounds have never been displaced or changed.

“Restoration works have been conducted since 1918, both in original traditional method of interlocking stone and modern methods using concrete to strengthen the temple structure. Even though extensive restoration works have been done in the past and as recently as after the 2006 earthquake, great care has been taken to retain the authenticity of the structures.”

My snapshots hardly do the structures justice. We visited in the mid-morning of August 11, 1994, after seeing Borobudur earlier that morning. The increasing tropical heat made the temple compound a little harder to appreciate than Borobudur, but it was impressive all the same.

More from UNESCO (the compound became a World Heritage Site in 1991): “Prambanan, named after the village, is the biggest temple complex in Java. It is actually a huge Hindu temple complex… Dedicated to the three great Hindu divinities, this temple with its decorated reliefs is an outstanding example of Siva art in Indonesia and the region.

“It was built in the 9th century and designed as three concentric squares. In all there are 224 temples in the entire complex. The inner square contains 16 temples, the most significant being the 47 m high central Siva temple flanked to the north by the Brahma temple and to the south by the Vishnu temple. These three ancient masterpieces of Hindu architecture are locally referred to as the Prambanan Temple or Lorojonggrang Temple (Slender Maiden); the compound was deserted soon after it was completed, possibly owing to the eruption of nearby Mount Merapi [volcanoes are always a risk on Java].”

Looking at it, I’m glad that Indonesia hasn’t spawned as much religious extremism as some other parts of the world. This is the kind of place that ISIS and Taliban barbarians would dynamite.

Sprite & Jackfruit in Thailand

Posted on June 28, 2015 by admin

The rooms were small at our guesthouse near Kanchanaburi, Thailand, in June 1994, but the price was good: 100 baht, or about $4 a night for the two of us. The rooms were for sleeping. Otherwise, when you were at the guesthouse, you hung out at the patio overlooking the river. Here I am there, staying hydrated.

I don’t remember exactly, but I think I was reading a loose Australian magazine someone had left behind on the patio.

Later in the month, we made our way to Chang Mai, in the north of the country. One of the things to do there is visit Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, which involves climbing 309 steps to the temple grounds. Somewhere along the way, we spotted jackfruit.

Over the years, I’ve found that almost no one in North America’s ever heard of it. (But it’s not as if I ask someone every day.) I’d never heard of it before visiting Southeast Asia either. It’s a tasty fruit, one of the tropical fruits you grow fond of in the tropics. It also disproves the notion that you shouldn’t eat anything bigger than your head. More about it here.

Too bad my face is overexposed. Even so, Lilly saw the picture after I’d scanned it and remarked on my youthful visage, though that wasn’t the word she used. As in, I can’t believe you were ever that young. It’s a hard thing to imagine one’s parents, even if I wasn’t that young at 33.

Shanghai Views

Posted on April 26, 2015 by admin

The view is from the first hotel we stayed at in Shanghai in late April 1994, whose name and exact location I forget. Even so, I’ll bet there are a lot more buildings in this view these days, if the view still exists. It was a cloudy day, but I think there’s some smog in the mix. The air’s probably not any cleaner now.

Soon we relocated to a hotel near the Bund — the Astor House Hotel, which in those days was part inexpensive hotel, part cheap-looking office space. It clearly had a magnificent and storied past, with a slow decline post-1949 and especially during the Cultural Revolution. Word was the hotel was going to be razed, which would have been a damned shame. Fortunately, it’s been renovated since then, and while probably not cheap any more, it’s still a jewel of the Bund.

The Bund was a fine place for walking, as it was designed to be.

Taman Negara 1994

Posted on September 7, 2014 by admin

Taman Negara is a large national park — more than 1,675 square miles — slap in the middle of the Malay Peninsula. I understand the name means “national park” in Bahasa Malaysia. As a park, it’s older than the independent nation of Malaysia, starting as a smaller game reserve in the 1920s and taking its present size in 1938 as King George V National Park. That gives you an idea of who persuaded the sultans of Kelantan, Pahang, and Terengganu to designate parts of their realm as parts of the park. Even now, the park is technically in all three of those Malaysian states.

Reaching Taman Negara from Kuala Lumpur involved a bus, and then a boat trip upriver to park lodging, about three hours each. We stayed at the cheapest part of the lodging — a small row of bunkhouses sleeping four each along the river — a few days in late August/early September 1994.

You might think it’s a jungly place. It is.

There wasn’t much else to do at Taman Negara besides walk through the rainforest, some of it on steep ground, since the park is in the Titiwangsa Mountains. We enjoyed the walks, and then idled back at the lodge’s common building, where we took out meals and read.

Various sources tell me that rare mammals live in the park, such as the Malayan tiger, crab-eating macaques, and Sumatran rhinos, but we didn’t see anything so remarkable. Rare mammals with any sense stay away from people tramping through the jungle. Bugs, on the other hand, seek you out in the rainforest.

Our bunkmates for a couple of days were a young Australian man and woman, a couple. For some reason, she was at pains to stress the independence and fortitude of Australian women, which I don’t doubt at all. Maybe she was trying to impress the point on Yuriko, who doesn’t doubt it either.

So I found it a little funny when she make a loud fuss about an insect that had gotten into the cabin: a gorgeous green-and-brown (I think) walking stick-like thing, maybe six or eight inches long, with large insect eyes. She insisted that we, the Australian fellow and I, kill it. We didn’t want to do that, so if I remember right, we shooed the creature onto a piece of newspaper and tossed it out the door.

One day we did the canopy walk. The park bills it as the longest one in the world. Maybe it is. It is way up in the trees, maybe 60 or 80 feet.

Of course it wobbled. Yuriko says she’s not sorry she did it, but doesn’t want to do another one.

A Passing Coconut Boat

Posted on June 8, 2014 by admin

I’m done with Orwell for now, though I need to find more of his essays and other writings and dip into them. So I’m taking up some of the travel books I have around the house but haven’t gotten around to. Such as The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux (1975), which I’m reading now. Somehow or other I’d never read it, though I’ve had a copy for a long time.

Other unread titles I have around the house include Journey to Portugal (Jose Saramango), three books by Evelyn Waugh (Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, and Labels), and The Happy Isles of Oceania (also Theroux). Or the subject at hand might be Far Away, rather than travel, since some of the books are about spending extended periods in far away places, such as Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea, Seven Years in Tibet, and Out of Africa.

The Great Railway Bazaar is justly famous as a tale of months of rail travel in Asia in the early ’70s. Lately I’ve finished the chapters about traveling through Sri Lanka, and was struck by how impoverished the country was 40 years ago. In some sense I must have known that, but mostly I’ve been used to reading or hearing about the decades-long civil war there, and then its more recent economic growth. Time flies, places change.

Which brings me to this picture. In June 1994, we were traveling down the Mekong in Vietnam, and we came very near to this coconut boat, and I happened to be ready to take a picture. Vietnam is and was a major producer of coconuts – 1.25 million metric tons in 2013, compared with 1.07 million metric tons in 1994 (a handy Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations interactive web site tells me this).

But never mind the production numbers. What became of the people in the boat? Are the parents still running a coconut boat, or did they ever really specialize in that? The child would be an adult now, assuming he survived the perils of third-world childhood, and very likely he did. What’s he up to? Or was it a girl? Just another set of minor unknowables here in the hyperconnected Information Age.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Around the World 94