Adam's Ambles

Washington in winter

You’d think, having spent the last month and a half in the tropics, I’d be hating on the winter now that I’m back in DC. But this assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. Let me describe the scene:

From my chair in Busboys and Poets restaurant and coffee shop, the same squishy chair by the door I always seem to luck out and land, I can see out of the big paned windows. A Korean baby paws through the frosted glass. The fairy lights dinkling on the Christmas tree peck little kisses of bright onto customers’ faces.

Outside, the nation’s capital walks by, hands huddled into coats and heads shrunk into hoods and jackets like so many shivering turtles. At 4:53 pm the sky is the dark blue of a night’s edge; the tint and hue has a magnificent depth, yet if it could sing, it would have the timbre of a mezzosoprano. It’s too cold to give this air a warm voice; it deserves something high, sharp and piercing, a girl who can hit the high ‘C’ at the end of the Star Spangled Banner.

The snow is ripping night in soft, silent tears, glowing and melting into the orange street lights, padding the sidewalks, drawn like a soft knife across an evening that is somehow very alive, even though it is, by nature’s circadian rhythms, supposed to be a time of sleep, slumber, withdrawal, huddling into yourself. But that impulse to hide inside the warm depths of the self cannot deny the desire to at least look, if not walk, out into a curtain of cold, of white winds and dark nights and yellow leaves and bare branches. I take it back; this stark evening does make me want to curl up with a fire and a dog, some jazz and a good book.

But I can’t stop looking outside.

Home.

The army men told me they would give me a ride at seven in the morning. At nine the next day, we finished our tea. By 9:45am, we left the Coast Guard base where they discussed keeping tabs on the Chinese in the Bay of Bengal.

China has no ports on the Bay like it does in the South China Sea ,on the other side of Southeast Asia, but it does have Burma and that country’s kleptocratic government. For all the Burmese junta talks about keeping the country free of foreign influence, they seem to have no problem opening the cyclone-ravaged Irrawaddy Delta to Beijing’s military interests.

But geopolitics weren’t as much on my mind as reaching Rangat, in Middle Andaman, where I could catch my ferry to Havelock Island . Getting there didn’t just require punctuality, though; I also tried to will away an oncoming small stormfront. A windy day would result in ferry cancellations. Go away dark clouds, I thought. Rain, rain, come again some other day, and then I remembered singing that song before vomiting flan in a Chinese restaurant when I was eight.

Nausea was avoided on this trip, perhaps thanks to fear. I clung to the back of the army men’s jeep, occasionally feeling the soft roll bar above my head and realizing that if the vehicle flipped, I would surely and unequivocally die. The military men drove fast and honked loud through the jungle. At one point, while using the wrong lane to go around an oncoming truck, there was a sharp intake sound, like glass popping from too much heat. It was one of the side-view mirrors of the jeep, bursting into fragments when brushed by an oncoming bus.

“Mr. Adam, I think the ferries will be closed today,” said the Kashmiri, looking at the sky, which he couldn’t really do; it was horizontal with rain.

We stopped at a small roadside urinal. When one of the majors exited, he looked at me and said, “Don’t go in there. It’s very filthy.” I didn’t need any other convincing.

When the army officers dropped me off in Rangat, I had 30 minutes to catch the next boat, which of course, had been cancelled. I parked outside the ticket seller’s office, which is located a few meters from a trade school, and asked some questions.

Not one student seemed to know when exactly someone would man the ticket office. One boy, with utter assuredness, told me one o clock. I wanted to believe him. He was wrong. Eventually, someone in the town accounting office informed me the ferry office was closed for the day. At this stage I was hellbent on reaching Havelock Island and spending my final three days of research in a state of laid-back beach-iness, so I asked when the next bus was to Port Blair, figuring I could catch a boat form the main hub of the islands.

“No more buses today,” someone said. The rest of the office nodded. It dawned on me that I might have to spend the night in Rangat.

“What if I hitch a ride on a truck?”

Their blank expressions indicated hitch hiking was as foreign to the Andamans as…well, me.

Miserable moments in the life of a travel writer: standing in monsoon rain in Rangat, Middle Andaman, trying to thumb a ride to Port Blair. I got wet. I got cold. What I did not get was a ride. Eventually, I conceded defeat and spent a miserable night in a miserable room with mildew-y sheets, bad electricity and loud neighbors.

The next day I boarded a bus at four in the morning to Port Blair. The front was emblazoned with the label, “Lord Buddha” and posters of the Shwedagon pagoda in Rangoon. My final bus ride in India, I thought, would be on a Burmese-owned bus through the thickest jungle I’ve ever seen.

The Lord Buddha was a remarkably comfortable bus with reclining, plush seats. It was an unfair last bus ride, in a way (although I was grateful for the comfort at the time): my last trip by bus in India, I thought, should be on a crappy Tamil Nadu state bus. As it turned out, this desire was realized a few days later in Chennai, followed by almost getting ripped off by an autorickshaw driver; India has a sense of nostalgia after all.

What’s more to tell? I spent my last days of research in beautiful islands and beach resorts. Time passed too quickly. Before I knew it, I was heading home, a concept I’ve grappled with throughout the past few years.

***

If I catalogue my moments of travel reward, they’re often measured in disproportion to the amount of fun I’m having and comfort I’m ensconced in.

A journalist friend recently told me she felt more like a backpacker than an explorer these days, that everything has been seen and mapped and as travel writers, there is little new to discover. In a similar vein, another journalist – the prolific Tsur Shezaff – told me that what modern travel writers provide is not so much access to new places but new angles on places the world thinks it already knows.

In my update to the coast regions of Lonely Planet’s upcoming Kenya guide, I tried to eschew the high end resorts that front East Africa’s white sand and focus on the culture and history of the region, on small villages and eco-tourism projects that attract more low-key tourists than the wealthy week-trippers who never see a Kenya beyond the five-star halls of their hotels and the air-conditioned taxi ride from the airport. The idea wasn’t to ignore the white sand and teal waves or their considerable charm, but remind readers of the story of the people behind the palm-fringed goodness.

Sometimes you need deep eyes and patience to see the above narratives as anything more than a sideshow to the immediate beauty of the Kenyan coast. But sometimes, the hard thing to see is also, undoubtedly, the best. I enjoyed making friends with other travelers on this trip – Francois, Charley, Moran, Simone, Anthony, Andy and Lara stand out – but the moments of revelation also came with difficult days on the road alleviated by the kind words, gestures and friendliness of dozens of Tamils and Andamaners: Abi, Shadab, Kumar and Mani to name a few

I’ve been home in Maryland for over a week now, writing or trying to and not procrastinate. The winter here is gorgeous. The grass and trees and fields are dead, but they become sharper in the cold as well, as do the stars and the outline of grass on sky and the dead branches that go black with winter backlight. But in contrast to the sharpness is the way the wind wets your eyes and bleeds the weak sunlight, so that when the sun does set it pours like gold and blood into the St. Mary’s River, the geographic anchor of my boyhood, adolescence and far wandering twenties. The river  runs through me, always will, wherever my life takes me. It’s beautiful enough to inspire me to discover other rivers like it, and still find a sense of peace and place whenever I pass my feet through its marriage of fresh and salt.

My friends welcomed me back with a night out in Hooters where I saw an Indian girl, not in a sari or Salwar Kameez, but skin tight short shorts and sports bra. We drank, laughed, and I remembered where I’m from. Now I need to write: the privilege of seeing the world has to be paid back with describing it. As Krishna would tell Arjuna in the Bhaghavad Gita, that is dharma: duty.

And if so, it’s one I can happily live with.